This group explores the forgotten epochs of Earth, civilizations lost to time, cycles of rise and fall, and the cataclysmic events that reset human history. Covering subjects like the destruction of Atlantis, the Younger Dryas impact, pole shifts, and global floods, we ask: What came before us? What was lost? What patterns are we repeating?
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Ancient Cataclysms & Human Cycles
The Green Sahara Hypothesis
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Most people picture the Sahara as timeless sand. Climate science says that picture is recent. During the African Humid Period, North Africa held lakes, rivers, grasslands, and human communities across areas that are desert today. Many reconstructions place this humid phase roughly in the 14,500 to 5,000 years ago window, driven largely by orbital forcing and monsoon shifts.
Several lines of research describe the end of the humid Sahara as a sharp drying transition in parts of the region, with feedback loops that accelerate aridification once vegetation retreats. As habitable corridors close, water concentrates into remaining refuges, and populations compress toward dependable rivers and lakes.
The archeological timeline sets the start of civilization in this area around the same broad window as the Sahara’s drying. This brings up the question: Could civilization have begun much earlier, throughout the Sahara, and been pushed near the Nile valley as the last fertile region?
Netism’s timeline of human history puts civilization far earlier. Ancient Egypt was an attempt to rebuild what was lost after global environmental changes. This is why it sprang up with an already advanced language and impressive monuments; the knowledge was carried from other places, mainly the Sahara.
Recent technology, mainly radar scans, has added weight to this theory. Radar satellites and radar flown on the Space Shuttle send microwave pulses and measure the return signal. In hyper-dry deserts, parts of that signal can penetrate sand and respond to buried gravel, bedrock texture, and subsurface contrasts. NASA’s Shuttle Imaging Radar missions were able to detect remnants of buried riverbeds in the Sahara.
The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission produced large digital elevation models that expose subtle slopes and valley traces across enormous areas. Researchers have used this kind of data to delineate major paleodrainage basins in the eastern Sahara. Work on the Lake Chad basin used SRTM topography to refine the extent and form of a much larger ancient lake system, “Megalake Chad,” and to map topographic features linked to past hydrology.
A green, forested west with plenty of food appears in Egyptian mythology. The Field of Reeds is typically referenced as the afterlife, but it is also in the West, having both metaphysical and physical meaning. While the West is equated with gravitation and return to the earth, it is also the direction of the Sahara. It is possible that the earliest Egyptian myths encoded this memory of a land with plenty of food and water at a time when people generally lived in peace.
Is it easier to believe that hunter-gatherers built the pyramids, carved hieroglyphs, and organized governments, or that the people who came to Egypt were already culturally advanced, pushed from their homes with rising floodwaters and other environmental disasters? Netism supports a much longer and more complex history of human civilization.
Have you heard about the Green Sahara Hypothesis? Do you agree with it? Share your thoughts.
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