Legal Research

The Friday Fillip

By Simon Fodden

As winter sets in, all grey and grim, it’s natural, I think, to find your thoughts wandering to warmer climes, or, if you’re nostalgic, warmer times. Well say no more. Today’s fillip does the work for you, taking you to a place (very) long ago and (very) far away.

The place: the Ténéré desert in what is now Niger. The time: oh, about 9,000 years ago.

And the way there (and thence) is photographs. Photographer Mike Hettwer went with an archeological expedition to Gobero, where once the Sahara was wet and hippos roamed the mud. They uncovered evidence not only of marvellous animal life — from dinosaurs to giraffes — but also of stone age human life, even more marvellous in its way.

Hettwer’s pictures are available on a number of sites, but I’ll point you first to that of Boston.com, which hosted 17 of his lovely images in an easily accessible way. The most impressive image for me (a really hard choice) was number 11, an 8,000 year old petroglyph of a tamed giraffe.

National Geographic ran a story about the expedition called The Green Sahara, and there you’ll find the same photos and a few that aren’t on the Boston.com site. As well, there’s a video where members of the expedition talk a bit about what they’re doing. As well you can find these images on Mike Hettwer’s own site, along with more of his photographs.

Now because I’m an academic, I have to give you the opportunity to do some follow-up reading: The scientists on the expedition have published a surprisingly accessible article about their findings, “Lakeside Cemeteries in the Sahara: 5000 Years of Holocene Population and Environmental Change” which is available in full text, along with good illustrations, on PLoS ONE. If you read any of the material in the various places where the photos are published you’ll learn that the Sahara got wet for those 8,000 years because the Earth shifted its orbit a bit. These shifts, which have brought us the ice ages, are known as the Milankovitch cycles, and you can learn about them on Wikipedia. Finally, if the Sahara proves to be your thing, you might like to read a great book by Canadian writers Marq De Villiers and Sheila Hirtle called simply Sahara.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on December 12, 2008 (boomark / email).