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New Discovered Rock Art Shows The Sahara Was A Radically Different Place 4000 Years Ago – IFLScience

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Written on the walls of sites in the Atbai Desert in Eastern Sudan, prehistoric rock art tells the story of a very distant past. While the region today is achingly arid, the artwork implies it was once a lush, green land filled with water, pastures, and animal life. 

Remarkably, the artwork only dates to around 4,000 years ago, suggesting this part of the Sahara Desert underwent a rapid and radical change in just the past few millennia. 

In their new study, archaeologists at Macquarie University describe the discovery of 16 rock art sites in the deserts around Wadi Halfa, a city in northern Sudan near the border with Egypt.

Among the many figures depicted in the art, the researchers found illustrations of humans, antelopes, elephants, and giraffes. There was also the recurrent appearance of cattle – which is pretty astonishing when you consider the current hyper-arid climate of the Atbai Desert.

Today, this region receives almost no annual rainfall, making cattle pastoralism impossible. However, the rock art shows that cattle farming was a common theme of everyday life as recent as 3000 BCE. 

“It was puzzling to find cattle carved on desert rock walls as they require plenty of water and acres of pasture, and would not survive in the dry and arid environment of the Sahara today,” Dr Julien Cooper, a researcher who led a team of archaeologists in 2018 and 2019 on the Atbai Survey Project, said in a statement.

The hyper-arid desert of  Atbai desert near Wadi Halfa in Sudan

Dry and desolate: today’s view of the Atbai desert near Wadi Halfa.

Image credit: Julian Cooper

“The presence of cattle in ancient rock art is one of the most important pieces of evidence establishing a once ‘green Sahara’,” added Cooper.

Between 15,000 years ago and roughly 5,000 years ago, Africa was doused by increased summer monsoon rainfall across the continent as a result of periodic variations in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Thanks to the downpours of rain, the continent was turned into a flourishing land of grassy pasture covered in freshwater lakes. 

When the wet period ended, however, a drastic change was brought to the region’s landscape, as well as the many people and other animals who lived here.

“The Atbai Desert around Wadi Halfa, where the new rock art was discovered, became almost completely depopulated. For those who remained, cattle were abandoned for sheep and goats,” explained Dr Cooper. 

“This would have had major ramification on all aspects of human life – from diet and limited milk supplies, migratory patterns of herding families and the identity and livelihood of those who depended on their cattle.”

The findings are published in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.

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40 Random Bits of Trivia About Artists and the Artsy Art That They Articulate – Cracked.com

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40 Random Bits of Trivia About Artists and the Artsy Art That They Articulate  Cracked.com

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John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, dies at 96 – CBC.ca

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John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, dies at 96  CBC.ca

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A misspelled memorial to the Brontë sisters gets its dots back at last

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LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.

More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.

The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.

They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.

“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”

It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.

Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”

Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.

“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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