Ancient Peoples of West Africa

When you first started to learn about ancient times, you read about the nomads who settled in the Fertile Crescent, between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. If you were to put your finger on a map right between those two rivers and then move your finger right, you would cross over the land of the Sumerians and of the Babylonians and the Assyrians.

If you put your finger on the Fertile Crescent and then moved it left, you would come to Egypt and the Nile River, where the pharaohs lived. We know a great deal about the history of Egypt, because the Egyptians left thousands and thousands of artifacts (treasures and everyday objects) behind them. Archaeologists dug up the artifacts and used them to learn more about ancient Egypt. And the Egyptians also left us writing on stone tablets. Historians read these tablets and wrote down the history of the ancient Egyptian empire.

But if you keep moving your finger on down the Nile River, you will see that Egypt is only one small part of a whole huge continent (a large piece of land with many countries on it). This continent is called Africa.

The people of Africa did not leave written records or thousands of artifacts behind them. So we don’t know as much about ancient Africa as we do about ancient Egypt. But we do know that people have lived in Africa from the very earliest times.

If you were to move your finger left from the Nile River, you would come to a huge, sandy desert—the Sahara Desert. Today, the Sahara Desert is as hot and dry as an oven. The ground is cracked and parched. Sand drifts over the iron-hard ground and piles up in huge drifts called dunes.

Life in the Sahara Desert is difficult and dangerous. But long ago, this part of Africa wasn’t a desert. It was a green, fertile place full of water and trees. Rivers and streams used to run where rocky, dried valleys now lie. Grassy meadows once grew where shifting sands now blow. Herds of gazelles and antelopes roamed through the green plains. Fish, crocodiles, and hippopotami swam in the rivers. Wild cows and sheep lived in the forests. The people of the Sahara were farmers, just like those who lived in the Fertile Crescent. They hunted wild animals and raised their own plants and animals for food.

How do we know this? Archaeologists who dug down through the hard dirt of the Sahara Desert found ancient pollen from trees and seeds from grasses and flowers. None of these trees or flowers grow in the Sahara today—they left their seeds long, long ago. The archaeologists also found bones of animals that used to live in the Sahara, back when there was enough water for them. In one place, the people who lived in a Saharan village had eaten a feast of turtle. There were hundreds of shells that had been cracked open for their meat. In another place, the villagers had eaten an entire giraffe—except for its head.

The ancient people of Africa also left paintings behind them. They drew pictures of their way of life on the stone walls of caves. In these paintings, we see men growing crops and taking care of herds of animals. We see women in beautiful clothes, riding tame cows. These pictures tell us about the way the Sahara used to be.

But then something happened in the Sahara. The rains got scarcer and scarcer. Trees began to wither and die. The grass died too, and the ground dried up until it was nothing more than dust and sand. The rivers stopped flowing and the streams disappeared. The animals went further and further south, down to the parts of Africa where there was still water and food. And the people of the Sahara went south too. They traveled for weeks and weeks. They settled around the lakes and rivers in central Africa and began a new life. And above them, the Sahara turned into desert.

From now on, Africa would be divided by the huge dangerous desert. Up along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, people from Mesopotamia and Egypt would settle down and live in the northern part of Africa. And down below the Sahara Desert, the people of Africa would live for centuries in peace, cut off from the rest of the ancient world by the massive sands between them.