The Cave of Swimmers

Thousands of years ago, the Sahara was surprisingly green with rich vegetation, trees and lakes that covered almost all of what is now sandy desert. There were vast open grasslands, forests, rivers, lakes and wetlands, that allowed a variety of animal species to survive. Antelopes, gazelles, giraffes, elephants, wildebeest, spotted hyenas, zebras and more roamed the savannah, while crocodiles baked in the river banks and hippos rolled in the mud. Evidence of the Sahara’s amiable past is recorded in the rocks—in the form of fossils, and petroglyphs and rock paintings by humans who lived during this period. One well-known such petroglyph location is the Cave of Swimmers in the remote Gilf Kebir mountains in southwest Egypt near the Libyan border. Do these petroglyphs in the Sahara depict people swimming? Photo: Roland Unger/Wikimedia Commons The Cave of Swimmers was discovered by the Hungarian explorer László Almásy in October 1933. The cave contains tiny artwork of what appears to be people swimming. The paintings are estimated to have been created during the Neolithic period, about 8,000 years ago. László Almásy, in his book The Unknown Sahara, postulates that the swimming scenes are real depictions of life at the time of painting, suggesting that there had been a climatic change from temperate to desert. At that time it was a radical new theory that sounded so dubious that his publisher felt compelled to add several footnotes in the book to make it clear that they did not share this opinion. László Almásy’s theory was sensational, but it was not entirely new. Many ancient historians, such as Herodotus and Strabo, mention the existence of a humid and vegetated Sahara, but these statements were not taken seriously by scientists because of their anecdotal nature.