AS FAR as the eye can see, there is nothing but sand. It is one of the harshest, most inaccessible places on Earth. This is the Fezzan.
Lying in south-western Libya, the Fezzan covers an area of around 640,000 square kilometres in the heart of the Sahara desert. Here, years can pass with no rain: no wonder it is so barren. It hasn鈥檛 always been like this. Around 10,000 years ago, 5 per cent of the Sahara was covered by lakes and rivers, and a humid corridor across the middle of the desert teemed with plants, animals and people. An eight-year project led by David Mattingly, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester, UK, and Kevin White, a geographer at the University of Reading, UK, has revealed that even the Fezzan was once lush grassland.
How do we know this? The clues lie beneath the sand: tools, arrowheads, fireplaces and even tombs. These artefacts reveal at least two separate phases of human occupation. The earliest humans were hunter-gatherers, who lived there between about 200,000 and 70,000 years ago. They were driven out by a prolonged arid phase around 70,000 to 12,000 years ago. When the rains then returned, so did the people. The most recent wet phase ended 5000 years ago, but this time a remarkable society called the Garamantes developed ways to combat desert hardship. They turned to farming and drew their water from a subterranean aquifer, using a sophisticated network of water extraction tunnels. When this water supply ran out, in around AD 500, this desert civilisation collapsed.
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The telltale human remains are hard to find. The best bet is to search close to the bed of an ancient river or lake that people might once have lived around. Satellites and ground-penetrating radar can spot dried-up rivers and lakes beneath the layers of sand. By studying the fossil traces left behind, researchers have built a comprehensive picture of the ever-changing Fezzan environment.
Today the Fezzan is probably home to some 80,000 people, clustered around a number of oases that depend entirely on water taken from beneath the sand. The Fezzan is also the source of the Great Manmade River. Oil prospectors in the 1950s discovered a huge fossil aquifer 鈥� deeper than the one found by the Garamantes 鈥� rather than the black gold they sought. A network of underground pipes now supplies around a million cubic metres of water a day to Tripoli, Libya鈥檚 capital city, and the region surrounding it. Groundwater levels in the Fezzan are dropping 鈥� perhaps because of the Great Manmade River 鈥� and if the oases dry up, the consequences for the people and the wildlife that depend on the desert lakes will be serious. The Fezzan is changing again.
