THE SAHARA

SLUGIULLA ROCK ART

Giraffe









The early morning started us bouncing over desert roads and tracks, using the occasional shortcut across hard-packed sand, all to the lively strings of the Sahrawi tidinit playing on the stereo.

First stop was the site of Sluguilla, a previously discovered 26-kilometer (16-mi) stretch of rock engravings on flat stones.

Animal images range from giraffes to elephants and rhinos. “This is a place where people would have gathered in the past, exchanged stories, renewed old acquaintances, where the young would meet marriage partners, and so on,” says Brooks. 


Sluguilla hasn’t been dated. But clearly this entire area has been tramped by human feet for hundreds

of millennia.


Stone Age artifacts ranging from Acheulian hand axes—these can go back more than half a million years—to more recent tanged points of chert, the color of dark chocolate, lie scattered wherever we walk.

That evening, after a camel stew simmered on an acacia-wood campfire, Brooks relaxes over sweet green tea and tells us about his recent presentation on climate change, the Sahara and the origins of the earliest civilizations at the British Association Festival of Science.

“The Independent, Times, Telegraph, Scotsman and Irish Times were all very keen and prepared
articles on it,” he says.