Cattle pastoralism and early astronomy at Nabta Playa in the Green Sahara
- Date
- c. 7500 BCE (onset; megalithic phase c. 4800 BCE)
- Category
- Social & demographic
- Region
- Nubian Desert, southern Egypt (Sahara)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
Around 7500 BCE, during the African Humid Period when monsoon rains transformed the eastern Sahara into seasonal savanna and lakes, Neolithic communities began settling the Nabta Playa basin in what is now southern Egypt's Nubian Desert.
These mobile peoples followed herds of cattle between seasonal water sources, representing one of the earliest pastoral economies in northeastern Africa, later supplemented by sheep and goats imported from Western Asia. Over subsequent millennia the inhabitants developed deep wells, organised settlements, and an elaborate ritual landscape that included cattle burials beneath stone tumuli. Around 4800 BCE they erected a small 'calendar circle' of standing sandstone slabs aligned with the summer solstice sunrise, followed by larger megalithic alignments and stelae built between roughly 4500 and 3600 BCE. Excavated from the 1970s by Fred Wendorf and Romuald Schild, Nabta Playa is regarded as among the world's oldest known archaeoastronomical sites, predating Stonehenge by over a millennium, though the degree of cattle domestication and the precision of the stellar alignments remain debated.
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Related social & demographic events
- Çatalhöyük and the great Neolithic towns of Anatoliac. 7100 – 5950 BCE
- Farming village at Mehrgarh and the Neolithic of South Asiac. 7000 BCE
- Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appears in Africac. 300,000 years ago
- Rise of the Yamnaya Culture and Steppe Pastoralismc. 3300 BCE
- The Natufian culture and the first sedentary hunter-gatherersc. 15,000 – 11,500 years ago (c. 13,000–9500 BCE)
- Uruk becomes the world's first cityc. 4000–3100 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
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