Daily History Challenge · No. 63 · Sunday 30 August 2026 · Gauntlet
Puzzle No. 63: Gauntlet
The Sunday Gauntlet: three before or after calls, four events to order and a final When? on Sahel Drought and Famine.
Act 1: Chain, against Laguna Copperplate Inscription (900 CE)
Before Laguna Copperplate Inscription
After Laguna Copperplate Inscription
After Laguna Copperplate Inscription
Act 2: Order, earliest first
Act 3: When?
Beginning in 1968, a prolonged failure of the monsoon rains across the Sahel, the semi-arid belt south of the Sahara, triggered one of the twentieth century's worst environmental and humanitarian disasters, peaking with widespread famine between 1972 and 1974. The crisis devastated Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), along with parts of northern Nigeria and Cameroon, killing an estimated 100,000 people and roughly a third of the region's livestock while leaving hundreds of thousands dependent on emergency food aid. As rivers shrank and the surface area of Lake Chad collapsed, the catastrophe was initially blamed on overgrazing, deforestation, and overpopulation, fuelling fears of permanent desertification; later research instead emphasised shifts in global sea surface temperatures as the dominant driver of the rainfall deficit. The disaster spurred the first large-scale international famine-relief mobilisation in the region and led to the creation of the United Nations Sahelian Office in 1973 and, later, the International Fund for Agricultural Development. The event reshaped scientific understanding of drought, desertification, and the interplay of natural climate variability with human land use.