Description
The Nile Basin contains a record of human activities spanning the last million years. However, the interactions between prehistoric humans and environmental changes in this area are complex and often poorly understood. This comprehensive book explains in clear, non-technical terms how prehistoric environments can be reconstructed, with examples drawn from every part of the Nile Basin. Adopting a source-to-sink approach, the book integrates events in the Nile headwaters with the record from marine sediment cores in the Nile Delta and offshore. It provides a detailed record of past environmental changes throughout the Nile Basin and concludes with a review of the causes and consequences of plant and animal domestication in this region and of the various prehistoric migrations out of Africa into Eurasia and beyond. A comprehensive overview, this book is ideal for researchers in geomorphology, climatology and archaeology.
Table of Contents
Preface; Acknowledgments; 1. Introduction; 2. Evolution of the Nile Basin; 3. Climate and hydrology; 4. Geology and soils; 5. Vegetation, land use and human impact; 6. The Ethiopian Highlands; 7. The Ugandan Lake Plateau; 8. The Sudd swamps and the White Nile; 9. Lake Turkana and overflow into the Sobat; 10. The Khor Abu Habl Fan and Kordofan desert dunes; 11. The Gezira alluvial fan and Blue Nile palaeochannels; 12. The Atbara valley; 13. Jebel Marra volcano; 14. The desert Nile; 15. West of the Nile: the Western Desert of Egypt and the Eastern Sahara: part one; 16. West of the Nile: the Western Desert of Egypt and the Eastern Sahara: part two; 17. The Fayum; 18. The Red Sea Hills; 19. The Sinai desert; 20. The Nile Delta; 21. The Nile Cone; 22. Origins of plant and animal domestication in the Nile Basin; 23. Epilogue: 'out of Africa'; References; Index.
