A Singular Story between Deserts and the Nile. The Egyptian Path toward Food Production.

Abstract

Abstract: Intensive research in recent decades has shed new light on Holocene Prehistory in northeastern Africa, particularly on the areas of the Nile Valley and adjacent deserts. Located at the northeast of the African continent, at the intersection with the Middle East, Egypt (valley and deserts) has followed a particular path between these two poles, from the end of the Big Dry to the emergence of food production during the 6th millennium and its establishment in the 5th millennium. If the Nile Valley is not very prolific until the end of the 5th millennium, partly for taphonomic reasons, the major surveys carried out in the western desert between the 1980s and the early 2000s made it possible to set up more and more complete regional chrono-cultural sequences and to develop scenarios involving economic and cultural dynamics linked with the dramatic climate changes of that period. The first populations to reoccupy the area thatthe Big Dry had completely emptied at the end of the Pleistocene, and which became again dwelling areas upon return to wet conditions, are Epipalaeolithic hunter-gatherers, whose economy was based on the exploitation of wild resources. Aurochs, bubals, gazelles, hares and ostriches invested around many water spots, a grassy savannah that substituted the desert thanks to the northward progression of monsoon rains. Plants adapted to this regime grew abundantly on the shores of lakes. As evidenced by the numerous grinding stones found on sites, they respond to the food needs of human groups, which are distributed throughout the African geographical area where the Nile flows. In the north, neither the sea nor the Sinai Peninsula have ever constituted any insuperable hurdles as shown by the occurrence in Heluan and Wadi Araba (eastern desert) of groups of hunters belonging to the PPNA/PPNB traditions. The transition toward new lifestyles, marked by the adoption of food production, took place over a long period of time, against the