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Gal Huard tried to group together all rock art into vast pan-Saharan cultures, such as a pre-Neolithic “Culture des Chasseurs” (culture of hunters) and then a Neolithic “Culture des Chasseurs-Pasteurs” (hunters and pastoralists). But these grandiose structures are open to criticism.

Scene with camels (ca. 0 B.C.), In-Itinen (Tassili, Algeria), painting in ochre color. Total length of the scene about 150 centimeters

(Alfred Muzzolini)

Only recently, in a remarkable and copiously documented study by J.-L. Le Quellec (1993), has an effort been made to interpret some thematic classes, using entities borrowed from the history of religions and supposed to be common to all cultures: the categories of the sacred and its symbols.

The Eastern Sahara since 1950

In the late 1960s, several modern excavations just north of Khartoum, at Chador, Saggai, and El Kadada, tried to define more precisely the Mesolithic and the Neolithic described by Arkell. The Neolithic of Shaheinab was found to begin very early, somewhere around 4000 b.c.

Systematic excavations and large-scale surveys were also undertaken, mainly in the Western Desert of Egypt, just north of the border with the Sudan, by the Combined Prehistoric Expedition (Wendorf, Schild, and Close 1984). Several sites, spread from 150 to 500 kilometers from the Nile—notably, Bir Tarfawi and Bir Sahara for the Paleolithic and Nabta Playa and Bir Kiseiba for the Neolithic—have yielded surprising results. Some are of very old occupation, from the Acheulean and then the Mousterian and Aterian, with fauna both from savannah and steppe. A very long hiatus followed, as everywhere else, corresponding to the post-Aterian Hyperarid phase, and a Holocene reoccupation has been noted from around 7800 b.c.

From as early as 7500 to 7000 b.c., there are a few bone fragments of small-sized cattle, ecologically unexpected in a desert biotope and incompatible with other wild fauna recorded at the same site. For these reasons A. Gautier argued that the cattle were domestic, existing a good millennium before the first domestic cattle in the Middle East and three millennia before those from the Neolithic of Merimde in Egypt—a proposition that has aroused controversy. Toward 6000 b.c. ceramics appeared, along with the traces of village structure at