Sahara, (from Arabic ṣaḥrāʾ, “desert”) largest desert in the world. The Sahara is the world's largest low-latitude hot desert. [citation needed]. Acacia trees, grasses, spiny shrubs, and palms, for example, have adapted to the Saharan climate by growing closer to the ground to avoid water loss from strong winds. The primary source of rain in the Sahara is the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a continuous belt of low-pressure systems near the equator which bring the brief, short and irregular rainy season to the Sahel and southern Sahara. The Tenerians were considerably shorter in height and less robust than the earlier Kiffians. [67] One other individual, an adult, was found at Uan Muhuggiag, buried in a crouched position. The Sahara exhibits great climatic variability within its borders, with two major climatic regimes differentiating along a north-south axis: the desert’s northern latitudes are arid subtropical and have two rainy seasons, while the southern ones, although also arid, are more tropical and have only one rainy season. The three are assumed to have died within 24 hours of each other, but as their skeletons hold no apparent trauma (they did not die violently) and they have been buried so elaborately – unlikely if they had died of a plague – the cause of their deaths is a mystery. [72] Burial items included pottery, jewelry, farming and hunting equipment, and assorted foods including dried meat and fruit. If the desert was a state, then it could be compared with Brazil. The Sahara pump theory describes this cycle. Saharan birds include the African silverbill and the black-throated Firefinch. The small towns and settlement in the Sahara are concentrated around the oases; areas where the underground water reaches the surface. [30] Once the ice sheets were gone, the northern Sahara dried out. About half of these species are common to the flora of the Arabian deserts.[46]. Because of this extreme heating process, a thermal low is usually noticed near the surface, and is the strongest and the most developed during the summertime. The southern border is delimited by the Niger River and the Sahel, a transitional belt that transverses the continent at the line where the desert landscape transforms into a semi-arid savannah. In Arabic the Sahara is called Al-Ṣaḥrāʾ al-Kubrā, or “the Great Desert.” The Arabic word ṣaḥrāʾ simply means “desert,” and its plural form, ṣaḥārāʾ, is where the northern African desert gets its Anglicized name. ", "Stone Age Graveyard Reveals Lifestyles Of A 'Green Sahara, "Graves Found From Sahara's Green Period", "Lakeside Cemeteries in the Sahara: 5000 Years of Holocene Population and Environmental Change", "Stone Age mass graves reveal green Sahara", "In the Sahara, Stone Age graves from greener days", "Antonio Ascenzi (1915–2000), a Pathologist devoted to Anthropology and Paleopathology", Late Neolithic megalithic structures at Nabta Playa, "Drones and Satellites Spot Lost Civilizations in Unlikely Places", List of countries where Arabic is an official language, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sahara&oldid=983149298, Articles with dead external links from January 2018, Articles with permanently dead external links, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia pages semi-protected against vandalism, Articles containing undetermined-language text, Articles with unsourced statements from September 2020, Articles with unsourced statements from August 2016, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from January 2019, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from April 2017, Articles with unsourced statements from February 2020, Wikipedia articles needing clarification from February 2020, Articles with unsourced statements from August 2009, Articles with unsourced statements from February 2013, Wikipedia articles with WorldCat identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 12 October 2020, at 14:56. The Sahara is about 30% of the entire African continent. To the north, the Sahara skirts the Mediterranean Sea in Egypt and portions of Libya, but in Cyrenaica and the Maghreb, the Sahara borders the Mediterranean forest, woodland, and scrub eco-regions of northern Africa, all of which have a Mediterranean climate characterized by hot summers and cool and rainy winters. Egypt became independent of Britain in 1936, although the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936 allowed Britain to keep troops in Egypt and to maintain the British-Egyptian condominium in the Sudan.