What If We’re the Amnesia?

Part 1: The Sahara Was Green and Other Weird Thing

Let’s talk about something no one ever bothered to tell us in school:

The Sahara Desert used to be green.
Not just “slightly less dusty” — we’re talking full-on lush, thriving, hippo-infested savannah.
There were rivers. Trees. Grass. Giant lakes. Crocodiles. Fishing villages. Campfires. Probably a guy named Kevin with an excellent beard.

This was about 6,000 to 9,000 years ago — not millions, not dinosaurs — this was post-agriculture, pre-Spotify.

And then... it just stopped.

Scientists call it the “African Humid Period,” which is a deeply underwhelming name for what was basically the Sahara going from “Jurassic Park” to “Death Valley” in geological fast-forward. Rainfall patterns shifted, monsoons retreated, and the entire region dried out and died.

Now it’s 3.6 million square miles of nope.

And sure, climates shift — but this was catastrophic.
And rapid.
And... weirdly not discussed much?

And here’s where it gets conspiratorial — because you know what cultures were hanging around right before that massive desertification?

All the ones we think of as the “firsts.”
The first cities. The first temples. The first signs of “civilisation.”
Right on the fringes of this now-dead zone.

Mesopotamia. Egypt. The Nubian corridor.
Places that didn’t start things — they survived them.

So here’s a thought:

What if those weren’t the beginnings of civilisation?
What if they were the holdouts?

Like refugees clinging to the last oasis while everything else got swallowed in sand.

And what if the real centre — the heart of a big, weird, intelligent, possibly very smug ancient civilisation —
was under the desert?

And we just haven’t dug deep enough.

Or worse — we have,
but we called it “a pile of rocks,” wrote a paper about it, and moved on.

Let me paint the image:

You’re living in a green Sahara.
You’ve got domesticated animals, tools, maybe early books made from giraffe skin.
You build. You plant. You pass things down.

Then — boom. Drought. Collapse. Wind. Sand.
Everything gets swallowed.

Your kids flee.
They end up in the Nile Valley, telling stories about what was.
About the gods. The flood. The golden age.

Eventually, someone builds a pyramid.
And history begins.
At Chapter 8.