At 7,000 years old, it's the earliest known astronomical site on Earth. Click the link to find out more.
The stone circle of Nabta Playa marks the summer solstice, a time that coincided with the arrival of monsoon rains in the Sahara Desert thousands of years ago. For thousands of years, ancient societies all around the world erected massive stone circles, aligning them with the sun and stars to mark the seasons. These early calendars foretold the coming of spring, summer, fall and winter, helping civilizations track when to plant and harvest crops.
But even these primitive sites are at least centuries younger than the world’s oldest known stone circle: Nabta Playa. The statue of Ramses the Great at the Great Temple of Abu Simbel is moved during the construction of the Aswan Dam. In the 1960s, Egypt was planning a major dam project along the Nile River that was going to flood important ancient archaeological sites. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization , stepped in with funding to help relocate famous structures, as well as scour the area for new sites before they were lost forever.
"[To] Fred and myself, Nabta Playa stands amongst our dearest discoveries in prehistoric archaeology," Schild says.After seven years without being able to crack their mystery, Wendorf called in Malville, an expert on archaeoastronomy of the American Southwest. The team had already performed radiocarbon dating on the site by taking samples from fire hearths and tamarisk roofing material found inside the stone circle.
“That makes it the oldest astronomical site we've ever discovered,” Malville says. Their analysis was published in the journalIn the decades since then, archaeologists have continued to unravel the mystery of the ancient people of Nabta Playa, who used their summer home to observe the stars.More than 10,000 years ago, Northern Africa shifted away from a cold, dry Ice Age climate that had persisted for tens of thousands of years.
The people of Nabta Playa would travel across the often-featureless Sahara from seasonal lake to seasonal lake, bringing their livestock along to graze and drink. This kind of celestial navigation would have made Nabta Playa's stone circle a powerful symbol to the ancient nomadic people. The stones feet would have been covered by seasonal water, and would have been visible from the western lakeshore.
However, this complex culture seems to have fallen somewhere in between nomadic and agrarian. In addition to the oldest astronomical site, Nabta Playa is also home to the, a crop first domesticated in Africa that’s now one of the world’s most important foods, especially in the tropics. That changing local climate forced the people of Nabta Playa to disperse. Some archaeologists think these people likely traveled south into Nubia, or modern day Sudan, as well as north into Egypt. And their migration would have taken place in the years just before the first pharaohs rose to power.
For Malville, and Wendorf as well, who died in 2015, there’s no need to invent such stories for Nabta Playa to be fascinating. In many years spent exploring the Sahara, Wendorf and other archaeologists found a number of other stone circles, but they never again found anything remotely like Nabta Playa.
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