Ténéré desert

The Teneré desert is a desert region located in the south-central part of the Sahara, in the department of Arlit, region of Agadez, in Niger. The enormous salt dunes of Temet and the magical scenery have made Ténéré one of the most beautiful deserts.

The Tuareg word teneré means "desert," and translated into Arabic, sahara. The most important city of Ténéré is Agadez, in the shadow of the Air mountains.

The desert is also known for the Ténéré tree, an acacia that was once considered the loneliest tree in the world. Surprisingly, in 1973, a Libyan truck knocked it down and it was replaced by a metal sculpture, the original being deposited in the National Museum of Niger.

Demarcation

This vast 400,000 km² sand plain stretches from northeastern Niger to western Chad. Its boundaries are the Air Mountains to the west, the Ahaggar Mountains to the north, the Djado Plateau to the northeast, the Tibesti Mountains to the east, and the Lake Chad Basin to the south.

Most of the desert is located on the bed of Lake Chad, when it was like a small inland sea, forming a huge southern plain, however, in the north, the Ténéré forms a wide sheet of sand that reaches Tassili Ahaggar hills, along the border with Algeria.

To the southeast, the desert is limited by the Kaouar cliffs, an escarpment of almost 150 km in the northeast of Niger at whose feet a series of oases sit, among which Bilma stands out and its impressive erg of gigantic dunes.

A part of the region was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1991, together with the Air mountains, under the name of Air and Ténéré Natural Reserves. It covers an area of 7,736,000 ha. In 1992 it was included in the World Heritage List in danger of extinction.

Prehistory

Like the Sahara, as a more complex whole, what is now known as the Ténéré desert has varied its climate in great leaps from prehistoric times to the present day. Just as Europe is known for at least four ice ages, these seem to coincide with wet periods in the latitudes that now comprise the Sahara. Specifically, Ténéré, one of the driest deserts known today, occupies the basin of what was once a large lake rich in fishing. Its edges were inhabited by fishing peoples whose utensils can be found today on the surface insofar as they were made of stone or bone: harpoons, hooks, thorny points.

The paintings of the Tassili (Tassili n'Ajjer), which appear to represent the customs of the inhabitants of this part of the Sahara from 15,000 to 6,000 years ago, show that civilizations of hunters and herders have coexisted and thrived in a habitat in which there was no lack of rivers, animals and the forests that have now moved further south.

El Ténéré has been inhabited by humans since the Paleolithic, at least 60,000 years ago. Between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, the Kiffian culture lived in this region, the oldest remains of which were found in Gobero. They were followed by the Teneriense culture, which remained in Ténéré until 5,000 years ago, during a period known as the Sub-Pluvial Neolithic, a humid phase of the Holocene that lasted from 7,500 B.C. C. until approximately 3000 B.C. C. and that it was one of the green periods of the Sahara that allowed livestock in inhospitable places today. Archaeological remains have remained from those settlements in the form of arrowheads and stone axes, flint stones and some rock art.

Rock Art

The rock art of the central and eastern Sahara owes its fame mainly to the frescoes of Tassili n'Ajjer, but it is also very rich and abundant in Ahaggar, Fezzan, Tibesti, Bourkou and Ennedi, as well as in the mountains of Air, where rich deposits have been found that extend to the Ténéré.

If we go into the desert, towards the center and south of the desert and sandy plain itself, hardly any remains of the ancient settlers can be found, except in Gobero, and cave paintings are very scarce for such a large area, although inauspicious. In the seventies the four most significant sites containing rock art were discovered, and in 1997 the most striking one was discovered.

• Jirafas de Dabous: discovered in 1997 by David Coulson in a rocky spur on the foothills of the Air Mountains, is a petroglyph with two six-metre high giraffes and 8,000 years old. Hundreds of animal engravings have been found in the surroundings on the rocks.

• Termit West 16°05′45′N 11°14′45′′E / 16.09583, 11.24583 It is located in the Termit massif, near the southwest end, under a rocky flank that gives rise to a cavity full of caves that served as shelter to the caravans of the Tubu of the region, which stood here on their way to Fachi, Bilma or Tasker. On a pink, hard and granulated sandstone, there are more than eighty engravings between vaults, oryx, gazelles, giraffes, human silhouettes, elephants, oats, horses and dromedaries on several panels, the largest of which has 5,40 x 3 m of extension.

• Dibella (Yerirom) 17°33′20′N 13°06′20′E / 17.55556, 13.10556 It is 255 km to the northeast of Termit West, near the small oasis of Dibella, remnant of several lakes that were sheltered by a cliff of 150 m high and which now lie under a bed of sand. Around the oasis there are several rocky islets. In the flank of a loma of cretaceous sandstone called Yerirom the cave paintings were discovered in 1972, a dozen figures on three panels of less than one square meter in total. You can appreciate some vaults and small people.

• Guedeza Keita 17°27′45′N 13°08′55′′E / 17.46250, 13.14861 It is 11 km southeast of Dibella, at the southeast corner of the mountain of the same name. It hardly contains the engravings of a vault and a giraffe of 36 and 55 cm high.

• Do Dimmi 16°29′05′′N 11°18′50′′E / 16.48472, 11.31389 It is located 45 km northeast of Termit West, in an area with small sandstone plates and very rich in post-neolytic vestiges. A small spurt of resistant sandstone has created a small coat in which there are depicted vaults, antelopes, giraffes, indeterminate ruminants, human silhouettes, elephants and turtles in a rather schematic way.

Climate

Desert climate, high temperatures all year round, large thermal oscillations, scant and irregular rainfall. The Ténéré is located in an area dominated by the northeast trade winds, which only recede in midsummer due to the advance of the Gulf of Guinea monsoons.

Precipitation, whose annual average is less than 25 mm, depends on the penetration of the monsoon. They can be zero, but they can also cause the wadis to rise for a few weeks between June and September. Only in the mountainous massifs, especially the Air, can they reach 75 mm per year.

Temperatures range from 10°C to 29°C in the coolest month, January, and 25°C to 44°C in the warmest month, June. It can get freezing, and the maximum can exceed 50 ° C.

Numerous indicators have made it possible to reconstruct the Holocene climate to the west of the desert, and it has been verified that where vegetation cover is currently non-existent, there were grassy savannahs, scrublands, some tree species, and lakes that remained year-round. The precipitations, in their moment of greater abundance, between the years 6300 and 5000 a. C. approximately, which is when the lakes were at their maximum level, were comparable to those of the Sahel, around 350 mm per year or more. The composition of the sediments indicates to paleoecologists that something resembling a small-scale Okavango Delta may have formed in this area.

Fonts

• "Africa. From Prehistory to Current States." Pierre Bertaux. Universal History 21st Century. First Edition in Castellano 1972
• http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMGC31A0114S (Holocene Paleoecology of the Western Tenere Desert, Niger, Africa; The Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System)