Today, the Sahara Desert is a huge, lifeless space in northern Africa, covering about six million square kilometers. More than a dozen states are located on its territory, but despite this, the population density in the Sahara is the smallest in the whole world - about three square kilometers per person.
The landscape of the Sahara is a rather dull sight: mountains of sand stretching beyond the horizon against the backdrop of the scorching sun. But the most surprising thing is that it was not always so. Until the beginning of the 20th century, humanity was not particularly interested in the Sahara. This is understandable - who needs lifeless territories, even the study of which, in principle, will give nothing.
Progressive mankind began to "study" the Sahara only from the point of view of its commercial use. Auguste Mushaud, the French inventor who built the first solar power plant, came to the Sahara to commercialize his invention. Together with him, his friend, the naturalist Jacques Lepeu arrived there. It was he who first drew attention to the images painted on the rocks near the Musho installations.
Lepeu became interested in these images and a year later, with his own expedition, he discovered a huge number of drawings in the Tassilin-Ajer region, which depicted the life of people inhabiting this area in a variety of situations. Somewhat later, other researchers, continuing the work of Lepeu, found a lot of evidence of the existence of a sufficiently developed civilization on the territory of modern Sahara. Moreover, the drawings depicted its development in dynamics - from tribes of pastoralists to the first large settlements with all the attributes of a developed society: power structures, religion, culture.
Based on these scraps of information, it was possible to restore the approximate time of the existence of this civilization. This period began about 12 thousand years ago and lasted until about 5 millennium BC. Ancient Egypt, the first "official" civilization of Africa, appeared on the historical scene much later.
In addition, geologists have established one very interesting detail: according to studies, the Sahara region became a desert at about the same time - about 5 thousand years BC. Up to this point, the region has been a thriving tropical oasis filled with all the essentials: jungle, lakes, birds and animals. Suddenly, due to some kind of cataclysm, all this, together with the people inhabiting it, disappeared somewhere.
Official science simply explains the "desertification" of the Sahara. It is believed that the climate in that region changed to a much drier one, the amount of precipitation decreased by about a hundred times, which was the reason for the death of all vegetation there and the transformation of this zone into a desert. The timing of such a transformation was also named - several hundred years, which is too fast for processes of this scale. On the other hand, in the absence of any water sources other than precipitation, such a process is quite possible. In general, the explanation suited almost everyone.
Among those who did not accept the official point of view was one notable researcher, also French, like Lepeu. His name was Henri Lot. This man was one of the best popularizers of science of his time. An ethnographer by education, he never shied away from working as a simple archaeologist and devoted most of his scientific activity to the study of the ancient cultures of Africa.
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Who seeks will always find. And Lot was lucky. He began his search with the already well-known Tassilin-Ajer, expanding the area of research, and in about two decades of work he received interesting results.
Lot was able to reproduce almost completely the history of this mysterious Saharan civilization, the features of its life and formation, and also proved its relationship with other cultures of the Mediterranean and northeastern Africa. Also, the lot was able to establish the ethnic composition of the population of this state, he found out that the inhabitants of these territories were representatives not only of different peoples, but also of different races. The population of this civilization was completely alien to any racial or ethnic prejudice; even today, such an approach is not present everywhere, and there is nothing to say about those ancient times …
But Lot made the most interesting discovery in the Ahaggar Highlands. In several places in Ahaggar, he found extremely unusual finds. They were images of humanoid figures dressed in very strange clothes. The costumes on the figures looked like divers' clothes or space suits for astronauts. Lot was initially skeptical about the idea of paleocontact. He suggested that he was faced with images of priests or some fairy-tale heroes. However, later, when similar images were found in other places in the Sahara, the scientist changed his mind about their origin. In addition, there were drawings in which strange creatures behaved hostile to people.
All images of strange creatures in spacesuits have one common detail: they are drawn at approximately the same time. The difference in their appearance on the rocks is no more than 50 years, which is commensurate with the error of the analysis itself. It was on the basis of these circumstances that Lot put forward a hypothesis that the Saharan civilization did not disappear as a result of natural causes, but could be destroyed by mysterious aliens in mysterious costumes.
Naturally, in the scientific world, Lot's ideas were subjected to severe criticism, however, this did not stop him. He continued his searches not only in Africa, but also in South America. It was there that he discovered figurines of the pre-Olmec era, depicting creatures exactly like Saharan creatures in spacesuits.
According to Lot's hypothesis, about five thousand years BC, aliens from outer space flew to Earth, with whom our distant ancestors had a conflict. As a result of this conflict, the most advanced civilization that existed on our planet was destroyed. And on the place of its existence, the largest desert on the planet is currently located - the Sahara.
This theory is very controversial and contains many gaps in its confirmation, however, one should not forget that so far, practically no serious and large-scale study of the culture of the civilization that lived in the Sahara has been undertaken. It is quite possible that soon new facts will be revealed to us …