Guillermo
How the climate changed 10.000 years go
Ten thousand years ago, the Sahara Desert was full of plants, trees and water. The climate changed and transformed most of the large Sahara Desert into a savanna-type ecosystem. It happened very quickly, in less than a few hundred years. There were grass, shrubs and small lakes. Animals and humans moved to the Sahara and settled there. Humans constructed towns and painted everything on walls made of rock. The Cave of Swimmers is a very famous example of rock art in the Sahara. The Hungarian explorer László Almásy located the cave and its art in 1933. He discovered paintings of humans swimming in lakes and rivers.
The Mojave Desert, in the United States of America, is both a hot and a cold desert, depending on the time of year, with temperatures below zero in the Winter to 50º in the Summer. Around 10,000 years ago the Mojave Desert was a much wetter place. There were lakes and rivers that appeared as glaciers from the Ice Age disappeared.
On the other side of the Atlantic, people walked from France to England as there was no English Channel. England was a peninsula of what is nowadays France. When the Ice Age ended and the ice melted, thousands of liters of water flooded what is now the English Channel and separated England from France.