Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River by Robert Twigger Read Free Book Online

had begun.
    Along with the settlement of the Nile came the stories – myths about its origin, stories about its source which have a semblance of truth about them even now. The stories fed into the traditional tales of Africa, Egypt and even Greece. As they were passed down orally and then set down in texts, the Nile became the first river of ancient literature.
    5 • Out of Eden bearing gifts
    Laughing she got pregnant; crying she delivered . Ethiopian proverb
    So we have a river, but what of the people that inhabited it? Sixty miles from the Nile valley, walking over dunes in the Egyptian desert, I accompanied executives from Oracle, the computer company, there on a company team-building exercise. My role was to reveal the secrets of the desert, but it was the company head of sales who found a hand axe. She didn’t realise its significance. It had been left there maybe 200,000 years ago by one of the earliest dwellers along the Nile valley.
    It was an Acheulean hand axe, as much leading technology in 200,000 BC as an Oracle database was in the twenty-first century. The early Nile dwellers have left behind no bones, no hearths – the desert has destroyed all that. All we have are their tools. And they are scattered everywhere in the desert, proving that the bounty of the Nile extended deep into what are now dry deserted lands. As I explained this, the executive saw my excitement and gave me the hand axe. Itwas too good a gift to pass up. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘it’s too heavy for hand luggage.’
    In the Book of Genesis we read: ‘And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.’ Was that river the Nile, the main artery of the human race? Down (and up) this artery humankind has spread and developed since the very formation of the River Nile.
    As we have seen, the Nile in its current formation is, as rivers go, relatively recent. A proto-Nile that ran into the Tethys Sea – what is now the Mediterranean – existed several million years ago. But it was not until the Ethiopian highlands tilted away from the Red Sea that the Nile could extend backwards out of Egypt. This was around 800,000 years ago.
    This new riverine link provided a certain band of hominids with the chance to break free of their isolation. They went on to dominate the world and outlast any other group, outliving Homo erectus in the Far East around 50,000 years ago and dominating Homo neanderthalensis through interbreeding. Yet Homo sapiens sapiens could easily have remained marooned in the Ethiopian highlands. Without the river they might have stayed in their own Eden – perhaps to have perished and become extinct as many earlier hominid groups had done.
    The Nile valley was their exit route.
    Early Homo sapiens sapiens had one advantage over his predecessors Homo ergaster , erectus and neanderthalensis . He was what he still is: a gift giver. Early hominids worked out how to use fire for their own purposes nearly a million years ago – there are fire-baked clays, evidence of controlled fire use dating from this long ago. Even earlier we see tool use that develops into the Acheulean hand axe, a ubiquitous tool that hardly changed its form in 500,000 years. A massive teardrop-shaped piece of stone, the hand axe was ideal for bashing out marrow from the scavenged and hunted long bones of large prey – deer, buffalo, eland, rhinos and giraffe. Marrow was crucial as a foodstuff as it is high in fat. This allows one to digest the protein of the kill. Without fat one can die of malnutrition, however much protein abounds – as survivalist Chris McCandless showed when he died in the Alaskan wilderness despite shooting plenty of lean game. He had no hand axe to bash out the marrow and died only twenty miles from the highway.
    So even 500,000 years ago ancient man had worked that one out. He had started funeral rituals – arranging the way the body was laid outafter death – and there is even