Today the Sahara desert is a dry, dusty, sandy land that stretches for millions of miles, but it wasn't always this way. Go back at little as 8,000 years and you'll find it was actually quite wet, ...

The fascinating but little-known history of how the Sahara was transformed from a pleasant green and fertile land into the largest hot desert in the world. Green Sahara. (Collage by Kuat Abeshev.

Long before the Sahara became the world’s largest desert, it was filled with rivers, lakes, and human settlements spread across a massive green landscape, and new research now suggests that beneath ...

The Sahara today is shorthand for desolation, a vast belt of sand and rock that helps define the climate of an entire hemisphere. Yet geological records show that this same region has repeatedly ...

You’ll find a lot more sand than trees in the Sahara Desert, but that doesn’t mean they don’t occasionally crop up. Here’s the story of the Tree of Ténéré, as well as a couple other famous trees found ...

Petroglyphs on sandstone at a national park in Chad bear witness to wildlife that once roamed the area before the continent’s water largely receded 6,000 years ago. Could it return? The Ennedi Natural ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. A pioneering study discovered a previously unknown human lineage in Africa that dates back 50,000 years when modern human lineages ...

Every year a small songbird, no heavier than a letter, crosses the Sahara Desert, the Mediterranean and the Arabian Desert on ...