Lost cities / archaeology / ancient history

All that stuff about Africa is incredibly interesting. I'm convinced that there are huge archaeological treasures to be unearthed there, and I've long considered Timbuktu one of the most fascinating places on Earth. The cultures that existed in this area were displaced by climate change that caused desert advancement, and, I think, probably particularly the loss of 'Lake Mega-Chad':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Basin

You can't help but wonder if large human populations wouldn't have clustered around this lake much earlier than the current state of the archaeology that's been done there indicates. There is also evidence of other large lakes in what is now the Sahara that only disappeared well into the period when humans would have been ubiquitous there.

A lot of speculation, to be sure, but I do think that human populations were much larger back then than we estimate today, and that North Africa in particular would have been a very busy place, and while climate change was undoubtedly the major factor, I suspect that human activity, e.g. unsustainable agriculture, was probably also an important cause of its desertification. Coastal Mediterranean North Africa must still have been more fertile than it is today in the time of the Romans, when it exported large amounts of grain to Rome.

The earlier (long pre-Medieval) Malian civilisations were probably so rich and famous in part because they grew with climate refugees and became diverse and culturally fertile. Later, some if its cities, including Timbuktu, were important points for the caravan trade across the Sahara.

One of the most fascinating things to me is that families in Timbuktu hold amazing heirlooms of large numbers of ancient books of history and lots of other topics. These treasures have still not been studied adequately, despite quite recently being occupied by iconoclastic forces.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/22/islamic-extremist-pleads-guilty-at-icc-to-timbuktu-cultural-destruction

It seems that many books were successfully hidden or taken out of the city, but there was still considerable material loss:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts

If anything can advance our understanding of African history, it is this trove of inestimable value, and I do hope that things become catalogued and archived before another wave of war engulfs the city.