ABSTRACT
The Tibesti Massif is the highest and largest mountain area in the Sahara. With more than 3400 m a.s.l., it must have reached into different climatic zones during cold periods of the Quaternary. Hence, for the whole of Northern Africa, it acted as an ecological niche and as a refuge during the arid phases; while during the humid “pluvials”, it operated as a centre for propagation. The former investigations into palaeoclimate, landscape, and cultural history, carried out mostly by French scientists and by the German Research Station at Bardai (established by the Free University of Berlin), came to an end after 1970 due to political problems. Only recently, researchers from the University of Cologne have resumed geoscientific research in this large, to date little-known area. This paper explains some of the previous activities and results and highlights important gaps in present knowledge. The history of climate and landscape evolution can better and more precisely be understood, in particular, by additional investigations into fluvial terraces (which document successions of erosion and accumulation) as well as into processes of weathering (fossil soils and their stratigraphic interference and intercalation by volcanic activities), and into the analysis of fossil-bearing sediments of ancient lakes, especially in high-altitude volcanic craters. In respect to cultural history the study of archaeological remains can help to solve hitherto unsettled questions: Where did people, animals, and plants, which populated the Sahara after the beginning of the Holocene humidification, come from? Where was the centre of the early African ceramic production? Where can we localize the origin of the wide-spread African cattle-herders? – There have long-since been serious suppositions and theories that the Tibesti was the main source of the beginning and further evolution of the Neolithic in Northern Africa. By this it must have fundamentally influenced the civilizations and state societies of the Old World that later evolved.
