Why are there paintings of swimmers in the Sahara Desert?

The paintings date from a time when the Sahara was far greener and wetter than today, so the explorer who found them thought they showed real people swimming; others think the figures are the souls of the dead. The paintings, discovered in October 1933 by Hungarian explorer László Almásy in a rock shelter on Egypt's Gilf Kebir plateau, show human figures with their limbs bent as if swimming, alongside drawings of a giraffe and a hippopotamus, animals you won't find in today's desert. Researchers estimate the art was made as early as 8000 BC, right as the African Humid Period began, a time when the Sahara was significantly greener and wetter than it is today.

Almásy himself was convinced the swimmers were literal: real people, realistically depicted, actually swimming in a landscape that later dried into desert. His idea was so unconventional at the time that his own editor inserted footnotes into his 1934 book just to make clear he personally disagreed. Scientists working in the area have since drawn a provisional link between the swimmers and two lakes about 200 kilometres south of the shelter, and in 2007 Eman Ghoneim found an ancient mega-lake of 30,750 square kilometres buried under the Sahara's sand in Sudan's Northern Darfur.

Not everyone accepts the literal reading, though. The researcher Andras Zboray questions whether the figures are swimming at all, calling them clearly symbolic with an unknown meaning, and others read them as souls of the dead. Scholars have pointed out striking parallels between the cave's swimming figures and ancient Egyptian funerary texts describing deceased souls floating through the waters of Nun, with the Egyptian anthropologist Yasser Al-Laithy finding the paintings closely resemble swimmer imagery inside the tomb of the pharaoh Ramesses VI.

The cave gained an unexpected second life through fiction: it's mentioned in Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient and appears in the film version, where Almásy himself is a character. That fame came at a cost. Since the film's 1996 release, visitors have irreversibly damaged substantial parts of the real site, removing fragments as souvenirs, cracking painted surfaces by wetting them for better photos, and leaving graffiti and litter behind.