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Concept
History of Chad
Summary
Chad (تشاد ; Tchad), officially the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It borders Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west. Due to its distance from the sea and its largely desert climate, the country is sometimes referred to as the "Dead Heart of Africa".
The territory now known as Chad possesses some of the richest archaeological sites in Africa. A hominid skull was found by Michel Brunet, that is more than 7 million years old, the oldest discovered anywhere in the world; it has been given the name Sahelanthropus tchadensis. In 1996 Michel Brunet had unearthed a hominid jaw which he named Australopithecus bahrelghazali, and unofficially dubbed Abel. It was dated using Beryllium based Radiometric dating as living circa. 3.6 million years ago.
During the 7th millennium BC, the northern half of Chad was part of a broad expanse of land, stretching from the Indus River in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, in which ecological conditions favored early human settlement. Rock art of the "Round Head" style, found in the Ennedi region, has been dated to before the 7th millennium BC and, because of the tools with which the rocks were carved and the scenes they depict, may represent the oldest evidence in the Sahara of Neolithic industries. Many of the pottery-making and Neolithic activities in Ennedi date back further than any of those of the Nile Valley to the east.
In the prehistoric period, Chad was much wetter than it is today, as evidenced by large game animals depicted in rock paintings in the Tibesti and Borkou regions.
Recent linguistic research suggests that all of Africa's major language groupings south of the Sahara Desert (except Khoisan, which is not considered a valid genetic grouping anyway), i.e. the Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Niger–Congo phyla, originated in prehistoric times in a narrow band between Lake Chad and the Nile Valley. The origins of Chad's peoples, however, remain unclear.
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