Abstract
Northeast Africa is here taken to include Egypt and northern Sudan. It contains the arid heart of the Eastern Sahara, the driest region of the great desert, large parts of which now lie within the O-mm isohyet. Across this desert, however, there flows the River Nile, one of the world’s major rivers. The Nile is tightly confined within its steep-sided and cliff-lined valley, flowing through a land in which rainfall is a newsworthy event, so that the transition between the riverine valley and the desert proper is abrupt and measurable in meters. The modem environments of the valley and the desert could not be more different; similarly, the effects of the Pleistocene—Holocene transition upon these two zones could not have been more different.
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Close, A.E. (1996). Plus Ça Change. In: Straus, L.G., Eriksen, B.V., Erlandson, J.M., Yesner, D.R. (eds) Humans at the End of the Ice Age. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1145-4_3
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