Did We Just Find An Ancient Civilization In The Middle of The Desert?

Hi, it's Katrina! Think about how easy it is for an entire empire, a city, or an advanced piece of technology to just get completely swallowed by the desert. It happens way more than you'd think. In this video, we are checking out some of the most amazing discoveries made in the deserts. We're talking about massive, 24-foot-thick fortresses built to survive catastrophic floods, secret underground tunnels, and hidden ruins that experts didn't even know existed until a guy with a camera walked out to find them. Here are five amazing secrets found in the desert. Finding Secret Ruins in the Sahara When a YouTuber by the name of Josh the Intern discovered something amazing on Google Earth, he decided to make a trek into the desert to find it. It all began when Josh discovered a cluster of undocumented and strangely geometric structures in the Moroccan section of the Sahara. He found them by playing around on Google Earth, but it wasn't enough to just see them on the screen. There were all of these bizarre structures sitting on the summit of a steep and isolated mountain miles from any known civilization. Josh wanted to see this sight for himself. This meant he was going to embark on a journey deep into the African wilderness. Once arriving in Africa and plotting his route, it took him three days of solo trekking to reach the remote mountain range and find what he saw online. What he found in person was so much greater than he could have imagined. And just like the archaeologists who spend years digging through the dirt to uncover lost civilizations, sometimes the best legends are the ones you discover for yourself. In this game, you're basically doing your own digital excavation, uncovering hundreds of unique champions from different factions, each with their own lore rooted in classic fantasy and myth. I know, that's right up your alley. It's Raid Shadow Legends. 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I would go with promo code RATH to get Grand Oak Padraig because his team acceleration and turn cleansing will carry you through the toughest PvE content in the game. These extra champions are only available within 48 hours of downloading through my link, so don't wait! See you in the game! First, Josh mapped out a route of 28 miles that he would follow up a dry riverbed. He was going to a spot with no roads or official trails, so he had to become his own cartographer. The route he chose to take might be empty today, but in ancient times, it wasn't. Thousands of years ago, the Sahara was in the middle of its lush green phase. People occupied this section of the Sahara in large numbers. There were whole human societies living here when the desert was a forest, hunting the wild game and possibly even farming. On his way up that ancient riverbed, Josh saw signs of life still in the desert. He spotted wild camels, encountered a local nomad, and even passed through an abandoned nomadic village. Then he found a thriving desert oasis, its cool waters home to families of frogs. It was the perfect place to cool down before continuing the long trek towards the mountain. On his journey, he found evidence of that forgotten ancient life. He started coming across mysterious stone circles that had clearly been made by lost cultures. There were weird earthen mounds that looked like they could have been the melted ruins of a city made from mud. There were also ancient stone structures perfectly camouflaged on the cliff sides. Josh was wandering into an area that had been occupied in prehistory, but is now completely abandoned. Amazingly, none of this appears to have been documented by experts. Some guy with a camera was able to document all of these amazing ruins while archaeologists haven't even bothered. Then came the mountain. It was a grueling climb. Josh had to abandon his heavy backpack just to get to the summit because it was a struggle. Right before the top, Josh discovered an intricate brick structure built into the face of the cliff. He makes a bunch of assumptions in his video, guessing the structure might have been a secret storage area for grain or water. I mean, maybe it was, but I don't know. At the summit, Josh captured what he claimed to be the first footage of the site, which he also claimed to be undocumented. It was packed with ruins just like what Josh saw on Google Earth. The entire mountaintop was densely crammed with obviously ancient stone structures. These ruins featured distinct rooms, doorways, and other features proving they were not made by Mother Nature. Josh even found a large outer building on the cliff edge that may have served as a lookout tower. But who built these structures? The people are obviously long gone now, but who were they? Did they belong to some exotic civilization that no one's ever heard of before? And how old are the ruins? Josh said he couldn't find any records or archaeological data online, so he shared his three theories on who may have built the city on the summit. Josh believes it may have been the Amazigh culture, an ancient sect of the Berber people of North Africa. Moroccan records show the Amazigh appeared in the Sahara about 3,000 years ago and became famous for building fortified mountaintop villages. Honestly, Josh is probably right. The Amazigh people did live here and they did build settlements just like the one he found. I'm going to dig a little deeper into the Amazigh in just a minute, but first, the other two theories. Josh also suggested the ruins could have been from the time when the Sahara was green. The stone ruins could date back 5,000, even as far back as 11,000 years. Josh did say he didn't see any immediate evidence to suggest the site is that old, but he's also not a trained archaeologist, nor did he do any digging, so maybe there's proof of something older beneath the surface. The ruins could also have been the last stand of a destroyed tribe. Josh suggested that given its isolation at the top of the mountain, it may have been a refuge in times of war. He said that people may have lived in a main village below the mountain, and then during times of war, they would flee up its slopes for protection. These are all just guesses, but the reality is that Josh did find ruins, and someone must have built them. My money is on the Amazigh people, so let's dive straight into their history next. Who are the Amazigh people of the desert? The Berber people of North Africa have gone by many names. The ancient Greeks called them Barbaroi, the Romans called them Barbaros, the Arabs used the term Barbar, but through it all, the word has meant one thing, wild. The Berber have long been considered the wild, uncivilized, untamed people of North Africa, living in the Sahara Desert. But what is civilized? Are the Berbers uncivilized because they live life the same as their ancestors had for thousands of years? For the Berbers, they refer to themselves as Amazigh. They have been living in this part of the world for more than 300,000 years. The Amazigh are the descendants of the original humans who lived in North Africa, dating back to the beginning of human history in the Upper Paleolithic. I'm serious! Their ancestry dates back to the evolution of Homo sapiens. Their modern communities can be found scattered all across North Africa, from the Canary Islands all the way to Egypt. They speak many dialects and can be found in every corner of the desert. The history of this ancient desert culture is largely a mystery. Unlike the Egyptians or Mesopotamians, the Berber didn't write anything down. They never had a written language in ancient times, so they never recorded their beliefs, religious teachings, or cultural traditions. Absolutely nothing about them is known, except for what scientists have found in cave paintings from 12,000 years ago. The paintings typically depict domestic animals and agricultural activities, showing the Amazigh to have been early pastoralists. More than 7,000 years before the pyramids were built, the so-called uncivilized Berber people were already farming and raising livestock. Doesn't seem very uncivilized to me. They may have even met aliens. Some of their most famous cave paintings are the ones at Tassili Nager in Algeria. The site is famous for its depiction of otherworldly figures, some of which look like aliens stepping out of a spaceship. A lot of people wonder if the Berber really did meet aliens, who perhaps gifted them some incredible knowledge. Maybe that was why the Amazigh were so secretive for so many millennia. Perhaps they were the guardians of a great cosmic truth given by aliens, and they were safeguarding it from other civilizations. You have to think, there must have been a good reason why the Amazigh people never settled down and formed a permanent civilization somewhere. After all, everyone else did. In the 7th century BC, the Phoenicians founded great trading ports along the coast of North Africa where the Amazigh had already been living for thousands of years. The city of Tangier originally had a Berber name, Tingi. The Phoenicians showed up, built cities, and renamed entire regions to suit their language. Meanwhile, the Berber largely maintained their pastoralist lifestyle in herding ways, remaining nomadic and mysterious. And they remain that way to this day. There are around 40 million Amazigh people still alive in North Africa right now. They might be the only culture who has managed to remain independent, unconquered, and relatively free for more than 10,000 years. But did they build the mysterious ruins discovered by Josh the Intern? Possibly. It's highly likely, but without an archaeological investigation, I simply can't say This civilization survived on one watering hole. The mystical Amazigh people are not the only ones who have called the Sahara Desert home. For thousands of years, there was an ancient society living in the same desert as the Berbers, but they got their water from only one source. They didn't have flowing rivers or an annual monsoon. These folks didn't even get rainfall in any meaningful amount. The civilization I'm talking about was known to the Romans as the Garamantes. As far as the archaeological records show, they were the first known urbanized society to establish itself in the heart of a desert. They didn't live on the fringes of the Sahara like the spoiled Egyptians did, sourcing their water from the Nile. They also didn't live on the shores of an inland lake that provided fish and fresh water. Nope, the Garamantes lived amidst a sea of sand. So how in the world did they survive without reliable rain or rivers? They sourced their water from the sand itself. This was a savage kingdom that used slaves to dig tunnels below sand dunes and harvest hidden groundwater. The rulers of the Garamantes kingdom achieved a standard of living that at the time was unmatched in the Sahara. But the good times didn't last. The groundwater satiated an entire civilization until one day, their luck ran out and their taps ran dry. Archaeologists first stumbled upon this forgotten civilization in the 1960s. They discovered the ruined capital of the Garamantes, a place called Garama, and ever since experts have been struggling to understand them. At the time, historians believed the civilization had been small and simple. Scientists all over the world ignorantly assumed the Sahara was too hot to have ever supported a large-scale culture. It was assumed that the Garamantes were made up of loosely allied desert barbarians. In recent years, though, evidence has started to emerge that changes the narrative. The ancient society was far more advanced than previously assumed. They were also significantly more widespread, covering an area of an estimated 70,000 square miles. Their capital city of Garama was home to an estimated 4,000 residents. While not exactly the hub of activity that Athens or Rome was, 4,000 people in a capital that doesn't receive a drop of rain is exceptional. How did the citizens stave off their thirst in the brutal desert heat? Just look at this image of Garama today. Notice the muddy ruins of the city and the disturbing lack of shade. These people were directly in the eye of the North African sun with nowhere to hide. The key to this civilization's survival was an underground stone aquifer. To this day, it is one of the largest aquifers on the planet. There was so much water inside the aquifer that entire towns survived off it. Farmers, cattle herders, engineers, and merchants all utilized what seemed to be an endless source of groundwater. But getting to it was difficult. The Garamantes spent hundreds of years directing their slaves down into vertical shafts and underground tunnels. They called these subterranean features fogaras. They would dig their fogaras at an incline so that they would reach just underneath the water table, like tilting a to-go cup just enough that the water starts coming out the end of the straw. This allowed the liquid inside the aquifer to run downhill. The engineers just had to make sure the fogaras were pointed in the right directions, bringing water to towns, the capital, and nearby farms. The Garamantes likely got their technology from the Persians, who used similar strategies to irrigate their farmland and bring water to their cities. But the situations weren't quite the same. In Persia, their natural aquifers are replenished when snow melts high up in the mountains. In the Sahara, there is no snow melt. Technically, this strategy of tapping into an aquifer shouldn't even have worked for the Garamantes. The only reason it did work was that the Garamantes got lucky. The enormous aquifer beneath their kingdom had a natural flow system that moved water from deep underground up to the base of a hill. The Garamantes built more than 500 fogaras at the base of that hill, leading to key locations that needed fresh water. Some of these underground tunnels would stretch more than two miles long. They went to cities, farms, and towns. These underground tunnels made it possible for the Garamantes to irrigate crops for hundreds of years without a single drop of rain. Although when rain did come, the huge increase in water created a more bountiful harvest than usual. Then came the day of doom. Day zero for this ancient civilization. The aquifer in the hill dropped to below the level of the fogaras, and the apocalypse soon followed. The best analogy for this disaster is an overflowing bathtub. For centuries, the water level in the aquifer was like your bathtub filled to the brim. There was so much water that it poured out of the fogaras. Think of the fogaras as the drain near the top of the tub that prevents the bathwater from overflowing. Eventually, so much water poured out of the overflow drain that the water level dropped below it. On that day, there was no more water flowing down the fogaras. The water level was simply too low. In order to access the rest of the water in the aquifer, the Garamantes would have needed to dig another 500 fogaras at lower inclines. If we're still talking about a bathtub, the only way to get more water would be to take the plug out of the very bottom. But to do that, to create new tunnels, was a huge amount of work. The civilization needed more supplies. They needed more slaves to perform the labor, and they needed more resources. But because the water had already run out, they were a bit short on water. Food, water, and hope were all in short supply. Shortages took hold in Garama, and the farms were pretty much toast. If the people didn't pack up and leave in search of food and water, they would have all died. It's ironic because had they started digging new tunnels before they ran out of everything, the Garamantes might still be living in the Sahara right now. Unfortunately for them, they waited until the disaster was already upon them to look for a solution. And by that time, it was too late. Sound familiar? One of the aquifers that is rapidly drying up is the one beneath the San Joaquin Valley of California. The groundwater is being used up way faster than it's being replenished, and scientists are warning that it could be disastrous. California could suddenly run into the same problems as the Garamantes. But will Californians share their fate? Historians aren't entirely sure what became of the Garamantes. Their cities were abandoned, and their civilization went extinct. But whether the citizens all perished, joined a different culture, or founded a new society elsewhere, nobody knows. The Hidden City of the Empty Corridor In 2002, the leader of Dubai became an unexpected archaeologist. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum was flying over the Rub Al Khali desert near Saudi Arabia when he noticed strange formations amidst the dunes down below. This desert, known as the Empty Corridor, was long thought of as a lifeless ocean of sand. Sure, there were brave explorers who ventured into its sandy depths hoping to find lost ruins, but none ever did. In fact, few ever returned from these ill-fated missions. Those explorers must be rolling in their graves right now, knowing that a Sheikh found what they couldn't, and all he did was casually peer out the window of his private airplane. What the Sheikh saw down there was Suruq Al Hadid. His keen eye would lead to the discovery of an archaeological site in the Empty Corridor from 5,000 years ago. Suruq Al Hadid appears to have been an ancient mine, used by a highly advanced prehistoric society for smelting copper and iron. It may be just one site, but it's also not just one site. The ruin is evidence of a complex society living in one of the most inhospitable deserts on Earth. If this was a site for smelting metals, surely there were cities, towns, and other industrial hubs nearby. The problem is finding them. Suruq Al Hadid should never have been found in the first place. Most of it is about 10 feet below the desert. That would suggest the other archaeological sites in the Empty Corridor are also buried, potentially under dozens of feet of sand. It also means the Empty Corridor isn't so empty after all. But just how vast was this buried civilization? They were flourishing 5,000 years ago, but that doesn't tell us when they first appeared. When did they start building their desert society? 10,000 years ago? 12,000 years ago? Scientists have no idea, but they're hoping to find out. The Rub' al Khali is a whopping 250,000 square miles. It's considered the largest expanse of continuous sand in the world. Finding any ruins is going to be an uphill battle. If they are buried under the sands, satellite images are not going to reveal anything. Maybe AI can help by piecing together a pattern to show the most likely spots for ruins, but that's a big maybe. The discovery of Suruq Al Hadid may have been a fluke. The true scope of this desert civilization may never be brought to light. Not unless archaeologists invent a sand-sucking vacuum that can clear away buried cities. It's a shame because somewhere out in the Empty Corridor could lie the mythical city of Ubar. Lawrence of Arabia called this place Atlantis of the Sands. According to the myth, the city of Ubar was buried deep below the sands of the Empty Corridor after it was destroyed. Some versions say it was hit by a natural disaster, but the most popular legend is that Ubar was destroyed by God. Just like how God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, or how the Anunnaki flooded the world, or how Atlantis was thrown into the sea, Ubar was destroyed for its sins. The people had strayed too far from the ways of God and needed to be corrected. Devastating ruin was brought to their shining city in the desert as a way to cripple their hubris and to show them that no mortals are above the divine. But what really happened? Lawrence of Arabia, whose real name was T.E. Lawrence, was in the Middle East during World War I. He is famous today for his role in the Arab Revolt and for his incredible interest in all things ancient. Lawrence claimed there was a real city of legend in the desert. It had boasted immeasurable wealth, grown rich off its natural resources. Lawrence never found the city, but he sure wanted to. Now researchers from Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi are trying their hand at it. But unlike Lawrence, they've got the technology to back them up. Researchers have started using Synthetic Aperture Radar, or SAR for short, to look underneath the surface of the desert. SAR is a fantastic tool that lets scientists see underneath sand dunes. And they don't even need a shovel! The technology works by emitting pulses of energy. Those pulses go through the sand and bounce back, almost like echolocation. When a bat uses echolocation, it creates a sort of map in its head of the environment. SAR does the same thing, creating a detailed map of whatever is underneath the desert. At the site of Sarukh al-Hadid, scientists used SAR to peek below the surface. They combined it with satellite images to get a better overall view of the site and its surrounding area. The radar yielded the most impressive results. It showed buried structures, metal objects, layers of animal bones, and buried artifacts. SAR has made it clear that there is even more to this archaeological site than what you can see on dry land. It looks like all the good stuff is underneath several hundred sandboxes worth of sand. Scientists took the radar data, satellite images, and combined them using advanced machine learning algorithms, which people often call AI these days. By doing this, researchers identified patterns and shapes that hinted at human activity. Experts are now convinced that a previously unknown civilization lived in this desert for a very long time. They were advanced, they understood metallurgy, and they were organized. Scientists don't know anything specific about them yet, but hopefully more discoveries in the Empty Corridor will deliver even better results in the coming years. China's Lost Desert Culture Most people don't associate China with the desert, yet on the country's northwestern frontier is one of the biggest and most desolate deserts in the world. The Gobi Desert brushes up against the Hexi Corridor, where archaeologists have found traces of a remarkable Bronze Age civilization. They are known as the Shajin culture, and they might just be the least understood ancient civilization of China's northwest. They flourished from about the 9th to the 5th centuries BC, thriving miraculously in one of the harshest environments imaginable, all while maintaining strong diplomatic connections with neighboring societies. Their story takes us to the 1920s, to when Swedish archaeologist Johan Gunnar Andersen conducted surveys in China's Gansu and Qinghai provinces. Andersen was an anthropological genius, identifying six key prehistoric periods in China's northwest. The latest phase was defined by a mysterious culture he named after the Shajin site, where he found their ruins. But it wouldn't be for another three decades that subsequent investigations in the 1950s showed evidence of a sophisticated desert culture. In 1979, major excavations in modern Jingcheng uncovered a society that did the impossible. They learned to conquer one of the most brutal, unforgiving environments in all of China. Most of their settlements sat in the eastern Hexi Corridor, a narrow, fertile slice of land squeezed between the massive Mongolian and Tibetan plateaus. Centuries later, this exact corridor would become the bustling superhighway of the Northern Silk Road. If you were a merchant trading between Central Asia and China, this flat, fertile oasis was your holy grail. But here's the twist. When this mysterious culture lived here, there was no Silk Road. That legendary trade route wouldn't appear until 130 BC, a full 400 years after this civilization had already vanished into history. And their story gets even stranger. While they had full access to the comfortable, fertile plains of the corridor, they didn't stay there. Instead, a massive chunk of their population chose to push farther north, willingly building their homes deep in the dead center of the hostile Tengger Desert. Why would a civilization turn its back on paradise just to fight for survival in a wasteland? Today, scientists are targeting three specific desert sites, desperate to find out what drove this lost culture into the dunes. At Shajing Village, archaeologists found a circular walled settlement and a cemetery. The cemetery only contained 44 graves, suggesting the village wasn't heavily populated. Even so, scientists found sophisticated fortifications, which means it was at least somewhat important. The crown jewel of these desert outposts was Sanjiao Cheng, a fortified village protected by massive earthen walls built right into the natural ridges of the landscape. To keep outsiders at bay, they constructed ramparts over 24 feet thick, turning natural hills into an impenetrable fortress. Inside, the city was meticulously organized, featuring residential neighborhoods, massive storage hubs, and central plazas used for large-scale communal gatherings, and possibly even ancient sporting events. Then there's Liuhudun, a site that couldn't be more different. It was a tiny, circular settlement barely 150 feet across, ringed entirely by raised earth. Standing inside it, you would have felt like you were living at the bottom of a volcanic caldera. But these structures reveal a massive paradox. They were built in the middle of a brutal desert, yet archaeologists discovered something shocking. These towns were built specifically to survive catastrophic floods. By deliberately constructing their settlements on high elevation points, this lost culture was protecting itself from raging waters. In this desert, rain didn't just fall, it likely slammed the region all at once in violent flash floods. This extreme survival strategy paid off. Positioned perfectly at the ultimate crossroads of the ancient world, where the Central Asian steppes, the harsh northern desert, and China's farmlands collided, they became a trading powerhouse, exchanging goods with legendary nomadic tribes like the Yuezhi. If everything was going so well, what happened to them? Where did they go? Today, many of their sites are completely buried under the desert sands. The desert is growing, with climate change accelerating the desertification of northwest China. It's actually a huge problem in China, because they've been suffering from sandstorms, and the desert is inching closer and closer to some large cities. China has planted so many trees around the Taklamakan Desert in the north that they've created a carbon sink. China is taking the desertification of their country very seriously. They've turned one of the world's biggest and driest deserts into a place that absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits. To give you an idea of what's going on here, the Taklamakan Desert is bigger than Montana. It's more than 130,000 square miles of dead, dry death. Ringed by high mountains, moist air is unable to reach the desert, resulting in conditions too harsh for nearly any plants to grow. But over the last few decades, China has been building a forest around its edges. Some people laughed, saying that planting trees would never work. But it has worked. China has planted enough trees that they have turned the desert's edges into a green paradise. Understanding how ancient cultures like the Shijing thrived in desert conditions could help modern civilizations resist being blown away by the desert. But with this kind of terraforming, is learning to live in the desert even necessary? Maybe not. And besides, the Shijing didn't last long anyway. They were ultimately swallowed by the very desert they tried to tame. So maybe living on sand dunes just isn't feasible for human beings. China's plan to greenify their desert started in 1978. The project, known now as the Great Green Wall, has already planted more than 66 billion trees. They completely encircled the Taklamakan Desert with vegetation in 2024. They've been observing for the last two years and have now officially announced that the effort has stabilized the sand dunes. It has also grown forest cover from 10% of the desert's area to 25%. But will it last? And will other countries take note? The Taklamakan Desert is typically dry as a bone. But now that it's ringed by forests, its rainfall is two and a half times higher than it used to be. More rain leads to more vegetation, which one day could grow over the entire desert, turning it into a forest. But is that a good idea? Should humans be erasing deserts from the world just to protect our cities from a bit of sand? What do you think? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you soon. Bye.