Kiffian is the name given by archaeologists to a prehistoric culture thriving between about 10,000 and 8,000 years ago in the Sahara Desert. This was during a wet period of Saharan history known as the Neolithic Subpluvial

Neolithic Subpluvial

The Neolithic Subpluvial — sometimes called the Holocene Wet Phase — was an extended period of wet and rainy conditions in the climate history of northern Africa...

. Human remains from this culture were found in 2000 at a site known as Gobero

Gobero

The Gobero archaeological site was discovered in 2000 and is the oldest known graveyard in the Sahara Desert, dating back to 8000 BCE.Located in the Ténéré desert of Niger, it is named after the Tuareg name for the region.-Archaeology:...

, located in Niger

Niger

Niger , officially named the Republic of Niger, is a landlocked country in Western Africa, named after the Niger River. It borders Nigeria and Benin to the south, Burkina Faso and Mali to the west, Algeria and Libya to the north and Chad to the east...

 in the Ténéré Desert

Ténéré

The Ténéré is a desert region in the south central Sahara. It comprises a vast plain of sand stretching from northeastern Niger into western Chad, occupying an area of over...

.

Characteristics

They were skilled hunters

Hunter-gatherer

A hunter-gatherer or forage society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were...

, and the discovery of bones of many large savannah animals in the same area suggest that they lived on the shores of a lake that was present during a period when the Sahara was verdant and wet. The Kiffian people were tall, often over six feet tall.

Decline

Traces of the Kiffian culture do not exist after 8,000 years ago, as the Sahara went through a dry period for the next thousand years. After this time, another culture, the Tenerians, colonized the area.