Over eight thousand years ago in northeastern Africa, this Neolithic Egyptian couple is gazing upon the fertile floodplains of the Nile River Valley from the high plains beyond. Back in those days, the Sahara of North Africa would have been a grassy savanna teeming with wildlife and nomadic peoples instead of the barren desert we know today. Once the land began to dry up between 4000 and 3000 BC, some of the people who had roamed it would have fled to the Nile and begun cultivating its banks, leading to the Egyptian and Kushite civilizations of historic times.