SWIMMING HISTORY
Elaine K Howley
Sometime prior to 6,000 BCE, maybe even as early as 13,000 BCE, red ochre images began appearing on the walls of a cave at Gilf Kebir, a sandstone plateau 400 miles west of the Nile River near the Egyptian-Libyan border. The images – which were made famous by Hungarian explorer László Almásy, who stumbled upon them in 1932 while searching for the lost city of Zerzura – seemed to depict something extraordinary for the location: people swimming.