Ben van Kerkwyk

But he's being very conservative in that dating also of saying, well, 12,000 years.

It could well be tens of thousands of years.

And in fact, it seems more likely to me based on the erosional evidence that we see not only in the Sphinx enclosure, but elsewhere on the Giza Plateau.

There's many places where you see just...

a huge amount of erosion that you can't really explain within the timelines and the climate of dynastic Egypt as we know it from roughly 3000 BC till even now, because it's still eroding, right?

But yeah, it could be vastly more ancient.

I actually think there's something else that came out

Was it earlier this year?

I think it was much earlier this year or maybe late last year.

But there was a study done that showed that during the African humid period, so this period of time before the desertification of Egypt, the Sahara becoming a desert, when it was green and there was more consistent rainfall, there was obviously a lot more water in the Nile, as we call it, and it had different channels.

One of the things they discovered was that there was a branch of the River Nile

And it's called the Aramat Branch.

And it was in places up to a kilometre, most of a mile wide.

So it was quite an extensive branch.

But it turns out that all of these valley temples on all of these pyramid sites from Dashur and Saqqara, Abyssinia, Abu Ghraib, Giza, all of those valley temples were built on the shores.

of this extinct branch of the Nile.

So it's like pyramids, when you look at a pyramid, it's not just a pyramid.

There's a whole complex associated with it.

There's a temple.

There's a structure at the pyramid.