Papyrus grew on stream banks, and ferns and grasses took root farther from water. The plants that covered the ancient Nile landscape and the pollens they brushed off were not unlike those of today. Researchers extract a sediment core in Giza. The group was looking for a different sort of treasure-microscopic grains of pollen deposited over the millennia. People would come to ask, “What are you looking for?” she remembered. Skeptical residents and onlookers assumed the researchers were looking for riches, Sheisha said. They collected sediment cores documenting 8,000 years of history. Sheisha, a doctoral student and lead author of the new paper, and her colleagues drilled nearly 9 meters beneath Giza’s streets, open areas, and gardens. Get the most fascinating science news stories of the week in your inbox every Friday. Credit: Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center This newsletter rocks. Today, the Nile River flows about 7 kilometers east from the Giza pyramid complex, which is situated at the center of this satellite photo, at the edge of the river’s flood plain. Ancient engineers and workers, authors say, took advantage of the waterway to easily move materials from quarries downstream to the deltaic necropolis. New research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, claims that a now abandoned channel of the Nile-termed the Khufu branch-once flowed freely through Giza. The distance between the Nile and the Giza pyramid complex has long led researchers to question how massive stone blocks were transported to the building site. The complex is “on the frontier between the desert and the floodplain,” said Hader Sheisha, a physical geographer at Aix-Marseille University, France. Giza lies within the Nile River delta, a 26,000-square-kilometer expanse of fertile soil. Perhaps the most well-known wonder of the ancient world, the pyramid of Khufu was built about 7 kilometers west of the present-day Nile River, in what is now the city of Giza, Egypt.
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