pointing to a far older origin for these desert dwellers.

In her book The Ancient Atlantic (Amherst Press, 1969) L.Taylor Hansen's included a purely anecdotal account which linked the Sahara's Tuareg tribesmen to a secret tradition probably going back to the Garamantians and their lost realm. Citing a chance encounter with a man of Arab descent in Mexico City, Hansen details the existence of a tribe of Tuareg "warrior women" who allegedly still exist in the Sahara, sporting the arm-daggers adn short swords used in antiquity, as well as shields with a pitchfork-shaped device representing "the three high peaks of the Hoggar" under which there supposedly exist underground galleries filled with petroglyphs similar to those at Tassili, depicting aurochs and other prehistoric animals. Hansen's interlocutor advised her that theTuaregs believed that their people had come from the ocean,and that the name they gave themselves meant "people of the sea".

Hansen pressed her anonymous source for more information on the subterranean galleries allegedly occupied by the modern Tuareg and was given the following information: A European explorer engaged in a survey of the Hoggar mountains was startled to come across a rough opening in the stone closed off with metal bars. Peering downward, the explorer realized that it was a ventilation shaft of some sort. Fear of alerting Tuareg raiders, however, kept him from casting a stone down the shaft in order to ascertain its depth.

The story becomes even more fantastic when the anonymous interlocutor tells Hansen that under the miles of underground torch-lit galleries can be found