The largest of these level areas, the Great Karoo, is a dry, barren region, and a large tract of the plateau proper is of a still more arid character and is known as the Kalahari Desert.

The Kalahari Desert ( in Afrikaans " Dorsland ", meaning " thirst land " or " thirsty land ") is a large semi-arid sandy savannah in Southern Africa extending, covering much of Botswana and parts of Namibia and South Africa.

Tsetse (,, or ), sometimes spelled tzetze and also known as tik-tik flies, are large biting flies that inhabit much of mid-continental Africa between the Sahara and the Kalahari deserts.

Other species hide in sandy patches in the shade of trees in semi-desert such as the Kalahari, and emerge to feed as soon as any large animal settles down in the shade during the heat of the day.

The Okavango Delta ( or Okavango Swamp ), in Botswana, is a large inland delta, formed where the Okavango River reaches a tectonic trough in the central part of the endorheic basin of the Kalahari.

is a 500 million year old mountain chain, the Lufilian Arc, which formed when two large pieces of continental crust, the Kalahari craton and the Congo craton, collided.

In these northern Kalahari groups, the killing of a large animal indicates that a man has mastered the art of hunting and is able to support a family ( Marshall 1976 ).

The Etosha pan is a large endorheic salt pan, forming part of the Kalahari Basin in the north of Namibia.

This region is largely covered by the Kalahari Desert, some of which is also covered by the Makgadikgadi Pans, a large seasonal wetland.

It is home to large mammalian predators such as black-maned Kalahari lions, cheetahs, leopards, and hyenas.

The surrounding Kalahari Basin covers over extending farther into Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, and encroaching into parts of Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Simplified climatic map of Africa: Sub-Saharan Africa consists of the Sahel and the Horn of Africa in the north ( yellow ), the tropical savanna s ( light green ) and the tropical rainforest s ( dark green ) of Equatorial Africa, and the arid Kalahari Basin ( yellow ) and the " Mediterranean climate | Mediterranean " south coast ( olive ) of Southern Africa.

Their range extends from the northwestern part of South Africa through the Kalahari desert into Namibia and Botswana.

In April 2000, a rare orange Prehnite was discovered at the famous Kalahari Manganese Fields in South Africa.

** Kalahari Acacia-Baikiaea woodlands ( Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe )

The consistently warm, dry conditions of the horse latitudes also contribute to the existence of temperate deserts, such as the Sahara Desert in Africa, the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, and parts of the Middle East in the Northern Hemisphere ; and the Atacama Desert, the Kalahari Desert, and the Australian Desert in the Southern Hemisphere.

Hoodia, a succulent plant, originates from the Kalahari Desert of South Africa.

These Late Stone Age people in parts of southern Africa were the ancestors of the Khoisan people who inhabited the Kalahari Desert.

Meerkats live in all parts of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, in much of the Namib Desert in Namibia and southwestern Angola, and in South Africa.

Archaeological evidence shows that the Khoikhoi entered South Africa from Botswana through two distinct routes – traveling west, skirting the Kalahari to the west coast, then down to the Cape, and travelling south-east out into the Highveld and then southwards to the south coast.

There is a significant linguistic difference between the northern Bushmen living between Okavango ( Botswana ) and Etosha ( Namibia ), extending into southern Angola on the one hand and the southern group in the central Kalahari towards the Molopo, who are the last remnant of the previously extensive indigenous San of South Africa.

A Kalahari Family ( 2002 ) is a five-part, six-hour series documenting fifty years in the lives of the JuǀʼHoansi of Southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000.

South African film-maker Richard Wicksteed has produced a number of documentaries on San / Bushman culture, history and present situation ; these include " In God's Places / Iindawo ZikaThixo " ( 1995 ) on the Bushman cultural legacy in the southern Drakensberg ; " Death of a Bushman " ( 2002 ) on the murder of Bushman tracker Optel Rooi by South African police ; " The Will To Survive " ( 2009 ) which covers the history and situation of Bushman communities in southern Africa today ; and " My Land is My Dignity " ( 2009 ) on the San's epic land rights struggle in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

Large endorheic regions in Africa are located in the Sahara Desert, the Kalahari Desert, and the East African Rift:

Colopus is a genus of Gekkonidae that is found in the Kalahari desert, in the nation states of Botswana, Namibia, and the Republic of South Africa.

He emigrated to South Africa during 1949, and from then until 1954 was a researcher at the International Locust Control Centre at Cape Town University, investigating methods of locust control and going on expeditions to the Kalahari Desert, the Knysna Forest, the Belgian Congo and Mozambique.

Kalimba-like instruments came to exist from the northern reaches of North Africa to the southern extent of the Kalahari desert, and from the east coast to the west coast, though many or most groups of people in Africa did not possess kalimbas.

The Kalahari has a number of game reserves — Tswalu Kalahari, South Africa's largest private game reserve, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve ( the world's second largest protected area ), Khutse Game Reserve and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park.

In the Kalahari, brown hyenas are active 80 % of the time at night searching for food in an area spanning 31. 1 km ( 19. 3 mi ), with 54. 4 km ( 33. 8 mi ) being recorded.

The town and the accompanying industrial area of Sishen came into being because of iron ore mining activity in the Kalahari — it has one of the five largest open-cast iron ore mining operations in the world.

The entire area is covered by thick vegetation, has abundant natural resources in its perennial water supplies, natural shelters, rich forest flora and fauna, and bears a significant resemblance to similar rock art sites such as Kakadu National Park in Australia, the cave paintings of the Bushmen in Kalahari Desert, and the Upper Paleolithic Lascaux cave paintings in France.

* Top Gear, British television series, featuring an episode following a desert challenge in which Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May attempt to drive three old cars across Botswana, including the Kalahari Desert

In Durban, a VR programming instructor named Irene " Renie " Sulaweyo is teaching a Kalahari Bushman named! Xabbu how to create such environments, while providing for her family, who are her alcoholic father Long Joseph and her ten-year-old brother Stephen.

In the late 19th century, hostilities broke out between the Shona inhabitants of Botswana and Ndebele tribes who were migrating into the territory from the Kalahari Desert.

The Kalahari Desert is in the central and the southwest.

* the southern and southwestern regions, which are the driest of all, are drained by the Molopo river along the South African border and the Nossob river through the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park, and are technically part of the basin of the Orange river.

Dance is still used for this purpose by many cultures from the Brazilian rainforest to the Kalahari Desert.

German General Lothar von Trotha implemented an extermination policy at the Battle of Waterberg, which drove the Herero west of the Kalahari Desert.

As semi-desert, with huge tracts of excellent grazing after good rains, the Kalahari supports more animals and plants than a true desert, such as the Namib Desert to the west.

Kalahari desert should not be confused with the Namib desert as these are separate deserts that have different causes.

The Kalahari is formed in a region of subsidence in the Hadley cell known as the " horse latitudes " and also its continentality, but the cause of the Namib desert is the cold Benguela current in the Atlantic ocean.

Ancient dry riverbeds — called omuramba — traverse the Central Northern reaches of the Kalahari and provide standing pools of water during the rainy season.

The Kalahari desert is rather similar to the Australian deserts in the southern hemisphere in the way it is formed and on which latitudes it is situated in.

Derived from the Tswana word Kgala, meaning " the great thirst ", or Khalagari, Kgalagadi or Kalagare, meaning " a waterless place ", the Kalahari has vast areas covered by red sand without any permanent surface water.

However, the Kalahari is not a true desert.

Parts of the Kalahari receive over of erratic rainfall annually and are quite well vegetated ; it is only truly arid in the southwest with under of rain annually, making the Kalahari a fossil desert.

In the driest and sunniest parts of the Kalahari, over 4, 000 hours of sunshine are recorded annually on average.

The Kalahari Desert was once a much wetter place.

Despite its aridity, the Kalahari supports a variety of fauna and flora.

Some of the areas within the Kalahari are seasonal wetlands, such as the Makgadikgadi Pans of Botswana.

The Bushmen have lived in the Kalahari for 20, 000 years as hunter-gatherers.