[2] Fred Wendorf, the site's discoverer, and ethno-linguist Christopher Ehret have suggested that the people who occupied this region at that time may have been early pastoralists, or like the Saami practiced semi-pastoralism.

[7] Larger settlements began to appear at Nabta Playa by the 7th millennium BC, relying on deep wells for sources of water.

[2] Joel D. Irish (2001), reported in "Holocene Settlement of the Egyptian Sahara", based on osteological and dental data suggested a mainly sub-Saharan African affinity and origin at Nabta (with sub-Saharan tendencies most commonly detected), but also possible North African tendencies, concluding that, "Henneberg et al. suggest that the Nabta Playa people may have been most similar to Negroes from south of the Sahara.

From 5500 BC the Late Neolithic period began, with "a new group that had a complex social system expressed in a degree of organisation and control not previously seen.

To directly quote professors Wendorf and Schild:[2] ... there are many aspects of political and ceremonial life in prehistoric Egypt and the Old Kingdom that reflects a strong impact from Saharan cattle pastoralists ...Rough megalithic stone structures buried underground are also found in Nabta Playa, one of which included evidence of what Wendorf described as perhaps "the oldest known sculpture in Egypt.

"[2] In the 5th millennium BC these peoples fashioned what may be among the world's earliest known archeoastronomical devices (roughly contemporary to the Goseck circle in Germany and the Mnajdra megalithic temple complex in Malta).

"[15] An inventory of Egyptian archaeoastronomical sites for the UNESCO World Heritage Convention evaluated Nabta Playa as having "hypothetical solar and stellar alignments.

Brophy and Rosen stated in 2005 that megalith orientations and star positions reported by Wendorf and Malville were in error, noting that "Given these corrected data, we see that Sirius actually aligned with the C-line circa 6000 BC.

They also concluded that, on closer inspection, the C-line of megaliths "consists of stones resting on the sides and tops of dunes and may not represent an original set of aligned stele".

[13] They conclude their report by writing that "The symbolism embedded in the archaeological record of Nabta Playa in the Fifth Millennium BC is very basic, focussed on issues of major practical importance to the nomads: cattle, water, death, earth, sun and stars.

"[13] In 2011, Maciej Jórdeczka, Halina Królik, Mirosław Masojć and Romuald Schild, a team of archaeologists, excavated a series of Holocene pottery from Nabta Playa which represented the earliest phase of ceramic production in the Saharan region and were described as "relatively sophisticated bowls decorated with a toothed wheel".

Also, they argued that the pottery from the region had an important role in shaping the cultural development of the Eastern Sahara during the early Holocene period.

The authors concluded that it is "likely that the Early Holocene colonisers of the southern Western Desert, the El Adam hunter-gatherer-cattle keepers, came to the south-eastern fringes of the Sahara from the Nile Valley" and shared an "almost identical" output of technology with the Arkinian culture in Lower Nubia.