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Posted on 09/15/2008 4:21:39 PM PDT by Fred Nerks
When Paul C. Sereno went hunting for dinosaur bones in the Sahara, his career took a sharp turn from paleontology to archaeology. The expedition found what has proved to be the largest known graveyard of Stone Age people who lived there when the desert was green.
The first traces of pottery, stone tools and human skeletons were discovered eight years ago at a site in the southern Sahara, in Niger. After preliminary research, Dr. Sereno, a University of Chicago scientist who had previously uncovered remains of the dinosaur Nigersaurus there, organized an international team of archaeologists to investigate what had been a lakeside hunting and fishing settlement for the better part of 5,000 years, originating some 10,000 years ago.
In its first comprehensive report, published Thursday, the team described finding about 200 graves belonging to two successive populations.
~snip
The most poignant scene was the triple burial of a petite woman lying on her side, facing two young children. The slender arms of the children reached out to the woman in an everlasting embrace. Pollen indicated that flowers had decorated the grave.
The sun-baked dunes at the site, known as Gobero, preserve the earliest and largest Stone Age cemetery in the Sahara, Dr. Sereno’s group reported in the online journal PLoS One. The findings, they wrote, open “a new window on the funerary practices, distinctive skeletal anatomy, health and diet of early hunter-fisher-gatherers, who expanded into the Sahara when climatic conditions were favorable.”
The research was also described at a news conference on Thursday in Washington at the National Geographic Society...
~snip
Other scientists said the discovery appeared to provide spectacular evidence that nothing, not even the arid expanse of the Sahara, was changeless. About 100 million years ago, this land was forested and occupied by dinosaurs and enormous crocodiles...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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Sahara graves ping
Did you notice the teeth? All straight and perfect with no decay, none missing.
What???!!! The Saraha desert was once GREEN??
I guess driving around in their stone age SUVs made their climate change! Oh when will we learn...
They died early back then and had a low sugar diet.
interesting.
The most poignant scene was the triple burial of a petite woman lying on her side, facing two young children. The slender arms of the children reached out to the woman in an everlasting embrace. Pollen indicated that flowers had decorated the grave.
I think they died suddenly, were covered by sand and silt; the pollen=grave theory isn't convincing.
That is very, very out of the ordinary. I would say very slim chances of a find like that.
I noticed. I guess that means they didn't emigrate to the British isles.
I knew you had but it has always been interesting to me how that people that didn’t do any of the things considered necessary to good dental health today had such beautiful chompers. What are we doing wrong?
The skull in the picture appears to be adult with all jaw teeth, no caries, none crooked. Something more than low sugar diet I think. If they find a skull with braces...now there’s news!
You mean pollen doesn’t equal flowers equals grave? Or area not green in past? I don’t understand.
Tassili-n-Ajjer in Algeria is one of the most famous North African sites of rock painting. Its imagery documents a verdant Sahara teeming with life that stands in stark contrast to the arid desert the region has since become. Tassili paintings and engravings, like those of other rock art areas in the Sahara, are commonly divided into at least four chronological periods based on style and content. These are: an archaic tradition depicting wild animals whose antiquity is unknown but certainly goes back well before 4500 B.C.; a so-called bovidian tradition, which corresponds to the arrival of cattle in North Africa between 4500 and 4000 B.C.; a "horse" tradition, which corresponds to the appearance of horses in the North African archaeological record from about 2000 B.C. onward; and a "camel" tradition, which emerges around the time of Christ when these animals first appear in North Africa.
Engravings of animals such as the extinct giant buffalo are among the earliest works, followed later by paintings in which color is used to depict humans and animals with striking naturalism. In the last period, chariots, shields, and camels appear in the rock paintings. Although close to the Iberian Peninsula, it is currently believed that the rock art of Algeria and Tassili developed independently of that in Europe.
How do you know that they were not doing any of the things considered necessary to good dental health?
Tooth twigs and chewing certain plants clean the teeth, kill bacteria and freshen breath.
Some plants are very high in fluoride such as tea, drinking it or rinsing out your mouth keeps your teeth strong.
I do doubt they saw the dentist every six months though.
The great Tassili Park, vast and beautiful expanse of rock and sand reaching the far southeast of Algeria presents a huge concentration of prehistoric rock art. Located in a strange lunar landscape of great geological interest, this site has one of the most important groupings of prehistoric cave art in the world.
Archaeological discoveries made by Henri Loth in the 1950s made Tassili famous. According to the Tassili National Park Office, the Neolithic archaeological heritage is concentrated in the Djanet region, with more than 15,000 stone carvings and paintings., and Oued Djarat is one of the most prestigious sites in Tassili Park as itcontains 4,000 stone carvings and paintings, which have partially resisted the difficult climatic conditions. The archaeological heritage recorded up to now provides evidence of a civilisation that dates back 2.5 million years.
This civilisation experienced prosperity as it evolved from precariousness to stability as it discovered pottery and how domesticate animals.
They lived on the shores of an ancient Lake!
Both stick to the teeth and promote decay.
Starchy foods and boiled sweets, something they are very fond of but that this tribe would not have had much access to are also "sticky" foods.
I’m a bit slow tonite. Beautiful pix. I seem to recall ground pentrating radar showing ancient rivers flowed where it’s dry now.
Thanks.
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