Ancient cemetery found in Sahara by Martina Janeckova

Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago and his colleagues were searching for the remains of dinosaurs in Niger when they found remains of cemetery. The details were provided at a news conference on August 14, 2008. Approximately 200 graves of humans were found at the site in 2005 and 2006 as well as remains of animals, which don’t live in the desert. Helene Jousse, a zooarchaeologist from the Museum of Natural History in Vienna, Austria said that the animal bones found here were from types common today in the Serengeti, Kenya, such as elephants, giraffes, hartebeests and warthogs. Sereno said they realized they were in the green Sahara. The graveyard is situated in a region called Gobero, in Niger’s Tenere Desert, but at that time there would have been a lake. The human remains dated from 2 distinct populations that lived there during wet times, with a dry period between. The first group, called Kiffian, colonized Sahara between 10.000 and 8.000 years ago. Chris Stojanowski, a bioarcheologist from Arizona State University said ridges on the thigh bone of one Kiffian man show he had huge leg muscles, “which suggests he was eating a lot of protein and had an active, strenuous lifestyle.” The second group, called Tenerians lived there between 7.000 and 4.500 years ago. The Tenerians were smaller and had a mixed economy of hunting, fishing and cattle herding. The burials often included jewelry or ritual poses. For instance pollen remains show a woman and two children were buried on a bed of flowers. While Sahara is a desert today, earlier because of small difference in Earth’s orbit seasonal monsoons wetted the landscape and attracted people and animals.

by Martina Janeckova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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