People of the Green Sahara

November 4, 2000
Special Update
by Paul C. Sereno & Gabrielle Lyon
An Ancient – Human – World

At first sight, a desert seems nothing more than an empty wasteland, a super-heated moonscape. To our expedition team, to the contrary, is a place that holds discoveries, surprises and inspiration. In a desert, you learn to expect the unexpected.

A complete human skull, approximately 5000 years old, is slowly exhumed by the wind and sand of the Sahara.

Crocodiles, Cows and Stone Tools

At the very end of Camp 2 and our prospecting in the Tenere, we drove up to an interesting spot before returning a final time to camp. Rudd was first to spot bone. “Look, a croc scute!” he shouted from the Land Rover. We got out and soon we found more of the hard, black, pock-marked disks. These were the fossilized armor plates of a crocodile, but they belonged to a species we had never seen at Gadoufaoua. There we had found several new small crocodiles as well as skeletons of the huge crocodile Sarcosuchus, but none had keeled plates like this one.

“There’s something big over here!” shouted Allison. We gathered around her find, a blackened, fossilized skull fragment more than a foot across. After puzzling over the piece briefly, I declared “It’s a cow, a fossilized cow skull.”

Now what was a fossil cow skull doing in a place like this – an area rich in dinosaur bone more than 100 million years old?

T ime-blackened fossil remains of rhinos, goats, and crocodiles recovered from a floodplain sit on the hood of the Land Rover alongside stone tools and remains of fossilized humans.

More pieces of the puzzle were being picked up by other team members. Dave exclaimed gleefully, “Look, it’s human! Part of the skull!” as he held high the curved plate of bone that shields the massive human brain. He never expected to find fossil humans on a dinosaur expedition.

The "desert-varnish" of a fossilized skull and skeleton of an ancient human lie in striking contrast to the sandy desert floor.

Clanking like ceramic, all of these bones were fossilized. A stone tool surfaced and we realized we were sampling the skeletons and tools of ancient human occupants of the Sahara and the animals that filled their world. Soon a pile of bone lay on the hood of one of the Land Rovers. “Put all fossil human pieces here, fish go there. Put non-human mammal finds here.”

“Here’s a goat shin bone,” remarked Eric, who added another domesticated animal to the bone assemblage.

Although much younger than the dinosaur bones we had been collecting, these fossils were still thousands of years old, dating back to a time when the Sahara was much wetter than today. The bones of crocodiles, snakes, and huge freshwater fish mutely testify to a time when the region boasted broad rivers and deep lakes that abounded with wildlife.

More Than A Cemetery

A near-complete fossil skull of an ancient human lies exposed on the desert floor some 5000 years after it was buried.

“You want skeletons?” Mike queried. “There’s a dozen just over there. Whole skulls, just lying about.”

“Whole human skulls?”, I asked a little unnerved.

“Yeah, it’s like a cemetery. There’s skeletons everywhere. And stone tools, too. Here, look for yourself”, he replied, thrusting his digital camera our way with an image of a complete human skull half buried in sand on the screen.

Mike, the expedition photographer, had wandered a few hundred yards away from where we were gathering bone, unexpectedly stumbling upon the richest Neolithic site ever discovered in Niger. We were standing on its margin, now breathless in anticipation.

“OK, folks,” I announced as I gathered the team together, “Mike has made a tremendous discovery just over there -whole skeletons, a graveyard, tools. We’re gonna walk over there in a minute, but be careful with each step and don’t pick up anything.”

Worn by the work of ancient hands, this ancient grindstone and tool were found just feet away from the exposed human skeletons.

As we tiptoed into the area, our jaws dropped in astonishment, and we began shooting photos with abandon. There before us lay entire skeletons, some crouched, some on their backs, all fossilized and half buried. Stone tools lay everywhere – arrowheads, cleavers, and grindstones, some made of green jasper. And there were carved, barbed harpoon tips made of bone. “Wow! Jewelry!” shouted Gabrielle from one side of the site. Its stone and shell pieces now cordless, a necklace lay near one of the skeletons.

The cord long disintegrated, beads are all that remain of a necklace of carved bone, stone and shell.

I’ve gotten giddy over dinosaur discoveries, but this site was different. My skin crawled as a looked at skeletons of my own species, fossilized and entombed in the rock of an ancient lakebed.

Paleontology and Archaeology…

Dinosaurs and humans did not live at the same time. The last of the dinosaurs died out 60 million years before the first modern human ever walked the earth. Paleontologists study ancient life forms, including dinosaurs. Archaeologists, on the other hand, study evidence of ancient humans. While the formal study of these subjects are different, the concurrence of “recent fossils” with dinosaur fossils is not uncommon. Archaeologists have even found tools and jewlery carved out of dinosaur bones.

The best remains of early humans come from the rift valleys of East Africa, a few thousand miles west of our field area in Niger. These early humans, Australopithecus the earliest and best known, diversified within Africa and, within the last half million years, colonized Europe, Asia, Australia and, most recently, the Americas.

In contrast to the famous Rift Valley in East Africa, which has produced human fossils dating back a million years, in the central Sahara the human record can be traced back only five to ten thousand years.

Two giraffes, the larger measuring 20-feet tall from head to toe, were carved into rock several thousand years ago by artists belonging to Tenere Culture.

These ancient Saharan peoples are as widely known for their rock carvings as for their skeletons and tools. The team has visited one of the more famous petroglyphs in the region at a place called Dabous. High on a flat surface of rock blackened by the desert wind are carved two giraffes; the larger one is twenty feet tall. The day of our visit, the morning light danced across the patchwork pattern on their bodies, carved with great skill in relief. More faintly incised are two human figurines, one next to each giraffe. A groove, representing a cord, runs from the snout of each giraffe to each human – the giraffes were tethered! Elsewhere on the rock outcrop we saw antelope, ostrich, and rhinoceri – a snapshot carved in time of a 5,000 year-old world.

The Tenere Culture

We returned to the graveyard site with our Nigerienne colleague, Abdoulaye Maga, an archaeologist with the Institute on Research on Human Science at the University of Niamey. Maga had worked with us during the first part of our field season and helped us excavate a number of the important finds from Gadoufoua. Now it was his turn to interpret fossils finds.

Maga, awed as he looked over the field of bones and tools, underscored the site as a landmark. The stone and shell necklace was the first of its kind discovered in Niger.

“This site has it all”, Abdoulaye proclaimed after his initial survey. “It’s part cemetery, part habitation, rich in tools and closely associated with a wide array of animals that lived in the region. It probably will be dated at about 5000 years old as part of what we call the Tenere Culture. It’s the most important Neolithic site ever discovered in Niger.”

Abdoulaye Maga, a Nigerienne archaeologist from the University of Niamey, holds a palm-sized green jasper scraper.

The people of the Tenere Culture were humans of modern appearance whose lives were rich in hunting and dance, and whose tools of stone and bone became ever more delicate and refined.

Somehow, this site, exposed for hundreds of years, had gone unnoticed amongst the endless dunes and rock of the Sahara. Careful excavation of this large site will resurrect many aspects of their stone-age lifestyle, their environment, and the animals they hunted or domesticated. Over time this site, which preserves not only humans, but fossils of the animals they lived with, will enable archaeologists to reconstruct many aspects of a stone-age Saharan lifestyle and environment.

As we left the archaeological site we came across a well-preserved four-foot long skull of another familiar face,Sarcosuchus, the enormous 110-million year old crocodile we have gotten to know so well this field season. Perhaps these ancient people puzzled, like us, over the fossil bones and teeth of crocodiles dinosaurs preserved in the rock beneath their feet.

Paul Sereno & Gabrielle Lyon