NIU student making history in Africa

September 15, 2005

BY DAVE NEWBART Staff Reporter

From the middle of the Sahara desert, 21-year-old Shureice Kornegay reflected on helping excavate one of the richest archeological sites ever found in the area.

"Your dreams, when they come true, are so much better than you can imagine,'' she said Wednesday in an interview over a satellite phone. "I'm just amazed.''

Kornegay, who lived the first eight years of her life in Cabrini-Green, is indeed in the middle of a dream: on an expedition with fossil hunter extraordinaire Paul Sereno.

Only on this trip, Sereno and Kornegay, an anthropology major at Northern Illinois University, are unearthing something new for the world-renowned paleontologist: human remains.

So far, the team at the site in northern Niger has identified more than 100 skeletons as old as 9,000 years. The site is so rich that some of the skeletons still have jewelry on them. There are also bones of many animals, evidence of early animal husbandry efforts and sophisticated tools.

For Kornegay -- who hopes to become one of the few African-American female paleoanthropologists -- the trip is also her first out of the United States. The 2002 Amundsen High graduate had only camped in Lawndale before she signed on with Project Exploration, an education institute formed by Sereno and his wife intended to make science accessible to women and minorities.

Now, she is the first junior paleontologist from the program to join Sereno on a research trip abroad. "She is a kid that could handle it,'' said Sereno. "She is seeing real science in the making,''

For Sereno, the trip is also a learning experience. He happened upon the site during a 2000 trip to the region in which his team dug up SuperCroc, a 110 million-year-old crocodile that was 40 feet long and weighed 10 tons. This is his first archeological excavation.

"You owe it to Africa and to the world'' to do this, he said.

'Quite skilled'

Sereno enlisted Elena Garcea, a paleoanthropologist at Cassino University in Italy, who called the area a "treasure.'' The cemetery is the largest she has seen in numerous African excavations.

"In 50 years, we've found two burial sites,'' she said. "Here we have at least 100.''

The inhabitants of the area were known as Tenereans and appeared to be hunters, gatherers and fishers, she said. But the site is unique because it features different types of artifacts and pottery, evidence of successive civilizations that occupied the area between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago.

Although now the largest desert in the world, the Sahara then was greener and had a lake, scientists believe. Sereno's team has uncovered catfish bones (found near a ceramic bowl) and the remains of other fish more than 6 feet long.

"They had to be quite skilled to be able to fish this,'' Garcea said. "They had to go into the water in teams. They had some social organization working very effectively back then.''

Wasting away

Because of strong winds, the bones are wasting away. That's why Sereno, who normally hunts dinosaurs, organized a follow-up trip in 2003 and this one, which will continue through October. They will likely bring back the human bones to his lab at the University of Chicago for preparation, said Gabrielle Lyon, his wife and director of Project Exploration.

Kornegay has been involved in all aspects of the dig. She realizes its significance. "We are doing things out there that are going to seriously make history,'' she said.