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Special Update
by Paul C. Sereno & Gabrielle Lyon
cont'd
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.
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