By Paul C. Sereno
Colored black
by desert patina, the fossilized skull of
a Neolithic woman emerges from crusty lake
sediments that preserve a stone age culture,
the oldest settled inhabitants of the Sahara.
There were skeletons
everywhere. By the second day, we had mapped
130 skeletons, with the likelihood that
at least 200 individuals were buried at
the site. These weren’t dinosaur skeletons.
They were human - human skeletons surrounded
by artifacts that recorded daily life over
5,000 years ago.
Artifacts included carved
bone harpoons and necklace beads made of
stone and ostrich eggshell. Tools ranged
from palm-sized cleavers to delicate arrowheads
smaller than a fingertip. We even discovered
a fossilized meal in preparation--a collection
of catfish skeletons piled inside a ceramic
bowl.
Fossilized catfish
skeletons are piled together in the center
of a ceramic bowl, a meal that went uneaten
some 5000 years ago.
Photo © Joshua Miller
Today’s Sahara
is the world’s largest desert. Entire
deserts the size of an average European
country reside within its borders. One of
those, the Tenere, is famed for its spectacular
100-mile long sand dunes and its dinosaur
graveyards. The latter is what caught my
eye—the chance to discover Africa’s
dinosaurs that once roamed the continent
more than 100 million years ago.
The first humans to
walk this dinosaur-bearing land, however,
were not paleontologists or even the nomadic
Tuaregs. They were a stone-age people called
the Tenere Culture. Some 10,000 years ago—a
blink of an eye to a dinosaur hunter—the
Sahara was a more hospitable place, boasting
crocodiles, hippos and elephants. Lake Chad,
now little more than a damp patch, was then
an enormous water body, covering much of
what is now the Tenere Desert in Niger.
An ancient Neolithic people settled the
lake’s shores, hunted its fish, and
grew crops nearby.
A delicate unworn
disk, presumed to have a ceremonial function,
is held in the hands of Nigerian archeologist
Abdoulaye Maga.
Rock engravings, stone
and bone tools, jewelry, and monumental
tombs are the main clues archeologists have
studied at various sites in Niger to reconstruct
the Tenere peoples’ lives. However,
no single site preserved an intact graveyard
or broad area of habitation – until
now...continued
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