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Fossil seekers return to Stone Age human
trove
By Paul C. Sereno
Special to
the Tribune
Published December 5,
2003
TENERE DESERT, NIGER -- There were skeletons everywhere. These weren't
dinosaur skeletons. They were human -- human skeletons surrounded by
artifacts that recorded daily life more than 5,000 years
ago.
We found the site during the 2000 Expedition to Niger.
Just as we prepared to leave our most remote area in the Tenere, a
team member looking out the window of a Land Rover spotted an
unusual bony plate. A few minutes later, we puzzled over the
fossilized remains of a cow skull. Then we found an ear region of a
human skull and pottery shards.
We
laid the evidence out on the hood of a truck. The minutes flew by as
we began to sketch a picture of Neolithic life from the human
fossils buried in ancient lake sediments overlying the dinosaur
beds.
At the beginning, it was just fun for my dinosaur
expedition. What happened next was electrifying.
"That ain't
nothing," called out the expedition's photographer and fossil hound,
Mike Hettwer, striding up to the truck.
"Look at this.
There's a dozen human skeletons over there," he said, thrusting his
digital camera out.
His images showed complete skulls and
skeletons lying half-buried, some preserved white and others
varnished black by the desert wind. I suddenly realized that I had
always been somewhat detached from whatever I was digging up, no
matter what emerged. I felt my skin crawl for the first time -- this
was Homo sapiens, my species, that lay fossilized. The bones I was
brushing off were like my own!
No question the site was
important and needed professional attention, but there wasn't time
to do more in 2000. The team left the Tenere thinking the site would
yield a great set of tools and perhaps a dozen skeletons -- the best
view yet of Neolithic Niger. We just needed to find professional
archeological expertise to take it on.
Enter the 2003
Expedition to Niger. I figured we would return to our find, make a
site map and collect the most fragile artifacts. Little did we know
the site's extent: We have found all of the clues needed to
reconstruct a detailed story about the lives of the Tenere people --
their ailments, cuisine, jewelry, hunting and farming techniques,
and even their domesticated animals.
By the second day of our
return visit, we had mapped 130 skeletons, with the likelihood that
at least 200 individuals were buried at the site.
The
artifacts we found included carved bone harpoons and necklace beads
made of stone and ostrich eggshell. Tools ranged from palm-size
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.
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 dinosaurs that once roamed Africa 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.
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 people's lives.
However, no single site preserved an intact graveyard or broad area
of habitation -- until now.
The location of the site is
secret. Our search is on for an archeological team to join Niger's
Neolithic experts. In the meantime, I find myself wanting to become
an archeologist!
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Project Exploration is a
non-profit science education organization co-founded by
paleontologist Paul Sereno and educator Gabrielle Lyon to make
science accessible to the public -- especially city kids and girls.
For more stories and photos from the 2003 Niger Expedition, log on
to www.projectexploration.org and
www.chicagotribune.com/dino.
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
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