Stone Age Graveyard Reveals Lifestyles Of A 'Green Sahara'

The largest Stone Age graveyard found in the Sahara, which provides an unparalleled record of life when the region was green, has been discovered in Niger by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and University of Chicago Professor Paul Sereno, whose team first happened on the site during a dinosaur-hunting expedition.

The remarkable archaeological site, dating back 10,000 years and called Gobero after the Tuareg name for the area, was brimming with skeletons of humans and animals — including large fish and crocodiles. Gobero is hidden away within Niger’s forbidding Ténéré Desert, known to Tuareg nomads as a “desert within a desert.” The Ténéré is the setting of some of Sereno’s key paleontological discoveries, including the 500-toothed, plant-eating dinosaur Nigersaurus that lived 110 million years ago and the enormous extinct crocodilian Sarcosuchus, also known as SuperCroc.

The discovery of the lakeside graveyard — representing two successive human populations divided by more than 1,000 years — is reported in the September 2008 issue of National Geographic magazine and the Aug. 14 issue of the journal PLoS ONE.

As they explored the site, the team tiptoed among dozens of fossilized human skeletons laid bare on the surface of an ancient dune field by the hot Saharan wind. Jawbones still clenched nearly full sets of teeth; a tiny hand reached up through the sand, its finger bones intact. On the surface lay harpoon points, potsherds, beads and stone tools. The site was pristine, apparently never visited.
A suite of five ancient crocs, including one with teeth like boar tusks and another with a snout like a duck's bill, have been discovered in the Sahara by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno. The five fossil crocs, three of them newly named species, are remains of a bizarre world of crocs that inhabited the southern land mass known as Gondwana some 100 million years ago.

Sereno, a professor at the University of Chicago, and his team unearthed the strange crocs in a series of expeditions beginning in 2000 in the Sahara. Many of the fossils were found lying on the surface of a remote, windswept stretch of rock and dunes. The crocs galloped and swam across present-day Niger and Morocco when broad rivers coursed over lush plains and dinosaurs ruled.

"These species open a window on a croc world completely foreign to what was living on northern continents," Sereno said. The five crocs, along with a closely related sixth species, will be detailed in a paper published in the journal ZooKeys and appear in the November 2009 issue of National Geographic magazine.
The pharaohs of ancient Egypt owed their existence to prehistoric climate change in the eastern Sahara, according to an exhaustive study of archaeological data that bolsters this theory.

Starting at about 8500 B.C., researchers say, broad swaths of what are now Egypt, Chad, Libya, and Sudan experienced a "sudden onset of humid conditions." (See a map of Africa.)

For centuries the region supported savannahs full of wildlife, lush acacia forests, and areas so swampy they were uninhabitable.

During this time the prehistoric peoples of the eastern Sahara followed the rains to keep pace with the most hospitable ecosystems.