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Stone Age Mass Graves Reveal Green Sahara
iminplaya sends along a New Scientist article that begins: "One of the driest deserts in the world, the Saharan Tenere Desert, hosted at least two flourishing lakeside populations during the Stone Age, a discovery of the largest graveyard from the era reveals. The archaeological site in Niger [is] called Gobero... It had been used as a burial site by two very different populations during the millennia when the Sahara was lush... 'The first people who used the Gobero cemetery were Kiffian, hunter-gatherers who grew up to two meters tall,' says Elena Garcea of the University of Cassino in Italy and one of the scientists on the team. The large stature of the Kiffian suggests that food was plentiful during their time in Gobero, 10,000 to 8,000 years ago... All traces of the Kiffian vanish abruptly around 8,000 years ago, when the Sahara became very dry for a thousand years. When the rains returned, a different population, the Tenerians, who were of a shorter and more gracile build, based themselves at this site... 'The most amazing find so far is a grave with a female and two children hugging each other. They were carefully arranged in this position. This strongly indicated they had spiritual beliefs and cared for their dead,' says Garcea." The research article is at PLoS One.
Isn't the history of civilization generally based around water for animals, agriculture, transport, industry?
Maybe time to start treating our seas with respect. I was on a beach in Togo last week and every day the ocean washes up plastic bags.
My blog
I thought it was fairly common knowledge that the Sahara used to be a very lush and fertile plain between 10-15k years ago. Or at least that's what I was taught 15 years ago. Still, nice to find anthropological and archeological evidence of the people that lived there.
This guy's the limit!
Were their shamans just as convincing arguing for less water use and building smaller huts to prevent the climate-changes?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The description of the Kiffian, robust versus gracile, and the skull with heavy brow ridges looks like the neandertal versus sapiens distinction but the dates are far later than the neandertal range. With this article flooding the searches, I can find little other description of the Kiffians.
Why does this imply spiritual beliefs? Maybe they just felt comfortable with the idea of being buried in the arms of someone they cared about.
You could go tell your mom that you are getting angry at the internets again.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
First of all, Paul Sereno is awesome. Modern day Indiana Jones, if there ever was one. I had the opportunity to work for him as a Research Assistant, doing fossil reconstruction of some of the other dinosaurs he dug up in Niger.
Interesting tidbits about the guy who led the research:
He left this particular site alone for three years before coming back to it with the appropriate team of people. He commonly does that... goes out in the field, finds something, and leaves it, only to return with the proper team and equipment. He doesn't like to mess up a find, and he'd rather be patient and do a thing right than go for a quick-win and run the risk of screwing something up. He knows how to follow through on super-complex projects better than almost anybody I've ever met before.
His dinosaur laboratory is located across the street from the site of Chicago Pile 1, where the first controlled release of atomic energy occurred, in the racketball court underneath the bleachers of Stagg Stadium. That building, across the street, now know as the Enrico Fermi Institute, holds all sorts of milling equipment, 50 ton hoists, and a "monster garage" that's three stories tall inside. It has all the right equipment to mill graphite into control rods, or hoist dinosaur skeletons onto their scaffolding. It once held the first cyclotron, and they now build dinosaurs and space satellites there. The dino lab is affectionally known as the "Atomic Dino Lab".
He also has a license plate that reads "dinosaur".
All in all, a super cool guy. His class on paleobiology was, hands down, one of the most educational classes I've ever had the opportunity to take. The class was all on phylogenetics and cladistics, with a lab in geostrata and mineral identifications. Who knew?
http://www.paulsereno.org/
http://www.projectexploration.org/
You can just see one of the Mars rovers about two thirds up near the right hand side.
What?
Were their shamans just as convincing arguing for less water use and building smaller huts to prevent the climate-changes?
No, but their chief, Chief Bush, was totally responsible for suppressing the data from the bones and tea leaves that it was happening. Then Chief Bush, along with the paleo-cons started bogus wars with tribes in Mesopotamia and with the Persians in order to promote chiefocracy. But the people eventually saw through the paleo-con lie that it was and realized that it was just a war to secure grain supplies.
In the meantime, a former chief, Gor, showed the populous cave paintings that would show what would happen if they didn't change their wasteful ways.
Really, that's the way it happened.
that the Sahara is not as lush and green as it used to be.
Too bad. I'm sure we'll hear that the Sahara would still be green except George Bush doesn't care about black people. The desert undoubtedly spread because of global warming (er, I mean "climate change" because you can't sell warming when it's cold -- and scientific consensus is all about marketing for some reason) caused by those evil SUVs of the time.
I hope The One can bring the green back. And future generations will say "... this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal...".
This strongly indicated they had spiritual beliefs and cared for their dead,' says Garcea.
"Cared for their dead" I get. This "spiritual beliefs" stuff doesn't make sense. What proves any kind of spirituality in this situation? Posing a corpse isn't proof of spirituality, it's just proof that they moved people around after they died.
This article in Science Magazine indicates that the Sahara was fully formed by 2300 BCE
To me, the timing between that and the rise of the Old Kingdom in Egypt (~ 2600 BCE) is too close to be coincidental. I think we will find that people migrated from sites such Gobero to the Nile, and that precipitated the formation of political organization in Egypt.
Well before this buried by Troll/Flamebait mods (or the more cowardly Offtopic/Overrated) mods.
I have to say this really is the only proper response to this story.
Two days ago I could have modded you Funny, but not now.
Well done.
Thank you for not posting anonymously. *adds to foe list*
oh so you are that AC that is always posting that shit....
We should forget about terraforming Mars. We should try to terraform Earth before that. This huge tract of land that is Sahara could be restored with some advanced technology to the greener place it once was. Are there any studies on the possibility of transforming Sahara?
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
And here I was thinking I was being clever!
The Proof that our industrial society is causing Global Warming! Yes, so it happened thousands of years ago, it's still obviously our fault. We must invent time machines to solve this problem before it gets worse!
Some science news gets posted, and a commentor or two pop up saying something along the line of "hey, I know that dudette, I worked with her on this and that. And here some more stuff related to this..."
What other sites have such audience, eh?!
Not that I can vouch for these comments, you understand, but these seem to happen with some regularity here.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
i bet basket games were quite like nowaday's
Paul is a Libertarian, and therefore, by definition, in a constant state of "full retard".
I used to be a Fascist, then I became a Republican, then I became a Libertarian, now I am a full-blown Anarchist. It is not that I have gone "full retard" as much as my respect for "authority" and the "rule of law" has been continually eroded over time as I have become more and more aware of the futility and idiocy of trying to "solve" problems with government "systems" and "institutions". Forgive my liberal use of quotes, I just don't even respect these ideas anymore.
As well intentioned as people like you and the majority of other people are, you simply fail grasp your own lack of power and knowledge. You like to imagine that if you had more power, you cold solve your problems. You imagine that we can devise a "system" that will solve our problems for us. But the reality is that you don't know shit about anything, and all you will do is make things worse.
All you can really do is try to solve your own problems in your own life and hope for the best. In the mean time, please leave everyone else alone.
By even asking "why don't you solve the worlds problems?" it is clear that you don't understand what I'm saying. I was not trying to insult you or anyone else. I don't know shit about anything either. Here is what I am saying:
Humans have limited knowledge. None of us has any reason to believe the that he will do a better job than another. I want you to let me try to solve my problems and I want to let you solve yours. If you need help, you can ask me for it and I will give it to you (to the extent that I can), and if I need help I'll ask you for it and you can help me if you so chose. I will not try to use power and authority to compel you to do my bidding, and I'd appreciate it if you'd afford me the same privilege.
NO 65 SANDY STREET,
GOBERO
SHORES OF NIGER
SIR/MADAM,
GREETINGS FROM ME TO YOU.I KNOW YOU DON'T KNOW ME. BUT PLEASE CAN YOU BE OF ASSITANCES TO ME. I GOT YOU CONTACT ADRRESS FROM THE SLASHDOT TO SEE IF YOU CAN HELP ME TO TRANSFER OUR FAMILY MONEY TO YOUR ACCOUNT IN YOUR COUNTRY.
10,000 TO 8,000 YEARS AGO, MY FAMILY ERECTED A LARGE STATUE OF THE KIFFIAN IN A TIME THAT FOOD WAS PLENTIFULL. THE KIFFIAN WAS UP TO TWO METERS TALL AND WOULD NOW BE WORTH MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IF DISCOVERED.
MY FAMILY, WHO ERECTED THE KIFFIAN, ALL TRACES OF THE KIFFIAN AND MY FAMILY VANISH ABRUPTLY! IT WAS TAKEN BY AWFULL TENERIANS, WHO ARE A SHORTER AND MORE GRACILE. THEY RUINED OUR KIFFIAN AND MAKE SAHARA BECAME VERY DRY FOR THOUSAND YEARS OR MILLENIUM.
NOW THE RAINS RETURNED, AND WASH AWAY SKULLS OF TENERIANS, TO REVEAL GREAT KIFFIAN. WHICH IS IN POSSESSION OF MY FAMILY.
SIR, IAM HONOURABLY SEEKING YOUR ASSISTANCE IN THE FOLLOWING WAYS.
1) TO CLAIM THE RIGHTS OF KIFFIAN IN THE COURTS
2) TO PROVIDE A BANK ACCOUNT WHERE THIS MONEY WOULD BE TRANSFERED FROM WINING AND SELLING THE KIFFIAN
2) TO SERVE AS THE GUARDIANS OF THIS FUND.
3) TO MAKE ARAINGEMENT FOR ME TO COME OVER TO YOUR COUNTRY AND TO PLACE THE KIFFIAN STATURE INTO YOUR CAPITAL AS A SIGN OF GOOD FRIEND BETWEEN MY COUNTRY
MY FAMILY IN WILL BE IN VERY THANKFULLY TO YOU. MY GRAND-GRAND-GRAND-MOTHER AND HER ONLY TWO CHILDREN HUGGING EACH OTHER IN THEIR GRAVE, THEY WILL THANK YOU. CAREFULLY ARRANGED POSITIONS TO JUSTIFY THEIR VERY LARGE SPIRITUAL BELIEFS AND CARES FOR THE DEAD AND ETERNAL LIFE OF THE STATURE KIFFIAN. THE KIFFIAN IS OUR INHERITANCE AND CAN BE WORTH TO YOU A LOT IF YOU HELP ME.
FURTHERMORE, YOU CAN INDICATE YOUR OPTION TOWARDS ASSISTING ME WITHIN SEVEN (7) DAYS YOU SIGNIFY INTEREST TO ASSIST ME.
MY iPHONE NUMBER IS BELOW. PLEASE BE VERY SECRET.
SINCERLY,
GARCEA BIN KIFFIA
PS I HAVE LINK-IN PROFILE AND FACESBOOK TOO
I think it is quite reaching to claim that bones found together were "hugs" and that it therefor means the people of this period were spiritual.
mass grave: a grave containing many human corpses, either as the result of natural disaster or war.
This is just a graveyard, 200 bodies, buried INDIVIDUALLY at DIFFERENT TIMES.
'The most amazing find so far is a grave with a female and two children hugging each other. They were carefully arranged in this position. This strongly indicated they had spiritual beliefs and cared for their dead,' says Garcea."
Explain to me how the fuck an organized burial "strongly indicates they had spiritual beliefs". If I had a wife and children who died, I would carefully arrange their corpses for burial, too. And I am as atheist as they come, nor do I "care for the dead" -- it's about respecting and loving what was a living being.
So Garcea, take your words and shove them elsewhere. You obviously like to make up stories to explain things you clearly don't understand (nor could anyone begin to truly understand a civilization that existed long before us). How I fucking hate the know-it-all attitude of modern science.
Absolutely, I stand by my statement. They are making decisions about my life for me. There's no one who knows more about my life than me (except God, and even he does not try to force me to do things against my will). If I make mistakes, certainly someone else would too. And if someone has more "expertise" than me, and thinks I should do something differently they are welcome to make that case to me directly. They don't need to force or coerce me into doing something for my own good. I'd rather die free than live in chains.
Also, it is unwise to let "the experts" decide things for you without your consent. That is just asking for corruption. In fact, you should always scrutinize expert advice and make sure you understand it and agree with it before you follow it.
"What is best for the group isn't always necessarily what is best for the individual."
It really scares me when I hear this. I am a compassionate person. I would be willing to make sacrifices to help others. But I would NEVER demand that someone make a sacrifice for me if they were unwilling. Who would?
There is a serious point here buried in the mass of rather thoughtless commentary. It is about what evidence there is for previous global or at least very large scale regional climate variation, not related to CO2.
This was the point of the Hockey Stick study. It seemed to show that there had been little natural variation in climate from about 1000 to 1975, after which temperatures seemed to have risen sharply. The Medieval Warm period vanished, and so did the Roman Warm and the Little Ice Age.
The point of this was that we now had something to explain: a historically unprecedented level of warming in the immediate past. This then made it reasonable to look for some other event which had coincided with it, which could explain it, and this is or was one of the main supporting arguments for CO2 driven warming. This warming has never happened before, what else could it be? It could not be natural variation, because there was none.
Increasingly however this account has come under attack. First the original Hockey Stick studies are increasingly discredited, though the HS itself is still used for marketing purposes. Partly it is that they seem to be very sensitive to the choice of proxy series. The statistics used appear to have been mistaken. Partly it is that the instrumental record is increasingly dubious - it has so many and such difficult to explain adjustments from anything we could regard as raw data. Partly it is that studies of the landscape, such as this one, show that large scale climate change has been more common than the HS studies suggested. It now seems likely once again that simply in the last 1500 years we have had a Roman Warm and Medieval Warm period which were of roughly the same scale and warmth as today's warming. This study suggests large scale desertification may have happened in the past from unknown causes. The argument that 'it must be CO2, there is nothing else to explain it' is becoming harder and harder to justify. The argument that the warming is going to carry on, because there is nothing we can see that would stop it, is also harder to make.
After all, when the Hockey Stick went, it was not just warmings that came back. Previous cooling from those warmings also came back with them. The Little Ice Age came back, as did the cooling after the Roman Warm period. This shows that there are natural processes which have produced cooling from some kind of cyclical warming. Why exactly will these processes, whatever they were, not produce cooling in the modern warming period? You can no longer plausibly argue that there was no cooling, because there was no warming for the planet to cool from. It really did happen several times. It may happen again. In fact, the odds must be, given the past history, that it will.
The real situation is that there have been many climate changes in the past, of the same scale as today's, which were definitely not due to CO2 whether human emitted or natural. This present warming episode may be caused by CO2, but if so, its the first ever, at least in the last couple thousand years, to have been so caused.
Studies like this are very important. They give us information about exactly what it is that we need to explain, and what explanations we can exclude. They show that we have to be a lot more certain than we have yet been that natural variation cannot explain what is happening today.
Not to mention that if you look at the satellite record for the last ten years, there is increasingly less and less of a temperature rise to explain... so maybe cooling has kicked in already... but that's another story for a different day!
Not at all. I simply figured that even if I write a completely legitimate and reasonable post, it'll be downmodded anyway. So what does it matter what I post?
Yes, let's blame me instead of the utterly broken moderating system that protects the lazy and the corrupt.
You're anonymous, you don't have a foe list. Why would you add me to one anyway? I'm not responsible for Slashdot's broken moderating system that ultimately makes no distinction between "fuck shit piss cunt" and normal replies.
And some people don't kill because they fear eternal damnation.
'm sure there are other reasons. What's yours?
They don't stay still during a ritual sacrifice, for the GNU god. We must open their sources for the GNU god, its for common good.
©God
Seems to belong here:
One day a little guy wandered into the camp looking for a job as a lumberjack. The head lumberjack looked at him doubtfully, but asked him to cut down a small tree. Zip. The tree was down. Kind of surprised, the head lumberjack told him to cut down a large tree. Zip. One swing, and the tree fell.
"Where did you learn to cut trees like that?"
"In the Sahara Forest."
"What do you mean? The Sahara is a desert!"
"That was afterwards."
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Dictionary definition are only common usage , yada ,yada etc... Originally defined as "ungodly, wicked" (16th and earlier ?) and used as an insult it shifted in the 19th to "disbelief in the Abrahamic God". Only recently it took over the definition as "absence of belief in any gods", so you are mostly right.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Would these people be the source of the reference to giants in Genesis?
Genesis 6:4 "There were giants in the earth in those days..."
It's nice to see "science" catching up with the historians (the ancient historians, that is). I've been working on this for a while now. You might want to take a look at http://neros.lordbalto.com/ChapterTen.htm. A rough idea of what the extent of this civilization was can be found here: http://neros.lordbalto.com/ChapterEight.htm. The map is still under development but it's good enough to give a general idea of what was going on. And by the way, the current inhabitants of the Hoggar (or Ahaggar), the Tuareg, are 7-feet tall, so I don't think the food availability argument holds much water, so to speak.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Your post has two interesting parts that are not related to one another. The phytoplankton that produce oxygen in the sea are free-floating throughout the oceans' euphotic zone, while the "killer algae" must grow on a substrate and so is limited to shallowest areas of the ocean (where the bottom receives significant sunlight). And, even in those areas, any local phytoplankton would be floating in the water column above the algae, and thus have first crack at the sunlight.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Umm...... maybe I don't go around killing people just on the off chance that maybe, just maybe, people won't like that and kill me?
All these grand misty-eyed philosophies nonetheless: no society / tribe / group of people would tolerate a killer in their midst. Got nothing to do with religion; got everything to do with simple common sense survival.
The condition of the Sahara is not the result of local factors, but instead depends on weather patterns that affect the rest of the plant as well, and as such, any attempt at "terraforming" it must look at the wider, global picture.
IIRC, one of the keys to why the Sahara is so dry is also the same reason that the far north of Europe is still comfortably warm -- i.e., the North Atlantic Drift, the northern arm of the Gulf Stream, a current of warm water heading north and consequently raising temperatures in northern Europe. The North Atlantic Drift is a current generated largely by thermohaline processes, i.e. as the warmer and thus more saline-rich waters from the Gulf cool off, they become denser and sink. This warm water leaving the tropical Atlantic means less energy and less evaporation off the west coast of Africa, and thus less rain on the Sahara.
There's some thought that meltwater (fresh water) flowing into the Arctic Ocean may interrupt this process by diluting the northern end of the Drift current and preventing the waters from sinking, with the shutdown of the Drift current possibly leading to more warmth staying in the tropical Atlantic, with Europe cooling off while changing weather patterns in the ocean off the west coast of Africa lead to more rain in the Sahara. There are a couple interesting articles on Wikipedia about this, notably Thermohaline circulation and Sahara Pump Theory.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
All the nihilists I know are chronically depressed. Evolution can take care of itself, it doesn't need our help. I am more concerned with living my life to the fullest.
Since this story is still accepting replies, I just thought I'd chime back in and mention that there's a fairly extensive article about this discovery in the September issue of National Geographic (also available online).
This guy's the limit!
Wonder what caused the global warming 8,000 years ago? Was it man-made greenhouse gases? Probably not. Maybe it was a natural occurrence, part of a cycle the earth goes through on a regular bases? Seems like this discovery might cast some doubt on those who say mankind is causing the current global climate change.
"Politicians always tell the truth, when they're calling each other liars."