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.

Comments

Question: Sapiens or ???

[drjohnretired]

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.

Re:Question: Sapiens or ???

[VoidEngineer]

You know, it's kind of interesting.... paleobiologists tend to focus a lot on eating habits, because teeth are commonly found fossils, and they show you insight into diet and behavior. They totally devided the Kiffians and the Tenerians into a sort of carnivore/herbivore classification. Lacking other data, and going only by the fossil record, this is about the best they can do. Interesting viewpoint to approach archeaology from. Also, the Kiffians may simply not be much in the record. Dr. Sereno (and the University of Chicago in general) has a tendency to not be interested in a project unless it's completely ground breaking and opens up a new area of research. I would bet he wouldn't have gone back for the dig at all unless he did a fair bit of research and confirmed that not only was it green sahara, but that there was essentially nothing on the record about the Kiffians.

The Sahara and the Old Kingdom

[mbone]

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.

Terraforming Earth

[dapyx]

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?

Re:plug for paul sereno

[VoidEngineer]

I know you're just trolling for kicks, but the stuff on phylogenetics and cladistics turned out to be extremely useful, and I've wound up using it all the time since.

If you've ever worked with binary trees, file systems, or any other type of tree data structure, you're working with tree models, which cladistics is the study of. Phylogenetics is the study of how to take observations of things, markup meta data, and then organize those observations into tree structures. Think when you take a bunch of digital photographs, add meta data to the images when you upload them to your computer, and then try to figure out which pictures should be sorted into which directories. That's a phylogenetic process. Cladistics is figuring out which directories you should have in the first place, which ones should be the root directories, and so forth. ie. Should /home be located in the root directory, the /usr director, or somewhere else? Where should /share be located? Do we need an /opt directory, or can we just use /tmp? Those kinds of questions are cladistic questions, and I wind up using them all the time.

And then there's all the stuff about evolution, and learning about natural selection and mutation and extinction and stuff. I won't get into that.

But it was actually pretty useful stuff, and I've been surprised at the number of places that knowledge has come in useful. Particularly in the areas of data analysis, structure, and storage.

Re:spiritual beliefs?

[gd2shoe]

His argument was incomplete and not well presented. And yet, you still haven't given a reason. That probably means that you really haven't thought about it.

Most people don't kill because they've been told repeatedly that it is a very, very bad thing to do. Personally, I think most people fit here. It becomes a matter of faith, even if it isn't a matter of spirituality. They never stop to think about why killing is bad, they just know that it is. They know that it is because people keep telling them that it is. Faith in established culture, if nothing else.

Some people don't kill because of the legal consequences. These people need to be watched, because they will probably hurt someone at some point.

Some people don't kill because they don't want to live in that type of society. They equate people who kill as people who destroy the freedom or civilization that they enjoy (or want to enjoy). By this definition, they don't want to be a bad person.

And some people don't kill because they fear eternal damnation.

I'm sure there are other reasons. What's yours?

Re:Water = civilization

[phulegart]

I'm not discussing what plant is better at making oxygen.

I'm discussing where most of our current oxygen comes from. Phytoplankton may or may not be less efficient than other plants at producing Oxygen. That fact is irrelevant, since the sheer volume of phytoplankton provides MORE than half (my bad, not "about half" like I said earlier) of the Oxygen that is produced on Earth.

References?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplankton
Nasa's take on the stuff
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/Phytoplankton/
This one claims two-thirds of the photosynthesis on the planet occurs within them
http://seagrant.gso.uri.edu/factsheets/phytoplankton.html

As a side note...
What started as a desire to create an Algae that would be the perfect fish tank decoration (one that fish would not eat, one that would flourish in a wide variety of waters and conditions, one that would proliferate easily) has turned into one of the world's greatest threats. One that could extinguish us.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/519228.html
In a nutshell, we made the stuff in Germany, it was studied at the Jacque Cousteau Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, and it got out... as it was first discovered in the Mediterranean under this very building. It is extraordinarily hard to kill, and it drives off all other sea life in any area where it grows. It drive off and suffocates other sea plant life, which drives off the little fish that eat that stuff, which drives off the larger fish that eat the small fish.
Go ahead. Search for Killer Algae. See what it has taken to eradicate the outbreak in a lagoon in Australia... and the outbreak in Southern California (I hear it is threatening the Florida coast in some spots). If we destroy the ocean's ecology, we are soon to follow. And apparently our desire for the perfect fish tank may be our downfall.

Also, it is possible to desalinate salt water, making it into fresh water. So sorry, I'm not with you that protecting our fresh water is more important. We've got to get on the ball and protect that which sustains our oxygen production, and ocean life. Else we die with lots of fresh water.