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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.
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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!
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.
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/
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.
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.
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?
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You're looking at leader/follower relationship with a peculiar modernistic cultural/anthro/sociological viewpoint.
What about the goose or the duck at the head of a flock? Or an ant that finds food and lays down pheremones on its way back to the colony and heads back out to gather more? Sometimes leadership/follower relationships don't require any social or political identity angst. Sometimes, it's simply a matter of efficiency, luck, or natural optimization (i.e. birds expend less energy when they fly in a flock formation, and one of the birds has to take the lead to get the aerodynamics going correctly)
I dunno. You're applying this political identity angst to a topic which often doesn't need it. Occams razor and all that.
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.