Stone Age Mass Graves Reveal Green Sahara 305
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.
plug for paul sereno (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [paulsereno.org]
http://www.projectexploration.org/ [projectexploration.org]
Re:not too surprising (Score:5, Informative)
Re:spiritual beliefs? (Score:5, Informative)
"Athiesm" only refers to disbelief in the Christian God - believe it or not, an Athiest can still be a very spiritual person.
Uhh, where do you get that, exactly? Have you looked up the word atheist in the dictionary? And it's spelled Atheist. Perhaps you were pointing that out by how you quoted your parent.
Perhaps you are confused with agnosticism. Atheists do not believe in any deity, Christian or otherwise. An agnostic believes it is unknown, undefined. Maybe even believes there's 'something' out there, but doesn't know what, and so rejects organized religion.
To claim Atheism is tied specifically to Christianity... is actually a bit offensive. Perhaps like saying Christianity is defined as simply denial of pagan beliefs.
Re:plug for paul sereno (Score:1, Informative)
You wrote something quite interesting and made him sound all great, but then you wrote this:
and you gave away the illusion - the most characters any state plates have is seven, and thus I have to assume that the rest of your story is completely fictitious.
Re:spiritual beliefs? (Score:3, Informative)
No, "atheism" refers to believing that there are no god or gods.
You are correct that an atheist can still be a spiritual person, both in the more typical interpretation of "spiritual" and in the more general sense. However, it has nothing to do with the Christian god specifically.
Re:spiritual beliefs? (Score:4, Informative)
In archaeology, "spritual" == "no other explanation".
I mean really, every other artifact that they dig up that doesn't immediately have an obvious purpose is a "ritual object" of some "spiritual significance".
Re:not too surprising (Score:5, Informative)
Re:spiritual beliefs? (Score:4, Informative)
The assumption is, if somebody did something special for a person that was already dead, they probably believed that some part of that person was 'still around' to appreciate it - else why go to the extra bother.
It's not invariably true - for example we probably try to honor people's last will and testaments as much for the peace of mind it brings them while they are still alive as for any other reason. This burial could arguably have been done just to give the deceased's survivors a mental image that alleviated some of their sorrow, with no real expectation beyond that.
Many prehistoric cultures have done more than just arranging the dead though, such as burying 'killed' tools with them. This goes back to at least some Neanderthal sites in the range of 60 - 65,000 BC, also shows up in some of our direct ancestors, and some particular symbolic rituals span roughly 50,000 years, making them part of what was probably by far the longest continuous religious system ever. One of the roughly 60,000 year old Neanderthal sites involved the burial of a young girl, about 5 or 6. Her corpse was laid on a sort of rug made of woven flowers, and carefully equipped with bone needles, a waterskin, spools of sinew, flint knapping stones, shell jewelry, and clothing in various sizes from hers at time of death to items which would have fit her fully grown. Many of the items showed signs of being neatly broken or damaged in a ritualistic fashion, as though to send them with her by some form of sympathetic magic.
If the article's writer is inferring spiritual beliefs just from the position of the corpses, they may well be in error, but if this is the opinion of the research anthropologists, they have probably noticed enough similarities to other sites to be confident it's part of the same cultural context.
Re:This what happened. (Score:2, Informative)
The same Gore who owns the very Eco-credit company he 'buys credits' from? The Gore who uses over 10x more electricity to run his mansion than any of us use in a year?
The Gore who can't seem to figure out that the vast majority of carbon released in the world is from natural causes we have no control over?
Yeah, Gore's a genius. Geez. He figured out how to cash in on the eco-craze.
Re:not too surprising (Score:3, Informative)
You don't need to go back very far.
The Romans didn't build stuff like this in a desert.
El Jem was a verdant hub of agricultural life.
http://hubpages.com/hub/Tunisias_Match_for_Romes_Colosseum_in_El_Jem
Re:spiritual beliefs? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Sahara and the Old Kingdom (Score:2, Informative)
That hypothesis is being investigated, and seems a very likely one, according to the article "Pharaohs from the stone age" published in NewScientist 16 Jan 2007.
Re:Water = civilization (Score:5, Informative)
The salt water isn't nearly as important as fresh water. The oceans only provide seafood, fresh water is necessary for most agriculture and industry. It is also necessary for most terrestrial animal life, including humans.