Egypt

Graves found from Sahara's "green" period

Another one which drifts somewhat off topic - out of Egypt altogether. For anyone who has a feel for the prehistoric archaeology of the Egyptian Western and Libya this article may be of interest. Well it interested me! The article is accompanied by an excellent slideshow (10 slides). If you are presented with an advert, the "skip" link is almost invisibly small, at the top right of the screen.

New York Times (John Noble Wilford)

When Paul C. Sereno went hunting for dinosaur bones in the Sahara, his career took a sharp turn from paleontology to archaeology. The expedition found what has proved to be the largest known graveyard of Stone Age people who lived there when the desert was green.

The first traces of pottery, stone tools and human skeletons were discovered eight years ago at a site in the southern Sahara, in Niger. After preliminary research, Dr. Sereno, a University of Chicago scientist who had previously uncovered remains of the dinosaur Nigersaurus there, organized an international team of archaeologists to investigate what had been a lakeside hunting and fishing settlement for the better part of 5,000 years, originating some 10,000 years ago.

In its first comprehensive report, published Thursday, the team described finding about 200 graves belonging to two successive populations. Some burials were accompanied by pottery and ivory ornaments. A girl was buried wearing a bracelet carved from a hippo tusk. A man was seated on the carapace of a turtle.

The most poignant scene was the triple burial of a petite woman lying on her side, facing two young children. The slender arms of the children reached out to the woman in an everlasting embrace. Pollen indicated that flowers had decorated the grave.

- More Re Out Of Africa Via Wet Sahara
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- Once Lush Sahara Dried Up Over Millennia
National Geographic (James Owen) The grassy prehistoric Sahara turned into Earth's largest hot desert more slowly than previously thought, a new report says—and some say global warming may turn the desert green once again. The new research is based...

- Climate Change In The Prehistoric Sahara
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article625034.ece This article summarizes and includes extracts from a book about the impacts of climate change - The Last Generation by Fred Pearce, published by Transworld . The write-up also offers a brief...

- Prehistoric Sahara Teeming With Life
http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/earth_sciences/report-54055.htmlThis may be of interest to anyone interested in the prehistory of the Western Desert of Egypt, with many of the same conclusions being drawn here for Libya, as have been drawn...

Egypt