Major Stone Age find in Niger

Dinosaur hunters in the Sahara stumble across a major Stone Age site -- in tomorrow's NY Times:

In search of pieces of the 110-million-year-old Cretaceous puzzle, Dr. Sereno's team had found what archaeologists in Niger say is a large Neolithic, or Stone Age, burial and settlement site tentatively dated at 5,000 years old.

"It's a very important site," says Dr. Abdoulaye Maga, an archaeologist with the Institute of Research in the Human Sciences in Niamey, Niger, who visited it in 2000, shortly after the discovery. "It's the largest site that has been found and not pillaged." Though he has discovered and excavated a few dozen new species of African dinosaurs, Dr. Sereno has no experience with prehistoric human sites like this. He said his team counted 130 skeletons, including one with the remains of a stone bead necklace and innumerable stone and bone tools. He suspects, he says, that much more lies buried. . .

Dr. Sereno thinks the sediments suggest that the settlement may have been on the shore of a lake. "I found some catfish skulls, a bunch of them, and there was a little tail, and I'm blowing the sand off and then I run into the edge of a ceramic bowl that was around them," Dr. Sereno said. "I was looking at a bowl of fossilized catfish. Someone in the middle of a meal abandoned this bowl, and it got fossilized."

Posted by David on January 26, 2004 9:03 PM