Chicago dinosaur hunters uncover ancient human graveyard in Sahara

Discovery offers glimpse of era when the desert was a lush paradise

By Jeremy Manier | Chicago Tribune reporter

12:05 AM CDT, August 15, 2008

A group of Chicago dinosaur hunters has stumbled across an ancient human graveyard in the middle of the Sahara, offering a unique glimpse of an epoch when much of the desert was a lush paradise.

The find represents several firsts, said University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno, whose team published the discovery in Thursday's issue of the journal PLoS ONE. It's the biggest Saharan graveyard ever found from the period between 4,500 and 10,000 years ago, a time that scientists have known mostly from scattered fragments of human remains buried in the hot sands.

The period of the Green Sahara, as some researchers call it, began when a fluctuation in the Earth's orbit changed African weather patterns and brought more rain to the desert. The lakes that developed supported 6-foot-long pike fish, turtles, crocodiles and an array of other wildlife and human settlers.

But the dunes eventually returned, swallowing for ages any record of how Stone Age people managed to thrive at the site in northern Niger.

"It's really the story of humanity's struggle to exist in an environment undergoing severe changes," Sereno said.

The team found the bones by the ancient lakeshore in 2000 and excavated the site through 2006. Sereno, who made his name in paleontology by unearthing giant crocodiles and new kinds of dinosaurs from the Sahara, was floored when a photographer with the team found old human bones in the dunes near where other group members were digging for dinosaur remains.

Knowing he would need more than dinosaur specialists to understand the site's full scientific story, Sereno enlisted several outside archeologists who specialize in the study of ancient human remains and settlements.

The most important discovery at the site, called Gobero, was an expanse consisting of 200 graves, including those of people from two separate populations called the Kiffian and the Tenerian.

One of the most moving and mysterious burials was of a Tenerian woman who was buried facing two young children. Pollen was found beneath the three skeletons, suggesting the three had been buried on a bed of flowers.

The diversity of material from the graves, homes and even garbage dumps makes the site unique, said study co-author Elena Garcea, an archeologist from the University of Cassino in Italy.

"It's not just one site, it's really eight sites where people buried their dead but also lived," Garcea said Thursday at a news conference on the discovery in Washington, D.C. The conference was held by the National Geographic Society, which helped fund the research.

The older population of Kiffians were taller and had heartier builds than the Tenerians, who settled in the area toward the end of the Green Sahara period. One Kiffian male whom the team uncovered stood well over 6 feet.

Sereno said he hopes to return the specimens to Niger when the country can build a national museum, which also would house his Saharan dinosaur finds.

From the politickerNJ.com

Release Date: Aug 14 2008

According to recent news reports, a top observatory that has been measuring sun spot activity predicts that global temperatures will drop by two degrees over the next 20 years as solar activity slows and the planet drastically cools down. They suggest this could potentially herald the onset of a new ice age. Following the end of the sun’s most active period in over 11,000 years, the last 10 years have displayed a clear cooling trend as temperatures post-1998 leveled out and are now decreasing.

Earlier this year, John Coleman, the founder of The Weather Channel, stated that manmade global warming is “the greatest scam in history,” adding, “I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a scam.” Coleman said the theory of global warming is based on fraudulent science.

“New Jersey’s tax and regulatory climate is already chasing jobs from this state left and right and these new regulations will make matters worse,” Doherty said. “Rather than conforming our policies to questionable scientific theories, we should be looking at the concrete economic indicators that show our state’s economy is in trouble. And we should be taking steps to help people who are losing jobs and being forced out of their homes by this state’s anti-economic growth agenda – not making matters worse.”

So you see that there is global warming and cooling but not by man.

After the “big ice age” where the Earth was covered by a two to three mile thick ice for about two million years the ice melted soaking the lands and as the Earth warms it is drying up. What I am saying is the Earth is gong back to its normal very hot climate. It has been doing this in cycles of hot and cold for thousands of years always getting a little hotter than before and cooling down but not as cool as before.

To say that man is a contributing factor in a cycle that has gone on long before man was the dominant species is a joke in science, but very serious if you are of the religion of hating man. So if you are of this religion I wish you well, if you are sucked in by the fake science, then you need to study harder.