Gobero

A photographer called Mike Hettwer, out with Paul Sereno’s dinosaur team, walked over a dune in the Ténéré on 13 October 2000 and found human skeletons lying on the surface. The site turned out to be a graveyard beside a freshwater lake about three kilometres across, in the middle of what is now some of the emptiest desert on the planet, used across two separate populations more than a thousand years apart. The Kiffians were here from about 7550 to 6250 BC, hunter-fishers, heavily built, some of the men over six foot eight. The Tenerians came later, herders with cattle, and left ivory ornaments and the bones of catfish, hippo and antelope. At least 182 burials, 67 of them excavated. One is a woman and two children laid on their sides facing each other with their hands entwined, and the pollen in the grave suggests flowers were put in with them. Ténéré desert, Niger.