Scientists Explore Lakefront Property, in the Sahara | NY Times

[Ediacara]

Scientists Explore Lakefront Property, in the Sahara
By BRENDA FOWLER

Published: January 27, 2004


Photographs from Mike Hettwer
A knife made of green jasper,
top, and a human burial site
were accidentally found in
Niger at a burial and
settlement site estimated at
5,000 years old.

The paleontologists were driving across the scorched and trackless Ténéré Desert of Niger, following a low ridge of rock bearing dinosaur fossils. Suddenly, someone on the team, led by Dr. Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago, spotted something dark against the tawny dunes.

Getting out of their vehicles, they stepped into sand littered with the fossilized bones of modern crocodiles, hippos, camels and birds — interesting creatures, to be sure, but not exactly the quarry of these paleontologists. "But then things got really strange," recalls Gabrielle Lyon, a member of the expedition who is Dr. Sereno's wife and the director of Project Exploration, a science education group.

As members of the group stood around their vehicles comparing finds, Mike Hettwer, the expedition photographer, came loping up with news of human skeletons and stone tools eroding from a hillside.

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.

More at the New York Times

[aquart]

1. Well, it's a skeleton. But is it a burial?

"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."

To me, that doesn't say burial. That says big fat disaster overtook the place. They ran like hell and died where they were caught and covered with sand and dirt.

According to the much maligned Velikovsky, there was a giant lake in Africa that drained away in a cataclysm. But, of course, he was never right, except about Egyptian chronology, the temperature of Venus, water on Mars?

[Nihil]

2. Maybe take a geologist with them next time?

Wonder what the covering sediment was and how different from the
underlying soil?

It would be interesting if it were oceanic sediments (think tsunami)
rather than just the same as the surrounding soil (slow covering after
being abandoned/wiped out by a tribal raid).

Nihil

[puerco-bellies]

3. Probably not a Tsunami

A tsunami would have churned and moved the material, and not left it in a relatively close position to the other finds. The bowl could have been buried with a body as an offering to help feed the dead on their journey, not a uncommon sentiment.

[Ediacara]

4. Speaking as someone who knows a little bit about paleontologic technique

1) They have a geologist with them.

2) They study the taphonomy of the site (ie the laws of burial).

If they say that it doesn't look catostrophic, it probably wasn't.

[Pale Blue Dot]

5. OMG! That first picture!

That's it! The evidence that the Bush administration has been looking for!

Yellow cake!