Gobero

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Aerial view of Gobero

Gobero is an archaeological site on the western edge of the Ténéré desert in Niger . The excavation is located in the municipality of Tabelot, about 180 km east of Agadez and 150 km southeast of the Aïr Mountains . In 2000, Gobero was discovered by paleontologists at the University of Chicago on an expedition that was actually looking for dinosaur fossils. Archaeologists found the oldest graves in the Sahara in 2005/2006 . The age of the roughly 200 graves with grave goods , which have been preserved completely undisturbed, was determined by radiocarbon dating . They come from two epochs of the Holocene , the earlier from 7700 to 6200 BC. The later began around 5200 BC after an interruption of around 1000 years. And lasted until 2500 BC. Chr.

The finds show that today's desert was then a water-rich lake landscape. The inhabitants of the first epoch lived as largely sedentary hunters, fishermen and gatherers . According to the graves and ceramic fragments that were discovered on former lake shores, they were tall, strong-boned and belonged to the Kiffian culture . The bones from the first epoch are petrified under the action of water , which means that an exchange of minerals took place here. Due to the effects of the water, it is assumed that the water level initially continued to rise and the long pause in settlement can be explained by the fact that the entire area was under water for centuries.

Around 1000 years later, after climatic change, water decline and the resulting lakes again, smaller and more gracefully built people of the Ténéré culture settled the region again. Their bones show no fossilization. Their food sources were the gathering of mussels , the fishing and the hunting of wild animals of the steppe . In addition, there were the beginnings of cattle farming . The reason for their withdrawal from the region is assumed to be prolonged drought with drying up of the lakes, right up to the current state of desert.

literature

  • Paul C. Sereno et al .: Lakeside Cemeteries in the Sahara: 5000 Years of Holocene Population and Environmental Change. In: PLoS One. Vol. 3, No. 8, August 2008, e2995. doi: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0002995 .
  • Elena AA Garcea (Ed.): Gobero: The No-Return Frontier. Archeology and Landscape at the Saharo-Sahelian Borderland (=  Journal of African Archeology Monograph Series . Volume 9 ). Africa Magna, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-937248-34-9 .
  • Christopher M. Stojanowski, Charisse L. Carver, Katherine A. Miller, (2014). Incisor avulsion, social identity and Saharan Population history: New data from the Early Holocene southern Sahara. In: Journal of Anthropological Archeology. September 2014, Vol. 35, pp. 79-91, doi: 10.1016 / j.jaa.2014.04.007 .
  • Christopher M. Stojanowski, KJ Knudson: Biogeochemical inferenes of mobility of earl Holocene fisher-foragers from the Southern Sahara Desert. In: American Journal of Physical Anthropology. September 2011, Vol. 146, No. 1, pp. 49-61, doi: 10.1002 / ajpa.21542 .

Web links

  • The dead of the Sahara . TV documentary about the Gobero excavations at arte.tv , accessed February 14, 2018 at youtube.com.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Paul C. Sereno et al .: Lakeside Cemeteries in the Sahara: 5000 Years of Holocene Population and Environmental Change. In: PLoS One. Vol. 3, No. 8, August 2008, e2995

Coordinates: 17 ° 5 ′ 0 ″  N , 9 ° 31 ′ 0 ″  E