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The Peopling Of The Sahara During the Holocene/Green Sahara
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Amun-Ra The Ultimate: [QB] Here's more about the Saharan-Sahel-Nile civilization also referred by many other names such as Saharo-Sudanese Neolithic, Saharan-Sudanese Culture, Nilo-Saharans Neolithic, Aqualithic Civilizations, Aquatic civilizations during the Holocene. Those following quotes are extracted from: [URL=http://www.english.pan.pl/images/stories/pliki/publikacje/academia/2005/07/20-24_kobusiewicz.pdf]Prehistoric Herdsmen by Kobusiewicz and Schild[/URL] which relates the archeological works at Gebel Ramlah. A site related to the ones at Napta Playa mentionned above and done by the same team. Although I suggest people to read the whole thing. This allow us to identify and qualify further more the Saharan-Sahel-Nile belt civilization. [QUOTE] Our excavations have enabled us to learn quite a bit about how these people lived. They inhabited settlements that were most likely composed of huts with external stone-laid hearths. Men and livestock alike drank groundwater that was drawn from deep wells. By these late Neolithic times, humans had for thousands of years already known techniques of ceramic-making, smoothing stone tools, and producing quern-stones for grinding. The inhabitants of these settlements attached great importance to adorning and decorating themselves, as is evidenced by the extensive cosmetic artifacts that have been unearthed, including various sorts of pigments, palettes used for processing them, and ornamental containers for storing them. Such late Neolithic people’s chief means of survival came from breeding the local aurochs, long since domesticated, and to a smaller extent from breeding small ruminants, sheep, and goats. After the annual damp season subsided, these shepherds drove their animals out into the vast plains, now turned green with new grass. For several months of the year they moved from one spot to another, as the savanna became exhausted by grazing. Such migration is evidenced by the scattered remains of thousands of hearths they used at their temporary pastoral campsites. Livestock was only rarely slain. These people probably ate various sorts of dairy products and presumably also drank the blood of their animals, letting it in small quantities that were easy to regenerate and not harmful to the livestock. [/QUOTE]Similar to the lifestyle of the rest of the Saharan-Sahel-Nile civilizations. [QUOTE]Three cemeteries Due to recent discoveries emerging from the careful investigation of three clan burial grounds, we have been able to learn much about the burial practices, beliefs, and also the social organization of these early herders. [...] All told, there are [b]67 individuals buried at the three sites[/b] . As the remains are relatively well preserved, the age and sex of the deceased can in most cases be identified. Both men and women were buried here, although the latter were in the majority, and there are also children present. The age of the deceased ranged from infancy to somewhat over 40 years old. There are no signs of any sort of social stratification, usually manifest in terms of differences in the size and construction of graves, or in the quantity and quality of the grave goods they contain. Interestingly, even though an [b]anthropological analysis employing such techniques as a detailed inspection of dental features has shown that two different populations - Mediterranean and sub-Saharan - coexisted here[/b] , there are no differences of any sort evident in the way they were buried. [/QUOTE]The bad side is that they still exclude Northern Sudanese and Sub-Saharan Africans with so-called Caucasoid features from the "Sub-Saharan" African category. The good side is that those remains does in fact include inner African Sub-Saharan features (the extreme case of them). Either you believe those people are of different unrelated ethnicities or you believe that the so-called diversity represent the inherent physical diversity of African people (aka of Sub-Saharan African people which is a misnomer since many black Africans today live in and above the Sahara) which seems to be more probable. [QUOTE] Neolithic beauty The exceptional wealth of the [b]grave goods[/b] is striking. Many deceased were laid to rest with ceramic pots, sometimes beautifully decorated. It seems that vessels of one particular sort, called tulip beakers, were produced exclusively to be used as grave goods. Such pots were usually placed on the chest or near the head. They were accompanied by sets of cosmetic artifacts consisting of flat stone palettes, circular grinding stones for grinding color-bearing minerals, and also containers made of ivory, decorative bovine horn, sandstone, or ceramic. The latter were used to store pigments obtained from various sorts of dark-red or yellow ochre (iron ore), green malachite, and probably also white limestone and black coal. Some of the palettes have preserved traces of these materials to this very day. Other means of personal adornment included necklaces strung from beads of various types and sizes, made of agate, carnelian, gneiss, fired clay, bone, or snail shells. The smallest of the beads, about two millimeters in diameter with a hole cut straight through them, are astounding in terms of the precision and technique involved in their production: we do not know how their makers bored holes less than a millimeter in diameter through hard stone. Decorative pendants made of bone are sometimes encountered, as are lip and nose plugs made of bone or turquoise. Also highly popular were bracelets wrought from large mussel shells from the Red Sea, or made of ivory. Bone needles, long gazelle bones fashioned into daggers, and also beautifully produced flint knives and flint or agate arrowheads have also been frequently found. Many graves contain large sheets of mica more than 10 cm across and about 1 cm thick. They must have been highly prized, since they were frequently buried in the vicinity of the head of a body. One such slab was shaped into the form of a fish. This sculpting is so accurate and realistic that one archeozoologist, upon observing it, immediately identified the find as depicting a tilapia fish - a species very frequently encountered in the Nile. This is the oldest known sculpture to have been discovered in Egypt. One of the graves also contained a miniature boomerang, or more precisely a throwing stick for hunting, made of bone with a decorative incision. Many burials were also accompanied by polished pebbles of unknown function, made of quartz, agate, or other types of rock. [/QUOTE]A lot of similarities with burial goods of later and contemporary Badarian/Nubian sites. [QUOTE] It is especially interesting that the cemeteries offer indications that the surviving contemporaries of [b]the people buried here took a keen interest in ensuring that their remains were kept well-preserved[/b] . Archeologists have found evidence of such an interest in the form of two skulls which have had some of their upper teeth replanted in the lower jaw, or vice versa. Also, the forearm of one woman was found to be wearing four bracelets which were later, at a time when this was already a bare skeleton, fastened in place with small wedges made of small human bones. Another skull was found to have eighteen teeth placed in the eye hole, while another had three teeth in the nasal aperture. Many burials were sprinkled over with sizeable amounts of hematite dust - a custom widespread in prehistoric times, in both the old and the new world. [...] These careful efforts to “repair” human remains attest to an exceptional concern for keeping bodies whole, in as undamaged a condition as possible. And so, the idea of preserving the body so that the spirit could rest in peace in the afterworld - [b]a notion so typical of the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians[/b] - may indeed have originated with the Neolithic peoples inhabiting the ever-drier savanna in what is today the Western Desert, only centuries prior to the emergence of ancient Egypt. [/QUOTE]Linkage between the burial practices of the Saharo-Sudanese civilization and the Ancient Egyptian culture. Notions typical of the beliefs of Ancient Egyptians as well modern African people (African Ancestral Religions). [QUOTE] Stone monoliths In the basin of the dried-up Nabta Playa lake, located only 20 km away, the same people who left behind the graveyards at the foot of Gebel Ramlah erected gigantic clusters of stelae, extending over many square kilometers. [...] This is where the oldest known Egyptian beliefs, as preserved in the Pyramid Texts, maintained that people went after their death.[...] In recent years, the expedition has discovered a massive kurgan in the Nabta Playa lake basin, towering over the fields of stone monoliths, now destroyed by the desert winds. Its small burial pit was found to contain the head of a child 2.5 to 3 years old, [b]undoubtedly the offspring of a powerful ruler of the Nubian Desert about 3,500 years BC, just prior to the establishment of the first Egyptian state. We already know that soon after this date, drought forced the herders to abandon these lands. Digging deeper and deeper wells proved insufficient, and people had go elsewhere in search of water. And so where might they have gone, if not to the relatively close Nile Valley? They brought with them the various achievements of their culture and their belief system. Perhaps it was indeed these people who provided the crucial stimulus towards the emergence of state organization in ancient Egypt [/b] [/QUOTE]Recalling the stone monolith of Nabta Playa and it's linkage with Ancient Egyptians. And again, showing us how the drying of the Sahara forced people living in the Saharan-sahel-Nile belt toward greener pastures including the Nile Valley. Bringing with them various aspects of their African culture and belief systems. Making them central to the formative years of Ancient Egypt. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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