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Cemetery 117 is an ancient cemetery discovered in 1964 by a team lead by Fred Wendorf near the northern border of Sudan. The remains discovered there were determined to be between approximately 13,140 and 14,340 years old.

The original project that discovered the cemetery was the UNESCO High Dam Salvage Project. This project was a direct response to the raising of the Aswan Dam which stood to destroy or damage many sites along its path. It is often cited as the oldest known evidence of warfare, although this point is disputed. The site is comprised of three cemeteries, two of which are called Jebel Sahaba, one on either side of the Nile river and the third cemetery being called Tushka.

59 bodies were recovered at Cemetery 117, and many more partial pieces found. There were twenty-four females and nineteen males all over nineteen years of age, thirteen children ranging in age from infancy to fifteen years old, and also three bodies that remain unaged and unsexed due to damage and missing pieces. The skeletons were dated using radiocarbon dating at 13,740 years before present plus or minus 600 years. Of the people buried in Jebel Sahaba about forty percent died of violent wounds. Stone projectile points were found in the bodies at places that suggest that they were attached to a spear or arrow. The wound sites were in the chest or abdomen area, the back, or in the skull through the lower jaw or neck. Also the lack of bony calluses due to healing around these wounds indicates that they were most likely fatal.

Some have speculated that this violence and aggression was due to diminishing resources in the area and the rising aridity of the land. Also the failure of earlier agricultural experiments may have led to this series of raiding and or ambush by other tribes or bands of people. This sudden decrease of population at the end of the Paleolithic is often seen as the effect of climate change which led to early agricultural failure and fewer food sources. This is why only about half as many sites as previous years in the Paleolithic have been found dating to the very end of the Paleolithic. Bands of people likely reverted back to a hunter-gatherer style of food procurement due to these changes in the climate and the waning populations.

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A. The Earliest Peoples in Nubia: The Old Stone Age (Paleolithic)
1. Nubia's Early Hunters

The earliest remains of man have been recovered in South Africa and Kenya, dating back approximately four million years. If environmental conditions in Sudan were as conducive to preserving skeletal remains as they are in these areas, there is no doubt that equally ancient remains would be found there. Until now, the earliest traces of man in Nubia and Sudan have been only the tools he created and used. The earliest tool type used by man was the large rough hand axe with one pointed and another rounded end. The pointed end was used for hammering; the rounded end was held in the closed palm of the hand. Such tools have been found from central Sudan to the Nile Delta and throughout the Sahara, and they are hardly different from those found all over Europe and Asia. Such tools have been identified with the species of early man called homo erectus.

Throughout the last 100,000 years, the Nile Valley and Sahara underwent many dry and wet phases, which over such a span of time would have constantly altered man's habitat. We do not know what the people who used these tools looked like, but they were surely hunters and would have migrated in bands, supplementing their diet with gathered fruits, nuts and vegetables. This uniform early Paleolithic tool "culture" is known as the Achulean, and it existed from about 500,000 to 50,000 years ago.

2. Nubia's Oldest House?

Some of the most important evidence of early man in Nubia was discovered recently by an expedition of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, under the direction of Dr. Kryzstof Grzymski, on the east bank of the Nile, about 70 miles (116 km) south of Dongola, Sudan. During the early 1990's, this team discovered several sites containing hundreds of Paleolithic hand axes. At one site, however, the team identified an apparent stone tool workshop, where thousands of sandstone hand axes and flakes lay on the ground around a row of large stones set in a line, suggesting the remains of a shelter. This seems to be the earliest "habitation" site yet discovered in the Nile Valley and may be up to 70,000 years old.

What the Nubian environment was like throughout these distant times, we cannot know with certainty, but it must have changed many times. For many thousands of years it was probably far different than what it is today. Between about 50,000 to 25,000 years ago, the hand axe gradually disappeared and was replaced with numerous distinctive chipped stone industries that varied from region to region, suggesting the presence in Nubia of many different peoples or tribal groups dwelling in close proximity to each other. When we first encounter skeletal remains in Nubia, they are those of modern man: homo sapiens.

3. Nubia's Oldest Battle?

From about 25,000 to 8,000 years ago, the environment gradually evolved to its present state. From this phase several very early settlement sites have been identified at the Second Cataract, near the Egypt-Sudan border. These appear to have been used seasonally by people leading a semi-nomadic existence. The people hunted, fished, and ground wild grain. The first cemeteries also appear, suggesting that people may have been living at least partly sedentary lives. One cemetery site at Jebel Sahaba, near Wadi Halfa, Sudan, contained a number of bodies that had suffered violent deaths and were buried in a mass grave. This suggests that people, even 10,000 years ago, had begun to compete with each other for resources and were willing to kill each other to control them.

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Prehistoric humans roamed the world's largest desert for some 5,000 years, archaeologists have revealed.

The Eastern Sahara of Egypt, Sudan, Libya and Chad was home to nomadic people who followed rains that turned the desert into grassland.

When the landscape dried up about 7,000 years ago, there was a mass exodus to the Nile and other parts of Africa.

The close link between human settlement and climate has lessons for today, researchers report in Science.

"Even modern day conflicts such as Dafur are caused by environmental degradation as it has been in the past," Dr Stefan Kropelin of the University of Cologne, Germany, told the BBC News website.

"The basic struggle for food, water and pasture is still a big problem in the Sahara zone. This process started thousands of years ago and has a long tradition."

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Posts: 8895 | Registered: May 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Djehuti:
Keep in mind, the Egyptians also once practiced human sacrifice for their dead kings, which was later replaced by ushabtis.

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Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006  |  IP: Logged |