Saharan remains may be evidence of first race war 13,000 years ago

Humans’ remains of people killed 13,000 years ago in what scientists believe is the oldest identified race war, are today due to going on display at the British Museum in London.

Two skeletons from a massacre in the Sahara desert in 11,000BC, which killed at least 26 people, will be shown in the new Ancient Egypt gallery, alongside the flint-tipped weapons with which they were killed.

French scientists have been working with the museum to examine dozens of skeletons that were found grouped together in the Jebel Sahaba cemetery – one of the earliest organized burial grounds – on the east bank of the Nile, northern Sudan, in the 1960s.

They believe the remains of the 60 individuals found – around half of which had cut marks on their bones – represent the first communal violence between groups.

Fighting probably broke out because of the environmental disaster of the Ice Age, which caused the attackers and victims to live together in a smaller area, the experts explained.

Renee Friedman, the museum’s curator of early Egypt, told The Times that the attackers and victims were hunter-gatherers who usually avoided violence by moving on when a certain area became overcrowded.

But she believed that the cold and dry conditions of the Nile valley around that time caused a ‘population crisis’, as more people moved to the same area surrounded by desert.

She said: ‘Things were probably very tight, so we think that people started picking on one another.’

The museum acquired the remains in 2002 when they were donated by Fred Wendorf, an American archaeologist who excavated the site in the 1960s.

At least 60 individuals were found and examined using modern technology. One body was found with 39 pieces of flint from arrows and other flint-tipped weapons, Dr. Friedman said.

As well as the human remains, the display will include flint arrowhead fragments and a healed forearm fracture, which was most likely sustained by a victim who was trying to defend himself during the conflict.

Over the past two years, anthropologists from Bordeaux University have managed to find dozens of previously undetected conflict marks on the victims’ bones.

The British Museum scientists are now planning to research more about the victims themselves, including their gender, age, and diet.

Meanwhile, according to The Independent, work carried out at Liverpool John Moores University, the University of Alaska, and New Orleans’ Tulane University suggests these humans were part of the general sub-Saharan originating population, who were ancestors of modern Black Africans.

Dr. Daniel Antoine, a curator in the British Museum’s Ancient Egypt and Sudan Department, told the paper: ‘The skeletal material is of great importance – not only because of the evidence for conflict but also because the Jebel Sahaba cemetery is the oldest discovered in the Nile valley so far.’

Looters destroy 2,000-year-old Sudan archaeological site in search for gold

When last month a team of archeologists deep in Sudan’s deserts arrived at Jabal Maragha’s ancient site, they thought they’d been lost. The site had vanished. But they hadn’t made a mistake. In fact, gold-hunters with giant diggers had destroyed almost all sign of the two millennia-old sites.

Archaeologist, Habab Idris Ahmed, who painstakingly excavated the historic site in 1999, told us that they had only one intention to search here — to find gold.

“They did something crazy; to save time, they used heavy machinery.”

In the baking-hot desert of Bayouda, some 270 kilometers (170 miles) north of the capital Khartoum, the team discovered two mechanical diggers and five men at work.

They had dug a vast trench 17 metres (55 feet) deep, and 20 meters long. The rust-coloured sand was scarred with tyre tracks, some cut deep into the ground, from the trucks that transported the equipment. The site, dating from the Meroitic period between 350 BC and 350 AD, was either a small settlement or a checkpoint. Since the diggers came, hardly anything remains.

“They had completely excavated it, because the ground is composed of layers of sandstone and pyrite,” said Hatem al-Nour, Sudan’s director of antiquities and museums.

“And as this rock is metallic their detector would start ringing. So they thought there was gold.”

Escape justice

Archeologists in Sudan assess the damage done by gold hunters digging up ancient sites looking for buried treasure. Archeologists in Sudan assess the damage done by gold hunters digging up ancient sites looking for buried treasure. Next to the huge gash in the ground, the diggers had piled up ancient cylindrical stones on top of each other to prop up a roof for their dining room. The archaeologists were accompanied by a police escort, who took the treasure-hunters to a police station — but they were freed within hours.

“They should have been put in jail and their machines confiscated. There are laws,” said Mahmoud al-Tayeb, a former expert from Sudan’s antiquities department.

Instead, the men left without charge, and their diggers were released too.

“It is the saddest thing,” said Tayeb, who is also a professor of archaeology at the University of Warsaw.

Tayeb believes that the real culprit is the workers’ employer, someone who can pull strings and circumvent justice. Sudan’s archaeologists warn that this was not a unique case, but part of a systematic looting of ancient sites. At Sai, a 12-kilometre-long river island in the Nile, hundreds of graves have been ransacked and destroyed by looters. Some of them date back to the times of the pharaohs. Sudan’s ancient civilisations built more pyramids than the Egyptians, but many are still unexplored.

Now, in hundreds of remote places ranging from cemeteries to temples, desperate diggers are hunting for anything to improve their daily lives.

Gold fever

Sudanese treasure hunters use mechanical diggers to cut deep trenches at ancient sites looking for gold Sudan is Africa’s third-largest producer of gold, after South Africa and Ghana, with commercial mining bringing in $1.22 billion to the government last year.

In the past, people also tried their luck by panning for gold at the city of Omdurman, across the river from Khartoum, where the waters of the White and Blue Niles meet.

“We used to see older people with small sieves like the ones women use for sifting flour at home,” Tayeb said, recalling times when he was a boy. “They used them to look for gold.”

But the gold they found was in tiny quantities.

Then in the late 1990s, people saw archaeologists using metal detectors for their scientific research.

“When people saw archeologists digging and finding things, they were convinced there was gold.”

Reason for pride

Remote archaeological sites in Sudan are being targeted by people believing they can find buried gold beneath the sand Remote archaeological sites in Sudan are being targeted by people believing they can find buried gold beneath the sand. Even worse, local authorities have encouraged the young and unemployed to hunt for treasures while wealthy businessmen bring in mechanical diggers alongside.

“Out of a thousand more or less well-known sites in Sudan, at least a hundred have been destroyed or damaged,” said Nour. “There is one policeman for 30 sites… and he has no communication equipment or adequate means of transport.”

For Tayeb, the root problem is not a lack of security, but rather the government’s priorities.

“It’s not a question of policemen,” he said. “It is a serious matter of how do you treat your history, your heritage? This is the main problem. But heritage is not a high priority for the government, so what can one do?”

The destruction of the sites is an extra tragedy for a country long riven by civil war between rival ethnic groups, destroying a common cultural identity of a nation.

“This heritage is vital for the unity of the Sudanese,” Nour said. “Their history gives them a reason for pride.”

Archaeologists Diving Under a 2,300-Year-Old Pyramid Find Ancient Treasure

Objects, ‘ gold leaf ‘ were uncovered by a team of archeologists ‘ diving’ the sweltering deserts of northern Sudan once Nubia, in a 2,300- years-old submerged tomb belonging to a pharaoh named Nastasen who ruled the Kush kingdom from 335 BC to 315 BC.

A major difference between the pyramids of northern Sudan and the most prominent pyramids in Egypt is that the pharaohs were buried beneath them, rather than within them. 

This is why Georges Reisner, an egyptologist in Harvard, visited Nouri for the first time visited Nuri over a century ago and discovered burial chambers beneath Taharqa’s massive pyramid, the largest of 20 pyramids marking the burials of Kushite royal family.

Sometimes called the “black pharaohs,” this dynasty conquered Egypt in the 8th Century BC and ruled for almost a century. Reisner not only reported that he had found their water filled tombs, but he also noted the presence of a narrow, ancient processional staircase cut into the bedrock running deep below Nastasen’s pyramid at Nuri.

In 2018, the team located the 65-step stairway and began excavating, but when they got to around 40 stairs down they hit a water table – enters underwater archaeologist Pearce Paul Creasman – associate professor in the dendrochronology laboratory at the University of Arizona, who led the team into the subaquatic ancient tomb for the first time in at least 100 years.

In a National Geographic article Creasman said “normal scuba tanks would have been too cumbersome” and this is why he decided to pump oxygen through 150-foot-long (45.72 meters) hoses from a gasoline-fed pump on the surface.

With Fakhri Hassan Abdallah, an inspector with Sudan’s  National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, manning the air pump, Creasman entered the ancient abyss.

There are three chambers, with these beautiful arched ceilings, about the size of a small bus, you go in one chamber into the next, it’s pitch black, you know you’re in a tomb if your flashlights aren’t on. And it starts revealing the secrets that are held within.

And in this instance, those secrets Creasman risked his life to touch came in the form of fragments of ancient gold.

According to Creasman, when he was making his way through the dark silt they… “Were still sitting there – small glass-type statues” which had once been leafed in gold.

And while the water destroyed the glass underneath, “the little gold flake was still there”. Under normal circumstances all traces of gold leaf would have been stolen by grave robbers , but the rising water level made this particular tomb inaccessible, said underwater archaeologist Kristin Romey in National Geographic .

‘Kush gold leaf’ sounds like the name of a tea, or a brand of really strong hashish, both products associated with the Kush empire; however, while Creasman’s team might be slightly let down at not having found a collection of solid gold statues , the fragments of gold leaf are in themselves priceless in heritage terms.

The land of the Kush became one of the main gold-producing areas of the ancient world and its alchemists and craftspeople forged intricate and beautiful jewelry and they adorned their temples and statues with gold leaf.

In 2007, The Guardian published an article announcing that archaeologists discovered “An ancient site where gold flakes were hand-ground from rare ores.”

Located at Hosh el-Geruf, 225 miles (362 km) north of Khartoum in Sudan, the archaeologists first unearthed grinding stones made of a granite-like rock called gneiss, used to crush the ore and recover flakes of gold. Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute, told The Guardian, “This work is extremely important because it can give us our first look at the economic organization of this very important but little-known African state – the Kush empire.”

Funded in part by a grant from the National Geographic Society, for more information and updates on archaeology at Nuri, visit the official expedition website at  Nuri pyramids.

Skeletons of war dead from 11,000 BC go on show at the British Museum

Lying on their left sides, curled together, the two skeletons on display for the first time at the British Museum look peacefully laid to rest.

But the razor-sharp stone flakes among the bones are the remains of ancient weapons. The two are among the oldest known war dead in the world, men who died 13,000 years ago.

The cemetery they came from, on the banks of the Nile in what is now northern Sudan, is famous among archaeologists: dating from about 11,000 BC, it is among the oldest organized burial grounds in the world. However, the finds have never been exhibited before.

“These were tribes mounting regular and ferocious raids amongst themselves for scarce resources,” curator Renee Friedman said.

“There were many women and children among the dead, a very unusual composition for any cemetery, and almost half bore the marks of violent death. These people lived in extraordinarily violent times.”

The bodies were laid on their left sides, heads to the south and looking east – towards the source of the river and the rising sun, on which survival depended.

“Before this date, we find isolated burials of bodies just placed in holes in the ground,” Friedman said. “These come from a time when the hunter-gatherers are starting to put down roots, and burying their ancestors is a very powerful way of laying claim to the land. But clearly they had to defend it, not once but many times, at a terrible cost.”

The cemetery at Jebel Sahaba now lies deep under the waters of the Aswan dam.

They were excavated in the 1960s by the American archaeologist Professor Fred Wendorf, in one of the Unesco-funded rescue digs to save as much history as possible before the waters rose.

Wendorf recovered the remains of 61 individuals, with weapons. When he retired from the Southern Methodist University of Texas in 2001 he presented his collection to the British Museum in London.

“Often with remains from such an ancient time, we will never know what happened to them,” Friedman said. “With these skeletons, there is no question: we found arrowheads lodged in spines, spear points that had pierced eye sockets … The lives and deaths of these people were not nice.”