Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

BCE to 2500 BCE. What she found odd, though, was the pottery with wavy lines that Garcea attributed to the Kiffian, a
fishing people who had lived in this same region thousands of years before the Tenerian, roughly from 6000 BCE to
4500 BCE. Garcea was baffled as to how the Kiffian and Tenerian peoples, whose presence here was separated by five
hundred or more years, had used the same burial grounds. Garcea and Sereno also explored a dry lake nearby and found
fishing hooks and harpoons made of bone and the remains of large Nile perch, crocodiles, and hippopotamus—all
evidence of the Kiffian fishing people’s presence in this area. Yet what could have induced the Tenerian, centuries later,
to bury their own people in the cemetery of the Kiffian? According to Garcea, “. . . perhaps the Tenerian found the
Kiffian burials and recognized this place as sacred. It’s possible they thought these bones belonged to their own
ancestors.” 56
There were more than two hundred burials at Gobero, and only carbon dating could determine their true age. Garcea
and Sereno had to act quickly, because the site was unprotected and open to looting by Tuareg nomads who were in
search of artifacts to sell to tourists. Many prehistoric sites in Niger have been looted before they could be studied and
excavated by archaeologists, and Sereno wanted to avoid this calamity at Gobero. He finally managed to ship bone
samples to his laboratory in the United States and have them dated by radiocarbon analysis. The results showed that some
bones were nine thousand years old, falling in the Kiffian epoch, while others were six thousand years old, falling within
the Tenerian epoch.
A biochemist from Arizona State University, Chris Stojanowski, also went to Gobero to examine the prehistoric
site, and his own study of bones and other prehistoric artifacts showed that the Kiffian men had huge leg muscles,
implying a high-protein diet, and the wear and tear of their bones showed that they had arduous lives consistent with the
theory that they were hunter-gatherers and efficient fishermen. The Tenerian, on the other hand, had slender legs, and their
bone structure showed that their lives were less strenuous than those of the Kiffian. This was consistent with the theory
that they were herders and pastoralists. It seems that in the area there had been a hunter-gatherer phase as well as a later
pastoralist phase, the former when the Sahara was very humid and rich with fauna, and the latter when the climate became
drier and the fish and fauna became scarce, forcing the Kiffians to domesticate the wild cattle so that they could move
their food supply to watering holes and fresh grazing grounds.
Of the hundreds of animal bones found at Gobero, none belonged to sheep or goats. They were the remains only of
cattle. Yet the cattle bones were few, because the herders rarely slaughtered their cattle but rather kept them for milk and
blood. In other words, the cattle were living protein larders. As far as we know, no DNA tests have been performed to
determine the origins of the Kiffian or the Tenerian, although, apparently, scientists in the United States are working on
this. In 2007 there was trouble in Niger from antigovernment insurgents, and the authorities imposed emergency rules
that prohibited foreigners from traveling into the Tenere Desert. Sereno and Garcea were obliged to abort their planned
2008 season at Gobero. As things stand now, this unique prehistoric graveyard may soon be lost forever. 57
TWO GIANT GIRAFFES IN STONE
Another fact regarding the prehistoric people of Gobero attracted our attention. Many of the stone tools that were
examined by Sereno and his team had come from the mysterious region known as the Aïr Mountains, located some 100
kilometers (62 miles) to the north of Gobero. A few years earlier, at the foot of the Aïr Mountains near a place called
Dabous, there was discovered an abundance of prehistoric art, notably two life-size giraffes that were exquisitely carved
on a flat outcrop of sandstone. These engravings, according to the experts, probably belonged to the Kiffian and are
tentatively dated to about 8000 BCE. The Dabous site contains more than eight hundred engravings, 50 percent of which
are cows or other large bovines, and the rest of which are giraffes, ostriches, lions, rhinoceros, and even camels. There are
also some sixty human figures. The two huge giraffes, a male and smaller female, are engraved on an 80-meter-long by
60-meter-wide (262-feet-long by 197-feet-wide) sandstone outcrop. The male giraffe is nearly 6 meters (20 feet) tall and
the female about 3.5 meters (12 feet) tall. Albeit on a much larger scale, they resemble the giraffes engraved at Jebel
Uwainat and Gilf Kebir in the Egyptian Sahara. More intriguingly, both at Gobero and Uwainat/Gilf Kebir, next to the
giraffes are carved human figures holding ropes attached to the mouths or heads of the animals—and this clearly shows a
special connection between humans and giraffes, perhaps even an attempt at domestication.
It is unlikely to be a coincidence that such similar images are found at Gobero and at Uwainat. Could the Gobero
people and the Uwainat/ Gilf Kebir people have a common ancestry or origin? Although the answer is still unclear, all
the evidence points to the possibility that the Kiffian and Tenere of Niger, the Nabta Playa pastoralists, and the pre-cattle
and cattle herders of Gilf Kebir and Uwainat all had a common ancestral source in the Tibesti-Ennedi region in Chad. The