Sahara used to be green and inhabited

Scientists have just discovered the skeleton of a small woman hugging two children, lying on a flower bed 5000 years ago in the barren Sahara desert today.

This amazing cemetery provided evidence of two civilizations that lived here, 1,000 years apart, when the Sahara was still wet and lush.

The woman's skeleton and possibly her two children, 5 and 8 years old, were buried 5,300 years ago in the Sahara.These skeletons are found in the oldest stone graveyard ever found in the African desert.Photo: AP.

Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago and his colleagues are searching for dinosaur fossils in Niger when they happened to discover this. About 200 human graves are found here in 2005 and 2006, next to the corpses of animals, large fishes and crocodiles.

"Wherever you dig, there are bones of animals that do not live in the desert. I realize that we are standing on a green Sahara , " Sereno said.

This graveyard is exposed by the hot wind of the desert, near a place once a lake. It is in the Gobero region, in the harsh Tenere desert of Niger, also known as a "desert in the desert".

Human skeletons belong to two different populations, living in two wet periods separated by a dry period.

The age-old radioactivity tests showed the most recent people lived about 1,000 years before the Egyptians built the pyramids. The first group occupied this area when the Sahara was in the wettest period, about 10,000 to 8,000 years ago. The second group of people lived about 7,000 to 4,500 years ago.