Discovery The Asselar skeleton was discovered by
Theodore Monod and
Wladimir Besnard during an expedition in 1927.
Wickliffe Draper funded the expedition.
Dating The Asselar skeleton has been dated to around 6,400 BP, making it no older than the
Holocene. Along with fossils such as those found at
Iwo Eleru (11,000 BP) and
Ishango (8,000 BP), which were excavated from archaeological sites in
West Africa and
Central Africa, the Asselar skeleton is one of the earliest known
anatomically modern human skeletons, with a
phenotype that is characteristic of later
Sub-Saharan African populations, located in Sub-Saharan Africa. Older fossils with a similar morphology have also been found near
Khartoum,
Sudan, which has been dated to between 8000 BCE and 5000 BCE. More recently, in the 1980s, geological dating from the Asselar site in the
Saharan region of northern
Mali has produced a date for the Asselar skeleton as being between 9500 BP and 7000 BP, amid the early
Holocene Wet Phase. Medical imaging techniques of the skeleton and surrounding matrix show that the Asselar individual was likely intentionally
buried, rather than having been drowned and subsequently buried by accident as originally thought. Human remains found buried in similar anatomical positions have been found at other early Holocene sites such as Hassi-el-Abiod in Mali. ==See also==