The press release was held in an auditorium at National Geographic Geo Headquarters which sat 200 or 250 people. On stage was a podium with silk ferns in front, a projection screen for slides and close up looks at the artifacts, the triple burial (well, a cast of it) on a rotating stand, a table of harpoons, beads, hooks, points, tools and fauna, and a table with two skulls - one Kiffian and one Tenerean - and the skeleton of the girl wearing the bracelet.
In the hours leading up to the press release, everyone was relaxed and for the most part disaster was avoided. (I would say 'uneventful,' but the whole thing was such an event that it wouldn't be the right word choice). The only glitch was that the warthog skull had been damaged en route from Chicago to the National Geographic podium. Tyler and I had to bust out some super glue to fix it - luckily he'd foreseen such an occurrence and brought glue with him.
The presentation was scheduled to begin at 10:30. The press and public were let in about 30 minutes before that. The auditorium began to fill with people holding copies of the new, unreleased National Geographic containing the article on the Gobero site - and I hadn't even seen it yet! Other team members and affiliates there were Gabe, Shureice, Tyler, Didier, Mike, Peter, Phil and Ide.
Paul Sereno, Elena Garcea, Helene Jousse, and Chris Stojanowski all spoke at the event. After a brief introduction, Paul spoke first and before he introduced the site, he mentioned a few of the team members in case the press wanted interviews. He introduced Gabe - the founder of Project Exploration, Didier, Shureice, and myself, I was really touched.
Helene, Elena, and Chris all highlighted different features of the site. I learned something new at the presentation when Chris showed an incredibly complicated plot of cranial-metrics and explained the theory that like-ness in cranial measurements could be used to estimate the probability of genetic relatedness.
At the end, reports had a variety of questions ranging from "Who are the descendants of the Tenereans?" to "What does this site tell us that we don't already know?" I was surprised at the second question, but I guess its valid if the paucity of information from this era in the Sahara hadn't been explain to you. As Anne Haour, an archaeologist specializing the region, noted in 2003, "The known archaeological record of Niger consists of series of punctuated episodes of past human settlements, separated by poorly understood gaps." The excavations at Gobero went a long way to filling in those gaps.
After the presentation, we retreated to a restricted access part of the headquarters for a luncheon and everyone kept checking on their iphones the number of websites reporting the site. It skyrocketed over the course of a few hours - Gobero has gone public!
Visit National Geographic for the article and a video about the site: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/09/green-sahara/gwin-text
