Offbeat ·
Mysterious Sahara "antennae" tomb finally dated
A team from the University of Girona and the Sahrawi Ministry of Culture has dated an "antennae tumulus" for the first time. It is a type of stone tomb found across the Sahara but rarely studied. This one sits at Lawash el Telli in northern Western Sahara, and the results were published in the journal African Archaeological Review.
What was inside the tomb
The monument is a mound of stacked slabs with two long lines of stones running out from it, 54.5 meters long in total. When they excavated half of the mound in 2018, the team found the skeleton of one person aged 25 to 35, buried with just four small ostrich eggshell beads.
How it was dated
Early tests failed because the bones lacked collagen. In 2025 the mineral part of the bone was analyzed, and two samples gave closely matching dates of roughly 4,400 to 4,100 years ago. Why the region shifted from simple graves to large stone monuments remains unexplained.
Source: Archaeology News Online Magazine. Original summary by JosephArnwolf.com.