One of the driest deserts in the world, the Saharan Tenere Desert, hosted at least two flourishing lakeside populations during the Stone Age, a discovery of the largest graveyard from the era reveals.

The archaeological site in Niger, called Gobero, was discovered by Paul Sereno at the University of Chicago, during a dinosaur-hunting expedition. It had been used as a burial site by two very different populations during the millennia when the Sahara was lush.

Careful examination of 67 graves - a third of the 200 plots on the site - has uncovered unprecedented details about the lifestyles of the people who inhabited the green Stone Age "desert", says Sereno.

"The first people who used the Gobero cemetery were Kiffian, hunter-gatherers who grew up to two metres tall," says Elena Garcea of the University of Cassino in Italy and one of the scientists on the team. The large stature of the Kiffian suggests that food was plentiful during their time in Gobero, 10,000 to 8,000 years ago.