A tiny woman and two children were laid to rest on a bed of flowers 5,000 years ago in what is now the barren Sahara Desert.
Researchers discovered the slender arms of the youngsters still extended to the woman in a perpetual embrace.
The remarkable cemetery is providing clues to two civilisations who lived there, a thousand years apart, when the region was moist and green.
Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago and colleagues were searching for the remains of dinosaurs in the African country of Niger when they came across the startling find.
Some 200 graves of humans were found during fieldwork at the site in 2005 and 2006, as well as remains of animals, large fish and crocodiles.
'Everywhere you turned, there were bones belonging to animals that don't live in the desert,' said Sereno.
'I realized we were in the green Sahara.'
The graveyard, uncovered by hot desert winds, is near what would have been a lake at the time people lived there. It's in a region called Gobero, hidden away in Niger's forbidding Tenere Desert, known to Tuareg nomads as a 'desert within a desert.'
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