Asselar Man is a neolithic skeleton discovered by Theodore Monod and M.V. Besnard in 1927, in the Adrar des Ifoghas, near Essouk in what is now Mali's Kidal Region. Wickliffe Draper funded the expedition.
Some scholars believe Asselar man to be one of the earliest known skeletons of a Negroid type African human, older examples being those found near Khartoum, dated between 8000 and 5000 BC, and at Iwo, Ileru, Nigeria to 11000 BC. Others claim it is more closely related to Cro-Magnon or bushmen[1]. Most place its age around 4500BC., no older than the Holocene.
More recently Peter Frost hypothesized Asselar Man, hence what most associate with black African racial type, to be the result of intense polygyny arising from women's independence due to the neolithic spread of agriculture throughout sub-Saharan Africa [2].