the surrounding plain. A few kilometres to the north, surrounded by the southern tip of the Aoukar sand sea, is an outlying island mountain plateau named Rkiss. French colonialists wrote a number of detailed accounts of the area at various points during the 20th century. The French naturalist Lieutenant P. Boery documented the outlying Rkiss 'mountain island' in the mid 1920s. A study of the area's hydrology was published in French in 1960. and the geology of the Affolle was fully surveyed and understood by the 1960s. Some unproductive modern mineral exploration was commissioned in the early 1980s, such as a survey of the copper in and south of the Affolle. Until the 1980s there were known to be small elephants (Loxodonta africana) surviving as relic populations in the Affolle valleys. But a proposed national park for them failed to materialize and more recently the conservation literature has presumed that the elephant has become extinct throughout Mauritania. Relic populations of a Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus laurenti, 1768), once presumed extinct, were found in the late 1990s at four wetlands sites in the Affole. The scientific report on these animals found that local beliefs afforded them some protection, since the "Mauritanian villagers living near the wetlands believe that if the crocodiles are killed the water will disappear and bad luck befall the village". Abderrahmane Sissako The acclaimed West African filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako was born in Kiffa. He has spent many decades away from Kiffa, over the border in Mali and in northern Europe. But he returned to film Kiffa for the opening section of one of his films, Rostov-Luanda (1997). 1970 meteorite impact Among the astronomical community Kiffa is known as the site of impact of a medium-sized meteorite in 1970. The meteorite struck about south-east of Kiffa on 23 October 1970, and was sufficiently large to leave many fragments of fused crust to be collected by a German mine operator. References Regional capitals in Mauritania Communes of Assaba Region