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July 31, 2012 | Modern culture emerged in South Africa 20,000 years earlier than thought |
Washington:
A new international study led by the University
of Colorado Boulder pushes back onset date of South Africa’s Later Stone Age by
more than 20,000 years. The study showed the onset of the Later Stone Age in South
Africa likely began some 44,000 to 42,000 years ago -- about the same time humans
were migrating from Africa to the European continent, said Paola Villa, a curator
at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and lead study author.
The new dates are based on the use of precisely calibrated radiocarbon dates linked
to organic artifacts found at Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains on the border
of South Africa and Swaziland containing evidence of hominid occupation going
back 200,000 years. The Later Stone Age is synonymous to many archaeologists with
the Upper Paleolithic Period, when modern humans moved from Africa into Europe
roughly 45,000 years ago and spread rapidly, displacing and eventually driving
Neanderthals to extinction. The timing of the technological innovations and changes
in the Later Stone Age in South Africa are comparable to that of the Upper Paleolithic,
said Villa. “Our research proves that the Later Stone Age emerged in South Africa
far earlier than has been believed and occurred at about the same time as the
arrival of modern humans in Europe ,” said Villa. “But differences in technology
and culture between the two areas are very strong, showing the people of the two
regions chose very different paths to the evolution of technology and society,”
the researcher added. Organic artifact assemblages at Border Cave dating to the
Later Stone Age included ostrich eggshell beads, thin bone arrowhead points, wooden
digging sticks, a gummy substance called pitch that was used to haft, or attach,
bone and stone blades to shafts and a lump of beeswax likely used for hafting.
The assemblage also included worked tusks of members of the pig family, which
likely were used to plane wood, and notched bones that may have been used for
counting. A wooden digging stick from Border Cave dated to about 40,000 years
ago was found in association with bored but broken stones likely used to weight
such sticks. The sticks and stone weights are similar to digging implements used
by women of the prehistoric San hunter-gatherer culture in the region to unearth
bulbs and termite larvae, a practice that continued into historic times, said
Villa. A paper on the subject has been published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences. |
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