A 22 000 Year-Old Middle Stone Age Camp Site with Plant Food Remains from the North-Eastern Cape

Late Quaternary glaciation in Southern Africa: moraine ridges and glacial deposits at Mount Enterprise in the Drakensberg of the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

“…The well-documented absence of human occupation in the area between ca. 22 000 yr BP (Opperman and Heydenrych, 1990) and 10 000 yr BP (Opperman, 1987;Lewis and Hanvey, 1993) therefore may be explicable as a response to harsh environmental conditions associated with a cold climate and the development of small glaciers at Mount Enterprise and elsewhere in the region during the maximum of the last glacial stage.…”

The Hybrid Origin of “Modern” Humans

“…Art, symbolism and ornamentation become entrenched in the Later Stone Age after episodic expression in the Middle Stone Age. The advent of the Later Stone Age is spatially and temporally complex, with earliest dates ranging from[46 ka in east Africa to\22 ka in parts of southern Africa (Opperman and Heydenrych 1990;Ambrose 1998).…”

A late Middle Stone Age artifact assemblage from Sibudu (KwaZulu-Natal): comparisons with the European Middle Paleolithic

“…This is a high value for late MSA industries which are generally said to have very low proportions of retouched pieces [113], e.g. Strathalan, layers SWA and VBP with 0.6 and 1.8% of retouched pieces [85,86] or Die Kelders with less than 3% [107]. However, these values are not really comparable to the RSP values because the Strathalan counts include all pieces of any size, including flaking debris !15 mm, while at Die Kelders the cut-off point was 3 mm.…”