Early evidence of San material culture represented by organic artifacts from Border Cave, South Africa

Abstract

Recent archaeological discoveries have revealed that pigment use, beads, engravings, and sophisticated stone and bone tools were already present in southern Africa 75,000 y ago. Many of these artifacts disappeared by 60,000 y ago, suggesting that modern behavior appeared in the past and was subsequently lost before becoming firmly established. Most archaeologists think that San hunter–gatherer cultural adaptation emerged 20,000 y ago. However, reanalysis of organic artifacts from Border Cave, South Africa, shows that the Early Later Stone Age inhabitants of this cave used notched bones for notational purposes, wooden digging sticks, bone awls, and bone points similar to those used by San as arrowheads. A point is decorated with a spiral groove filled with red ochre, which closely parallels similar marks that San make to identify their arrowheads when hunting. A mixture of beeswax, Euphorbia resin, and possibly egg, wrapped in vegetal fibers, dated to ∼40,000 BP, may have been used for hafting. Ornaments include marine shell beads and ostrich eggshell beads, directly dated to ∼42,000 BP. A digging stick, dated to ∼39,000 BP, is made of Flueggea virosa . A wooden poison applicator, dated to ∼24,000 BP, retains residues with ricinoleic acid, derived from poisonous castor beans. Reappraisal of radiocarbon age estimates through Bayesian modeling, and the identification of key elements of San material culture at Border Cave, places the emergence of modern hunter–gatherer adaptation, as we know it, to ∼44,000 y ago.

Widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early Neolithic farmers

“…However, the association of humans with A. mellifera predates post-industrialrevolution agriculture, as evidenced by the widespread presence of ancient Egyptian bee iconography dating to the Old Kingdom (approximately 2400 bc) 1 . There are also indications of Stone Age people harvesting bee products; for example, honey hunting is interpreted from rock art 2 in a prehistoric Holocene context and a beeswax find in a pre-agriculturalist site 3 . However, when and where the regular association of A. mellifera with agriculturalists emerged is unknown 4 .…”

A demographic perspective on the Middle to Later Stone Age transition from Nasera rockshelter, Tanzania

“…Prominent changes in artefact assemblages across the MSA-LSA transition are seen in aspects of stone tool production, the proliferation of items of personal adornment such as ostrich eggshell beads, and intensification of the long-distance movement of obsidian through trade or other mechanisms. Together, these shifts imply key changes in hominin technological and social systems that anticipate the behavioural systems of extant and historic hunter-gatherers [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. Most of the East African Late Pleistocene archaeological record was made by morphologically diverse populations of Homo sapiens [8], but some fossil and genetic evidence hint at the possibility of the late persistence of archaic taxa [9,10].…”

Late Pleistocene age and archaeological context for the hominin calvaria from GvJm-22 (Lukenya Hill, Kenya)

“…Typical archaeological signatures include lithic technologies focused on the production of microliths (small flakes, blades, and bladelets with one edge blunted or "backed") from bipolar, single-, and opposed-platform cores; an increased use of ground-stone tools; and implements made of wood and bone. These new technologies occur with the appearance of material correlates of social identity and networks of long-distance exchange, including ostrich eggshell (OES) beads, ochre, and nonlocal stone raw material, as well as increased dietary breadth, all consistent with larger, more dense, or more interconnected populations (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9).…”