Border Cave and the beginning of the Later Stone Age in South Africa

Kenya National Museums Lukenya Hill Hominid 1 (KNM-LH 1) is a Homo sapiens partial calvaria from site GvJm-22 at Lukenya Hill, Kenya, associated with Later Stone Age (LSA) archaeological deposits. KNM-LH 1 is securely dated to the Late Pleistocene, and samples a time and region important for understanding the origins of modern human diversity. A revised chronology based on 26 accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dates on ostrich eggshells indicates an age range of 23,576–22,887 y B.P. for KNM-LH 1, confirming prior attribution to the Last Glacial Maximum. Additional dates extend the maximum age for archaeological deposits at GvJm-22 to >46,000 y B.P. (>46 kya). These dates are consistent with new analyses identifying both Middle Stone Age and LSA lithic technologies at the site, making GvJm-22 a rare eastern African record of major human behavioral shifts during the Late Pleistocene. Comparative morphometric analyses of the KNM-LH 1 cranium document the temporal and spatial complexity of early modern human morphological variability. Features of cranial shape distinguish KNM-LH 1 and other Middle and Late Pleistocene African fossils from crania of recent Africans and samples from Holocene LSA and European Upper Paleolithic sites.

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Tryon

Crevecœur

Faith

et al. 2015

“…The subsequent Howiesons Poort (HP) developed new innovative cultural features that disappear at ∼59 ka. These give way, during the post-Howiesons Poort (post-HP), to large unifacial points on flakes that by 40 ka disappear to give rise to the production of microliths obtained with a bipolar knapping technique (10,20,21). This disappearance has been attributed to climatic change (22,23), decrease or lack of population (24), and changes in the mechanisms of cultural transmission (12).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Opinions diverge on when and how this emergence happened, mostly because no consensus exists on the classification of lithic industries between 40 ka and 22 ka (21) and when and how distinct LSA tool kits appear in the archaeological record. The dating of key archaeological contexts is also contentious (21,31,32).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

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

d’Errico

Backwell

Villa

et al. 2012

Self Cite

341

146

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.

“…Only the Out-of-Africa expansion that occurred roughly 60-50 ka confirms such enhancement, and the underlying factor then is likely to have been the development of forager cultures that not only more closely resembled historic ones in technological complexity but that maintained this complexity more or less continuously. Mumba Cave, Tanzania (63), and especially Border Cave, South Africa (64,65), have provided artifacts that demonstrate such complexity and its uninterrupted persistence only after 60-50 ka. Most South African coastal sites that formed between 60 and 12 ka are now on the drowned continental shelf and are probably badly degraded (66), even if they could be located.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Archaeological shellfish size and later human evolution in Africa

Klein

Steele

2013

105

Approximately 50 ka, one or more subgroups of modern humans expanded from Africa to populate the rest of the world. Significant behavioral change accompanied this expansion, and archaeologists commonly seek its roots in the African Middle Stone Age (MSA; ∼200 to ∼50 ka). Easily recognizable art objects and “jewelry” become common only in sites that postdate the MSA in Africa and Eurasia, but some MSA sites contain possible precursors, especially including abstractly incised fragments of ocher and perforated shells interpreted as beads. These proposed art objects have convinced most specialists that MSA people were behaviorally (cognitively) modern, and many argue that population growth explains the appearance of art in the MSA and its post-MSA florescence. The average size of rocky intertidal gastropod species in MSA and later coastal middens allows a test of this idea, because smaller size implies more intense collection, and more intense collection is most readily attributed to growth in the number of human collectors. Here we demonstrate that economically important Cape turban shells and limpets from MSA layers along the south and west coasts of South Africa are consistently and significantly larger than turban shells and limpets in succeeding Later Stone Age (LSA) layers that formed under equivalent environmental conditions. We conclude that whatever cognitive capacity precocious MSA artifacts imply, it was not associated with human population growth. MSA populations remained consistently small by LSA standards, and a substantial increase in population size is obvious only near the MSA/LSA transition, when it is dramatically reflected in the Out-of-Africa expansion.