Those marvellous millennia: the Middle Stone Age of Southern Africa

Abstract

Africa's Middle Stone Age (MSA) may have lasted almost half a million years, but its earliest expression is not yet well understood. The MSA is best known for innovations that appear in the archaeological record at various times after about 200,000 years ago with the first appearance of Homo sapiens. These novel behaviours embrace hafting technology, the use of compound paints and adhesives, ingenious lithic technology that included pressure flaking and the heat treatment of rock, the engraving of ochre and eggshell with geometric designs, the stringing of shell beads and the production of a wide range of bone implements. Such innovations might have been linked to new types of social behaviour stimulated by demographic pulses and movements within and out of the continent. Population shifts may have occurred repeatedly during the MSA. Southern African sites seem concentrated in the interior of the subcontinent before 130 kya. Thus, the florescence of MSA innovations described here appears to have coincided with the dispersal after 130 kya of populations from the interior to mountainous areas, but, more particularly, to the coastal stretches of the southern and western Cape. Coastal sites are the focus of much of southern Africa's research into the MSA and some of the continent's most esteemed sites are coastal ones, particularly those containing iconic Still Bay and Howiesons Poort technocomplexes. By 58 kya occupations tended once more to shift away from the southern coast and back into the interior, or to the eastern seaboard. Some of these later MSA sites have extensive footprints, implying population growth or repeated occupations. Regional and even local variability is characteristic of stone assemblages of the time, while sites seem to have fewer ornaments or decorated items than was formerly the case. The variability in late MSA lithic assemblages is matched by apparent flexibility in the timing of the transfer from the MSA to the Later Stone Age.

The role of play objects and object play in human cognitive evolution and innovation

“…Such innovations first began to characterize human material culture behavior with the emergence of Homo sapiens in sub‐Saharan Africa about 300,000 years ago. Especially since about 100,000 years ago, we see a flourishing of material culture diversity in the African Middle Stone Age . Yet, with the global establishment of modern humans, some periods and places still appear to be more strongly associated with innovations than others.…”

Lithic technological responses to Late Pleistocene glacial cycling at Pinnacle Point Site 5-6, South Africa

“…Mellars [81] suggests new economic, social, and cognitive behaviors in MIS 4 were the impetus for a dramatic demographic expansion that ultimately resulted in the dispersal of modern humans into Eurasia and beyond. However, Wadley [94, 95] problematizes using similarities in lithic material culture to make interpretations about the flow of ideas, and the presence of what archaeologists consider symbolic items as evidence for cultural complexity.…”

Still Bay Point-Production Strategies at Hollow Rock Shelter and Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter and Knowledge-Transfer Systems in Southern Africa at about 80-70 Thousand Years Ago

“…The archaeological record from this time is considered to contain multiple lines of evidence that indicate enhanced cognitive and behavioural trends that are comparable to those of humans today (for most recent synthesis see Wadley [3]). The unique way in which humans are able to process information makes us behaviourally more flexible than any other organism [4].…”

“…Variation in lithic tool production has been stressed as key to understanding behavioural flexibility within the later stages of the Middle Stone Age of southern Africa [3], [12–25]. Soriano and colleagues [23], however, note that questions of technological traits and patterning in Still Bay lithic industries have hitherto been dealt with inadequately, and Archer and colleagues [22] conclude that not enough consideration has been given to ‘diachronic and synchronic’ trends within the Still Bay technocomplex.…”