Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [83]
In further research into Africa’s genetic history, published in 2009, Tishkoff’s team identified a group with even greater genetic diversity: San hunter-gatherers. Although confined today to areas of southern Africa, the San once occupied much of eastern Africa. Tishkoff concluded that the San represented the oldest population on earth.
Archaeological researchers, too, found increasing evidence that cultural innovation in Africa had occurred far earlier than previously thought. In the 1920s, archaeologists in South Africa had discovered a collection of relatively advanced stone tools—long thin flakes or blades—in a small rock shelter on the side of Howieson’s Poort pass near Grahamstown. Other examples of ‘Howieson’s Poort’ tool technology were subsequently found in some twenty rock shelters scattered across southern Africa, indicating that networks of toolmakers had been active. The blades were similar to those found in Europe’s Upper Palaeolithic, with an age of 40,000 years or less. But new dating techniques in the 1980s placed the Howieson’s Poort industry firmly within Africa’s Middle Stone Age, in a period between 80,000 and 60,000 years ago.
Further evidence of advanced toolmaking came from Katanda in the western branch of the Rift Valley in Congo. Exploring sediments in the Semliki River dating back 90,000 years, a team of archaeologists in the 1980s led by John Yellen and Alison Brooks were astonished to find thousands of artefacts that included finely carved harpoons and knives. Local inhabitants had fashioned the harpoons to spear catfish during their spawning season in the shallows, apparently some 50,000 years before Europe’s Cro-Magnons had used such sophisticated carving techniques.
During the 1990s, a South African archaeologist, Christopher Henshilwood, uncovered a treasure trove in a cave site he discovered high in a limestone cliff on a wild stretch of the southern Cape coast near Still Bay. The cave entrance at Blombos had been almost totally sealed by dune sand; the cave floor was buried under layers of sediment. But excavations over the years revealed evidence that 75,000 years ago, local inhabitants had been engaged in activities considered to be examples of modern behaviour. They had collected thousands of pieces of ochre from sites at least twelve miles away and turned two of them into tablets engraved with distinct crosshatched patterns. ‘These designs’, wrote Henshilwood, ‘were engraved with deliberate symbolic intention and had meaning for the maker and very likely for a wider social grouping’. Red ochre pigment, he said, had probably also been used for symbolic body decoration and to colour artefacts.
The Blombos inhabitants had also collected from local river mouths small, pearly white gastropod shells—Nassarius kraussianus—turning them into bead ‘necklaces’ or ‘bracelets’, providing further evidence of symbolic thinking. ‘Each shell was carefully pierced by inserting a small bone tool through the mouth and then with pressure creating a keyhole aperture’, said Henshilwood. ‘The shells were then strung, perhaps using plant or animal-derived thread, and worn as a personal adornment’.
He maintained that the presence of marine beads, whether used as trade items or to convey group status or to identify group members or relationships within a group, suggested some form of language