Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [84]
Other artefacts found in Blombos Cave from levels dated at about 75,000 years ago included finely worked and polished bone tools—sharp points for hunting weapons and awls for punching holes in tough materials such as animal skins—and leaf-shaped bifacial stone points made in a style previously seen before only in Europe and dated much later at 19,000 years old.
The cave floor also yielded more than 1,000 fish bones, many from large fish—seals and dolphins—and bones from animals such as antelopes. The Blombos community was evidently capable of fishing and hunting large mammals.
While Henshilwood’s team was at work at Blombos Cave, another team led by an American palaeoanthropologist, Curtis Marean, began excavations at cave sites on a sandstone cliff at Pinnacle Point, near Mossel Bay, to the east of Still Bay, once sealed off by sand dunes. The discoveries they made there over the course of four years once again changed the narrative of human history. Writing in the journal Nature in October 2007, they reported finding three hallmarks of modern life. The inhabitants of Pinnacle Point, they said, had harvested seafood—mussels, clams and snails—and put them over hot rocks to cook; they had manufactured bladelets—tiny blades fashioned from heat-treated silcrete that could be used to form a point for a spear or lined up like barbs on a dart or made into a cutting tool; and they had used pigments—notably red ochre—in ways that appeared to be symbolic, such as body painting. And all this activity was dated as occurring 164,000 years ago.
Marean speculated that the cave dwellers at Pinnacle Point had been in desperate need of new food sources. Africa at the time was experiencing a prolonged cold, dry phase lasting from 195,000 years to 125,000 years ago. The Sahara Desert expanded, virtually cutting off North Africa from the rest of the continent. The Kalahari Desert also expanded, forming another impenetrable barrier. Palaeoenvironmental data suggests that there were only five or six locations in Africa where humans could have survived such harsh conditions. Facing extinction, Marean suggested, inland residents had been forced to search for ‘famine food’ and migrated to coastal habitats to find it.
‘The shellfish may have been crucial to the survival of these early humans’, he said. ‘Generally speaking, coastal areas were of no use to early humans—unless they knew how to use the sea as a food source. For millions of years, our earliest hunter-gatherer relatives only ate terrestrial plants and animals. Shellfish was one of the last additions to the human diet before domesticated plants and animals were introduced’.
The ability of humans to use food from the sea also meant that they could travel around the coasts of Africa and establish new settlements. ‘Coastlines generally make great migration routes. Knowing how to explore the sea for food meant these early humans could now use coastlines as productive home ranges and move long distances’.
He concluded: ‘We believe that on the far southern shore of Africa there was a small population of modern humans who struggled through the glacial period 125,000 to 195,000 years ago using shellfish and advanced technologies, and symbolism was important to their social relations. It is possible that this population could be the progenitor population for all modern humans’.
What is notable about the achievements of Homo sapiens in this early period in Africa is the pace of innovation. For more than 2 million years, our ancestors had relied on two basic patterns of toolmaking—the Oldowan and the Acheulean traditions—making few changes to the simple stone implements they produced. But from about 300,000 years ago, the archaeological record points to a series of innovations suggesting the dawning of a new age of symbolism and self-awareness. The use of red ochre for body decoration or other purposes is the earliest example. Subsequent