Modern human technology began more than 70,000 years ago in South Africa before spreading to communities elsewhere, a new study claims.
It was there that our ancestors made the first bone tools, the first abstract art, the first jewellery and probably the first stone tipped spears and arrows, research shows. The claims, based on archaeological findings over the past decade, contradict the widely held belief that modern human behaviour originated in Europe about 40,000 years ago.
They chime with findings published just last month which suggested that the development of long-range weapons in Africa was the technological breakthrough which allowed humans to become the dominant species. Renowned archaeologist Professor Christopher Henshilwood, of Wits University in South Africa, author of the new paper, says the most recent research decisively shows that Africa is the birthplace of modern human cognition.
'All of these innovations, plus many others we are just discovering, clearly show that Homo sapiens in southern Africa at that time were cognitively modern and behaving in many ways like ourselves,' he said. 'It is a good reason to be proud of our earliest, common ancestors who lived and evolved in South Africa and who later spread out into the rest of the world after about 60,000 years.'
Professor Henshilwood's paper is the first detailed summary of research into the Still Bay techno-traditions, dating back 75,000 years, and the Howiesons Poort techno-tradition, which dates back 65,000 years.
The paper, entitled Late Pleistocene Techno-traditions in Southern Africa: A Review of the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort, c. 75 ka, published online today in the Journal of World Prehistory. These were periods of many innovations including, for example, the first abstract art (engraved ochre and engraved ostrich eggshell); the first jewellery (shell beads); the first bone tools; and the earliest use of the pressure flaking technique, that was used in combination with heating to make stone spear points and the first probable use of stone tipped arrows.
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