Early modern human cultural interactions investigated
through Middle Stone Age tool technologies.
(July 10, 2015) Two
of South Africa's most famous archaeological sites, Sibudu and
Blombos, have revealed
that Middle Stone
Age groups who
lived in these different areas,
more than 1,000
kilometres apart, used
similar types of
stone tools some
71,000 years ago, but
that there were
differences in the
ways that these
tools were made.
"This was not the case at 65,000 years ago when
similarities in stone tool making suggest that similar cultural traditions
spread across South Africa," says Professor Lyn Wadley, archaeologist from
the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Wadley is part
of an international
team of researchers
from South Africa,
France, the US
and Italy who published the results of their systematic study of
Middle Stone Age (MSA) stone tool technologies in a paper, titled: The
Still Bay and
Howiesons Poort at
Sibudu and Blombos:
Understanding Middle Stone
Age technologies, in the
journal, PLoS One,
on 10 July
2015.
The team also includes Wits University's Professor
Christopher Henshilwood, as well as lead author Sylvain Soriano (France),
Paola Villa (US),
and others (*).
The researchers undertook
systematic technological and typological
analysis on two
types of Middle
Stone Age assemblages—Still Bay
and Howiesons Poort—from
two of the
most famous archaeological sites
from this time
period in South
Africa, Blombos Cave
in the Western
Cape and Sibudu
in KwaZulu-Natal. At
these sites we
find much of
the archaeological evidence
for the origins
of modern human
behaviour.