Glimpse into human origins
You don’t have to travel to The Cradle of HumanKind in Gauteng to learn about our human ancestors. A major event in the survival of small populations of Homo sapiens happened right here in the eastern and southern Cape.
On Thursday 22 September Prof Richard Cowling of the Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience at NMMU will present the annual Jack Skead Memorial Lecture to which the general public and university members are invited.
This lecture and debate, which will be followed by eats and drinks, is on Environments and food resources associated with the emergence of modern humans on the Cape south coast and is the final event of the Humans Origins Experience of the local branch of Wessa.
Close by to Grahamstown in the Howieson’s Poort Shelter, some 70 000 to 80 000 years ago, Middle Stone Age Man left key artifacts that mark this site as an important one in archeological research. (A visit to this site in July was the fist event in the Wessa 2016 Experience.)
Travel south-west to the coast and many shelters and caves provide evidence of the survival of small population of hunter-gatherer hominins who developed stone age tools some 200 000 and 140 000 years ago, showing evi- dence of cognitive skills even involving the development of language.
Cowling will discuss the environmental conditions that prevailed when these progenitors of all humankind emerged. He will also discuss the unique combination of foodstuffs that likely sustained them at the time, and how their foraging strategies led to prosocial behaviours.
A number of Wessa members participated in the excursion in early August when we visited the Pinnacle Point Caves in the company of Dr Pieter Nilssen, the archaeologist who discovered them.
Prior to the tour, Nilssen gave an in-depth presentation on the archaeological findings also explaining the EIA process for the Golf Estate and Casino where the caves are located near Mossel Bay.
This site has been the focus of the Mossel Bay Archaeology Project, and the South African Coastal Palaeoclimate, Palaeoenvironment, Palaeoecology, and Palaeoanthropology (SACP4) Project – under the leadership of Professor Curtis Marean of Arizona State University - since 2000.
Dr Janette Deacon, the mother of modern archaeology in South Africa, led the Wessa excursion which also visited the Blombos Cave Museum in Still Bay and two sites in Plettenberg Bay.
This was a most exciting excursion and we had so much to learn. In the southern Cape sites there is a paucity of fossilised human skeletons or skulls as is found in sites farther north; but future studies may uncover these remains in the southern Cape as well.
The late Hilary Deacon, husband to Janette Deacon and founder of the Department of Archaeology at Stellenbosch University, promoted the idea that underground storage organs of geophytes, which are so abundant in the Cape fynbos, could have provided the subsistence food of hunter-gathers.
The late Dr Amy Jacot Gullarmod, formerly of the Rhodes Botany Department and IWR, records that the roots of a Pelargonium sp (geranium) were ground as a food for infants in Lesotho. Were the ancient hominins grinding up bulbs and rhizomes as their stable diet to go with shell fish some 150 000 years ago?
At the Jack Skead lecture, Prof Cowling will explain why humankind survived on the southern tip of Africa during the severe climate of the last major Ice Age of the Pleistocene.
This is certainly is a talk not to be missed.
Eden Grove Blue, 7.30pm Thursday 22 September.
Contact: Priscilla Hall 046 622 2663 or 078 125 8498 • Prof Roy Lubke is the Chairperson of Wessa
Grahamstown