Research links modern behaviour to ancient San

MODERN human behaviour as we know it emerged in SA and has a direct link to San culture, according to new research published yesterday.

The San people are the earliest known modern human inhabitants of SA. While the country is home to earlier hominoid fossils, these are not indicative of modern humans and palaeoanthropologists are still looking for the “missing link”.

“There is an ongoing debate about when human culture as we know it emerged in terms of language, culture and even when we became humans anatomically,” Lucinda Backwell, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, said yesterday. “This is the first clear evidence of modern behaviour as we know it.”

It was believed that Bushman culture could be traced back to between 10 000 and 20 000 years ago. However, new evidence dates it to 44 000 years ago.

The internationally authored paper, of which Prof Backwell is a co-author, is entitled Early Evidence of San Material Culture Represented by Organic Artifacts From Border Cave, SA, and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

There are early signs of innovation in other sites in SA dating back as far as 70 000 years ago: engraved ochre in Blombos Cave and evidence of complex hafting techniques in Sebudu, in KwaZulu-Natal, but “the link between us and those people … it’s a bit too remote”.

“The 44 000-year-old (evidence) is a direct link with people as we know (them)…. They are the same tools used by the Bushmen we know today,” Prof Backwell said.

“The dating and analysis of archaeological material discovered at Border Cave in SA has allowed us to demonstrate that many elements of material culture that characterise the lifestyle of San hunter-gatherers in southern Africa were part of the culture and technology of this site 44 000 years ago,” she said.

According to the paper, a “reanalysis of organic artifacts from Border Cave, SA, shows the Early Later Stone Age inhabitants of this cave used notched bones for notational purposes, wooden digging sticks, bone awls, and bone points similar to those used by San as arrowheads”.

The artifacts were originally excavated in the 1970s but “they didn’t have the sophisticated microanalytic techniques we have today”, Prof Backwell said. The site, in the foothills of the Lebombo Mountains, is in KwaZulu-Natal.

“In the earlier sites, you had an isolated item, an isolated occurrence. In the Border Cave, there’s an entire package of their culture, stuff that’s functional, such as hunting kits,” she said.

“About 44 000 years ago, all these organic artifacts arrived overnight.”

When asked why the artifacts “arrived overnight”, Prof Backwell said: “That’s the million-dollar question.”

To answer this question, researchers would expand their search: “Zambia all the way to Cape Town, looking at what has happened regionally.”

However, it would take years to collect and analyse such regional data, Prof Backwell said.