Wits prof digs up another treasure
● Lyn Wadley, a professor of archaeology at Wits University, has a knack for finding hidden treasures at archaeological digs.
In early 2020, she found the oldest bedding in the world at the Border Cave between Eswatini and KwaZulu-Natal, proving that at least 200,000 years ago people were making beds for themselves out of grass.
The same year, and at the same site, she discovered the world’s first evidence of ancient humans cooking starchy vegetables 170,000 years ago, much earlier than had been thought up until then.
Her latest discovery, and one which took several years to analyse, is 23 spatula-like bone tools found at the Sibudu Cave near Ballito in KZN that change what we thought we knew about human behaviour 80,000 years ago.
Solving the mystery of the bone tools, which had been fashioned in a specific way, took the invention of a highly specialised microscope to figure out they were used for debarking trees and digging in humus-rich soil.
“Fully shaped, morphologically standardised bone tools are generally considered reliable indicators of the emergence of modern behaviour,” said Wadley and the team of the double-bevelled bone tools from about 80,000 to 60,000 years ago. “We analysed the texture of use wear on the archaeological bone tools.”
Another Wits researcher on the international team is Lucinda Backwell, also from the Evolutionary Studies Institute, who in 2020 unlocked a fascinating miniature ecosystem in the remains of Australopithecus sediba.
Back then, she and the team discovered that tiny fossil fungus gardens had been made by termites in dappled sunlight within the remains, and that holes in Sediba’s skull were used as an incubation and birthing room for flies.
This time, Wadley, Backwell and the rest of the team used a confocal microscope to study the roughness of the areas worn by their use on archaeological tools and on bone tools used experimentally for debarking trees, processing skins, digging in sediments inside and outside caves, and on ethnographic tools.
Speaking to the Sunday Times, Francesco d’Errico, lead author on the paper that analyses the tools in the science journal Nature, said: “As archaeologists, we want to know when people for the first time shaped bones to use them for scraping. This discovery showed that the earliest bone tools with this particular technique come from South Africa.”
D’Errico, of the University of Bordeaux in France and the University of Bergen in Norway, was previously a visiting professor at Wits.
He has carried out a vast amount of work in SA and is set to return shortly for more excavation work at Border Cave.
He said the tools found by Wadley “looked more like a spatula than a spear so [we] did not know what they were used for. For this reason, we employed new technology which consists of studying this in a quantified way with a special microscope.”
By analysing the roughness of the worn areas, they concluded that “tree debarking and digging in humus-rich soil are the activities that most closely match those recorded on most Sibudu tools”.
The confocal microscope “allows you to reconstruct in a 3D way any kind of use wear and quantify the morphology”, said D’Errico, adding: “So, you’re not just looking at it three dimensionally, but you’re mathematically quantifying it and comparing it to other use wear.”
Wadley and her fellow researchers said this sophisticated technique helped them to figure out the function of these first elaborate tools.
Until the beginning of this century, it was believed that these functions, like debarking and digging in soil with carefully modified tools, was an innovation introduced into Europe 40,000 years ago by modern humans.
Research carried out over the past two decades has led to the discovery of fully worked bone tools in several regions of Africa, some of which could date back 100,000 years.
“But those found so far are rare or non-standardised in shape. The new discovery changes the picture,” said Wadley and the team.
These are the “earliest shaped bone tools from SA”, and though there are older ones — even a million years — these are the first that have been modified or shaped in such a sophisticated way to make them fit for purpose, according to D’Errico.
The researchers said this type of tool continued to be used at this site for 20,000 years, though the occupants radically changed the way they produced stone tools during this period.
These results appear to support a scenario in which some modern human groups in Southern Africa developed and maintained specific, highly standardised cultural traits locally, while sharing others across the subcontinent.