Clues to How Homo sapiens Conquered the Earth Emerge from Digs in South Africa [Slide Show]

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Archaeological sites along the southern coast are yielding fresh insights into an enduring mystery of human evolution

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Excavators reveal Middle Stone Age artifacts on a landsurface at Vleesbaai that dates to around 70,000 years ago. The red sediment is a paleosol (ancient soil) and a dune is stratified above.

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In the of the August Curtis Marean of Arizona State University tackles a longstanding question in paleoanthropology:  how did our species, disperse so far and wide? Other human species colonized Africa, Europe and Asia, but only our kind managed to spread across the entire globe. Marean suggests that the emergence in our species of a special propensity for cooperation and the invention of a game-changing technology—projectile weaponry—powered our ancestors’ march across the planet, allowing them to go places no member of the human family had gone before.

Marean’s hypothesis derives in part from discoveries he and his colleagues have made at archaeological sites on the South African coast where early once eked out a living. This summer the team returned to the region to dig at a seaside rock shelter at Pinnacle Point known as PP5-6, which they have been excavating since 2007. The site dates from about 90,000 years ago to 50,000 years ago, preserving the shift from interglacial to glacial conditions at about 74,000 years ago.

The team also excavated some sites at a new locality known as Vleesbai, a half-moon bay just west of Pinnacle Point.  These sites are the open-air activity sites of the inhabitants of the Pinnacle Point caves and rockshelters.  Whereas these ancient people based their camps in the caves and rockshelters at Pinnacle Point, they foraged for food, firewood and stone for making tools at Vleesbaai. “This is a very unique preservation context where we have sites that sample both the homes and activity sites of people who would have belonged to the same social groups of hunter-gatherers,” Marean remarks.

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