Between the time when early modern humans emerged in Africa and when they spread around the globe, they developed complex behaviors that enabled them — and us — to adapt and thrive in new environments.
Those behaviors — toolmaking, thinking and planning — evolved during the Middle Stone Age (315,000-40,000 years ago), but our current understanding of where, why and how the behaviors arose relies on spotty archaeological evidence. The Middle Stone Age in southern Africa is best known from famous sites along the lush southern Cape Coast, such as Blombos Cave. But new research suggests people in the overlooked desert regions to the north sometimes lived very different, and in some ways more creative, lives.
In an article in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, Alex Mackay of University of Wollongong in Australia, Teresa Steele, professor of anthropology at University of California, Davis, and colleagues report that 80,000 to 92,000 years ago people occupying a site in the Knersvlakte region of southern Namaqualand, in what is now South Africa, were innovating in multiple ways, including:
- Creating unique methods for producing stone tools by heating silcrete rocks to fracture along impurities
- Transporting mollusk shells an unusually long distance from the coast
- Producing technology from ostrich eggshells, their first known use as a medium for creativity
These innovations, found at the Varsche Rivier 003 site, are not present in sites just 65 miles (100 kilometers) to the south, demonstrating a lack of connections between these contemporaneous populations.1
- 1. “It might be adaptations in these periods of isolation that helps motivate innovation,” said Steele. However, Steele noted that a few thousand years later after a climatic shift, the occupants of Varsche Rivier 003 and the sites to the south began making the same stone tool industries, highlighting a change toward connections across wider geographic regions.
Mackay, A., Armitage, S.J., Niespolo, E.M. et al. Environmental influences on human innovation and behavioural diversity in southern Africa 92–80 thousand years ago. Nat Ecol Evol (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01667-5
Africa’s Middle Stone Age preserves sporadic evidence for novel behaviours among early modern humans, prompting a range of questions about the influence of social and environmental factors on patterns of human behavioural evolution. Here we document a suite of novel adaptations dating approximately 92–80 thousand years before the present at the archaeological site Varsche Rivier 003 (VR003), located in southern Africa’s arid Succulent Karoo biome. Distinctive innovations include the production of ostrich eggshell artefacts, long-distance transportation of marine molluscs and systematic use of heat shatter in stone tool production, none of which occur in coeval assemblages at sites in more humid, well-studied regions immediately to the south. The appearance of these novelties at VR003 corresponds with a period of reduced regional wind strength and enhanced summer rainfall, and all of them disappear with increasing winter rainfall dominance after 80 thousand years before the present, following which a pattern of technological similarity emerges at sites throughout the broader region. The results indicate complex and environmentally contingent processes of innovation and cultural transmission in southern Africa during the Middle Stone Age.
