Today, let's visit Blombos Cave. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
You and I have to struggle
with our of Clan-of-the-Cave-Bear
thinking: We've been trained to believe that, only
about thirty-five-thousand years ago, the fine
upright Cro-Magnons arose to displace the brutish
Neanderthals. Well, that's all being turned on its
ear by the Blombos Cave site.
Blombos Cave overlooks the Indian Ocean, on the
south coast of South Africa. In 1993 it stunned the
anthropological world when it yielded
hundred-thousand-year-old, finely-formed, bone
tools -- two or three times the age of such tools
from Europe. And the people who made them were,
anatomically, Modern Humans -- like you
and me.
Let me give some benchmark dating here: the
Paleolithic Era (which means the Era
of Old Stone). It starts with
the first human tool-making two and a half million
years ago. It ends after the last Ice Age and the
beginnings of agriculture. After that, we talk
about the Neolithic Era (the Era of
New Stone). It lasted until
we took up metalworking, and we invented writing.
The older Paleolithic Era took place in
two parts: Lower and Upper.
During the latter part, the Upper Paleolithic
Era, Modern Humans appeared and rapidly
extended tool making beyond simple chipped rocks.
For a long time, we'd believed all that'd started
just a little over thirty thousand years ago.
But most of the evidence for that had come out of
Europe. Now Blombos Cave has moved the rise of
Modern Humans back to a time long before the
Neanderthals vanished. It has tripled the length of
the Upper Paleolithic Era, and it places
the cradle of Modern Humans down at the far tip of
the African continent
Among those oldest-known bone tools we find spear
points, awls, spatulas. We find standard forms of
tools. We find the first evidence of fishing. We
find fine stonework of a kind that didn't turn up
in Europe until twenty-thousand years ago. We find
different areas of the cave devoted to specific
activities.
The most remarkable discovery is that of purely
artistic technologies. Ochre was widely used. Ochre
is a form of iron ore that makes a fine paint. It
can be used on human bodies or on walls. And those
chunks of ochre themselves have been scribed with
abstract designs. The cave has also yielded up a
seventy-five-thousand-year-old snail-shell necklace
-- the oldest ever found.
All this suggests something beyond just tool
making. These uses of an esthetic, symbolic
language would hardly have been possible without
speech, as well. And speech was also something we'd
thought was only thirty thousand years old.
It's neat to find our grandparents doing so well,
so long ago. As I was reading about that old
necklace, my wife showed me a simi-lar one in a
jewelry catalog. She said, "I guess we haven't come
as far as we'd thought." Well, it's true. We really
did not start being smart just the day
before yesterday.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
J. N. Wilford, Tiny African Shells May Be Oldest
Beads. New York Times, Science
Times, Tuesday, April 20, 2004, pg. D3.
For more on the Blombos Cave site, see:
http://www.museums.org.za/sam/muse/9904.htm
http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/02/pr0202.htm
I have not complicated this text by introducing the
term Mesolithic. The Mesolithic
Era was the relatively brief transition from
the end of the ice age to the fully evolved
agricultural Neolithic Era.
