The sharing of technology played a key role in helping our Stone Age ancestors living in Africa evolve, and can help explain how and why humans ultimately traveled to Europe, according to a team of researchers from the University of Bergen and the University of the Witwatersrand.
As they explained in a recent edition of the journal PLOS One, Christopher S. Henshilwood, an archaeologist and evolutionary studies professor, and his colleagues discovered new evidence at Blombos Cave in South Africa that found that the more contact that different groups had with one another, the higher-quality tools and technology they would go on to develop.
Discovered near Cape Town, South Africa in the early 1990s, Blombos Cave had been a source of essential new information about the behavioral evolution of our species, the authors explained in a statement. The cave contains deposits from the Middle Stone Age dated at between 100,000 and 70,000 years ago, as well as Later Stone Age deposits between 700 and 2,000 years old.
Henshilwood’s team has been examining technology used by different groups in this and other parts of South Africa to see if there was any kind of contact between various groups of Middle Stone Age humans, and if so, would they have exchanged ideas with one another and what kind of impact would that have had on each different culture.
Contact enabled our ancestors to adapt, build better tools
“We are looking mainly at the part of South Africa where Blombos Cave is situated. We sought to find out how groups moved across the landscape and how they interacted,” Henshilwood said. He and his colleagues published a total of four scientific papers last year based on their work.
“The pattern we are seeing is that when demographics change, people interact more. For example, we have found similar patterns engraved on ostrich eggshells in different sites,” study co-author and University of Bergen researcher Dr. Karen van Niekerk added. “This shows that people were probably sharing symbolic material culture, at certain times but not at others.”
Researchers from UiB and Witswatersrand have found that contact between cultures has been vital to the survival and development of Homo sapiens. (Credit: Magnus M. Haaland)
The practice of sharing technology and material culture also reveals more about early humans’ journey from Africa, across the Arabian Peninsula and ultimately to Europe, the researchers said. Contact between different groups was essential to the survival and evolution of Homo sapiens as a species, as the more contact they had with one another, the stronger their tools, technology and culture ultimately became.
“Contact across groups, and population dynamics, makes it possible to adopt and adapt new technologies and culture and is what describes Homo sapiens,” said Henshilwood. “What we are seeing is the same pattern that shaped the people in Europe who created cave art many years later.”
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
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