SA's archaeological wonder-sites reveal more of the origins of our unity and diversity

1/2. Blombos Still Bay points. Wits University

Early modern human cultural interactions investigated through Middle Stone Age tool technologies

University of the Witwatersrand. Two of South Africa's most famous archaeological sites, Sibudu and Blombos, have revealed that Middle Stone Age groups who lived in these different areas, more than 1 000 kilometres apart, used similar types of stone tools some 71 000 years ago, but that there were differences in the ways that these tools were made.

"This was not the case at 65 000 years ago when similarities in stone tool making suggest that similar cultural traditions spread across South Africa," says Professor Lyn Wadley, archaeologist from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Wadley is part of an international team of researchers from South Africa, France, the US and Italy who published the results of their systematic study of Middle Stone Age (MSA) stone tool technologies in a paper, titled: The Still Bay and Howiesons Poort at Sibudu and Blombos: Understanding Middle Stone Age technologies, in the journal, PLOS ONE, on 10 July 2015. [...] eurekalert.org