Hunter-Gatherer Culture 20,000 Years Older Than Previously Thought

POISON darts and beeswax have been found in a South African cave, suggesting that a hunter-gatherer culture emerged 20,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Artefacts at the Border Cave, an archaeological site on the border of Kwa Zulu Natal and Swaziland, have been reanalysed and dated to 44,000 years ago, about twice as old as widely believed, said the research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

These signs of advancement, signalling perhaps the oldest traces of modern culture in what is known as the Later Stone Age, would coincide with the first known migration of humans from Africa to Europe, said the US-published study.

The research focused on items left by what are known as the San people, including ostrich eggshell beads, bone arrowhead points, wooden digging sticks, warthog tusks and beeswax likely used for making tools...

Technological and use-wear analysis of these objects, and their comparison with experimental and ethnographic data, reveals that a number of specialised bone tool types (wedges, pièces esquillées, pressure flakers, smoothers, sequentially notched pieces), previously known only from the Upper Palaeolithic and more recent periods, were manufactured and used at least 30,000 years earlier at Sibudu Cave.