Late Stone Age Occurred 20,000 Years Earlier Than Believed

Phys.org: Study pushes back onset date of South Africa's Later Stone Age by more than 20,000 years.

The study shows the onset of the Later Stone Age in South Africa likely began some 44,000 to 42,000 years ago, said Paola Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and lead study author. The new dates are based on the use of precisely calibrated radiocarbon dates linked to organic artifacts found at Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains on the border of South Africa and Swaziland containing evidence of hominid occupation going back 200,000 years. The Later Stone Age is synonymous to many archaeologists with the Upper Paleolithic Period, when modern humans moved from Africa into Europe roughly 45,000 years ago and spread rapidly, displacing and eventually driving Neanderthals to extinction. The timing of the technological innovations and changes in the Later Stone Age in South Africa are comparable to that of the Upper Paleolithic, said Villa. "Our research proves that the Later Stone Age emerged in South Africa far earlier than has been believed and occurred at about the same time as the arrival of modern humans in Europe," said Villa. "But differences in technology and culture between the two areas are very strong, showing the people of the two regions chose very different paths to the evolution of technology and society." A paper on the subject was published July 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Co-authors included Sylvain Soriano of the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique, or CNRS, at the University of Paris; Tsenka Tsanova of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig, Germany; Ilaria Degano, Jeannette Lucejko and Maria Perla Colombini of the University of Pisa in Italy; Thomas Highham of the University of Oxford in England; Francesco d'Errico of the CNRS at the University of Bordeaux in France; Lucinda Blackwell of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa; and Peter Beaumont of the McGregor Museum in South Africa. A companion paper published in PNAS and led by d'Errico reports on organic materials found at Border Cave dating to the Later Stone Age, an indication that the San hunter-gatherer culture first thought to have begun about 20,000 years ago in the region probably emerged as early as 44,000 years ago, said Villa.