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The Archaeology of People: Dimensions of Neolithic Life, Whittle

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<< Other Photo Pages >> Blombos Cave - Cave or Rock Shelter in South Africa

Submitted by Andy B on Tuesday, 23 November 2010  Page Views: 10345

Natural PlacesSite Name: Blombos Cave
Country: South Africa Type: Cave or Rock Shelter

Latitude: 34.414103S  Longitude: 21.217689E
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
5
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Blombos Cave
Blombos Cave submitted by bat400_photo : Blombos Cave exterior. Site in South Africa. Uploaded: 10 December 2011 Source : Magnus Haaland This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. (Vote or comment on this photo)
Blombos Cave is a cave in a calcarenite limestone cliff on the Southern Cape coast in South Africa. It is an archaeological site made famous by the discovery of 75,000-year-old pieces of ochre engraved with abstract designs and beads made from Nassarius shells, and c. 80,000-year-old bone tools. Some of the earliest evidence for shellfishing and possibly fishing has been discovered at the site and dates to c. 140,000 years ago.

Excavations carried out since 1991 at Blombos Cave provide snapshots of life in the African Middle Stone Age (MSA) in the southern Cape, South Africa. Three phases of MSA occupation have been identified and named M1, M2 and M3. Dating by the optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) and thermoluminescence (TL) methods have provided occupation dates for each phase: these are about 71,000 BCE for the M1 phase, about 78,000 BCE for the M2 phase and between 100,000 and 140,000 BCE for the M3 phase.

Read More at Wikipedia

Note: Stone Age people sharpened skills 55,000 years earlier than thought
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// thoughtco.com/blombos-cave-167250 // Top 10 Inventions in Ancient Human History Human Creativity at its Best  Updated August 09, 2016  Modern human beings are the result of millions of years of evolution. But not just physical evolution: we are also th

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Nearby sites listing. In the following links * = Image available
 83.3km ENE 74° Pinnacle Point* Cave or Rock Shelter
 263.4km W 281° Iziko South African Museum Museum
 293.3km E 84° Klasies River Caves* Cave or Rock Shelter
 341.6km NW 311° Diepkloof* Rock Outcrop
 627.4km NNE 29° Thomas' Farm Belmont Rock Art Rock Art
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 714.4km NNE 29° McGregor Museum Museum
 717.0km NNE 28° Wildebeestkuil* Rock Art
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 731.7km NNW 326° Spitzkloof* Cave or Rock Shelter
 763.5km NNE 18° Wonderwerk Cave* Cave or Rock Shelter
 766.7km NNE 14° Kathu Pan* Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry
 816.5km NNE 29° Stowlands Rock art Rock Art
 834.5km NE 54° Lesob 1 Rock Art
 835.2km NE 54° Lesob 3 Rock Art
 835.2km NE 54° Lesob 2 Rock Art
 835.8km NE 54° Lesob 4 Rock Art
 835.9km NE 54° Lesob 5 Rock Art
 841.8km NNW 331° Apollo 11 Cave* Cave or Rock Shelter
 869.1km N 349° The Lost City of Kalahari* Ancient Village or Settlement
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"Blombos Cave" | Login/Create an Account | 3 News and Comments
  
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More news items about the inhabitants of Blombos Cave by Andy B on Tuesday, 23 November 2010
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Stone Agers Sharpened Skills 55,000 Years Earlier Than Thought by Andy B on Tuesday, 23 November 2010
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Stone toolmakers living in southern Africa 75,000 years ago pushed the cutting edge in more ways than one. These intrepid folk sharpened the thin tips of heated stone spearheads using a forceful technique previously dated to no more than 20,000 years ago, a new study finds.

sciencenewsThis stone toolmaking method, called pressure flaking, was invented and used sporadically in Africa before spreading to other continents, according to a team led by archaeologist Vincent Mourre of the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail in France. Having a flexible repertoire of toolmaking methods aided the survival of modern humans who left Africa beginning around 60,000 years ago, the scientists propose in the Oct. 29 Science.

The finding fits with the idea that symbolic art, rituals and other forms of modern human behavior developed gradually over hundreds of thousands of years, not in a burst of cultural innovation marked by cave paintings and other creations that appeared after 50,000 years ago in Western Europe.

Excavations of sediment dated to 75,000 years ago in South Africa’s Blombos Cave produced stone artifacts displaying signs of pressure flaking, Mourre and his colleagues say.

“The Blombos evidence for pressure flaking is the oldest we know,” says anthropologist and study coauthor Paola Villa of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in Boulder.

Blombos Cave and nearby sites of comparable age previously yielded engraved pigment chunks, decorated ostrich eggshells and heat-treated stone artifacts.

Southern Africans occasionally made items with symbolic meanings and used special forms of toolmaking beginning 100,000 years ago or more, Villa suspects. These practices flourished in and out of Africa starting about 40,000 years ago, in her view.

Pressure flaking consists of trimming the edges of a finished tool by pressing with a bone point hard enough to remove thin slices of rock. This process creates the narrow, evenly spaced grooves found on flint tools from Europe’s 20,000-year-old Solutrean culture and prehistoric Native American groups.

Wider, more irregular grooves characterize 36 pressure-flaked Blombos tools, which were made from silcrete, Villa says. This rock, a silica-rich material, is of lower quality than flint and requires heating to ready it for pressure flaking.

Villa and her colleagues identified glossy areas on silcrete tools at Blombos that, they surmise, formed when the stones were pre-heated for pressure flaking. Other marks on the artifacts indicated that they had been attached to handles, probably as spearheads.

By pressure flaking preheated replicas of the Blombos finds made from silcrete and collected near the South African cave, Mourre was able to reproduce marks resembling those on the ancient artifacts.

Toolmakers likely used pressure flaking by 100,000 years ago in East Africa, remarks archaeologist John Shea of Stony Brook University, New York. Several sites there contain stone artifacts, many made from obsidian, that deserve close analysis for pressure-flaking marks, Shea says.

Shea, an expert at making replicas of Stone Age tools, notes that pressure flaking can be taught in 30 minutes to a novice. “It is, literally, so easy a caveman can do it,” he says.

Pressure flaking doesn’t add much sharpness or strength to a cutting instrument, Shea adds. Blombos toolmakers probably employed this technique to advertise their skill or to denote users’ social identity, he proposes.

Archaeologist Curtis Marean of Arizona State University in Tempe calls the evidence for pressure flaking at Blombos “suggestive but not completely convincing.” Further work needs to confirm that pressure flaking of replicated silcrete artifacts consistently produces marks like those on the Blombos finds, Marean asserts.

Knowledge of pressure flaking doesn’t imply any special ment

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