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<< Our Photo Pages >> Pinnacle Point - Cave or Rock Shelter in South Africa

Submitted by jackdaw1 on Thursday, 22 November 2012  Page Views: 5589

Natural PlacesSite Name: Pinnacle Point Alternative Name: PP5-6, PP13B,
Country: South Africa
NOTE: This site is 13.217 km away from the location you searched for.

Type: Cave or Rock Shelter
Nearest Town: Mossel Bay
Latitude: 34.207778S  Longitude: 22.089444E
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
3 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
4 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.
3 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
4

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Pinnacle Point
Pinnacle Point submitted by derekwijtenburg : Caves at Mossel Bay, Pinnacle Point. (Vote or comment on this photo)
Pinnacle Point is a small promontory immediately south of Mossel Bay, a town on the southern coast of South Africa. Excavations since the year 2000 of a series of caves at Pinnacle Point have revealed occupation by Stone Age people between 170,000 and 40,000 years ago.

The focus of excavations has been at Cave 13B (PP13B), where the earliest evidence for the systematic exploitation of marine resources (shellfish) and symbolic behavior have been documented, and at Pinnacle Point Cave 5-6 (PP5-6), where the oldest evidence for the heat treatment of rock to make stone tools has been documented. The only human remains have been recovered from younger deposits at PP13B which are ≈100,000 years old.

Source: Wikipedia

Website: Mossel Bay - Point of Human Origins
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Pinnacle Point
Pinnacle Point submitted by derekwijtenburg : Caves at Mossel Bay, Pinnacle Point. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Pinnacle Point
Pinnacle Point submitted by derekwijtenburg (Vote or comment on this photo)

Pinnacle Point
Pinnacle Point submitted by derekwijtenburg (Vote or comment on this photo)

Do not use the above information on other web sites or publications without permission of the contributor.

Nearby Images from Flickr
2019 11b Mossel Bay-010
¤ PInnacle Point Estate Golf Champions Course | Mosselbay | SOUTH AFRICA
DSC04491.jpg
DSC_3539.jpg
DSC_3538.jpg
DSC_3537.jpg

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Nearby sites listing. In the following links * = Image available
 83.3km WSW 254° Blombos Cave* Cave or Rock Shelter
 211.7km E 88° Klasies River Caves* Cave or Rock Shelter
 339.9km W 274° Iziko South African Museum Museum
 393.9km WNW 300° Diepkloof* Rock Outcrop
 572.1km NNE 22° Thomas' Farm Belmont Rock Art Rock Art
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 662.2km NNE 22° Wildebeestkuil* Rock Art
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 729.4km N 7° Kathu Pan* Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry
 756.8km NE 52° Lesob 1 Rock Art
 757.5km NE 52° Lesob 3 Rock Art
 757.5km NE 52° Lesob 2 Rock Art
 758.1km NE 52° Lesob 4 Rock Art
 758.2km NE 52° Lesob 5 Rock Art
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 864.6km NW 325° Apollo 11 Cave* Cave or Rock Shelter
 866.4km NNW 343° The Lost City of Kalahari* Ancient Village or Settlement
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 1060.0km NNE 32° Sterkfontein* Cave or Rock Shelter
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"Pinnacle Point" | Login/Create an Account | 5 News and Comments
  
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Re: Pinnacle Point - Visiting by derekwijtenburg on Monday, 23 March 2020
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To visit the Caves, which are near Mossel Bay, (10km driver), you make your way by taxi to the Pinnacle Point Golf Course Club House. From there you can taken on a guided tour to one cave.

The other can be visited without a tour by taking the board walk down the dune side and turning left onto the beach. Follow the trail until it becomes ambiguous but keep going as far as you can. When it becomes impossible to go any further you will be at the cave. You can't miss it.
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'Oldest Arrowheads' hint at how modern humans overtook Neandertals by Andy B on Thursday, 22 November 2012
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Archaeologists excavating a cave on the southern coast of South Africa have recovered remains of the oldest known complex projectile weapons. The tiny stone blades, which were probably affixed to wooden shafts for use as arrows, date to 71,000 years ago and represent a sophisticated technological tradition that endured for thousands of years. The discovery bears on an abiding question about when and how modern human cognition emerged, and suggests a way by which early modern Homo sapiens outcompeted Neandertals to eventually become the last human species standing.

Fossils show that humans who basically looked like us had evolved by around 200,000 years ago. Yet based on the cultural stuff they left behind, it looked as though anatomically modern humans didn’t begin thinking like us until much later. And when the creative spark did eventually ignite, the flame flickered only briefly before fizzling, only to spark and fade again and again as populations died out, taking their innovations to the grave. Complex projectile weapon technology, for example, seemed to make a brief first appearance sometime between 65,000 and 60,000 years ago and didn’t stick until after 40,000 years ago. But whether this flickering pattern in the archaeological record is real or merely an artifact of the small number of sites excavated has been unclear. The new South African finds, which come from a site called Pinnacle Point 5 – 6 (PP5-6), support the latter scenario.

Read more at Scientific American
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/11/07/oldest-arrowheads-hint-at-how-modern-humans-overtook-neandertals/

With thanks to Jackdaw1 for the link
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Brain changes may have led to Stone Age tools by Andy B on Thursday, 22 November 2012
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Submitted by coldrum on Thursday, 01 October 2009

Once upon a time in the long evolution of Homo sapiens, a band of our African ancestors learned to use fire for more than cooking meat, lighting the dark or warding off attacking animals.

Those Stone Age people became the world's first engineers - they discovered that the intense heat of a fire's embers could make chunks of stone much easier to flake for making tools, and to make them much sharper too.

It was "a breakthrough adaptation in human evolution," reports an international group of archaeologists and anthropologists. And it may have come about because of changes in those early human's brains, other scientists say.

What began at least 165,000 years ago became the most common method of stone toolmaking in Africa by about 72,000 years ago.

The scientists from Africa, Australia and Arizona analyzed nearly 200 ancient tools found around cave dwellings at a South African coastal site called Pinnacle Point, which earlier excavations had shown were inhabited by people of the Middle Stone Age.

The knives, scrapers and hand axes were made of a widely used type of silicate rock called silcrete. Some of the scientists, reporting in the current issue of the journal Science, are themselves skilled at "knapping" - the art of chipping stones by hand to create sharp tools - and their tools demonstrated the clear improvements possible from heat treatment at fire temperatures of 450 Fahrenheit or more.

Others explored the South African sites where they collected ancient silcrete tools that were deliberately heat-treated by the Stone Age people. They analyzed them with high-tech methods to reject any that may have accidentally fallen into hearth fires or been heated later in accidental bush blazes.

"Early modern humans regularly employed pyrotechnology to increase the quality and efficiency of their stone tool manufacturing process," wrote team leader Kyle Brown of South Africa's University of Cape Town and the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University in Tempe.

That ability to "alter and improve available raw materials and the quality and efficiency of stone tool manufacture may have been a behavioral advantage" over others, including the Neanderthals, Brown and his colleagues wrote.

At UC Berkeley, anthropologist Steven Shackley noted that in California and elsewhere in the American Southwest, the people of the well-known Clovis culture who had migrated from Siberia across the Bering land bridge some 13,000 years ago also used fire to temper their stone tools - apparently their own age-old technology.

"So for those earlier Stone Age people of 100,000 years ago, this report suggests that something was going on in their brains and something was changing the forms of their hands to make that improvement in stone tools possible," Shackley said.

Katherine Pollard, a biostatistician and human genome analyst at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, supported Shackley's conjecture that changes in brain DNA may have endowed those Stone Age folks with new toolmaking skills.

"It seems almost certain that there were some genetic changes involved," she said in an e-mail. "These may have affected our ancestors' brains, but could also have been involved in manual dexterity or vision or other systems.

"It will probably be a while before we can link specific genetic changes to specific neurological changes and then to events in the archaeological record. We just don't really know that much yet about how our brains work. But, it will be cool to see how these stories unfold."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/26/MNHK19AS41.DTL&type=science#ixzz0PRydkcPh
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Did seafood encourage 'Out of Africa' trips? by Andy B on Thursday, 22 November 2012
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Submitted by coldrum on Thursday, 18 October 2007

Archaeologists have uncovered the earliest known remains of human habitation by the coast, a finding that may explain how humans ventured beyond Africa at the start of their planetary odyssey.

Mussel shells, sharpened pieces of red ochre and stone micro-tools found in a sea cave in South Africa suggest that Homo sapiens headed for the beach quite soon after emerging from the savannah, they say.

By stumbling upon the rich harvest of the sea, Man found the means to explore beyond Africa, sustaining himself through maritime edibles by probing along the coast, they suggest.

Until now, the earliest evidence of human settlement by the coast dates from 120 000 years ago - about 80 000 years after the approximate time when, according to fossil evidence, H. sapiens arose in the grasslands of East Africa.

Experts have long suspected that coastal migration must have occurred earlier than this.

The problem, though, has been finding proof to back this belief.

Turn the clock back to an era between 195,000 and 135,000 years ago, and you will find Earth in the grip of an Ice Age.

So much water was locked up in glaciers that the sea level was as much as 125 metres lower than today. When the glaciers eventually retreated, the sea rose once more, swamping coastlines and sweeping away the traces of habitation.

One remarkable location that survived, though, was a cave overlooking the Indian Ocean in coastal cliffs at Pinnacle Point, near South Africa's Mossel Bay.

The cave is so high that, even now, it is 15 metres above the sea. At the time when it was inhabited, it was located within five to 10 kilometres of the coast.

Curtis Marean of Arizona State University led a team that sifted through the cave's walls and floor and found remains of hearths, of some two dozen shellfish, mainly brown mussels, as well as 57 pieces of ochre pigment, some of them brilliant red, and nearly three dozen "bladelets", or tiny tools made of chipped stone.

The find has been dated to around 164 000 years ago, give or take 12 000 years, according to their paper, which appears on Thursday in the British weekly journal Nature.

Marean believes the discovery opens a door to understanding the movements of our early forebears.

During the long glacial period, southern Africa was cooler and drier, and hunter-gatherers probably found it hard to get food from animals, fruits and berries, he says.

Moving to the coast thus opened up a whole new larder of food.

"Shellfish may have been a critical food source to the survival of human populations when they were faced with depressed terrestrial productivity during glacial stages... when much of southern Africa was more arid and populations were isolated and perhaps concentrated on now-submerged coastal platforms," the study says.

Read more at
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?art_id=nw20071017073334241C545814
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Early seafood, makeup found in S. Africa by Andy B on Thursday, 22 November 2012
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Submitted by coldrum on Thursday, 18 October 2007

In one of the earliest hints of "modern" living, humans 164,000 years ago put on primitive makeup and hit the seashore for steaming mussels, new archaeological finds show.

Call it a beach party for early man. But it's a beach party thrown by people who weren't supposed to be advanced enough for this type of behavior. What was found in a cave in South Africa may change how scientists believe Homo sapiens marched into modernity.

Instead of undergoing a revolution into modern living about 40,000 to 70,000 years ago, as commonly thought, man may have become modern in stuttering fits and starts, or through a long slow march that began even earlier. At least that's the case being made in a study appearing in the journal Nature on Thursday.

Researchers found three hallmarks of modern life at Pinnacle Point overlooking the Indian Ocean near South Africa's Mossel Bay: harvested and cooked seafood, reddish pigment from ground rocks, and early tiny blade technology. Scientific optical dating techniques show that these hallmarks were from 164,000 years ago, plus or minus 12,000 years.

"Together as a package this looks like the archaeological record of a much later time period," said study author Curtis Marean, professor of anthropology at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.

This means humans were eating seafood about 40,000 years earlier than previously thought. And this is the earliest record of humans eating something other than what they caught or gathered on the land, Marean said. Most of what Marean found were the remnants of brown mussels, but he also found black mussels, small saltwater clams, sea snails and even a barnacle that indicates whale blubber or skin was brought into the cave.

Marean figured the early people, probably women, had to trudge two to three miles to where the mussels, clams and snails were harvested and to bring them back to the cave. Then they put them over hot rocks to cook. When the food was done, the shells popped open in a process similar to modern-day mussel-steaming, but without the pot.

Marean and colleagues tried out that ancient cooking technique in a kind of archaeological test kitchen.

"We've prepped them the same way," Marean said in telephone interview from South Africa. "They're a little less moist (than modern steamed mussels). They definitely lose some moisture."

Marean also found 57 pieces of ground-up rock that would have been reddish- or pinkish-brown. That would be used for self-decoration and sending social signals to other people, much the way makeup is used now, he said.

There have been reports of earlier but sporadic pigment use in Africa. The same goes with rocks that were fashioned into small pointy tools.

But having all three together shows a grouping of people that is almost modern, Marean said. Seafood harvesting, unlike other hunter-gatherer activities, encourages people to stay put, and that leads to more social interactions, he said.

Yet 110,000 years later, no such modern activity, except for seafood dining, could be found in that part of South Africa, said Alison Brooks, a George Washington University anthropology professor who was not associated with Marean's study. That shows that the dip into modern life was not built upon, said Brooks, who called Marean's work "a fantastic find."

Similar "blips of rather precocious kinds of behaviors seem to be emerging at certain sites," said Kathy Schick, an Indiana University anthropologist and co-director of the Stone Age Institute. Schick and Brooks said Marean's work shows that anthropologists have to revise their previous belief in a steady "human revolution" about 40,000 to 70,000 years ago.

Source: Yahoo.com (link no longer works)
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