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

Submitted by coldrum on Tuesday, 24 January 2012  Page Views: 22363

Natural PlacesSite Name: Sibudu Cave
Country: South Africa Type: Cave or Rock Shelter
Nearest Town: Durban  Nearest Village: Tongaat
Latitude: 29.522627S  Longitude: 31.085895E
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
4
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derekwijtenburg visited on 23rd Dec 2019 - their rating: Access: 4 We needed to cross the Tongati River to actually set foot on the site, but could not as it was flowing too rapidly.

Andy B have visited here

Sibudu Cave
Sibudu Cave submitted by Andy B : Researchers in South Africa have revealed the earliest direct evidence of human-made arrows. The scientists unearthed 64,000 year-old "stone points", which they say were probably arrow heads. Photo by L. Wadley Site in South Africa (Vote or comment on this photo)
Cave in South Africa. Sibudu Cave is a sandstone cliff cave in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It is an important Middle Stone Age site.. In it evidence has been found of some of the earliest modern human technology including the earliest bone arrow, needle, and use of heat treated mixed compound gluing.

The complexity of the skill needed to create and process such glues has been argued to provide evidence of continuity between modern human cognition and that of early humans around 70,000 years ago.

The cave is roughly 40 km (25 mi) north of Durban and about 15 km (9 mi) inland of the ocean near the town of Tongaat and has the form of a rock shelter. It is on forested west-south-west facing steep cliffs that overlook the Tongati River in an area that is presently sugar cane plantation. The cave was formed by the Tongati Rive down-cutting the sandstone cliff; the river is now 10 m (33 ft) below the cave

More on the cave at Wikipedia
http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/prehistoric-color-glue-factory.html#mkcpgn=emnws1



Note: "... Parents, children, grannies, and all sorts of people using the same bed." 70,000 year old mattress.
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Sibudu Cave
Sibudu Cave submitted by derekwijtenburg : View of the site from the opposite bank of the Tongati River. You need to cross the river to access the site. On this occasion the river was flowing too strongly for us to cross. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Sibudu Cave
Sibudu Cave submitted by derekwijtenburg : Track down to the cave, with the overhang in the background. (Vote or comment on this photo)

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"Sibudu Cave" | Login/Create an Account | 8 News and Comments
  
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Accessing the site by derekwijtenburg on Monday, 23 December 2019
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If you are in the Durban area or even better, the popular holiday area, Balito, then it is extremely easy to just enter, "Sibudu Caves", into Google maps. It will take you by car and then by foot directly to the area. The roads are good tarred roads until the last short drive of perhaps 500 meters, which is a dust track. We pulled over half way down it and walked the rest of the way. An easy walk.

We were disappointed at not being able to access the site for you come to the Tongati River, the flow of which will be very dependent on the current rainfall. At our visit it was flowing to fast to cross with small rapids.

Wearing water friendly hiking sandals and having water proof pouches for our electronics would have allowed us to cross as the rapids would have been okay to cross for the prepared. We were not.

It did make me think about what this must have meant for people living here. At times they must have had to wade through fairly strong current. Was this also a kind of natural moat for the site, which made it easy to defend from animals or foe as you could attack them while they were encumbered by the crossing of the river? Could the crossing area have been a watering point for animals and therefore they perhaps had a larder on their door step? The thick bush that we saw would have concealed the inhabitants exceptionally well, giving them the advantage of seeing out far more easily than those across the bank seeing in.
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Oldest Known Mattress Found; Slept Whole Family by bat400 on Monday, 23 January 2012
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Roomy mats also had insect-repelling "top sheet," archaeologists say.

The world's oldest known mattress has been unearthed in South Africa, archaeologists have announced. The mattress—which consists of layers of reeds and rushes—was discovered at the bottom of a pile of bedding made from compacted grasses and leafy plants. The bedding had accumulated at the Sibudu Cave site in KwaZulu-Natal over a period of 39,000 years, with the oldest mats dating to 77,000 years ago.

"What we have is evidence of plant bedding that is 50,000 years older than any previous site anywhere in the world," said study leader Lyn Wadley of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

The compacted layers of fossil plants—excavated from sediments 9.8 feet (3 meters) deep—show that the bedding was periodically burned, possibly to limit pests and garbage.

What's more, researchers believe the ancient people added a "top sheet" to the bedding made of insect-repelling greenery, possibly to ward off biting bugs such as mosquitoes and flies.
This fine covering of leaves may also represent the earliest known use of medicinal plants by humans. The leaves are from the tree Cryptocarya woodii, or river wild-quince, a medicinal plant that produces insect-killing chemicals.

Measuring up to 22 square feet (2 square meters), the beds were also large enough to accommodate a whole family.

For modern hunter-gatherers, such as the Inuit and Kalahari Bushmen, "the idea of just one or two people sleeping on a bed is unknown," she noted.

"Hunter-gatherers tend to live with each other in kinship groups," said Wadley, whose study appears tomorrow in the journal Science.

"It was probably the same in the Stone Age—parents, children, grannies, and all sorts of people using the same bed."

Thanks to coldrum for the link to National Geographic News. For more, go to the link.
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    Breakfast in bed: Earliest Human Beds Found in South Africa by bat400 on Sunday, 11 March 2012
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    And from coldrum, a similar article:

    Early members of our species, Homo sapiens, were nomads who made their living by hunting and gathering. Yet they often created temporary base camps where they cooked food and spent the night. One of the best studied of these camps is Sibudu Cave, a rock shelter in a cliff face above South Africa's Tongati River, about 40 kilometers north of Durban. Sibudu was first occupied by modern humans at least 77,000 years ago and continued to serve as a favored gathering place over the following 40,000 years. Since 1998, a team led by Lyn Wadley, an archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, has been excavating at Sibudu, uncovering evidence for complex behaviors, including the earliest known use of bows and arrows.

    Over the past several years, the team has found that many of the archaeological layers featured large, 1-centimeter thick swaths of plant remains, including the remnants of both stems and leaves. Most of them cover at least three square meters. The team suspected that these swaths were the remains of bedding, but the earliest previous evidence for sleeping mats is only between 20,000 and 30,000 years old, at sites in Spain, South Africa, and Israel, where similar but more fragmentary arrangements of plant remains have been found.

    So to be sure, the researchers put the remains under the microscope. Reporting online today in Science, Wadley and her colleagues describe the results of two sophisticated archaeological techniques: analysis of phytoliths, tiny fossil plant remains, which allows identification of plant species; and micromorphology, the high-resolution examination of archaeological remains.

    The team found that the swaths, which dated from 77,000 to 58,000 years ago, were made from sedges, rushes, and grasses, plants that grow down by the Tongati River but are not found in the dry rock shelter. Thus the people at Sibudu must have gathered them deliberately and brought them to the cave. Under the microscope, blocks of the plant material showed signs of compression and repeated trampling. In the earliest layer, 77,000 years old, the team found the leaves of Cryptocarya woodii, also known as Cape laurel, or the "bastard camphor tree," an aromatic plant whose leaves are used in traditional medicines even today. The leaves contain several chemical compounds that can kill insects, and the team suggests that early humans chose them to protect against malaria-carrying mosquitoes and other pests.

    Microscopic analysis also suggests that the bedding had been burned, perhaps to eliminate insect pests and get rid of accumulated garbage, so that new layers of bedding could be laid down.

    To bolster its case that the plant remains represented bedding, the team members practiced a little experimental archaeology: They collected sedge plants, allowed them to dry, cut them into sections, then layered them in a hole dug in some sand. They compacted the plant mats with a tennis court roller, ignited them and let them burn, and then compacted them some more. The resulting compressed layers looked very similar to the ancient samples found at Sibudu, the team reports.

    Among the plant remains, Wadley's team also found tiny fragments of chipped stone and crushed, burnt bone, which the researchers interpret as evidence that these were not only sleeping mats but also work surfaces where tools were fashioned and food was prepared. Thus while early modern humans were skilled at organizing their living spaces, some parts of the cave served double duty, Wadley says. "There were no rules for separate eating, working, or sleeping places," she says. "Breakfast in bed may have been an almost daily occurrence."

    For more, see news.sciencemag.org.
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Another article on Sibudu Cave by bat400 on Sunday, 07 August 2011
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The 5300 year old bow and arrows of Otzi the Iceman, two of them nicely feathered and tipped with flint points, fit nicely with the circa 1991 story of the bow and arrow's origins.

"The invention of the bow and arrow used to be closely linked to the late Upper Paleolithic (Stone Age) in Europe," less than 30,000 years ago, says anthropologist Marlize Lombard of South Africa's University of Johannesburg, in a study in the current Journal of Archaeological Science.

Last year, however, Lombard and her colleagues reported in the journal Antiquity, that arrows were around at least 64,000 years ago, and were first discovered not in Europe, but in South Africa. A single quartz arrowhead, bloodstained, had turned up at the Sibudu Cave site, dating to that time. In the new Journalof Archaeological Science study, Lombard reports more arrowheads and more evidence pushing back the age of the bow and arrow.

Why does it matter? Well, modern-looking humans turn up in fossils from as long as 195,000 years ago in Africa, but only spread worldwide starting about 60,000 years ago. Anthropologists have debated for decades about the innovations or changes, everything from language to genes to tools, that turned modern man loose on the world.

Arrows are one possibility for what helped people spread all over the world, either through hunting or fighting, as Lombard cautiously notes. "Although the existence of bow and arrow technology (more than 60,000 years ago) may have far-reaching consequences for hypotheses about human behavioural evolution and adaptation, it is by no means easy to establish," she says at the beginning of her study. In the study, she looks through the microscope at 16 quartz blades found in dirt layers as much as 65,000 years old at the South African site.

All but two of the ancient blades have blood traces on them and nine were deliberately hafted, or chipped, to fit onto a tool, she finds. More than half of the blades look like they were attached to arrows and eight carry traces of blood stains, Lombard concludes. "It is therefore my reading that at least nine tools in this sample were probably used as transversely hafted arrowheads."

"I think the finding adds to growing evidence for the great antiquity of complex projectile weaponry in Africa," says paleoanthropologist John Shea of Stony Brook (N.Y.) University. "The real startling upshot of this finding is that it challenges longstanding archaeological beliefs that important changes in projectile technology only occurred very recently, less than 30,000 years ago, after humans dispersed into Europe."
In North America, "it also challenges the longstanding hypothesis that the bow and arrow were only invented a few thousand years ago and largely in conjunction with the origins of agriculture."

Even after prehistoric people invented arrows, they likely kept on using spears as well, Lombard suggests. She concludes, archaeologists shouldn't be surprised when they find both heavier spear points and arrowheads mixed together at future archaeological digs.

" Complex projectile technology may have given our species a crucial ecological advantage in competition with other hominin (human) species as they dispersed from Africa," Shea says, by e-mail. That's one explanation for the disappearance of the Neanderthals, who have left only spear points behind at sites in Europe.

No wonder Otzi had such nice arrows. Archery was an ancient technology in his day. Unfortunately for the Iceman, who "probably bled to death within a matter of minutes," because a flint arrowhead severed a major artery in his shoulder.

For more, see : http://www.usatoday.com. Thanks to an anonymous reader.
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What Old Arrowheads Tell Us about the Origins of Modern Thinking by bat400 on Sunday, 23 January 2011
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A more philosophical item about the stone tools of Sibudu Cave:

The great American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was one of the fathers of modern architecture, and for that I am immensely grateful. I love the sleek, clean, powerful lines of Mies’s buildings, the fearlessness simplicity of his skyscrapers. But even more than the beauty of his buildings was the beauty of his aesthetic. It was Mies, after all, who once said, “God is in the details.”

Mies was thinking of architecture, of course, but I sometimes think that this aphorism was tailormade for the field of archaeology, a discipline of detail. Sometimes all these patiently gleaned details add up to, well, little more than a pile of details. But on occasion, they make something beautiful and elegant and important, like one of Mies’s famous glass walls. And so it was recently, with a study that two archaeologists completed on a collection of 64,000-year-old stone tools from Sibudu Cave, a site perched on a forested cliff some 40 kilometers north of Durban, South Africa.

By studying a particular class of stone tools from the site—tools that looked a lot like arrowheads—University of Johannesburg archaeologist Marlize Lombard and private scholar Laurel Phillipson, ended up telling us a lot about the origins of modern human behavior.

First, a little background. Until recently, many archaeologists believed in an event they dubbed the Great Leap Forward, or the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. Some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, they theorized, Homo sapiens sapiens underwent some kind of neural reorganization—perhaps due to a genetic mutation–and suddenly became accomplished artists, jewelry makers, fishers, and sophisticated tool makers.

Dissenting archaeologists, however, suggested that the transition to behavioral modernity was a gradual affair unfolding over hundreds of thousands of years. And recently evidence of a slow transition has accumulated. At Blombos Cave in South Africa, for example, archaeologists found 75,000-year-old shell beads, 80,000 year-old bone tools, as well as possible evidence of fishing—all indicators pointing to modern thinking and behavior.

Now Lombard and Phillipson have come up with superb evidence of a much more sophisticated human behavior—the making of bows and arrows– 64,000 years ago. Examining a collection of artifacts, largely from Sibudu Cave, the pair measured the 79 small stone points to see whether they fit into the range of arrowheads. They did. Then they looked for characteristic signs of impact damage, analyzed microresidues along the edges for traces of animal tissue, and tested the backings for plant resins used to haft them. Everything pointed clearly to their use as arrowheads.

Lastly, the two researchers drew up a list of the technologies early humans needed in order to make bows and arrows. These ranged from the ability to make long strong cords and formal knots to the skill of harnessing the latent energy in flexed wood. Early modern humans, concluded Lombard and Phillipson, could be shown to possess nearly all of these in South Africa by 64,000 years ago.

I’m now convinced that bow-and-arrow hunting humans roamed the shadowy forests of South Africa 64,000 years ago–thousands of years before the proposed Great Leap Forward.

God, it seems, really is in the details.

Source: archaeology.org/blog with thanks to coldrum.
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Oldest evidence of arrows found by bat400 on Sunday, 12 September 2010
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Researchers in South Africa have revealed the earliest direct evidence of human-made arrows.

Submitted by coldrum --
The scientists unearthed 64,000 year-old "stone points", which they say were probably arrow heads. Closer inspection of the ancient weapons revealed remnants of blood and bone that provided clues about how they were used.
The team reports its findings in the journal Antiquity.
The arrow heads were excavated from layers of ancient sediment in Sibudu Cave in South Africa. During the excavation, led by Professor Lyn Wadley from the University of the Witwatersrand, the team dug through layers deposited up to 100,000 years ago.
Marlize Lombard from the university based in Johannesburg led the examination of the findings. She described her study as "stone age forensics". "We took the [points] directly from the site, in little [plastic] baggies, to the lab," she told BBC News. "Then I started the tedious work of analysing them [under the microscope], looking at the distribution patterns of blood and bone residues."
Because of the shape of these "little geometric pieces", Dr Lombard was able to see exactly where they had been impacted and damaged. This showed that they were very likely to have been the tips of projectiles - rather than sharp points on the end of hand-held spears.
The arrow heads also contained traces of glue - plant-based resin that the scientists think was used to fasten them on to a wooden shaft.
"The presence of glue implies that people were able to produce composite tools - tools where different elements produced from different materials are glued together to make a single artefact," said Dr Lombard.
"This is an indicator of a cognitively demanding behaviour."
The discovery pushes back the development of "bow and arrow technology" by at least 20,000 years.

Researchers are interested in early evidence of bows and arrows, as this type of weapons engineering shows the cognitive abilities of humans living at that time.
The researchers wrote in their paper: "Hunting with a bow and arrow requires intricate multi-staged planning, material collection and tool preparation and implies a range of innovative social and communication skills."
Dr Lombard explained that her ultimate aim was to answer the "big question": When did we start to think in the same way that we do now?

"We can now start being more and more confident that 60-70,000 years ago, in Southern Africa, people were behaving, on a cognitive level, very similarly to us," she told BBC News.

Professor Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London said the work added to the view that modern humans in Africa 60,000 years ago had begun to hunt in a "new way".

Professor Stringer said:
"But the long gaps in the subsequent record of bows and arrows may mean that regular use of these weapons did not come until much later. "Indeed, the concept of bows and arrows may even have had to be reinvented many millennia [later]."

For more, see http://www.bbc.co.uk
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Stone Age Color, Glue 'Factory' Found by Andy B on Saturday, 19 June 2010
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A once-thriving 58,000-year-old ochre powder production site has just been discovered in South Africa. The discovery offers a glimpse of what early humans valued and used in their everyday lives.

The finding, which will be described in the Journal of Archaeological Science, also marks the first time that any Stone Age site has yielded evidence for ochre powder processing on cemented hearths -- an innovation for the period. A clever caveman must have figured out that white ash from hearths can cement and become rock hard, providing a sturdy work surface.

"Ochre occurs in a range of colors that includes orange, red, yellow, brown and shades of these colors," project leader Lyn Wadley told Discovery News. "Yellow and brown ochre can be transformed to red by heating them at temperatures as low as 250 degrees Celsius (482 degrees Fahrenheit)."

Wadley, who authored the study, is a professor in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies and in the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand. She said ochre has been found on bone awl tools probably used for working leather, so it is possible that the ancients sported colorful leather clothing and other leather goods.

More at
http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/prehistoric-color-glue-factory.html#mkcpgn=emnws1
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