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

Submitted by bat400 on Wednesday, 26 September 2012  Page Views: 5188

Natural PlacesSite Name: Border Cave
Country: South Africa
NOTE: This site is 159.11 km away from the location you searched for.

Type: Cave or Rock Shelter
Nearest Town: Pongola  Nearest Village: KwaNonjinjikazi
Latitude: 27.02S  Longitude: 31.988000E
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.
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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Border Cave
Border Cave submitted by bat400 : Sifting of deposits at mouth of Border Cave, near Ingwavuma, South Africa. Photo from excavations in the 1970s, dated 2 January 1971, by "Androstachys." This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. Commons is a freely licensed media file repository. (Vote or comment on this photo)
Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal.
Located in the Lebombo Mountains near the border between South Africa and Swaziland. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens skeletons and stone tools and knapping debris have been recovered. A set of tools almost identical to that used by the modern San people and dating to 44,000 BP were discovered at the cave in 2012. These represent the earliest unambiguous evidence for modern human behaviour, including specialized tool manufacture, hunting tactics, personal adornment, and notation.

The rock shelter is semi-circular in horizontal section, some 40 m across, and formed in Jurassic lavas as a result of differential weathering. Dating by C-14, amino acid racemisation and electron spin resonance places the oldest sedimentary ash at some 200,000 years ago.

Human bone fragments found in 1940 were recognised as extremely old, but In 1941 - 42 a team (University of the Witwatersrand) carried out a thorough survey. Later excavations in the 1970s by Beaumont were rewarded with rich yields, including the complete skeleton of an infant and remains of five adult hominins. Also recovered were more than 69,000 artifacts, and the remains of dozens of animal species showing that its early inhabitants ate bushpig, warthog, zebra and buffalo among others. Raw materials used in the making tools, beads and other artifacts include chert, rhyolite, quartz, and chalcedony, as well as bone, wood and ostrich egg shells.

Amafa Heritage/KwaZulu-Natal runs an Interpretive Center and an overnight camp below the site. Guides can take visitors up the hillside to the mouth of the rock shelter.

Ref:
Border Cave (South Africa), from About.com Archaeology.
Border Cave, Wikipedia.
Border Cave, Amafa Heritage/KwaZulu-Natal website.

Note: A Modern Culture Emerged 44,000 Years Ago. Later Stone Age emerged in South Africa more than 20,000 years earlier than previously believed -- coinciding with the time when humans were migrating from Africa to the European continent.
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Nearby Images from Flickr
Plectranthus sp - south africa north of the pongola dam
seedpods on pachypodium saundersii - N of pongola dam, south africa 3
seedpods on pachypodium saundersii - N of pongola dam, south africa 2
Pachypodium saundersii - N of pongola dam, south africa
flower bud of cotyledon orbiculata - W of greytown, south africa 4
aloe vanbalenii in south africa overlooking swaziland

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A Modern Culture Emerged 44,000 Years Ago by bat400 on Wednesday, 26 September 2012
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The emergence of clearly recognizable modern culture in our prehistoric past, as reflected by the observable cultural characteristics of modern hunter-gatherer groups, has long eluded scientists and has been a subject of debate for years. But now, an international team of researchers has uncovered material evidence that indicates a culture, much like that of the modern hunter-gatherer San people of Africa, existed as much as 44,000 years ago.

Led by Francesco d’Errico, Director of Research at the French National Research Centre, and a team of scientists that included Lucinda Backwell and Marion Bamford of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, they have dated and analyzed objects recovered from archaeological strata, or layers, at the Border Cave. The site has yielded exceptionally well-preserved organic material, making it well-situated for the application of a variety of time-tested dating techniques.

“The dating and analysis of archaeological material discovered at Border Cave in South Africa, has allowed us to demonstrate that many elements of material culture that characterise the lifestyle of San hunter-gatherers in southern Africa, were part of the culture and technology of the inhabitants of this site 44,000 years ago,” says Backwell.

Until now, most archaeologists thought that the earliest evidence of San hunter-gatherer culture in southern Africa dates back at most 20,000 years.

The artifacts revealed uses and practices very similar to that of modern San applications. Some of them:
Digging sticks weighted with perforated stones, dated to about 44,000 years ago;
A wooden stick decorated with incisions, used to hold and carry a poison containing ricinoleic acid found in castor beans;
Dated to about 40,000 years ago, a lump of beeswax, mixed with the resin of toxic Euphorbia, and possibly egg, wrapped in vegetal fibres made from the inner bark of a woody plant. Like the modern San equivalent, it was likely used for hafting arrowheads or tools;
Warthog tusks shaped into awls and possibly spear heads; and

The similarities did not stop there. Says Backwell, “they adorned themselves with ostrich egg and marine shell beads, and notched bones for notational purposes. They fashioned fine bone points for use as awls and poisoned arrowheads. One point is decorated with a spiral groove filled with red ochre, which closely parallels similar marks that San make to identify their arrowheads when hunting."

Another key research team leader, Paola Villa, (University of Colorado Museum of Natural History) lead study author of another report based on the same research, suggests that the finds indicate that the Later Stone Age thus emerged in South Africa more than 20,000 years earlier than previously believed -- coinciding with the time when humans were migrating from Africa to the European continent.

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."

The research by the team, consisting of scientists from South Africa, France, Italy, Norway, the USA and Britain, is published in two articles online in the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper titled Early evidence of San material culture represented by organic artifacts from Border Cave, South Africa. The other paper, titled Border Cave and the Beginning of the Later Stone Age in South Africa.



Thanks to coldrum for the link. For more, including photograsphs of the most recent finds, see popular-archaeology.com/issue/june-2012.
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