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Text Pages: Diepkloof - Rock Outcrop in South Africa
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Submitted by bat400 on Friday, 05 March 2010 Page Views: 1047
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 Site Name: Diepkloof Country: South Africa Type: Rock Outcrop
Nearest Town: Capetown, South Africa Nearest Village: Elands Bay
Latitude: 32.38685S Longitude: 18.453055E
Condition:| 5 | Perfect | | 4 | Almost Perfect | | 3 | Reasonable but with some damage | | 2 | Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site | | 1 | Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks | | 0 | No data. | | -1 | Completely destroyed |
no data
Ambience:| 5 | Superb | | 4 | Good | | 3 | Ordinary | | 2 | Not Good | | 1 | Awful | | 0 | No data. |
no data
Access:| 5 | Can be driven to, probably with disabled access | | 4 | Short walk on a footpath | | 3 | Requiring a bit more of a walk | | 2 | A long walk | | 1 | In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find | | 0 | No data. |
no data
Accuracy:| 5 | co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates | | 4 | co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map | | 3 | co-ordinates scaled from a bad map | | 2 | co-ordinates of the nearest village | | 1 | co-ordinates of the nearest town | | 0 | no data |
4
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External Links:         Rock Outcrop in South Africa.Two large rock shelters on the west bank of the Verlorenvlei River. Excavations have found hearths, tool fragments, decorated eggshell, and plant and animal remains dating to 55,000 to 65,000 years ago.
Note: Engraved Ostrich Eggs Suggest Early Early Man's Symbolic Thought. See comment.
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60,000 year old engravings on eggshells. (Score: 1)
by bat400 on Friday, 05 March 2010
(User Info | Send a Message) | What do Homo sapiens have that our hominid ancestors did not? Many researchers think that the capacity for symbolic behaviors—such as art and language—is the hallmark of our species. A team working in South Africa has now discovered what it thinks is some of the best early evidence for such symbolism: a cache of ostrich eggshells dated to about 60,000 years ago and etched with intricate geometric patterns.
This fits with other recent suggestions of symbolism from South Africa. For example, last year researchers reported pieces of ochre etched with what may be abstract designs and dated to 100,000 years ago at BlombosCave on the Southern Cape; similar etchings dated to about 77,000 years ago were previously reported from Blombos. The Blombos team argued that this represented a continuous, long-standing symbolic tradition, but some archaeologists question whether such etchings qualify as true symbolic behavior.
Since 1999, a team led by prehistorian Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux in France has been working at the Diepkloof rock shelter. This shelter contains evidence of several cultures that used stone tools typical of modern humans. Over the past few years, the team has uncovered fragments from an estimated 25 ostrich eggs in 18 archaeological layers dated by two separate techniques to between 55,000 and 65,000 years ago. The fragments are etched with several kinds of motifs - parallel lines with cross-hatches and repetitive non-parallel lines.
The team also found a few eggshell fragments that appeared to have been pierced with a tool to make a hole in the top part of the egg. The researchers suggest that the large eggs, which had a volume of about 1 liter, might have been used as water containers, as hunter-gatherers in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert have used ostrich eggshells during historical times. The team concludes that the discovery “represents the earliest evidence of the existence of a graphic tradition among prehistoric hunter-gatherer populations.”
But is this really symbolism? Yes, says Stanley Ambrose, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “It is an important new addition to the corpus of evidence for the development of modern human symbolic and artistic expression in Africa.”
Others aren’t so sure. The engravings could have been done for aesthetic purposes unrelated to symbolism, says Thomas Wynn, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Researchers need to demonstrate that such engravings “require symbolic thinking,” rather than simply assuming that all such etchings are symbolic, says Wynn.
For more, see Science Now. | [ Reply to This ]
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