Some modern humans spend a lot of time engaged in a game in which specially crafted clubs are used to strike a small ball. The setting for this game is traditionally a relative large and specially landscaped course. The game is known as golf. One of the modern golf courses, Pinnacle Point, is located near the town of Mossel Bay, Western Cape Province, South Africa. Near the golf course are a series of coastal caves. As the work began to construct the golf course in 2000, these caves were found to contain a wealth of evidence regarding very early human—Homo sapiens—occupation. Subsequently the site was excavated by an international team under the leadership of paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.
Shown above is the Pinnacle Point Archaeological Site. Photograph by Andrew Hall.
Caves are often archaeological sites simply because the preservation of ancient materials is better in a cave. As the archaeologists dig down in the site, they go back in time. In most sites, the top layer is the youngest and the lowest is the oldest. Edward Cecil Harris, in an entry in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, puts it this way:
“Stratification is a three-dimension body of archaeological deposits and features, from which a fourth dimension of relative time may be inferred.”
At Pinnacle Point, the lowest level was designated as PP13B. This level was dated by optically stimulated luminescence which dates the last time minerals were exposed to sunlight. The materials in the lowest level were about 165,000 years old. At this time, the world was in a long glacial state known as Marine Isotope Stage 6 (MIS6) and Africa was much cooler and drier than it is today. In his book
Humans: From the Beginning, Christopher Seddon reports:
“In the PP13B levels were found evidence for the use of ochre, sophisticated stone tools, and harvesting of seafood, all of which are considered to be markers of modern human behaviour. There were almost sixty pieces of red ochre, some of which show signs of grinding or scraping.”
Ochre was used for body painting and possibly for coloring animal hides. Ochre has been used by people all over the world, and ethnographic reports as well as archaeological findings show that it is generally associated with symbolic and ceremonial behavior. The presence of ochre in the site infers that the people who used Pinnacle Point at this time had religion.
Pinnacle Point is located near the ocean and the seafood remains show that the people were consuming seafood. Archaeologists uncovered fifteen types of marine invertebrates. These included whelks, limpets, mussels and periwinkles. In their report on the first season of archaeological excavation at Pinnacle Point published in PaleoAnthropology, Curtis Marean et al report:
“Their collecting rounds targeted the mid- and lower reaches of the intertidal zone from where brown mussels, arikreukel snails, limpets, chitons and black mussels were collected most probably during low spring tides.”
According to Christopher Seddon:
“…seafood might have been crucial to the survival of these early modern humans as their traditional food sources became scarce, forcing them to expand their home ranges to include Africa’s coastline. Shellfish collecting is often associated with more complex and sedentary societies; and at Pinnacle Point, this might have been a stimulus for symbolic expression through ochre use.”
The caves at Pinnacle Point 164,000 years ago were located between two and five kilometers from the sea because of lower sea levels at this time. The people at Pinnacle Point would have scheduled their trips to the coast to gather sea food using some sort of lunar calendar.
At this time, all humans used stone as their primary cutting tool. What was a bit surprising at Pinnacle Point, however, was that the people were using microliths, a type of stone tool that archaeologists had thought was first used only 70,000 years ago. Microliths are small—less than 10 mm or 0.375 inches wide—which are set into bone or wooden handles to make knives and saws or set into the tip of spears. Curtis Marean reports:
“Composite toolmaking is indicative of considerable technical know-how, and the bladelets at PP13B are among the oldest examples of it.”
The advantage of using microliths comes from the fact that they are easily replaced when they become dull or broken.
In addition to using microliths, the people at Pinnacle Point also used heat treatment to improve the flaking properties of the stone. Heating the stone in a fire makes it easier to flake and results in a much sharper edge. Heating the stone, however, can be a tricky process: too much heat may result in a broken stone, unusable for flaking. Similarly, sudden changes in the heat may also result in unusable stone: the heat must be brought up slowly, held steady, and then dropped down slowly. Experimental archaeology has shown that a temperature of 450-500° F maintained for 8 to 10 hours works well for stone such as chalcedony, chert, and jasper. Curtis Marean writes in a chapter in Becoming Human: Our Past, Present and Future:
“The process of treating by heat testifies to two uniquely modern human cognitive abilities. First, people recognized that they could substantially alter a raw material to make it useful—in this case, engineering the properties of stone by heating it, thereby turning a poor-quality rock into a high-quality raw material. Second, they could invent and execute a long chain of processes.”
The findings from Pinnacle Point are summarized by Christopher Seddon:
“At Pinnacle Point on the southern coast of South Africa, evidence has been found of an innovative cultural ‘package’ 165,000 years ago, including the harvesting of seafood, manufacture of sophisticated stone tools, and the use of red ochre pigment.”
Paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean:
“The remains debunk the abiding notion that cognitive modernity evolved long after anatomical modernity: evidence of behavioral sophistication abounds in even the oldest archaeological levels at PP13B. This advanced intellect no doubt contributed significantly to the survival of the species, enabling our forebearers to take advantage of the resources available on the coast.”
In 2012, Pinnacle Point was declared a provincial heritage site.