Introduction
Research Project
‘Origins of Modern Humans in Africa’
With the closure of
the Department of Archaeology in 1999 degree courses in archaeology are no
longer offered. However, some archaeological expertise has been retained through
the research project ‘Modern Human Origins in Africa’. This project
continues the research focus on African archaeology of the former department.
The origins of modern humans is one of the main research problems in
palaeo-anthropology and of interest not only to archaeologists but also to
physical anthropologists and evolutionary geneticists. Advances in research
since the 1970s have pointed to sub-Saharan Africa as the centre for the
emergence of modern humans. It would seem that some 50 000 years ago small
groups of modern humans, people like us, dispersed from Africa to Eurasia and
Australasia, replacing archaic humans like the Neanderthals in those parts. This
is the so-called Out-of-Africa hypothesis. Support for the hypothesis comes from
the high genetic diversity of sub-Saharan populations and the southern African
San people are of particular interest in this respect. The contribution of
archaeology has been to trace the distribution and provide information on the
behaviour of the people living in Africa prior to the dispersal.
Our research over the
last three decades has been directed at two archaeological sites, Boomplaas Cave
in the Cango Valley near Oudtshoorn and Klasies River main site
on
the Tsitsikamma coast. Together these sites cover the time from the appearance
of Khoekhoe herders less than 2 000 years ago to 125 000 years ago. Based on
this research we have argued for continuity in populations over this long period
that includes the Later Stone Age and part of the Middle Stone Age. We have long
championed the idea that the anatomically modern human remains dated to between
115 000 and 90 000 years recovered from Klasies River main site represent Middle
Stone Age people living and behaving much as present-day hunter-gatherers in the
Kalahari. This argument for the emergence of modern behaviour at an early date
is contrary to the perception based largely on evidence from Europe that the
emergence was relatively recent. Increasingly the findings at archaeological
sites elsewhere in Africa support our main contention.
