Page 108 - Bulletin 15 2011

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They did contain crescents, by now renamed segments, they were made on blades using fine-

grained raw materials, but stratified above these assemblages were ones of ‘normal’ MSA
character. The evolutionary assumption needed attention, although it was clear that the MSA

assemblages above the Howiesons Poort ones were not the same as those below. The
assumption of unilinear change seemed to be the problem.

Second, and slower to emerge, it became clear that all of the MSA assemblages, including the

Howiesons Poort ones, were beyond the range of the radiocarbon dating technique, older than

30,000 years, and perhaps much older. In the meantime, Hilary and Janette Deacon had re-
excavated at the Howiesons Poort type-site and had tried to obtain radiocarbon dates from the

deposits there. Although it was clear that their excavated remains were similar to those of
Stapleton and Hewitt, getting reliable ages from the humic sediments, penetrated by tree

roots, was far from easy. The ‘ages’ ranged from about 9,000 to 18,000 years, an early hint
that archaeologists had previously seriously underestimated the antiquity of the Howiesons

Poort. Resolution of this problem had to await the development of new techniques, as we

show later.

Third, made the more remarkable by the increasing likelihood of great age for the Howiesons

Poort tools, all of the human skeletal remains were universally recognised as modern.
Although none of these remains came from burials, and all were fragmentary, all were

comparable with the equivalent portions of the skeletal remains of anatomically modern
people. There were some surprises in the size range of body parts. Of the mandibles, some

were considerably more robust than others, suggesting either a great deal of sexual or other
dimorphism in a single population, or the possibility of two separate populations. The former

is more likely, the latter not impossible. One parietal fragment had clear cut-marks coming

from the application of a stone flake, an observation that promoted the idea of cannibalism
among Klasies River MSA folk.

There were no assemblages at these sites that could be described as Still Bay, an important

reminder that sites generate idiosyncratic reflections of the regional narrative, certainly not
mirror image duplications of one another. Perhaps more significant was the undeniable

conclusion that MSA people, living far earlier than the last 12,000 years, had been

systematically exploiting marine shellfish and, although in ways still debated, other marine