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food items such as seals, birds and fish. Howiesons Poort folk were not only flaking stone in

innovative, perhaps precocious, ways, they were also engaging in food gathering tactics
generally believed by archaeologists not to have appeared until much later. This site was

pivotal in turning perceptions of African people from being, in Desmond Clark’s famous
words, ‘peripheral to paramount’.

Current Situation

After the publication of the Wymer and Singer reports in 1982, and bolstered by Peter
Beaumont’s work at Border Cave, interest in the southern African Middle Stone Age

accelerated substantially. Work on the genetics, especially mitochondrial DNA, by
Californian scientists provoked a very lively debate on whether or not ‘anatomically modern

humans’ (however this is defined) emerged first in Africa and subsequently spread into
Eurasia. The fact that all of the Border Cave and Klasies River MSA human remains were

morphologically modern and pre-dated 50,000 years substantially supported this idea. On the

other hand, European Middle Palaeolithic assemblages, in many ways similar to the African
MSA ones, are always associated with archaic Neanderthalers who were superceded at about

35,000 to 40,000 years ago by modern so-called Cro Magnon people making blades as well as

art.

Evidence from the increasing number of excavations showed clearly that all human skeletal
remains associated with MSA assemblages across southern Africa are modern in morphology.

The focus of the search for modern human origins therefore shifted definitively to Africa and
in large part to its southern tip. However, it should be noted here that the Peers’ Fish Hoek

Man turned out to be only 7,000 years old and is not from the MSA but is certainly an LSA

burial into MSA deposits. (Stynder et al 2009).

In the 1990s Hilary Deacon re-excavated at Klasies River and more finely resolved the dating
and stratigraphy through this sequence. The Howiesons Poort levels were, he thought, over

70,000 years old, that is 30,000 years before the appearance of modern people in Europe. At
Blombos Cave, excavated by Chris Henshilwood, there are no Howiesons Poort assemblages

but there are ones characterised by an abundance of bi-facially-flaked leaf-shaped points of

the Still Bay form, well dated to 70,000 to 77,000 years old by the new luminescence