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the complementary resources of land and sea. We presume that the selection of many near-
coastal caves was a part of a logistical pattern of land use that took people inland at other
times, perhaps following seasonal rhythms of plants and shellfish.
As regards Skildergat Kop and Trappies Kop, Deacon and Wilson (1992) have suggested that
people may have been living in Peers Cave for 200,000 years. Between 90,000 – 12,000 years
ago sea levels were much lower than they are today and so the ‘Peninsula’ would have looked
very different. These sites would have changed over those millennia from being near-coastal
to inland and back again, perhaps several times. But during the era of ‘Fish Hoek Man’ (the
last 7,000 years) the environment would have been similar to that in the photos at the
beginning of this paper.
With hindsight we can see that Victor and Bertie Peers, Eales and others at Dale-Rose Parlour
and Nero’s Cave on Trappies Kop, and Keith Jolly at Peers Cave in 1948, were excavating in
exactly the right places but were 80 years too soon. They were encountering the complex but
exciting world of early modern humans before either excavation techniques or dating methods
had become sufficiently well developed to allow them to reveal the full significance of their
finds. At that time, too, Africa was still regarded as a backwater in the flow of human
evolution, ‘peripheral’ in most archaeologists’ minds to the presumed centres of development
in Europe and the Near East. This has subsequently been proven to be dramatically wrong.
References
Clark, J. D. (1959). The Prehistory of Southern Africa. London. Penguin Books.
Deacon, J. and M. Wilson (1992). Peers Cave, ‘The cave the world forgot’. The Digging
Stick, 9 (2), 2-5.
Goodwin, A. J. H. and B. Peers (1953). Two Caves at Kalk Bay, Cape Peninsula. South
African Archaeological Bulletin 8 (31): 59-77.
Goodwin, A. J. H. and van Riet Lowe, C. (1929). The Stone Age Cultures of South Africa.
Annals of the South African Museum 27: 1-289.
