Ancient tools from South African caves reveal connections between prehistoric peoples

In a cave overlooking the oceans on South Africa’s southern coast, archaeologists have discovered thousands of stone tools, made around 20,000 years ago. By examining the small details of the blades and chipped edges of stones, archaeologists can tell how to create the tool.

In a study published in the Journal of Paleolithic Archeology, researchers analyzed these stone tools and discussed how they suggested a variety of techniques to suggest how prehistoric people traveled, interacted, and shared craft.

“This is an important insight into how people who lived in the area live, hunted and responded to the environment,” says Sarah Watson, a postdoctoral scientist at the Field Museum’s Negany Integrated Research Center and lead author of the study.

During the period when these blades were made, 24,000 to 12,000 years ago, Earth was approaching the end of the last major ice age. Much of the Earth’s water was frozen in glaciers and ice caps, so sea levels were low, and the area now on the coast of South Africa was a few miles inland.

“As opposed to being on the water as we do today, these caves would have approached a vast, open plain with large game animals like Antelope,” says Watson. “People hunted those animals and to do that, they developed new tools and weapons.”

Part of what is called archaeologists, the caves no longer overlook the plains. They are on the face of a cliff towering over a rocky beach.

“It’s a 75-foot climb from the coastline to the cave,” Watson says. “We had stairs made of safety ropes and sand bags, and we had to use them while we were excavating.”

Every day, Watson and her colleagues climbed with up to 50 pounds of excavation and photography equipment.

“These are so old places that we had to be very careful about excavations even before the end of the last ice age,” Watson says. “We used small, small dental tools and minislayers to allow us to remove small individual layers of sediment.”

Under ancient dust and dirt, Watson and her team found thousands of stone tools. They are small sharp blades and large rocks with these blades missing. The large rock on which the blade is made is called the core.

“When your average person thinks about stone tools, they probably focus on isolated parts, blades and flakes. But what’s most interesting to me is the core, as it shows us the specific methods and orders people have experienced to make their tools,” says Watson.

Watson and her colleagues observed several distinct patterns of how the core was split into small blades. “In many of these technologies, core reduction is very specific, and that’s what you’re teaching and learning, and that’s where social information is,” says Watson.

“As an archaeologist, looking at the concrete ways of core reduction across multiple sites across the landscape, it tells us that these people share ideas with each other.”

For example, one particular way Watson breaks small blades from the core he found in a robbery cave is a style that is hundreds of miles away, in places that include Namibia and Lesotho. “The same core reduction pattern, the same intended product,” says Watson. “The pattern is repeated over and over again. This shows that it is intentional and shared, not just a similarity of opportunities.”

Overall, Watson says the study reveals how much we should still learn about robbery caves and the people who used them thousands of years ago.

“We have a very long and rich history as a species, and humans take much longer to come back than most people notice,” says Watson. “The people who lived around the last Ice Age looked very similar to the people we are today.”