Modern culture emerged in Africa 20,000 years earlier than thought

Modern culture emerged in southern Africa at least 44,000 years ago, more than 20,000 years earlier than anthropologists had previously believed, researchers reported Monday.

That blossoming of technology and art occurred at roughly the same time that modern humans were migrating from Africa to Europe, where they soon displaced Neanderthals. Many of the characteristics of the ancient culture identified by anthropologists are still present in hunter-gatherer cultures of Africa today, such as the San culture of southern Africa, the researchers said.

The new evidence was provided by an international team of researchers excavating at an archaeological site called Border Cave in the foothills of the Lebombo Mountains on the border of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa and Swaziland. The cave shows evidence of occupation by human ancestors going back more than 200,000 years, but the team reported in two papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they were able to accurately date their discoveries to 42,000 to 44,000 years ago, a period known as the Later Stone Age or the Upper Paleolithic Period in Europe.

Once again I have to call Bull$hit. Nothing about modern culture came from Africa. Especially South Africa. Once again, name me one, just one successful subSarahan African country.

There have been tons of them. Didn't you get the memo?

I remember one Freeper years ago, who was an expert on African civilations, all of which disappeared without a trace. He wasn't too good at grammar and spelling, but he knew his myths.

Not a trace of written language in sight, no history, no narrative of any kind. Just the speculations defined by Mark Twain, "Such large returns of conjecture, from so modest investment of fact."

1200 BCE ~ estimated age for establishment of Tiwanaku ~ long after the big ice went away.

When the ice melted and the oceans began rising human beings were forced to figure some stuff out ~ maybe killing the big tigers was one of them. Still, as the ice melted the zone of grass that fed the giant elephants moved North as well and the predators followed the prey.

Serendipitously a comet smacked into the Earth and froze the elephants and that took the predators with the prey leaving behind only the smaller cats like lions and tigers.

Human beings quickly learned to deal with the smaller cats and today they are almost extinct.

For most of our history and pre-history human beings have lived in tents and temporary shelters.

You can see how important this to us at any camping trip ~ you set up the tent, behavior changes to a focus on the life of the tents and the campfires/cooking areas. You take down the tent, behavior changes to focus on the journey next.

You can literally order up the emotions by putting up a simple dining fly, and taking it down.

When I say this is built in, I mean really built.

So now we live in permanent dwellings ~ yet, even in times of incredible economic hardship Americans still have one of the highest address relocation rates on the planet ~ right up there with the khalihari bushmen (Sen people)

Recently some stone structures have been found on ancient shorelines 400 feet down ~ and the Indian archaeologists claim they've found several places like that.

But stone is rare ~ a recent Swedish find that looked initially like a space ship being dragged over the ocean floor appears to be a rock outcrop with stone fire pits built around it. This would have been right at the oceans edge as recently as 14,000 years ago.

Pretty primitive stuff.

There are some proto-writing materials scattered around the world in or on ancient sites. That big one in Turkey that dates back maybe to 12,000 BC has some interesting markings ~ very similar to shamanistic markings, and there are theories those things were involved in developing later writing systems (once somebody had the accounting system figured out in Sumer ~ the other major theory, and one with hard evidence for it as well).

You also find this same sort of thing with dates of up to 8,000 years ago in the Kola Peninsula Finland/Russia. There's some beautiful art there too ~ carvings in bas relief of birds, plants, so forth ~ just like the site in Turkey.

I"ve taken a good look at the statistical evidence for the Turkey site and it seems to me there are about 12 major totemic animals, and that pretty much means there was a systemic ordering of business there to reflect the primary social structure of the users.

12 shows up with any fully militarized society (Wales is a good example, so is Israel, the Greek tribes, etc.) It's a convenient number with the least number of items with the maximum number of primes. Far later Babylonian systems are based on 12 (with even their high base "60' being nothing more than 12 5's.

What we don't have is the slightest evidence that anything as old as 35,000 years had inherent shamanistic symbols, or more advanced accounting. There are signs of that in some of the cave materials from 15,000 years ago.

Like the ability to read, it probably takes time to spread the genes that make it possible to draw or write.

Again, I think this is a case of people in Arabia moving to Africa and taking their more advanced culture with them.

I have a very hard time believing that humans with at least the same mental capacity of modern people sat around for 40,000 years hunting and gathering.

Imagine, if you will, human societies living throughout the world during the last interglacial period. Then, in the space of a relatively few years, the next glacial period commenced and froze out everything in the temperate zones. Over the next hundred twenty-five thousand or so years, glaciers pushed through where many lived, obliterating all but ambiguous traces of their existence. The survivors fled to warmer climes and tried to reestablish their former ways of life.

Over the first centuries, the sea levels rapidly fell, exposing new routes into other places. Over the first few millennia, those millions of square miles, now below sea level, became habitable and were settled, especially in the warmer regions nearer the equator. And life continued, people doing who knows what, but probably a lot like now, A invents this, B expropriates that, C tries to control A and B, invaders come in to wipe them all out (look what happened to the Middle East over the course of about 4 centuries of Muslim conquest. Vast areas of productive land went to waste).

Rinse, lather, repeat.

Then over a period of about 6000 years, starting about 20k years ago, the sea level rose up to 30 meters above what it was at the lowest point of the last glacial maximum. That's almost 100 feet. AGW alarmists are touting the catastrophe for civilization that 5 feet would be. A hundred feet would be enough to disrupt a considerably large area. So those folks moved from there in search of other habitation.

Then over the course of 1000 years the sea level rose another 40 meters or 130 feet. Following that, until about 7000 years ago, the sea level rose another 75 meters or about 227 feet. This means that every bit of civilization that could have developed in the lower elevations of habitable land over the previous 100,000 years or so was obliterated over the course of the last 18,000 years, about 2/3 of the 470 foot increase taking place over the last 13,000 years, turning all those people into global warming refugees looking for somewhere to live at higher elevations, having to lose whatever they had built, taking with them whatever they could carry, having to deal with others already living at the higher elevations. It would have been a mess. There was more than ample cause going into the last glacial period and coming out of it for huge disruption of anything humans could have built.

Then, somewhere about 10,000 BC, there was some sort of celestial event that appears to have resulted in the wiping out worldwide of the megafauna. That was sure to have wreaked considerable havoc on whatever else humans had going on then.

And now, over the course of about 5000 years, a tiny blink of time, we've had successive, interactive waves of transient, largely agricultural-based civilizations that finally resulted in the last 300 or so years of "modern" technology and the past 100 years of ultra-modern technology using petroleum, advanced chemistry, metallurgy, and electricity. It has been about 20,000 years since the depths of the last glacial period and only the most recent 1/200th of that has seen the greatest growth in human population, learning, and longevity--due largely to the technological innovations based on petroleum and electricity. So, yes, given all the climatic disruption going on over the past 125,000 years and human nature in general, it's not surprising to see that humans spent so much time just eking out an existence, regardless of mental capacity.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.