Africa

Africa, South Africa

Blombos Cave and the birth of human intelligence

Artwork from Blombos Cave. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

11 Nov 2024

At the dawn of humanity, in a cave on what would become the Southern Cape coast, people who thought and looked like us mixed paint, crafted fine tools and explored graphic design.

Read Part 1

In a sense, it will be a pilgrimage to our ancient ancestry. Blombos Cave near Still Bay is known worldwide for evidence found there of our cognitive origins as a species, including a small piece of ochre carefully cross-hatched with intentional design. It’s one of the oldest art objects on earth.

We six citizen scientists and paleoanthropologist Jan de Vynck plan to hike the coast to the cave mouth simply to have been there. For newly minted anthropologists, not visiting the cave would be like travelling to Egypt without seeing the pyramids. Hindsight will tell us it was a crazy idea.

strandlopers blombos beaches The beaches near Still Bay seem wild and remote. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

strandlopers blombos aeolianite formations Strange aeolianite formations near Still Bay. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

strandlopers blombos aeolianite Strange aeolianite formations near Still Bay. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

The road west of Still Bay goes from tar to gravel to jeep track and ends at a gate above a headland covered in spring flowers. The gate is locked. Only the privileged in their seaside villas far below have access, so we walk.

At the sea-slammed shore, we turn east and the challenge immediately becomes evident. The shoreline looks like Poseidon teamed up with Thor to smash up the cliffs. There’s a path of sorts, but from time to time we lose it and stumble on. It’s all spectacularly beautiful in a wild, deranged way, but we have to watch our feet at every step.

There are places where the path clings sandily to the cliff face with nasty drops only centimetres away on the lee side. There is much wobbly boulder hopping. This goes on, we will discover when the GPS recovers from the shock, for four kilometres.

strandlopers blombos trackway San trackers /uce Nǂamce and #oma Daqm view a trackway. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

De Vynck is driven on by sheer enthusiasm. The three Ju/’hoansi San trackers from Nyae Nyae in Namibia, Steven Kxunta, /uce Nǂamce and #oma Daqm, are super fit, but the rest of us seem rather grim, sweaty and not too talkative.

Finally, De Vynck announces the cave is just around the corner. It is, but also up a pretty hectic incline, and boarded up. Licenced scientists only. So we sit below and gaze at the legendary cave in which our ancestors once lived.

strandlopers blombos trackway Preparing a trackway for photogrammetry. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

strandlopers blombos tracks hippo Ancient tracks, possibly hippo. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

strandlopers blombos ancient track An ancient track of an animal yet to be identified. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

This is a special place, Steven Kxunta says. “It’s the cave of my people thousands of years ago.” Of course, he’s correct. We’re all linked to the first Homo sapiens on this coast, but the purest DNA connection would probably be to the San.

It’s going to be a long path back on tired legs so we head back along the now-dreaded path. But like resilient Homo sapiens, we make it through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA6VG_MWhi8&t=1s

Thinking food

De Vynck is a man of many specialities, one of which is paleo diets. That afternoon, as we put up our tired feet, he’s out foraging in the fynbos. Around an hour later he’s back with enough food to feed seven people with plant food. Another hour on the rocks and he could probably have produced more than double that amount from the intertidal zone. The names of the plants are long and escape us, but the meal is delicious.

“We survived as a species in the Middle Stone Age because we became coastal foragers,” he tells us as we munch what looks like asparagus but isn’t. “Once people became coastal adapted, which began around 164,000 years ago, they had a stable, dependable resource in shellfish and coastal plants, which made migration along the coast easier. Shellfish are a reliable source of food – they don’t run away when hunted.”

strandlopers fish traps still bay Ancient fish traps near Still Bay. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

strandlopers blombos staegemann Citizen scientist Layla Staegemann views an ancient trackway. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

Artwork from Blombos Cave. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

His interest in ancient foodways is more than just about how and what they ate, it’s about who we are. “There have been many steps along the way to being us,” he continues, “but there’s strong evidence that points to the Cape as the origin of cognitively modern humans.”

One hypothesis is that coastal living and the consumption of shellfish played a role in mental development. When Homo sapiens began consuming lipid-rich fatty acids like omega-3s, along with iodine from shellfish from around 164,000 years ago, it led to a physiological change. It was also brain food. These people made ever finer tools, they used pigments and they made art. They were indistinguishable from us.

It might seem unremarkable that they were eating shellfish. But for millions of years, earlier savanna-roaming Homo species had been restricted to eating land plants and animals. The Cape south coast is the first known example of human species exploiting marine resources.

From dating, it is thought that this adaptation came along perhaps between 160,000 and 70,000 years ago. This exploitation of coastal resources is seen as definitely modern human behaviour and would have been crucial to their survival.

Another hypothesis suggests that the availability of a productive and dependable resource forced humans to become socially more complex. This is true for any type of society, from hunter-gatherers to modern states.

“When a society has a stable resource, it fosters collaboration and increases social complexity,” says De Vynck. “You need structure. This was one of the drivers of modern Homo sapiens, which is fantastic.”

There were, it seems, two outcomes, one good, the other darker. The positive was intergroup collaboration, a novel social activity for our species. No other species, not even close ones like chimpanzees, practice sustained collaboration between groups.

On the other hand, Africa in a glacial period was drying out and many areas were becoming uninhabitable. As the game migrated, people would follow it to water sources at the coast.

But maybe these areas had reached carrying capacity, so you had people from inland competing for your resources. At this point, intergroup collaboration may have become necessary to defend your resources from other groups. And history tells us where that leads. Other species may have violent encounters, but organised war as we know it is uniquely human.

As we watch the sun heading down over the Cape Fold Mountains, De Vynck gets reflective. “Homo sapiens were developing here in the southern part of Africa. This was their home. But conflict might have driven some groups further along the coast, or it could simply have been population growth, which in turn forced migration.

“It wasn’t necessarily planned, it was slow, they were also responding to climate change. But the rich coastline provided a highway northward and gradually the movement that would emerge out of Africa and into the rest of the world.

“Globally, though, we’re beginning to agree that when you come to the Cape – specifically the Greater Cape Floristic Region or more narrowly the coastal Cape Floristic Region, you’re a Homo sapiens arriving home.” DM

This expedition was supported by the Discovery Wilderness Trust.

Read Part Three: A secret coast and the search for ancient footprints

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Africa

Read Part 1

Thinking food