http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7049597.stm
Cave clue to 'first beachcombers'
Curtis Marean in the cave at Pinnacle Point, South Africa (D.Johanson/ASU)
The cave at Pinnacle Point is about 50m above current sea level
The waste from shellfish dinners discarded in a South African cave is said to be the earliest evidence of humans living and thriving by the sea.

Researchers tell the journal Nature the remains were buried in sediments that are 164,000 years old.

The exploitation of coastal resources is thought to have been key in allowing early humans to move across the globe.

"All we find is the trash that was left behind, so we have to interpret what they were doing from the remains," said team member Erin Thompson from Arizona State University (ASU), US.

"[The layer of material] is about half-a-metre deep. It's cemented up against the side of the cave. That would be tens of thousands of years of garbage," she told the BBC.

The team excavated from the cave the cooked remains of some 15 types of marine invertebrate, mainly brown mussels, as well as other animal bones.

Colourful thoughts

The researchers also found pieces of ochre, a soft stone that can be scraped to produce powders with rich pigments.

Ochres are viewed as important indicators of advanced behaviour - the use of colour for symbolism. And although the powders can have a functional use, as an ingredient in glue, the persistent choice of the brightest hues suggests some abstract activity is being undertaken, such as body painting

Being able to conceptualise - the ability to let one thing represent another - was a giant leap in human evolution. It was the mental activity that would eventually permit the development of sophisticated language and maths.[i]

"It has been argued that shellfish exploitation was crucial to a potential early coastal route of modern humans out of Africa via the Red Sea coast."

[i]The Pinnacle Point cave, although it stands directly on the coast today some 15m above the waves, would actually have been a few km from the shoreline when its inhabitants were eating their shellfish meals.

Settlements directly on or near the beach 164,000 years ago would now be under water.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/200...u-rfe101207.php
Researchers find earliest evidence for modern human behavior in South Africa
Arizona State University paleoanthropologist, graduate students, among hunters of modern human lineage
Ochre specimens with scrape marks, believed to have been made by early humans who used the red pigment in symbolic behavior.
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TEMPE, Ariz. – Evidence of early humans living on the coast in South Africa, harvesting food from the sea, employing complex bladelet tools and using red pigments in symbolic behavior 164,000 years ago, far earlier than previously documented, is being reported in the Oct. 18 issue of the journal Nature. The international team of researchers reporting the findings include Curtis Marean, a paleoanthropologist with the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and three graduate students in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

“Our findings show that at 164,000 years ago in coastal South Africa humans expanded their diet to include shellfish and other marine resources, perhaps as a response to harsh environmental conditions,” notes Marean, a professor in ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change. “This is the earliest dated observation of this behavior.”

Further, the researchers report that co-occurring with this diet expansion is a very early use of pigment, likely for symbolic behavior, as well as the use of bladelet stone tool technology, previously dating to 70,000 years ago.

These new findings not only move back the timeline for the evolution of modern humans, they show that lifestyles focused on coastal habitats and resources may have been crucial to the evolution and survival of these early humans.

Cashew nut fossils have been identified in 47-million year old lake sediment in Germany, revealing that the cashew genus Anacardium was once distributed in Europe, remote from its modern “native” distribution in Central and South America. It was previously proposed that Anacardium and its African sister genus, Fegimanra, diverged from their common ancestor when the landmasses of Africa and South America separated. However, groundbreaking new data in the October issue of the International Journal of Plant Sciences indicate that Europe may be an important biogeographic link between Africa and the New World.

“The occurrence of cashews in both Europe and tropical America suggests that they were distributed in both North America and Europe during the Tertiary and spread across the North Atlantic landbridge that linked North America and Europe by way of Greenland before the rifting and divergence of these landmasses,” explain Steven R. Manchester (University of Florida), Volker Wilde (Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, Sektion Palaeobotanik, Frankfurt am Main, Germany), and Margaret E. Collinson (Royal Holloway University of London, UK). “They apparently became extinct in northern latitudes with climatic cooling near the end of the Tertiary and Quaternary but were able to survive at more southerly latitudes.”
The researchers examined possible fossil remains found in the Messel oil shales, near Darmstadt, Germany, which are dated to about 47 million years before the present and reveal the presence of a “conspicuously thickened” stalk. In four out of five specimens, this hypocarp was still firmly attached to the nut, indicating that the two were dispersed as a unit.

Early gestural communication may then have gradually developed from, as Mike Corballis puts it, 'hand to mouth' leading to vocal language in modern Homo sapiens by about 130,000 years ago. The anatomy of the vocal apparatus of these early modern humans suggests that they were capable of speech...

the first strong evidence that they used symbolic representations (e.g., ornaments, figurines and paintings - 38,000 to 32,000 years old) is the beginning of Palaeolithic art around 40,000 years ago (Bahn, 1996). The earliest incontrovertible evidence for the presence of language, however, is of course only about 5,500 years old (i.e., the first writings). The hiatus between the emergence of anatomically modern humans and the first evidence for symbolic thought has been used to support the claim that modern humans evolved language very recently through social construction (Lock, 1999). Similar arguments have been advanced for other human representational skills. Baron-Cohen (1999), for example, claims that only with the artefacts emerging in the last 40,000 years do we have evidence for a representational theory of mind.


For example, the finding of a single clear artefact of symbolic representation confidently dated at, say, 250,000 years ago would shatter the 40,000 year theories. One contender for this position (the Berekhat Ram 'figurine') has already been proposed (Marshack, 1997). However, no find could possibly falsify an early-bloomer theory that, say, postulates that even Homo erectus was capable of cave drawings. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

However, the dating of older items becomes increasingly unreliable and is ever more prone to error. After 40,000 years less than one percent of the original 14C remains in the sample and radiocarbon dating becomes nearly impossible.

7. The older the item the greater the chance that there is some form of contamination. Anything would do: some root material, improper handling, or some organic waste transported through underground water. If there is any contamination with later organic matter it will make the fossil appear to be younger than it actually is by introducing fresh 14C. A 200,000 year-old object could thus erroneously be dated to be 32,000 years old.

Thieme (1997) recently excavated wooden throwing spears in between deposits of the Elsterian and Saalian glaciations. The well-studied sedimentary sequence at this site suggests that the spears are about 400,000 years old. The spears were found in association with 10 butchered horses, suggesting that there was coordinated and planned big game hunting well before modern Homo sapiens. Again, the boundary can be pushed in only one direction. The question is how far back.

13. This sounds like bad news for all those cherished late-bloomer theories. However, it is precisely because they are likely to be falsified that they represent good Popperian science. It may be exactly for this reason that we might choose to disregard the Socite de Linguistiques ban.

Sally McBrearty, an archaeologist and fossil expert at the University of Connecticut, argues that there is no evidence for genetic mutations encouraging symbolic thinking.
Her own research at sites in Kenya, she said in an interview, indicates that "even those early people more than 100,000 years ago showed symbolic behavior, cognition and as much intelligence as modern people." Henshilwood's evidence, she said, "is very convincing -- it's the real deal."
There is other tentative evidence for the emergence of complex symbolic thinking in Africa, according to John E. Yellen, an archaeologist at the National Science Foundation who has excavated a 90,000-year-old site in the Katanda region of Zaire.
Working at Katanda more than a decade ago with his wife, Alison S. Brooks of George Washington University, the two discovered bone points with barbs on three edges and rings carved at their bases to tie them to shafts -- evidence, he said, of sophisticated spears for organized fishing expeditions with giant fish as their prey.
The evidence, Yellen and Brooks said, indicates that the ancient people "not only possessed considerable technological capabilities at this time, but also incorporated symbolic or stylistic content into their projectile forms."

In hunter-gatherer societies beads communicate, among other things, the personal, social and ethnic identity of the holder. Fully syntactical language is arguably an essential requisite to sharing and transmitting the symbolic meaning of each beadwork. Since the use and transmission of such means of visual communication imply contacts with surrounding groups, sharing similar needs, the Blombos shell beads cannot represent an isolated or idiosyncratic behaviour.