Posted on May 2, 2021
Canadian researchers help uncover oldest evidence of human activity in African cave
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TORONTO -- A team of archeologists and geologists has confirmed the oldest cave dwelling at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa's Kalahari Desert, dating back nearly two million years.
Wonderwerk Cave is an archeological record that spans over millions of years and holds evidence of some of the first use of fire and tool making by prehistoric humans.
The study, led by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Toronto, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, has confirmed the date of this site.
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Magnetostratigraphy and cosmogenic dating of Wonderwerk Cave
"We can now say with confidence that our human ancestors were making simple Oldowan stone tools inside the Wonderwerk Cave 1.8 million years ago. Wonderwerk is unique among ancient Oldowan sites, a tool-type first found 2.6 million years ago in East Africa, precisely because it is a cave and not an open-air occurrence," lead author, Ron Shaar at Hebrew University's Institute of Earth Sciences, said in a press release.
The team of researchers was able to determine that the shift from the Oldowan tools, sharp flakes and chopping tools, to early hand axes occurred more than one million years ago.
Deep inside the cave they also found evidence of early uses of fire from one million years ago. There were burnt bones, sediment, tools and even ash. According to the press release, the discovery of fire use inside the cave is significant because most evidence of early human fire use occurred in outdoor spaces where wildfire can’t be excluded as a possibility.
Due to the difficulty of dating cave deposits, the team worked on a 2.5-metre layer of sedimentary material using paleomagnetism and burial dating.
"We carefully removed hundreds of tiny sediment samples from the cave walls and measured their magnetic signal," Shaar said in the release.
According to the press release, magnetization would have happened when clay particles from outside the cave went inside and landed on the cave’s floor. These particles would preserve the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field at the time they entered the prehistoric cave.
"Our lab analysis showed that some of the samples were magnetized to the south instead of the north, which is the direction of today's magnetic field,” Shaar said. “Since the exact timing of these magnetic "reversals" is globally recognized, it gave us clues to the antiquity of the entire sequence of layers in the cave.”
A second method was used to further confirm dating of the human activity in the cave.
“Quartz particles in sand have a built-in geological clock that starts ticking when they enter a cave. In our lab, we are able to measure the concentrations of specific isotopes in those particles and deduce how much time had passed since those grains of sand entered the cave," Ari Matmon, Director of HU's the Institute of Earth Sciences, said in the press release.
Co-directors of the Wonderwerk Cave project, University of Toronto’s Michael Chazan and Hebrew University’s Liora Kolska Horwitz, said that these findings play an important role in understanding the rate of evolution in Africa.
“With a timescale firmly established for Wonderwerk Cave, we can continue studying the connection between human evolution and climate change, and the evolution of our early human ancestors' way of life."
Wonderwerk Cave is an archeological record that spans over millions of years and holds evidence of some of the first use of fire and tool making by prehistoric humans.
The study, led by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Toronto, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, has confirmed the date of this site.
Related Stories
Why was a 17th century Swedish bishop buried with a fetus?
Researchers discover ancient 'pet cemetery' in Egypt
Roman chariot unearthed 'almost intact' near Pompeii
Related Links
Magnetostratigraphy and cosmogenic dating of Wonderwerk Cave
"We can now say with confidence that our human ancestors were making simple Oldowan stone tools inside the Wonderwerk Cave 1.8 million years ago. Wonderwerk is unique among ancient Oldowan sites, a tool-type first found 2.6 million years ago in East Africa, precisely because it is a cave and not an open-air occurrence," lead author, Ron Shaar at Hebrew University's Institute of Earth Sciences, said in a press release.
The team of researchers was able to determine that the shift from the Oldowan tools, sharp flakes and chopping tools, to early hand axes occurred more than one million years ago.
Deep inside the cave they also found evidence of early uses of fire from one million years ago. There were burnt bones, sediment, tools and even ash. According to the press release, the discovery of fire use inside the cave is significant because most evidence of early human fire use occurred in outdoor spaces where wildfire can’t be excluded as a possibility.
Due to the difficulty of dating cave deposits, the team worked on a 2.5-metre layer of sedimentary material using paleomagnetism and burial dating.
"We carefully removed hundreds of tiny sediment samples from the cave walls and measured their magnetic signal," Shaar said in the release.
According to the press release, magnetization would have happened when clay particles from outside the cave went inside and landed on the cave’s floor. These particles would preserve the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field at the time they entered the prehistoric cave.
"Our lab analysis showed that some of the samples were magnetized to the south instead of the north, which is the direction of today's magnetic field,” Shaar said. “Since the exact timing of these magnetic "reversals" is globally recognized, it gave us clues to the antiquity of the entire sequence of layers in the cave.”
A second method was used to further confirm dating of the human activity in the cave.
“Quartz particles in sand have a built-in geological clock that starts ticking when they enter a cave. In our lab, we are able to measure the concentrations of specific isotopes in those particles and deduce how much time had passed since those grains of sand entered the cave," Ari Matmon, Director of HU's the Institute of Earth Sciences, said in the press release.
Co-directors of the Wonderwerk Cave project, University of Toronto’s Michael Chazan and Hebrew University’s Liora Kolska Horwitz, said that these findings play an important role in understanding the rate of evolution in Africa.
“With a timescale firmly established for Wonderwerk Cave, we can continue studying the connection between human evolution and climate change, and the evolution of our early human ancestors' way of life."
Canadian researchers help uncover oldest evidence of human activity in African cave
Posted from ctvnews.ca
World History
Archaeology
Africa
Posted 3 y ago
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I always find this type of data very interesting. We just keep learning more and more about our past.
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SFC (Join to see)
One thing we can usually count on is that they will find even more extreme data. Maybe in a hundred years they might find something from 3 million years ago.
Archeologists are an interesting species. I remember some 20 years ago when I was working a design of a bridge replacement over the Delaware River between Shola and Barryville we carbon dated some corn at an Indian/white man encampment that was some hundreds of years before it was generally recognized that Europeans were in the area. It didn’t fit the pattern the archeologists recognized and they wanted nothing to do with it. I believe since then other sites showed the same data and they needed to accept it. My point is at least some archeologists are very protective and snobbish about theories they have credit for and will work to discredit any work counter to their own. What I have seen, MHO.
Archeologists are an interesting species. I remember some 20 years ago when I was working a design of a bridge replacement over the Delaware River between Shola and Barryville we carbon dated some corn at an Indian/white man encampment that was some hundreds of years before it was generally recognized that Europeans were in the area. It didn’t fit the pattern the archeologists recognized and they wanted nothing to do with it. I believe since then other sites showed the same data and they needed to accept it. My point is at least some archeologists are very protective and snobbish about theories they have credit for and will work to discredit any work counter to their own. What I have seen, MHO.
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SFC (Join to see) - It's good to know we have that proof! National Geographic's DNA research was for the purpose of finding migratory patterns out of Africa and around the world. Their results put earliest people in the Kalahari . . . the indigenous of that region being the Khoisan also referred to as San/Bushmen/Pigmy/Hottentots/Giraffe people (who historically hunted Giraffes).
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