Then, about 80,000 years ago, says Blombos archaeologist Hen****lwood,
modern humans entered a "dynamic period" of innovation. The evidence
comes from such South African cave sites as Blombos, Klasies River,
Diepkloof and Sibudu. In addition to the ocher carving, the Blombos
Cave yielded perforated ornamental shell beads=97among the world's first
known jewelry. Pieces of inscribed ostrich eggshell turned up at
Diepkloof. Hafted points at Sibudu and elsewhere hint that the moderns
of southern Africa used throwing spears and arrows. Fine-grained stone
needed for careful workman****p had been trans****ted from up to 18
miles away, which suggests they had some sort of trade. Bones at
several South African sites showed that humans were killing eland,
springbok and even seals. At Klasies River, traces of burned
vegetation suggest that the ancient hunter-gatherers may have figured
out that by clearing land, they could encourage quicker growth of
edible roots and tubers. The sophisticated bone tool and stoneworking
technologies at these sites were all from roughly the same time period=97
between 75,000 and 55,000 years ago.
Virtually all of these sites had piles of seashells. Together with the
much older evidence from the cave at Pinnacle Point, the shells
suggest that seafood may have served as a nutritional trigger at a
crucial point in human history, providing the fatty acids that modern
humans needed to fuel their outsize brains: "This is the evolutionary
driving force," says University of Cape Town archaeologist John
Parkington. "It is sucking people into being more cognitively aware,
faster-wired, faster-brained, smarter." Stanford University
paleoanthropologist Richard Klein has long argued that a genetic
mutation at roughly this point in human history provoked a sudden
increase in brainpower, perhaps linked to the onset of speech.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/human-migration.html?c=3D=
y&page=3D3
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