Africans who lived about 90,000 years ago

 

 

Africans who lived about 90,000 years ago carved animal bones into spear points and used these relatively sophisticated weapons to catch fish, a team of anthropologists has concluded. The discovery indicates that these tools existed in Africa about 75,000 years before appearing in Europe or Asia.

 

The findings, reported in today's issue of the journal Science, fit well with other evidence that modem humans (Homo sapien sapien) evolved first in Africa, perhaps about 125,000 years ago, and then reached Eurasia much later, bringing their superior toolmaking abilities with them.

 

Previous research suggested that these earliest examples of modem humans had developed only a simpler, cruder stone tool technology until they reached Europe 40,000 years ago. In European archeological sites of that time, scientists had found what until now were the oldest known carved bone points.

 

Such tools were not known to have appeared until around 14,000 years ago. The 90,000-year-old African points look very much like the newer European ones. The new find "shows that humans in Africa had invented sophisticated technologies long before their European counterparts, who long have been credited with initiating modem culture," said Allison S. Brooks, an anthropologist at George Washington University.

 

Brooks made the discoveries in collaboration with her husband, John E. Yellen, director of the National Science Foundation's archeology program. The two led a research group that included more than a dozen collaborators. The bone points were found in a site called Katenda, in the Sermiliki Valley of eastern Zaire near the Uganda border.

 

"We were pretty blown away by this," Brooks said. "We didn't expect it at all." The bone points measure up to about 5 inches long. The ends have been sharpened by rubbing against an abrasive surface, and in some cases one end has grooved rings apparently created to help hold the bone on a wooden shaft.

 

The edges have been carved, presumably with stone tools, to create rows of barbs that would lock in the flesh of a speared animal. Yellen and Brooks said 10 bone points were found at a site littered with bones of catfish, including some that in life would have measured 6 feet long and weighed 75 pounds.

 

They said that when the site was occupied, it was near a shallow river where such fish would have been abundant.

 

This report is from April 28, 1995 and is also listed in the publication journal Science.

 

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