Blombos Cave is an important site discovered in the ’90’s. It is about 300 km east of Cape Town, South Africa and has yielded phenomenal Middle Stone Age deposits dated at between 100,000 and 70,000 years ago as well as Later Stone Age sequence dated at between 2,000 and 300 years.
A new paper in PLoS looks closer at the technology used by different groups from this site and compares them to other regions in South Africa, such as spear points made of stone and decorated ostrich eggshells. The authors sought to determine whether there was an overlap and contact across groups of Middle Stone Age humans. How did they make contact with each other? How would contact across groups affect one group? How did the exchange of symbolic material culture affect the group or groups?
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