Artifacts Point to Earlier African Stone Age

Archaeologists at Border Cave where the artifacts were found.

 New findings indicate that the late Stone Age in Africa began about 20,000 years earlier than previously thought. Artifacts found in a cave reveal residents were carving bone tools, using pigments, making beads and even using poison 44,000 years ago.

Such artifacts had previously been linked to the San culture, which was thought to have emerged around 20,000 years ago. The Later Stone Age in Africa occurred at the same time as Europe's Upper Paleolithic Period, when modern humans moved into Europe from Africa and met the Neanderthals about 45,000 years ago.

 According to LiveScience.com:

"Our research proves that the Later Stone Age emerged in South Africa far earlier than has been believed and occurred at about the same time as the arrival of modern humans in Europe,” says researcher Paola Villa of the Colorado Museum of Natural History. "The differences in technology and culture between the two areas are very strong, showing the people of the two regions chose very different paths to the evolution of technology and society."

Traces of civilization have been found going back nearly 80,000 years in Africa, but these fragments — bone tools, carved beads — vanish from the archaeological record by about 60,000 years ago.

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Genes Reveal Prehistoric African Migration

Stone art depiction of Africans migrating.

Researchers have uncovered the first genetic evidence for prehistoric gene flow between Africa and Europe, as far back as 11,000 years ago. This evidence predates better known migrations between Africa and Europe during the Roman Empire, Arab conquest and the slave trade.

To trace human ancestry, scientists study the DNA sequence of the mitochondria, a specialized cellular structure that produces energy for the cell and carries genetic information separate from the rest of the genome that resides in the nucleus. While the nuclear genome is a mix of genetic information from both mother and father, the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed directly from mother to child without any contribution of DNA from the father. Geneticists can use these changes as markers that indicate the movements and migrations of humans in the past, and classify them into specific "haplogroups."

According to Genome Research:

"It was very surprising to find that more than 35 percent of the sub-Saharan lineages in Europe arrived during a period that ranged from more than 11,000 years ago to the Roman Empire times," said Dr. Antonio Salas of the University of Santiago de Compostela and senior author of the study. The other 65 percent of European haplogroup L lineages arrived in more recent times.

The authors explain that these contacts likely connected sub-Saharan Africa to Europe not only via North Africa, but also directly by coastal routes. Salas said it remains unknown why there was genetic flow between the Africa and Europe in prehistoric times, but one possible scenario is that some bidirectional flow was promoted when the last glaciation pushed some Europeans southward, until the glacier receded and populations returned north.

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Tools Indicate Earlier Migration from Africa to Arabia

Jebel Faya, where the stone tools were found.

Ancient stone tools unearthed from a once-fertile area near the Persian Gulf indicate early humans migrated from Africa much earlier than previously thought. The artifacts from Jebel Faya and dated to 120,000 years ago, were created with several techniques, including “bifacial reduction” ~ removing material from two rock faces ~ that was abundant in Africa, but has never before been found in the Arabian Peninsula.

“When I looked at this material, none of it looked Near Eastern,” said Anthony Marks, an archaeologist with Southern Methodist University who analyzed the tools. “The more I looked at the material, the more it became clear that it had a connection with the kind of tools of East Africa.”

According to PBS:

Tools like this were believed to be used to kill and butcher animals, scrape fat from hides, make clothes from animal skin and create other, possibly wooden, tools. Scientists dated the artifacts with a technique called optically stimulated luminescence data.

“In essence, this is a technique which allows us to determine the time which has elapsed since sand grains were last exposed to sunlight,” said Simon Armitage, a professor of geography with Royal Holloway, University of London, and co-author on the study.

Additional evidence supports the theory that these tools belonged to a group of people that migrated from Africa to Arabia, scientists say. The standard model, which relies on data from mitochondrial DNA, says the first humans left Africa about 60,000 years ago, traveled to Arabia and eventually, about 50,000 years ago, arrived in Australia.

Marks says he’s skeptical that the migration occurred so quickly. “The earlier movement out of Africa makes a lot more sense to me.” Plus, 120,000 years ago, the now-aird area had been transformed by monsoon rains into lush grasslands with lakes and acacia trees. Briefly, sea levels were low and the Red Sea was relatively easy to cross.

Click here for the PBS article.

Click here for the BBC article.

Artifacts Indicate Earlier Human Migration

Two artifacts from United Arab Emirates indicate early human residents.

New research indicates that early humans may have left Africa earlier than previously thought, but still doesn’t answer if they got any farther than Arabia. The most comprehensive genetic data so far available, based on material called mitochondrial DNA, indicates that all modern humans outside Africa are descended from a single, small population that left Africa less than 60,000 years ago, but even that data may be unreliable.

According to the New York Times:

The present view, based on both archaeological and genetic evidence, holds that modern humans, although they first emerged in Africa some 200,000 years ago, were hemmed in by deserts and other human species like Neanderthals and did not escape to the rest of the world until some 50,000 years ago.

An archaeological team led by Hans-Peter Uerpmann of the University of Tübingen in Germany now reports the discovery of stone tools 127,000 years old from a site called Jebel Faya in what is now the United Arab Emirates, just south of the entrance to the Persian Gulf. If the new tools were made by modern humans, as the researchers assert, then modern humans got out of Africa much earlier than believed.

“This is a huge milestone, but unfortunately it raises more questions than it answers,” Jeffrey Rose, an archaeologist at the University of Birmingham in England, tells the Times. The new finding ~ reported in Thursday’s issue of Science ~ points to a new level of importance of Arabia in understanding the human story.

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Earliest Illustrated Christian Book is Saved

A page from the Garima Gospels.

A British charity has saved the world's earliest illustrated Christian book, which was found at a remote Ethiopian monestary.

The Garima Gospels are named after a monk named Abba Garima who arrived in Ethiopia from Constantinople in 494 AD. Legend has it that he was able to copy the gospels in a day because God delayed the sun from setting. The relic has been kept ever since in the Garima Monastery near Adwa in the north of the country.

According to the London Mail:

Experts believe it is also the earliest example of book binding still attached to the original pages. The survival of the Gospels is incredible considering the country has been under Muslim invasion, Italian invasion and a fire in the 1930s destroyed the monastery's church. 

They were written on goat skin in the early Ethiopian language of Ge'ez. There are two volumes which date from the same time, but the second is written in a different hand from the first. Both contain illustrations and the four Gospels.

Though occasional travelers have mentioned the texts since the 1950s, it was thought they dated from the 11th century at the earliest. Carbon dating, however, gives a date between 330 and 650, overlapping the date Abba Garima arrived in the country.

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Ancient Ram Statues May Hold Key to One of Africa's Oldest Languages

Inscriptions on the base of these newly discovered statues of rams at el-Hassa may hold the key to understanding the Meroitic language.


Archaeologists this week announced the discovery of three ancient statues in Sudan with inscriptions that could bring them closer to deciphering one of Africa's oldest languages. The stone rams ~ representing the god Amun ~ were carved during the Meroe empire, a period of kingly rule that lasted from about 300 BC to AD 450.

Vincent Rondot, director of the dig carried out by the French Section of Sudan's Directorate of Antiquities, told Reuters News that each statue displayed an inscription written in Meroitic script, the oldest written language in sub-Saharan Africa.

"It is one of the last antique languages that we still don't understand,” he said. “We can read it. We have no problem pronouncing the letters. But we can't understand it, apart from a few long words and the names of people."

He said experts were still trying to work out the meaning of the words by comparing them with broken remnants of similar royal dedications in the same script. The statues were found three weeks ago under a sand dune at the site of a temple to the god Amun, an all-powerful deity represented by the ram in Sudan.

Click here for the Reuters article.

Workers clear soil away from the ram statues at the site of the Meroitic town in Sudan.