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Apr. 26, 2021 5:00 AM
Archaeologists have found the oldest home in hominin history. Unsurprisingly, it is a cave: Wonderwerk Cave in the Kalahari Desert. Astonishingly, it has been occupied more or less continuously for two million years. Through most of that time, modern humans didn’t even exist.
The archaeologists have also demonstrated the earliest-ever use of fire, a million years ago, and of symbolic thinking half a million years ago in Wonderwerk Cave, report Ron Shaar, Ari Matmon, Liora Kolska Horwitz, Yael Ebert and Michael Chazan in Quaternary Science Reviews.
Among the signs of advanced cognitive ability, the archaeologists believe they have found indications that ocher may have been used there 500,000 to 300,000 years ago – hundreds of thousands of years earlier than thought.