Rock stars: how a group of scientists in South Africa rescued a rare 500kg chunk of human history yahoo.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yahoo.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A team of scientists theorize that a kite-shaped stone found on the coast of South Africa was intentionally shaped to resemble an endemic blue stingray species.
Patterns of so-called modern human behavior are increasingly well documented in an abundance of Middle Stone Age archaeological sites across southern Africa. Contextualized archives directly preceding the southern African Middle Stone Age, however, remain scarce. Current understanding of the terminal Acheulean in southern Africa derives from a small number of localities that are predominantly in the central and northern interior. Many of these localities are surface and deflated contexts, others were excavated prior to the availability of modern field documentation techniques, and yet other relevant assemblages contain low numbers of characteristic artifacts relative to volume of excavated deposit. The site of Montagu Cave, situated in the diverse ecosystem of the Cape Floral Region, South Africa, contains the rare combination of archaeologically rich, laminated and deeply stratified Acheulean layers followed by a younger Middle Stone Age occupation. Yet little is known about the site