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Social Science: Anthropology
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The Paleoanthropology Society
Publication Date: Fall 2004
New artifacts found in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park offer some of the strongest evidence yet that symbolic thinking developed in humans earlier than once thought. The artifacts were excavated from a site in the Loiyangalani River Valley, and they are the first of their kind found in East Africa.
Scientists presented the new findings at the Society of Paleoanthropology meeting in March 2004. Curtis Marean of ASU’s Institute of Human Origins and J.C. Thompson from the Anthropology Department at ASU were among the presenters.
The findings include ochre pencils, bone artifacts, fish bones, mammal bones, and two ostrich eggshell beads. Other ostrich eggshell fragments found on the site could represent debris from bead making. The artifacts have not yet been dated using advanced dating techniques. However, Marean says that they were found alongside an assembly of Middle Stone Age tools.
Scientists define “behavioral modernity” as the ability to think abstractly and to create culture and art. Until recently, they believed that such modern behavior developed first in Eurasia. Human art and sophisticated artifacts found at various Eurasian sites have been dated to about 35,000 years ago.
Marean says that the Middle Stone Age in East Africa lasted from approximately 280,000 years ago to about 45,000 years ago. This is much earlier than what paleoanthropologists had considered the accepted beginning of symbolic thought.
“Some of the artifacts, in particular the ostrich eggshell beads, are rare or unprecedented in the Middle Stone Age,” Marean explains. “Beads were not previously believed to be present in the Middle Stone Age. Nothing like this has been published in Africa.”
The researchers see the beads as significant indicators of human cultural modernity because beads are clearly decorative. They say that decoration strongly implies abstract or symbolic thinking. The methods used to produce ostrich shell beads are also significantly more sophisticated than any techniques used to produce the tools generally found in the Middle Stone Age.—Diane Boudreau