News Anthropology

Going Coastal: Sea cave yields ancient signs of modern behavior

By Bruce Bower

- More than 2 years ago

At Pinnacle Point on South Africa’s southern coast, a cave perched above the sea has provided scientists with evidence of a set of surprisingly complex behaviors practiced by Stone Age people about 164,000 years ago, near the evolutionary dawn of Homo sapiens. Our species emerged an estimated 200,000 years ago.

ANCIENT VIEW The ocean recedes beneath the mouth of a South African cave where researchers found the earliest known evidence of modern-human behavior, including a chunk of pigment (inset).