MALI: Crouched in a shallow square grid dug into the red African earth, American graduate student Sarah Edlund uses a hand brush to scrape soil into a dustpan.
She is uncovering scraping tools of a different kind – implements fashioned from quartz that were used 100,000 years ago to prepare animal hides.
“We have found a lot of quartz and this is important because it is not natural to this area. It must have been brought here,” Edlund said as she topped up her bucket with soil before taking it to a sifting device, where the dirt is separated from the quartz and other potential scientific treasures.
The two-metre-by-two-metre grid was pegged out just a month ago, but the site – Swartkrans – has been excavated for decades, yielding hundreds of hominid fossils and shining a light on our evolutionary past stretching back almost 2 million years.
The new ground being broken on a rocky hillside 25 km (15 miles) northwest of Johannesburg helps to reveal the material culture of our ancestors a thousand millennia ago, shortly after they had evolved into our species, Homo sapiens.
“In this area we have what are mostly called scrapers, a certain form of stone tool,” said Travis Pickering, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. The reason behind this conjecture is simple: modern humans also scrape and prepare hides with similar tools. Clothing and perhaps shelter would have been the most likely end product of the hides.
Much of the quartz retrieved at the site is in the form of flakes that may have come off while a tool was being fashioned. The scrapers themselves are fairly basic: a piece of quartz worked so that the edge can be used to literally scrape a hide from an animal. But what is striking is the sheer number unearthed, and what that suggests about our social development 100,000 years ago.
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