Hunting technologies during the Middle and Late Pleistocene in Africa: Implications for Modern Human Origins
By:
Jane Wilkins
Date:
Tue, 08/09/2015 - 18:00
Venue:
SA Astronomical Observatory auditorium
Branch:
Western Cape
LECTURE September 2015
Humans are intelligent, innovative, and prosocial. We are unique among apes because we express these traits in an exaggerated way, and because we rely heavily on material culture to interact with the environment and with each other. Stone tools that preserve traces of their use as hunting weapons help to inform us about the timing and nature of the origins of these traits. Spear technology has a long chronology in South Africa, dating back to the early Middle Pleistocene ~500 thousand years ago. Long-distance, high-velocity projectile weapons such as the bow-and-arrow first appear during the Late Pleistocene by at least ~70 thousand years ago.
In this talk I will outline the new evidence for hunting technologies in the African Middle Stone Age. I suggest that each innovation represents a technological 'tipping point' where new cognitive and/or social capacities may have been both the cause and the effect. (For those of you who cannot attend the meeting, you can read https://www.academia.edu/8195052/An_Experimental_Investigation_of_the_Functional_Hypothesis_and_Evolutionary_Advantage_of_Stone-Tipped_Spears)
 |  |
| Experimental weapons used to test performance characteristics of tipped vs. untipped spears. (Photo by Jayne Wilkins) | Jayne Wilkins |