By Steve Drury First PUBLISHED ON April 1, 2021

We all, especially as kids, have collected visually interesting objects for no particular reason other than they ‘caught our eye’: at the beach; from ploughed fields; river gravel, or at the side of a path. They end up in sheds, attics and mantel shelves.

In an online News and Views article at the Nature website Pamela Willoughby discusses the significance of a paper on an archaeological site in the southern Kalahari Desert, North Cape Province South Africa (Willoughby, P.R. 2021. Early humans far from the South African coast collected unusual objects. Nature, v. 323, online News and Views; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-00795-5).

Jayne Wilkins and co-workers from South Africa, Australia, Canada, Austria and the UK have investigated a rock shelter, with floor deposits going back over 100 thousand years.

The researchers have, in a sense, continued the long human habit of seeking objets trouvée by using trowels and sieves to excavate the shelter’s floor sediments. They found a collection of cleavage fragments of white calcite and abundant shards of ostrich shell.

Ga-Mohana Hill is still a place that locals consider to have spiritual significance.

The authors consider the original collectors to have had no other motive than aesthetic pleasure and perhaps ritual, and that this signifies perhaps the earliest truly modern human behaviour.

Yet, in 1925 a cave on the other side of South Africa, in Limpopo Province, yielded a striking example of a possible ‘collector’s piece’ from much earlier times. It is associated with remains of australopithecines and has been dated to around 3 Ma ago (see: Earliest sign of a sense of aesthetics, November 2020).

Source: Wilkins, J. et al.2021. Innovative Homo sapiens behaviours 105,000 years ago in a wetter Kalahari. Nature, v. 323 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03419-0

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Many thanks to Steve Drury for permission to republish his article and to Bernie Bell for sending it into The Orkney News