Tortoise taphonomy and tortoise butchery patterns at Blombos Cave, South Africa

Diachronic Change within the Still Bay at Blombos Cave, South Africa

Characteristically shaped bifacial points are stone artefacts with which the Middle Stone Age Still Bay techno-complex in Southern Africa is identified. Traditional approaches such as chaîne opératoire and two-dimensional metrics in combination with attribute analyses have been used to analyse variability within Still Bay point assemblages. Here we develop a protocol to extract and analyse high...

Blombos Cave

Blombos Cave is an important site on the Southern Cape of South Africa for supporting " modern behavior " of the Middle Stone Age people. Many contend that the MSA people were not fully modern in behavior because the artifact remains do not support the working of organic material, fishing, and other advanced behavior. They also project that these behaviors may not have originated in Africa. How...

Techno-Cultural Characterization of the MIS 5 (c. 105 – 90 Ka) Lithic Industries at Blombos Cave, Southern Cape, South Africa

Blombos Cave is well known as an important site for understanding the evolution of symbolically mediated behaviours among Homo sapiens during the Middle Stone Age, and during the Still Bay in particular. The lower part of the archaeological sequence (M3 phase) contains 12 layers dating to MIS 5 with ages ranging from 105 to 90 ka ago (MIS 5c to 5b) that provide new perspectives on the technolog...

The last tortoise

The UN used World Environment Day earlier this month to launch a report highlighting the problems facing the conservation and management of biodiversity in the face of the many assaults humans are making on the natural environment. The report — Dead Planet, Living Planet; Biodiversity and Ecosystem Restoration for Sustainable Development — highlights not only the preservation of natural ecosyst...

A Two-headed Tortoise.