Archaeologists Find Oldest Home in Human History, Dating to 2 Million Years Ago
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium-archaeologists-find-oldest-home-in-human-history-2m-years-old-1.9745372
Archaeologists have found the oldest home in hominin history. Unsurprisingly, it is a cave: Wonderwerk Cave in the Kalahari Desert. Astonishingly, it has been occupied more or less continuously for two million years. Through most of that time, modern humans didn’t even exist.
The archaeologists have also demonstrated the earliest-ever use of fire, a million years ago, and of symbolic thinking half a million years ago in Wonderwerk Cave, report Ron Shaar, Ari Matmon, Liora Kolska Horwitz, Yael Ebert and Michael Chazan in Quaternary Science Reviews.
Among the signs of advanced cognitive ability, the archaeologists believe they have found indications that ocher may have been used there 500,000 to 300,000 years ago – hundreds of thousands of years earlier than thought.
Two million years ago, our ancestors were still small-brained but were definitely bipedal. We don’t know when our ancestors left the trees and began to stride the Earth upright, but we seem to have begun to trade arborealism for bipedalism during our australopithecine phase. That began about 4 million years ago. The point at which we discovered the virtues of shelter is even murkier.
Wonderwerk isn't one of the caves supporting the idea that our Middle Stone Age ancestors were obsessed with the sea, as shown at other sites clustered on South Africa's coast. It's inland, near the town Danielskuil in the chalky rocks of the Kuruman Hills and over 700 kilometers (435 miles) from the nearest beach.
Horwitz points out that the thinking in archaeological circles had been that in the Middle Stone Age, the interior was arid and hominins clung to the coasts. But Wonderwerk clearly shows human activity in the cave 240,000 years ago, showing that the interior wasn’t that dry.
In 2008, archaeologists Prof. Michael Chazan of the University of Toronto and Horwitz reported it as the earliest evidence of cave-dwelling hominins. At the time, they thought all this dated to some 2 million years; others thought that nonsense. Now the dating has been validated.
At the time, they deduced that the oldest stone tools had been made and deposited in the cave by the hominins, as opposed to being washed in by flooding. That opinion has not changed, Shaar tells Haaretz.
Who actually lived there? There were multiple hominids in southern Africa at the time. Chazan and the team in 2008 surmised that the most likely tool-maker was Homo habilis.
For about half the two million years the cave was in use, it seems its occupants were warming themselves and/or possibly even barbecuing.
They may not have had control of fire in the sense that they knew how to ignite it but a million years ago, they were certainly using it. Burned bones, burned stones, burned soil and ash have been found 30 meters in from the cave mouth – which was probably at least 40 meters back when, Chazan explains to Haaretz. (The cave mouth would have eroded in all this time.) That's too deep inside the cave to have been caused by a wildfire, he explains.
The postulation is that they may have “harvested” fire, taking advantage of naturally caused bushfires, taking a burning twig back to the cave, and that sort of thing.