Cultural modernity: Consensus or conundrum?

The development of the Out of Africa model for the origins and dispersal of modern humans in the 1980s and 1990s led the field of paleoanthropology to drop other approaches to the evolution of modernity. Earlier models suggesting a gradual evolution from archaic to modern human morphology and cultural behavior simultaneously across the Old World have been replaced by models pointing to Africa as the only continent where modern humans evolved and modern patterns of cultural behavior emerged. The important paper by Texier et al. (1) in a recent issue of PNAS is the latest of a number of recent papers pointing to South Africa as a key area for studying the origins of cultural modernity. The authors present the most convincing data yet recovered documenting that Middle Stone Age people lived in a world characterized by symbolically mediated social and cultural relationships. The study presents numerous unambiguous examples of engraved ostrich eggshells (OES), including fragments that come from containers. The repetitive depiction of motifs, including a hatched band motif, suggests a behavioral tradition similar to that practiced by recent populations of hunters and gatherers. The use of OES flasks for storage and transport represents an important innovation. Excavators recovered these finds from multiple Howiesons Poort strata at Diepkloof, in the Western Cape, which have been dated using optically stimulated luminescensce and thermoluminescence to about 60,000 years ago. Much of the scientific community will view these finds, which document the storage of symbolic information, as further proof that cultural modernity evolved exclusively in Africa.