Lyn Wadley

TL;DR: Age ages for nine sites from varied climatic and ecological zones across southern Africa show that both industries were short-lived (5000 years or less), separated by about 7000 years, and coeval with genetic estimates of population expansion and exit times.

TL;DR: Compound adhesives made from red ochre mixed with plant gum were used in the Middle Stone Age of South Africa and this ability suggests overlap between the cognitive abilities of modern people and people in the MSA.

TL;DR: Recently discovered bone implements from Middle Stone Age (MSA) deposits at Sibudu Cave, South Africa, confirm the existence of a bone tool industry for the Howiesons Poort (HP) technocomplex as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: In this paper, it is argued that artefacts are not inherently imbued with symbolism and that modern human culture cannot be automatically inferred from inventories of archaeologically recovered material culture, and evidence for out-of-brain storage of symbolism in southern African sites first appears in the final phase of the Middle Stone Age at about 40,000 years ago.

TL;DR: Micromorphological analysis of sediments from the Middle Stone Age site of Sibudu Cave, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, provides a high-resolution sequence and evidence of site formation processes of predominantly anthropogenic deposits.