Archaeologists say the dwelling place in Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert was home to early humans two million years ago, making it “the oldest home in human history”.
In scientific articles at Quaternary Science Reviews, a team from the University of Toronto, Canada, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, dated dwellings by examining sediment in caves.
The lead author of the journal, Professor Ron Shaar, explains determining the age of occupancy in caves is the team’s most challenging work of archaeologists.
The solution, says Shaar, is that the team analyzed a layer of sediment 2.5 meters thick containing stone tools, animal remains, and fire traces using two methods: paleomagnetism and burial dating.
“We carefully took hundreds of very small sediment samples from the cave walls and measured their magnetic signals,” said Shaar.
Magnetization occurs when clay particles enter the cave from the outside, fall on the floor of the cave, and thereby perpetuate the direction of the magnetic field at that time.
“Our laboratory analysis shows some of the samples are magnetized to the south, not to the north, which is the direction of the current magnetic field,” said Shaar.
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Shaar explained that the date for changing the direction of the magnetic field has been recognized globally. “This provides clues about the age of the entire layer sequence in the cave,” he added.
Professor Ari Matmon’s team members used the second dating method to find out when humans first entered and lived in this cave.
“The quartz particles in the sand have a geological clock that starts ticking when they enter the cave. In the laboratory, we can measure the concentration of specific isotopes and deduce how much time has passed since the grains of sand entered the cave,” explains Matmon.
The analysis showed some two million year old sediments.
This conclusion is the same as the results of research conducted by a team member, Professor Michael Chazan, in 2008 using the cosmogenic dating method.
The confirmation that humans have lived in the Wonderwerk Cave two million years ago has very significant implications.
“This is an important step in understanding the tempo of human evolution across the African continent. The time scale has been confirmed and we can continue to study the connection between humans and climate change, as well as study the lives of our ancient ancestors,” said Chazan and another team member, Liora. Kolska Horwitz.
In Wonderwerk Cave, ancient stone tools such as hand axes were found, and evidence of early humans in this cave used fire about a million years ago, as published in the journal. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.
Evidence of fire traces such as charred bones and ashes were found deep in the cave and experts conclude that the fire tracks were “confirmed to be the result of human activity not due to natural causes.”
The historical site inside the Wonderwerk Caves was discovered by some farmers in the 1940s. Since then excavations have been carried out to “unravel the mystery of the human existence in the cave some two million years ago”.
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