Bone awls and points of Blombos
Punzones y puntas de hueso de Blombos
- Date
- c. 75 ka · confidence medium
- Place
- Blombos Cave, Still Bay, Western Cape, South Africa
- Credited to
- Middle Stone Age modern humans
- Field
- Tools
What was discovered
The Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos have yielded bone awls and points that were scraped and polished following a recognisable manufacturing pattern. They show that modern humans in South Africa worked bone systematically some 75,000 years ago.
Henshilwood and colleagues (2001) dated the pieces to between 84 and 72 ka; functional bone tools appear in Africa from the Middle Pleistocene, so Blombos is not the first use of bone but a well-dated example of its systematic working.
What it led to
- piercing of hide and fibre for clothing, bags and bindings
- bone points that may have served as projectile heads
- an early bone technology linked to the symbolic behaviour at Blombos