Reply to d’Errico et al. on Primordialism and the ‘Pleistocene San’ of southern Africa
We thank our colleagues for their insightful comments. The weight of modern evidence is against the notion that contemporary human cultures can be tracked backwards into the Pleistocene (e.g. Lee and DeVore 1976; Kuper 1988; Wilmsen 1989; Solway et al. 1990; MacEachern 2000). Modern-day hunter-gathe...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Journal article |
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Cambridge University Press
2016
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| Summary: | We thank our colleagues for their insightful comments. The weight of modern evidence is against the notion that contemporary human cultures can be tracked backwards into the Pleistocene (e.g. Lee and DeVore 1976; Kuper 1988; Wilmsen 1989; Solway et al. 1990; MacEachern 2000). Modern-day hunter-gatherers are not our Stone Age ancestors. Current protestations notwithstanding, the provocative title d’Errico and colleagues chose for their (2012) paper “Early evidence of San material culture represented by organic artifacts from Border Cave, South Africa” unambiguously asserts the opposite. Our critique of that paper’s content does not question the robusticity of the methods employed at Border Cave (for this see Evans 2012). Rather, our comments focus on the theoretically flawed search for a specifically “San” “cultural adaptation” at any Pleistocene archaeological site. |
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