An international research consortium, spearheaded by the University of Tübingen, has documented at the site of Kathu Pan 9 in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, that Middle Paleolithic human groups deliberately and repeatedly extracted stones from specially designated locales at least 220,000 years ago.
This data, which has appeared in the journal Nature Communications, challenges the prevailing notion that hunter-gatherers of this epoch procured their lithic raw materials incidentally during other activities.
The investigation centered on analyzing remnants unearthed at Kathu Pan 9, an area characterized by extensive grasslands, situated roughly 140 kilometers inland from the Indian Ocean coast. There, Pleistocene geological processes sculpted a landscape of erosional gullies, exposing substantial layers of hornfels—a fine-grained metamorphic rock derived from slate, frequently utilized in the Stone Age for tool production.
The research team, led by Dr. Manuel Will from the Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the University of Tübingen, has been examining the geology and archaeology of this setting since 2022.
“At Kathu Pan 9, we uncovered numerous traces of hornfels quarrying, including pieces that underwent quality assessment, flakes of various sizes, thousands of millimeter-sized manufacturing debris fragments, and hammers,” Will notes.
According to the researchers, the aggregation of these items at this location does not suggest sporadic usage. The people knapped cobbles and fractured material here, shaping it to their desired specifications, presumably for subsequent tool creation, the archaeologist adds.
A crucial element in interpreting the function of this site is the composition of the recovered lithic assemblage itself. The researchers found almost exclusively what they term “production waste.” The absence of both finalized implements—that is, finished tools—and other signs of encampment or domestic activity indicates that the Paleolithic inhabitants of Kathu Pan 9 visited this spot exclusively and purposefully to access the coveted raw material.
There is no evidence that they cooked, consumed food, or manufactured other items during their stays; the rock was processed on-site down to a usable blank before final tool fabrication, and then transported elsewhere.
Luminescence dating of the findings points to the commencement of this activity around 220,000 years ago and extends the period of its use to at least 110,000 years BP. This implies that successive generations of Homo sapiens, over tens of thousands of years, returned to the very same deposit to source hornfels.
During our initial excursions, both on foot and utilizing drones, we identified approximately a dozen locations where perfectly preserved and unweathered flakes of hornfels residual material were visible in the eroded deposits—a veritable rarity for an open-air site,” Will explains.
Subsequent excavations revealed distinct stratigraphic horizons with high concentrations of finds, ranging from 200,000 to two million remnants per cubic meter. All sediments were sieved to capture even the minutest fragments.
Among the recovered materials, Günter Mähler from the Tübingen Institute of Prehistory, Protohistory, and Medieval Archaeology, successfully reassembled 353 discarded fragments through a process of ‘re-fitting’. “Using these three-dimensional puzzles, we could precisely see where and how the material detached, and in what sequence. Multiple such puzzles together allow us to infer the shape of the final product before it was carried away,” Mähler elucidates.
The significance of these findings transcends mere technological data. The planning demonstrated by the systematic quarrying of hornfels at Kathu Pan 9 over such an extended duration points to organizational capabilities not previously attributed to human groups of that antiquity.
The Rector of the University of Tübingen, Professor Karla Pollmann, emphasizes in a statement that the findings at Kathu Pan 9 provide a clear and uncommon insight into the early roots of humanity’s capacity for planning. They demonstrate that the ability to purposefully select resources and organize activities was transmitted across generations.
Thus, the study introduces fresh nuance to the depiction of early Homo sapiens, suggesting that long-term resource management was conceived much earlier than previously theorized.
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