Stone Quarrying in South Africa Began 220,000 Years Ago
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- University of Tübingen team, led by Dr. Manuel Will, demonstrated deliberate stone quarrying at the Jojosi site in eastern South Africa dating to 220,000 years ago — far earlier than previously thought, per the Nature Communications study.
- Excavators uncovered extensive evidence of systematic hornfels extraction — quality-tested blocks, flakes of various sizes, thousands of millimeter-sized production waste pieces, and hammerstones — but almost no end products or settlement traces.
- Luminescence dating shows the Jojosi site was used continuously for tens of thousands of years, at least until 110,000 BCE, with the team finding that early Homo sapiens planned long-term resource acquisition across generations.
- PhD student Gunther Möller reassembled 353 left-behind fragments into 'refits' — 3D puzzles revealing exactly where and in what order material was chipped off, allowing reconstruction of the end products taken elsewhere.
- Jojosi's artifact horizons contained concentrations of 200,000 to 2 million finds per cubic meter, and the team identified roughly a dozen perfectly preserved hornfels flake sites using on-foot surveys and drones since 2022.
- University president Karla Pollmann framed the finds as a 'rare, clear view of the early roots of humanity's ability to plan,' arguing deliberate resource selection and organized activity stretched across generations.
Why it matters: The Jojosi evidence challenges the entrenched view that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers picked up raw stone incidentally while doing other things — the site shows they traveled to and revisited a specific outcrop over more than 100,000 years, pushing back the date for sophisticated, multi-generational planning by early Homo sapiens by tens of thousands of years.
