
Modern culture emerged in Africa 20,000 years earlier than thought - jamesbritt
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-modern-culture-africa-20120730,0,4412702.story
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billswift
I am not sure exactly what the newspaper's claim is, I didn't see any links to
a technical paper that I could follow up on. But I understood behaviorally
modern humans to have been around for about 50,000 years. Are they just
claiming that modern humans reached southern Africa earlier than previously
thought?

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sanxiyn
I think this is exactly the case. Behaviorally modern human in South Africa,
about the same time as in Europe.

I believe the paper is
<http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/23/1202629109>

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netcan
I'm know if I'm wrong about definitions or the title is misleading but this is
talking about the definition "modern humans" in the sense I was expecting:
neolithic culture (agriculture, pottery, permanent settlements, megalithic
relics, large groups).

Rather this is evidence for what I've heard called "behaviorally modern
humans." They know about behavioral modernity in other places (including
Africa) during this period.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity>

Still fascinating, but don't expect 40 thousand year old pyramids.

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sanxiyn
Since some cultures are still hunter-gatherers and did not adopt agriculture,
it would be strange to interpret culture as agriculture.

Also, megalithic relics predate agriculture.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobekli_Tepe>

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netcan
I meant "modern culture" and sure, all the elements of modern culture do not
necessarily coincide.

Göbekli Tepe is still a mystery. It might be easier to push back the date for
the neolithic revolution than explain how/why hunter-gatherers built such big
structures and how they were sustained in the necessary numbers to do so.

Either the dating is wrong, the neolithic started earlier or our understanding
of paleolithic cultures is flawed enough to make us rethink the paleolithic-
neolithic classification altogether (maybe agriculture ins't such a key
component).

Semantics aside, the discovery mentioned in the article basically finds
evidence of human behaviors known to have existed during that period elsewhere
in the world.

