New discoveries fundamentally change the picture of human evolution

CNN — The story of humankind’s origins was thought to have largely unfolded in a cave with a sea view. Jayne Wilkins Some 22 calcite crystals and fragments of ostrich shell – found in the Ga-Mohana Hill North Rockshelter in South Africa and dated to approximately 105,000 years ago – are thought to have been deliberately collected and brought to the site. Crystals around the world are really important for spiritual and ritual reasons in different time periods and different places,” said Jayne Wilkins, a palaeoarchaeologist at the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, and lead author of the study that published Wednesday in the journal Nature. People must have brought them to the site.” Wilkins said that in light of these findings, ideas linking the emergence of Homo sapiens and coastal environments “needed to be rethought.” Shesuggested that humans’origin story was more complex, involving different places and environments in Africa and different groups of earlypeopleinteracting with one another and contributing to the emergence of our species. Jayne Wilkins “The objects they found suggest it is time to revise current thinking about the emergence of cultural innovations among early human populations,” she said in a commentary that was published alongside the study.