From Reader's Digest, August 1973: +quot;. . . a cave in southern Africa on the border bet

From Reader's Digest, August 1973:

". . . a cave in southern Africa on the border between Swaziland and Natal
was inhabited by men of modern type quite possibly as long as 100,000
years ago. . . the remains unearthed in the Border Cave in southern Africa--
including the skeleton of an infant--are unmistakably those of our own
species, _Homo sapiens sapiens_, who is not supposed to have appeared until
around 35,000 B.C.E. Equally disconcerting are the artifacts found with the
fossils.  They indicate that men had developed intellects and had embarked
on the road to civilization many millennia earlier than had been believed
possible.  The Border Cave dwellers had already learned the art of mining.
They manufactured a variety of sophisticated tools, including agate knives
with edges still sharp enough to slice paper.  They could count and kept 
primitive records on fragments of bone.  They also held religious convictions
and believed in the afterlife, for the body of the infant had been carefully
and ceremoniously buried.  Obviously [sic] they spoke a well-developed
language, for such abstract ideas as immortality cannot be conveyed by grunts
and gestures. Inspired detective work by two prehistorians in their mid-30's,
Adrian Boshier of the Museum of Man and Science and Peter Beaumont, led to 
the discovery at Border Cave.  Back in 1964, engineers opening an iron mine
on Bomvu Ridge in Swaziland had come across stone implements of curious
design, and Beaumont was engaged to explore the site with Boshier.  In
18 months the young researchers located ten ancient filled-in pits, some
as deep as 45 feet, from which a bright-red ore called hematite had been
dug.  In these pits were some of the richest deposits of Stone Age relics
ever uncovered, including thousands of cleavers, picks, hammers, wedges and
chisels, heavily bruised from use.  From archeological and geologic evidence,
the earliest strata have been estimated to be 70,000 to 80,000 years old. . .
Having discovered the reason for the mines, Boshier and Beaumont began to 
look for the miners.  It was this quest that led them to start digging at 
Border Cave.  The cave had been investigated in 1934, and scientists had found
various pieces of fossilized human skull and bone there, including the 
infant skeleton lying in a shallow grave in a Middle Stone Age stratum.  But
since radiocarbon dating had not yet been developed and the bones were of
modern type, they evoked little interest.  The earth of the grotto had 
remained undisturbed for 30 years when Boshier and Beaumont plunged their 
trowels into it in December 1970.  In 50 active days, before supplies and
money ran out, they unearthed some 300,000 artifacts and charred
animal bones, many of creatures long extinct.  Charcoal from an
overlyin ash level, more recent than the stratum in which the child's
skeleton was discovered, proved to exceed the limit of radiocarbon
dating, which is around 50,000 years.  Thus the burial had occurred
more than 50,000 years ago, but exactly how much earlier is difficult
to say.  Stone implements and ground ocher appear right down to
bedrock, nine feet below the surface, suggesting that the cavern had
been occupied for the last 100,000 years.  'Practically everything we
found was three times older than the books said it should have been,'
Boshier observes.  The discovery of stone arrowheads places the
invention of the bow more than 50,000 years ago, whereas most
archeologists had previously dated its appearance in Europe at only
15,000 B.C.E. Carefully notched bones from a 35,000-year-old level,
which may have been used to record the phases of the moon, indicate
that man had learned to count.  The atmophere of the cave is such that
it has preserved perfectly layers of twigs, leaves, grass and
feathers, brought in as bedding, which have been found in levels
ranging beyond 50,000 years.  What the evidence of the Border Cave
proves, to cite Boshier and Beaumont, is that 'as early as 100,000
years ago man had developed an interest in happenings beyond the needs
of survival.  He had begun to question the purpose of existence and
the nature of human destiny, to seek causes and fabricate
explanations.  This was the birth of intellect and the ascendancy of
reason.'. . . It may be years before prehistorians can fully evaluate
the significance of these. . . discoveries, but from the evidence it
seems clear that modern man evolved on earth far earlier than has been
realized and that most probably it was in the darkness of an African
cave that the miracle of civilization had its genesis."