Erica Klarreich, Freelance Science Writer
As long as 160,000 years ago, people who looked like modern humans roamed Africa. For more than 100,000 years, these populations remained small in number and were confined largely to Africa. Approximately 50,000 years ago, despite no apparent physical change, a subset of these people dramatically altered their behavior, producing the first artifacts unequivocally deemed to be jewelry and inventing new technologies, such as projectile weapons, that allowed them to fish and to hunt dangerous prey. Over the next 15,000 years, these Stone Age hunter–gatherers spread from Africa to Europe, and, wherever they appeared, the Neanderthals, who previously inhabited Europe, rapidly disappeared.
For the last 35 years, Stanford paleoanthropologist Richard G. Klein has intensively investigated the artifacts and animal bones that he and others have excavated at South African Stone Age sites, helping to illuminate the behavioral leap that led to the modern human's expansion out of Africa. He has pioneered the analysis of animal bones in understanding human culture. His research has painted a detailed portrait of the behavior and ecology of the more primitive hunter–gatherers who lived more than 50,000 years ago during the Middle Stone Age (MSA) and of the more sophisticated people who succeeded them in the Later Stone Age (LSA).Klein takes pride in being an integral part of the archaeological community in South Africa. In July 2002 he was elected president of the South Africa Archaeological Society. In 2003 Klein was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences. His Inaugural Article, published in this issue of PNAS, describes animal remains and stone artifacts that date from the MSA in a South African rockshelter (1). Klein and his colleagues suggest that the people who lived in the shelter exploited coastal resources much less effectively than later people, providing further evidence that a major …
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Richard G. Klein leciona na Stanford Universiy.
