Blombos Cave: a veritable treasure trove

From an archaeological perspective, Blombos Cave rates as a veritable treasure trove. The archaeologist Steven Mithen, for instance, clearly impressed by the artefacts that have been found at the cave, states that Blombos Cave is ‘the most important currently known archaeological site for understanding the origin of modern thought and behaviour – and, by implication, language’ (2005: 250). Among the finds made by Christopher Henshilwood and his colleagues there are engraved ochres, bifacial points, bone tools and, notably, shell beads (Henshilwood and Dubreuil 2009: 49–51, 2011: 372–4). These beads, they claim, were worn by the people who inhabited Blombos Cave in the Middle Stone Age. And, from data about properties of these prehistoric shell beads they, as we noted in Chapter 1, infer the following:

Conclusion about language of Blombos inhabitants

The humans who inhabited Blombos Cave some 75,000 years ago had fully syntactic or modern language (d'Errico et al. 2005: 19–20; Henshilwood and Dubreuil 2009: 45; Henshilwood et al. 2004: 404).

The inference with this conclusion – henceforth the ‘Blombos inference’ – deserves close analysis for various reasons; we will now consider three of these.

First, if sound, the inference would bear in an interesting way on the question of when modern language emerged. That is, it would push the emergence of modern language back by roughly 25,000–30,000 years. And, in so doing, it would run counter to the belief – held by the archaeologist Richard Klein (2000: 27), the palaeoanthropologist Ian Tattersall (1998a: 230–1, 1998b: 23–5) and others – that modern language emerged as late as 50,000 to 40,000 years ago.

Second, the Blombos inference is representative of a major category of inferences drawn by archaeologists about the evolutionary emergence of language. Starting out from data about properties of artefacts, and moving on stepwise from there, these inferences typically end up by ascribing some stage of language to some group of prehistoric humans. These inferences owe their potential archaeological significance to two fundamental assumptions: (i) that the key criterion for modern human behaviour is the use of symbolism to organise that behaviour (Henshilwood and Marean 2003; Wadley 2001), and (ii) that the stage of language needed to organise behaviour symbolically is the one referred to as ‘fully syntactic language’ or ‘modern language’ (Henshilwood and Marean 2003; McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Mellars 1998a, 1998b).