The 71,000-Year-Old Projectile Technology of Pinnacle Point

Along a limestone cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean near Mossel Bay, South Africa, a set of caves first documented by archaeologists Jonathan Kaplan and Peter Nilssen in 1997 has become one of the most important sites for understanding when and where modern human behavior first emerged. Excavations at Pinnacle Point, ongoing since 2000, have uncovered evidence stretching across tens of thousands of years of Middle Stone Age occupation, including some of the earliest known evidence of humans systematically eating shellfish, using pigment for symbolic purposes, and, in a 2012 study that drew wide attention, making sophisticated projectile weapons.

The 2012 findings, published in Nature by a team led by Curtis Marean of Arizona State University with lead study author Kyle Brown, focused on a layer at the Pinnacle Point Cave 5-6 site dated to approximately 71,000 years ago. There, researchers recovered large numbers of tiny, carefully shaped stone blades, some barely wider than a fingernail, that had been deliberately blunted along one edge. That blunting made sense once the researchers understood the purpose: the blades, known as microliths, were designed to be glued with adhesive into slots cut into shafts of wood or bone, creating lightweight composite projectile points sharp enough to kill at a distance, whether thrown as spears or, potentially, shot as arrows.

Before the blades were shaped, the stone itself was heat-treated, a technique the same research group had previously identified at Pinnacle Point as the oldest known example of humans using fire to deliberately alter the properties of raw material before working it into a tool. Heating the local silcrete stone made it easier to flake into the fine, controlled shapes the microlith technology required, evidence of a multi-step, forward-planned production process rather than opportunistic tool-making.

What made the 2012 study particularly significant was not just the age of the technology but its persistence. The Pinnacle Point evidence showed this microlithic projectile tradition in continuous use for roughly 11,000 years, a span the researchers described as remarkable given how often earlier archaeological models assumed that advanced technologies in this period appeared briefly and then vanished, a pattern some researchers had nicknamed “flickering.” Marean and his colleagues argued that the apparent gaps and disappearances seen at other sites more likely reflected incomplete excavation and preservation than genuine loss of the technology, and that this kind of sustained technological sophistication may have been more consistently present in southern Africa during the Middle Stone Age than earlier research suggested.

The broader significance of these projectile weapons lies in what they represent about early modern human capability well before the migrations that populated the rest of the world. Weapons capable of killing at a distance, rather than requiring close-quarters contact with dangerous prey or rival groups, would have offered a considerable survival advantage, reducing the physical risk of hunting and, potentially, of conflict with other hominin populations. Similar projectile technology using microliths did not become common elsewhere in Africa and Eurasia, including in regions where Homo sapiens encountered Neanderthal populations, until roughly 20,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years after it was already established on the South African coast. The Pinnacle Point findings, along with related work at other Middle Stone Age sites such as Sibudu Cave, have become central evidence in the case that many of the behavioral traits once used to define a sudden “human revolution” around 40,000 to 50,000 years ago actually developed far earlier and more gradually within Africa itself.