Panga ya Saidi
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Panga ya Saidi is an archaeological site in Kilifi County in Kenya from the transition from the Middle Stone Age to the Later Stone Age , as these epochs are called in East Africa, i.e. from the Middle to the Later Stone Age. It is a large limestone cave system, the ceilings of which have partially collapsed. The so-called main chamber, which has been researched so far, has an area of around 100 square meters and is located around 15 kilometers inland from the Indian Ocean in the Dzitsoni highlands of the Zanzibar-Inhambane coastal forest mosaic at a height of around 150 meters above sea level.
In the cave (an abri in an ecotone between tropical forest and savanna , which has been explored since 2010) was u. a. Stone tools recovered from layers up to 78,000 years old; the most recent finds of almost uninterrupted use of the cave by humans come from the Holocene .
A total of more than 30,000 stone artifacts were recovered during the first excavation period between 2010 and 2013, as well as several worked bones, 17 fragments of ocher and several dozen pearls from the shells of ostrich eggs and sea snails of the genus Conus . The conus pearls are around 65,000 years old, the ostrich pearls are around 25,000 years old. The ocher pieces come from several horizons and are partly 48,000 years old, partly 25,000 years old.
Web links
- Archaeological finds from 78,000 years ago prove early cultural innovations in East Africa. On: shh.mpg.de from May 9, 2018
- Kenyan cave sheds new light on dawn of modern man. On: eurekalert.org from May 9, 2018
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ceri Shipton et al .: 78,000-year-old record of Middle and Later stone age innovation in an East African tropical forest. In: Nature Communications. Volume 9, Article No. 1832, 2018, doi: 10.1038 / s41467-018-04057-3
Coordinates: 3 ° 40 ′ 41.9 ″ S , 39 ° 44 ′ 10 ″ E