‘Primordialism and the ‘Pleistocene San’ of southern Africa’: final reply

Authors

Justin Pargeter, Stony Brook University, University of Johannesburg
Alex Mackay, University of WollongongFollow
Peter Mitchell, University of Oxford, University of the Witwatersrand
John Shea, Stony Brook University
Brian A. Stewart, University of the Witwatersrand, University of MitchiganFollow

RIS ID

109757

Publication Details

Pargeter, J., Mackay, A., Mitchell, P., Shea, J. & Stewart, B. A. (2016). ‘Primordialism and the ‘Pleistocene San’ of southern Africa’: final reply. Antiquity, 90 (352), 1087-1089.

Abstract

We thank our colleagues for their insightful comments. The weight of modern evidence is against the notion that contemporary human cultures can be tracked backwards into the Pleistocene (e.g. Lee & DeVore 1976; Kuper 1988; Wilmsen 1989; Solway & Lee 1990; MacEachern 2000). Modern-day hunter-gatherers are not our Stone Age ancestors. Current protestations notwithstanding, the provocative title that d'Errico and colleagues (2012) chose for their paper, ‘Early evidence of San material culture represented by organic artifacts from Border Cave, South Africa’, unambiguously asserts the opposite. Our critique of that paper's content does not question the robusticity of the methods employed at Border Cave (for this, see Evans 2012). Rather, our comments focus on the theoretically flawed search for a specifically ‘San’ “cultural adaptation” (d'Errico et al. 2012: 13214) at any Pleistocene archaeological site.