Early humans were using insect repellent in the Durban area about 77 000 years ago, a team of international archaeologists, including one from Durban, have found.
The discovery, published in the journal Science, is expected to turn the archaeological world on its head.
Why? Because the plant bedding in excavated shelters at Sibudu, near Durban and inland from Ballito, is about 50 000 years older than plant bedding found anywhere else in the world.
Before this discovery,
the oldest known plant bedding was found at the Strathlan B Cave in the Eastern Cape.
It is dated between 29 000 and 26 000 years old, while in Israel, at the Ohalo II site, the bedding was said to be 23 000 years old.
The discovery was made by a team led by Professor Lyn Wadley of the University of Witwatersrand, who has been excavating the site since 1998, in collaboration with Christopher Miller of the University of Tübingen in Germany, Francesco Berna of Boston University in the US, and Durban archaeologist Christine Sievers.
The scientists excavated at least 15 different layers at the site that contained plant bedding dated between 77 000 and 38 000 years ago.
Plant layers, usually deliberately laid between ancient fireplaces, are called bedding by archaeologists, but are believed to have been used as working and sleeping areas.
The Sibudu bedding consists of centimetre-thick layers of compacted stems and aromatic leaves,.
It extends over at least 1m2 and up to 3m2 of the excavated area.
The oldest evidence for bedding at the site is particularly well preserved.
It consists of a layer of fossilised sedge stems and leaves, overlain by a tissue-paper-thin layer of leaves, identified as Cryptocarya woodii, or River Wild quince.
The leaves of this tree contain chemicals that are insecticidal, and would be suitable for repelling mosquitoes.
“The selection of these leaves for the construction of bedding suggests that the early inhabitants of Sibudu had an intimate knowledge of the plants surrounding the shelter, and were aware of their medicinal uses,”said Wadley.
“Herbal medicines would have provided advantages for human health, and the use of insect-repelling plants adds a new dimension to our understanding of behaviour 77 000 years ago,” she said.
Collected
“The inhabitants would have collected the sedges and rushes from along the uThongathi River, located directly below the site, and laid the plants on the floor of the shelter. The bedding was not just used for sleeping, but would have provided a comfortable surface for living and working,” she said.
Sievers said the site was the first discovery in the world where there was evidence of people having knowledge of a plant’s properties and using it to their advantage.
“Where they were using aromatic leaves to repel insects 77 000 years ago, what we discovered in the more recent years – especially around 58 000 years ago – was that they were using a different method to control insects in their bedding.
“What they were doing was that they were regularly burning the bedding to get rid of the insects,” she said.
Sievers said the sedge bedding used by the early humans was very similar to that still being used and sold in KZN.
“The grass mats that are sold in Durban are sedges. The Zulu people, when they get married, give a mat that is made out of a rush called ncema, but that has become very rare.
“Generally they will give the larger one that you always see at the market. And that is the interesting thing. People were using sedges to sleep on 77 000 years ago in KZN and they are still using sedges to sleep on. This is fascinating,” she said.
The archaeologists were able to determine how old the site was by using what is known as Optically Stimulated Luminescence Dating.
It is a system which analyses individual grains of mineral quartz to establish when last they were exposed to the sunlight.
Sievers said that although no skeletons of who may have lived there had been found at the site, they were confident that they were the ancestors of the modern day San or Bushmen.
“We know through DNA analysis that these people left Africa about 60 000 years ago and went to other parts of the world,” she said.
The recent discovery adds to a long list of important finds at Sibudu over the past 10 years.
They include perforated seashells, believed to have been used as beads, and sharpened bone points, likely to have been used for hunting.
Wadley and others have also presented early evidence from the site for the development of bow and arrow technology, the use of snares and traps for hunting, and the production of glue for hafting stone tools.
Sievers said Sibudu – the exact location of which is known by only a few people in an effort to preserve the site – was the “most important” archaeological site in South Africa.
“What we have here is evidence of people who thought like we did and were using the kind of things we did and this kind of evidence is very rare.
“It is mostly in southern Africa that we get this kind of evidence.
“It’s great to have a site like this in KZN,” she said.