modern behavior hypothesis, equates modern behavior with the level of symbolic expression evident some 40,000 years ago with the spread of the Upper Paleolithic into western Europe.

The alternative, earlier modern behavior hypothesis recognizes that behavior is context specific and sees the Upper Palaeolithic as a regional phenomenon not represented in sub-Saharan Africa. It holds that by the beginning of the late Pleistocene (H. J. Deacon 1998), evidence concerning the organization of living space, the arbitrary changes in styles of artifact designs, and the use of colored pigments at middle–Stone Age sites in Africa indicates a capacity for modern symbolic communication. This is part of an ongoing debate that is taking the study of the origins and dispersal of modern humans out of regional contexts and making it global in compass.

Recent Stone Age Ancestors

Southern Africa is one of the few areas of the globe where there are extant communities of hunter-gatherers, the San. Systematic studies of San language and ethnography were initiated in the 1870s by Wilhelm Bleek (Lewis-Williams 2000) and continued after his death by his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd (Bleek and Lloyd 1911), and his daughter, Dorothea. After the turn of the century, interest in San ethnography continued, but within South Africa there had been an almost total disruption of traditional San societies. However, San communities continued to exist in Namibia and Botswana (D. F. Bleek 1928), and it was in those countries that there was a revival of research stimulated in the 1950s by the Marshall family (L. Marshall 1976; T.E. Marshall 1959) and later by researchers associated with the University of Harvard and other overseas institutions.

The Bleek and Lloyd historical records and the corpus of more recent ethnographic research continue to provide a rich source of analogies for later–Stone Age studies. Goodwin and van Riet Lowe (1929) appreciated a direct link between the historical San and the later Stone Age but struggled to explain the relationship between the major Wilton and Smithfield cultures they recognized and perceived similarities between the Wilton and the Capsian of North Africa.

Goodwin (1938) had laid the basis for later–Stone Age research through his excavations at Oakhurst, but this work was not followed up with a new phase of excavations until after the 1950s. Holocene Wilton and Smithfield sites could be dated by radiocarbon at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research facility in Pretoria, which was started by J.C. Vogel. This facility played a large part, not only in ordering Stone Age sites but also in dating the advent of agriculture. Chronologies showed that the cultures Goodwin and van Riet Lowe had assumed to be geographically and culturally distinct entities were better explained in a temporal sequence of innovations and changes in San technology (J. Deacon 1974). Radiocarbon dating has also resolved the age of the youngest middle–Stone Age occurrence to 22,000 years at Strathalan (Opperman and Heydenrych 1990) and the oldest later Stone Age to 21,000 at Boomplaas (H. J. Deacon 1995). The latter age estimate is close to that for the earliest Epipaleolithic industries throughout the continent, which suggests that there was indeed some basis for Goodwin and van Riet Lowe’s concern with similar industries found in North Africa.

The continuity between the later Stone Age and the ethnographic present is very impressive with items like ostrich eggshell containers and tortoise-shell bowls still being made as they were 15,000 years ago. This continuity finds no better demonstration than in the use of historical ethnography like the Bleek and Lloyd records to understand the metaphors expressed in the rock art. Although the art has long been trivialized as childlike drawings and engravings to do with hunting magic, myths, and legends, research since the 1960s (Lewis-Williams 1981; Vinnicombe 1976) has highlighted the symbolic significance of depictions like those of the eland and has shown that the art is essentially shamanic and religious. There are more than 10,000 rock-art sites known in South Africa alone, and many more have been recorded in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. Southern African rock art covers the area where San click-language speakers were known or can be suggested