The study of man’s origins fascinates us all – and recent discoveries in the caves at Pinnacle Point (on the coast 10 km west of Mossel Bay) have delivered the earliest evidence for modern human behaviour: evidence that stretches back as much as 165,000 years.

These enormously significant findings are a result of the Mossel Bay Archaeology Project through which nearly fifty scientists from around the world are studying data collected from the caves under the leadership of Professor of Paleoanthropology Curtis Marean of the Institute of Human Origins at the Arizona State University’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change and South Africa’s Dr. Peter Nilssen.

Professor Marean has been invited to deliver the opening lecture at the 44th Nobel Conference which begins at the Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, on October 7th.

In 1963 Gustavus – a private liberal arts college founded by Swedish Lutheran immigrants in 1862 – named its Hall of Science in honour of Sweden’s most famous inventor and philanthropist, Alfred Nobel. In 1965 – with the permission of the Nobel Foundation – it launched the prestigious Nobel Conference.

According to this year’s prospectus, the Conference “continues to set a standard for timeliness, intellectual enquiry and free debate of contemporary issues related to the natural and social sciences.”

Its theme – ‘Who Were the First Humans’ – will be addressed by Prof. Marean as well as by Professor Robin Dunbar of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford; Professor Marcus Feldman, director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies and Wohlford Professor at the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University; James McCord, Professor of Theology and Science at Princeton Theological Seminary; Svante Pääbo, a molecular biologist and Director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig; and Dennis Stanford, the Curator of Archaeology and the former chairman of the Anthropology Department at the USA’s National Museum of Natural History (the Smithsonian Institution).

The Mossel Bay Archaeology Project is funded by the USA’s National Science Foundation and the Hyde Family Trust. It works in collaboration with, and receives various forms of support from, the Iziko South African Museums, the University of Cape Town and Mossel Bay’s Dias Museum.The Project is described on the Arizona State University web site as “a long-term field study of the Middle Stone Age (MSA) in the Mossel Bay region. The MSA in South Africa has gained increasing attention due to the discovery of bone tools at Blombos Cave, the abundance of ochre suggesting artistic expression, the presence of a variety of lithic assemblages (‘stone tools’ to the layman) with advanced technological characteristics, and debates over the interpretation of the fauna.”

In 2007 – after seven years of work – Professor Marean and his colleagues announced that the inhabitants of the Caves at Pinnacle Point had been collecting coastal resources for food 165,000 years ago – and that they’d also been producing advanced stone tools and using ochre pigments for ‘symboling.’

This, they said, was the earliest known evidence for modern human behaviour.

Significantly, carbon isotopes isolated from stalactites in the caves reveal much about the water which filtered through from the vegetation above – and by correlating the findings of the archaeological excavations with the information gleaned from these isotopes, man’s origins can be placed in the context of the climate and the environment.

An important aspect of the Mossel Bay Archaeology project is thus the development of a continuous picture of climatic and environmental changes in the period from 400,000 to 30,000 years ago.

According to Prof. Marean, the Mossel Bay Archaeology Project therefore has a much bigger impact than it would if it were studying only the origins of man: it will also help us to understand the response of ecosystems to long-term climate change.

He said that it was relatively easy to predict the impact of global warming on sea levels, but that the manner in which rainfall and vegetation responded to warming was not well understood.

He is quoted on the Gustavus website as saying, “Our best sources for predicting these environmental changes are the records from the past, since the Earth warmed and cooled many times and ancient humans designed strategies to adapt to these orbitally driven changes.

“Today, climate changes are driven by human behavior, and once again we must learn to adapt. The past holds lessons for us both on how the environments may change and on how we may adapt to these changes.”

“The fact that Professor Marean will be addressing the Nobel Conference is an indication of the importance of his work and that of his colleagues – and of the significance of the Pinnacle Point Caves,” said Mossel Bay Tourism’s Chairman, Louis Cook.

“We congratulate him on his invitation and thank him for his contribution to our understanding of man’s ancient heritage.”

More information at http://gustavus.edu/events/nobelconference/2008/ – with web casts and information about previous Nobel Conferences at http://gustavus.edu/events/nobelconference/archive/.