THEAFRICANS
ologists and physical anthropologists in recent years-it
is probable that
the hominid predecessors of modern humans originated in various parts of
East and Southern Africa. That includes the Transvaal, where, among other
discoveries, archaeologists have found fossils that they have identified as
being in the human continuum and have dated three million or more years
ago. The earliest fossils that have been discovered anywhere in the world
that some physical anthropologists attribute to modern Homo sapiens
come from Klasies River mouth in the eastern Cape Province and Border
Cave on the Natal-Swaziland border, which they have tentatively dated at
more than fifty thousand years ago."
Scholars now recognize that in Southern Africa as elsewhere the changes
they have identified in the shape and size of the stone tools of the hunter-
gatherers represent the development of increasingly specialized methods of
exploiting the resources of the different environments in the region. Each
group adapted its hunting methods to the climate, topography, and animal
species of its territory. The outcome of this territorial specialization was
diversity.From area to area, groups became increasingly different from one
another.