It's an enduring enigma in paleoanthropology: when and where did modern humanbehavior arise? The fossil record suggests that anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa sometime between 150,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Yet the earliest convincing indications of behavioral modernity in our species, archaeologists have argued, date to tens of thousands of years later and have turned up in Europe, not Africa. With that in mind, some theorists posited that modern behavior blossomed late and rather suddenly (perhaps as a result of key changes in the brain), shortly after anatomically modern humans began
to colonize other parts of the globe.

Now a new discovery is making that scenario difficult to swallow. Researchers have recovered 28 specialized bone tools and related artifacts indicative of modern behavior from 70,000-year-old deposits in a South African cave known as Blombos. This, team member Christopher S. Henshilwood of the Iziko-South African Museum in Cape Town asserts, implies "that there was modern human behavior in Africa about 35,000 years before Europe." An analysis of
these tools will appear in the December issue of the Journal of Human Evolution.

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