BY DR TONY MONDA
In the vast yellowing plains of zhizha (autumn), in the ever-changeful African savannahs, archaeological excavations in caves through limestone deposits were undertaken early in the two preceding centuries uncovered the skull of what became known as Australopithecus Africanus; indicating Africa the scene of the emergence of the human race. No sign of pre-man, man, or of human culture appears nowhere else on earth, but in Africa.
Many discoveries of the archaeological remains of early hominoids have been made in South and East Africa.
In Zimbabwe, in the lower levels of the Redcliff lime works, near Kwekwe in early 1900s, the largest and richest deposits of fossil fauna from the Stone Age were also found by colonial archaeologists.
In 1922, the discovery of Australopithecus Africanus in the untamed Northern Transvaal valley of Makapan, close to the Limpopo River, threw the scientific world into turmoil. Studies of the teeth in the skull indicated that the being led a hunting life and was therefore carnivorous.
Was it the missing link to humankind?
Approximately 800 000 years ago, the Makapan area of South Africa was the theatre of the human drama, during the Pliocene times of the world’s evolution. During the same time Australopithecus Africanus roamed and hunted further to the South in the area of Sterkfontein. Here, in the high veld of Sterkfontein, near Johannesburg, archaeologists uncovered deep in the cave’s breccias (rubble), other human and animal
remains. The same site also contained the first pebble (stone) tool fashioned by man from quartz – the archeological find, shook the First World.
Hitherto, the first known stone implements found anywhere on earth, outside the African Continent, appeared in France.
A pebble (stone) tool is the simplest of all stone implements, consisting of a fair-sized small rock, usually smaller than a man’s hand; chipped at one end to create a cutting edge. Although crude, stone tools mark the beginning of the human capacity for creation – to take something found in nature (there were no industrial debris or found objets at the time), and fashion it into an object – the design of which was only known in the mind of the maker.
Anthropologists regard these early stone tools as the beginning of human culture.
The Southern African primate had begun to fashion simple stone tools with surfaces from which flakes had been removed, and although the Sterkfontein tools were crude, they were highly developed. There was evidence found in the mid-1950s, of bones also fashioned in what archaeologists assumed to be weapons.
Did the hunting primate therefore, also fashion bones into tools?
Later, hand axes, fashioned from quartz and chipped almost round, were found in the same Sterkfontein breccias. These were man’s first, crude, but developed stone implements. The product of cultural evolution.
Over the past four million years the evolution of modern humans Homo sapiens took place almost entirely within Eastern and Southern Africa. Only comparatively recently, however, perhaps during the past one million years, did ancestral populations of Homo erectus begin to spread outwards to the Middle East, Europe and Asia. Africans are thus, the oldest human of the race and conclusively the first artists and artisans.
Man’s earliest identified stone implements are over two-and-a-half-million years old; and Zimbabwe has recovered such tools from dated settings of this age.
Meanwhile, in the lime-packed caves of East Africa, fossils and sophisticated hand axes were unearthed. Buried deep in the limestone bed of the Olduvai Gorge in the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania in East Africa, a skull was found together with scattered stone tools. These had evolved directly from the first rough stone tools – marking the evolution of stone implements of the human culture.
Buried deep in lake deposits in East Africa, and encompassing a period of roughly 200 000 years, the evolution of four major stages of hand implements is recognizable. The first stages of tools are somewhat oblong in shape, thick and crudely chipped. From the second stage the flaked implements get slimmer and pointier and more precise in their making.
The final stage of the cultural evolution was the discovery of the principle of the chisel. Using a bone or hardwood – held where the stone shaving was to be removed, the ‘chisel’ was struck and not the stone. This was the beginnings of a tool to make a tool.
Given that the Shona migrated from Guruhuswa in Tanzania, East Africa, where stone-age implements were believed to originate and found; could this have been beginnings of masonry at Great Zimbabwe which culminated in the sculpting of the stone Zimbabwe Birds?
Could this have been the seed of contemporary Zimbabwean stone sculpture?
Could it be that stone sculpting is endemic in the genes of the Shona and is as old as time itself?
Early Stone Age industry reveals that Zimbabwe alone had an increased variation in tool types by the Middle Stone Age, which demonstrated the expanded capacity of the early African Homo sapiens to exploit their environment.
The inventory of tools found in Zimbabwe comprised hand axes, cleavers, picks, scrappers, anvils, adzes, choppers, points and prepared foundation. These tools were discovered spread throughout the archaeological ages and sites – from the Limpopo to the Zambezi Rivers.
Archaeologically and historically, one can conclude that it is through this early antediluvian memory in the early stone masons and other artisanship of Great Zimbabwe that the Shona stone sculptors of today developed their Humhizha – craftsmanship.
Dr. Tony Monda holds a PhD. in Art Theory and Philosophy and a DBA in Post-Colonial Heritage Studies. E-mail: tonym.MONDA@gmail.com
About Author
