To evidence such as this can be added suggestions of a symbolic organization of space at the site of Klasies River Mouth (Fig. 11), also near the southern tip of Africa, at over 100,000 years ago. Pierced shells, with the strong implication of stringing for body ornamentation, are known from Porc-Epic Cave in Ethiopia at around 70,000 years ago. Bone tools of the kind introduced much later to Europe by the Cro-Magnons, are found at the Congolese site of Katanda, dated to perhaps 80,000 years ago. Blade tool industries, again formerly associated principally with the Cro-Magnons, are found at least sporadically at sites in Africa that date to as much as a quarter of a million years ago. Also in the economic/technological realm, such activities as flint-mining, pigment-processing and long-distance trade in useful materials are documented in Africa up to about 100,000 years ago. These and other early African innovations are reviewed by McBrearty and Brooks (2000).

Even taken together, these developments do not constitute as visually impressive a record as that compiled by the Cro-Magnons in Europe. But it is a highly significant one, and it leaves little doubt that the first stirrings of the human capacity were felt in Africa, whence all major innovations in human evolution appear also to have come. And the nature of this African record also suggests that the process of discovery of the human capacity was not a sudden event but—in modern cultural terms at least—a gradual one. For it seems that the myriad uses of the new human potential that had presumably emerged with the origin of anatomical Homo sapiens were sequentially discovered over a long period of time. Which is hardly surprising, for even today we are continuing to find new uses to which our remarkable underlying capacity can be put.