Qualla: Klasies River Caves

Klasies River Caves: Introduction

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.0. Somewhere around 120,000 years ago, a person living in a sandstone cave on the southeastern coast of Africa cooked starchy roots over a fire. We know this because the charred remains of that meal survived in the cave's hearth, discovered by researchers more than a thousand centuries later. The Klasies River Caves -- three main chambers and two overhanging shelters carved into a cliff less than a kilometer from the Indian Ocean -- hold some of the earliest evidence of anatomically modern humans anywhere on Earth. What these caves contain is not just old. It is foundational: the material record of our species learning to be itself.

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Image: John Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Klasies River Caves: The Caves at the World's Edge

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Klasies River Main site sits on a sandstone cliff on the Tsitsikamma coast in the Eastern Cape's Humansdorp district, within the Greater Cape Floristic Region. The environment is a mosaic of mixed woods and fynbos shrubland, with a temperate climate moderated by the Indian Oc...

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Image: John Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Klasies River Caves: Tools That Tell a Story

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nevit Dilmen (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The stone tool sequence at Klasies River reads like a chronicle of cultural innovation. Four distinct Middle Stone Age phases are represented -- MSA I through MSA IV -- along with the Howiesons Poort industry, a sophisticated tradition characterized by hafted tools and backed bla...

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Image: Nevit Dilmen (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Klasies River Caves: Our Ancestors, in Bone and Ochre

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Hawks, Marina Elliott, Peter Schmid, Steven E. Churchill, Darryl J. de Ruiter, Eric M. Roberts, Hannah Hilbert-Wolf, Heather M. Garvin, Scott A. Williams, Lucas K. Delezene, Elen M. Feuerriegel, Patrick Randolph-Quinney, Tracy L. Kivell, Myra F. Laird, Gaokgatlhe Tawane, Jeremy M. DeSilva, Shara E. Bailey, Juliet K. Brophy, Marc R. Meyer, Matthew M. Skinner, Matthew W. Tocheri, Caroline VanSickle, Christopher S. Walker, Timothy L. Campbell, Brian Kuhn, Ashley Kruger, Steven Tucker, Alia Gurtov, Nompumelelo Hlophe, Rick Hunter, Hannah Morris, Becca Peixotto, Maropeng Ramalepa, Dirk van Rooyen, Mathabela Tsikoane, Pedro Boshoff, Paul H.G.M. Dirks, Lee R. Berger, CC BY 4.0. The human remains from Klasies River are mostly fragmentary -- cranial pieces, mandibles, teeth, a few hand bones -- but they are profoundly significant. The specimens show anatomically modern human features: no retromolar spaces in the mandibles, supraorbital regions similar to ...

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Image: John Hawks, Marina Elliott, Peter Schmid, Steven E. Churchill, Darryl J. de Ruiter, Eric M. Roberts, Hannah Hilbert-Wolf, Heather M. Garvin, Scott A. Williams, Lucas K. Delezene, Elen M. Feuerriegel, Patrick Randolph-Quinney, Tracy L. Kivell, Myra F. Laird, Gaokgatlhe Tawane, Jeremy M. DeSilva, Shara E. Bailey, Juliet K. Brophy, Marc R. Meyer, Matthew M. Skinner, Matthew W. Tocheri, Caroline VanSickle, Christopher S. Walker, Timothy L. Campbell, Brian Kuhn, Ashley Kruger, Steven Tucker, Alia Gurtov, Nompumelelo Hlophe, Rick Hunter, Hannah Morris, Becca Peixotto, Maropeng Ramalepa, Dirk van Rooyen, Mathabela Tsikoane, Pedro Boshoff, Paul H.G.M. Dirks, Lee R. Berger | CC BY 4.0

Klasies River Caves: A Landscape of Knowledge

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.0. Ethnobotanical research at Klasies River has drawn a direct line between the past and the present. A survey of plants within 5 kilometers of the modern site identified 268 species, of which over 50 percent are used medicinally and 43 percent are edible or have other practical app...

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Image: John Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Klasies River Caves: What Modernity Means

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.0. Klasies River sits at the center of one of paleoanthropology's most important debates: when did modern human behavior emerge? The traditional view held that anatomical modernity and behavioral modernity arrived together during the European Upper Paleolithic. Klasies challenges th...

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Image: John Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.0