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KATANDA, ON THE BANKS of Africa's Semliki River, seems an unlikely place for a great civilisation. It's a sleepy, unspoiled spot where hippos cool themselves in the muddy waters.
Yet archaeologists have discovered that this remote part of the Democratic Republic of Congo was once home to a flourishing society. Men and women made elegant bone harpoons, knives, fish hooks and other finely carved tools; trawled for catfish during the spawning season; and constructed homes along the river bank.
That is intriguing enough. But Katanda holds an even greater secret. Research carried out here, and at other newly discovered African sites, has revealed startling evidence about the nature of our species and the roots of its inventiveness, not long after its emergence from sub-Saharan Africa.
These studies show that Homo sapiens displayed profound intellectual and cultural gifts far earlier than experts had realised.
A hundred thousand years ago, we had already evolved complex language which helped hold large tribes together; used symbols to express ourselves artistically; and created sophisticated tools - new weapons, special fish hooks and other implements - to boost hunting and the gathering of food. Human inventiveness, it turns out, is a far more ancient quality than previously supposed.
And just as well, for at this time Africa's climate underwent a series of paroxysms that triggered catastrophic alterations to the environment. Deserts spread, forests vanished and human populations plummeted. We hung on, but only just, thanks to the flexibility our newly evolved intellect allowed.
Our distant past was really a battle of brains versus climate. And for evidence we need to look no further than Katanda.
Consider those elegantly carved harpoons, discovered in 1988 by the American husband-and-wife team Alison Brooks and John Yellen. When tested, these were found to be more than 80,000 years old - a level of antiquity that caused considerable surprise.
Until then the world's oldest harpoon, found in Europe, had been dated as being a mere 25,000 years old. It was "as if a Pontiac car had been found in the attic of Leonardo da Vinci," as one observer put it.
Nevertheless the dating is correct, insists Brooks, an archaeologist based at George Washington University in Washington DC. "We have tested those implements in many different ways and we get a consistent result. We think they still are more than 80,000 years old."
This antiquity is significant; for it indicates humans were capable of sophisticated thinking from the moment they appeared on the African savannah (see box at end of article).
"Until relatively recently, scientists have argued that humans went through further recent changes to the wiring of their brains and continued to evolve intellectually long after they left Africa," adds Brooks. "Our work indicates those ideas are wrong. A hundred thousand years ago, humans were identical, mentally, to men and women today."
It is a controversial proposal but it has powerful support - supplied by archaeologists and palaeontologists who have poured into southern Africa with the fall of apartheid.
For example, at Ntolana Tsoana in Lesotho, a group led by Peter Mitchell, professor of African archaeology at the University of Oxford in England, has excavated 60,000-year old razor-sharp points, called Howieson Poort tools. Made from the mineral opaline, these appear to have been used for butchery, as spearheads, and possibly even arrows - a truly sensational idea.
"It was thought the bow and arrow was invented 10,000 years ago in Europe," said Mitchell, but here in this remote part of Africa there is compelling evidence that archery was practised 60,000 years ago.
