63,000–46,000 BCE: (The Howiesons Poort Culture and the Temporary Loss of Southern Africa — Early Toolmaking Advances Spreading from Eastern Africa to Southe…

63,000–46,000 BCE: (The Howiesons Poort Culture and the Temporary Loss of Southern Africa — Early Toolmaking Advances Spreading from Eastern Africa to Southern Africa Around 63,000 BCE Where They Are Called the Howiesons Poort Culture, but Around 58,000 BCE This Culture Came to an End in the Face of a Reexpansion of Middle Stone Age Hominins, Fully Modern Humans Finally Returning Permanently to Southern Africa Beginning from Around 46,000 BCE Onward): While our early, fully modern ancestors in eastern Africa spread their early technological advances over the next ten thousand years more and more widely across eastern Africa and into the northeastern parts of the continent, in southern Africa the Howiesons Poort culture came to an end around fifty-eight thousand years ago, in the face of a reexpansion of Middle Stone Age hominins across that part of the continent. Fully modern humans finally returned permanently to southern Africa beginning from around 46,000 BCE onward. This is a detail that complicates any simple narrative of modern human triumph. The first expansion of fully modern humans into southern Africa was not permanent. It was reversed — pushed back by archaic hominins who reclaimed the territory for another twelve thousand years. The possession of syntactic language and microlithic technology did not guarantee immediate and irreversible dominance. It took tens of thousands of years for fully modern humans to establish themselves permanently across the full extent of the African continent that had given them birth. The eventual permanence of that establishment, when it came around 46,000 BCE, set the stage for the final peopling of southern Africa by the ancestors of the Khoisan-speaking communities who would inhabit those regions for the next forty-eight thousand years.