Crayfish feasts and a medicine horn: new finds depict life in pre-colonial South Africa | Business Insider

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The hunter-gatherers who populated South Africa before the arrival of colonists dined on crayfish and springbok, often drank sheep milk, and carried medicines in bespoke containers. | BISouthAfrica

These are some of the discoveries by two teams of scientists who have just reported the outcome of their investigations within a day of each other.

And if any early South African felt unwell after their seafood platter, evidence that medical help was available comes from a team led byThe team's paper reports the discovery of a 500-year-old cattle-horn medicine container, complete with contents, in a rock shelter in the Langkloof mountains between Uniondale and Plettenberg Bay.

Until now there was no proof, but pottery from the two Orange River sites has provided it. “Our results bear out the ethnohistoric accounts, which suggest milk was usually stored in organic containers but that pots were occasionally used to cook milk, often together with other foodstuffs,” says Hopper’s paper.

When it was found by chance in 2020 after being dug up by an animal, it was capped with a rawhide lid and wrapped in a bundle of grass and leaves from the century plant , which was used by hunter-gatherers as a source of poison for their arrow tips. Analysis of the sticky mass was more successful and showed the main organic compound it contained was inositol, a sugar found in many plants that can control diabetes, treat high cholesterol and help with mood disorders by stimulating the production of serotonin and dopamine.

 

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BISouthAfrica Until the white man arrived and turned practically everything into high monetary value for himself so he could live in comfort in so called first world status while we remain with our begging bowls in hand in third world status.Whos fooling who.

BISouthAfrica Medicine? Fat fucking chance

BISouthAfrica Cradle of Humankind means that those “colonialists” you are referring to, were merely returning to the birthplace of their ancestors.

BISouthAfrica I assume that you include the Nguni peoples as “colonists” or do they not count because they walked south rather than sailed?

BISouthAfrica Why oh why would anyone post this except to stir the race and apartheid pot once again. There are bigger fish to fry. Do your job and be journalists. Not historians.

BISouthAfrica Lies and more lies. Van Reebeck is a fiction and hunter gatherers were never the only habitats of these lands. They will never right about Mapungubjwe empires because they don't know anything. You can make a theory our reality. Amen. Your findings have been rejected.

BISouthAfrica Playing the apartheid and race card, I see. Biased people working for news24.

BISouthAfrica And so it shall be again. Sooner than later.

BISouthAfrica Shame, so their lives changed when the Bantus arrived then? The poor khoi, they were clearly happy until the colonisers from the Congo region arrived in SA.

BISouthAfrica Wow, charged terminology.

BISouthAfrica Before blacks even crossed the Tugela ohk...

BISouthAfrica Haha nice News24 trying not to sound racist 🤣 'colonists'

BISouthAfrica Luckily the colonists came and introduced them to the modern world, eg the wheel, reading, writing, arithmetic, houses, towns and the list goes on and now you will hear how we oppressed them and they will forget the upliftment part.

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