Fascinating, extremely fascinating, breaking news today: Middle Stone Age sites of Mozambique, dated up to 105,000 years ago, has been found that tools retained abundant remains of sorghum, which was harvested and processed into palatable food (bread, porridge or maybe just beer).
Julio Mercader. Mozambican Grass Seed Consumption During the Middle Stone Age. Science, 2009. (Paywall but the supplementary material is freely accessible and an important read for those who speculate on possible contamination, which seems to have been very carefully ruled out).
News articles on the discovery can be found at Yahoo News, and at Science Daily. According to the latter, besides sorghum, other relevant plant remains have been identified: wine palm, false banana, pigeon peas and the "African potato", a medicinal plant.
However this does not imply farming but it's a clear precursor that was until now believed to have evolved only much later, in the Mesolithic.
I found this highly significative news at a discussion at Music 000001, thanks to Glen.
Update (Mar 9 2013): the paper is available at Julio Mercader's profile in Academia.edu → DIRECT LINK. He also has some other very interesting materials on that area near Lake Malawi and in general on African Prehistory.
A new study, by D.M. Behar et al., on the oldest human maternal lineages (mtDNA) has seen light at the AJHG (subscribers only - but will be open access in six months). As I have only access to the abstract and to the news published here and there, I can only comment so much but certainly it is great that mitochondrial genetics and specially old African ones (at the root of everyting else) are been given due attention.
The abstract is rather cryptic:
Both the tree phylogeny and coalescence calculations suggest that Khoisan matrilineal ancestry diverged from the rest of the human mtDNA pool 90,000-150,000 years before present (ybp) and that at least five additional, currently extant maternal lineages existed during this period in parallel. Furthermore, we estimate that a minimum of 40 other evolutionarily successful lineages flourished in sub-Saharan Africa during the period of modern human dispersal out of Africa approximately 60,000-70,000 ybp. Only much later, at the beginning of the Late Stone Age, about 40,000 ybp, did introgression of additional lineages occur into the Khoisan mtDNA pool. This process was further accelerated during the recent Bantu expansions. Our results suggest that the early settlement of humans in Africa was already matrilineally structured and involved small, separately evolving isolated populations.
But the news are written in a more spectacular style, suggesting that humankind was about to split in two separate species, one in southern and the other in equatorial Africa, due to isolation from each other. But later both groups came into contact again and the unity of the species was re-estabilished.
As far as I can tell this is related to the antiquity of L0, specific of Khoisan peoples of southern Africa.
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Update: Science daily has an article with a maybe less dramatic approach to the same paper: Early Human Populations Evolved Separately For 100,000 Years. Here an excerpt:
Recent paleoclimatological data suggests that Eastern Africa went through a series of massive droughts between 135,000-90,000 years ago. It is possible that this climatological shift contributed to the population splits. What is surprising is the length of time the populations were separate - as much as half of our entire history as a species.
The timing of these events coincides with the onset of the Late Stone Age in Africa, a change in material culture that many archaeologists believe heralds the beginning of fully modern human behavior, including abstract thought and complex spoken language.
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