1 What constitutes modern human behaviour and how can it be recognised in the archaeological record. According to the premise proposed by Cremo & Thompson, there should be archaeological remains of this behaviour stretching back hundreds of millions of years. If their idea is to be valued, they should have also set forth criteria determining how such behaviour is recognised and evaluated against the fossil record. An examination of their work reveals that no such criteria has been proposed.

2 The remains examined here include the type of artifacts manufactured and utilised, the composition of the faunal remains, and the occurrences of worked organic remains. The question of the behavioural capacity of the southern African MSA [Middle Atone Age] hominins has been much debated in the literature, predominantly through two principal figures over the last two decades with Richard Klein advocating primitive behaviour and Hilary Deacon, cognitively modern behaviour.

3 The evidence for site use at Florisbad suggested to Brink that distinctions between the spatial organisations of patterns between it and the LSA can not be readily drawn. This is reflected on a greater scale in the Florisbad people’s subsistence practices. Brink (1987) regards the MSA horizon as being representative of a "home base". He defines a "home base" as being "the location where certain "quasi universal” sets of human behaviour as carried out [including] the tendency to carry food to the specific locality, to feed at such a locality, to sleep at the locality [and] the controlled use of fire in such localities which tend to organise activity areas". Brink regards the presence of these four categories as being representative of modern behaviour. The problem with this is that the "home base" hypotheses were developed to provide an explanation for artifactual and faunal occurrences in the early Pleistocene in East Africa, and they have subsequently been challenged (e.g. Blumenschine & Peters 1998). The controlled use of fire is also present in the early Pleistocene at Swartkrans. As such, the mere presence of these categories cannot be sufficient and conclusive evidence by itself to regard a site use pattern as being indicative of modern behaviour.

Brink (1987) used the environmental and faunal information derived from the Old Collection, despite its limitations, as a control menu on the resources available to the MSA inhabitants. From this a level of selection utilized by the people was proposed. Brink contends that, despite the relatively small comparative age differences, the same range of animals were present for the MSA hunters as is evident in the Old Collection. It is notable that carnivores and small animals are conspicuously absent in the MSA assemblage (Brink 1987).

The local aquatic animals are poorly represented in the MSA assemblage, as opposed to medium-sized bovids predominating. Brink (1987) hypothesises this is evidence of two different subsistence strategies used by the hunters: opportunistic scavenging and active hunting.

The MSA assemblage bovids are notable for possessing a body mass of less than 100kg. Body size and height is a major factor that hunters need to take into account (Bourliere 1963). The optimal prey is of the same size or slightly bigger than the predator. The MSA people lacked the technological advantage of the bow and arrow. The killing of prey larger than their own size may have been regarded as being both an unnecessary risk and an unnecessary expenditure of energy, especially in the unique Florisbad environment. The MSA assemblage bovids are either the size of humans or lesser and the remains are predominantly those of young prime adults, indicating that these were preferentially targeted. These selective patterns of faunal representation imply standardised hunting methods aimed at targeting prey animals. Their success contradicts the theory of MSA hominins being ineffectual hunters.

Therefore while the site use patterns are ambiguous, the faunal remains point towards the people of Florisbad possessing a behavioural system which bears considerable similarities to the LSA. Brink (1987) puts the site into perspective when he states that "the total environmental setting was different from later times, and it is to be expected that human subsistence behaviour in the earlier part of the Late Pleistocene was different in degree but not necessarily in kind from the subsistence behaviour of Later Stone Age Holocene populations in more impoverished habitats". Also if the Old Collection and MSA assemblage are recognised as penecontemporaneous, then there arises the situation of late archaic Homo sapiens possessing exhibiting essentially modern behavioural patterns.