Evidence like poison darts and beeswax found in a South African cave indicate that modern culture emerged at least 44,000 years ago, more than 20,000 years earlier than previously thought, a recent research reveals.

An international team of researchers found the evidence at Border Cave in Lebombo Mountains close to KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa's northeastern border with Swaziland. While the evidence proves human ancestors occupied the cave more than 200,000 years back, researchers from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could identify only the period till 42,000 to 44,000 years ago, a period known as the Later Stone Age or the Upper Paleolithic Period in Europe.

The team has found hunting kits that contain thin bone arrowhead points, bone and stone blades to wooden shafts, a lump of beeswax, notched bones, wooden digging sticks and jewelry made of ostrich egg and marine shell beads.

"They adorned themselves with ostrich egg and marine shell beads, and notched bones for notational purposes," said Lucinda Blackwell, a paleoanthropologist from University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and a member of the research team. "They fashioned fine bone points for use as awls and poisoned arrowheads. One point is decorated with a spiral groove filled with red ochre, which closely parallels similar marks that San make to identify their arrowheads when hunting."

According to the researchers, women of that time used to use the digging sticks to unearth bulbs and termite larvae.

"These digging sticks from Border Cave are the oldest artefacts of this kind known from South Africa or anywhere else in Africa," said Paola Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.

Professor Francesco d'Errico of the French National Research Centre and the team lead believes that the findings hint that people of that time were highly evolved.

"They were fully modern genetically and cognitively," d'Errico said.