Recently, I had the opportunity to take a private group on a journey along the southern Cape coast, travelling from the Western Cape towards the Eastern Cape. One of the places we visited was Blombos, where we were given a private tour of the museum.

Most people associate the Eastern Cape with a much more recent past. The Xhosa kingdoms, the arrival of the 1820 Settlers, the Frontier Wars and the long, complicated encounters between African societies and colonial expansion. Those are the stories I spend much of my time telling.

But travelling along this coast is a reminder that there is another history here, one that stretches back far beyond anything recorded in a book or remembered in an oral tradition.

Long before the first farmers arrived. Long before the Xhosa kingdoms. Long before Europeans appeared on these shores, people were already living here.

And places such as Blombos are helping us understand something about them.

The stone tools speak of skill and technology. The bone tools required careful selection and shaping. The shell beads suggest that people were making and wearing objects that served some purpose beyond the immediate business of finding food or making a shelter.

One of the most remarkable finds is a piece of silcrete on which someone drew a cross-hatched pattern using an ochre crayon around 73,000 years ago. There are also pieces of ochre from the site that were deliberately engraved.

Of course, the difficulty with archaeology is that we cannot simply ask what these markings meant. We do not know whether they represented an idea, an identity, a message or something else entirely. There is always a temptation to fill in the gaps and create a story around an object, but sometimes the most honest answer is simply that we do not know.

What we do know is that somebody made those marks deliberately.

And that person was part of a community living on this coast at a time when the world looked very different.

The people who occupied this region were hunter-gatherers, although that description can sometimes lead us to imagine a rather vague collection of people wandering through an empty wilderness. The archaeological evidence suggests something far more interesting.

These were communities with accumulated knowledge and skills. They knew how to work stone and bone, how to exploit the resources available to them and how to make use of the coast. At Blombos, the remains of shellfish and other food sources give us some indication of what people were eating, although, as is always the case with archaeology, much of what was once part of their daily lives has simply disappeared.

Wood, plants, clothing, baskets and other organic materials rarely survive for tens of thousands of years. What we find is only a fraction of what was once there.

That is worth remembering when we look at an archaeological display.

Along the southern Cape coast and further east are a number of important archaeological sites that are gradually helping researchers build a more detailed picture of early human life in this part of the world. Klasies River, for example, has produced evidence of human occupation going back well over 100,000 years and is internationally important for what it has revealed about early modern humans.

Taken together, these sites are changing the way we think about the distant human past. For me, however, the most interesting part of the story is the people themselves. We have no names for them. We do not know what language they spoke. We do not know what they called this coastline, what stories they told around their fires or what they thought when they looked out towards the sea. We can only work with the fragments they left behind. A tool. A bone. A shell. A piece of ochre with marks still visible after more than 70,000 years.

From those fragments, archaeologists are slowly reconstructing something of their lives.