When Nature and Culture were One | Professor Richard Cowling

Title: When Nature and Culture Were One - a Perspective from the Cape Stone Age

Speaker: Professor Richard Cowling

Date: 28th January 2026

Time: 18h00 to 20h30

Location: The Lagoon Room, Beacon Island Resort Hotel

Cash Bar Available

Cape Stone Age hunter-gatherers, the first behaviourally modern humans, depended entirely on wild nature for their sustenance: a diet of bulbs, shellfish and game, which provided rich rewards but required great skills to procure. This talk tells the story of how cultural progress amongst Stone Age people was underpinned by an increasingly sophisticated understanding of wild nature’s pattern and rhythms. This state of being in nature underpinned the material and spiritual life of behaviourally modern humans for 95% of the 160 000-year existence. Most humans today do not see themselves as living in nature. What went wrong?

The Robberg Coastal Corridor sits within one of the most archaeologically and ecologically significant landscapes on Earth. It is a place where deep-time ecology, human history, and living biodiversity intersect. Professor Richard Cowling, one of South Africa’s most respected scientists, has spent decades researching how plants, people, and climate interacted during the last ice age, on the now-submerged Palaeo-Agulhas Plain. Professor Cowlings work speaks directly to this corridor, which contains caves, middens, and botanical refugia that hold evidence of how early humans lived, moved, and survived in this landscape tens of thousands of years ago. Blending rigorous science with compelling storytelling, Richard brings the ancient story of this coastline to life, helping us understand why protecting places like the Robberg Coastal Corridor is not only about conservation today, but about safeguarding a globally important human and ecological legacy.

Purchase a ticket or donate the equivalent sum to enter into the Prize Draw to win a signed, limited edition framed print:

Framed Print

African Black Oystercatcher

Haematopus moquini

From the painting by David C.Thorpe

Signed David Thorpe

Signed G.R. McLachlan

R.Liversidge

No16 of a signed limited edition of 850

Size of print

76 cm x 60cm

Framed 100cm x 86cm