This is an excellent and tightly written argument against the indiscriminate and essentialist extension of invented anthropological typologies, such as ‘the San’, back into the Pleistocene. While analogical arguments that relate similarities in excavated tools, poisons and so on to the repertoire of items used by extant peoples in order to interpret their function is a common approach in archaeology, as the authors rightly point out, the extension of these analogies to include particular cultural and linguistic forms is ‘a theoretically flawed exercise’.

More seriously, such approaches short-circuit more detailed investigations that seek to identify and investigate differences between prehistoric assemblages that would point to greater diversity in hunter-gatherer adaptations than were recorded in the few detailed ethnographies we have of living peoples. No detailed ethnographic or ecological studies, for example, have ever been carried out amongst the contemporary Khoe who neighbour the Ju/’hoa and hunt, gather, fish and tend small stock along the waterways of the Okavango and Boteti, as well as the vast plains surrounding the salt pans of the Makgadikgadi. Such studies would certainly expand our understanding of the historicity and diversity of hunter-gatherer adaptations in southern Africa. They would also problematise overly simplistic relationships between simple artefact types, such as bone points and beads, and a static and essentialist social identity that presupposes cultures living in a time-warp outside the ordinary flow of history (Wolf Reference Wolf1982; Fabian Reference Fabian1983). Sadly, the fact that corrective arguments such as those made by Pargeter et al. still (rightly) need to be made, despite the issues raised in the Kalahari Debate over 25 years ago (Denbow Reference Denbow and Schrire1984; Wilmsen & Denbow Reference Wilmsen and Denbow1990), suggests that the film Groundhog Day reflects a temporal reality.