| Summary: | Site PP13B is a sea cave overlooking the Indian Ocean in the quartzitic coastal cliffs at Pinnacle Point near Mossel Bay (South Africa). Archeological evidence indicates that around 164 ka, in the midst of the Middle Stone Age, PP13B was inhabited by early modern human populations which fed on shellfish and other seafood. Pinnacle Point preserves the archeologically oldest evidences for human use of marine resources. Such a diet and habitat expansion has been interpreted as a response to the generally harsh environmental conditions which affected southern Africa during the predominantly glacial MIS 6. Among the fossil marine invertebrates recognized at Cave PP13B, an isolated whale barnacle rostrum was tentatively determined as Coronula diadema and regarded as an indirect evidence of human scavenging and consumption of a baleen whale, most likely Megaptera novaeangliae. Here we redetermine the whale barnacle plate found at PP13B as belonging to Cetopirus complanatus, an unusual but characteristic coronulid species currently known as a highly genus-specific phoront of the right whales (Cetacea: Mysticeti: Eubalaena spp.). This record significantly improves the most fragmentary fossil history of the genus Cetopirus and permits various paleobiological inferences. To our knowledge, the fossil whale barnacle plate from cave PP13B represents the first occurrence of the genus Cetopirus in Africa. Moreover, this record significantly expands the fossil history of C. complanatus, of about 150 ky, to the Middle Pleistocene: in fact, to this date, the geologically oldest published record of C. complanatus dated back to the Late Glacial period of southern Spain. Furthermore, the Middle Pleistocene C. complanatus specimen from Pinnacle Point partially bridges the occurrence of Cetopirus fragilis in early Pleistocene (1.95-1.73 Ma) deposits of Otranto (South Italy) to the Late Pleistocene to Recent C. complanatus record. Since C. complanatus is a strictly genus-specific phoront of the right whales, we propose that the Middle ...
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