Human drawing put back 30,000 years
WASHINGTON: A small stone flake marked some 73,000 years ago with intersecting lines of red ochre represents what archaeologists yesterday called the oldest known example of human drawing.
The abstract design was drawn by huntergatherers who periodically dwelled in Blombos Cave, which overlooks the Indian Ocean roughly 300km east of Cape Town, the researchers said. It predates the previous oldest known drawings by at least 30,000 years.
While the design appeared rudimentary, the fact it was sketched so long ago was significant, suggesting the existence of modern cognitive abilities in our species, Homo sapiens, during the Middle Stone Age, the researchers said.
The crosshatched design consists of six straight lines crossed by three slightly curved lines. The coarsegrained stone flake measures about 38.6mm long and 12.8mm wide.
‘‘The abrupt termination of all lines on the fragment edges indicates that the pattern originally extended over a larger surface. The pattern was probably more complex and structured in its entirety than in this truncated form,’’ said archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood, of the University of Bergen, Norway, and the University of the Witwatersrand, in South Africa, who led the research.
‘‘We would be hesitant to call it art. It is definitely an abstract design and it almost certainly had some meaning to the maker and probably formed a part of the common symbolic system understood by other people in this group.’’ Other Blombos Cave artefacts of similar age included
ochre pieces engraved with abstract patterns resembling the one drawn on the stone, as well as ochrecovered shell beads. Blombos Cave artefacts dating from 100,000 years ago included a red ochrebased paint.
‘‘All these findings demonstrate that early Homo sapiens in the southern Cape used different techniques to produce similar signs on different media,’’ Henshilwood said.
‘‘This observation supports the hypothesis that these signs were symbolic in nature and represented an inherent aspect of the advanced cognitive abilities these early African Homo sapiens, the ancestors of all of us today.’’
Homo sapiens first appeared more than 315,000 years ago in Africa, later trekking to other parts of the world.
The research was published in the journal Nature. — Reuters