Oldest known drawing by humans discovered
South African cave artifact believed to be 73,000 years old
Nine red lines on a stone flake found in a South African cave may be the earliest known drawing made by Homo sapiens, archaeologists reported on Wednesday. The artifact, which scientists think is about 73,000 years old, predates the oldest previously known modern human abstract drawings from Europe by about 30,000 years.
“We knew a lot of things Homo sapiens could do, but we didn’t know they could do drawings back then,” said Christopher Henshilwood, an archaeologist from the University of Bergen in Norway and lead author of the study.
The finding, which was published in Nature, may provide insight into the origins of humanity’s use of symbols, which laid the foundation for language, mathematics and civilization.
The ancient drawing was unearthed in Blombos Cave, which is about 200 miles east of Cape Town. Archaeological deposits at the site date from 70,000 to 100,000 years ago. Inside the cave, scientists have uncovered Homo sapiens’ teeth, spear points, bone tools, engravings and beads made from seashells.
Luca Pollarolo, a research fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, was cleaning some stones excavated from the site in 2011 when he stumbled across a small flake, measuring only about the size of two thumbnails, that appeared to have been drawn on. The markings consisted of six straight, almost parallel lines that were crossed diagonally by three slightly curved lines.
He contacted Henshilwood and Karen van Niekerk, also an archaeologist from the University of Bergen, and they agreed the flake was worthy of further investigation.
They took the artifact to France to be examined by Francesco d’Errico, an archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux.
Using a microscope, a laser and a scanning electron microscope, they determined that the marks were on top of the rock and that they were made from red ocher, a type of natural pigment that was often used to make prehistoric cave paintings. In fact, ancient humans in the Blombos Cave were making ocher paint as far back as 100,000 years ago.
“Then we had to determine how did they make those lines?” van Niekerk said. “Were they painted or drawn on?”
They determined the ancient crisscross pattern was a drawing, not a painting, made with an ocher crayon tip that most likely measured only about 1 to 3 millimeters in thickness.
That distinction between a painting and drawing is important, according to Henshilwood, because ocher paint batches can dry. That makes it less useful than an ocher crayon used by an ancient human whenever she or he wanted to make symbols without going to the trouble of mixing up paint.
Henshilwood and his team also showed that the red lines were drawn onto a smooth surface. That indicated that the flake was once a part of a larger stone that the prehistoric humans may have used to grind ocher. They also showed that the original red lines most likely stretched past what was seen on the stone flake before the grindstone was broken.
“I’m convinced they are more than just random marks,” Henshilwood said. “I think it’s definitely a symbol and there’s a message there.”