Oldest known sketch a hashtag?

NEW YORK — It looks a bit like a hashtag, but it’s 73,000 years old. And scientists say this tiny sketch found in a South African cave is the oldest known drawing.

It’s not the earliest deliberate design; some abstract engravings are far older. But the drawing shows early humans in southern Africa could produce designs on various surfaces with different techniques.

The collection of crisscrossed lines was found in the Blombos Cave about 190 miles east of Cape Town. It is at least 30,000 years older than any other known drawing, researchers wrote in a report released Wednesday by the journal Nature.

It was created with a sharpened flake of ochre, a pigment widely used in the ancient world, said Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen in Norway.

The drawing is six red lines crossed by three other slightly curved lines. It appears on a flake of mineral crust measuring about 1.5 inches long and about one-half of an inch tall. It’s thought to be part of a larger drawing because lines reaching the edge are cut off abruptly, researchers said.

The drawing was apparently made before the flake was deliberately struck off of a grinding stone used to make ochre powder, Researchers work inside the Blombos Cave in South Africa. Scientists say a tiny, 73,000-year-old sketch found in the cave is the world’s oldest known drawing. This 73,000-year-old sketch was made with ochre pigment on silcrete stone.

Henshilwood said in an email.

Similar patterns are engraved in other artifacts from the cave, and the hashtag design was produced widely during the past 100,000 years in rock

art and paintings, he said. So the newly found sketch is probably not just a collection of random scratchings.

“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,” he said.

The finding gives evidence that early humans could store information outside the brain and supports the argument that early members of our species “behaved essentially like us” before they left Africa for Europe and Asia, he said.

Silvia Bello, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London who didn’t participate in the study, called the finding important.

“It further shows how rich and complex human behavior already was 73,000 years ago,” she said in an email.