Cave sketch world’s oldest drawing

Hashtag-like design discovered in S. Africa

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 say in a report released Wednesday by the journal Nature.

It was created with a sharpened flake of ochre, said Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen in Norway.

The drawing is basically six red lines crossed by three slightly curved lines. It appears on a tiny flake of mineral crust measuring only about 1.5 inches long and about half an inch tall. It’s evidently 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, Henshilwood said in an email.

Similar patterns are engraved in other artifacts from the cave, and the hashtag design was produced widely over 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, he said.

Magnus M. Haaland The Associated Press Researchers work in this undated photo in the interior of the Blombos Cave east of Cape Town, South Africa. Scientists said a 73,000-year-old sketch found in this cave is the oldest known drawing.