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Nine of the red lines on a stone flake found in a South African cave could be the first known drawing made by Homo sapiens, archaeologists reported on Wednesday. The artifact, estimated at around 73,000 years ago by scientists, is about 30,000 years older than the oldest known human abstract drawings in Europe.
"We knew a lot of things that Homo sapiens could do, but we did not know they could make drawings at the time," said Christopher Henshilwood, an archaeologist at the University of Bergen in Norway and lead author of the book. 'study.
The discovery, published in Nature, could provide insight into the origins of humanity's use of symbols, which laid the foundation for language, mathematics, and civilization.
The old drawing was discovered in the cave of Blombos, about 200 miles east of Cape Town. Archaeological deposits on the site date back 70,000 to 100,000 years in the Middle Ages. Inside the cave, scientists have discovered teeth, spearheads, bone tools, engravings and Homo sapiens beads made from shellfish.
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Luca Pollarolo, a researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, was cleaning stones from the site in 2011 when he came across a small snowflake measuring just two vignettes. pull on. The marks consisted of six straight lines, almost parallel, crossed diagonally by three slightly curved lines.
"I think I've seen more than ten thousand artifacts in my life so far, and I've never seen red lines on a snowflake," said Dr. Pollarolo. "I could not believe what I had in my hands."
He contacted Dr. Henshilwood and Karen van Niekerk, also an archaeologist at the University of Bergen, and they agreed that the snowflake deserved to be deepened.
They took the artifact to France to be examined by Francesco Errico, an archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux. There, the team had to determine if the red lines were drawn on the stone, and if they were not, what they were made of.
With the help of a microscope, a laser and a scanning electron microscope, they determined that the marks were above the rock and that they were in red ocher, a kind of natural pigment often used to make prehistoric rock paintings. In fact, the ancient humans of the Blombos cave made ocher paintings 100,000 years ago.
"Then we had to figure out how they did these lines?" Said Dr. van Niekerk. "Have they been painted or drawn?"
They recreated ocher paint, and then fashioned a brushed wooden stick and made strokes on stone chips comparable to those in the sample. They also made an ocher pencil and drew lines. They then compared the paint marks and the pencil marks with what they had seen on the artifact.
They determined that the old cross pattern was a drawing, not a painting, made with an ocher pencil tip that probably measured only 1 to 3 millimeters in thickness.
According to Henshilwood, this distinction between painting and drawing is important because lots of ocher paint can dry. This makes it less useful than an ocher crayon used by an ancient human whenever he or she wanted to create symbols without having to meddle with the paint.
Dr. Henshilwood and his team also showed that the red lines were drawn on a smooth surface. This indicated that the flake was once part of a larger stone that prehistoric men could use to grind ochres. They also showed that the original red lines probably stretched beyond what had been seen on the stone chips before the wheel was broken.
They can not say for sure what was the purpose of the drawing and whether it was a simple scribble or whether it had a broader meaning. But they have their conjectures.
"I'm convinced that these are more than just random marks," said Dr. Henshilwood. "I think it's definitely a symbol and there's a message out there."
They also believe that the drawing was made by a member of our species, and not by another hominin, as they found only remains of Homo sapiens in the cave.
The first examples of abstract and figurative drawing techniques prior to this discovery come from The Chauvet Cave in France, the El Castillo Cave in Spain, the Apollo 11 Cave in southern Namibia and the Maros Caves in Indonesia, some of which date back to around 42,000 years ago. A recent study also found 64,000-year-old Neanderthal paintings in ocher in Europe.
"Until now, we did not know that drawing was part of this repertoire of the old homo sapiens," said Dr. van Niekerk.
Dr. Henshilwood stated that similar patterns of cross and hashmark were found in pieces of ocher found in the cave. The latest discovery, he added, provides further evidence that early humans in Africa used symbols and abstract thinking through a multitude of methods, including drawing, painting, engraving, and jewelry making. .
"The authors are right in saying that this still represents the first deliberate visual marking known by Homo sapiens," said Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist from the University of Durham in England who did not participate in the study. "The new discovery is essential to our understanding of the emergence of visual culture as it documents the transfer of one of these visual motifs to the stone, in an intentional act."
If the drawing was on a stone flake that was formerly part of the grinding wheel used for the manufacture of ocher, she would have liked to see the researchers perform additional experiments that duplicated activities other than drawing in order to demonstrate that the Ocher marks were not unintentional. grinding the ocher powder.
Dr. d'Errico replied by stating that the milling of powdered Orcher would have left important red spots on the flakes, not the very thin red lines visible on their artifact.
Although the debate remains unresolved, the researchers gave the artifact, initially called G7bCCC-L13, a new name, drawn from a much more modern symbol.
"We call him" L13 "since we are in 2018 and everything has hashtags," said Dr. van Niekerk.
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