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The cave is about 200 miles east of Cape Town on the south coast of South Africa. Henshilwood started working there in 1991; A decade later, he and his colleagues found two pieces of ocher engraved with hatched lines and aged at least 70,000 years old. At the time, they were the oldest abstract art ever found. Henshilwood took them as proof that humans in Africa already had the ability to think symbolically well before they started painting on the walls of European caves.
Complex human cultures are older than scientists thought.
A few years later, his team found jewelry in Blombos, a set of 77,000-year-old pearls made from shells and decorated with ocher. Shortly after, they found a 100,000 year old paint shop: stones for grinding and hammering ocher stones, a bone rod for brewing liquefied pulp and abalone shells for storage.
But despite the discovery of several prints, "we never found any drawings, and it was a bit strange," says Henshilwood. It was not for lack of tools. During his excavations, his team had found several colored pencils – ocher flakes that had been crushed to a point and that could leave red marks when pressed on the stone. "We knew that they had been used. We never knew what they were used for, "he said.
This changed when Henshilwood's colleague Luca Pollarolo began reviewing stone artifacts discovered in 2011 and noticed a pattern of red hatching on one of them – six lines in one direction and three more in one. diagonal. It looked like a drawing, even though "it was rather dull," says Henshilwood. "I was convinced, but not totally convinced."
The chemical tests have reassured him. They showed the signatures of two different types of ocher, one of the red lines and the other of the rock itself. Evidence suggests that the rock was once part of a larger grindstone used to treat ochres. At some point, someone cleaned the wheel, drew red lines on it and then cut a piece.
To test this idea, the team made their own ocher crayons and used them to mark the rocks of the same part of Blombos. "We produced something that exactly matched the design we found," says Henshilwood, on a microscopic scale.
But there is some circularity in these experiments, says Lyn Wadley, an archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand. The team believes that the lines were intentionally drawn and that the intentional drawing could have produced such lines. What about other activities? In other South African caves, ocher was clearly used in different ways. "If after performing various activities with grinding wheels, grinding stones and ocher pieces, the only marks corresponding to the archaeological pieces come from the drawing with an ocher pencil, I would be convinced that their interpretation is most likely . " said.
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