Squeezing a piece of silcrete found in the cave of Blombos is prior to previous human-made drawings of at least 30,000 years

The first traces of a drawing made by humans were found in the cave of Blombos, in South Cape, South Africa.

The design, consisting of three hatched red lines of six distinct lines, was intentionally drawn on a smooth silicon flake about 73,000 years ago. This is prior to a previous drawing of Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia at least 30,000 years ago.

The archaeologist Luca Pollarolo, an honorary researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), found the drawing on the silcrete flake, and thoroughly sifted thousands of similar flakes extracted from the cave of Blombos at the Wits University. satellite laboratory in Cape Town.

The Blombos Cave has been excavated by Professor Christopher Henshilwood and Dr. Karen van Niekerk since 1991. It contains materials dating from 100,000 to 70,000 years ago, a time known as the age of the middle material stone dating from 2000 to 300 years.

Henshilwood holds a Research Chair at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and is the Director of a new Center of Excellence at the University of Bergen, Center for Early Sapiens Behavior (SapienCE). Van Niekerk is a senior scientist at SapienCE. The 73,000-year-old design team's findings were published in the high-impact journal, NatureSeptember 12th.

Realizing that the lines on the snowflake looked nothing like what the team had encountered from the cave before, they started answering questions. Were these lines natural, or part of the rock matrix? Were they, perhaps, made by humans living in the cave of Blombos 73,000 years ago? If humans made the lines, how did they make them and why?

Under the direction of Professor Francesco Errico at the PACEA laboratory of the University of Bordeaux, France (second author of the paper), the team examined and photographed the piece under the microscope to determine if the lines were doing part of the stone or if this has been applied to it. To ensure their results, they also examined the piece using RAMAN spectroscopy and an electron microscope. After confirming that the lines were applied to the stone, the team experimented with various painting and drawing techniques and found that the drawings were made with an ocher pencil, with a tip of 1 to 3 millimeters thick. In addition, the abrupt termination of the lines at the edge of the flakes also suggests that the pattern originally extends over a larger area and may have been more complex in its entirety.

"Prior to this discovery, Paleolithic archaeologists had long been convinced that unambiguous symbols had emerged when Homo sapiens entered Europe about 40,000 years ago, and then replaced the local Neanderthals," he says. Henshilwood. "Recent archaeological discoveries in Africa, Europe and Asia, to which our team members have often participated, support a much earlier emergence for the production and use of symbols."

The oldest known engraving, a zigzag pattern, engraved on a freshwater shell of Trinil, Java, was found in layers dating back 540,000 years ago and a recent article suggested that representations painted in three caves of the Iberian Peninsula years and therefore produced by the Neanderthals. This makes the drawing on the flakes of Blombos is the oldest drawing of Homo sapiens.

Although abstract and figurative representations are generally considered as conclusive indicators of the use of symbols, it is difficult to evaluate the symbolic dimension of the first possible graphics.

Symbols are an integral part of our humanity. They can be written on our bodies as tattoos and scarifications or covered with clothing, ornaments and clothing.

Language, writing, mathematics, religion and laws could not exist without the typically human ability to master the creation and transmission of symbols and our ability to embody them in material culture. Substantial progress has been made in understanding how our brain perceives and treats different categories of symbols, but our knowledge of how symbols permanently permeate the culture of our ancestors is still unclear and speculative.

The archaeological layer in which the Blombos drawing was found also provided other indicators of symbolic thought, such as ocher-covered shell pearls and, more importantly, pieces of gold. ochres engraved with abstract patterns. Some of these engravings are very similar to those drawn on the silcrete flakes.

"This shows that early Homo sapiens in southern Cape used different techniques to produce similar signs on different media," says Henshilwood. "This observation confirms the hypothesis that these signs were symbolic in nature and represented an inherent aspect of the modern behavioral world of these African Homo sapiens, the ancestors of all of us today."

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More information:
Christopher S. Henshilwood et al. An abstract drawing of 73,000-year-old levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa, Nature (2018). DOI: 10.1038 / s41586-018-0514-3