The oldest drawing in the world was made with an ocher pencil

The oldest drawing in the world might be easy for a casual observer to see: a 1.56 inch (38.6 mm) long silicon flake (a fine grained sand and gravel) with some pale red lines drawn on a smooth surface a rich iron pigment called ocher. According to Christopher Henshilwood, an archaeologist at the University of Bergen and his colleagues, the lines would have been bolder and brighter, but over time they lost pigment on rinsing and wear, which paralyzed them. But an archaeologist working at the Blombos cave, about 300 km east of Cape Town, South Africa, noticed the marks while analyzing fragments of rock and debris in a 73,000-year-old layer. years.

The design has six almost parallel lines, with three curved lines cut across an oblique angle, but it suggests more complex work. All lines intersect sharply at the edges of the snowflake, suggesting that the model that archeologists see today is only a fragment of something originally drawn on a larger surface and later broken.

"The model was probably more complex and structured in its entirety than in this truncated form," wrote Henshilwood and his colleague. Modern viewers will probably never know what the rest of the drawing was like – or what it meant to people 73,000 years ago.

You're never too old for pencils

Even if we can not grasp the meaning of the prehistoric artist, we can still understand a surprising amount of detail about their technique. In part, archaeologists have approached these questions in the same way that art students have tried for centuries to learn the techniques of the great masters, ie, by copying their work. Henshilwood and his colleagues tagged many pieces of smooth silcrete with ocher pencils and ocher-based paint, trying to replicate the cross-hatching aspect of the anonymous Stone Age artist. The best match came from a soft ocher pencil with a pointed tip of about 1.3 to 3.3 mm in diameter.

Looking more closely, the lines have a sort of uneven appearance, which comes from the ocher powder that falls in the low spots and ends up washing or wearing, while the ocher sticks better to the parts more taller and smoother rocks; Think of how a modern pencil leaves an uneven and uneven line if it draws on a rough surface. The painting, on the other hand, left a much smoother line that did not correspond to the old drawing.

Henshilwood and his colleagues also noticed that most of the lines appeared to have been drawn in one go, but one of them (line 5 on the diagram) is thicker than the others and shows two-way lines . may have scribbled several times to thicken the line. Modern viewers can only wonder why.

Meanwhile, the "canvas" chosen by the prehistoric artist is as interesting as the technique. This particular silcrete flake seems to have been part of a millstone used to grind powdered ocher, because of the unusual softness of its curved face and the microscopic traces of ocher residue still stuck to its surface. And it seems that someone originally formed this surface as a striking platform (a flat and prepared surface from which smaller stone flakes). Later, grinding made it much smoother than similar surfaces on other silcrete flakes – a perfect place to draw with an ocher pencil.

We are artists for a long time

It is not surprising that humans drew abstract designs 73,000 years ago. Evidence from Africa, Asia and Europe shows that humans – and our close hominids – have learned to use symbols and make art from the beginning. Archaeologists have found zigzag etchings on Java shells, which were probably the work of Homo erectus 540,000 years ago. And Homo erectus probably also more or less parallel lines on bones found on a German site 370 000 years old.

At Blombos Cave itself, archaeologists have unearthed shell beads, carved bones and pieces of ocher dating from 100,000 years ago to 72,000 years ago. They also found a 100,000 year old kit for the creation of pigmented liquid: ocher, heated seal bone, charcoal and other treatment materials. But this little flake is the oldest drawing (as opposed to engraving) ever found. It contains the same type of hatched pattern as the artifacts etched on the site, so the pencil marks on the rock "demonstrate their ability to apply similar graphic designs to different media using different techniques," wrote Henshilwood and his colleagues. colleagues.

Most of the earlier examples of prehistoric drawings date back at least 42,000 years, although the recently dated Neanderthal rock paintings in Spain are probably around 65,000 years old.

Nature , 2018. DOI: 10.1038 / s41586-018-0514-3 (About DOIs).