This South African cave can wear the oldest drawing in the world.

A hatched red design adorning a rock in a South African cave can be considered the oldest known design.

According to scientists, ancient humans drew the line pattern about 73,000 years ago by running a piece of pigment on a smooth stone section in the Blombos cave. Until now, the first drawings dated from around 40,000 years ago on cave walls in Europe and Indonesia.

The discovery "helps to complete the argument that Homo sapiens [at Blombos Cave] behaved essentially like us 70,000 years ago, "says archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen in Norway.

His team noticed the old drawing while examining thousands of stone fragments and tools excavated in 2011 from underground sediments. Other discoveries have focused on pieces of pigments 100,000 to 70,000 years old engraved with hatched lines and lines (SN Online: 6/12/09), 100,000-year-old abalone shells containing remnants of paint infused with pigments (SN: 19/11/11, p. 16) and shell beads at about the same time.

The motif is composed of six lines facing upward, crossed at an angle by three slightly curved lines, researchers report online on September 12th. Nature. Microscopic and chemical analyzes showed that the lines were composed of a reddish earthy pigment called ocher.

The lines end abruptly on the edges of the rock, indicating that a larger and perhaps more complex version of the drawing originally appeared on a larger stone, say the researchers. Tiny pigment particles punctuated the drawing surface of the rock, which had been ground. Henshilwood suspects that the large piece of stone was part of a large stone on which people scraped pencil-shaped pieces of pigment.

Hatched drawings similar to the drawing were found engraved on shells on the site, says Henshilwood. Models may have made sense for their creators. But it is difficult to know if the crossed lines represent an abstract idea or a real concern. Some modern hunter-gatherer societies create abstract designs that represent animals, objects or people, he says.

Whatever the original meaning of the drawing, it shows that the inhabitants of the Stone Age in Southern Africa have communicated something that they considered important by applying hatch patterns to different surfaces, says archaeologist Paul Pettitt of the University of Durham in England. "There is a time when it can be said that a symbolic activity has appeared in human society, that is it."

But the archaeologist Maxime Aubert of Griffith University in Southport, Australia, is not so sure. The Henshilwood team can not rule out the possibility, for example, that the apparent pattern was accidentally caused by people sharpening the tips of pigment pieces on rocks to create stone-age pencils.

Henshilwood does not agree. Experimental reproductions of the hatched pigment pattern, drawn on rocks such as those in the South African cave, indicate that the lines were intentionally produced and that they were originally darker and better defined, he says. Previous evidence has also suggested that ancient humans in the cave used pigments as an ingredient in glue and possibly as sunscreen. But the experimental designs produced too little powder to use as a glue additive or sunscreen. The owners of old pigments seem to have wanted to draw only a drawing on the stone.

Archaeologist Gerrit van den Bergh of the University of Wollongong, Australia, has shown that the Henshilwood team has shown how to identify deliberate drawings on ancient human sites by excluding other possible explanations for the creation of strokes. pigment. "It is likely that further evidence of early symbolic behavior will be found in the very near future."