Finds of this kind are unusual, she says, so future discoveries might widen the timing between the origin of drawing in the two species. That timing could just be coincidence, says April Nowell, an archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada. It might seem remarkable that early humans and Neanderthals apparently began drawing at about the same time. Earlier this year, a team including Pike and Pettitt published evidence that Neanderthals occupying caves in what is now Spain were drawing on the walls at least 65,000 years ago 3 - although some researchers have since questioned the age of the artworks 4. It’s an achievement that Neanderthals might have matched at roughly the same point in prehistory. “Drawing using pigment shows a higher level of intentionality,” he says. Pike says that there’s no way to prove that abstract “engravings” were works of art and not simply the marks left by someone sharpening a tool against a harder surface. This suggests it had symbolic importance, although the meaning is unknown.Īlistair Pike, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK, thinks that the latest find provides clearer evidence of Stone Age art than some other discoveries at Blombos and elsewhere. “The sign was reproduced with different techniques on different media,” he says. Team member Francesco d’Errico, an archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux, France, says that the cross-hatched crayon lines are reminiscent of patterns engraved on objects found previously at the cave.
The stone pebble was once part of a larger grindstone - exactly how large is impossible to say, according to the researchers - and the drawing might have originally covered most of the smooth grinding surface. “With this object we can, to some extent, study the final product.”īut it is an incomplete view. “With the toolkit we reconstructed how paint was made, but we knew little about what it was it used for,” says Henshilwood. The artwork has given researchers their first insight into how Blombos cave’s prehistoric inhabitants used ochre as a pigment. The lines appear to have been drawn with an ochre crayon, rather than painted on the surface.
In 73,000-year-old deposits at the site, Henshilwood and his colleagues discovered a four-centimetre-long pebble criss-crossed with nine lines. Now scientists know the Stone Age cave-dwellers liked to draw, too. Credit: Henshilwood et al., Nature 2018 #StoneAgeArt In 2011, the team announced it had discovered an ancient artistic “toolkit” which included a couple of large snail shells containing residues of an ochre-rich paint 2.Īncient people used ochre crayon to draw on this rock. The archaeologists working at the site - including Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen in Norway - had also found hints that the cave’s ancient inhabitants were keen painters. Earlier excavations had already indicated that they were an arty bunch: archaeologists have uncovered beads at the site fashioned from sea-snail shells, as well as pieces of bone and chunks of ochre - a clay mineral rich in iron oxide - engraved with geometric patterns. Prehistoric people ( Homo sapiens) lived in and around South Africa’s Blombos Cave between 100,000 and 72,000 years ago. The find is described in a paper published on 12 September in in Nature 1. “If there is any point at which one can say that symbolic activity had emerged in human society, this is it,” says Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University, UK, who was not involved in the discovery. Now, from the ancient rubble that accumulated on the floor of a South African cave comes the earliest-known example - an abstract, crayon-on-stone piece created about 73,000 years ago. Sometime in the Stone Age, human artists began experimenting with a new form of visual art: drawing.
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