Africa. www.newsweek.com,
Public domain.
The ever
fruitful Blombos Cave in South Africa has produced another candidate for the
earliest drawing ever.
"Archaeologists who excavated a
seaside cave in South Africa have discovered what they say is the world's
oldest drawing. It is an abstract pattern, a crosshatch of red lines, like a
hashtag, on a rock flake. The scientists who found it determined that the
pattern is about 73,000 years old. This mark is about 30,000 years older than Paleolithic
animal figures and hand stencils scrawled on cavern walls in Europe and
Indonesia."
(Guarino 2018)
"Blombos Cave is an
archaeological site located in Blomboschfontein Nature Reserve, about 300 km
east of Cape Town on the Southern Cape coastline, South Africa. The cave
contains Middle Stone Age (MSA) deposits currently dated between c. 100,000 and
70,000 years Before Present (BP), and a late Stone Age sequesce dated at
between 2000 and 300 years BP. The cave site was first excavated in 1991 and field
work has been conducted there on a regular basis since 1997, and is
ongoing."
(Wikipedia/Blombos)
Previous
art-related discoveries at Blombos have included the ocher crayons, and
seashells with traces of ocher in them, apparently used as containers for
mixing liquid paint. (See https://rockartblog.blogspot.com - Oldest Petroglyphs So Far?,
August 25, 2018, and A PaleolithicArtist's Tool Kit in Blombos Cave, South Africa, February 10, 2012)
"University of the
Witwatersrand archaeologist Luca Pollarolo, was cleaning fragments of rock from
Blombos Cave when he found perpendicular lines scrawled on a flake of silcrete
rock. The study authors determined that he medium was ocher, and iron-rich rock
that can be as soft as lipstick."
(Guarino 2018)
The fact
that the inhabitants of Blombos Cave were working with silcrete as a tool rock
73,000 years ago, suggests two types of technology had been developed. They not
only had the technology to flake stone tools, but they also had learned to heat
treat the stone to make it easier to work.
"Silcrete is an indurated soil
duricrust formed when surface sand and gravel are cemented by dissolved silica.
Tools made out of silcrete which has not been heat treated are difficult to
make with flintknapping techniques. In South Africa at Pinnacle Point
researchers have determined that two types of silcrete tools were developed
between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago and used the heat treatment
technique."
(Wikipedia/Silcrete)
"After Pollarolo identified the
hashtag, the authors of the new study attempted to re-create this pattern. They
used stone flakes and pieces of ocher from Blombos to draw on rock. "There
was absolutely no doube that these were drawn with an ocher pencil or an ocher
crayon," Henshilwood said. "We could even tell the direction that the
ocher pencil was drawn across the surface." The crayon made stroke marks,
the way a paintbrush does across a wall. The hashtag piece is a fragment of a
larger drawing, the authors determined." (Guarino 2018)
"The scientists "used a
battery of impressive techniques to demonstrate crayon stroke direction, the
method of ocher application" as well as the ocher's chemical composition,
said archaeologist Lyn Wadley, from the University of Witwatersrand in South
Africa, who was not involved with this research. It is "perfectly
feasible," she added, that the Blombos inhabitants could make pattern
drawings. This would indeed be the oldest set of such lines that is made with
an ocher 'crayon' rather than a sharp instrument, and constitute the oldest
evidence of drawing with a crayon," George Washington University
paleoanthropologist Alison Brooks said." (Guarino 2018)
The
existence of this marked flake of rock not only indicates that the people knew
two types of technology; flintknapping, and heat treating, but they had also
achieved symbolic thought illustrated by the use of ocher in making marks on
the rocks. While it is not possible to determine a purpose for the marks, we
can say with confidence that there was a purpose to them. The fact of their
existence illustrates that someone purposely created them.
NOTE:
The image in this posting was retrieved from the internet with a search for
public domain photographs. If this image was not intended to be public domain,
I apologize for its misuse. For further information on these reports you should read
the originals at the sites listed below.
REFERENCE:
Guarino,
Ben
2018 Archaeologists
Just Found the Oldest Drawing. It's a 70,000-Year-Old Hashtag, 13 September
2018, Baltimore Sun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blombos_Cave
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silcrete
www.newsweek.com
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