Oldest Known Drawing by Human Hands Discovered in South African Cave

Nine red lines on a stone flake found in a South African cave may be the earliest known drawing made by Homo sapiens, archaeologists reported on Wednesday. The artifact, which scientists think is about 73,000 years old, predates the oldest previously known modern human abstract drawings from Europe by about 30,000 years.

“We knew a lot of things Homo sapiens could do, but we didn’t know they could do drawings back then,” said Christopher Henshilwood, an archaeologist from the University of Bergen in Norway and lead author of the study.

The finding, which was published in Nature, may provide insight into the origins of humanity’s use of symbols, which laid the foundation for language, mathematics and civilization.

The ancient drawing was unearthed in Blombos Cave, which is about 200 miles east of Cape Town. Archaeological deposits at the site date from 70,000 to 100,000 years ago during the Middle Stone Age. Inside the cave, scientists have uncovered Homo sapiens’ teeth, spear points, bone tools, engravings and beads made from seashells.

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Luca Pollarolo, a research fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, was cleaning some artifacts excavated from the site in 2011 when he stumbled across a small flake, measuring only about the size of two thumbnails, that appeared to have been drawn on. The markings consisted of six straight, almost parallel lines that were crossed diagonally by three slightly curved lines.

“I think I saw more than ten thousand artifacts in my life up to now, and I never saw red lines on a flake,” said Dr. Pollarolo. “I could not believe what I had in my hands.”

Image“We knew a lot of things Homo sapiens could do, but we didn’t know they could do drawings back then,” said Christopher Henshilwood, an archaeologist from the University of Bergen in Norway.
Credit...Christopher S. Henshilwood

He contacted Dr. Henshilwood and Karen van Niekerk, also an archaeologist from the University of Bergen, and they agreed that the flake was worthy of further investigation.

They took the artifact to France to be examined by Francesco d’Errico, an archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux. There, the team had to determine whether the red lines were drawn onto the stone, and if they weren’t, what were they made of.

Using a microscope, a laser and a scanning electron microscope, they determined that the marks were on top of the rock and that they were made from red ocher, a type of natural pigment that was often used to make prehistoric cave paintings. In fact, ancient humans in the Blombos Cave were making ocher paint as far back as 100,000 years ago.

“Then we had to determine how did they make those lines?” Dr. van Niekerk said. “Were they painted or drawn on?”

They recreated ocher paint, then fashioned a wooden stick into a brush and made strokes on stone flakes comparable to the specimen. They also made an ocher crayon and drew lines. They then compared the paint markings and crayon markings with what they had seen on the artifact.

They determined that the ancient crisscross pattern was a drawing, not a painting, made with an ocher crayon tip that most likely measured only about 1 to 3 millimeters in thickness.

That distinction between a painting and drawing is important, according to Dr. Henshilwood, because ocher paint batches can dry. That makes it less useful than an ocher crayon used by an ancient human whenever she or he wanted to make symbols without going to the trouble of mixing up paint.

Dr. Henshilwood and his team also showed that the red lines were drawn onto a smooth surface. That indicated that the flake was once a part of a larger stone that the prehistoric humans may have used to grind ocher. They also showed that the original red lines most likely stretched past what was seen on the stone flake before the grindstone was broken.

They cannot say with certainty what the purpose of the drawing was and whether it was mere doodling or if it held some greater meaning. But they have their conjectures.

“I’m convinced they are more than just random marks,” said Dr. Henshilwood. “I think it’s definitely a symbol and there’s a message there.”

They also believe the drawing was made by a member of our species, and not some other hominin, because they have only found Homo sapiens remains in the cave.

The earliest examples of abstract and figurative drawing techniques before this find came from the Chauvet cave in France, the El Castillo cave in Spain, the Apollo 11 cave in southern Namibia and the Maros cave sites in Indonesia, some of which date back to about 42,000 years ago. A recent study has also found Neanderthal paintings made of ocher in Europe that were 64,000 years old.

“Up to now, we didn’t know that drawing was part of these ancient Homo sapiens’ repertoire,” Dr. van Niekerk said.

Image
Credit...Christopher S. Henshilwood

Dr. Henshilwood said that similar criss-cross and hash mark patterns have been found engraved in pieces of ocher found in the cave. The latest finding, he said, provided further evidence that early humans in Africa used symbols and abstract thinking across a multitude of methods, including drawing, painting, engraving and jewelry making.

“The authors are right that this represents as yet the earliest known deliberate visual marking by Homo sapiens,” said Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University in England who was not involved in the study. “The new discovery is critical to our understanding of the emergence of visual culture as it documents the transferral of one of these visual motifs to stone, in an intentional act.”

But Lyn Wadley, also an archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, said she was, “not convinced of intentional ‘drawing’ on the flake based on the present evidence.”

If the drawing was on a stone flake that was once part of grindstone used for making ocher, she would have liked to have seen the researchers perform additional experiments that replicated activities other than drawing in order to demonstrate that the ocher marks weren’t made unintentionally while grinding ocher into powder.

Dr. d’Errico countered, saying that grinding ocher for powder would have left large red spots on the flake, and not the very thin red lines that they see on their artifact.

While the debate remains unsettled, the researchers have given the artifact, originally called G7bCCC-L13, a new name, drawn from a much more modern symbol.

“We are nicknaming it ‘#L13’ since we’re in 2018 and everything has hashtags,” Dr. van Niekerk said.