The outside of Blombos Cave, where the drawing was discovered. They also had syntactic language – essential for conveying symbolic meaning within and across groups of hunter gatherers who were present in southern Africa at that time.īlombos Cave is a really significant archaeological site. They were able to produce and use symbolic material culture to mediate their behaviour, just like we do now. They were behaviourally modern: they behaved essentially like us. The discovery adds to our existing understanding of Homo sapiens in Africa. They were hunter-gatherers who lived in groups of between 20 and 40 people. The drawing was made by Homo sapiens – people like us, who were our ancient direct ancestors. It’s also evidence of early humans’ ability to store information outside of the human brain.ĭoes it tell us anything else about the people who made it? And do we know which group they belonged to on our ancestral tree? It is definitely an abstract design it almost certainly had some meaning to the maker and probably formed a part of the common symbolic system understood by other people in this group. Is there any reason to think the pattern is an artwork? This may indicate that comparable signs were produced in different contexts, possibly for different purposes. ![]() It’s also worth noting that patterns drawn on a stone are less durable than those engraved on an ochre fragment and may not survive transport. This is what we would expect to find in a society with a symbolic system embedded in different categories of artefacts. The presence of similar cross-hatched patterns engraved on ochre fragments found in the same archaeological level and older levels suggests the pattern in question was reproduced with different techniques on different media. You describe it as a “drawing” – how can you be sure it wasn’t just a random series of scratches? So the drawing on the Blombos silcrete flake is the oldest drawing by Homo sapiens ever found. ![]() In terms of drawings, a recent article proposed that painted representations in three caves of the Iberian Peninsula were 64,000 years old – this would mean they were produced by Neanderthals. The earliest known engraving, a zig-zag pattern incised on a fresh water shell from Trinil, Java, was found in layers dated to 540 000 years ago. What was the earliest known drawing found before this? This has shifted our thinking about when human ancestors started drawing.
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