An abstract drawing from the 73,000-year-old levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa

Abstract

Depictive and abstract representations produced by drawing-known from Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia after 40,000 years ago-are a prime indicator of modern cognition and behaviour. Here we report a cross-hatched pattern drawn with an ochre crayon on a ground silcrete flake recovered from approximately 73,000-year-old Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa. Our microscopic and chemical analyses of the pattern confirm that red ochre pigment was intentionally applied to the flake with an ochre crayon. The object comes from a level associated with stone tools of the Still Bay techno-complex that has previously yielded shell beads, cross-hatched engravings on ochre pieces and a variety of innovative technologies. This notable discovery pre-dates the earliest previously known abstract and figurative drawings by at least 30,000 years. This drawing demonstrates the ability of early Homo sapiens in southern Africa to produce graphic designs on various media using different techniques.

What Early Sapiens Cognition Can Teach Us: Untangling Cultural Influences on Human Cognition Across Time

“…Several hundred thousand years ago, early Homo sapiens learned to control fire, invented complex tools such as bowand-arrow sets, and began to use abstract symbols and language (Henshilwood et al, 2002(Henshilwood et al, , 2018Wadley, 2013;Backwell et al, 2018). Even in hindsight, these achievements strike us as truly impressive, yet what made them possible has remained one of the most tantalizing questions of human evolution.…”

Biónica: hacia la ciencia del diseño

“…La siguiente sorpresa fue encontrar construcciones gráficas primi vas con la misma composición. En sep embre de 2018 Henshilwood y Van Niekerk de la Universidad de Witwatersrand en Suráfrica, publicaron en Nature [5], la datación de más de 70.000 años de los dibujos de la Cueva Blosbom. Los dibujos son una triangulación entre tres líneas horizontales, una estructura visual muy parecida a la losa de Olocau.…”

Population structure and the evolution of Homo sapiens in Africa

“…About 80 ka, MSA people at Blombos Cave, South Africa, and at the Grotte des Pigeons, Taforalt, eastern Morocco, perforated tiny intertidal gastropod shells (Figure , top), perhaps for stringing as beads or pendants. MSA people at Blombos also incised a cross‐hatched pattern on a lump of red pigment and they used a pigment crayon to draw a similar pattern on the surface of a stone flake . In addition, MSA deposits dated to 70–60 ka at Diepkloof Rockshelter and Klipdrift Shelter, also South Africa, have provided fragments of ostrich eggshell on which patterns had been engraved.…”