ART

Apollo 11: Africa's Oldest Figurative Art

~30,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

At the Apollo 11 rock shelter, in Namibia, seven painted stone plaques about 30,000 years old carry the oldest securely dated figurative art in Africa.

Apollo 11 is a rock shelter in the Huns Mountains of the Karas Region, southern Namibia, with the longest late Pleistocene and Holocene sequence in the country. From a single occupation layer of its Middle Stone Age deposits came seven stone plaques painted with figurative images, the only African figurative art securely dated to the late Pleistocene; W. E. Wendt's excavations brought them to light, and he published them in 1976 as Africa's oldest dated works of art. The layer is dated by accelerator radiocarbon and by optically stimulated luminescence, which measures the time elapsed since grains of quartz were last exposed to daylight, to about 30,000 years. Analyses of the pigments in 2016 showed how the images were made: black from manganese minerals and charcoal, red probably from an ochreous shale, white possibly from ostrich eggshell, applied as prepared, paint-like mixtures and also as crayons of mineral and of carbon.

Why it matters

Figurative art, the recognisable depiction of a living thing, is often taken as a marker of fully modern cognition, and its oldest dated examples were long sought in Europe before Sulawesi joined them. Apollo 11 places the same capacity in southern Africa at the same period, ~30,000 years ago, and the pigment analyses show that it rested on a real technology: paints prepared from several minerals, crayons for drawing. The African record remains thin, seven Pleistocene sites south of the Sahara, all chance finds of portable pieces, which argues for a tradition under-sampled rather than absent.

Dating & uncertainty

The plaques come from one anthropogenic layer dated by AMS radiocarbon and by optically stimulated luminescence to about 30,000 years; a 2013 survey of sub-Saharan Pleistocene art places them 'by ~32,000 years ago', which sets the older bound retained here. The younger bound of 26,000 years is carried by none of the published abstracts: the date is secure as an order of magnitude, ~30,000 years, but the precision of a 30,000 to 26,000 bracket is not, as things stand. Whichever bound is preferred, the plaques remain of the same order of age as the earliest cave art of Europe.

Our species’ history as one day

21:42:512 h 17 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day