ART

Blombos, the Oldest Known Drawing

~73,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Last glacial

A flake of silcrete, a hard rock formed where silica cements sand grains, carries on one ground face a cross-hatched pattern in red ochre. It comes from levels at Blombos Cave, on the southern Cape coast of South Africa, dated to approximately 73,000 years. Microscopic and chemical analysis of the marks established that the pigment had been applied deliberately, with an ochre crayon, rather than reaching the stone by some accident of the sediment. The layer belongs to the Still Bay, a technical complex of the Middle Stone Age which at this same cave has yielded shell beads and pieces of ochre engraved with comparable cross-hatched designs. The distinction between the two is worth holding: engraving cuts into a surface, drawing lays pigment upon it, and both gestures are documented in these levels.

Why it matters

Drawing was known from Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia after 40,000 years ago, and images of that kind were treated as a prime indicator of modern cognition. The Blombos flake carries the practice back by at least 30,000 years, and places it in southern Africa. Taken with the engraved ochres from the same cave, it shows early Homo sapiens producing graphic designs on different materials and by different techniques, which is a stronger claim than any single object could support: a repertoire rather than an accident.

Dating & uncertainty

The object is dated through its layer, never in itself. Single-grain luminescence modelling of the Still Bay across southern Africa gives a most plausible span of 72,200 to 71,300 years and, at conventional 95 per cent confidence, a beginning no earlier than 75,500 years and an end no later than 67,800. The engraved ochres from the same cave were dated separately, by thermoluminescence on burnt stone, to a mean of 77,000 years. The figure of 73,000 years is therefore the age of a level, and the order of the gestures inside that window cannot be resolved.

Sources

1. Henshilwood et al. (2018), Nature · An abstract drawing from the 73,000-year-old levels at Blombos Cave, South Africadoi:10.1038/s41586-018-0514-3
2. Henshilwood et al. (2002), Science · Emergence of Modern Human Behavior: Middle Stone Age Engravings from South Africadoi:10.1126/science.1067575
3. Jacobs et al. (2013), Journal of Archaeological Science · An improved OSL chronology for the Still Bay layers at Blombos Cave, South Africa: further tests of single-grain dating procedures and a re-evaluation of the timing of the Still Bay industry across southern Africadoi:10.1016/j.jas.2012.06.037

Our species’ history as one day

18:26:175 h 34 min before midnight

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