FROM a cursory glance, the lines on this small, brown stone could be mistaken for a natural formation. In fact, it is the first known drawing ever made by human hands.
“This is the beginnings of cultural modernity and sophisticated behaviour,” says Colin Renfrew at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in its discovery. “You would be astonished if you found another animal species producing something like that. It’s the origins of humankind.”
Laboratory analysis shows that the dark red lines, forming a rough, cross-hatched pattern, must have been drawn with a chunk of soft, coloured stone called ochre, possibly one whittled into a simple crayon.
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Attempts to recreate the pattern using the same materials show that the lines were no careless scrawls but took deliberate effort.
“You have to use a lot of pressure and control or it doesn’t leave enough ochre,” says Christopher Henshilwood at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Henshilwood and his colleagues dug up the drawing in a South African cave from layers of earth dated to about 73,000 years ago. This makes it nearly twice as old as any previously found Stone Age drawings or paintings by our own species – although it was recently discovered that Neanderthals were painting caves in Spain 64,000 years ago.
“This is the beginnings of cultural modernity and sophisticated behaviour, the origins of humankind”
Modern humans, or Homo sapiens, evolved in East Africa about 200,000 years ago, before spreading to the north and south of the continent. The Blombos cave, on the south coast, has been excavated for more than two decades, turning up a wealth of material from people living there as far back as 100,000 years ago.
The artefacts uncovered include shell beads and spear tips made from stone and bone. Another provocative find was a painting kit – the paint, made from ochre, charcoal and seal fat, was mixed in large sea snail shells – but so far no paintings have turned up.
The newly found drawing is on a rock just 4 by 1.5 centimetres. It was unearthed in 2011, but, covered in dirt, drew no notice, and was just labelled and stored. Only when the muck was washed off in a search for stone tools years later did a team member notice the markings, triggering microscopic and chemical analysis of the rock and the ochre traces.
Ochre comes in various forms and hues – this particular type would have been about as hard as a child’s colouring pencil, perfect for the job, says Henshilwood. Going by the width of the lines, the tip was a 2-millimetre point that may have been deliberately sharpened.
Crayon on stone
The nine lines extend right to the edges of the rock, suggesting that they were once part of a larger artwork that was later broken up. For most lines, the team could tell the direction of the stroke, because microscopic bumps on the stone surface accumulated ochre on the opposite side to the crayon’s approach. The scribbler must have gone over one line several times in a to-and-fro motion, making it thicker than the rest. “There’s no doubt it was done deliberately,” says Henshilwood.
The stone “canvas” also told a story. The drawn-on surface is much smoother than the other sides, and its pits contain tiny traces of a different kind of ochre that is as hard as rock. This indicates it might have initially been used as a grindstone for rubbing the hard ochre into powder, perhaps used for paint (Nature, ).
Henshilwood says we don’t know if the original cross-hatch drawing was for decoration or had some symbolic meaning. “If you have a little ochre pencil, perhaps for the first time you are able to store information outside of your brain,” he says. “You can carry it across the landscape and leave a message anywhere.”
“This shows that the minds of these people would have been very similar to ours today,” says Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum. “They were able to try to represent something by abstracting something. That suggests cognitive capacities similar to ours.”
Impressive though it is, the drawing isn’t the earliest ever artwork from our species. There are plentiful examples of earlier designs – including similar cross-hatchings – made by etching, a simpler technique than drawing with a crayon.
The first known etched design was found on a clam shell from Indonesia, dated to half a million years ago – so must have been made by a different species of hominin, Homo erectus.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The oldest human drawing”
