Blombos Cave in South Africa yielded a red ochre piece engraved with a deliberate cross-hatched pattern, dated to at least 73,000 years ago — alongside drilled shell beads carrying pigment traces. Elsewhere in Africa, ochre crayons show use around 100,000 years ago. The African record keeps pushing symbolic behavior deeper into our past!
Blombos Cave ochre engraving pushes symbolic behavior back to 73,000 years ago
South AfricaTheory
Key facts
- In Blombos Cave on the southern coast of South Africa, archaeologists found a piece of red ochre engraved with a deliberate cross-hatched pattern, dated to at least 73,000 years ago
- Shell beads drilled and worn, some still carrying traces of pigment, were found in the same cave
- Elsewhere in Africa, ochre crayons worn down from use were dated to approximately 100,000 years ago
- Recent analysis of more than 3,000 engraved signs on Ice Age tools, pendants, and ivory figurines from Central Europe found that 40,000-year-old sequences carried roughly the same information density as the earliest proto-cuneiform tablets appearing tens of thousands of years later
- The study did not claim the sequences were writing, but demonstrated they were recognizably on the same developmental road toward information encoding
Site mentioned
Sources
bradshawfoundation.com
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nationalgeographic.com
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nationalgeographic.com
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ted.com
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ucl.ac.uk
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An abstract drawing from the 73000-year-old levels at ...nature.com
by CS Henshilwood · 2018 · Cited by 422 — Here we report a cross-hatched pattern drawn with an ochre ... Engraved ochres from the Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa.
South Africa's Blombos cave is home to the earliest ...theconversation.com
They've found a 73 000-year-old cross-hatched drawing on a silcrete (stone) flake. It was made with an ochre crayon. These include shell beads ...
Blombos Ocher Plaque | The Smithsonian Institution's Human ...humanorigins.si.edu
About 77,000 - 75,000 years old. No Scan. oblong shaped, brown, engraved ocher plaque, Blombos Cave, South Africa. © Copyright Smithsonian ...
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