It’s official – humans have come full circle.
(Also, spoiler alert – I don’t think the drawing is crap at all, but this is the headline Seth gave me.)
Scientists have found the world’s earliest ever human drawing, about 300 kilometres east of Cape Town in Blombos Cave. It predates previous drawings from Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia by at least 30 000 years, and proves that humans were capable of abstract thought far earlier than previously thought.
So, what artistry are we celebrating here today? The drawing is…wait for it…a ‘hashtag’.
Here’s the Telegraph:
Consisting of three red lines cross-hatched with six separate lines, the sketch was intentionally drawn on a smooth silcrete flake about 73,000 years ago…
The slice of rock containing the drawing was discovered by archaeologist Dr Luca Pollarolo, of the University of the Witwatersrand, who at first thought the crossed lines were a natural feature.
But after studying thousands of similar flakes, Dr Pollarolo and Professor Christopher Henshilwood, who has been excavating the cave since 1991, concluded they could only have been made intentionally, probably with an ocher crayon.
A hashtag isn’t exactly the pinnacle of human achievement, but it did set some wheels in motion.
We’re also only looking at a fragment of the original drawing:
The abrupt termination of the lines at the edge of the flake also suggests that the pattern originally extended over a larger surface, and may have been far more complex…
The ability to produce symbols is thought to be a crucial part of humanity, eventually allowing the development of language and writing.
The archaeological layer in which the Blombos drawing was found also yielded other examples of symbolic thinking, such as shell beads covered with ochre, and, pieces of ochres engraved with abstract patterns.
All that hard work and advancement, and 99% of modern-day WhatsApp communication involves the words ‘LOL’ and ‘haha’ with a few cry-face emojis thrown into the mix.
Our ancestors deserve better.
Given that the debate over what qualifies as art and what doesn’t will carry on forever, Henshilwood has this to say:
“We would be hesitant to call it art. It is definitely an abstract design and it almost certainly had some meaning to the maker and probably formed a part of the common symbolic system understood by other people in this group,” Henshilwood added…
“This observation supports the hypothesis that these signs were symbolic in nature and represented an inherent aspect of the advanced cognitive abilities these early African Homo sapiens, the ancestors of all of us today.”
So much promise, and look at us now.
