Field Trip: Blombos Cave and the World’s “Oldest Doodle”

Photo illustration: Humanizing History Visuals. Photo: Vincent Mourre / Inrap, CC BY-SA 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.

This month’s theme: The Human Story Begins in Africa

This week’s focus: Field Trip, where we highlight significant historic, archaeological, and cultural sites around the world

Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 700 words, an estimated 2½-minute read.

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The Why for This Week’s Topic

This month, we’re expanding narratives about the diverse continent of Africa. 

• As the birthplace of humanity, Africa holds the greatest genetic diversity of all continents. It is also home to vast geographical, cultural, and linguistic diversity. 

• Many innovations that occurred across the African continent, however, are overlooked, especially the origins of human art, or complex ways human beings express and communicate symbolic thought.

• While many historians, for example, have placed the origins of human art in the caves of Europe tens of thousands of years ago, archeological evidence has emerged that suggests our cultural, artistic imprint begins long before this — such as by different groups of humans who lived in southern Africa for various periods between 70,000 to 100,000 years ago.

Where Is Blombos Cave? What’s Been Excavated There?

Archaeological evidence excavated from Blombos Cave has impacted ideas about the origins of human cognition, art, and culture. 

• Located about 300 km, or 180 miles, east of Cape Town, South Africa, Blombos Cave is set on a south-facing cliff face, just meters from the Indian Ocean. 

• It was first excavated in 1991, and for decades, archaeologists have unearthed numerous human-made objects — up to 100,000 years old — that have shifted what we know of, and how we tell, the human story. 

• As described in this video, such artifacts include: “Spearheads, beads fashioned from shells, and pieces of bone and ochre with crosshatch patterns cut into them. Other objects found appear to be evidence of an ability to make ochre pigment in liquid form.” 

• As reported in BBC, archeologists have uncovered a collection of human-made tools in Blombos Cave that suggest humans were making paint 100,000 years ago! While the purpose of the paint is not clear, archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood, who was the first to excavate Blombos Cave, has a few educated guesses for the ancient innovation of paint: "It's possible the paint was used to paint bodies, human skin. It could have been used to paint designs on leather or other objects. It could have been used for paintings on walls, although the surfaces of southern African caves are not ideal for the long-term preservation of rock art.”

How Does Blombos Cave Represent Cognitive Complexity & Symbolic Thought?

The vast collection of archaeological findings at Blombos Cave suggest great complexity of thought was happening in modern humans who lived 70-100,000 years ago. 

• Some consider Blombos Cave to be the cradle of human culture. As described by University of Bergen, “Blombos Cave is famous for its contributions to our understanding of symbolism and cognition in early modern humans. These finds include the discovery of the world’s oldest drawing, engravings and shell beads.”

• The world’s oldest drawing — or as National Geographic describes as the world’s “oldest doodle” — survives on a piece of rock: “Seventy-three thousand years ago, an early human in what is now South Africa picked up a piece of ocher and used it to scratch a hashtag-like mark onto a piece of stone.” While the intended purpose of this famous rock is not known, it represents human intention, to deliberately carve something that represents symbolic meaning. 

• As described in Nature, this rock drawing marks an important finding, shifting the timeline for cultural modernity and symbol use: “Our microscopic and chemical analyses of the pattern confirm that red ochre pigment was intentionally applied to the flake with an ochre crayon…This notable discovery predates the earliest previously known abstract and figurative drawings by at least 30,000 years. This drawing demonstrates the ability of early Homo sapiens in southern Africa to produce graphic designs on various media using different techniques. [It indicates] that drawing was part of the behavioural repertoire of populations of early Homo sapiens in southern Africa at about 73,000 years ago.”

• In a video about Blombos Cave, Neil deGrasse Tyson, states that the carved rock represents the, “Earliest remnant we have of human culture,” or art. He states, “We found a way to leave behind something distinctly human.”

While archaeological evidence from Blombos Cave cannot paint a full picture, it helps to illustrate how our human story begins in the immense, diverse continent of Africa.

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