January 11, 2002. Copyright 2001. Graphic News. All rights reserved.

PICTURE CAPTION TO GN13301: Picture shows a three-inch (9-cm) piece of engraved ochre, dated at more than 70,000 years old -- the oldest symbolic art yet discovered

Ancient artwork shows modern man twice as old

LONDON, January 11, Graphic News: Two 77,000 year-old pieces of engraved ochre from a South African cave suggest that modern human behavior arose relatively early in the African Middle Stone Age, according to a report published in Science.

While genetic and fossil evidence suggests that humans were anatomically modern in Africa before 100,000 years ago, itÕs been unclear when modern behavior emerged. Such behavior requires the type of cognitive abilities that would be used, for example, in creating abstract or depictional images, according to Dr Christopher Henshilwood, from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. 

Scientists have proposed two scenarios for the emergence of modern human behaviour: that it arose relatively late and rapidly, 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, or that it evolved earlier and more gradually. 

Now researchers from South Africa, the U.S., Norway, France, and the U.K. have discovered two pieces of red ochre, engraved with a cross-hatching design.

The decorated ochre pieces were recovered from Middle Stone Age layers at Blombos Cave, 290 kilometres (180 miles) east of Cape Town on the shore of the Indian Ocean. Previously, the earliest evidence of abstract art came mainly in France from the Eurasian Palaeolithic period less than 35,000 years ago.

Ochre -- a form of iron ore -- is frequently found in Stone Age deposits less than 100,000 years old. It may have been used as a body or decorative paint. 

Henshilwood and his colleagues believe the artifacts may have been constructed with symbolic intent, the meaning of which is now unknown. 

ÒThe engraving itself is quite a complex geometric pattern. There is a system to the patterns,Ó says Henshilwood. 

ÒWe donÕt know what they mean, but they are symbols that I think could have been interpreted by those people as having meaning that would have been understood by others.Ó 

The fact that the surfaces were first ground smooth, and the complexity of the geometric motif indicate that the artwork was prepared by a deliberate sequence of choices, according to the authors.
/ENDS
Source: Science