He told Reuters that while the team would be "hesitant to call it art", it almost definitely had "some meaning to the maker".<doc-sep>Using a microscope, a laser and a scanning electron microscope, they determined that the marks were on top of the rock and that they were made from red ocher, a type of natural pigment that was often used to make prehistoric cave paintings. In fact, ancient humans in the Blombos Cave were making ocher paint as far back as 100,000 years ago. “Then we had to determine how did they make those lines?” Dr. van Niekerk said. “Were they painted or drawn on?” They recreated ocher paint, then fashioned a wooden stick into a brush and made strokes on stone flakes comparable to the specimen. They also made an ocher crayon and drew lines. They then compared the paint markings and crayon markings with what they had seen on the artifact. They determined that the ancient crisscross pattern was a drawing, not a painting, made with an ocher crayon tip that most likely measured only about 1 to 3 millimeters in thickness. That distinction between a painting and drawing is important, according to Dr. Henshilwood, because ocher paint batches can dry. That makes it less useful than an ocher crayon used by an ancient human whenever she or he wanted to make symbols without going to the trouble of mixing up paint. Dr. Henshilwood and his team also showed that the red lines were drawn onto a smooth surface. That indicated that the flake was once a part of a larger stone that the prehistoric humans may have used to grind ocher. They also showed that the original red lines most likely stretched past what was seen on the stone flake before the grindstone was broken. They cannot say with certainty what the purpose of the drawing was and whether it was mere doodling or if it held some greater meaning. But they have their conjectures.<doc-sep>The cave lies about 200 miles east of Cape Town, on South Africa’s southern coast. Henshilwood started working there in 1991; a decade later, he and his colleagues found two pieces of ochre that had been engraved with crosshatched lines, and were at least 70,000 years old. At the time, they were the oldest abstract art ever found. Henshilwood took them as evidence that humans in Africa already had the capacity for symbolic thought long before they started painting on European cave walls. Complex human cultures are older than scientists thought. A few years later, his team found jewelry in Blombos—a set of 77,000-year-old beads that had been made from shells and decorated with ochre. Shortly after, they found an entire 100,000-year-old paint-making workshop: stones for grinding and hammering ochre stones, a bone rod for stirring the liquefied paste, and abalone shells for storing it. But despite finding several engravings, “we never found any drawings, and it was kind of strange,” Henshilwood says. It wasn’t for a lack of tools. During its excavations, his team had found several crayons—ochre flakes that had been ground to a point and could leave red marks when pressed on stone. “We knew they had been used. We never knew what they had been used on,” he said. That changed when Henshilwood’s colleague Luca Pollarolo started combing through stone artifacts that had been excavated in 2011, and noticed a red crosshatch pattern on one of them—six lines going in one direction, and three more that cross them diagonally. It looked like part of a drawing, although “it was pretty dull looking,” Henshilwood says. “I was convinced, but not totally convinced.” Chemical tests reassured him. They showed the signatures of two distinct kinds of ochre—one from the red lines, and another from the rock itself. The evidence suggests that the rock was once part of a larger grindstone that was used to process ochre. At some point, someone cleaned the grindstone, drew red lines on it, and then flaked a piece off. To test that idea, the team made ochre crayons of its own, and used them to mark rocks from the same part of Blombos. “We produced something that exactly matched the drawing we found,” Henshilwood says, right down to a microscopic scale. But there’s some circularity in those experiments, says Lyn Wadley, an archeologist at the University of Witwatersrand. The team thinks the lines were made through intentional drawing, and it showed that intentional drawing could have produced such lines. What about other activities? Across other South African caves, ochre was clearly used in many different ways. “If after performing a variety of activities with grindstones, grindstone fragments, and pieces of ochre, the only marks to match the archaeological ones are from drawing with an ochre crayon, I would be convinced that their interpretation is the most likely one,” Wadley says.<doc-sep>
Scientists said on Wednesday that they have discovered the world's oldest drawing on a small rock in South Africa. The drawing, found at Blombos Cave, some 300km east of Cape Town in South Africa, is approximately 73,000-years-old and vaguely resembles a hashtag sign with several criss-crossed lines. It predates previous oldest known drawings by at least 30,000 years and was made with red ochre pigment, which has been used by human species for at least 285,000 years. Archeologist Christopher Henshilwood told Reuters that he "would be hesitant to call it art". "It is definitely an abstract design and it almost certainly had some meaning to the maker, and it probably formed a part of the common symbolic system understood by other people in this group," he added. The rock with the drawing measures about 38.6mm long and 12.8mm wide. "The abrupt termination of all lines on the fragment edges indicates that the pattern originally extended over a large surface. The pattern was probably more complex and structured in its entirety than in this truncated form," Henshilwood explained. Researchers work inside Blombos Cave on South Africa's southern coast. Magnus M. Haaland/Handout via REUTERS Numerous other artefacts were found in Blombos Cave, including beads covered in red ochreand a paint-making kit dating back around 100,000 years. For the scientists, who published their findings in the journal Nature, these artefacts "are a prime indicator of modern cognition and behaviour" by early African Homo Sapiens. Africa is considered to be the birthplace of modern man with Homo Sapiens first appearing there more than 315,000 years ago.