ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY
Oldest known artwork found in Mossel Bay
The oldest known human-made art discovered to date — a 73,000-year-old cross-hatch design that looks like an oversized hashtag — has been retrieved from the Blombos Cave on the Western Cape coast. The drawing was unearthed from sediments in the cave near Mossel Bay that have yielded a remarkable array of human-made artefacts, including engraved ochre, bone tools, spear points and shell beads. The most recent find adds to the growing body of evidence that modern human behaviour emerged in Africa before our ancestors migrated to Europe. It is at least 30,000 years older than any other human-made art discovered so far. "The conferences were all saying 20 years ago that the origins of behavioural modernity lay in Europe — in France, Spain and Germany because that was where there were markers like the rock art of the Lascaux Cave. The evidence from Africa at that stage was virtually nonexistent," says Wits archaeologist Chris Henshilwood, the lead author of a paper describing the latest ...
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