Engraved ochre and shell-bead ornaments at Blombos Cave
- Date
- c. 100,000–75,000 years ago
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- Southern Africa (South Africa)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
Blombos Cave on the southern Cape coast of South Africa has yielded some of the most influential evidence for the deep antiquity of symbolic behaviour.
In Middle Stone Age levels dated to around 75,000–100,000 years ago, excavators recovered pieces of red ochre deliberately incised with geometric cross-hatched and linear patterns — abstract designs that carry no obvious utilitarian function and imply shared symbolic meaning. The same deposits produced more than seventy shells of the tick-shell snail Nassarius kraussianus, perforated and worn in ways that show they were strung together and worn as beads, among the earliest known personal ornaments. Personal ornamentation is widely read as a proxy for symbolically mediated social identity and language-like communication. Together with formal bone tools and heat-treated, pressure-flaked stone points from the site, these finds pushed the recognised origins of 'modern' human cognition back well before the later Upper Palaeolithic of Eurasia, anchoring behavioural modernity firmly in the African Middle Stone Age.
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Related culture, arts & philosophy events
- The world's earliest known drawing, Blombos Cavec. 73,000 years ago
- Behavioural modernity and major Out-of-Africa dispersalc. 70,000–50,000 years ago
- Göbekli Tepe – monumental architecture by hunter-gatherersc. 9,600–8,000 BCE
- Upper Paleolithic art and symbolic explosionc. 40,000+ years ago
- World's earliest figurative and narrative cave art on Sulawesic. 51,000 – 45,500 years ago
- Chauvet Cave: early masterworks of figurative cave artc. 36,500 years ago
Further reading
The wider story
The Story of Art
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