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Archaeologists discovered a prehistoric drawing in a South African cave, believed to be the oldest known work of art in the world, around 73,000 years old. The drawing’s criss-cross pattern of red lines resembles Twitter’s hashtag symbol and is considered a “great advance” in human development. The locals most likely used shells to carry the mixture of ochre, blubber, and charcoal into the cave and applied it to the wall with a stick. The artwork was recreated and determined to be part of a larger picture.
Twitter might seem ubiquitous, but it’s only been around for about 15 years, not 73,000. However, it’s hard to miss the similarity between the social media site’s iconic hashtag symbol and the prehistoric drawing inside a seaside cave in South Africa, discovered by archaeologists in 2018.
The criss-cross pattern of red lines has been considered the oldest known work of art in the world because it is regarded as a symbol meant to convey information. The use of symbols denotes a “great advance” in human development, according to archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen in Norway.
“What they could do with symbols is, for the first time, store information outside the human brain,” Henshilwood said.
The drawing, which is around 30,000 years older than the artwork previously thought to be the oldest, was discovered by Luca Pollarolo, an archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Pollarolo said the locals most likely used the shells to carry the mixture of ochre, blubber and charcoal into the cave, then applied it to the wall with a stick. He and his team recreated the artwork and determined that at one point it was part of a larger picture.
Rock art history lessons:
In 2016, art historians determined that the 36,000-year-old paintings in France’s Chauvet Cave depicted a volcanic eruption.
The wall paintings inside Spain’s Altamira Cave were created over the course of approximately 20,000 years.
Europe contains at least 400 sites where ancient cave paintings have been discovered thanks to modern technology.
