77,000-year-old engravings found in Africa. Scale bar = 1 cm© Science

Engraved stones found in a South African cave could be the earliest known artworks. The findings predate the oldest cave paintings by more than 40,000 years.

About 77,000 years ago, human hands carved lines and triangles on two pieces of red ochre. The patterns show that people made abstract images and had the language and intellectual capacity to discuss their meaning, says Christopher Henshilwood of the South African Museum in Cape Town.

"Clearly, they stand for something else - they're not idle doodles," says Henshilwood, pointing to the elaborateness of the design and its repetition on separate stones. But he has no idea what this something else might be: "We don't understand human thought that deep in time."

Henshilwood and his colleagues found the stones in Blombos Cave, on the Southern Cape coast. The cave also contains finely carved bone tools and fishing equipment, suggesting that the cultural sophistication of the cave's inhabitants matched their technology.

Red ochre "didn't just lie about the cave", Henshilwood adds. "It would have had to be brought 30 or 40 kilometres". The stone might also have been used for body paint or decoration, he says.

Writing on the wall

"When I first saw a photo [of the carvings], my hair stood on end. It was mind-blowing," says anthropologist Alison Brooks of George Washington University in Washington DC. How the carvings were made might tell us whether they were writing, numbers, or an image, she suggests.

Artworks hint at when our ancestors acquired language and culture.

Anatomical and genetic evidence points to Homo sapiens being about a quarter of a million years old. But we do not know when our ancestors acquired language, culture and the other trappings of modern humanity.

Artworks are the key to answering this question, says Ben Smith, who studies rock art at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. "Art tells us about the makers' social systems, beliefs and rituals. It's like looking into their brain."

Old masters

The next-oldest marks generally accepted as art are French cave paintings, the oldest of which date back about 35,000 years.

These paintings led some researchers to posit that art arose in Europe. The new findings suggest otherwise, says Smith. "Art, culture and religion originated in Africa, and arrived in Europe as a package," he says.

Such attributes might even be older than modern humans, says Smith. Some million-year-old stone tools are far too big to be functional: "They might have a symbolic element," he says.

Ourknowledge of African Stone Age culture is based on discoveries at very few sites. More work is needed to show whether the Blombos Cave people were unusually sophisticated for their time and place, says Henshilwood.

Even if we don't recover art from this period, that doesn't mean people weren't, making it says Kathleen Gibson, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, Houston. "The Mona Lisa might not survive 40,000 years," she points out.

Decoration and aesthetics may only have taken off when populations got big enough for interaction between groups to become common and ideas to cross-fertilize, Gibson suggests. "If you're living in a group of 20 people, why would you wear jewellery and dress up?" 

• References

  1. Henshilwood, C. S. et al. Emergence of modern human behaviour: Middle Stone Age engravings from South Africa. Science, (2001).