Archaeologists investigating Blombos Cave in South Africa recently announced the discovery of nine faint red lines drawn at least 73,000 years ago on a 4cm long flake of rock. These lines are thought to be the earliest known drawing, probably a fragment of a larger work, since the strokes are cut off at the top and bottom edges of the flake. The pigment is red ochre, a mineral mixture of iron oxides in a clay or chalk matrix.

Ochre colours vary from rich reds to light yellows, depending on the amount of water bound to the iron oxides and particle size. Yellow ochre can be reddened by heating, as it drives off the bound water. Yellow and brown ochre are common constituents of modern paint sets, whether acrylic, oil, watercolour or gouache.

While the drawing is considered remote in terms of time, it is not remote in terms of material or technique. An artist today can walk into any art shop and pick up a pencil of red chalk — powdered iron oxide and chalk pressed into a cylindrical shape. Just as an artist rotates a sheet of paper while making a sketch, attempts to recreate the design revealed that the prehistoric artist rotated the rock.

A drawing is made with dry pigment, while a painting is made with pigment dispersed in a liquid that dries. Paint goes back at least 100,000 years. Two abalone shells uncovered in Blombos Cave in 2011 were found to contain red ochre, charcoal, bone fragments and stone flakes, with telltale signs that the contents had been stirred with a liquid that evaporated long ago, indicating that the shells were mixing bowls for a dark red watercolour. To this day, painters of miniatures favour mussel shells for mixing and holding paint.

Nine faint red lines discovered at Blombos Cave in South Africa are considered a piece of drawing that is at least 73,000 years old

Unlike ochre, charcoal is organic in origin, made from charred wood or other vegetation. The bone fragments in the shells had been burnt before being crushed, perhaps to release the fatty marrow, which would have served to bind the pigments to a surface. Although marrow is not used today, the binders in some artists’ inks are extracted by boiling the skins and bones of fish or rabbits in water. Watercolours and gouache substitute animal-friendly gum arabic, a sticky resin that leaks through the bark of certain acacias.

As for the flakes of stone found in the shells, these originated from the stones used to abrade and crush the ochre, charcoal and bone.

The earliest painting, made at least 64,000 years ago in La Pasiega Cave in Spain, resembles a three-rung ladder. It, too, is made with red ochre. While the design’s significance is unknown, it is enormously significant to our understanding of human origins. Confounding expectations, it was not made by Homo sapiens (that’s us) but by Homo neanderthalensis. Palm-sized red discs dotting cave walls have also been attributed to Neanderthals. The earliest disc, in El Castillo in Spain, was painted 40,800 years ago. These cave paintings suggest that abstract thinking and language are not unique to our species.

More famous than these abstract paintings are figurative hand stencils and animal paintings. The oldest hand stencils appear to have been made by blowing red paint (ochre again) through a hollowed bone or reed or directly from the mouth, around a hand placed against a wall. Hand stencils have been found in locations as distant from each other as Sulawesi in Indonesia (39,900 years old) and El Castillo (37,300 years old). Curiously, the oldest painted animal image, a pig-deer, is close by the Sulawesi hand stencil, but it was made 4,500 years later.

Black hand stencils are placed around two handsome spotted horses that were painted with black mineral manganese dioxide in France’s Pech Merle Cave 25,000 years ago. Finger-length ratios reveal that the stenciled hands were women’s, casting doubt on the assumption that early artists were men. Indeed, a 2009 analysis of hand stencils in caves across France and Spain concluded that most of the hands were female. What could these hand stencils mean?

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 21st, 2018