The Blombos engravings
Cross-hatched patterns cut into ochre in a South African cave 73,000 years ago.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 4 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 3 thousand years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
Blombos Cave has produced pieces of ochre bearing deliberate cross-hatched geometric designs dated to around 73,000 to 77,000 years ago, along with shell beads and a 100,000-year-old ochre-processing workshop with abalone shells used as containers. In 2018 a stone flake was found bearing a cross-hatched pattern drawn with an ochre crayon — the oldest known drawing. The designs are abstract rather than figurative, and what they meant is unrecoverable.