https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/647178335/researchers-discover-ancient-hashtag
I'm not sure how long NPR keeps their articles up - so I will repost the copy and one photo and then my own personal rant afterwards.
I love to show students a timeline that illustrates two points in time. The point at which we started with actual writing and written records compared to the oldest known *making-of-marks* which were not alphabets and words. The point on the timeline for oldest known making of marks has been going back, further and further, as discoveries have been made and a few years ago it was exciting when it inched back to 40,000 years. Compare that to the oldest known writing system - clay tablets - 3500 B.C. - or 5,500 years ago. That would put the timeline at 42 inches long and known writing would be the last 5 1/2 inches.
With this latest discovery, we can extend the timeline to 73-inches. Wow. nearly twice as long. And it gets better. I lost the link, but there was an article including a video about some odd stones, carved into shapes that were long and slender. They've been found all over the world and nobody could figure out what they were until someone noticed that they made a tone if they were struck with something. So, they are like caveman xylophones. Am I the last person to hear about this? Maybe an alert reader will leave a comment on what they are called.
Previously, I would talk about how the *doodling* gets a lot of attention because it was the only thing that lasted - but there must have been singing and dancing and music and theater and sports. Now I know that at least the musicians left some traces.
So here is the NPR story:
Scientists working in South Africa say they've found the earliest known drawing. It was dug up in a cave where early humans apparently lived for thousands of years and left behind numerous artifacts.
The drawing isn't what you'd call elaborate; it's a row of crosshatched lines along the smooth face of a rock that may have been a tool for making ocher. In fact, the red lines were made with red ocher. The pattern (with a little imagination) resembles a hashtag. What's remarkable is that it was apparently made about 73,000 years ago. That's tens of thousands of years older than similar drawings made in European caves.
The researchers, led by Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen in Norway, have previously found a sort of toolkit for making ocher at the site, known as Blombos Cave, that dates back 100,000 years. That evidence shows that early Homo sapiens were clearly making ocher a long time ago, though for what purpose is unclear. And they've found a piece of ocher from about 70,000 years ago with engraved crosshatching on it.
It now seems that they weren't just scratching marks onto things, but also drawing on stone with ocher. "Our microscopic and chemical analyses of the pattern confirm that red ochre pigment was intentionally applied to the flake with an ochre crayon," Henshilwood and his team explain in the journal Nature.
To test their idea, the researchers made up a batch of ocher and used a wooden stick to paint it onto a similar shard of rock. They also made an ocher "crayon" and used that as well. The drawn lines matched the crayon application most closely. The researchers say that's an interesting distinction, suggesting that a crayon might have lasted longer, while ocher "paint" would have been prone to drying up quickly.
Research team member Karen van Niekerk, also from the University of Bergen, says these lines appear to be more than just random doodling. "The archaeological layer in which [the drawing] was found has yielded other indicators of symbolic thinking, such as shell beads covered with ochre and, more importantly, pieces of ochres engraved with abstract patterns," she writes in the journal Ecology & Evolution.
These people used different techniques and media, she says, supporting the hypothesis "that these signs were symbolic in nature and represented an inherent aspect of the spiritual world of these African Homo sapiens," says van Niekerk.
End of article - and here is my rant.
It annoys me when every discovery includes theories about symbolism and meaning. Maybe some of it was just mindless doodling. I hang with a enough people who agree that sometimes the activity is the whole ball of wax. It doesn't mean anything. It's possible to make marks that have no content. I'd go further and say that the content-less work is just as significant as the content laden, but that's probably too far out there for a lotta people, so, I'll just keep that to myself. Except I didn't, did I.
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