Oldest Art from the New World?

In a cave in Brazil, researchers have found what they claim may be the oldest known art from the western hemisphere. Dating from between 9,000 and 12,000 years ago, the simple petroglyph pictures a human-like figure that is roughly 30cm tall.

The report of the discovery is published in the February 22, 2012 issue of PLoS ONE, an open access journal. The team was led by Walter Neves of the University of Sao Paulo.

Caption: This is the oldest reliably dated petroglyph ever found in the New World.

Credit: Citation: Neves WA, Araujo AGM, Bernardo DV, Kipnis R, Feathers JK (2012) Rock Art at the Pleistocene/Holocene Boundary in Eastern South America. PLoS ONE 7(2): e32228. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0032228

Early New World art is rare, and the oldest examples are not nearly as old as art discovered in Europe and Africa, which ranges back 30,000 years or more. But this finding is interesting nonetheless. Odd features of the drawing--is it human or a bird or reptile, and does it include an oversize phallus--are sure to fuel speculations about the religious or shamanistic origins of ancient art. The earliest expressions of symbolic culture in any setting or context provide additional insight into the cultural origins of modern humanity.

"Rock Art at the Pleistocene/Holocene Boundary in Eastern South America" is published in the February 22 issue of PLoS ONE and is available free to the public.

100,000 Years of Art

The awakening of human creativity is one of the great mysteries of our species. Even today we marvel at the artistic power of cave art, some of it dating back nearly 35,000 years ago. Musical instruments—flutes, at least—date back nearly as far. Beads, often made by carefully drilling a hole through shells, date to nearly 100,000 years ago.

And now comes evidence to suggest that painting goes back just as far. At least 100,000 years ago, about 40,000 years earlier than previously thought, human beings made pigments for paint through a process that is surprisingly complex.

In the October 14 edition of the journal Science, Christopher Henshilwood and his team present their analysis of the earliest known “artists’ workshop.” In the Blombos Cave in Cape Town, South Africa, they discovered a 100,000 year old ochre processing site. In two places in the cave, ochre was ground into fine powder, mixed with crushed quartz and other chemicals including charcoal and bone, and blended into a pigment mixture that was stored in two abalone shells. The pigment may have been used for painting, body decoration, or coloring of clothing.

"The recovery of these toolkits adds evidence for early technological and behavioural developments associated with humans and documents their deliberate planning, production and curation of pigmented compound and the use of containers. It also demonstrates that humans had an elementary knowledge of chemistry and the ability for long-term planning 100,000 years ago," concludes Henshilwood in a press release issued by the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The article, "A 100,000-Year-Old Ochre-Processing Workshop at Blombos Cave, South Africa," appears in the October 14 issue of Science.

What is fascinating is how early all this occurred and just how complex the process was. It involved careful planning over time. It included surprisingly sophistical technology (one is tempted to say “chemical engineering”). Why? What was stirring then, and how are we still inventing new ways to release the human imagination?