Blombos Cave

Blombos Cave sits in a limestone cliff above the Indian Ocean coast of the Western Cape, South Africa. The cave faces south, overlooking a rocky shoreline. It has been excavated since 1991 under the direction of archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood.

The Ochre

In the Middle Stone Age layers, dating to approximately 77,000 years ago, excavators found two pieces of red ochre with crosshatch patterns deliberately scratched into the surface. The marks are not accidental. They follow a geometric pattern, with parallel lines crossed by diagonal ones. The pieces are the oldest known examples of deliberate symbolic marking by a human hand.

The Paint Kit

In a layer dating to approximately 100,000 years ago, the team found an ochre processing workshop: abalone shells used as mixing containers, ochre pieces ground to powder, animal bone used for stirring, and charcoal. Someone had prepared pigment, mixed it with a binding agent, and stored it. The kit is the oldest known evidence of compound tool manufacture.

What Blombos Shows

The ability to make a mark that refers to something other than itself is the foundation of all symbolic thought. Writing, mathematics, art, and religion all depend on it. The Blombos ochre fragments show that this capacity existed at least 77,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before the cave paintings of Lascaux or Altamira. The question is not when humans learned to think symbolically. The question is what they were doing with that ability for the intervening millennia.