World’s oldest 73,000-year-old human drawing discovered

Scientists have discovered the oldest ever known drawing by human, which is similar to a hashtag and it is much older than we thought.

Researchers have found out the oldest drawing made by homo sapiens, which is a 73,000-year-old sketch drawn with a ochre crayon on silcrete rock in Blombos cave near Still Bay in the Western Cape, as per their research published in journal Nature.

The etching is a reminiscent of a hashtag and predates the previously known abstract and figurative drawings by humans some 30,000 years ago in Europe. However, the team leader Christopher Henshilwood told The Conversation that they are ‘hesitant to call it ‘art’’.

“We don’t know that it’s art at all. We know that it’s a symbol. Art is a very hard thing to define. Look at some of Picasso’s abstracts. Is that art? Who’s going to tell you it’s art or not?”

He also informed that the cross-hatched patterns have been discovered on pieces of ochre in other sites too. This signifies that early ancestors were able to reproduce the graphic designs with various techniques.

“It’s definitely an abstract design; it almost certainly had some meaning to the maker and probably formed a part of the common symbolic system understood by other people in this group. It’s also evidence of early humans’ ability to store information outside of the human brain.”

Blombos Cave is now an important archaeological site for researchers in order to know more about our early ancestors. Also, earlier in 2011, a painting kit made of abalone shells was discovered that dates around 100,000 years old, wrote Mashable.