The first symbols
Cross-hatching scratched into ochre, 60,000 years before cave art
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Blombos has produced engraved ochre, snail-shell beads with wear showing they were strung, and an ochre-processing workshop dated to 100,000 years. Together with finds from Diepkloof and Pinnacle Point, this paints a picture of symbolic behaviour far older than the European "creative explosion" around 40,000 years — and makes European cave art a regional flowering rather than a starting point. The distinction between using a tool and using a sign is the most fundamental in human cognition: a sign stands for something other than itself.
For children
In Blombos Cave in South Africa, archaeologists found a piece of red ochre with a cross-hatched pattern scratched into it. It is 73,000 years old. The pattern serves no practical purpose — it is just a pattern. But it shows someone thinking in signs, and that is the beginning of language, art and mathematics alike.
Connects to
Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org