A red, crosshatched design adorning a rock from a South African cave may take the prize as the oldest known drawing. Ancient humans sketched the line pattern around 73,000 years ago by running a chunk ...

Around 73,000 years ago, in a cave now known as Blombos, someone took a pointed lump of iron-rich rock—ochre—and dragged its tip across another rock, leaving behind a pattern of red, crosshatched ...

Scientists excavating a Stone Age cave on South Africa’s southern coast have followed a trail of engraved pigments to what they suspect are the ancient roots of modern human behavior. Analyses of 13 ...

The oldest known abstract drawing has been found in South Africa's Blombos Cave -- on the face of a flake of siliceous rock retrieved from archaeological strata dated to 73,000 years before the ...

On Wednesday, scientists announced further proof that creativity and symbolic thought emerged in Africa, further debunking conventional belief that that Homo sapiens didn’t express creativity and ...

In an African cave high above the rocky shores of the Indian Ocean, a group of anatomically modern humans left a legacy of finely wrought artifacts some 77,000 years ago that could place the origins ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A small stone flake marked with intersecting lines of red ochre pigment some 73,000 years ago that was found in a cave on South Africa's southern coast represents what ...

Blombos Cave in South Africa has given us vast knowledge about our early ancestors. In 2015, four open access articles, with research finds from Blombos as a starting point, have been published in the ...

Charles Helm does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...