The World's Oldest Known Drawing Is a 73,000-Year-Old Hashtag.

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Homo sapienscreated the world's first known drawing on this stone about 73,000 years ago in what is now South Africa.
Credit: Craig Foster
▼ A small rock flake no larger than a house key is covered with a colossal surprise: the first known drawing ever made by a human.
Some human or humans (Homo sapiens) used a red-ochre crayon to draw a hashtag-like design on a rock flake in what is now South Africa about 73,000 years ago, said the researchers who analyzed the doodle.
It's unclear what the crisscrossed lines mean, but similar designs have been found at other early human sites in South Africa, Australia and France, said study senior researcher Christopher Henshilwood, director of the Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour at the University of Bergen in Norway.
"It seems to be part of the human repertoire of producing signs," Henshilwood told Live Science.
Archaeologists discovered the 1.5-inch-long (3.8 centimeters) rock flake in Blombos Cave, an archaeological site on the coast of South Africa, about 185 miles (300 kilometers) east of Cape Town. The cave is famous for its Middle Stone Age artifacts — including shell beads and engraved stone tools — that were left by humans who lived there between 100,000 and 70,000 years ago.
Study co-researcher Luca Pollarolo, a technical assistant in anthropology and African archaeology at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, made the actual discovery in 2015, when he was going through sediment samplesin the lab, which excavators had painstakingly "removed millimeter by millimeter" from the cave, Henshilwood said.
The flake was covered with ash and dirt, but a quick wash revealed the red crosshatch lines, Henshilwood noted. The ancient drawing includes six parallel lines that are crossed by three slightly curved lines, the researchers said. (Go hereto see a 3D video of the ancient drawing.)
In other words, the piece of abstract art "is a hashtag," said Henshilwood, who added that the drawing predates other known early human drawings by at least 30,000 years.
Is it real?
As any skeptic would, the researchers wondered whether the drawing was made naturally or if it was created byH. sapiens. So, they reached out to study co-researcher Francesco d'Errico, a professor at the University of Bordeaux, who helped them photograph the artifact and determine that the lines had been applied to the rock by hand.
The research team members even tried making their own designs with ochreon similar pieces of stone. The original artist (or artists) first smoothed the stone and then used an ochre crayon that had a tip between 0.03 to 0.1 inches (1 to 3 millimeters) thick, they found. (Ochre is a clay that can vary in hardness and can leave behind a mark similar to a crayon's.)
Moreover, the sudden termination of the red lines suggests that the pattern originally covered a larger surface. For this reason, the researchers suspect the flake was once part of a larger grindstone, Henshilwood said. Archaeologists are currently searching for more pieces of the grindstone, but they haven't found anything yet, he said. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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