Civilization / Foundations of Civilization

Art & Symbols

Engravings, jewelry and cave painting show people storing meaning outside the head: a precursor of writing and number.

Blombos Cave (South Africa) yielded a stone flake with an ochre-crayon cross-hatch drawing (~73,000 years), engraved ochre pieces (~75,000-100,000) and pierced shell beads (~75,000). In Sulawesi (Indonesia), a narrative scene of human-like figures with a pig is at least 51,200 years old (Nature, 2024), the oldest known example of visual storytelling. Symbols make group identity and memory visible and shareable.