The oldest drawing is a pattern
In 2018 a team led by Christopher Henshilwood published a flake of silcrete, a hard stone, from Blombos Cave on the southern coast of South Africa. On it, someone had drawn with a crayon of red ochre: three lines crossed by six others. It is about 73,000 years old, the oldest drawing known, and at least 30,000 years older than any abstract drawing found before it.
So the first thing anyone drew, as far as we know, was a pattern; the oldest dated paintings of animals, in Sulawesi, came more than 20,000 years later. In the caves of Ice Age Europe the habit never went away. Genevieve von Petzinger counted 32 types of geometric sign there, used from about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago, and most of them already appear in the oldest phase, alongside the first painted animals.
Five families to recognise
Sorting symbols into families gives them no meaning. It does show what repeats, much as you sort jigsaw pieces by colour before you know the picture.
- Hands: a stencil is a negative, with pigment sprayed around the hand; a print is positive, made with a painted palm. Hand stencils cluster near entrances and passages.
- Dots, in lines, fields or clusters. At Chauvet the big red dots were made by dipping the palm of a right hand in paint and pressing it to the wall, and the sizes suggest at least two different people.
- Grids and ladders, which look like diagrams and often lead the eye into a niche.
- Zigzags and meanders, which read as movement: water, lightning, a path.
- Spirals and circles, common on carved or painted rock alike. On a pecked panel a spiral is the record of thousands of small blows.
The same family can do different jobs in different places. In European caves, grids and ladders often sit deep inside, near hands and animals. In southern Africa, fine painted dots and lines accompany human figures in scenes that the archaeologist David Lewis-Williams links to the trance dances recorded among San communities. On the varnished cliffs of the American Southwest, pecked spirals and ladders piled up over centuries.
Counting, calendars or stars?
Rows of dots and notches invite counting. Scattered dots invite stars. Both readings are possible and both are easy to force: with enough patience any random scatter can be matched to a constellation.
What would a proven calendar look like? Newgrange, in Ireland, sets the bar. This passage tomb, built around 3200 BCE, has spirals carved on its entrance stone, and at the winter solstice the rising sun shines through a small opening above the door, the roof-box, and lights the chamber at the end of the passage. Building, date and light all agree. A painted row of dots needs that much evidence before anyone calls it a calendar.
Hands at the threshold
A hand puts a real person on the wall without drawing a face. Stencils may have marked belonging, initiation or simply “I was here”, and the evidence rarely lets us choose. Their size shows that adults and young people both made them, and the large share of left hands suggests that most makers held the spray in the right.
Where they sit is often the best clue. A band of lines at a narrow point of a passage, or a cluster of cupmarks at the mouth of a valley, works like a threshold: from here on, you are somewhere else.
Echoes and flickering light
In the 1980s Iégor Reznikoff and Michel Dauvois walked through French caves such as Niaux, Le Portel and Arcy-sur-Cure testing the acoustics with their own voices. The red marks clustered where the echo was strongest, including in tunnels you can only crawl through. Nobody knows what was sung there. But it looks as if the signs marked places where sound mattered.
Light changes them too. Painted dots glow under a lamp and fade in daylight, while pecked spirals outdoors jump out when the low sun rakes across the rock at dawn or dusk.
How not to over-read a symbol
Describe first. “Twenty red dots in two even rows on either side of a crack” helps everyone; “calendar” helps only if you can prove it. A spiral is not always a sun, a grid is not always a map, and the most honest reading often keeps two or three possibilities open. Never wet or chalk a panel to make a sign clearer, since that damages the very evidence you want to read; raking light does the job safely, and knowing how the colours were made often explains what looks like a deliberate sign.
Where to see prehistoric symbols
El Castillo, in Cantabria, takes small guided groups, and its Panel of Hands shows disks and stencils side by side. Newgrange is reached through the Brú na Bóinne visitor centre. Chauvet’s red dots are in the full-size replica, Grotte Chauvet 2. Places are limited at all three, so check the official websites before you go.
Sources
- C. S. Henshilwood et al., “An abstract drawing from the 73,000-year-old levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa”, Nature 562 (2018).
- G. von Petzinger, The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols (2016).
- Ministère de la Culture, “Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc”: the panels of hand-dots (archeologie.culture.gouv.fr/chauvet).
- A. W. G. Pike et al., “U-series dating of Paleolithic art in 11 caves in Spain”, Science 336 (2012).
- Office of Public Works, Ireland, “Brú na Bóinne: Newgrange winter solstice”.
- I. Reznikoff and M. Dauvois, “La dimension sonore des grottes ornées”, Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française 85 (1988).
- J. D. Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave (Thames & Hudson, 2002).
- A. A. Oktaviana et al., “Narrative cave art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago”, Nature 631 (2024).
