World’s oldest drawing discovered in South Africa

This 12 September 2018 video says about itself:

Oldest Drawing Ever Found Discovered In South African Cave

The researchers examined the marks and even recreated the patterns themselves, concluding they had definitely been deliberately applied with an ochre crayon.

Archaeologists used to think the ability of our species to think symbolically did not emerge until Homo sapiens colonised Europe around 40,000 years ago.

However, a steady trickle of evidence from places as far apart as Morocco and Indonesia has revealed that humans began practising art far earlier.

From Nature:

12 September 2018

World’s oldest drawing is Stone Age crayon doodle

‘Hashtag’ pattern drawn on rock in South African cave is 73,000 years old.

Colin Barras

Sometime in the Stone Age, human artists began experimenting with a new form of visual art: drawing. Now, from the ancient rubble that accumulated on the floor of a South African cave comes the earliest-known example — an abstract, crayon-on-stone piece created about 73,000 years ago.

“If there is any point at which one can say that symbolic activity had emerged in human society, this is it,” says Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University, UK, who was not involved in the discovery. The find is described in a paper published on 12 September in Nature.