A stone shard on which is a fragment of the Blombos Cave drawing
'The earliest ever human drawing was a complex ‘hashtag’, scientists have found, proving man was capable of abstract thought far earlier than previously thought'.
The article concerns the discovery of drawings in the Blombos Cave in the southern Cape of South Africa. The drawing consists of three red lines cross hatched with six separate lines. The startling issue is that this drawing is 73,000 years old and predates previous drawing from Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia by at least 30,000 years.
The drawing was made with apparently an ochre crayon, a fact that was for me even more interesting, because I was fascinated as to how the crayon was made. Was it simply a found lump of material, was it shaped or was it a crayon made out of material soaked in fat and grease? Ochre is a natural clay earth pigment which is a mixture of ferric oxide and varying amounts of clay and sand. It ranges in colour from yellow to deep orange or brown and can come in both hard and soft formats and like any clay material has the ability to be shaped when wet and it hardens when dry. I.e. it has the possibility to be shaped by other things it comes into contact with.
Prof Henshilwood, the scientist reporting on this stated,
“Before this discovery, Palaeolithic archaeologists have for a long time been convinced that unambiguous symbols first appeared when Homo sapiens entered Europe, about 40,000 years ago." I was interested in his use of the term 'unambiguous symbols', but before I return to that, and the idea of 'abstract thought' lets compare the Telegraph's reporting with how the 'History' website carried the story,
'It turns out the hashtag was trending way before Twitter—a new discovery in a South African cave shows human’s earliest known drawing was a depiction of the now pervasive symbol, or at least very close to it'. In this case we have the idea that the drawing was a depiction of a symbol. But how do we know the reading was 'unambiguous'? Every time I make a drawing I'm very aware that what it might mean to others is open to interpretation.
The obsession that the media has about finding a similarity in behaviour with ourselves is interesting, the stories don't attempt to unpick what is really going on here and they leave the impression that the earliest humans went around drawing the hash symbol # and similar forms and as they did that they used them to carry unambiguous messages.
The hashtag symbol we now use in twitter, (the hash sign on a computer keyboard that looks like this #), is at the moment used within a Twitter message to identify a keyword or topic of interest and facilitate a search for it. Whenever a user adds a hashtag to their post, it's able to be indexed by the social network and becomes searchable/discoverable by other users. Therefore it has a very specific (unambiguous) use within the context of Twitter usage. The hashtag was first brought to Twitter on August 23, 2007 by Chris Messina. This is really interesting because in this case you can point to the very moment a symbol was linked to a particular use. Messina's suggestion was quickly taken up by others and most of us will have used it in the way Messina suggested, but as Messina's original tweet points out, at the time # was thought of as a pound sign.
The # or hash sign was previous to its Twitter use, most commonly known as the number sign, (the designation of an ordinal number) in American English as a pound sign or in British English a sign for a pound in weight (a ligatured abbreviation for pounds avoirdupois. having been derived from ℔). It is also known as an octothorp. Within the language of musical notation we have the ♯ or sharp symbol. In Chinese the sign for moon uses a similar construction and if you look at the signs for mouth, eye and ear, you will see that they all have a similar graphic identity, or come from a family of forms very close to that occupied by the hash or sharp symbol.
Chinese characters for moon, mouth, eye and ear
The evolution of language
The Phoenician symbol for H was at times very similar to our # sign and it is likely that when making up written languages from a few variations of line, the # sign is going to crop up more often than not.
All of these symbols are learnt conventions and they only operate within the subgroup language preoccupations of the particular cultures that use them. There are other theories about the very early use of non figurative marks on cave walls, one of which relates them to entoptic forms. (See link at the end of this post)
Entoptic forms and art
Prof Henshilwood also states, “These signs were most likely symbolic, which helps round out the argument that these Homo sapiens were behaviourally modern". But where are the other symbols in the cave? You can't have a Twitter message just consisting of hashtags. Symbols of this sort exist within a field of other symbols and that is what makes them part of a language system. So what does the professor mean by behaviourally modern? Are we to read these marks as belonging to some sort of narrative? It could be one that states "I live here, this is my home, my territory is dear to me and I will defend it". If so, I think we could find that story being told by a wide variety of species. I suspect that humans in those days were much more integrated into their world and that language development had yet to lead to a separation from reality.
But what is a tag? It is defined as a label attached to someone or something for the purpose of identification or to give other information. Within the world of graffiti tagging is defined as a form of communication between street gangs and serves the purpose of marking territory.
But there are a lot of animals that mark territory. For instance smell is often used as a territorial marker. In the case of a rhinoceros there is a visual and olfactory sign system in use, a large part of it the product of bacteria in the gut. (But more on that later)
Leopards create scrapes in the ground, and these together with urinated scent create territory markers and bears make marks on trees not that dissimilar to a hashtag.
Bear claw marking on a tree
The way that bears leave territorial markers on trees is perhaps not dissimilar to the way that the Blombos Cave markings were made. Bears and other animals have been known to mark the walls of caves when the rock was soft enough. In fact, bear scratches have been reported as underlying the paintings at Chauvet Cave in France and it could be that the first human markings were simply tracings made over the ones made by animals. By tracing over the marks of another animal, you could perhaps build an empathy with the creature that made the marks. I'm not trying to debunk Prof Henshilwood's theories, but what I am trying to do is to make a point about the way we think about complexity and abstract thought. Going back to the first quote I came across, "The earliest ever human drawing was a complex ‘hashtag’, scientists have found, proving man was capable of abstract thought far earlier than previously thought". Would a newspaper bother to report that the earliest ever animal markings were found to be made at a much earlier time, and that they represented complex communication systems? How 'complex' is a hashtag? Some graffiti tags are simply signs that state, 'I was here'. How can we know how complex another creature's thought is? Of course the statement, "proving 'man' was capable of abstract thought", is somewhat thoughtless in a time of sexual equality. This could be read as a further sign of hierarchical thinking, man above woman, humans above animals, abstract thought valued as being more important than emotional or tacit understanding.
Of course it is wonderful to think that 73,000 years ago humans were making marks on walls, but is it not just as wonderful that dogs mark territorial boundaries by urinating on things? When you begin to look closely at anything you reveal deeper and deeper mysteries, rather like the line you see that defines a Koch snowflake, the closer you look at it, the more complex it gets.
Koch Snowflake
Every time you look at a Koch snowflake you become aware of levels of complexity that can seem very like that story about how long is the coastline of Britain? The closer you look the longer it gets, at some point you are having to measure around every pebble on a beach and at another level of investigation every indentation in every grain of sand needs to be factored in, etc. All objects or events can be looked at using different magnifications, we can regard things at a distance, or we can walk right up close, very like a fractal. A fractal (of which the Koch snowflake is an early example) has been defined as "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," a fractal having a property of self-similarity. Therefore as you look closer, what you begin to see are smaller units that are related to the larger units. It is complex all the way down. You are probably familiar with Mandelbrot sets, images of which exhibit an elaborate and infinitely complicated boundary that reveals progressively ever-finer recursive detail at increasing magnifications.
A Mandelbrot set
The image above shows a Mandelbrot set with external rays, which are curves that run from infinity toward the Mandelbrot set. What is interesting here is that these curves are called rays because they are similar to images of rays. I.e. the mathematical world dips its toe into my world, one where the line can be regarded as a visual symbol for a ray. In the case of the drawing below, dashed lines being used to represent radiating sun rays, suggesting that the rays pulse outwards, rather than emanate as an even flow.
Visualisation of Sun rays
In mathematical language a ray is a part of a line that has one endpoint and goes on infinitely in only one direction and because it extends infinitely you cannot measure the length of a ray.
The sun rays that have bathed the Earth for billions of years can be captured by cyanobacteria, and this was the case long before plants developed photosynthesis. The original spread of cyanobacteria has been called the Great Oxygenation Event, an event that in some scientific circles has been described as a type of holocaust. However it took a very long time, from about three billion years ago, to about one billion years ago. A huge proportion of the early life-forms on earth were anaerobic, which means that they reacted negatively (were killed) if oxygen was present, therefore the initial release of oxygen into the Earth’s atmosphere was catastrophic to the existing life forms. It was only after the evolution of oxygen consuming aerobic organisms, that life on Earth established an equilibrium again. Free oxygen has been an important constituent of the atmosphere ever since, but as we are becoming more and more aware of global warming, we also become more aware of the fact that in the long term things have been very different and that the Earth's biosphere was always capable of renewal, even after unexpected catastrophes. When exploring fractal worlds you begin to visualise different mathematical possibilities, and it is almost as if new worlds, not dissimilar to the microscopic one of our more physical world, are coming into being. At some point everything begins to dissolve into everything else. The maths becomes geometry, abstract geometric forms become biomorphic cellular structures, and cellular structures begin to gather together and move. I am very aware that I am composed of 57% microscopic microbial entities, my human cells are the other 43%. So something hugely important is going on at a microscopic level, especially in my gut where these tiny creatures are mainly concentrated. If I am over 50% made up of other creatures then when looked at very closely what am I? The notion of self begins to dissolve and it might be better to state that there is no such thing as 'I', simply a working correspondence with other entities that at certain levels of magnification appear to be a mass of single celled organisms, a sack full of water or a human being. When looked at using a powerful microscope, a family of resemblance becomes apparent, a rat's DNA being very similar to my own, and like myself the rat too is made up more of micro organisms than rat cells, the DNA of which it could be argued is only viable when fused with that of mammals.
Rat's cerebellum
Human cerebellum
At huge levels of magnification one thing can easily be another, as we go further down the microscopic levels we would of course enter the world of quantum theory, physical reality dissolving into energy and mathematical probabilities.
A Buddhabrot
The grid / hatching /hash / net / sieve
Van Gogh
The oldest existent drawings in the UK are from the Channel Isles. As you can see they could be of anything and the current interpretations are in my mind rather suspect, at the end of the day they might as well be of hashtags.
Coda
Marks scratched into the wall of Gorham's Cave
Incised 'hashtag' type marks: Rising Star cave
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