Depressant

• Sand is a vast canvas – and may have been used as one for far longer than people realise.
• When people think of ancient palaeoart, cave paintings (pictographs), rock engravings (petroglyphs), images on trees (dendroglyphs) or arrangements of rocks in patterns (geoglyphs) might come to mind.
• Until recently it was only possible to speculate that the oldest art might have been in sand.

Method

• In the case of the Cape south coast aeolianites, we use a dating method called optically stimulated luminescence.
• Given how the tracks and markings in this study must have been formed – impressions made on wet sand, followed by rapid burial with new blowing sand – it is a good method as we can be reasonably confident that the dating “clock” started at about the same time as the trackways and markings were created.
• Of course, we had to be diligent in trying to exclude other causes of the patterns in rock that we encountered, including modern graffiti.

Understanding the marks

• The other two contained either knee or footprint impressions in association with the ammoglyphs.
• At one of the latter sites human forefoot impressions were found in association with a number of linear grooves and small round depressions.
• We were not able to determine whether these represented palaeoart, were some form of “messaging”, or had a utilitarian function such as foraging.
• Read more:
  South Africa's Blombos cave is home to the earliest drawing by a human

An ancient impulse

• The creation of art is one of the characteristics that helps to make us human.
• Knowing that our ancestors so long ago did the same as we do today perhaps helps to add to that sense of “humanness”.