Cape Town and Environs Part 3 - Ancient Rock Art in South Africa

A story about Indonesian cave paintings that aired recently on NPR (http://www.npr.org/2014/10/08/354166930/indonesian-cave-paintings-as-old-as-europes-ancient-art) prompted me to write this blog post on rock art at Sevilla, near Clanwilliam, which Rishi and I saw while on our Cape Town, South Africa trip. We viewed the artwork shown below during an afternoon spent walking along a trail that accesses rock paintings created by San bushmen, the area’s original inhabitants.

In Indonesia, per the NPR story, new dating techniques that analyzed mineral deposits on top of the drawings put the age of the cave art at about 35,000 to 40,000 years old, comparable to the age of cave paintings in Western Europe. Although European cave paintings may be the best known and thus have led to the belief (the Euro-centric belief, I might add) that human artwork began there, archaeologists quoted by NPR asserted that cave painting likely originated in Africa and then spread around the world as those peoples left Africa. 

"When something like this shows up almost instantaneously, all over the distribution of humans, within say 10,000 years, the odds are it's something from our ancestors," says John Shea of Stony Brook University in New York.

In Africa, our species goes back 200,000 years, Shea notes. But archaeological sites there tend to be found in shallow caves that are relatively exposed to wind and the hot, humid conditions — unlike the deep, cold caves in Europe that are ideal for preserving artwork." 

The exact date of the Sevilla paintings is unknown, with estimates ranging widely from 800 years to 8,000 years old. But as the NPR story reports, dating rock art is difficult and Indonesian researchers previously thought the art there was less than 10,000 years old, so perhaps the drawings we saw are older as well. 

The paintings are not protected at all, allowing visitors to get right up to them. Fortunately, the fellow visitors we saw were all respectful and refrained from touching the ancient drawings. 

Nature’s artwork, in the form of flowers and spectacular rock formations, was also on display.