Ancestors and Antecedents: Things (400,000 BCE)

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Since humanity existed, we have made things, and some of those very first things could be considered to be art. The earliest known cave paintings are as old as 35,000 years, though fragments of pigment and the primitive equipment for grinding and mixing pigment, discovered in Zambia, has been dated between 350,000 and 400,000 years old – it is thought that these were used for making body paint and ‘make-up’, possibly for ritual purposes. 

image from Wikimedia Commons

Simple stone hammers, and flakes of flint for cutting, were in use by pre-human species more that two-and-a-half million years ago. Carved stone glyphs and artefacts such as stone hand axes are thought to date back more that one million years! Because we are dealing with minerals and stone, which in themselves are millions of years old, it is very difficult to date much of this evidence accurately. Even if we give-or-take several millennia, it seems safe to say that where we find evidence of the earliest humans and related hominid species, we find artefacts, and possibly some form of art. These are things made by our ancestors and date so far back in time that many of them were actually used by our close ‘cousins’, such as the Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalensis, and all the other Homo genus who have since become extinct. 

Obviously, our own ancestors, the forebears of modern humans, did not become extinct, though historians, geneticists and archaeologists believe that during the last ice age, the total human population of Earth dropped to around 10,000. Some think that at one earlier point, up to 100,000 years ago, there may have been as few as 2,000 humans in the entire world! It is generally accepted, through genetic evidence, that the entire human race can be traced back to a single ‘mother’. 

It is during the latter centuries of the ice age that modern humans migrated up from Africa and through Europe, or Eastward to Asia. This coincided with the displacement and eventual demise of all the other hominid species. These migratory clans of early ‘modern human’, Homo Sapiens, were set aside from their competitors by more than just their ultimate survival. Around this ‘make-or-break’ evolutionary bottle neck, our ancestors were the first to fashion ‘non-functional’ objects. 

To call these objects ‘non-functional’ is misleading as they appear to have had a key role to play in ensuring the survival of those peoples, and therefore must have served some social, psychological and/or metaphysical functions. So although these things were not necessarily tools, they seem to be either the by-product of, or the catalyst for, whatever characteristics our ancestors needed to survive. It seems that all human and humanoid species had some innate need to make art of some sort, hence the pigment and glyphs carved by many pre-human species, but it is the direct ancestors of modern humans that were the first to produce objects that we begin to recognise as art.

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Short article at the Archaeology Journal's website about the discovery of pigments in Zambia which could be 400,000 years old