Painted Ladies by Kate Douglas, New Scientist
by Kate Douglas, New Scientist
It all began when women set out to fool their men with a dab of make-up. Kate Douglas pictures the dawning of human culture.
AT FIRST glance it looks like any old lump of pinkish rock. But look closer and you can see it has a cross-hatched pattern carefully etched onto its surface. If someone told you the marks on this piece of red ochre were made by humans more than 70,000 years ago, making it the world’s oldest known work of art, you might well be impressed. But if they told you it was a Stone Age lipstick? You’d probably think they were pulling your leg. In fact, they’re completely serious. The artefact was found at the Blombos Cave, 30 metres above the sea on the coast of South Africa, and the cave is full of similar lumps of pigment. Many older, undecorated ones have been found throughout Africa. Researchers are using the discovery to paint an extraordinary picture of the emergence of our species, putting cosmetics at the heart of what makes humans unique.
Take this Stone Age make-up, along with fossil evidence arid archaeological findings of permanent dwellings, hearths and group living, and you start to see the first signs of an organised society, communicating through signals and symbolism, even rituals. It's exciting the researchers because they believe this could be the earliest evidence uncovered so far of human symbolic culture–and it may even tell us how culture began.
