Blombos Cave
— — the earliest known marks a human made.
Not only on a wall.
“A small cave in the limestone cliffs of South Africa's southern Cape coast, a few kilometres east of Still Bay. Excavations led by Christopher Henshilwood since 1991 have pulled out some of the earliest known evidence of symbolic human thought — engraved ochre, shell beads, and a paint workshop that predate the European cave paintings by tens of thousands of years.
Blombos Cave, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Blombos Cave opens in a limestone cliff on the southern Cape coast of South Africa, about a hundred kilometres east of Cape Agulhas and a few kilometres east of Still Bay in the Western Cape province. The cave sits roughly thirty-five metres above the present-day sea, set into coastal fynbos. Archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood, now of the University of Bergen and the University of the Witwatersrand, began systematic excavation in 1991, and the site is protected as part of South Africa's heritage estate. It is a research site rather than a tourist destination, and access is restricted.
The cave has yielded some of the oldest known evidence of symbolic human behaviour. A piece of silcrete bearing a deliberate cross-hatched drawing in ochre, dated to about 73,000 years ago, was published in Nature in 2018 as the earliest known abstract drawing. Earlier layers produced a set of perforated Nassarius kraussianus shell beads about 75,000 years old and an ochre-processing kit from around 100,000 years ago using abalone shells as containers. Together the finds reset the timeline for when modern human cognition emerged.
The time depth of Blombos is the part that holds you. The earliest occupation layers reach back roughly 100,000 years, and the symbolic finds cluster in the Still Bay industry between about 75,000 and 70,000 years ago. The lower layers were sealed by a thick band of sterile sand that protected the older deposits through the Last Glacial Maximum, when sea levels dropped and the coastline lay tens of kilometres further south. The cave looks out today across coastal fynbos and the Indian Ocean.