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Language and the stones of the Blombos Cave
The Blombos Cave is an archeological site located on the southern Cape shore of the Indian Ocean 180 miles east of Cape Town, South Africa. There, in 1999 and 2000, Christopher Henshilwood, adjunct professor at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and a team of the Ikiko South African Museum in Cape Town, found two engraved ochre stones.
Although minute (two and three inches long) the artifacts are causing much stir because they have abstract engravings and they are dated to more than 70,000 years ago. The earliest previous evidence of abstract representations until now is from the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic period, mainly in France, and dated to less than 35,000 years ago, the Chauvet cave. Details are being published in this week´s issue of Science. Dating of the material was done through luminescence methods, and just to be sure Geoff Duller, co-author researcher from the University of Wales, stated that 1,800 grains of sand from the cave were dated individually by the same method, arriving at the same results. The two pieces of ochre were first scraped and ground to create flat surfaces, and then marked with cross hatches and lines to create a consistent complex geometric motif. Says Henshilwood: "Rather than being outlines of animals or other representations drawn from nature, the designs on the two pieces of ochre show a consistent representation of the development of arbitrary conventions to express mutually understood concepts. They may have been constructed with symbolic intent, the meaning of which is now unknown. These findings demonstrate that ochre use in the Middle Stone Age was not an exclusively utilitarian (body or decorative paint, skin protection, tanning animal hides) and, arguably, the transmission and sharing of meaning of the engravings relied on fully syntactical language". He goes further by saying that carved lines and triangles are patterns that show that people made abstract images and had the language and intellectual capacity to discuss their meaning. Which agrees rather well with two statements by Terrence W. Deacon in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution: "Language acquisition certainly depends on predispositions. The search for an innate set of ´rules´ is giving way to the investigation of environmental, behavioural, perceptual and learning biases that form the ´scaffolding´ of language construction"; and "The multitude of language adaptations seamlessly integrated into human nature provide strong evidence for an ancient origin for language". João Zilhão, the Portuguese archeologist and researcher also has something to say: "There can be no symbols without language, and the discovery of the symbols proves the existence of language". But he stresses that the development of a language capable of the cultural transmission of the meaning of the engravings must have happened earlier. He adds that the sophistication of the brains and their cultural materials since at least 500,000 years is sufficient proof to the existence of language. A sign of the presence of language, to him, is the prevalence of physiologically expensive, from the energetic point of view, huge human brains. Pessimistic, Steve Kuhn, from the University of Arizona, said that "It is possible they were just doodlings that really didn´t mean anything". Related news:
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