The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba by Robin Brown-Lowe Page B

pre-Christian millennium of the Phoenicians, Solomon and Sheba these creative ‘ancestors’ of the lost people of Africa learned to trade gold.
    And that is where I had got to in Cape Town last year when a copy of the
Cape Argus
was dropped on my stoep. MAN’S EARLIEST IDEAS ARE WRITTEN ON OCHRE , was the headline of an article by the
Argus
science correspondent, John Yield.
    What are ochres?
    Yield had more important questions to answer, however, and his intro was a quote from Descartes: ‘
Cogito ergo sum
’ (I think, therefore I am).
    Yes, but what are ochres?
    Implacably, Yield went on: ‘It is the ability to think and to translate these complex thoughts into actions that distinguishes modern humans, like homo erectus, or from the hominids like Australopithecus, which came even earlier, and from other species in the animal kingdom.’
    Was this the San again?
    â€˜One of the keys to complex, abstract thought is the use of symbols, including geometric shapes. An international team of researchers led by South African archaeologists have discovered abstract representations engraved on pieces of red ochre in the Middle Stone Age layers at Blombos Cave, near Stillbaai on the southern Cape coast.’
    Yes it was!
    The discovery was apparently about to be reported in the prestigious American journal,
Science
, and the scientists led by Professor Christopher Henshilwood of the South African Museum in Cape Town, and professor at Bergen University in Norway and the State University of New York, Stony Brook, had evidence that modern human behaviour emerged in Africa at least
35,000 years
before the start of the Upper Paleolithic era in Eurasia. The San had a history of coherent, creative social groupings far, far older than I had ever suspected, and infinitely older than Solomon and Sheba.
    Ochre is chunks of hardened red-ochre-coloured clay and it is thought to have been used for things like hide-tanning and pigments, but no other ochre pieces or artefacts older than about 40,000 years have provided evidence for abstract or depictable images which would indicate modern human behaviour. Among archaeologists, modern human behaviour means the thoughts and actions underwritten by minds equivalent to those of Homo sapiens today. Such cognitive abilities have, until now, been confined to depictable images found at Eurasia’s Upper Paleolithic sites and date back some 35,000 years.
    Two pieces of engraved ochre have now been found in the Blombos Cave, another seven are potentially engraved and there are some 8,000 other pieces, many bearing signs of use from Middle Stone age layers. That they were worked by members of a settled community is confirmed by the discovery of a number of bowl-shaped hearths. On one piece of ochre, both the flat surfaces and one edge are modified by scraping and sanding. ‘The edge has two ground facets and the larger of these bears a small cross-hatched engraved design,’ says Henshilwood. The cross-hatching consists of two sets of six and eight lines partly intercepted by a long line. The engravings on the second slab consist of rows of cross-hatching, bounded top and bottom by parallel lines, and divided through the middle by a third parallel line which divides the lozenge shapes into triangles. ‘The preparation by grinding of the engraved surface, situation of the engraving on this prepared face, engraving technique, and final design are similar for both pieces, indicating a deliberate sequence of choices,’ Henshilwood concluded.
    Both pieces were found within layers of bifacial flaked stone points which occur only below the so-called Howeison’s Poort horizons, which date to between 65,000 and 70,000 years ago. This truly ancient date for thinking, decision-taking, artistic people who could only be the ancestors of the San has subsequently been confirmed by two different luminescence-based dating methods. The engraved slabs are therefore about 77,000