TaphArt: exploring the potential existence of rock art paintings in the Middle Stone Age of southern Africa and its destruction due to the action of taphonomic processes

ended

"The advent of symbolic material culture and the storage of information outside the human brain through the production of artefacts and images imbued with meaning was a landmark in human evolution. Although it has been generally considered as the consequence of an European Upper Palaeolithic ""revolution"" that took place around 40 ka, new evidence from the Middle Stone Age (MSA, ~300–40 ka) suggests the presence of symbolic material culture in Africa at ~150 ka. In this context, a major research challenge for archaeology is to explain the apparent absence of rock art paintings in the MSA archaeological record of southern Africa. Ochre pigments are ubiquitous in the sites from this period, and toolkits used to produce ochre-rich liquid paint date from at least ~100 ka. Furthermore, images engraved on pieces of ochre and a crayon drawing demonstrate that the MSA populations had all the material, technical and cognitive resources necessary to create graphic representations. Thus, through an innovative and interdisciplinary approach that brings together archaeology, paleoenvironmental science, atmospheric science, material science, and analytical chemistry, the TaphArt project aims to develop an experimental research to determine whether the absence of rock art paintings in the MSA sites of southern Africa is due to a cultural choice of the human populations or the result of taphonomic processes that eliminated the painted images from the archaeological record. Taking as reference the archaeological and paleoenvironmental context of Blombos Cave (South Africa), the project tests the hypothesis that marine aerosol and wind erosion may have contributed to the destruction of rock art paintings potentially produced on the site, providing groundbreaking unprecedented data to the discussion on the origins of rock art and the behavioural evolution of the Homo sapiens. "