It seems reasonable, at the beginning of this Archaic Visions adventure, to recede back to a time when human symbolic culture was just dawning. Contrary to popular opinion, this was not the European Upper Palaeolithic: palaeoarchaeology has since the 1980s steadily been revealing a wealth of artefacts disclosing the emergence of symbolism, ritual and vision in Southern Africa in the Middle Palaeolithic. One such site is Tsodilo, a sacred locale in continuous usage for perhaps 24,000 years and possibly the site of the world's oldest known ritual. This essay has been adapted for an article originally written for a Ugandan arts magazine, and was more of a meditation on the age of the site than an in-depth study.
In the northwest of Botswana’s Kalahari Desert, beyond the famous Okavango Delta, lies a small range of parched hills called Tsodilo, a UNESCO World Heritage site and perhaps one of the oldest sacred places in the world. For it is here, and in a few other sites dotted around Southern Africa, that we can come to know ourselves as human beings, through our shared origins in the soils of Africa.
Tsodilo, Bruce Rimell, 2009
Tsodilo consists of four hills running south to north, with the highest being the ‘Male’ hill at the southern edge, with the ‘Female’ hill just a little further north. These two hills are held to be intensely sacred by the San peoples living in the desert and villages nearby, and they call the Tsodilo hills the 'Mountains of Gods' or 'Whispering Rocks'. Here they tell that the First Spirits came to create the world through collective actions of prayer and dancing. In some ways, this myth can be said to be literally true, for Tsodilo is very ancient indeed, and is intimately involved with the emergence of a uniquely human world.
The Female and Male hills are covered with rock art in a variety of styles and a variety of motifs: familiar images of giraffes, rhinos, zebras and even fish give us important clues about what the ancient painters of these artworks held to be important. In such an unforgiving environment as the Kalahari Desert, the animals who offered themselves up as food to the hunter gatherer peoples were the beings most worthy to be reproduced upon the rocks.
The Female and Male hills are covered with rock art in a variety of styles and a variety of motifs: familiar images of giraffes, rhinos, zebras and even fish give us important clues about what the ancient painters of these artworks held to be important. In such an unforgiving environment as the Kalahari Desert, the animals who offered themselves up as food to the hunter gatherer peoples were the beings most worthy to be reproduced upon the rocks.
Sketch of wheel-like structures on frieze at Tsodilo
Other stranger motifs are also seen: wheel-like structures reminiscent of shadows seen behind the eyes at night, entoptic images of dots and twisting structures, and dreamlike human figures marching in lines. These latter figures are a common feature at many San peoples' rock art sites (including several I visited in the Drakensburg mountains in South Africa in 2010).
Their interpretation is perenially unclear: academic debate tends towards various interpretations from notable chieftains or shamans to ancestral hunters now in the afterlife. Given that the current San living around Tsodilo believe that the hills contain the spirits of their dead, this latter notion seems more tempting, although Coulson and Campbell consider these friezes to represent unknown ceremonies. At a place like Tsodilo that speaks so eloquently of our ancient human experiences and yet equally remains so silent, there will always be questions unanswered.
Their interpretation is perenially unclear: academic debate tends towards various interpretations from notable chieftains or shamans to ancestral hunters now in the afterlife. Given that the current San living around Tsodilo believe that the hills contain the spirits of their dead, this latter notion seems more tempting, although Coulson and Campbell consider these friezes to represent unknown ceremonies. At a place like Tsodilo that speaks so eloquently of our ancient human experiences and yet equally remains so silent, there will always be questions unanswered.
Human figures arranged in lines. Both female and male figures are seen.
The age of these petroglyphs is startling to those accustomed to the view that human symbolic culture emerged in the Euro-Asiatic Upper Palaeolithic. Some are recent, painted perhaps only 500 years ago, but many of them are estimated at over 24,000 years old, attesting to a truly awesome continuous usage for the site. However, this date represents only the tail-end of the history of ritual at Tsodilo.
In 1995, two exciting discoveries were made by archaeologist Sheila Coulson and her team: upon the Male hill there was found a giant sculpture of a python carved out of the living rock, positioned almost as if it should command reverence, and sculpted in such a way that it would be an awe-inspiring sight by day or night. Coulson herself said of the six metre long python: "You could see the mouth and eyes of the snake. It looked like a real python. The play of sunlight over the indentations gave them the appearance of snake skin. At night, firelight gave one the feeling that the snake was actually moving."
In 1995, two exciting discoveries were made by archaeologist Sheila Coulson and her team: upon the Male hill there was found a giant sculpture of a python carved out of the living rock, positioned almost as if it should command reverence, and sculpted in such a way that it would be an awe-inspiring sight by day or night. Coulson herself said of the six metre long python: "You could see the mouth and eyes of the snake. It looked like a real python. The play of sunlight over the indentations gave them the appearance of snake skin. At night, firelight gave one the feeling that the snake was actually moving."
The 'Python Sculpture' at Tsodilo
(No high resolution image of this important artefact could be found)
(No high resolution image of this important artefact could be found)
A skilful and remarkable work of art, in other words. But underneath this sculpture were found flint tools that showed evidence of having been transported many hundreds of miles across the desert before being burnt and buried under the earth. Remarkably, when they were subjected to dating tests, these tools were found to be between 70,000 and 100,000 years old. Tsodilo is ancient and venerable indeed.
The python is an important animal in San belief: humanity is descended from the animal, and the streams around Tsodilo were said to have been created during its search for water at the beginning of the world. This python figure was located in a difficult-to-access cave, and was heavily eroded suggesting its great age, and Coulson reports that all artefacts found in the cave, including bright red spear-points, were connected with ritual use:
"Stone age people took these colourful spearheads, brought them to the cave, and finished carving them there. Only the red spearheads were burned. It was a ritual destruction of artefacts. There was no sign of normal habitation. No ordinary tools were found at the site. Our find means that humans were more organised and had the capacity for abstract thinking at a much earlier point in history than we have previously assumed. All of the indications suggest that Tsodilo has been known to mankind for almost 100,000 years as a very special place in the pre-historic landscape."
The python is an important animal in San belief: humanity is descended from the animal, and the streams around Tsodilo were said to have been created during its search for water at the beginning of the world. This python figure was located in a difficult-to-access cave, and was heavily eroded suggesting its great age, and Coulson reports that all artefacts found in the cave, including bright red spear-points, were connected with ritual use:
"Stone age people took these colourful spearheads, brought them to the cave, and finished carving them there. Only the red spearheads were burned. It was a ritual destruction of artefacts. There was no sign of normal habitation. No ordinary tools were found at the site. Our find means that humans were more organised and had the capacity for abstract thinking at a much earlier point in history than we have previously assumed. All of the indications suggest that Tsodilo has been known to mankind for almost 100,000 years as a very special place in the pre-historic landscape."
Rhino and Impala at Tsodilo – the simpler style discloses a great age
There are many people in the world who revere the holy sites of Jerusalem, or Mecca, or perhaps Rome, in their religious beliefs, but Tsodilo makes these respected elder spaces of human spirituality seem like children: the San peoples of the Kalahari have held these four hills to be sacred for so great a period of time as to be almost inconceivable. Coulson and her team suggest that Tsodilo bears the evidence of the earliest human rituals in the burning of the spear-points, and the earliest human art in the python sculpture. If the flints really had come from hundreds of miles away, we also have here the earliest notions of pilgrimage, and an expression of ritual and creativity from the very dawn of human symbolic consciousness.
Tsodilo thus seems to record some of the first human realisations towards something other than hunting, gathering and socialising: art opens here, as do perhaps early conceptions of beauty and the sacred, and the emergence of both the inner world and the world-beyond-sight held in common belief by all human cultures. One can easily imagine such cognitions beginning here and spreading outwards to the whole of humanity. Tsodilo and other Middle Palaeolithic sites in Southern Africa, such as Blombos and Apollo 11 Cave, are eloquent testimony to radical perceptual innovations which enabled anatomically- and cognitively-modern humans to outpace all other human species then currently living.
Tsodilo thus seems to record some of the first human realisations towards something other than hunting, gathering and socialising: art opens here, as do perhaps early conceptions of beauty and the sacred, and the emergence of both the inner world and the world-beyond-sight held in common belief by all human cultures. One can easily imagine such cognitions beginning here and spreading outwards to the whole of humanity. Tsodilo and other Middle Palaeolithic sites in Southern Africa, such as Blombos and Apollo 11 Cave, are eloquent testimony to radical perceptual innovations which enabled anatomically- and cognitively-modern humans to outpace all other human species then currently living.
Geometric humanoid forms at Tsodilo
We may have forgotten, for a long while, as cultures must surely do, where we first opened our eyes as humans, and told ourselves instead ever-increasing layers of different stories to explain our origins, but now that archaeologists have revealed these first sacred places, we can perhaps come to know our earliest human selves again, and make the realisation that, in a sense, we are all children of ancient sites like Tsodilo.
Bibliography
David Coulson and Alec Campbell, African Rock Art: Paintings and Engravings on Stone, Harry N. Abrams Inc, 2001
Sheila Coulson, Sigrid Staurset, and Nick Walker, Ritualized Behavior in the Middle Stone Age: Evidence from Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills, Botswana, PaleoAnthropology, 2011
David Lewis-Williams, The Mind In The Cave, Thames & Hudson, 2002
Patricia Vinnicombe, People of the Eland: Rock Paintings of the Drakensburg Bushmen as a Reflection of their Life and Thought, Wits University Press, 2009
Science Daily, World's Oldest Ritual Discovered -- Worshipped The Python 70,000 Years Ago, November 2006, url: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061130081347.htm , retrieved Jan 2010
Sheila Coulson, Sigrid Staurset, and Nick Walker, Ritualized Behavior in the Middle Stone Age: Evidence from Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills, Botswana, PaleoAnthropology, 2011
David Lewis-Williams, The Mind In The Cave, Thames & Hudson, 2002
Patricia Vinnicombe, People of the Eland: Rock Paintings of the Drakensburg Bushmen as a Reflection of their Life and Thought, Wits University Press, 2009
Science Daily, World's Oldest Ritual Discovered -- Worshipped The Python 70,000 Years Ago, November 2006, url: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061130081347.htm , retrieved Jan 2010
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