S.A. Bushmen rock paintings : how old are the oldest?

Question

Yesterday I watched a National Geographic documentary which showed a full-colour, perfectly preserved painting of a Bantu (not Bushman) warrior and said it was 6,000 years old!

NatGeo is getting worse and worse.

Answer 1

Date released 9 February 2004

Some of the world’s finest rock paintings are more than three times older than previously believed, according to a researcher from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne who used the latest radio-carbon dating technology.

Previous work on the age of the rock art in South Africa’s uKhahlamba-Drakensberg, a World Heritage Site, concluded it is less than 1,000 years old. But the new study, by archaeologists from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and Australian National University in Canberra, estimate the panels were created up to 3,000 years ago.

When Europeans first encountered the rock paintings in the mountainous uKhahlamba-Drakensberg region, around 150 years ago, they considered it primitive and crude. Today, experts consider the area to be one of the top areas in the world for rock art, with the largest and most concentrated group of paintings in Africa south of the Sahara. Over 40,000 paintings exist in 500 rock shelters.

The artwork, made by the San hunter-gatherers who first settled in the area around 8,000 years ago, was made using mainly black, white, red and orange pigments. It depicts animal and human scenes and are said to represent the religious beliefs of the San, whose occupation of the mountains ended in tragic circumstances in the nineteenth century following their conflict with European colonists. Subjects include the indigenous eland (a large, spiral-horned antelope) and huntsmen.

Until recently, archaeologists have struggled to tell exactly how old the paintings were, mainly because dating techniques have required larger samples for analysis than it has been possible to collect without destroying the art work.  However, the research team analysed salt samples taken from rocks adorned with the paintings using a new highly-refined radiocarbon dating technique known as accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS).

The results showed some of the paintings are up to 3,000 years old. Experts suspect they could be even older due to the San people’s long occupation of the area but say they need to carry out further tests to prove this theory.

Dr Aron Mazel, a South African researcher, formerly of the Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, and now based at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, who carried out the work with Australian archaeologist Dr Alan Watchman, said:

“We are still in the early stages of exploiting this new technology but it’s possible further investigation could reveal that some of the paintings could be even older than 3,000 years, especially as we knew the San people first occupied the area 8,000 years ago.

“We hope to use this technique to date more of the paintings and organise them in chronological order in the hope that, like a family photograph album, they can tell us a little more about how life evolved for the San people during the several thousands of years they occupied the mountains.

“For example, how did their society change, and how did their beliefs change with it? Was there periods of stress that led to increased episodes of painting? Did the themes of the paintings develop over time? So many questions like this are unanswered at the moment.”

Dr Chris Chippindale, reader in archaeology at Cambridge University and professor with the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, said:

“The uKhahlamba-Drakensberg sequence is one of the great riches in rock art, and rock art is one of the great riches in archaeology. The pictures are a direct firsthand record of the world that ancient people lived in, experienced, and understood.

“Dating is important to all archaeology and rock art has proved very hard to date. It looks as if the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg rock art sequence may be very long.

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/press....

Answer 2

The oldest have never yet been found, and proabably never will be...