The world's oldest example of abstract art, dating back more than 70,000 years, has been found in a cave in South Africa.
Complex motif
Dr Christopher Henshilwood, from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, says: "They may have been constructed with symbolic intent, the meaning of which is now unknown.
"The engraving itself is quite a complex geometric pattern. There is a system to the patterns."
"We don't know what they mean, but they are symbols that I think could have been interpreted by those people as having meaning that would have been understood by others."
The engraved ochre pieces were recovered from Middle Stone Age layers at Blombos Cave, 290 kilometres (180 miles) east of Cape Town, and are at least 70,000 years old.
Dr Henshilwood says more than 8,000 other pieces of ochre were found in the cave, many of which had been rubbed smooth as if to make pigment powder.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1753326.stm
