Sublime

One hundred thousand years ago at Blombos Cave on the South African coast, one of humanity’s first workshops flourished. It processed a liquified ochre-rich mixture – used for multiple purposes, including religious, medicinal, and for group identification – and stored it in abalone shells. Production involved a multi-step process, starting with a r... See more

At that moment I asked myself, what would a mobile culture do about maintaining their songlines, their memory trails, their set of sacred memory locations across the landscape when they settled down? They could not afford to lose the knowledge but they were no longer travelling the wider landscape. It seemed immediately obvious that a circle of sto

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Paleolithic people had stories to tell. From about 40,000 years ago, and for approximately the next 25,000 years — a period 12 times longer than the Common Era — they conveyed these through images painted on cave walls, carved on ivory tusks, engraved and etched on stones and shells, and did so, as far as we can tell, all over Europe, Asia and Sibe... See more

In order to create such an artefact, the stone knapper must choose a suitable rock, then set to work chipping away at it – with, all the time, an idea of the finished shape in their mind. An abstract idea – ‘teardrop’ – is made real. A capacity for symbolic thinking is demonstrated by the ability to make that symbol into a physical object. A virtua

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The famous burial of a man known as the Amesbury Archer, not far from Stonehenge, is a case in point.2 His grave, which has been radiocarbon dated to between 2470 and 2280 BC, was carefully arranged with five complete Beaker pots, a large collection of fine flint and polished stone objects, and no fewer than three copper daggers, plus a pair of gol

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