c. 100000 BCE–c. 73000 BCE
Engraved ochre from Blombos Cave
Human evolution & hominins · Arqueología · Pigmentos · Marcado deliberado
Engraved ochre pieces from Blombos Cave, South Africa, date roughly between 100,000 and 73,000 years ago. Their deliberate incisions are material evidence of marking practices and pigment treatment, but do not securely reconstruct one symbolic meaning, a language, or a globally uniform human population. This entry avoids presenting one artefact as the “birth” of culture.
Precision, calendar, and review
- Start
- year · approximate
- End
- year · approximate
- Calendar and convention
- Historical-era years; the source calendar is not identified. No conversion of days is assumed.
- Year zero
- The scale goes from 1 BCE to 1 CE without year zero. Changing era names changes labels only.
- Documentary review
- Date not recorded
Reading the date: duration of a process.
Sources
- www.nature.com (opens in a new tab)
Source provenance and scope
- Publication date
- 2012-11-28
- What this date describes
- The cited source or edition; it may postdate the historical event.
- Bibliographic date checked
- 2026-09-23
- Date evidence
- Declared in the cited source’s publisher metadata.
The correspondence between this reference and individual claims has not yet been itemized.
This record is an editorial synthesis. Consult the sources to check claims and their limits. Chronological relationships alone do not establish causation.