Tsodilo

Why this is extraordinary

Four quartzite hills stand out of the sand in north-west Botswana, near the Namibian border. UNESCO calls the place one of the great concentrations of rock art and records more than 4,500 paintings in about 10 square kilometres. The archaeological record, not continuous, runs to at least 100,000 years. The paintings themselves are not accurately dated. The listing says they appear to span from the Stone Age to the nineteenth century. Hambukushu and San communities revere the hills and the waterholes as a sacred landscape, a place of ancestral spirits. That living reverence is part of why the site was inscribed. It is not a date for a picture.

Rhino Cave is the dispute inside the hills. A published study of the Middle Stone Age deposits describes an unusually large number of points, many in colourful stone that does not occur on the spot, carefully made, and then not taken away to hunt. Once finished, they were burned until they were useless, or broken, or simply left. With them were grinding slabs and pieces of specularite, a glittering pigment. They lay under a freestanding rock face carved with hundreds of cupules, small cups pounded into the stone. A fragment of that carved face was found in the Middle Stone Age deposits, together with the handheld stones that could have done the pounding. The authors argue that the best fit is ritualised behaviour. Making a point, and then destroying it in the cave, is a strange way to produce a weapon. It is an ordinary way to produce an offering, if offering is allowed as a word for an act whose belief we cannot name.

A public account of the same cave, ahead of that paper, gave the rock the shape of a python and the activity an age of about 70,000 years. The journal article argues from the tools and the cupules. It does not rest its case on a snake, and it does not print 70,000 years as the age of the deposit. Archaeologists who had worked the cave before called the python reading a matter of looking, said the cupules had not been shown to be one episode, and said dates already published for the Middle Stone Age levels were younger than that public figure and awkward for a classic Middle Stone Age. Projecting today’s San stories onto a cupule is a further step. UNESCO’s sacred landscape is a present fact about Hambukushu and San worship. It is not, in the listing, a caption for a 70,000-year-old rite.

The paintings in the second photograph are the later art, animals and a human figure in red outline. They are not the cupuled rock. No source used here points either the paintings or the cupules at a solstice or a named star. The sky in this room is the living sacredness of the hills, ancestral spirits at the water, which is a religious fact without an azimuth. A python-shaped rock, if the shape is accepted, is a being on the ground. It is not a constellation unless a published identification says so. None used here does.

What this changes: if the destroyed points are a rite, ritualised action of this care sits in a southern African cave in the Middle Stone Age, whenever inside that age the deposit belongs. If they are waste of an odd workshop, the hills are still a 100,000-year archive and a living shrine, and the python was a story told about a rock in 2006.