Before 68,000 BCE: (Symbolic Markings Predating Full Artistic Representation — Engraved or Painted Markings of Apparently Symbolic Character on Object Surfac…

Before 68,000 BCE: (Symbolic Markings Predating Full Artistic Representation — Engraved or Painted Markings of Apparently Symbolic Character on Object Surfaces Dating Back Even Earlier Than Fully Modern Humans, Including the Blombos Cave Site in South Africa and Neanderthal Sites in Spain, but Full Artistic Representations of Animals Plants and People of the Kind Known from Shamanistic Art Originating Only Among Early Fully Modern Ancestors): The practice of engraving or painting apparently symbolic markings on object surfaces extends back even further than fully modern humans — to the not-yet-fully-human predecessors of the later Middle Stone and Middle Paleolithic eras. The Blombos Cave site in South Africa provides one such example, and recent finds from Spain reveal similar practices among Neanderthals. But these are markings, not representations. The full artistic depictions of animals, plants, and people — the kind of art known from shamanistic traditions worldwide — appear to have originated only among our early, fully modern ancestors. The distinction matters enormously. Symbolic markings — geometric patterns scratched into ochre or incised on shells — demonstrate cognitive capacities that pre-modern hominins possessed: the ability to create and recognize symbols, to impose pattern on material. But the leap from abstract marking to representational art — from a crosshatch pattern to a painting of an eland in full stride — is a leap of an entirely different order. It requires the ability to hold a mental image and translate it onto a surface, to represent the absent as present, to make the invisible visible. This is the cognitive capacity that syntactic language conferred, and it is this capacity that separates the markings at Blombos from the paintings at Game Pass. Both are significant. But only the latter is art in the full sense, and only the latter is the product of fully modern human cognition.