Why We Draw II: Very Old Art – Faces and Edges

The most widely thought, possible, primigenial ‘artwork’ connected with our genus, homo, is a red jasperite cobble found in a South African cave. The cobble fits within the palm of a hand and is thought to be a carried art object or manuport. Some of the oldest surviving artwork are manuports. The cobble is worn and polished and it was possibly found, three million years ago by a curious Australopithecus africanus on the ground and brought between 20 and 30 miles to Makapansgat Cave in South Africa.¹ This interesting cobble {image of dart and the cave}rested enmeshed in the bones of its likely caretakers until it was found in 1925 by W. I. Eitzman, a local ad-vocational archeologist.²

Images of the pebble routinely depict it’s deep-set holes, appearing to be the eyes of a brooding face, slight indentation suggesting a nose and below it, a gaping mouth. With these features Eitzman imagined it to be “the god of these early people.”³One year prior Raymond Dart, an anatomist from Australia, found the first remains of an australopithecus about 40 miles south in Taung, South Africa. When in 1925 Eitzman presented the anatomist with the pebble, Dart felt it to have little interest except for the curious fact that it could not have come from the same place where the A. africanus fossils were found.⁴

Dart explained that the striking face of the cobble has an appearance similar to us but not Australopithecus africanus, who presumably would have been the creature reflected in the stone. But, after having seen a playful reconstruction sketch of the Toung child forty years after the pebble was found he had second thoughts:
“…ultimately with the aforesaid australopithecine reconstructional background I had come finally to realize, if tardily, that it was necessary to study the pebble from an ‘australopithecine’ point of view. In that process I was turning the stone around until it was upside down. Then instantly the cause of those inhibitions of antagonisms that had prevented me from looking at it seriously during the previous forty years and more became apparent.”⁵

After having rotated the cobble and observing the light reveal differing facial figures and images in the stone Dart had an epiphany: “[E]ven the total absence of nostril openings would have been incapable of preventing any perceptive australopithecus from recognizing it as anything other than a caricature of one or another of his extremely flat-faced male or female relatives in a positively hilarious mood.”²³Raymond Dart goes on to write how, this alone would have been enough to motivate an A. africanus to take and carry the cobble to Makapansgat. He goes on to describe how, with the light and the rotation of the object, the face changes and how the obverse, ‘human’ face with the inset eyes could have been taken as the amusing images of a very elderly, decrepit, A. africanus woman.

Some twenty years later Robert Bednarik also took a look at the Makapansgat pebble. Bednarik’s principal interest is, according to his website“…in the origins of the human ability to create constructs of reality.”⁶ With a 1998 paper Bednarik revisited Dart’s question about its anthropological significance with the intention to see if and how the pebble had been modified. Bednarik drew out the geological history of the stone by examining the minute marks, trails, inclusions and the mineral composition and speculated about how the stone ended up in the cave.⁷ Bednarik’s work revels that the stone was entirely shaped by natural forces. It was not carved or modified nor was it used as a tool.⁸ There were no marks to indicate pounding or scratching.

The jasperite stone, according to Bednarik was shaped in a river with relatively uninterrupted flow of fast water smoothing it into an oval form. The water that shaped the stone halted and the cobble rested with other cobbles where it lied to be covered with sandy sediments, cobbles and pebbles. Eventually enough sediments covered our cobble to compress it into a conglomerate. There it stayed within the range of hundreds of thousands of years until a narrow region of the conglomerate, around the cobble, found itself to be subject to prolonged moving water that worked to loosen the conglomerate and dislodge the Makapansgat pebble. Dislodged the cobble sat exposed for about 600 years.⁹It was at this point that the A. africanus, who’s bones remain in the Makapan cave, presumably picked up the cobble.

There are good reasons to believe that even three million years ago a then A. africanus would have been intrigued by a stone mirroring her own face. Still the questions arise: would have very distant kin, more ape than homo sapiens, living three million years ago been attracted to the stone and be motivated to take to the stone to be a companion in his or her dwelling? Both Dart and Bednarik, as well as others argue in the affirmative. Dart uses the then new research from the ethologist, Richard Coss to support his case as well as his own cross examination of figures that emerged from the stone.¹⁰Coss’s paper uses the Makapansgat pebble as an example of an early hominid relation that, like some apes, picked an interesting stone. Coss also offers the example of neanderthal that arranged bear skulls at the foot of caves to scare intruders and described how the hollow eye sockets of ape skulls frighten chimpanzees. Bednarik’s 1995 paper takes a deeper dive into the evolutionary ‘chain’ and points out that many species, including birds and butterflies, have defensive marking in the form of exaggerated eyes, indicating that a vast cohort living creatures can recognize a ‘face’ and respond to it.¹¹

This likely manuport of-a-sort functions through pareidolia like the ‘bull’ made by Picasso out of a bicycle’s seat and handlebar or when we read the shape of gods and squirrels into the clouds.¹² Pareidolia appears to be perceptual function that is dyed deep into earth’s evolutionary chain. Facial recognition very likely goes hand in hand with pareidolia and facial recognition has been tested and observed in a number of creatures including honey bees, pigeons and apes. Facial recognition and paradolia function as projection as well as recognition and communication with and among the place where we live as well as our kin species. Francis Joy in her “Introduction to Pareidolia” argues that pareidolia functions to impress our species connection to natural surroundings. Focusing on plants, landscapes and skies in Lapland of northern Finland she offers examples of faces, appearing within a mountainside as well as older trees each having appeared known mythologies or manifesting out of intentional trance and or dream states.¹³Taking a broader focus Bustamante D.P. Et Al, offer a formula of key concepts that are likely to have lead to granting significance to things and landscape beginning, they argue, in the paleolithic: Pareidolia, Apophenia, and Hierophany. Pareidolia we have already discussed, involves projecting our own know landscape of socially significant image – especially faces – onto things; apophenia, really a broader category for paradolia, makes connections between things and hierophany projects sacrality, call it ‘power’ onto things or landscapes.¹⁴

Drawing, itself, can be understood to be the reverse of pareidolia nearly identical in process. When, for example, we take a rest in the forest to sit on a fallen tree we can let our mind wander. Very likely we will find an old tree leaning to the side with a gaping mouth and two off-kilter knobs above it appearing as old eyes. Sometimes the face emerges and then disappears. When we move around the tree the face will change, it will become more pronounced, change into something hideous or maybe another animals face altogether. With a loss of concentration the face evaporates but appears again when we refocus but with different details. Likewise, at our feet, the pattern of the moss, soil and fallen nuts can emerge something like a face. Like paradolia drawing is a pulling out, a drawing out, of what we see before us. When we put pencil to paper, there again in the forest, we hesitantly mark loops on the paper in the shape of the profile of the forest at the edge of the field. Lines, loops and curves start to accumulate and on the pad of paper what looks to be an image of the forest face appears but some erasing of misplaced lines will improve the image. An interesting drawing will go through a number of transformations before the artist will set down the pencil to call it done.

It may be impossible to prove that this cobble of many faces is anything but a fetish of sorts for the dreamers in the 20th and 21st century seeking to find kinship with an ancient relative. Nevertheless, our own fascination with the stone as well as our increasing understanding of thinking and communication between differing species, plants and even atomic systems lends weight to the original phenomenological intent of those endeared by the cobble.

All creatures, are folded in to a web of a living world of which the earth, the sky ‘significance and power’ as well as a kindred African living three million years ago could have found the cobble intriguing seems entirely plausible but some recent work at Makapansgat offers critical doubt.¹⁵ The australopithecine bones seem have marking indicative of being chewed by these animals lending credence to the possibility that the bones at Makapansgat lie in a hyena den not a dwelling of the ancient hominin. Still is the older concern that the cobble’s precise context had been poorly understood making it difficult to verify that how the cobble was, related to the A. africanus bones of bone breccia strata three.

About one million years after the cobble of many faces fell into the hands of A. africanus, north of Makapansgat at Oldolvi Gorge in Kenya, were found the remains of Homo Habilis. H. Habilis, was thought for a long time to be the first tool maker. Yet, in recent years significantly older tools, including tools now associated with australopithecus have been found. H. Habilis fashioned tools in “cores and flakes” and, interestingly, a number of stones appearing to resemble baboons left by Homo Habilis.¹⁶

Homo Habilis is famous for being excavated by the Leakeys at Olduvai Gorge. “Lucy” was the best known of the species. The cores and flakes of Homo Habilis are comparable but not at all representative to animal tools (See image of an Olduvai Gorge chopper (from 1.8 to 2 Million years ago) to the left.¹⁷James Harrod writes, how chimpanzee tool-use differ. Chimp tool-use, writes Harrod, is ‘expedient’ were as human tool use is planned.¹⁸ A well known example of chimpanzee tool-use involves sticks for excavating termites. When a chimp finds a large termite nest he seeks a stick to ‘attack’ the nest only in that moment. He does not carry a stick with him anticipating termites, nor, and more to the point, does he spend time fashioning a stick with the anticipation of using it later. Homo Habilis did anticipate and in that anticipation spend time crafting tools. Unlike the chimp, there had already been a tradition of tool making, within which tools were manufactured. Further, the tool makers of Olduvai Gorge left clear categories of tools. Among them are awes, scrappers, points and hammers. Harrod also points out that the tools themselves were intentionally crafted in the sense that many of the tools – not all – assumed symmetry, a careful attention to edge and surface that demonstrate a care transcending the construction of mere tools. It seems that Homo Habilis took pleasure in making these things, and felt an anxiety involved in making a ‘good’ tool. The process that Homo Habilis used to make tools bears on “why we draw” for two reasons. First, and the most obvious reason: the tools of Homo Habilis represent very early artifacts, some can tentatively be called art, made by a relative to modern people. Second, the process of separating flakes from a core is little different than that of drawing. In drawing there is a figure and ground. In Olduvai toolmaking there is the core and the flake. Both figure/ground and Core/flake represent a negotiation between two ‘regions.’ Harrod calls the thinking that the Olduvai toolmaker does, in this regard, “dialectical.” Hitting on an important relation between figure/ground or core/flake the dialectic, here, suggests a back and fourth between two equal spheres. Harrod uses the term to emphasize the fact that both cores and flakes were significant.¹⁹When we draw the image of a tree on a white sheet of paper both sheet and line support the other. Flakes are snapped away by the tool maker. The tool’s edges, like the drawn line that distinguishes ‘tree’ lets some-thing emerge. Richard Serra, an expert draftsman and sculptor, famous for his ‘Tilted Arch’ describes the significance of ‘edge’ with which the ancient tool and drawing have in common: “… I went to Paris and happened to Brancusi’s studio, and what I noticed about Brancusi is the way the shapes formed on the edge, the way they push out to space, that’s a condition of drawing.²⁰ I mean all edges are [a] condition of drawing.” Homo Habilis’ tool use has a bearing on the ‘why we draw’ because as we examine their well worn tools we can recognize a way orienting towards the world that corresponds to humanity, now, two million years later. The essential similarity is that all people, Homo Habilis included, lived in a world of significance and, observing that this kind of process had occurred at least two million years ago makes it less likely that ‘art’ is a product of leisure but, instead a core aspect of our species. ‘Significance’ is opened, made apparent, by what Harrod recognized in those ancient “cores and flakes” as well as the “edges” defined in a Brancusi sculpture and a drawing that any of us make on a sheet of paper. At best it is probably an incidental point that no ‘drawings’ survive Homo Habilis. They might very well have drawn figures into wood or a now badly worn slab of stone. In a similar vein the Leakeys suggest that, by inspection of tool edges and other means, the these ancient inhabitants Southeast Africa were likely to have made baskets of vegetable material as well as ties and containers with skin.²¹ None of these things have survived.²²

To find our most ancient, surviving ‘drawings,’ we have to take a more than million year forward leap. As of the first posting of this article (2013) the earliest surviving drawings were to be found in Europe, India and Australia. In the middle of 2024, ten years later, an article in Nature published findings of cave art in Indonesia dating to 51,200 BP.²³

When these drawings were made glaciers covered all of the British Isles, the northern half of present Germany, Russia and, surrounded the Himalayas. The climate in tropical Indonesia would have been effected by northern hemisphere glaciation with a dryer atmosphere and significantly lower sea level.²⁴ The most famous, are in Cheuvet Cave, France. These drawings are date to 32,000 years before the present. Drawings of a competing antiquity are those in the Apollo 11 Cave, Africa (26, 000 to 28, 000 BP), and drawings within the Australian Malangine Cave which date to 28, 000 BP. Drawings in India’s Bhimbetka Auditorium Cave date from the same general time period.²⁵ My next post, Why We Draw II, will look at these well known Pleistocene drawings as a way to approach why it is that we draw.

Image attribution: 1. The most familiar face of the Makapansgat Cobble. From Pleistocene Palaeoart of Africa, Arts 2013, 2(1), 6-34 https://doi.org/10.3390/arts2010006 Robert G. Bednarik. 2.Makapansgat Cave, where the cobble was found. From, Dart, Raymond A. The Waterworn. 3. “Dart’s Baby” drawn by Raymond Dart’s friend drawn by Mrs E. Esson. From Dart, Raymond A. The Waterworn. 4. The Makapansgat Cobble rotated by Dart from Dart, Raymond A. The Waterworn.  5. Tête de taureau, Pablo Picasso, 1942. Fair Use. found at https://www.wikiart.org/fr/pablo-picasso/tete-de-taureau-1942. 6. Sculpture in Brancusi’s Studio.

1. Makapansgat Cave is located at Makapansgat and Zwartkrans Valleys, northeast of Potgietersrust in Limpopo province, South Africa. This is in north east South Africa. The pebble is described in detail by Bednarik, Bednarik, Robert G. The australopithecine, Cobble From Makapansgat, South Africa. In South African Archeological Bulletin, 53: 4-8, 1998. Dart (citation below) and an interesting article by Eitzman, W.I.. Reminiscences of Makapansgat Lime works and its Bone-Breccial Layers. In Suid·AJrikaanse Joernaal van. Wetenskap. pp. 182. July, 1958.
2. Where the cobble could have been found varies from 200 miles (Coss) to a couple of miles. Dart and Bednarik put the distance to be 20-30 miles.
3. Dart, Raymond A. The Waterworn Australopithecine Pebble of Many Faces from Makapansgat. In South African journal of Science. Vol. 70 June 1974. pp. 176.
4. At a site about 450 miles southwest of Makapansgat, Raymond Dart found the skull of our then earliest known ancestor called the Taung Child, Australopithecus africanus. The fossil was important not only because, amid significant opposition, it developed the case for human ancestry to be focused in Africa rather than Europe. Since then more ancient fossils have been found dating human origins in Africa to about six million years ago (Sahelanthropus Tchadenssis). See Dart, Raymond A.. “1925. Australopithecus africanus: the man-ape of South Africa”. A Century of Nature: Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed Science and the World, edited by Laura Garwin and Tim Lincoln, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 10-20. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226284163-005 and for the discovery of S. Tchadenssis see: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-earliest-hominins-sahelanthropus-orrorin-and-ardipithecus-67648286/
5. Dart. The Waterworn. pp. 168
6. https://www.ifrao.com/robert-g-bednarik/
7. Bednarik, Robert G. The ‘Australopithecine’ Cobble From Makapansgat, South Africa* South African Archaeological Bulletin 53: 4-8, 1998
8. Bednarik is using methods of the interdisciplinary field of triboloy; the science of friction, lubrication and wear. Robert Bednarik is responsible for a recent book on triboloy in archeology and geology (Bednarik, Robert. Tribology in Geology and Rock Art. Nova Science Publishers. 2019) as well as a paper about the use of tribology within the evaluation of rock art.
9. Bednarik, Robert G. The … Cobble. pp. 6
10. Coss, Richard G. “The Ethological Command in Art.” in Leonardo, Vol. 1, No. 3. (Jul., 1968), pp. 273-287.
11. See also “Lighting” the next to last post in this series about why we draw that cites more recent research that finds that facial recognition has a broad scope and deep evolutionary history and that “chimpanzees, dogs, sheep, pigeons and honey bees” are proved able to recognize one face from another.
12. also a mimetolith, a stone that mimics something else
13. Joy, F. (2024). “Introduction to Pareidolia.” Sentient Forest Project https://www.sentientforestproject.com/_files/ugd/b1f772_05c28e52398c4e539b9b8eb68cd9b96d.pdf
14. Patricio Bustamante Díaz, W. Fay Yao and Daniela Bustamante, “From Pleistocene Art to the Worship of Mountains in China: Methodological Tools for Mimesis in Paleoart”, Palethnologie [Online], 5 | 2013, Online since 30 January 2013, connection on 01 February 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/palethnologie/5579; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/palethnologie.5579
15. According to Dart the Makapansgat Cobble came to public attention in a 1967 BBC 2 documentary, “The Roots of Art” with the presenter Dr. Kennith Oakley. Since this this time the cobble has been a matter of discussion by art historians/critics as well as archaeologist; some being more affirmative in granting the stone its status as an original work of art. There is a poem about the pebble by Deborah Bacharach, ‘The Makapansgat Pebble of Many Faces’ it can be found on her blog. And an article about its inclusion in an exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Park (Texas) entitled “First Sculpture.”
16. Harrod, James. “Two Million Years Ago: The Origin of Art And Symbol” in Continuum 2,1:4-293, pp 16-18
17. Image of an Olduvai Gorge Chopper in the British Museum. Creative Commons License. Description in Wikimedia Commons: Photo of a chopping tool from Olduvai Gorge 1.8-2 million years old.
18. Harrod, James. “Two Million Years Ago. pp 8.
19. Hopewell architectural constructions are another example of construction where both the ‘figure’ and the ‘ground’ the source and ‘remains’ were understood to have significance. A structure like the Newark Earthworks (Newark, Ohio built ca. 2000 BPE thru 1600 BPE.) involved three designed aspects, mounds, motes and borrow pits. The borrow pits from from where the most important mounds were excavated remained as designed aspects of the entire complex. Francis, Tammeron. Place, Land and Building: Lessons for the making of architecture from the Adena-Hopewell. 1995. University of Cincinnati. Master’s Thesis.
20. Transcript of a 2002 John Tusa Interview with Richard Serra, Radio 3 BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p00nc9n3 original resource: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/serra_transcript.html [accessed 2013, that file is no longer available]
21. Harrod, James. “Two Million Years Ago. pp 7.
22. The survival of artifacts is a science in itself called taphonomy: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Art/Bednarik_94.html [accessed 18 March 2025 and 2014]
23. Oktaviana, A.A., Joannes-Boyau, R., Hakim, B. et al. Narrative cave art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago. Nature 631, 814–818 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07541-7
24. Brown University. “Ancient Indonesian climate shift linked to glacial cycle.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 24 March 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140324154009.htm>
25. R. G. Bednarik suspected that some images within Bhimbetka’s Auditorium Cave may be the earliest of all known rock art. See: Bednarik, R. G. Earliest Evidence of Paleoart. in Rock Art Research. Vol. 20 No 2. 2003. Yet dates, often because of increasing technological accuracy are continually being pushed back.