The Tsodilo Hills, in Botswana, are one of the three main Middle Stone Age sites of the Country and the only major hills for 100 kilometres in any direction.
The biggest and highest hill (also the highest peak in Botswana), is known as the "Male", the smaller hill is called the "Female", the one that is even smaller is called the "Child" and the smallest of the four is called the "Grand-Child".
They contain one of the highest concentration of rock paintings in the World and they host evidence early human settlements, making them a World Heritage site.
Because of this they're one of the most intensely investigated areas in Botswana, but it wasn't until 1995 that the existence of the Rhino cave, located on the Female hill, was revealed by the headman of one of the two local community groups who inhabit the area, the Ju/’hoansi San.
The San are said to believe the hills to be home to the spirits of their ancestors, and specifically the caves of the Female hill to be the home to their Gods.
They also have stories regarding a giant serpent living there.
Very difficult to access and with almost no direct sunlight, the Rhino cave wasn't an ideal habitation site, but still presents signs of its use over an extended amount of time.
The North wall presents a group of paintings from which the cave gets its name, and initial excavations revealed sign of its use during the Late Stone Age, but, most importantly, found flakes and chips created from the production of stone tools that can be dated back to the Middle Stone Age.
Looking at the South wall, something peculiar stands out that will be the focus of this post:
A free standing massive rock, almost 7 meters long and 2 meters tall, decorated with over 300 inverted dome-like depressions on the lower 1.4 meters of it.
Some are oval, some are long and thin, other tear-drop shaped and they sometimes overlap.
During the mid-winter months, for a few hours in the late afternoon, a narrow arc of sunlight enters through a small opening on the ceiling of the cave and illuminates it directly.
[picture of the engraved rock art from the British Museum]
After the first excavations, the conclusion was that the site may have been used for short visits to conduct rituals in connection to the rock art during the Early Iron Age, but no real conclusion was drawn about the South wall.
Later Nick Walker felt that testing closer to the carved wall than the previous excavations did could have helped understanding more about it, while Sheila Coulson and Sigrid Staurset were interested in the unusual materials found on site.
They knew how the cave was used in the Early Iron Age, but how it was used in the Middle Stone Age, especially after these considerations, was really a mystery.
Tools were usually crafted using the locally available quartz, but in the Rhino cave were found large quantities of non-local raw materials.
Not only the points found there were created with non-local materials, but a large amount of them was in excellent condition. They were never used and instead just left there.
The new excavations began in 2004, directly beneath the central portion of the carved wall.
Early Iron Age and Late Stone Age material was found in the first 80 centimetres down, and finally, after that were the finds attributable to the Middle Stone Age.
They included 53 unifacial and 33 bifacial points, scrapers, grinding stones and much more.
Local quartz was also used for them, but non-local materials were concentrated in this specific layer. Two common ones were silcrete and chalceony, of which the closest sources were respectively around 50 kilometres and 100 kilometres away from the cave.
[photo by Sheila Coulson]
The points were bright and varied extensively in colour. The same happened for the raw materials brought to the cave to then become points, so it looked like colour was one of the decisive factors when choosing the non-local material and the flakes to bring back.
The fact that raw material was found also shows that the points were completed there (even the ones made from local quartz).
But by far one of the most interesting facts for me is that a portion of those tools and points were burned, as they had evidence on them of short-term exposure to low temperature fires.
We know they were not burned in random fires because it seems like the one that were burnt were selected and the burning was persistent in the whole Middle Stone Age strata, indicating repeated behavior.
Also, none of the artifacts from the Late Iron Age were burnt.
One option is that they could have been burned to alter the colour of the stone, because with very few exceptions, the burnt points are now all deep pink, purple or red.
A group of 26 of them was burnt to destruction, but not by a long-term fire.
The unburnt, unused points were also completed in the cave and then abandoned.
Some other points were intentionally broken.
All of this could be evidence of ritualized behavior in the Late Pleistocene.
"Ritual" meaning a particular sequence of actions, performed in a specific order that is not altered from previous times and that require commitment and don't have their usual goal.
There's also a theory about red pigment being associated with rituals in Middle Pleistocene, and we can note from the red and purple points being burned (maybe to intensify their colour) that red somehow seemed to have a role in the Rhino cave's rituals as well.
There also is evidence that the engraved rock that we talked about before was carved in the Middle Stone Age period.
It's impossible to determine how they interpreted it, but at the modern eye, it definitely looks like a snake head of sorts.
[photo by Sheila Coulson]
Sheila Coulson conducted a series of experiments on the rock and carvings to observe the effects of flickering light on them, as the cave is scarcely illuminated and fires were definitely lit in there, and she observed that, paired with the natural colour variation of the formation, that kind of light on the engravings created the illusion of movement.
All of this together could be evidence of mankind's oldest known ritual.
From Rhino cave, in Botswana, around 70.000 years ago.
Comments