Origins

The oldest documented piece of art was produced around 70,000 years ago by the San Bushmen and was discovered on rocks in the caves along the southeastern coast of South Africa. We learned this at the Origins Centre in nearby Braamfontein.

It is not, as we were previously told when we visited Lascaux and Les Combarelles, found on the walls of the caves in southwestern France. The San rock art preceded the French cave paintings by almost 30,000 years! I love rock art. It always seemed to me to be both ancient and modern at the same time.


Having just recently been in Boston where I visited Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, I learned that rock art is not just "art for art's sake." The archaeology of rock art is very much related to the ethnology of religious ritual. Archaeologists and Ethnologists agree that most rock art was produced in conjunction with an attempt by man to connect with the spirit world through a combination of art, dance and ceremony.

I have visited many archaeological sites besides Lascaux showcasing very fine examples of rock art such as the petroglyph figures carved into rock surfaces on the big island of Hawaii, rock carvings of animals in Alta, Norway and the hand-shaped  pictographs painted onto rocks in the Northern territory of Australia. And in fact I have been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and have managed to see some of these religious ritual ceremonies in person. 

Vince and I were inside Newgrange in Ireland on the winter solstice when the dawn sun shines through a narrow shaft and illuminates the ancient Celtic pictographs inside the underground room only twice a year. We coincidentally had a wedding that afternoon in Dublin and were able to get a ticket for the solstice ceremony in the early morning. We had to get up in the middle of the night to drive the two hours to be there before dawn but it was worth it.

We watched the serpent Kukulkan slither down the side of Chichen Itza in Mexico when the sun hit the stone steps at just the right angle during the spring equinox. On the field in front of the temple, descendents of ancient Mayans danced and worshiped in their feathered costumes below the serpent's head. The spring equinox fell in the middle of Pingry's spring break that year and we happened to be spending it in nearby Cancun. We were able to find room on a bus tour at the last minute which took us from our hotel to the temple for the whole day. 

 

And we were in Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain on the summer solstice once at the start of a two week vacation with our sons to London and England's West Country and Paris and Normandy in France. We had just landed at Heathrow that morning and were coincidentally driving west to the Cotswolds on June 21. 




We had planned to stop at Stonehenge on our way without realizing the significance of the date. But as soon as we saw the Druids in their white robes processing to the center of the circle we realized our great luck!





Besides the display on the origin of art, the Origins Centre museum lays further claim to identifying the very DNA from which all of mankind stems, the origin of the human species. According to their display on the Origins of Humanity, we are all unified by a genetic thread that traces humankind back to a common ancestor in Africa. 

Now that I have been to the Origins Centre, I would of course really like to visit the UKhahlamba-Drakensberg Park and see the San rock art in person.  Maybe we can even plan our visit to coincide with one of their ceremonies if they allow guests. But since we are all related anyway, we wouldn't really be a guest as much as part of the family.