ART

Engraved Eggshell Canteens

~60,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Last glacial

At Diepkloof Rock Shelter, in South Africa, hundreds of fragments of ostrich eggshell carry deliberate engravings: hatched bands, parallel and converging lines, cut around 60,000 years ago. The shells were water containers, everyday gear, and the same few motifs recur across pieces and centuries, shifting slowly in frequency, like a style that a community maintains and revises.

Why it matters

One engraved object is a curiosity; four hundred that repeat a restricted set of patterns are a convention, and a convention is information passed between minds. Whether these marks denoted anything, or worked more like decoration and group identity, is still tested and debated. Either way, canteens that say something about their owners are a habit we never dropped.

Dating & uncertainty

The main sample dates to about 60,000 years ago, within the Howiesons Poort industry; a few engraved pieces from lower layers extend the practice further back. The tradition disappears together with the Howiesons Poort technology itself, which is part of what makes it look like a shared convention rather than idle scratching.

Sources

1. Texier et al. (2010), PNAS · A Howiesons Poort tradition of engraving ostrich eggshell containers dated to 60,000 years ago at Diepkloof Rock Shelter, South Africadoi:10.1073/pnas.0913047107
2. Texier et al. (2013), Journal of Archaeological Science · The context, form and significance of the MSA engraved ostrich eggshell collection from Diepkloof Rock Shelter, Western Cape, South Africadoi:10.1016/j.jas.2013.02.021
3. Tylén et al. (2020), PNAS · The evolution of early symbolic behavior in Homo sapiensdoi:10.1073/pnas.1910880117

Our species’ history as one day

19:25:424 h 34 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day