The World's Oldest Animal Art Could Be This 130,000-Year-Old "Stingray Sand Sculpture"

This can initially appear to be just an oddly symmetrical rock. But after giving the item a closer examination, scientists now think it might be a prehistoric stingray sand sculpture. In that case, the artifact would rank as the earliest known work of another animal's artwork.

It was found in 2018 on the coast of South Africa, approximately 330 kilometers (205 miles) east of Cape Town, along the cliffs close to Still Bay. In addition to its amazing symmetry, other people observed that the rock's shape was strikingly similar to that of a stingray—just without the tail.

Researchers at Nelson Mandela University looked into this theory in a recent study and concluded that the item was made as a sand sculpture to resemble a blue stingray (Dasyatis chrysonata). The researchers emphasized how closely the rocky object and photos of a blue stingray, which is native to Africa's southern coast, match in size and proportion.

They argue that to make the sculpture, a prehistoric human would have encountered a stingray near the water's edge and traced around it, much like a kid building a sandcastle.

This is the first—and so far, the only—example that raises the possibility of tracking back to this era. This may be the only specimen ever found, but we can always hope that others may turn up. The odds of something like this being kept and comprehensible to us are slim. Charles Helm is a research associate at the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience at Nelson Mandela University and the primary study author.

There are numerous reasons why this stranded stingray might have been significant to an "ancient artist," but as far away viewers, we can only hypothesize as to why someone might have chosen to trace around it.

The ease of tracking a rather flattish creature could be the first. Perhaps its usefulness as a food source comes in second. The third possibility is that it really may have been fatal for those who were accustomed to strolling by the shore and in estuaries, which is why it might have commanded respect and fear, according to Helm.

The researchers employed a method called optically stimulated luminescence to date the piece. This method determines how long a piece of sediment has been buried by measuring the length of time a grain of sand was exposed to sunlight. It implied that the piece was probably made some 130,000 years ago, during the Middle Stone Age.

It's a strong claim to make considering the antiquity of the ray-shaped object that it was a skillfully constructed sculpture. This occurred around 90,000 years before representational cave art in Eurasia and long before art of this kind was on the scene.

An artwork that maintains significant allusions to reality, dating back 45,000 years, is the oldest known example of figurative art. It is located on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Before the emergence of cave art approximately 40,000 years ago, artistic creations were restricted to abstract forms or designs.

The theory is not entirely at odds with the evolution of art over the Palaeolithic, despite the researchers' cautious assessment of their findings. According to the study, sand tracing may have acted as a "stepping stone" between abstract and animal representations. A similar theory of how hand stencil artworks may have functioned as a similar shift from abstract shapes to representational forms has been advanced by archaeologists before.

Understanding the evolution of art is essential to comprehending human history. We may learn a great deal about the values of ancient human societies and how their environment grew more complicated by examining the evolution of visual culture. Though the idea of an animal sculpture dating back 130,000 years might seem a little out of place at first, human history is filled with oddities that defy our expectations.