Michael Coy
A NEW discovery in Marbella may reshape our understanding of human communication.
Archaeologists digging at the the Coto Correa archaeological site the Las Chapas neighbourhood have found a small rock with a simple ‘X’ scratched on it – and experts say that it could revolutionise our ideas of how art developed in prehistory, not to mention the entire course of human migration.
The site has been offering up important finds for some time – primitive tools which have enabled the archaeologists to date settlement to the palaeolithic period – the Old Stone Age.
A rock which predates the ‘X’ stone bears carvings in long, straight lines, indicating that the first settlers in Marbella came here in the Early Middle Palaeolithic Age, which has caused a stir in the archaeological world, because no-one has previously associated that timescale with this part of the world: it is “a period little known in Spain and unprecedented in the province of Málaga”, according to researchers.
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Indeed, the exciting news is that these scratches may be the very first examples that we know of, in which humans attempted to record their ideas. And it seems that the Marbella carvings may well date to a hugely significant moment in our planet’s history – when our forebears started moving out of Africa.
If these rocks are (as is suspected) 200,000 years old, then they double the understood timespan of prehistoric art. To give a simple example, we’ve known about the cave paintings in the Cueva de Pileta in Benaoján for a little over a hundred years, but those art works are only 20,000 years old – and these crude Marbella scratching are ten times older.
“This unique stone, which contains a set of graphic representations of human origin, could be 100,000 years older than the very oldest cave art depictions,” the Marbella City Council said in a statement. Scientists are conducting further assessments to confirm the dating of the stone and the carving.
“The techniques applied for absolute dating consist of quartz analysis of different sediment samples, which will allow for a precise chronology of the samples,” the city council said. Researchers also hope to conduct a high-resolution 3D scanning of the rock to obtain a virtual composite of the set of marks.
“This will allow the entire surface to be studied in maximum detail, allowing for the identification of working marks and graphic elements,” according to the Marbella City Council. When these scientific tests are completed, it may well emerge that our human ancestors crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to colonise Andalucía, radically changing the fashionable theory, that people from what is now Sudan moved into the Middle East, thus ‘breaking out’ of Africa.
