Apollo 11 cave

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Stone slab with the image of a big cat, painting from the Apollo 11 rock cave in Namibia (27,000 years old)

The Apollo 11 cave is an archaeological site in the Hunsberg Mountains in southern Namibia . In the cave, drawings were found on stone slabs about the size of a hand, which are among the oldest works of art in Africa , but also among the oldest existing drawings in the world. The site got its name from Wolfgang Erich Wendt, an archaeologist who researched the previously unnamed cave on July 24, 1969. When hearing the news of the successful return of the command module of Apollo 11 received, named Wendt the cave after the first manned lunar mission .

description

In 1969 Wolfgang Erich Wendt examined the rock cave in southern Namibia. Between charcoal from fireplaces he found four painted stone slab fragments and a flat oval pebble with remains of painting. In 1972 he discovered three more stone slabs, including a fragment that, when combined with a fragment from the first excavation section, gave the image of a big cat . The hind legs of this animal look human.

Not all motifs on the stone slabs can be clearly interpreted. On other plates, a rhinoceros drawn in outlines and a striped animal that has similarities with a zebra are captured in the picture with charcoal, ocher and white. Probably brought into the cave from outside, the slabs remained in the grotto, partly broke when part of the cave collapsed and were finally embedded in the most recent layer of finds of the Middle Stone Age . Investigations have shown that the stone slabs are not chipped parts of wall or ceiling paintings. They were therefore classified as small works of art (art mobilier).

In the maximum 2.40 m thick sediment layer of the Apollo 11 cave, Wendt was able to identify seven main cultural layers . In addition to artefacts and biofacts from ostrich eggshells , bones , ceramics and wood , he excavated around 57,000 stone artifacts . Wendt and his team found a total of seven painted stone tablets in the cave and uncovered over 60,000 finds. Radiocarbon dating allowed the plates to be assigned an age of 27,000 years BP (Mesolithic, Middle Stone Age). This makes them one of the oldest finds in southern Africa. Investigations on fragments of ostrich egg shells with carefully rounded edges, which could be fragments of ostrich egg trailers and come from the Howieson's Poort layers of the Apollo 11 cave, showed an age of 40,000 years.

Ralf Vogelsang from the Africa Research Center of the Institute for Prehistory and Protohistory at the University of Cologne examined the cave in 2007. The excavations revealed a succession of settlement layers spanning more than 100,000 years.

Finds from the Apollo 11 cave are exhibited in the Namibian National Museum in Windhoek . You can visit animal bones, plant remains and minerals as well as the strong coloring pigments with which the works of art were made 27,000 years ago. The stone slabs are stored in a vault in the National Museum.

classification

The drawings on the stone slabs from the Apollo 11 Cave are among the earliest documented evidence of artistic creation, the beginning of which, among others, by the world's ivory carvings from the southern German cave Hohle Fels or by cave paintings and cave drawings in the Chauvet cave in France dated becomes.

literature

  • Peter Breunig: Archaeological Travel Guide Namibia . Africa Magna Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-937248-39-4 .
  • Ralf Vogelsang: Middle Stone Age sites in Southwest Namibia. (= Africa Praehistorica. 11). Heinrich Barth Institute, Cologne 1998, ISBN 3-927688-17-7 .
  • Ralf Vogelsang ao: New Excavations of Middle Stone Age Deposits at Apollo 11 Rockshelter, Namibia: Stratigraphy, Archeology, Chronology and Past Environments. In: Journal of African Archeology. 8 (2), 2010, pp. 185-218. .
  • Wolfgang Erich Wendt, Wilfried Menghin (eds.): Art mobilier from the Apollo 11 grotto in South West Africa. (= Acta Praehistorica et Archaeologica. 5). National Museums in Berlin - Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Berlin 1974.
  • Klaus-Dieter Gralow among others: Hidden in the desert - The oldest art in Africa. ( Hidden in The Desert - Africa's Most Ancient Art. ) DVD with German and English language versions, Pitann Film und Grafik GmbH Rostock, Rostock 2008.
  • Jürgen Richter: Studies on the prehistory of Namibia. Heinrich Barth Institute, Cologne 1991, ISBN 3-927688-04-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ John Onians: Atlas of World Art. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-521583-4 , p. 17.
  2. ^ Tilman Lenssen-Erz, Marie-Theres Erz, Gerhard Bosinski (Ed.): Brandberg. Namibia's Bilderberg, art and history of a primeval landscape. Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-7995-9030-7 , p. 89.
  3. ↑ Miller et al .: Earliest modern humans in southern Africa dated by isoleucine epimerization in ostrich eggshell. In: Quaternary Science Reviews. Volume 18, No. 13, 1999, pp. 1537-1548.
  4. ^ John C. Vogel: Suitability of Ostrich eggshell for radiocarbon dating. In: Radiocarbon. Volume 43 (1), pp. 133-137.
  5. ↑ Ralf Vogelsang: The Rock-Shelter "Apollo 11" - Evidence of Early Modern Humans in South-Western Namibia. In: Megan Biesele, Cornelia Limpricht (Ed.): Heritage and Cultures in Modern Namibia: In-depth Views of the Country. TUCSIN Festschrift, Klaus Hess Verlag, Windhoek / Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-933117-39-7 , pp. 183–193.
  6. ^ Wiebke Schmidt: On the trail of the oldest art. ( Memento of October 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) In: Allgemeine Zeitung . May 2, 2008 (accessed May 19, 2009)

Coordinates: 27 ° 45 ′  S , 17 ° 6 ′  E