Apollo 11 Cave Stones: Africa's Oldest Figurative Art

The Apollo 11 Cave stones are a set of painted stone slabs found in a rock shelter in southern Namibia and dated to roughly 30,000 years ago. Excavated between 1969 and 1972, they show animals drawn in charcoal and ochre and are among the oldest figurative artworks known from Africa. The cave takes its name from the Apollo 11 Moon mission, which was under way when the excavator first worked there.

Background: the Huns Mountains and southern Africa’s Stone Age

Apollo 11 Cave is a rock shelter in the Huns Mountains, in the ǁKaras Region of southern Namibia, not far from the border with South Africa. It lies in a dry, rugged landscape of cliffs and valleys, which in the past offered water, game and shelter to hunter-gatherers.

Archaeologists divide the African Stone Age into the Early, Middle and Later Stone Age. The Middle Stone Age, from roughly 300,000 to 30,000 years ago, saw the emergence of Homo sapiens and of new behaviours such as the use of pigments, personal ornaments and engraved designs. The Later Stone Age, which followed, is the period of the ancestors of the San (often called Bushmen) and other southern African hunter-gatherers.

The Apollo 11 shelter contains a long sequence of deposits covering both periods. People returned there repeatedly over tens of thousands of years, leaving stone tools, hearths, animal bones and fragments of ostrich eggshell.

Discovery and the name

The German archaeologist Wolfgang Erich Wendt began excavating the shelter in 1969. In July of that year, while he was working there, news came over the radio of the Apollo 11 mission, which landed the first astronauts on the Moon on 20 July 1969. Wendt named the site Apollo 11 Cave in its honour, linking one of the oldest artworks on Earth with one of the defining events of the twentieth century, described in Apollo 11 Moon Landing.

Over excavation seasons between 1969 and 1972, Wendt recovered several painted slab fragments from the deposits. According to accounts of the excavation, two pieces of one of the painted slabs were found in different seasons and later fitted together.

Wendt published the finds in 1976 in the South African Archaeological Bulletin, describing them as Africa’s oldest dated works of art.

What the stones show

The painted pieces are slabs of local stone, small enough to be carried. In total, seven slab fragments with paint are usually counted. Unlike most rock art, which is painted directly on cave or cliff walls, these are portable artworks, or “art mobilier” in the French term used by archaeologists.

The images were painted with charcoal, red and yellow ochre and white pigment. One slab shows a rhinoceros in black. Another shows a feline or bovid-like animal with what appear to be human-like hind legs; some researchers describe it as a therianthrope, a figure that combines human and animal features. Other fragments show animals that are harder to identify, including possible zebra or antelope.

The figures are drawn in profile, with confident outlines. They show that the artists had a well-developed tradition, not a first experiment.

Interpreting the figures

Part-human, part-animal figures are common in later San rock art across southern Africa. The archaeologist David Lewis-Williams and others have argued that many San paintings relate to the experiences of healers or shamans in trance, during which they were believed to take on animal qualities. Some researchers have suggested that the Apollo 11 figure may belong to an early form of this tradition.

This idea remains debated. The gap between the Apollo 11 stones and the San paintings of the last few thousand years is very large, and continuity of meaning over such a long time cannot be assumed.

Dating the stones

Wendt obtained radiocarbon dates on charcoal from the layer containing the slabs. They were reported as roughly 27,500 to 25,500 radiocarbon years before present. Radiocarbon years are not the same as calendar years, and when calibrated, these dates correspond to roughly 30,000 years ago or slightly more. Published figures for the stones therefore range between about 30,000 and 26,000 years depending on the method used.

In the 2000s a team led by Ralf Vogelsang of the University of Cologne carried out new excavations at the shelter and re-examined its sequence. Their work confirmed a long Middle Stone Age record, including tool industries known as Still Bay and Howiesons Poort, and refined the dating of the layers. The painted slabs come from the late Middle Stone Age or the transition to the Later Stone Age.

Life at the shelter

The painted slabs are only one part of what the shelter reveals. Its layers record how people used the site over a very long time, as the climate of southern Africa swung between wetter and drier phases. In wetter periods the surrounding hills could support more game and plants, and people seem to have visited the shelter more often; in very dry periods it was used less or abandoned.

The finds include stone tools, fragments of ostrich eggshell, which hunter-gatherers in the region later used as water containers and for beads, and pieces of ochre. Ochre was ground into powder for pigments, and its regular presence shows that colour played a role in daily life long before the slabs were painted.

Together, these traces suggest small, mobile groups who knew their landscape intimately and moved between water sources and hunting grounds. The painted slabs were made within this way of life.

Apollo 11 and African rock art

Africa holds one of the world’s richest traditions of rock art, with hundreds of thousands of painted and engraved images from the Sahara to the Cape. Yet most dated paintings are only a few thousand years old, because paint on exposed rock rarely survives longer. This makes the Apollo 11 stones, preserved in buried layers, exceptionally important.

They show that painting animals existed in southern Africa around the same time as the famous cave paintings of Europe, such as those at Chauvet Cave. Even older symbolic behaviour is known from the continent: engraved pieces of ochre and a crosshatched drawing from Blombos Cave in South Africa are around 75,000 years old or more, though they are abstract patterns rather than images of animals.

Namibia also has major later rock art sites, including the engravings of Twyfelfontein, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007, and the many paintings of the Brandberg massif.

Timeline

• c. 30,000–27,000 years ago: The painted slabs are made and left in the Apollo 11 shelter.
• 1969, July: Wolfgang Erich Wendt begins excavating and names the site after the Apollo 11 Moon mission.
• 1969–1972: Wendt recovers the painted slab fragments during several excavation seasons.
• 1976: Wendt publishes the slabs as Africa’s oldest dated works of art.
• 2000s: New excavations led by Ralf Vogelsang refine the site’s sequence and chronology.
• 2010: Results of the new excavations are published.

Why it matters

The Apollo 11 stones prove that figurative painting was practised in Africa tens of thousands of years ago, at least as early as in Ice Age Europe. They challenge the old idea that art began in Europe and show that the roots of the world’s great rock art traditions run deep in African prehistory.