Apollo 11 Cave painted plaques
Placas pintadas de la cueva Apollo 11
- Date
- c. 30 ka · confidence medium
- Place
- Apollo 11 Cave, Huns Mountains, Karas, Namibia
- Credited to
- Hunter-gatherers ancestral to the San
- Field
- Communication
What it is
Stone slabs painted with ochre, charcoal and white showing animals, including a feline with human hind legs. They are Africa's oldest portable figurative art and predate most southern African rock art by millennia.
Found by W. E. Wendt in 1969, on the day of the Moon landing (hence the name). Revised dating (Vogelsang et al., 2010) places them around 30-28 ka.
What it led to
- a southern African rock-art tradition spanning tens of millennia
- depiction of hybrid beings and shamanistic beliefs
- comparison with contemporary European Palaeolithic art