Blombos Cave Drawing

The earliest known drawing made by humans is generative. Ochre cross-hatching found at Blombos Cave in South Africa is the earliest known drawing yet found anywhere. “They qualify as generative because the placement of individual marks has not been decided by the artisan, but dictated by a manually executed symmetry‐based algorithm,” according to Philip Galanter.

Casey Reas has spoken of how logical, systems thinking is “really essential for this medium.” What the Blombos cave art and many other similar, prehistoric tiling patterns reveal is the ancient, innate and unmistakably human origins of systems thinking in art.

Blombos Cave’s symmetry-based tiling system may not universally be considered autonomous and thus generative. As I argue, the critical question to ask is: “Does the artist relinquish control to an external system at some point?” While a simple tiling system is deployed here, more complex versions will appear later in our story with Islamic tile art.