I'm standing on the
southern tip of Africa
and imagining what it was like
sometime in the last hundreds
of thousands of years.
Back then, Africa was home to
all the world's Homo sapiens,
all 10,000 of them.
If you were an extraterrestrial
on a survey mission,
you might have thought we
were an endangered species.
Someday soon, there will
be 10 billion of us.
What happened?
How did we become the globe
girdling space traveling
species that we are today?
Welcome to the first
laboratory on Earth.
We're in Blombos Cave, where
the evolution of the mind
made a great leap.
Our ancestors were conducting
chemistry experiments here with
a mineral rich in iron, ocher.
They used it to decorate
objects with bits of red color,
but it may have
also had other uses.
To preserve animal
hides or as a medicine,
or as a way to
sharpen their tools.
Or maybe as an insect repellent.
And they engraved the ocher with
symbols, something completely
new on the planet Earth.
Art.
Not to be eaten, not
to provide shelter,
but to symbolize something.
Or just to be.
Looks a little bit like
a ladder or double helix.
Whatever it was supposed to
be, it's the earliest remnant
we have of human culture.
We had found a way to
leave behind something
distinctly human.
A means to communicate
however enigmatically to you
and me 100,000 years away.
A great power was discovered
here in Blombos Cave.
