Rock Art Research

The Tswalu Reserve in the southern Kalahari is an arid place, the present occupation of which is only made possible by means of boreholes that tap patches of fossil water, while semi-permanent surface sources of ~65 m2 extent are confined to three localities within an investigated area of over 1000 km2. Lithic evidence indicates that this vicinity was abandoned by humans during even drier Ice Age intervals, when rainfall fell at times to ~40% of present values, thereby providing a way to refer petroglyphs there to interglacials of known age and intensity in terms of regional and global paleaoclimatic data. By such means, together with microerosion measurements, it then becomes possible to identify three regional cupule production intervals: the earliest with cupules only at ~410–400 ka bp, the next with cupules and outline circles at ~130–115 ka ago, and the most recent, with cupules, geometric motifs and iconic images, at ~8–2 ka bp.