Tsodilo Hills
In 2006 the University of Oslo announced that a python 6 meters long, pecked into a rock face in Botswana, marked the oldest known ritual site on Earth at around 70,000 years. Archaeologists who had excavated the same cave dated it closer to 15,000, and the researcher's own peer-reviewed account dropped the number.
Field Guide Entry
On November 30, 2006, the University of Oslo announced that Sheila Coulson had found the oldest known ritual site in the world. In a cave on the Female Hill at Tsodilo, a rock face 6 meters long had been pecked into the shape of a python, and the floor beneath it held 13,000 stone artifacts, many of them burned, some worked from material carried in from hundreds of kilometers away. The age given was around 70,000 years.
The rebuttal came from people who had dug the same cave
Lawrence Robbins, Alec Campbell, George Brook, and Michael Murphy answered in Nyame Akuma in 2007. Their own radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dates from Rhino Cave came out closer to 15,000 years. They also raised a point aimed at the headline rather than the excavation: the pecking on the rock cannot be dated at all. Marks cut into stone leave no material to test. What can be dated is what lies on the floor below them, and a floor accumulates for as long as people keep arriving.
Coulson's peer-reviewed account of the site, written with Sigrid Staurset and published in PaleoAnthropology in 2011, does not carry the 70,000 year figure.
What is not in dispute
People used that cave repeatedly, carried worked stone into it from a long way off, and burned it there. The hills hold more than 4,500 recorded paintings. For the Ju/'hoansi and the Hambukushu, Tsodilo is where creation happened, which is a claim of a different order from a radiocarbon date and is not settled by one.
The site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001 and is run with the communities around it.
Visiting Information
Entry is through the museum at the gate, and a guide is required on the trails. An entry charge per person and a separate charge for each trail are both paid there, and the current rates are posted at the desk rather than published reliably anywhere online.
The Rhino Trail takes about 2 hours. The dry season, May through October, is the practical window. A community campsite operates near the entrance.
Getting there is the hard part. The access road off the A35 south of Shakawe is a long run of bad gravel and sand, and high clearance with four-wheel drive is the sensible choice.
The paintings sit on open rock with nothing between them and a hand. Touching them, or wetting them to bring the color up for a photograph, is what closes sites like this to visitors.
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