Offerings to a Stone Snake Provide the Earliest Evidence of
Religion
70,000-year-old African ritual practices linked to mythology
of modern Botswanans
By JR Minkel on December 1, 2006
“Coulson made the discovery while searching for artifacts
from the Middle Stone Age in the only hills present for hundreds of kilometers
in any direction. This group of small peaks within the Kalahari Desert is known
as the Tsodilo Hills and is famous for having the largest concentration of rock
paintings in the world.
The Tsodilo Hills are still a sacred place for the San, who
call them the "Mountains of the Gods" and the "Rock that
Whispers".
The python is one of the San's most important animals.
According to their creation myth, mankind descended from the python and the
ancient, arid streambeds around the hills are said to have been created by the
python as it circled the hills in its ceaseless search for water.
Sheila Coulson's find shows that people from the area had a
specific ritual location associated with the python. The ritual was held in a
little cave on the northern side of the Tsodilo Hills. The cave itself is so
secluded and access to it is so difficult that it was not even discovered by
archaeologists until the 1990s.
When Coulson entered the cave this summer with her three
master's students, it struck them that the mysterious rock resembled the head
of a huge python. On the six meter long by two meter tall rock, they found
three-to-four hundred indentations that could only have been man-made.
"You could see the mouth and eyes of the snake. It
looked like a real python. The play of sunlight over the indentations gave them
the appearance of snake skin. At night, the firelight gave one the feeling that
the snake was actually moving".
They found no evidence that work had recently been done on
the rock. In fact, much of the rock's surface was extensively eroded.
When they saw the many indentations in the rock, the
archaeologists wondered about more than when the work had been done. They also
began thinking about what the cave had been used for and how long people had
been going there. With these questions in mind, they decided to dig a test pit
directly in front of the python stone.
At the bottom of the pit, they found many stones that had
been used to make the indentations. Together with these tools, some of which
were more than 70,000 years old, they found a piece of the wall that had fallen
off during the work...”
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