What is the oldest picture of honey hunting?
Short answerMostly true
The figure at the Cueva de la Araña near Bicorp in eastern Spain is the best known and usually cited as the oldest: a person climbing towards a rock cavity, reaching in, holding a container, with bees around them. Its date is a bracket several millennia wide rather than the single figure usually quoted, and southern African and Indian rock art contains further honey scenes whose dating is at least as uncertain.
Why the date is a range
Levantine rock art in eastern Iberia is painted with mineral pigment, so the paint itself generally cannot be radiocarbon dated. Dates come from stylistic sequence, from association with dated deposits at the shelters, and from arguments about which economy the scenes depict. The commonly repeated figure of around eight thousand years is one point inside a range specialists have placed several millennia apart.
The other corpora
- Southern Africa has a considerably larger body of rock art containing bees, combs and honey-gathering scenes than the single Iberian image everybody cites.
- Central Indian rock shelters contain honey-collecting scenes, again on uncertain dates.
- The recurring elements across all of them — a ladder or rope, a container, a smoking brand, bees in flight — match living harvesting traditions closely enough to be recognisable.
Sources
- Mesolithic rock art of the Cuevas de la Araña, Bicorp, Valencia — Spanish archaeological literature · Historical text
- The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting — Routledge (1999) · Historical text
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.