How 49 shells from a cave in Africa motivated me to get to work

When was the last time you felt uninspired? Maybe you’ll recognize what happens to me sometimes: I scroll through social media and wonder how so many people are making so many beautiful things, while my own work feels flat and unimaginative. Sound familiar?

Recently I learned about the shell beads of Blombos Cave in South Africa, and they’ve transformed how I think about who we are as makers.

In 2004, archaeologists found forty-one carved shell beads strewn among cave-floor rubble with other human makings: rocks engraved with zigzags, chunks of ochre pigment crayons worn down to nubs, and flint-knapped tools that were beautiful beyond mere utility. What has me so fascinated by these beads is that they date back at least 75,000 years to a singular chapter in human history—a time when every single one of our Homo sapiens ancestor was still living in Africa. That makes everyone alive today a direct descendant of this artistic tradition. Every one of us. No exceptions.

Take that in for a moment. Art was already a core component of the original human family in Africa well before a few of us left the homeland to seek out new homes in the Middle East, India, Australia, Europe, and eventually the Americas. And shell beads went wherever humans went. Our wandering Homo sapiens grandparents bore with them the inspiration and the skills necessary to make art, passing it on from person to person for the last three thousand generations, if not longer.

Let’s go back to Blombos for a minute. I envision a parent squatting low, teaching their child how to drill a small hole in a shell. The adult makes a couple shell beads to show the child how it must be done—slowly, and with a sharp point so as not to break the thin calcium wall of the shell. The child tries their hand at it. Surely the first one breaks. But maybe the second doesn’t. And the child keeps drilling holes into shells until one day they get to teach their own children, who teach their children, and so our artistic lineage evolves.

The exact practices may have changed over time—I don’t know any parents today who teach their children how to drill holes in shells, lamentably—but the expressions remain unchanged. We know that human capability for symbolic communication inherent in art is encoded in our DNA. So do we have some kind of built-up muscle memory for creation after multi-millennia of practice?

The next time I’m wandering in the social-media wilderness looking for direction, unsure about connecting to my own creative source, I hope I remember this: that creativity is written into our cartilage and our sinew. Our bodies contain all the teachings of all the ancestors on how we can transform this world with our touch and intention. There is no need to look anywhere else.