A Discovery Timed to the Space Race
In 1969, while humanity took its first steps on the moon, German archaeologist W.E. Wendt was excavating a rock shelter in the Huns Mountains of southwestern Namibia. As he listened to the historic Apollo 11 moon landing on his shortwave radio, he decided to name the site "Apollo 11 Cave." The name would become permanently linked to a discovery that pushed back the timeline of figurative art in Africa. Over the course of excavations between 1969 and 1972, Wendt's team unearthed seven stone slabs of brown-grey quartzite. These were stones, but fragments of portable art, or "art mobilier," a rare find in African archaeology.
The cave itself, known locally as "Goachanas," is a wide rock overhang, about 28 meters across and 11 meters deep. Archaeological layers within the cave show a history of human occupation stretching back over 100,000 years. The seven painted stones were found within a concentrated area of the cave floor, buried in a layer of sediment from the Middle Stone Age. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal and ostrich eggshell found in the same layer placed the stones' burial between 25,500 and 25,300 years ago, making them the oldest examples of figurative art on the continent at the time.