Then in 2018 came the hashtag, an ochre pattern on a small stone slab that archaeologists believe is the world’s oldest example of a ubiquitous hashtag pattern painted on a concrete pebble slab in South Africa’s Blombos Cave, Crystal DiCosta writes in Scientific American, noting that the makers of the pattern did not attach the same importance or importance to [hashtags] as we do. The small artifact, thought to be about 73,000 years old, may actually have been part of a much larger pattern that looks nothing like a hashtag at all, which is simply a convenient, though misleading, label. Archaeologists have also discovered a number of tools used in the Middle Ages to make a pigmented composition that may have been stored in abalone bowls, DCosta reported. According to the researchers, these features indicate a very early form of abstract symbolism, and similar motifs have been found on later artifacts elsewhere in the cave. Fleur also describes the little hashtag in the New York Times as a tiny waffle, only the size of two thumbs, which appears to have been painted. Take a look at some excerpts from Picasso, says Christopher Henshilwood, an archaeologist at the University of Bergen and lead author of a study about the tiny artifact published in Nature in 2018. We know that it is a symbol created for a specific purpose, and that it is about 30,000 years older than the oldest known cave paintings. Until recently, the oldest prehistoric art was thought to be about 40,000 years old, in petroglyphs found in Indonesia and Spain. This shows that modern human behavioral actions, such as expressing abstract thoughts in material form, originated in the form of images even closer to the evolutionary emergence of modern humans.