Prehistoric Art, Eoliths & Figure Stones – World’s Oldest Stone Age Art

Eoliths.org exists because something has gone badly wrong in how prehistory is described. For over a century, eoliths and figure stones have been waved away as “geofacts”, “battered nodules” or “curiosities”, while the obvious prehistoric art and ancient flint tool technologies they carry are largely ignored. The earliest researchers in the 19th century – Boucher de Perthes, Abbott, Rutot, Bourgeois and others – documented stones with clear profiles of animals and faces, worked edges and deliberate composition. Instead of engaging with that evidence, later commentators woefully relabelled these finds as accidents of nature.

The material presented here tells a very different story. From a single South Downs site near Boxgrove, and from earlier classic collections, we see portable rock art, figure stones and heavily patinated flint tools that display planning, symmetry and repeated motifs. These are not random fractures. They are stone age art and ancient figurative art in flint, created using real toolmaking skills and a visual language that recurs across pieces, layers and even regions. All common sense and logic point to sophisticated tools and figurative artworks from great antiquity, not only in my finds but in the original 19th-century discoveries that were quietly written out of the story.

On this site you will find high-patina flint tools, Oldowan- and Acheulean-style technologies, and some of the strongest candidates for the world’s oldest art in stone: engraved, pecked and sculpted pieces that combine cutting edges with images of animals, faces and composite forms. Multiple lines of evidence – patina depth, geological context, technological consistency and cross-comparison of motifs – all support deliberate human agency. The aim of Eoliths.org is simple: to put that evidence for ancient stone age art and portable rock art back on the table and invite serious scientific scrutiny instead of automatic dismissal.

Rethinking Early Human Origins

For over a century, archaeologists and collectors have wrestled with the question of eoliths “dawn stones” found in Tertiary deposits and once thought to be the earliest human tools. Many dismissed them as “geofacts” because they seemed impossibly old, but the evidence keeps returning: deliberate flake removals, platforms, bulbs of percussion, design, convention, obvious tools and a patina depth that speaks of enormous age.

Wikipedia repeats the old 1905 claim that eoliths are now believed to be simply made by natural fractures, not tools — an idea based on early bias and limited testing. The example shown there looks crude, completely unrepresentative of historical eolith collections (even here they cannot prove a lack of agency). Many real eoliths show clear signs of shaping, controlled blade edges, and intentional working, indistinguishable from palaeolithic tool sets. Even the term “crude” is misleading: some eolith design may be minimal yet elegant. Showing something that looks crude while ignoring the finer shaped tools is a failure of observation. The assumption of randomness is what’s unscientific; the evidence of human agency is right there in the stone.

Some of these stones are more than just tools. They cross the boundary into art. Figure stones, first discussed in the 19th century by Abbé Bourgeois and Jacques Boucher de Perthes, often show animal profiles, ape faces, or figurative art. To wave them aside as “accidental” ignores the consistency of whole assemblages where one piece after another repeats the same motifs, clearly ancient sculpture.

That is where the question of evidence of cognition becomes central. If these stones were intentionally shaped, then humans or pre-human ancestors were sculpting figurative art far earlier than textbooks allow. We are not looking at a sudden spark of art in the Upper Palaeolithic, but a much deeper tradition stretching into the Miocene and Pliocene.

But how do we know how old such finds are? This is where science can help. Patina, the hydrated rind that slowly builds on flint, thickens over hundreds of thousands to millions of years. My dating flint artefact patina chart compiles measurements from global archaeological literature and shows that some of these artefacts are consistent with multi-million-year antiquity. Other artefact dating methods, the geology, typology, and even spectroscopy of pigments, can add further support, though every approach has limits.

Ultimately, these questions come together in the attempt to date ancient artefacts and art. Before dating, one must prove agency: is it truly art, a stone tool or just natural form? Once intent is established, cross-checking with patina, geological stratigraphy, and comparison to the fossil record offers provisional timelines.

If you’d rather see the evidence directly, the Revelation in Stone video series brings many of these pieces to life, showing close-up studies of flint tools, figure stones, portable rock art and motifs, alongside historical accounts of the earliest discoveries.