 San/Bushman woman in western Botswana (Kalahari Desert). Ancestral San hunter-gatherers were responsible for much of the rock art of southern Africa. |  San/Bushmen standing in a painted shelter at Botswana's Tsoldilo Hills (1980s). Some of these San used to say that their ancestors painted the white paintings, but that the red paintings were painted by God. |  Tuareg custodian at the Dabous Giraffe site in Niger, west of the Aïr Mountains. |
 Tuareg guide in a rock shelter covered in millennia-old paintings from the Pastoral and Horse periods of Saharan art, superimposed by some camel period paintings and recent graffiti. |  Red and white geometric paintings in a shelter in southern Mauretania. Local guide looks on. |  Sandawe woman in central Tanzania's Kondoa province not far from the Kondoa World Heritage rock art site. Some of the earliest art was made by ancestral Sandawe. |
 Director of Antiquities for Somaliland, Dr Sada Mire looks at pastoral paintings at an important painting site. |  Ethiopian villager sitting on a rock inscribed with ancient geometrics, southern Ethiopia. |  A Ndorobo hunter-gatherer at a Samburu painting site in northern Kenya. |
Prehistoric African Paintings and Engravings
TARA, based in Nairobi, documents & safeguards Africa’s ancient rock paintings & engravings, humankind’s earliest artistic and cultural expressions.“Africa’s rock art is the common heritage of all Africans, but it is more than that. It is the
common heritage of humanity.”
President Nelson Mandela
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