Tsodilo

Tsodilo
Rock art at Tsodilo
Location	Ngamiland District, Botswana
Coordinates	18°45′0″S 21°44′0″E / 18.75000°S 21.73333°E / -18.75000; 21.73333Coordinates: 18°45′0″S 21°44′0″E / 18.75000°S 21.73333°E / -18.75000; 21.73333
UNESCO World Heritage Site
Official name: Tsodilo
Type	Cultural
Criteria	i, iii, iv
Designated	2001 (25th session)
Reference no.	1021
State Party	Botswana
Region	List of World Heritage Sites in Africa
Tsodilo Hills

The Tsodilo Hills are a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS), consisting of rock art, rock shelters, depressions, and caves. It gained its WHS listing in 2001 because of its unique religious and spiritual significance to local peoples, as well as its unique record of human settlement over many millennia. UNESCO estimates that there are over 4500 rock paintings at the site. The site consists of a few main hills known as the Child Hill, the Female Hill, and the Male Hill. These hills are of great cultural and spiritual significance to the San People of the Kalahari.

There are four chief hills. The highest is 1,400 metres AMSL. This is one of the highest points in Botswana. The four hills are commonly described as the "Male", this is the highest, the "Female", "Child" and an unnamed knoll.

There is a managed campsite between the two largest hills, with showers and toilets. It is near the most famous of the San paintings at the site, the Laurens van der Post panel, after the South-African writer who first described the paintings in his 1958 book 'The Lost World of the Kalahari'. The hills can be reached via a good graded dirt road and are about 40 km from Shakawe. Also by the campsite is a small museum. There is also an airstrip.

People have used the Tsodilo Hills for painting and ritual for thousands of years. UNESCO estimates that the hills contain 500 individual sites representing thousands of years of human habitation. The hills' rock art has been linked to the local hunter gatherers. It is believed that ancestors of the San created some of the paintings at Tsodilo, and were also the ones to inhabit the caves and rock shelters. There is evidence that Bantu peoples were responsible for some of the artworks at the hills. Some of the paintings have been dated to be as early as 24,000 years before present.

Rhino Cave is located at the North end of the Female Hill and has two main walls where paintings are located. The white rhino painting which the cave is named for is located on the north wall, and is split by another painting of a red giraffe. Excavations of the cave floor turned up many lithic materials from. While the cave lacks ostrich egg shell, bone artifacts, pottery or iron, there were a few mongongo shell fragments found in Later Stone Age layers.