Stone Age paint
shop discovered
Finds suggest advanced
manufacturing knowledge
By Bruce Bower
People concocted a colorful pigment of
their imagination around 100,000 years
ago. In a cave hugging what’s now South
Africa’s coast, Stone Age humans stirred
up a recipe for a red-hued paint that
they stored in abalone shells and possibly used to decorate themselves or their
belongings.
In a technological advance impressive
for its time, these hardy foragers worked
out a system for collecting components
of a pigmented compound, producing
the substance and storing it.
“Recovery of these toolkits shows that
Homo sapiens at Blombos Cave 100,000
years ago had an elementary knowledge
of chemistry and an ability to make
long-term plans,” says archaeologist
Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen in Norway. Abalone-shell
paint holders found at the site represent
the oldest known containers, he says.
Henshilwood and his
colleagues excavated a pair
of ancient toolkits. Pieces of
ocher, soft rock containing
iron oxides, were rubbed on
stone slabs to produce a red
powder that was mixed in a
predesignated order with ocher chips,
heated and crushed animal bone that
acted as a binder, charcoal fragments,
quartz grains and an unknown liquid,
the team reports in the Oct. 14 Science.
Each toolkit consisted of several
stone tools, some stained with red ocher,
lying above and below an abalone shell
partly coated with a red mixture. An
animal bone with a red-tinged, spatula-shaped end found next to one shell probably served as a paint stirrer and utensil
for dabbing paint on people or objects.
It’s possible that this ancient substance was a glue used to attach wooden
handles to stone tools, but the researchers found no signs of any sticky, gumlike
substance in the mixture’s remnants.
“It’s tough to tell what they did with
the stuff,” says anthropologist Sally
McBrearty of the University of Con-
necticut in Storrs. “I would call it paint.”
Whatever the Blombos toolkits were
used to make, she says, they imply that
c
This abalone
shell uncovered in
Blombos Cave held
paint made 100,000 years
ago by southern Africans
in a series of chemically
distinct steps.
This abalone shell uncovered in
Blombos Cave held
paint made 100,000 years
ago by southern Africans
in a series of chemically
distinct steps.
people of that time carefully planned out
how to gather various ingredients that
were mixed in a specific sequence to produce a compound.
Soil layers containing the toolkits
included only a few stone implements
and little food waste, indicating that paint
making occurred over perhaps a couple
of days before the cave was abandoned.
Although researchers need to test the
effectiveness of the ancient Blombos
recipe as a paint or some other prod-
uct, says archaeologist Lyn Wadley of
the University of the Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg, “making compounds of
any kind implies complex cognition.”
Comparably sophisticated thinking
characterized European Neandertals,
who heated birch bark at high tem-
peratures to make an adhesive for tool
handles more than 100,000 years ago,
says Stanford University anthropologist
Richard Klein.
