By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News
Blombos Cave is an archaeological site with significant information about the behaviour of our ancestorsRelated Stories
The kits used by humans 100,000 years ago to make paint have been found at the famous archaeological site of Blombos Cave in South Africa.
The hoard includes red and yellow pigments, shell containers, and the grinding cobbles and bone spatulas to work up a paste – everything an ancient artist might need in their workshop.
This extraordinary discovery is reported in the journal Science.
It is proof, say researchers, of our early ancestors’ complexity of thought.
“This is significant because it is pushing back the boundaries of our understanding of when Homo sapiens – people like us – first became modern,” said Prof Christopher Henshilwood from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
“These finds indicate that humans were certainly thinking in a modern way, in a way that is cognitively advanced, at least 100,000 years ago,” he told BBC News.
Prof Henshilwood shows what was found and how the tools were used
Blombos Cave on the southern Cape Coast, 300km east of Cape Town, has been giving up remarkable archaeological treasures for more than 20 years.
Scientists have been scraping down through its sandy sediments to find all manner of artefacts left by the Middle Stone Age people who occupied the limestone cavity.
In 2002, researchers described 70,000-year-old blocks of ochre. This soft stone contains iron oxides that can be used as a pigment, or colouring agent.
The toolkits were removed from the Blombos sediment in 2008But apart from some engravings on the blocks, there was little hard evidence to determine the precise purpose of the Blombos ochre. The new items seem to have had a much more obvious use – as the equipment to process paints.
The finds include abalone shells with ochre residues inside. There are tools made of quartzite that were presumably employed to hammer and grind ochre into a powder in the shells. And there is evidence that charcoal and oil from seal bones were being added to the mix. It seems bone implements were also being used to turn and lift the paint pastes.
All these artefacts were found together, almost as if someone had put them down intending to retrieve them at a later time, but then never coming back. Sands blown in through the cave entrance subsequently buried the kits and locked them away until they were excavated in 2008.
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