Evidence of the earliest art-studio, existing 100,000 years ago, has been unearthed, literally. In a cave, some hundred miles off Cape Town, archaeologists found red-paint like mixture carefully stored in makeshift containers made of mollusc shells. Surrounding each of these ‘palette’ shells was a toolkit of items such as bones and flat rocks, presumably employed in producing this mixture, involving grinding, mixing and storing.
All of these artefacts have been dated to 100,000 years ago, which is 100,000 years after the speciation of Homo sapiens. No evidence of such level of sophistication during the Stone Age exists. This is the earliest human record of a workshop facility and also the first use of containers.
Leading the excavation in 2008 and subsequent analysis, professor Christopher Henshilwood of Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johanne-sburg, discovered these deposits to be a once liquefied compound mixture, manufactured in the same cave. Ochre — a red or yellow iron oxide rock, was the main component, mixed with minute quantities of charcoal, marrow, possibly sand and an unknown fluid — “water or urine”, Prof. Henshilwood deliberated in the Science journal podcast. “Ochre may have been applied with symbolic intent as decoration on bodies and clothing during the Middle Stone Age,” he said.
The prepared pigment was definitely used to stain something; this is clear because these ancestors left their brushes behind. Among the tools, the team found a small piece of bone which might have been used as a paintbrush; its tip was found to have bits of the same ocre deposits- it is obviously it was dipped into the mixture and used to transfer it onto a surface.
In a classic cave dwelling of stone-agers, it is common to find items like food, clothing etc., remains that the inhabitants left behind. In this cave space, however, no such clues were found. The researchers think this indicates at the exclusivity of the space, used only as an “ochre processing workshop”.
Henshilwood said: “This discovery represents an important benchmark in the evolution of complex human cognition (mental processes) in that it shows that humans had the conceptual ability to source, combine and store substances that were then possibly used to enhance their social practices”.
The archaeologists believe their study has provided secure and direct evidence to show that early humans “were capable, certainly, of carrying out quite sophisticated acts, at least 40 or perhaps 50 thousand years before any other known example of this kind of basic chemistry.”
‘Their research is to be published this week in the journal Science.