ART × TECHNOLOGY

An Ochre Workshop by the Sea

~100,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Last glacial

At Blombos Cave, on the South African coast, two abalone shells were found still holding a dried ochre-rich paint, beside the grindstones, hammerstones and heated bone used to make it: a complete pigment workshop, left in place 100,000 years ago. The same cave yielded ochre pieces engraved with cross-hatched patterns over a span of 25,000 years, and a silcrete flake bearing the oldest known drawing, made with an ochre crayon around 73,000 years ago.

Why it matters

Making paint is planning: sourcing four ingredients, combining them by recipe, storing the result in containers for later use. What the mixture was for, skin, hide or sign, is unknown, and recent work shows ochre also served as a plain good tool for pressure-flaking stone. Symbol and technique are tangled together at Blombos, which is perhaps the most honest picture of how minds like ours work.

Dating & uncertainty

The two toolkits lie in a level dated to about 100,000 years by optically stimulated luminescence. The engraved ochres from the same cave span roughly 100,000 to 75,000 years, and the drawn silcrete flake about 73,000: a tradition with duration, not one afternoon.

Sources

1. Henshilwood et al. (2011), Science · A 100,000-year-old ochre-processing workshop at Blombos Cave, South Africadoi:10.1126/science.1211535
2. Henshilwood et al. (2009), Journal of Human Evolution · Engraved ochres from the Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave, South Africadoi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.01.005
3. Henshilwood et al. (2018), Nature · An abstract drawing from the 73,000-year-old levels at Blombos Cave, South Africadoi:10.1038/s41586-018-0514-3

Our species’ history as one day

16:22:517 h 37 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day