African cave yields paint from dawn of humanity - The Washington Post

African cave yields paint from dawn of humanity - The Washington Post: A hundred thousand years ago, not long after Homo sapiens emerged as a species, a craftsman — or woman — sat in a cave overlooking the Indian Ocean, crushed a soft rusty red rock, mixed it inside a shell with charcoal and animal marrow, and dabbed it on something — maybe a face, maybe a wall.

Before the person left, he or she stacked the shell and grindstones in a neat pile, where they lay undisturbed for a hundred millennia.

Unearthed in 2008 and described Friday in the journal Science, these paint “toolkits,” researchers say, push deeper into human history the evidence for artistic impulses and complex, planned behavior. Previously, the oldest evidence of ochre paint was found at another site in South Africa dated to about 60,000 years ago.