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 tool kits 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 adds.