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 mixture, beside the grindstones, hammerstones, bone and charcoal that make up the rest of the production kit: a 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

Mixing that pigment was an act of planning: sourcing several substances, combining them to a recipe, storing the result in containers for later use. What the mixture was for, skin, hide or sign, is unknown, and recent work has also found ochre used as a plainly practical tool, for pressure-flaking stone. Symbol and technique are tangled together at Blombos, and that is perhaps the most honest picture of how minds like ours work.

Dating & uncertainty

The two shells and their tools 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