Discovery Of An Early Human Ochre-processing Workshop
Sunday, October 16, 2011 - 04:30
in Paleontology & Archaeology
An exciting new discovery from Blombos Cave, South Africa indicates that early Homo sapiens were assembling collections of artistic implements approximately 40,000 years earlier than previously thought. This has been determined by dating 2 toolkits--abalone shells filled with objects used to process pigments--to approximately 100,000 years ago. The only other known pigment-related tools that date back that far are grindstones and hammerstones--objects like those that would have been used in conjunction with the toolkits from Blombos Cave, but which do not indicate the same level of "planning, production, and curation" that would have been associated with the collection and use of the newly-discovered artifacts. read more