Mixing Paint in the Earliest Days- Blombos Cave
How did people make paint in the early days? Well, there's the ochre which I discussed in my last post that gives the color (yellow, orange, red or brown), but how to get it to stick to yourself or the wall? According to finds in the Blombos Cave in South Africa, 100,000 years ago some of our earliest ancestors did it by grinding up the ochre, mixing it with some melted bone marrow fat and adding a dash of urine. The paint might have been put on skin as an early form of insect repellent, or as a decoration, but we have no way of knowing exactly what the paint's intended purpose was. Inside the cave, Christopher Henshilwood of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his team found tools and two abalone shells that were used for mixing and storing the paint. Alongside one of them were quartzite stones used to hammer and grind ochre to a powder, and animal bones used to stir the powder with other materials, which included bone, charcoal,...
