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 ...

Archaeologists in South Africa uncovered two 100,000-year-old abalone shells and assorted bones and stones that served a toolkits to make some sort of ochre-based compound. The mixture may have been ...

The cave was found littered with hammers and grindstones for making ochre powder. The findings also include two abalone shells that had once been used to store a red, ochre-rich mixture that was ...

The oldest known painting kits, used 100,000 years ago in the stone age, have been unearthed in a cave in South Africa. Two sets of implements for preparing red and yellow ochers to decorate animal ...