World's oldest artist's workshop

摘要

GRIND up ochre, melt bone-marrow fat, mix the lot with a splash of urine and paint the resulting gloop over your body. It sounds like an avant-garde performance, but something similar may have happened some 100,000 years ago in the oldest known artists workshop - a cave in South Africa. Inside the cave, Christopher Henshilwood of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, found two abalone shells that were used for storing paint (see picture). There were also stones used to grind ochre to a powder and animal bones that served as stirrers.