100,000-Year-Old Art Workshop Found in South Africa

Talk about taking a while for an artist's work to be appreciated....

It's long been known that art has been a defining feature of human life for thousands of years, but a discovery in South Africa suggests humans had been painting as long as 100,000 years ago. South African researchers found abalone shells in a cave near Cape Town that bore traces of a paste containing ochre, a mineral that can be used as a red or yellow dye. The samples were then dated using a technique known as optically stimulated luminescence dating, which found them to be about 100,000 years old. And given that no other human traces were found near the cave, the researchers think the cave might have been a painting workshop, where Middle Stone Age artists would have mixed materials before applying them as paint to clothes and skin. The shells and paint traces will be on display in a Cape Town museum starting today.