In the 1940s the archaeologist A.J. Arkell noted the presence of Paleolithic sites on Sai Island, in the Nile in northern Sudan, and remarked that excavation of those sites might reveal significant information about Stone Age man in North Africa. He failed to act on his own intuitions, however, and the place was more or less forgotten until its rediscovery in 1996 by a team of Belgian architects from the University of Leuven. As Arkell had suspected, they found that the extremely unusual geomorphology of the site – where a depression protected by a sandstone ridge had created a “sediment trap”, preserving deep layers of trapped history from erosion – had created a rare opportunity to excavate for signs of human activity in the Palaeolithic period. So they dug, and the remarkable fruits of their explorations can now be seen in a new exhibition, “Sudan: Ancient Treasures”, which opened last Friday at the British Museum.

The finds from Sai are by no means the most visually spectacular exhibits in this wide-ranging show, but they are certainly among the most thrilling. They include the kind of material that might be expected from a Stone Age settlement – the jagged triangular head of a handaxe made from sandstone, another axe of quartz, some grinding tools – but also a small group of intriguingly amorphous lumps of hard, coloured material. These gobbets of stuff, which are agglomerations of yellow iron oxide, yellow ochre and red ochre, clearly rubbed and worn and shaped by human touch, were found with a number of smooth pebbles themselves bearing traces of colour. This apparently innocuous gathering of objects amounts to the world’s earliest clear evidence of human beings gathering, processing and using pigments – and represents, therefore, the almost unimaginably dim and distant first stirrings of Man...

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