People were painting and selling ostrich eggs thousands of years ago – and we may finally know how they did it

A 5,000-year-old mystery surrounding how a collection of ostrich eggs got their colorful decorations may have finally been cracked.

Ornate eggs were prized items among the elite circles of Mediterranean civilizations during the Bronze and Iron Ages, but little was know about how they were produced, traded and moved around the region.

So, just in time for Easter, researchers re-examined a group of five eggs which were on display at the British Museum in London and found that their origin story was “much more complicated than we had imagined.”