🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE: Archaeologists are learning how we evolved our cognitive abilities with the help of ochre, an ancient pigment used for everything from body paint to sunscreen.
Both ancient and modern peoples use ochre to decorate themselves and their environments as well as in sunscreen and other functional applications. Stephen Alvarez/National Geographic CreativeSmeared on shells, piled in graves, stamped and stenciled on cave walls from South Africa to Australia, Germany to Peru, ochre has been a part of the human story since our very start — and perhaps even earlier.
Ochre, which ranges in color from yellow to deep purple, has been favored by humans longer than any other pigment. Philippe Psaila/Science Source Ochre is most commonly defined by archaeologists as any iron-rich rock that can be used as a pigment. Most people associate the term with hematite, or red ochre, chemically known as Fe2O3. But a range of other rocks appear in the archaeological record, from the yellow ochre goethite to the often-dramatic specular hematite, sometimes called specularite.
Ochre use became widespread in the Middle Stone Age, a period of about 50,000 to 280,000 years ago, and during this time, Hodgskiss says, “there seems to be a preference for red — a larger percentage of the ochre used was red. But a lot of these sites have hearths one atop another. It’s possible some of the red ochre we find may have been yellow once.”Confidently dated archaeological sites showing ochre worked by humans now go back more than 300,000 years, close to the emergence of.
Brooks adds: “There are lots of rocks that come in powdery form that aren’t red and didn’t get used. Ochre has importance because it signals to others. … Its use is extremely widespread, even in the modern world. Why do we color our world when our world is colorful already? It could be a lot of reasons, but it’s a form of communication.”
And in South Africa, Hodgskiss says, ochre is widely used as sunscreen. “You can buy it at hardware stores and in traditional medicine shops,” says Hodgskiss, where the sunscreen is known asThe archaeological record suggests ochre had some other practical uses, turning up on tools and weapons.
Ochre was used to create these 50,000-year-old aboriginal Gwion Gwion rock paintings in western Australia. Jason Edwards/National Geographic Creative Among their findings: assorted tools for processing ochre, such as grindstones, and a limestone pebble with ochre residue on one side. The pebble appears to have been dipped into an ochre-based paint and used as a stamp on an unknown material.
“One of the pieces has been chipped with some kind of sharp object,” Brooks says. “The other one has grinding striations and what seems to be attempted perforation. It looks like someone took something like a chisel and just dug and dug.” Zipkin typically measures more than 40 elements per sample and could find up to 15 of them useful for the fingerprinting, which creates that site’s geochemical signature. The signatures are added to a database which, when large enough, can be used to determine the geographic origin of material found at an archaeological site.
“The ochre at Olorgesailie appears in the same time period as a new behavior: the importing of obsidian from distant places,” Brooks says. “This is a radical shift in behavior.” At about 100,000 years old, this engraved ochre from Blombos is the oldest known art of its kind. Christopher HenshilwoodOchre reveals details about our ancestors’ behavior, but could it have played a more active role in our evolution? Marine ecologist Carlos Duarte of Saudi Arabia’s Abdullah University thinks so. The idea came to him when preparing to give a talk on the role of the ocean in our past and future.
An abalone shell and other ochre-related artifacts are among the many finds from Blombos Cave in South Africa. Courtesy Christopher Henshilwood/Craig Foster
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