THE FIRST TIME HUMANS used pigments to make communicative marks, they used the colour red – ochre. As a mineral, ochre doesn’t decay or wash away, which gives it a powerful longevity. This, says April Nowell, a paleolithic archaeologist from Canada’s University of Victoria, makes it “an ideal crayon or paint base”.
The earliest evidence of humans using ochre dates to Homo erectus, 285,000 years ago, while the earliest known drawings by Homo sapiens – a kind of cross hatch – were made by crafted and portable ochre crayons in Blombos Cave, 300 kilometres east of Cape Town, South Africa. The advent of this drawing implement, says Christopher Henshilwood from Norway’s University of Bergen, means “you can put a crayon into a bag, walk over the landscape and mark a rock or tree without needing to make paint or engrave something.” And this makes it easier to communicate.
Ochre was widely traded in
