tOMOrrOW's AnsWers tODAY - AkzoNobel

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The early history of paint and painting
No one knows exactly when paint was
used for the first time, but the earliest
evidence of paint comes from South
Africa, where traces of mineral-based
ochre pigments – oxides of iron that
are still used as pigment to this day –
have been dated to around 100,000
years ago.
There’s an inherent problem with
dating paint, however, because
radiocarbon dating, which is used to
estimate the age of organic matter, can
only date back to about 62,000 years, so
any organic pigments that may have
been used – blood or berries or tree
bark, for example – cannot be dated.
According to Alistair Pike, the ochre
pigments on the walls of European caves
that he has dated to at least 40,000
years old were almost certainly mixed
with water. While those first cave
paintings are simply dots, hand prints
and squiggles, over many thousands of
years, the caves were re-visited by
succeeding generations of increasingly
sophisticated artists.
The caves of Northern Spain reveal
outlines of bison and horses, some in
black or yellow, and then truly phenomenal
polychrome bison and other
animals dating to around 15,000 years
ago. During this period, modern humans
started using charcoal and organic
pigments, while some later paints were
based on plant resins, and possibly
blood, though that view is disputed.
Pike’s specialty is the technical
analysis of these traces of early art, but
that doesn’t preclude speculation on just
what they mean. Some of the paintings,
he notes, bring out forms in the rock that
resembled the animals that were
painted. “It could be that the cave is
another world, and it’s inhabited by
these mythical versions of real
creatures that they see in the hunt. What
they do brings them to life by drawing
around them.”
Curiously, in some cases, the
paintings are so remotely placed that it
seems as if they were intended not to be
seen, or only with great effort. “It may
have been the act of painting that was
important – not the painting itself – because
the painting resides in the dark in
the other world. Or that other people are
brought to see it, and that journey might
have been part of whatever meaning the
painting had.”
Look beyond: bristol.ac.uk/news/2012/8560.html