Yellow Ochre Cave Paintings

For cave pictures pottery the human body and various artifacts.

Yellow ochre cave paintings.

25 000 years old and the cave of altamira in spain ca. 3 2019 shows ochre rock paintings in a prehistoric cave site unearthed in ngari prefecture southwest china s tibet autonomous region. An artificial substitute for yellow ochre was found in the 1920s and it is still used today. Ochre is the earliest known pigment used by humans to paint our world perhaps as long ago as 300 000 years.

Natural iron rich oxides provided red yellow brown paints and dyes for a wide range of prehistoric uses including but in no way limited to rock art paintings pottery wall paintings and cave art and human tattoos. For example the ochre used in the famous cave paintings at lascaux probably came from 25 miles away. Because it was widely available yellow ochre pigment was one of the first colors used in art. Red and yellow ochre are examples commonly seen in prehistoric cave paintings.

Paintings of animals made with red and yellow ochre pigments have been found in paleolithic sites at pech merle in france ca. Ochre and orpiment pigments were used to represent gold and skin color in egyptian tombs then in the murals in roman villas. Yellow and red ochre pigments have been found in the caves at pech merle altamira and lascaux to name but a few examples. The lascaux cave in france has a painting of a yellow horse 17 000 years old.

Cave paintings over 17 000 years old use this pigment which was made from the natural ochre mineral. Prehistoric people mined these from the earth and probably traveled significant distances to get the right pigments. The cave of lascaux has an image of a horse coloured with yellow ochre estimated to be 17 300 years old. Photo provided by local archaeological authorities on jan.