(Barbie’s signature pink may be Earth’s oldest color.)
A colorful copper mineral
Wisher’s colleague Felix Riede, also an archaeologist at Aarhus University, was reexamining a few objects previously excavated from the site, including the stone. If it was indeed a lamp, he believed it might contain traces of animal fat. Wisher has knowledge of Paleolithic art and pigments and lighting technologies utilized in the Upper Paleolithic, so he looped her in.
“As we were viewing at this lamp, we noticed that there were these very compact traces of blue residue on the object, and at first we joked that it might be some modern kind of ink that obtained onto it,” Wisher explains.
The animal fat analysis was inconclusive, and a series of coincidences and curiosity led them to view more at the blue residue. With support from geoscience colleagues, they figured out that the pigment contained copper and eventually identified it as a mineral called azurite.
Rocks near the archaeological site contain azurite, and the mineral’s chemical fingerprint suggests it came from the area. In this region of Germany, archaeologists have also uncovered evidence that people mined for two other minerals, flint and a red pigment called ochre, during the same period. Wisher’s team’s theory is that people likely came across the mineral while mining for these other resources and extracted it similarly to how they were extracting ochre and flint. Small fragments of ochre from the site support this idea.
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