For fifty years, a small stone sat on display in a German museum. Catalogued in the 1970s as a simple “oil lamp” from the end of the Ice Age, it drew little attention. But when archaeologists looked again, they saw something that should not have been there at all: shimmering traces of blue.
“This is actually one of the rare examples when we were completely surprised by the discovery,” said archaeologist Izzy Wisher of Aarhus University, lead author of the new study in Antiquity.
The team found that the pigment was azurite, a deep-blue copper mineral. At ~13,000 years old, it represents the earliest known use of blue pigment in Europe, predating previous evidence by some 8,000 years. Until now, scholars believed Ice Age artists stuck almost exclusively to red ochre and black charcoal.
A Colorful Prehistoric Surprise
To prove their case, researchers applied a suite of cutting-edge tests. Micro–X-ray fluorescence showed copper signals exactly where the blue appeared. Particle-induced X-ray emission (PIXE) confirmed the chemistry, while infrared and reflectance spectroscopy further backed it up.
The blue pigment was deliberately applied, and tiny specks surrounding the main residue suggest much more once coated the stone’s surface.
The dating of the artifact is considered robust. The item was excavated from a layer just beneath the Laacher See volcanic ash, which erupted about 13,000 ago. Additional luminescence dates bracketed the occupation between ~14,000 and 13,000 years ago, firmly placing the stone in the Final Paleolithic.
“The presence of azurite shows that Paleolithic people had a deep knowledge of mineral pigments and could access a much broader color palette than we previously thought — and they may have been selective in the way they used certain colors,” Dr. Wisher says.
Hints of Blue
The authors acknowledge a few earlier claims of blue use, but emphasize that the evidence is weak or ambiguous. One comes from Siberia, where figurines dating to about 19,000 to 23,000 years ago show traces of a bluish-green tint. It’s tempting to imagine some Ice Age sculptor deliberately brushing them with color, but the substance hasn’t been securely identified. Was it azurite? Malachite? Or just some weird discoloration that fooled our eyes millennia later? No one knows.
Then there’s Georgia, where people living in Dzudzuana Cave some 32,000 years ago were grinding up plants like Isatis tinctoria — a cousin of the indigo that would eventually dye denim jeans. In theory, that plant can yield a purplish-blue dye. In practice, there’s no proof the ancient people in that area ever used it to paint anything. Maybe they were testing recipes, maybe they were after medicinal extracts. The evidence literally fades away.
That’s why the German discovery is such a big deal. Unlike the Siberian figurines or the Georgian plants, the flecks of azurite from Mühlheim-Dietesheim are unmistakable. Chemical analysis shows the blue is real, it’s mineral-based, and it’s exactly where a human once worked the stone surface 13,000 years ago.
Rethinking Color in the Ice Age
If this rare discovery is truly evidence of Ice Age artists employing blue, then why don’t we see more blue in Paleolithic art? If azurite was locally available — its isotopic “fingerprint” matches copper deposits in the nearby Rhine-Main region — why did Ice Age people use it so sparingly?
Wisher and colleagues suggest the answer lies in activities that leave no trace in caves or on stone walls. “We think that this is probably because azurite was used for archaeologically invisible activities that don’t preserve, such as decorating the body or dying fabrics,” Wisher explained to National Geographic.
That possibility reframes our image of Ice Age Europe. Perhaps people were painting not only cave walls but also themselves, their clothes, their tools — surfaces that vanish with time. The “lamp,” the researchers now argue, was likely a grinding palette for pigment preparation. “Our feeling now is that this category of object needs to be re-examined in light of this paper to see whether some of these so-called lamps were instead used for pigment processing,” said Wisher.
More Colorful Than We Thought
Archaeologist Elizabeth Velliky, who studies prehistoric pigments but was not involved in the research, sees this as part of a bigger story. “I do think that the past was more colorful than we originally thought, but now we actually have evidence for it.”
Blue has always been loaded with symbolism. Millennia after these Ice Age artists, Egyptians would create synthetic “Egyptian blue” and Renaissance painters would grind lapis into ultramarine, a pigment more precious than gold at the time. But it all may have started in Mühlheim-Dietesheim, when someone 13,000 years ago crushed a copper mineral into powder.
