Qafzeh Cave

Ancient peoples used it in the cave paintings at Lascaux in France over seventeen thousand years ago, pressing it into the limestone walls to create images of horses, bison, and deer that still survive today.

Archaeologists have found it in burial sites at Qafzeh and Skhul in Israel, dating back roughly a hundred thousand years, sprinkled over the bodies of the dead in what appear to be some of the earliest intentional burial rituals ever discovered.

At Catalhoyuk in Turkey, a sprawling Neolithic settlement that flourished between seven thousand and six thousand years before the Common Era, red ochre was painted on the bodies and bones of the deceased as part of elaborate funerary customs.

Across cultures, across continents, across millennia, the pigment carried powerful symbolic associations with blood, life force, regeneration, and the protection of the dead as they passed into whatever came next.