"We know that people in the Early Stone Age engaged in aesthetic and artistic activity. The cave paintings in Spain and France, especially those at Lascaux, are very well known, for example. But the color palette used in those works is quite limited," said Ester Oras, professor of archaeochemistry at the University of Tartu. The paintings feature black, reddish, orange and brown hues, along with yellowish and white tones. But green and blue are missing from that palette.

Until now, the earliest known traces of blue pigment dated back to the later Stone Age — around 5,000 to 8,000 years ago. A new international study has pushed that timeline much further back. In their collaboration, the researchers determined that the object — long believed to be an oil lamp and dated to between 13,000 and 14,000 years ago — is in fact an ancient paint palette. "We found blue azurite pigments on it. This shows that, although blue doesn't appear in cave paintings, Neolithic people must have been doing something with the color," the professor noted.

From a lamp to a palette

According to Ester Oras, the oldest trace of blue pigment found in Europe was discovered by a stroke of luck. "I got involved in the project because researchers I had previously worked with reached out to me. They had an intriguing find from northern Germany and asked if I'd be willing to help with biomolecular analyses," she recalled.

The object itself was excavated between 1976 and 1980 at the Mühlheim-Dietesheim site in Germany. For decades afterward, it sat on a museum shelf in storage. "An interesting detail about the study is that this stone base or dish was previously interpreted as a lamp and that's how it was cataloged in the museum collection," Oras noted. It may have been classified as a lamp because similar shallow vessels are known from ethnographic materials, where oil or animal fat was burned.

Oras agreed to assist in part because she had previously studied similar Stone Age lamps. But she also found it personally exciting to examine Paleolithic material. "The Paleolithic is the oldest part of the Stone Age. It's a period we don't have in Estonia because the Ice Age essentially wiped away all traces of earlier human activity," she explained. Estonia does have Mesolithic — or Middle Stone Age — remains, but Estonian researchers rarely get to study older material.

"My analyses showed that this particular find was definitely not an oil lamp. I said I'd never seen 'lamp oil' like that before — this had to be something else," Oras said. In her view, it's a good example of how scientific thinking works: how people are immediately influenced by the label something is given. "At first, no one even considered that it might actually be a paint palette," she added.

Local material

Ester Oras's own contribution to the study was relatively limited, as the focus shifted from analyzing lamp oil to examining colors, pigments and elemental composition. "I mainly work with biomolecules and organic compounds. Pigments, on the other hand, are heavily mineral- and metal-based, which means they're inorganic materials," she explained.

The blue pigment used consisted of finely ground azurite, a copper-based mineral, to which ancient people likely added some kind of binding agent. "It didn't appear to be a traditional fat-based substance or at least not in a concentration my methods could detect," Oras recalled. The azurite itself likely came from a natural copper deposit located some 20 kilometers from where the palette was found.

Although no blue pigment has been identified in Early Stone Age cave paintings, Oras believes people of the time must have used it for something. "As one idea or a tentative hypothesis, we suggest in the article that perhaps blue was more suitable in other contexts, such as for body painting," she said. For comparison, blue pigment has been found in connection with female burials at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, suggesting a possible cosmetic use. Similarly, Bronze Age depictions of women with blue-painted eyes have been discovered in Greece.

Excavations in a museum's collection

According to Ester Oras, the research process was a long one: nearly three years passed between her initial conclusion that the object was a palette and the article's publication. "We had lengthy discussions about how we could be certain that the blue pigment wasn't a more recent ink or some other kind of contaminant that might have ended up on the artifact while in storage," she explained. To address this, the team created comparison profiles using modern inks and paints. A close visual inspection also confirmed that the pigment was found only on the interior or functional side of the palette, suggesting it had been applied intentionally.

Another Estonian researcher, archaeologist and archaeobotany specialist Kristiina Johanson of the University of Tartu, also contributed to the study. Together with Oras, she examined microscopic residues on the surface of the find, including phytoliths — tiny silica particles from plants. "These analyses pointed to ordinary soil from a settlement area — nothing especially distinctive and certainly nothing indicating an oil lamp," Oras noted. The microresidue analysis also helped rule out the possibility that the dish had been used to crush medicinal plants or spices. "Everything continues to point toward it being a paint palette," she concluded.

She described the study as a clear example of a combinatory approach. In this case, it relied heavily on natural science methods, but also on logical reasoning and a strong understanding of archaeological context. The object also had to be interpreted within its historical and environmental setting. "This interplay of different kinds of knowledge — that's the beauty of combining archaeological and scientific research," Oras said with a smile.

She also sees the study as a reminder that museum collections can yield discoveries just as valuable as those made in the field. Similar dishes exist, but they've never been viewed from this perspective. "In our article, we're calling on researchers to begin re-examining comparable finds using an open mind and chemical methods," she said.

Ester Oras and her colleagues have published their findings in the journal Antiquity.

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