The oldest drawing in the world was done with an ocher crayon
73,000 years ago, someone drew a cross-hatch pattern in ocher on a stone flake.
Kiona N. Smith - 9/12/2018, 1:00 PM
The world’s oldest drawing might be easy for a casual observer to miss: a 38.6mm (1.52 inch) long flake of silcrete (a fine-grained cement of sand and gravel) with a few faint reddish lines drawn on one smooth, curved face using an iron-rich pigment called ocher. The lines would have been bolder and brighter when the drawing was new, according to University of Bergen archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood and his colleagues, but over time they’ve lost pigment to rinsing and wear, leaving them faint and patchy. But an archaeologist working at Blombos Cave, about 300km (186 miles) east of Cape Town, South Africa, noticed the markings while analyzing stone flakes and debris excavated from a 73,000-year-old layer of the site.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/the-oldest-drawing-in-the-world-was-done-with-an-ocher-crayon/
