Dr. Genevieve von Petzinger

Because if it's the same or very, very similar, right?

Because usually the way you make paint is you start with it.

Oh, actually,

I have some ochre.

As one does.

This is ochre.

It's found all over the world.

That's just the catch-all term for iron oxide or hematite, which is basically like rusty sediment.

And so in different parts of the world, you get different variations of red, purple, things like that.

So different vibrancies, that kind of stuff.

So what that means, though, is that each of these has slightly different chemical signatures.

because they come from different places with other sort of like, some might have like bits of quartz in it or bits of talc or titanium, like just depends where you are.

That way you can match up the paint recipes.

Isn't that cool?

So this is another whole new thing that's just been cracking open in like the last 10 to 15 years is also being able to directly read paint recipes and then figure out which chunks of ochre were used to make which things on the wall.

I'm sorry from the outside, I'm sure it seems excruciatingly slow, but these are kind of complicated things that we're having to sort of develop as we go.

We're at the start of this.

I think we're just... I just gave a paper at a conference this year where I actually said, hey guys, let's all work together on this because this is a big project.

Can we split off Neanderthal motifs, so like the specific shapes or types of things they were making?

Can we actually, for the first time, speak about a Neanderthal art tradition that is separate and distinct from a human tradition?