The very first symbol

In 1934, archaeologists began to excavate a cave, partially obscured by cacti, near the Israeli town of Nazareth. Within the cave, the leader of the dig, René Neuville, a French diplomat and prehistorian, found human remains that were almost 100,000 years old. They’d been buried with care and ceremony. So much care, in fact, that next to each grave the historians found fragments of red ochre – a type of red-coloured stone.

Dr Erella Hovers of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem worked on further excavations of the site in the early 2000s. As she told the BBC at the time: “The red ochre meant something to [the people who buried their dead there], exactly what we do not know… [but] it is an example of symbolic thought, the ochre symbolised death.” The discoveries were important because they indicated that as early as 100,000 years ago our ancestors had begun to understand symbolism.

“Right at the beginning of ‘modern’ human thinking, the colour red was there. It was the first symbol,” says Dr Spike Bucklow, a research scientist at the University of Cambridge.

From then it appears again and again. History is awash with violent reds, dominant reds, seductive reds and reds that represented fertility, new life and death.

Barton points out that it’s difficult to untangle science and history. “It’s possible that our brains now respond to red because of thousands of years of social and cultural conditioning.” If red stone was the first symbol used by man, it stands to reason that 100,000 years of red symbolism would leave a neurological mark.

“It’s equally possible, though, that it only ever developed that meaning because we have an underlying biological predisposition to it,” she adds.

Whether it’s nature or nurture, Pastoureau points out that as the colour of blood, flames and meat, red has always been present in human life. Danger, action and violence or love, warmth and sexuality, red embodies extremes of humanity. Little wonder that it has the power to make our pulses race.

Images: Brooke Cagle / iStock / Rex Features

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