"It has sometimes been suggested that the wall paintings carried out by the hunters in southwestern France in caves during the Ice Age are unusual and represent a flowering of the arts which died... [However,] early farming communities ...frequently carried out quite elaborate paintings on the walls of their houses ...they appear to have decorated themselves as well, and we find small pestles and mortars used for grinding pigments in the making of cosmetics on many of their sites. ...[A] search had to be made for suitable pigments, and this ...led mankind to the ores of at least two metals. Yellow ocher or , and red ocher or , commonly known as jeweler's rouge, are both ores of iron, while the green mineral, , and the blue mineral, , are both ores of copper. But ...occasionally sizable lumps of copper are to be found among the ores of the metal. It is therefore more than a possibility that man's first interest in metallic copper was aroused while he was ...searching for a suitable green pigment..."