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This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

Modern painters usually get art supplies from a store.

You want red paint, you buy red paint.

But thousands of years ago, indigenous artists in what went on to become British Columbia

actually cooked a slurry of aquatic bacteria to produce their distinctive red paints.

Well, yeah, it was a long time ago. There were no art stores. But yeah, that's what really

got us interested in exploring it further because it was just such a complex series of steps

to produce this paint. Brandy McDonald, she works in archaeological science at the University of

Missouri Research Reactor. That's a nuclear reactor used for studies in a wide variety of disciplines.

The paint McDonald examined was on a fragment of ancient rock art from central British Columbia.

Indigenous artists there had used a distinctive ochre pigment to paint rocks with designs of otters,

fish, caribou, beavers, and canoes.

Under an electron microscope,

McDonald saw tiny tubules in the paint, structures produced by a particular microbe, and that tipped her off that the iron oxide pigment might be of biological origin. She later determined

the pigment was produced by the aquatic bacterium leptothorix Eccratia.

It kind of floats as this like brownish, auburn, orangish, algal, mat, like at the surfaces of little freshwater streams. And so it takes iron out of, you know, iron-enriched water

and uses that to produce energy to grow these little colonies.

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