When did people start to grind things into powder (history of things in form of particles)?

For tens of thousands of years people have ground things into powder for many reasons......cooking, medicinal purposes and body painting in particular.When did people start to grind things into powder (history of things in form of particles)?
Go back to cave painting. Not all of this was managed by simply using existing coloured clays in the area. Some of the paint was probably made by grinding soft stones into powders.When did people start to grind things into powder (history of things in form of particles)?
One needs to look at the origins and first use of the pestle and mortar to answer this.





Both the video Mysterious Origins of Man and the book Forbidden Archaeology, claim that artifacts found in the gold-bearing gravels of California provide convincing evidence of the existence of modern man in California around 55 million years ago. In the 1880's, they claim that gold miners found pestles, mortars, ladles, and spear points within Tertiary gravel deposits underlying volcanic rocks that cap Table Mountain within Tuolumne County, California. These finds were reported by both D. J. Whitney (1880) and Becker (1891).





These claims are disputed and have never been corroborated, however it does give a clue to the very early nature of materials being ground into powders by man in pre-historic times.
You won't find an exact date, since grinding things probably goes back well before recorded history. It probably started when some old person with rotten teeth could not eat solid food, or an infant had no milk and need a paste of some sort to survive. A food source, a flat stone and a round stone were all that was needed.
When Adam and Eve ate the apple in the Garden of Eden ....they made Cider with the remains ! Lol !
I would suppose the earliest powder product was flour for bread making. The other items were potions as medicine so that they could be hidden in food or drinks to make them palatable.