Radical Anthropology<p>What&#39;s great about the Dapschauskas paper is the way they test models against this record (huge apologies for misspelling the lead author&#39;s name earlier. This should be correct).<br />Notably they focus on our own FCC model.</p><p>For analysis of the southern African record, they rely heavily on the pioneering work on MSA pigments by our colleague Ian Watts. Ian, now in the <a href="https://c.im/tags/UCL" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>UCL</span></a> Anthropology dept, has worked on collections of ochre at <a href="https://c.im/tags/Blombos" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>Blombos</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/PinnaclePoint" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>PinnaclePoint</span></a> and <a href="https://c.im/tags/Wonderwerk" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>Wonderwerk</span></a> and is preparing work on <a href="https://c.im/tags/BorderCave" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>BorderCave</span></a>, all key sites in Southern Africa. </p><p>Ian did not just pioneer close examination of ochre, he was also way ahead of the field in the early 90s -- before we got major evidence from Blombos and Pinnacle Point -- in arguing that the human symbolic revolution was an African phenomenon. At that time this was NOT the fashionable view, with the &#39;Human Revolution&#39; predicated on the European <a href="https://c.im/tags/UpperPaleolithic" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>UpperPaleolithic</span></a> at 40,000 years ago. Ian simply knew that was wrong. </p><p>6/<br />Images: archaeologist Ian Watts, and a slide of his analysis of ochre frequency at Border Cave, which jumps between c.180 to c.160 ka</p>