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Before c.100,000 years ago, or the end of the #MiddlePleistocene say 130,000 years ago, the ONLY repeated material cultural evidence involving signaling behaviours in Homo is the #archaeological record of earth #pigment use.

Going back c.500,000 years -- that is pre- Homo sapiens -- this overwhelmingly comprises blood-red iron oxides, known as ochre, including #haematite and the sparkly #specularite. Sites like #WonderwerkCave and #CanteenKopje in the Northern Cape have the oldest pigments which Ian Watts has analysed here
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/686484

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Images: View from the back of Wonderwerk Cave, a huge space carved by an ancient river deep into the hillside. Pieces of sparkly specularite and blood-red haematite are some of the world's oldest pigments

Rather than focus on specific sites,regions or technocomplexes, #Dapschauskas et al use methods based on #timeaveraging to identify three continent-wide distinct phases of ochre use: an initial phase 500-330 thousand years ago (ka); an emergent phase from 330-160 ka; and an habitual phase from 160-40 ka.

At each phase, the number of sites with ochre increases; the ratio of sites with ochre compared to those with only stone artefacts shows increasing intensity of ochre use. It becomes habitual cultural practice in S, E and N Africa from 160 ka when a third of sites contain ochre.

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Image: three maps of Africa show three distinct phases of ochre use, initial from 500-330,000 years ago; emergent from 330-160,000 years ago; and habitual from 160-40,000 years. The final phase shows large quantities in South and East Africa with sites also in the North.

Most importantly, the authors "view...habitual ochre use as a proxy for the emergence of regular collective rituals". While ochre definitely can have functional uses, ritualised, visual display use appears primary: MSA ochres reflect costly and repetitive behaviours, including long-distance procurement and intentional colour selection.

"The overall dominance of grinding use-wear on archaeological specimens from the MSA indicates the primary production of powder". The authors note red residues produced on shell beads, when these appear later in sites like #Blombos, #Taforalt and now #Bizmoune. This likely results from bodypaint on skin or deliberate colouring.

In sum, they "view a large proportion of ochre finds from the MSA as the material remains of past ritual activity". This builds cogently on the position the #FemaleCosmeticCoalitions team took three decades ago that the ochre marked #ritual activity which was critical to the emergence of #symbolic cognition.

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Image: from the Moroccan MSA at Bizmoune dating for large blocks of ochre accompanying ochre-residued shell beads are now back to 140 thousand years ago.

What's great about the Dapschauskas paper is the way they test models against this record (huge apologies for misspelling the lead author's name earlier. This should be correct).
Notably they focus on our own FCC model.

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 #UCL Anthropology dept, has worked on collections of ochre at #Blombos #PinnaclePoint and #Wonderwerk and is preparing work on #BorderCave, all key sites in Southern Africa.

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 'Human Revolution' predicated on the European #UpperPaleolithic at 40,000 years ago. Ian simply knew that was wrong.

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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

But how does our FCC model now stack up in the new paper?

We published our original version (then called 'sham menstruation') in 1995 here
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/abs/human-symbolic-revolution-a-darwinian-account/D933D0D2744AC9F64E1E5E15518BE6C4

We argued that reproductive stress on mothers of increasingly large-brained offspring drove signaling strategies in female coalitions. Women simply needed more energy to meet the extra metabolic costs of those large brains, and they turned on the leisured sex, males, to provide more reliably. They used ritual action to demand increased investment from men, and the key signal they used was #menstruation Why? Because when most women would be pregnant or breastfeeding, menstrual cycling implies imminent fertility and, in a Darwinian world, is immediately attention-grabbing. Women created cosmetic rituals of synchronized to 'bleed' together and resist the advances of any male who tried to single out fertile women from the pregnant/nursing mothers (who most needed energy).

This was both protosymbolic action -- with a group of women sharing in imagining 'blood' or 'fertility' -- and also protomoral establishing 'taboos' on bleeding bodies. But the argument is Darwinian and we say it is the only Darwinian hypothesis for why all the red pigments are there.

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We've made lots of predictions from FCC over the years, ranging over the archaeology of ochre, the fossil record and African hunter-gatherer ethnography. We're happy to be tested on these.

First, the authors agree there is no good ochre record in #Acheulean levels; we don't expect that before significant brain-size increase.
But what did we say on stages? We identified two main phases: first ad hoc with improvisatory use of cosmetics (maybe with biodegradable material, plant pigments or just blood itself). This would occur as and when somebody actually menstruated, so it's not necessarily fully symbolic. A second stage, pushed by the pressure of brain-size, became regular and habitual, underpinning a symbolically structured sexual division of labour -- looking like #brideservice among hunter-gatherers today. Such regular ritual would organise kinship, sex and economics.

The ROCEEH authors pinpoint 3 phases (initial/emergent/habitual). Looking at their chart here, we see a lengthy build-up of usage, then a sharpish inflection into habitual use. So it's fairly arbitrary how that's divided up.

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Image: chart from Dapschauskas et al showing timesmoothing of the ochre dataset, x axis is Age (ka), y axis is density, with significant uptick around 160,000 years

How did we do on dating the shift into habitual -- which for us indicates the #revolutionary onset of a novel symbolic domain?

In the 1995 paper we focused on the intersection of increasing brain size, putting extra energetic demands on mothers, with the cold, dry Marine Isotope Stage 6 (MIS6) when people would have experienced severe energy pinchpoints during lean, dry seasons. That would definitely affect women's fertility.

We said "Reproductive stress motoring 'sham menstruation' may have become most acute in the period 160-140 Kya, the height of the Penultimate Glacial cycle" (1995:81)

OK that's not bad for nearly 30 years ago!
Subsequently here we opened that dating out to 200-150 ka, partly because we suspect these cosmetic strategies were implicated in the speciation (later stage) of Homo sapiens.
https://ub31.uni-tuebingen.de/ojs/index.php/paleo/article/view/700

Just lately Ian has again focused on the MIS6 glacial dry to argue for novel waterhole nightstand hunting techniques that could have solved dry season scarcity.

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Image: title page of article by Ian Watts on 'Hunting by the Moon in human evolution'

Lastly, the strong point of our model is that we deal with why the colour #red and why humans took such pains to get blood red pigments. They also mined and carefully curated this material -- it was precious, like gold!

Perhaps the weak point of the ROCEEH article is an unsatisfactory explanation for redness, falling back on psychological arguments for salience.

But variability cannot be explained from a constant substrate. The signaling arose specifically in the late Middle Pleistocene large-brained human populations. So why did red get so important then?

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Images: MSA ochre artefacts including 'crayons' honed to points for application of bodypaint design, or by grinding facets for powder. And the famous geometric engraved haematite pieces from Blombos.

Ethnohistoric evidence of #Khoesan people show similar selection criteria for colour (haematite) and sparkliness (specularite) to MSA people's. They chose the same materials where they could get them. If we check on the ritual contexts where pigments are used by Khoesan and other African #huntergatherers menstrual/menarcheal ritual and cosmology figure prominently. And archaeologists should take that data into account.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307107960_Reconstructing_a_source_cosmology_for_African_hunter-gatherers

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Finally, the ROCEEH team argue that establishment of ritual traditions and the ensuing social cooperation was the basis for early modern human demographic expansion. We fully agree with that, and the FCC model can explain how that works via increase in female fertility and better child survival with increased male productivity.

We want to say thank you to the ROCEEH team for a fantastic paper, and their thoughtful treatment of competing hypotheses. It is high time that the ochre record was taken so seriously and understood as fundamental to the evolution of human symbolic culture.

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Image: Kua women perform the menarcheal dance, a typical occasion when red pigments would be used to mediate and harness the potency of the girl in the seclusion hut
(photo: C Valiente-Noailles).