Interviewee: Sally McBrearty. Paleoanthropologist Sally McBrearty speaks about early modern-human burials and their characteristics. (DNAi Location: Applications > Human Origins > Comparisons > Behavior > Early humans)

Well, from about 60,000 or 70,000 years ago, in South Africa, there is now very, very good evidence, for really what is incontrovertible evidence for symbolic behavior, in the form of engraved pieces of red ochre from the site of Blombos. And we're interested in knowing how far back into the past you can see this use of red ochre, for making pigment, for making paint, painting the body or painting other objects, which we think indicates symbolic behavior, and really communicating about things other than simply day-to-day life. And in my own work, there is a particular site, it's in east Africa in Kenya and that is dated to greater than 285,000 years, and it contains quite a large quantity of red ochre and grindstones that I think were used to process it.

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