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Ethnoarchaeology and the symbolic and functional exploitation of ochre during the South African Middle Stone Age (2016)
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Given that red ochre is a ubiquitous artefact in Middle Stone Age (MSA) contexts throughout southern Africa, the habitual exploitation of ochre has been widely interpreted as evidence for symbolism, a proxy for the origin of language and as a key element of ‘symbolic’ and modern human behaviour. Although evolutionary explanations generally agree that ochre and the products of its processing played a significant role in the adaptive strategies of early modern humans, they differ substantially in...