When she completed her doctoral dissertation, she asked if I would work with her on publishing her findings. I had not previously given much attention to this practice, but this all changed as I read her results.
I remember when excavating our site in Thailand, occupied 4000 years ago, uncovering the blood-red skull of an 18-month-old baby, soon to be followed by the rest of her skeleton still reddened by ochre.
Archaeologists are increasingly interested in how early humans perceived the world around them. Why, for example, did they crawl deep into caves with their lamps and store of paint to depict scenes of the animals they preyed on?
Humans are the only primates that decorate their bodies with cosmetics, display their social status by what they wear and go in for fashionable hair styles. When and why did all this begin?
The answer can perhaps be found at least 100,000 years ago. Blombos Cave lies on the coast of South Africa, and excavations there have uncovered where humans who looked very like us had a veritable home industry for making red ochre powder. They even incised designs on to blocks of haematite, and the shell beads they wore were ochre-stained, suggesting that they had rubbed against ochre-stained clothing, or skin.
This is still to be seen in the Himba people of Namibia, where they cover their bodies in red ochre for protection against the sun, insects and to beautify themselves. A cave in Morocco, occupied 80,000 years ago, contained beads stained with ochre, that had been imported from the coast, a distance of 40km, so the practice was widespread when the first waves of modern humans began their migrations that were to take over this planet.
Tracking their movements can be done simply by finding their red ochre, from the Levant into India and so to the furthest extremity of their journey into Australia by at least 50,000 years ago.
