okay thanks Chris I'm afraid I'm gonna have to read this because I'm going to try and cover a lot of ground but I'll try and keep it lively and it probably would help if I gave you the title of the talk I think it was something like border cave reevaluated a behavioral signature of our speciation question mark so we have here a sort of summary of the broad outlines of homos evolution evolutionary biologists don't agree on how best to define speciation but they do agree that it typically involves morphological genetic and behavioral change in 1987 geneticists claimed that we evolved in Africa close to 200,000 years ago in the late Middle Pleistocene only dispersing over the last hundred thousand years in the earlier Late Pleistocene replacing other hominids this brought to the fore a problem this dominated human origins debate ever since a perceived discrepancy or even a sapient paradox between our speciation diagnosed from fossils and genetics and consensual evidence for symbolic culture often reduced to a distinction between modern bodies and modern minds or modern human behavior symbolic culture is far more precise is this domain of shared fictions treated as objective facts that we all inhabit the possibility of the rule of law and that some things are sacred this requires immense trust social anthropologists have long held that collective ritual was the mechanism that established such trust over the last twenty years behavioral ecologists investigating whether group ritual and religion were evolutionary adaptations have come to share this view we associate ritual and religion with special times and places in evolutionary terms the first special places were campsites the arenas where battles to establish such a trust were fought and won and puberty rituals epitomized special times now in the late 80s the earliest agreed archaeological proxies for symbolic culture were things like hang on sorry wrong place there are things like cave paintings sculpture beads and burials and grave Goods so sociated with the European Upper Paleolithic nun all older than about 35,000 years with the exception of cave painting similar if less elaborate evidence has since been found in Africa and Israel going back a little over a hundred thousand years this is a calf subaerial adolescent with a deer's antler paint palette from blombo sit around a hundred thousand geometric engravings on a piece of oak are also from blombo's 75,000 and beets perforated beads seashell beads also from blombo's so symbolic culture was in place around the time some Homo sapiens left Africa but the discrepancy paradigm remains and its duration may be as protracted as ever as paleontologists now suggests that speciation can be diagnosed by about 300,000 the problem may be even deeper many Africanist archaeologists think that it's not just evidence for symbolism that's lacking it around the time of our speciation but evidence for any significant behavioral change the period of interest is the African Middle Stone Age or MSA characterized by the absence of these hand axes and the presence of these points and all blades made from a variety of prepared cause conventionally it lasts from about 300,000 to 40,000 years ago but while hand axes typically disappear around 300,000 blades and points have recently been pushed back to about half a million to transitional industries such as the forest myth of interior South Africa so the MSA has reverted to its original negative definition the absence of diagnostic ESA and later Stone Age traits it doesn't correlate with any major transition any sorry any major innovations there have been two main responses to the perceived discrepancy to see it as a paradox demanding some non Darwinian explanation such as Chomsky's cosmic-ray resulting in a neural macro mutation producing language or to attribute it to small population size and weak connectivity between groups preventing innovations from stabilizing thereby preventing the rapid accumulation of further innovations crudely the first approach dominated the first 15 years of the discrepancy paradigm and the second is now dominant but neither has been particularly successful in this context even some Darwinian have been tempted to abandon or qualify normal science and treat a speciation as a special case either questioning the applicability of fundamental explanatory concepts such as selection pressures and speciation or stipulating that once cultural transmissions involved which goes back at least early homo at two-and-a-half million behavior has to be excluded from the diagnosis of speciation cultural transmission is simply the repertoire of social mechanisms for information trans transfer with imitation and learning long predating language as we know it so tonight I'll argue that there is no discrepancy that it's the product of flawed methods empirical gaps and a normally safe assumption that's unsafe in this instance in its place I hope to show that symbolic culture became an evolutionary stable strategy during the latter part of our speciation and that it did so quite dramatically I'll get there by testing an eminently refutable precise prediction of the earth pigment record may 25 years ago a shift from irregular to regular and and ubiquitous use of red ochre or hematite in campsites should be evident by the peak of the penultimate glacial cycle between 160 and 140 thousand years ago this was derived from an abstract model of the evolution of symbolic culture that some of you will be familiar with by now Chris Knight sex strike model revised with Camilla power as the female coalition's model to evaluate that prediction I'll be focusing on a particular MSA culture or industry the Petersberg of north east and south africa stretch stretching down to here and neighboring Swaziland or s were teeny as it's now called in the second half of the talk I'll be focusing on a particular petersburg sequence border cave which was until recently the only dated petersburg sequence to get there though I'm going to have need to say a bit more about the weaknesses of the discrepancy paradigm the relevance of the petersburg are speciation red ochre and hematite and the model that generated the prediction so first floors of the discrepancy paradigm methodologically the perceived discrepancy is largely an artifact of archaeologists focus on innovation a qualitative presence/absence scale of variation rather than looking for appropriate quantitative fields of variation which would be more consistent with evolutionary theory the empirical gaps concern our two main bodies of msai evidence southern and eastern Africa in southern Africa almost everything we've learnt over the last 50 years has come from late pleistocene rock shelter occupations younger than 130,000 according to Sarah verts in a 2013 review no spatial or chronological patterning can be identified in the early Middle Stone Age earlier than 130,000 in Eastern Africa many more sites have been dated to the earlier Middle Pleistocene MSA some like Gaddy Mata and cooky Lettie in Ethiopia have provided invaluable insights on progressive technological change but the East African sites are overwhelmingly open sites few of which can confidently be interpreted as camp sites in this context it may be dangerous to assume that current understanding will necessarily be better than that then supposedly outdated interpretations what makes the Petersburg special is that it provides the only regional cluster of early MS a camp science cave and rock shelter sequences several of which span the greater portion of our speciation a good starting point for questioning the discrepancy paradigm is to take seriously the view of the Petersburg prevailing 60 to 70 years ago back then Africa was considered peripheral to modern human origins too so little was at stake in MSA research the Petersburg was the best understood MSA industry on the continent provided the best case for cultural evolution and border cave was the original type sequence since the 60s and until very recently the Petersburg has been neglected while the notion of cultural evolution fell out of fashion so let's turn to our speciation throughout Homer's evolution each period of brain size increase poses the question how were mothers to meet the costs of increasingly large brained and more dependent offspring Sara hurdies cooperative breeding hypothesis is the main explanatory framework addressing this this problem and there's considerable agreement about the how the costs were met during the lower Pleistocene from more than two and a half million years ago so 780,000 but there's less agreement about how they were met during the Middle Pleistocene brain size increase from seven hundred and eighty thousand in our case brain size increase plateaued out towards the end of the epoch between 200 and 150 thousand slightly later for Neanderthals in the earlier Late Pleistocene one thing is clear collective hunting of medium to large animals plays an increasing role which in our case ended up with the institution of hunter-gatherer bride service where hunters surrender the product of their labor to in-laws morphologically a speciation comprised two stages a modern human face first appeared around three hundred and fifteen thousand possibly related to greater reliance on cooked food reducing the load on the jaws but a modern globular shaped brain case this one down here I don't know if you can see it because of the table first appears 200,000 years ago great thanks this one's a classic Neanderthal and this is an African fossil from around 400,000 arguably Homo heidelbergensis there's a correlation between this change in brain shape and the final period of brain size increase amongst African fossils so the globular crania are appearing here so we're talking about this last increase here early Homo sapiens fossils without globular eyes crania have appreciably larger comparing these two figures have appreciate larger brains than then African Homo heidelbergensis but when compared to later Homo sapiens with the globular eyes crania there's approximately a hundred cubic centimeter difference between the two averages so within our speciation there appears to have been a six percent absolute increase associated with the second phase of morphological change how was this afforded so the sex strike model and it's key prediction the models premise is unconscious that this energetic burden primarily fell on mothers but it highlights a more particular problem mother's faced biologically males are interested in sex with females likely to get pregnant females had already lost signs of when they were ovulating probably with early homo around two million years ago making it harder for males to discriminate between them on in this way however breastfeeding or visibly pregnant females those in greatest need of animal fats would still be discriminated against males would be interested in menstruation as the only reliable sign does a particular female would be would soon be fertile and it might pay to stick around how were mothers to stop men picking and choosing in this way the model concerns coalition Ares strategies that evolved to address this problem and it proposes two stages to the evolution of group ritual the first concerns preventing would be alpha males trying to control sexual access to fertile females by sharing the blood around using blood substitutes like red ochre essentially advertising that one or more females in the group were genuinely fertile but scrambling the information making it harder for a would-be philanderer to identify and monopolize the genuine menstruate while rewarding males prepared to make a longer-term investment the ritualized signaling is still is still context dependent indexical referring to the presence of a real menstruate but it has the we intentionality essential to symbolic culture so the stage one pigment predictions the initial use shouldn't predate Middle Pleistocene brain size increase so claims of ochre use a million years ago should prove groundless an almost exclusive focus on red preferably blood red even if blacks or yellows are locally available local procurement patchy and/or irregular use and an association with early evidence for campsites the proposed second stage concerns final brain size increase remember that for our ancestors this peaked with globalization first seen around 200,000 renewed stress on maternal energy budgets meant female coalition's had to secure regular regular investment regardless of whether any individual was cycling this is proposed drove a runaway process of sexual selection with the unusual feature of both sexes being choosy female coalitions were demanding that males invest long term by performing bride service males prepared to make this investment needed a costly ritual signal as to the quality of any particular female coalition to evaluate the support available to offspring born into it coalitions competed to put on the most impressive song-and-dance displays where quality was judged on multiple levels including the quality of cosmetic raw materials and there is aesthetic deployment wrapped up in the playful tease of anticipated sex was the serious message piss off we're on strike and don't think of coming back without the bacon the predicted form of this message was to invert standard our Willian fertility signaling we're the wrong species the wrong sex and this is the wrong time the pigment predictions of this second stage to the evolution of group ritual are that the final period of brain size increase should associate with the pronounced and fairly rapid shift from a mosaic pattern of no earth pigment use irregular use or localized regular use to ubiquitous use in camp science but we're suitably read and saturated materials are locally unavailable regional or exotic procurement is expected and that this shift should correlate with evidence for greater investments in camp science when we proposed this in the mid 90s less was known about the timing of final brain size increase so he made a second-order prediction about the shift from irregular to regular use that in Africa this should be evident by the coldest driest part of the ice age before last between 160 and 140 thousand years ago shortly after what was then considered a fairly punctuated speciation genetically inferred close to 200,000 our reasoning was that the effects of increased aridity would be most severe in the late dry season when game animals had least fat creating a reproductive bottleneck if recently evolved Homo sapiens populations were to get through this they had to maximize the productivity of late dry season collective hunting this wouldn't simply have been a matter of improved hunting efficiency but increased reliance on ritual mechanisms to motivate such hunts South Africa provides the largest body of msai data much of it from long sequences in caves and rock shelters so in the early 90s I focused on these sites to try and test the irregular regular pigment prediction preoccupied with calculating relative frequencies my pigment descriptions were very basic for two sites border cave and Bushmen rock shelter I also had to provide basic data on the unreported lithic assemblages now this endeavor had limited success generalized red ochre use across the region could be shown from roughly one hundred and ten thousand years ago but it was unclear whether this was a real date or an artifact of dating uncertainties for older assemblages nevertheless it did support another important prediction that symbolic culture be in place by the time of initial migration before reevaluating this irregular regular prediction in the light of subsequent developments and better and improved descriptions of the earliest pigments at border cave I must say a bit more about red ochre and place southern African Middle Stone Age Research in some historical context red ochre is any earth mineral or clay sufficiently rich in the iron oxide hematite to provide a red stain when drowned or rubbed as as simple as that is the most widely used earth pigment typically for body painting or cosmetics archaeologically is the common thread uniting the various lines of evidence currently used to infer symbolic culture from around a hundred thousand associated with the school and Casa burials the paint in the painting kit I showed the substrate of the early geometric engravings and as a residue on the shell beads before a hundred thousand years is the only repeatedly found category of material culture directly relevant to signal evolution in genus homo the earliest occurrences associated with the forest Smith industry in South Africa's northern cape going back at least half a million years but not much more than this in europe it goes back at least quarter of a million probably four hundred thousand and there's an indian occurrence more than three hundred thousand years old so all the presumed daughter lineages of Homo heidelbergensis occasionally used it the ioniq the iron oxide most frequently reported from the earliest sites in Zambia and South Africa is a glittery form of hematite called speck your eighth one on the top-left ethnographically Spector writes only known use was in visual display for which it was universally highly esteemed parties of Australian Aborigines would travel up to 500 kilometres to get it one of the forests myths specular light fine sites is the back of one divert cave where it's pitch-black one can't avoid conjuring images to file it ritual with the performers glistening and red the nearest speculate outcrops are 38 kilometres away putting these earliest pigments into a behavioural context the small the forest Smith roughly dates between half a million and 300,000 years ago and it's the regional expression of the eschew lien to middle Stone Age transition aside from the earliest pigments it provides the earliest evidence for hafted Spears the transition is earlier and longer-lasting than was thought only ten years ago when it was placed between 300,000 and 250,000 and assimilated into the MSA in Europe in the near east comparable transitions associate with most of the early evidence for controlled use of fire so together these developments appear to signal the generalization of a camp site focused form of social organization implying that both camp sites and group ritual were prerequisite to symbolic culture but weren't sufficient to stabilize it so now my concerns to the MSA in the Petersburg when John Goodwin first proposed the MSA in 1928 the Petersburg was just one of eight proposed informal variants sorry informal variants and industries or cultures in southern Africa four of which he placed in an evolutionary sequence Glengarry Glen gray Falls Petersburg still Bay and Harrison sport with some overall trend to more specialized tool types most famously including still bay by facial points followed by Harrison's port backed geometric tools which were considered transitional to the latest Stone Age the Petersburg only known from open sites in what were then the Transvaal and Swaziland was primarily characterized by round based by facial points like these it achieved the status of a culture or industry with Barry Milan's 1945 report on border cave on the towers northern border with Swaziland this is the first time we see sights in locations like this perched high up with commanding views of a hunting terrain but quite difficult to get to this suggests some improvement in logistical organizational abilities the excavation was prompted by the accidental discovery during a local farmers removal of the ash rich deposits as fertilizer of a robust but modern looking partial cranium believed to have come from the MSA layers I'll jump ahead for a moment to introduce the resolved stratigraphy and dating of the lower portion of the sequence as resolved from this excavation and this one here and we're just looking at the Petersburg these four four members here this is the oldest Harrison sport member there isn't yet an older petersburg member but that hasn't been dated which is why it's not on the chart this that basal six brown sand hasn't been back directly dated but with an estimate of two hundred and twenty seven thousand on the overlying v white ash it's thought to be in the order of quarter of a million years old the cultural sequences as described by Milan started with a simple Laval WA point orientated technology showing hardly any retouch this effectively replaced the Glenn gray falls variant the industry developed gradually into a more refined form with the classic round based by facial points there followed an apparently brief period of less intense occupation with less diagnostic traits but nevertheless important for providing an infant burial associated with a seashell pendant the shell having come from 80 kilometers away this layer dates to around 77,000 immediately before the house and sport spanning 74 to 58,000 so the infant burial comes from the very end of the Petersburg MS a site reports claiming cultural evolution once knew in 1945 and four years later Philip debarked Tobias confirmed the Petersburg pattern at Mueller's cave appear in the northern Transvaal in a similarly perched location up here and here's the close-up halfway up a cliff but in 1957 Revell Mason put claims for cultural evolution on a new footing he'd excavated several petersburg site new petersburg sites and reanalyzed the MU loos collections producing a uniformly described sample of five sites and 13 excavation units for no good reason though he'd excluded border cave cave of Hafs became the new petersburg type sequence in bed for above later Julian assemblages as with hand axes he found an earlier expression of the petersburg than anything previously reported characterized by some very long blades and a heavy-duty tool component the basal estimate of quarter-of-a-million for border cave suggests that cave of half speed for is in the order of 250 to 300 thousand if bed for was followed by the now-familiar petersburg cultural evolutionary pattern spanning beds five to nine ending with an assemblage including some bat geometric tools Mason summarized his findings as a serial trend spanning earlier middle and later or developed phases of the Petersburg applied to border cave the basal assemblages there should correspond to Mason's middle Petersburg the serial trend comprised an initial almost exclusive reliance on local quartzite rhyolite it wry like lava at border cave some blades up to 20 centimeters long very few retouched formal tools over time a shortening of flakes increased frequency and variety of formal tools increased use of non-local finer grained raw materials and the appearance of pigments and ground stone in the middle and later stages which Mason considered quote among the more important products of evolution in the later stages at the Petersburg culture this last conclusion was based on the three shelter sites cave of Hafs mu lose cave and Dali boon port rock shelter at cave of Hafs it was absent in the fairly large assemblages from beds 4 and 5 the earlier and middle fate phases of the Petersburg while five pieces were reported for the combined bed six to nine sample spanning the developed Petersburg and the house and sport at Mueller's cave a single piece associated with the middle Petersburg of bed one multiple pieces associated with the smaller developed Petersburg assemblages of beds two and three early boom port provided only provided developed Petersburg but it was remarkable for huge quantities of hematite hundreds of pieces weighing over twelve kilos since Mason's groundbreaking work is as if time Stood Still for Petersburg research there are multiple reasons for this but I'll focus on just 1 peterborough months early 1970s re excavation of border cave his main 4 by 9 yard trench was dug so quickly that the house and sport was initially missed so so a second smaller trench was opened in an area where it was known to be present Peter revealed an important younger part of the sequence that had been missed by Milan his dating colleague John Furcal pushing radiocarbon dating to the limits of the technique showed that the latest stone age didn't begin 10 to 15,000 years ago as was widely thought in 1970 but close to 40,000 years ago when the Middle Stone Age was thought to have begun furthermore the Hammondsport wasn't transitional to the LSA but was followed by a return to a more orthodox MSA the Houston sport provided a carbon date estimate older than 49,000 implying that the infant burial was older still when summary findings for the whole sequence were published in 1978 in 1980 Peters semi arbitrary Petersburg samples seemed to provide only weak support for Mason's cereal trend only the shortening of flakes and blaze was robustly supported I won't go into the details here which I'll be talking more about on Friday but in short it seemed as legitimate to compare board a cave with the distance classes rhythm off sequence on the southern Cape Coast as with other petersburg sequences unlike Petersburg sequences by the late 70s basal occupations at the coastal sites were being relative were being relatively dated to shortly after the height of the last interglacial 125,000 years ago so Peter hung the interpret that the techno type of logical and chronological interpretation of border cave on classes the techno psychological comparison was left very vague the chronological linkage went unchallenged for almost 25 years the weak support for Mason's trend didn't seem particularly important at the time the headline claims were that both border cave and classes supported the presence of Homo sapiens in Africa at around 110,000 bolstering Kris stringers case for the Out of Africa hypothesis of human origins Beaumont returned to the site in 1987 and 1988 to resolve the Petersburg stratigraphy and apply new dating techniques he excavated older deposits at the front of his main trench while Larry Todd excavated the mostly younger deposits along the south side in the process much larger lithic assemblage lithic samples were obtained but they've never been professionally analyzed and I remain the only person to have looked at them dating estimates for the three youngest Petersburg members were published in 1990 the oldest of these fit brown sand fell on the cusp of the middle later stone at middle later Pleistocene transition implying that the two underlying layers members v white ash and six brown sand were Middle Pleistocene but it was to be another 11 years before this was widely accepted when revised estimates pushed v Brown sand into the terminal Middle Pleistocene and new estimates of one hundred and eighty eight thousand and two hundred and twenty seven thousand were obtained on the underlying previously undated with v white ash these estimates span the beginning of the penultimate glacial and the previous interglacial ironically they'd been good evidence for this long chronology back in the 70s but few were prepared to believe it James frem Lonavla Birmingham University got two experimental thermoluminescence at dating estimates on different materials of around 170,000 from the bottom of the main excavation trench but these were never published at the same time Carl but sir had proposed on geomorphological grounds that the sequence went back almost 200 thousand years Peter left it very vague as to how the resolved dated Petersburg Stratego fee of the 80s related to the semi arbitrary but exhaustively analyzed 70 samples nobody considered how he'd constructed those samples relying instead on the very brief published summaries moments master's thesis however provides a wealth of appendix data that allows us to reverse engineer his analysis together with unpublished provenance data from the resolve dated stratigraphy of adjacent squares is possible to show that Peter made a mistaken stratigraphic extrapolation in the 70s because he was working to an eight-week deadline for funded fieldwork he didn't clear clean and inspect Milan's profiles before digging relying instead on a sketch profile drawn by geologist turned paleoecology HBS cook he mistook this as being down to bedrock but it wasn't bedrock it was just the base of the farmers pit two years later Peter exposed Milan's profiles down to bedrock and realized the significance so this is the chocolate-colored earth at the base of the previous drawing and this is the older deposits revealed when he cleaned the profiles and he realized the significance of this thick white ash horizon that contain yeah a thick white ash member beneath the chocolate earth that had contained the youngest normal Petersburg Beaumont called this fourth white ash and extrapolated extrapolated across four yards of unknown deposit into a much thinner ash horizon in his own trench this lower part of his sequence had been dug by arbitrary spits rather than stratigraphically so a redefinition of excavation aggregates was required but he did this surreptitiously rather than acknowledging the change the thin white ash band eventually proved to be a considerably to be in a considerably older part of the sequence but this had cascade effects on the analysis and the conclusions the stratigraphic mistake was compounded by unnecessary over reduction of his data grouping raw materials tool forms and core forms into higher-level more generic categories now that might be useful if you're looking for measures of central tendency but if you'll just look interested in raw frequencies it's inappropriate and this hid a whole suite of techno typological changes that I won't go into but I must draw attention to the most consequential merger the cut and paste of the two separate 1970 trenches into one continuous sequence because of the mistaken extrapolation of fourth white ash Beaumont treated all three semi arbitrary Petersburg in aggregates in the truncated sequence of excavation three be the smaller excavation as older than the basal aggregate in the main trench basal complex a so yeah he caught he called the Petersburg aggregates in the small excavation basal complex DC and B DD being at the bottom and he called the basal aggregate in the main trench base backhoe a for some analyses this was compact compounded further compounded by combining the back OB and back away samples the supposedly continuous sequence actually comprised two partially overlapping sequences and the dislocation masked complementary trends in both so they on the top the top two we're looking at formal tools like OD at the bottom bekesy back OB this is excavation 3b same pattern but you've just got two units and it's in the main excavation area and this is looking at the frequency of pigment I shouldn't make any anything of this difference between back OD and back I see here it's just due to different overall sample sizes and and just dealing with single pieces of pigment so they have a big effect Larry Todd's excavation for a this this one in 1987 sorry forced Beaumont to recognize his earlier mistake but he couldn't afford to admit it as it would mean analyzing the new lithic collections something he wasn't prepared to do so the discrepancy was covered up there was another reason for saying little about the new excavations most of the samples from the two oldest members v white ash and six brown sand came from excavations in breach of his permit conditions since 2015 a new team has been conducting a fifth round of excavation but restricted to tiny slots of deposit now this will undoubtedly provide a wealth of new technological and environmental information but rare material culture categories like formal tools or red ochre will be poorly represented this incomplete picture wouldn't matter if the ATS collections had been professionally examined or if Beaumont thesis had been thoroughly reevaluated in 1993 Beaumont let me examine the 87-88 collections the provenance data from directly adjacent squares in two of the trenches shows that at least on the south side of excavation 3a maybe I have to go back a bit here so this is the south side of excavation 3a by months 70s trench at least on the south side of excavation 3a the youngest 1970s petersburg member which was at the acronym of 1 gb/s grey brown sand crosscut both of the resolved late pleistocene petersburg members forth brown sand and forth white and forth white ash forth white ash was the one I was talking about earlier beneath and the terminal Middle Pleistocene deposit of v brown sand and in the forward rows basal complex a crosscut v brown sand and underlying v white ash my non-professional observations on these collections confirm and amplify the findings when you separate out by months to 1970s excavations so this is a raw material profile whereas in Beaumont it looked as if there was no change until the final unit which he said was equivalent to four BS at that end actually with a resolve data you can see that the increase in finer grained materials fine quartzite and chalcedony goes all the way back through fourth white ash so all the way back through the earlier Late Pleistocene light Pleistocene that these fight that chalcedony was coming from 15 kilometers away second the most pronounced increase in formal tools occurs between the fifth white ash and the and the fifth brown sand somewhere between 200 and 170 thousand years ago long before any raw material change a more detailed examination of three squares of 5bs material in 2016 confirmed the presence of by facial points suggesting a correlation with backhoe B also supported by the average length of blades third and most importantly from my purposes 5bs showed a pronounced increase in pigment use this shows petersburg pigment relative pic frequencies of pigment as percentages of the combined lithic and pigment assemblages basal 6b s older than 230,000 provided almost 10,000 lithics from 18 squares and just one pigment a quite dense relatively soft piece of hematite now this is borderline archaeological visibility but it's consistent with the single pieces beaumont reported from his two basal aggregates back OG and backhoe a back OD in three three b and back o a and three a this is the back OD p click piece much more chemically weathered expression of hematite but clearly specular and the fresh surfaces the overlying fifth white ash with dating estimates of 227 and 183 thousand provided a similar-sized lithic assemblage and just three pieces of pigment from 17 squares this is a large chunk of hard dense or grade hematite at 51 grams is by far the largest piece in the whole sequence making weight based comparisons between members inappropriate the youngest Middle Pleistocene layer fit brown sand provided inverted dating estimates of 145 and 160,000 the height of the penultimate glacial the relative frequency of 0.16% is a five-fold increase over v white ash pigments were encountered in almost half the examined squares although there's a greater range of expressions you still all looks like hematite albeit mostly chemically weathered to greater or lesser degrees the late pleistocene members fourth white ash and fourth brown sand provides similar percentages for 'the white ash provided the first intensively ground pieces that might be characterized categorized as crayons having convergent facets fourth brown sand provided the only non red pigment this is about 77,000 a piece of manganese no high-quality hematite s' are known in the local or regional environments the most probable source is the Mekons way mountains straddling the border between Northeast s Wakeeney and South Africa simple malanga provinces within this ancient mineral rich zone lies in Gwen year mountain and bom vu or red ridge some 140 kilometers northwest of border cave this is peter beaumont in the sixties excavating lion cavern in a cliff face on bamboo ridge is the added mine of lion cavern the oldest mine in the world when mining began here is unknown but in 1969 the bottom layers provided petersburg type tools and an infinite radiocarbon date of 47,000 the miners were targeting a localized specular expression of hematite similar geology outcrops slightly to the southeast but not much closer to border cave still at least 120 kilometers comparing the lion cavern example with Peters backhoe DPS I think you'll agree that there's a family resemblance to put this in perspective the only comparable inferred transfer distance for any ESA or MSA material in southern Africa is the forest miss speculate from canteen copy thoughts who have come from about 170 kilometers away so I draw two main conclusions from the border cave pigment record first in a regional geological setting apparently lacking high-quality pigments early Homo sapiens around a quarter of a million years ago imported such materials over 120 kilometres second sometime between 200 in 170,000 years ago there was a relatively rapid and pronounced increase in red ochre use the pattern was repeated in both 1970s trenches and in the 1980s excavation this offers a possible timeframe for similar observations made 60 to 70 years ago and Mueller's cave and cave of Hafs a fourth petersburg site bushmen rock shelter will shortly provide a test of this pattern and its chronology this is another site I happen to look at in 93 94 and again briefly in 2013 I've reverted that here the timelines transpose this is the oldest layers and that's the younger we've just had dates from here of about a hundred thousand and Carl boots her the geomorphologists who tried to date on geomorphological grounds border cave also had to go at this site and he thought that this layer layer 31 was Middle Pleistocene and I think that the current team working there are going to confirm that recall this exotic procurement was considered a proxy of competition between coalition's and was predicted to associate with the irregular to regular shift taking the Vandiver canteen copy and border cave evidence together regional and exotic procurement appears to have begun considerably earlier associating with late forest myth and early MSA context but this doesn't seem to challenge the model in any fundamental way so to the overall conclusion contrary to recent reviews there is spatial and chronological patterning to the southern african MSA before 130,000 Mason's 1950s observations stand up to scrutiny and much of the cultural evolution he identified occurred in the late Middle Pleistocene this should come as no surprise but technological evolution is unlikely to be particularly informative about our speciation perhaps more relevant is that in there perched positions neither mu lose cave nor border cave provide evidence of earlier petersburg occupation suggestive of a significant change in logistical organizational abilities pigment use did not appear first appear in the middle of the Petersburg as Mason and Tobias thought but they identified a significant quantitative change to more regular use within the Petersburg all dated shelter sites in southern Africa younger than 170,000 show regular ochre use earlier than this and the patterns more mosaic so this bears out what we predicted 25 years ago is suggests our speciation was absolutely conventional in evolutionary terms comprising a suite of morphological genetic and behavioral changes the most significance of which being that group ritual using earth body paints red earth body paints or cosmetics became a matter of habitual performance and that this happened relatively rapidly this permits the more abstract inference that symbolic culture involving some form of blood symbolism had become an evolutionary stable strategy across vast landscapes people were able to refer to shared fictions and treat them as objective facts similar to the gods dragons and Rainbow snipe snakes we're familiar with so our speciation while gradual and conventional on the one hand was also revolutionary in its final stages both in tempo and finally stabilizing a new kind of information and information transmission finally it has to be noted that across the diverse Bushmen cultures of southern Africa at the time of European contact the most universal context in which various forms of red pigments and blood symbolism occur was in a girl's first menstruation ritual this had the most in variant syntax of all Bushmen rituals essentially a performance of wrong species wrong sex wrong time which I'm sure Camilla will talk about on another occasion thank you [Applause]
