Over the last two decades, red ochre has played a pivotal role in discussions about the cognitive and cultural evolution of early modern humans during the African Middle Stone Age. Given the importance of ochre for the scholarly debate about the emergence of ‘behavioral modernity’, the lack of long-term spatio-temporal analyses spanning large geographical areas represents a significant gap in knowledge. Here we take a continent-wide approach, rather than focusing on specific sites, regions or technocomplexes. We report the most comprehensive meta-analysis of ochre use to date, spanning Africa between 500 and 40 thousand years ago, to examine data from more than a hundred archaeological sites. Using methods based on time averaging, we identified three distinct phases of ochre use: the initial phase occurred from 500,000 to 330,000; the emergent phase from 330,000 to 160,000; and the habitual phase from 160,000 to 40,000 years ago. The number of sites with ochre increased with each subsequent phase. More importantly, the ratio of sites with ochre compared to those with only stone artifacts also followed this trend, indicating the increasing intensity of ochre use during the Middle Stone Age. While the geographical distribution expanded with time, the absolute number of ochre finds grew significantly as well, underlining the intensification of ochre use. We determine that ochre use established itself as a habitual cultural practice in southern, eastern and northern Africa starting about 160,000 years ago, when a third of archaeological sites contain ochre. We argue that this pattern is a likely material manifestation of intensifying ritual activity in early populations of Homo sapiens. Such ritual behavior may have facilitated the demographic expansion of early modern humans, first within and eventually beyond the African continent. We discuss the implications of our findings on two models of ritual evolution, the Female Cosmetic Coalitions Hypothesis and the Ecological Stress Hypothesis, as well as a model about the emergence of complex cultural capacities, the Eight-Grade Model for the Evolution and Expansion of Cultural Capacities.

在过去的二十年中，红赭石在有关非洲中石器时代早期现代人类的认知和文化进化的讨论中发挥了关键作用。鉴于赭石对于“行为现代性”出现的学术辩论的重要性，缺乏跨越大地理区域的长期时空分析代表了知识上的巨大差距。在这里，我们采取全大陆范围的方法，而不是专注于特定地点、地区或技术综合体。我们报告了迄今为止最全面的赭石使用荟萃分析，涵盖 500 至 4 万年前的非洲，检查了一百多个考古遗址的数据。使用基于时间平均的方法，我们确定了赭石使用的三个不同阶段：初始阶段发生在 500,000 到 330,000 之间；紧急阶段从33万到16万；以及16万至4万年前的习惯阶段。随着后续阶段的进行，赭石地点的数量不断增加。更重要的是，含有赭石的遗址与仅有石器的遗址的比例也遵循这一趋势，表明中石器时代赭石的使用强度不断增加。虽然地理分布随着时间的推移而扩大，但赭石发现的绝对数量也显着增加，凸显了赭石使用的集约化。我们确定，从大约 16 万年前开始，赭石的使用已成为非洲南部、东部和北部的一种习惯性文化习俗，当时三分之一的考古遗址含有赭石。我们认为，这种模式可能是早期智人群体中仪式活动强化的物质表现。这种仪式行为可能促进了早期现代人类的人口扩张，首先是在非洲大陆内部，最终是在非洲大陆之外。我们讨论了我们的研究结果对两种仪式进化模型（女性化妆品联盟假说和生态压力假说）以及关于复杂文化能力出现的模型（文化进化和扩展的八级模型）的影响。能力。