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Study of the marked objects made of bone, ochre, and ostrich eggshell reported for the Middle Stone Age in Africa indicates that they are nonrepresentational, relatively small, and rare and that they may have been made in a single sitting with a design intended from the outset. Explanations for their appearance may involve a change in mental abilities and, ultimately, a change in early modern human society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the research paper "An Early Case of Color Symbolism: Ochre Use by Modern Human in Qafzeh Cave," by Erella Hovers. Important archaeological and geological proof about the use of ochre during the late Middle Paleolithic age at Qafzeh Cave in Israel have been discussed in the paper. However, there is no proof that ochre was produced anywhere in Middle Europe during the late Middle Paleolithic age.

The article presents the authors' reply to comments on their research paper "An Early Case of Color Symbolism: Ochre Use by Modern Human in Qafzeh Cave." The authors congratulate the commentators for their responses. They clarify point by point objections to their study. In response to the objections raised on the robusticity of the selection criterion based on red color, they clarified that color of ochre in the area of Qafzeh Cave in Israel was more often yellow than red.

The article presents the author's views regarding the article "An Early Case of Color Symbolism: Ochre Use by Modern Humans in Qafzeh Cave," by Erella Hovers, which has been published within the issue of the periodical. Hovers' article focused on color symbolism and Paleolithic archaeology. Middle stone-age people inherited the act of using pigments from their ancestors. Inhabitants of Qafzeh Cave, Israel, collected natural pigments.

The article cites a study related to the functional and symbolic uses of ochre. Many researchers equate the appearance of symbolic behavior in hominid evolution with the onset of behavioral modernity. For these researchers, archaeological work in southern Africa continues to push the origins of modern behavior deeper into the Pleistocene past. However, recent evidence from KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa suggests that ochre may have played a functional rather than a symbolic role during the African Middle Stone Age. Examining usewear patterns and plant residues on lithics from Sibudu Cave, scientist Lyn Wadley and colleagues conclude that ochre was often part of the adhesive used for hafting stone tools. Initially informed by experimental replication and ethnographic observation, the researchers infer this function from the correlation of ochre and plant residues with use-wear patterns consistent with hafting. Though they do not reject the possibility that ochre had symbolic importance in other cases, they suggest that its use in this instance was strictly functional.

The article comments on the research paper "An Early Case of Color Symbolism: Ochre Use by Modern Human in Qafzeh Cave," by Erella Hovers. The author views that the paper by Hovers and colleagues provides observational evidences for manipulation of ochre in middle Paleolithic period. According to the author, the various evidences prove that the ochre was used for its color properties.