The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Emergence of Modern Human Behavior: Middle Stone Age Engravings from South Africa
Abstract
In the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic after about 35,000 years ago, abstract or depictional images provide evidence for cognitive abilities considered integral to modern human behavior. Here we report on two abstract representations engraved on pieces of red ochre recovered from the Middle Stone Age layers at Blombos Cave in South Africa. A mean date of 77,000 years was obtained for the layers containing the engraved ochres by thermoluminescence dating of burnt lithics, and the stratigraphic integrity was confirmed by an optically stimulated luminescence age of 70,000 years on an overlying dune. These engravings support the emergence of modern human behavior in Africa at least 35,000 years before the start of the Upper Paleolithic.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
The Origin of Modern Human Behavior: Critique of the Models and Their Test Implications
Henshilwood, C. S., & Marean, C. W. (2003) · Current Anthropology · doi:10.1086/377665 · Cited by 735
Self-citationEngraved ochres from the Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa
Henshilwood, C. S., d'Errico, F., & Watts, I. (2009) · Journal of Human Evolution · doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.01.005 · Cited by 632
Self-citationFitch, W. T. (2010) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511817779 · Cited by 594
The Evolution of the Brain, the Human Nature of Cortical Circuits, and Intellectual Creativity
DeFelipe, J. (2011) · Frontiers in Neuroanatomy · doi:10.3389/fnana.2011.00029 · Cited by 527
Fire As an Engineering Tool of Early Modern Humans
Brown, K. S., Marean, C. W., Herries, A. I. R., Jacobs, Z., Tribolo, C., Braun, D., Roberts, D. L., Meyer, M. C., & Bernatchez, J. (2009) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1175028 · Cited by 506
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Henshilwood, C. S., d'Errico, F., Yates, R., Jacobs, Z., Tribolo, C., Duller, G. A. T., Mercier, N., Sealy, J. C., Valladas, H., Watts, I., & Wintle, A. G.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 2002-02-15
- Volume
- 295
- Issue
- 5558
- Pages
- 1278-1280
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2130956984
- Cited by
- 985
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 203.83
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Emergence of Modern Human Behavior: Middle Stone Age Engravings from South Africa. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.1067575
- The paper
- Henshilwood, C. S., d'Errico, F., Yates, R., Jacobs, Z., Tribolo, C., Duller, G. A. T., Mercier, N., Sealy, J. C., Valladas, H., Watts, I., & Wintle, A. G. (2002). Emergence of Modern Human Behavior: Middle Stone Age Engravings from South Africa. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1067575
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
