The deliberate coating of a burial with red ochre — applied to both the body and the associated artifacts — is one of the most widespread behaviors documented in the human archaeological record.

It appears in African sites more than 100,000 years old.

It appears in European Paleolithic burials.

It appears in Australian contexts.

It appears across Asia and in the Americas at multiple sites.

Its universality suggests that it reflects something deep in human behavior around death — something about how humans mark the transition from life to death, or about how they conceptualize the relationship between the living and the dead.

At Anzick, the ochre unified the child and the tools into a single ensemble — coating them all in the same distinctive red, marking them as belonging together, or as belonging to a different category from ordinary objects and ordinary bodies.