Compound adhesives made from red ochre mixed with plant gum were used in the Middle Stone Age (MSA), South Africa. Replications reported here suggest that early artisans did not merely color their glues red; they deliberately effected physical transformations involving chemical changes from acidic to less acidic pH, dehydration of the adhesive near wood fires, and changes to mechanical workability and electrostatic forces. Some of the steps required for making compound adhesive seem impossible without multitasking and abstract thought. This ability suggests overlap between the cognitive abilities of modern people and people in the MSA. Our multidisciplinary analysis provides a new way to recognize complex cognition in the MSA without necessarily invoking the concept of symbolism.ochre ͉ replications ͉ glue ͉ modern behavior ͉ Ͼ70,000 years ago A rchaeologists often use symbolic material culture as a marker of modern behavior, but few agree on definitions of either term or explore the types of mental architecture required for symbolic innovations. Here, we move away from the contentious issue of symbolism and draw on the combined expertise of cognitive and earth scientists to create a fresh way of recognizing, in the deep past, cognitive abilities that overlap with our own. People today have a capacity for novel, sustained multilevel operations; this ability may have arisen from neural connectivity in part of the prefrontal cortex (1). The capacity may be recognizable in some technologies, and we use compound adhesive manufacture as our example. To demonstrate complex cognition, we must show that some executive steps required for compound adhesive manufacture are not possible without mental abilities of the kind implied in the ninth subsystem of the Barnard et al. (2) model of mental architecture. Here, abstract meanings and sophisticated organization of action sequences determine decision making. An earlier eighth subsystem would have been mentally incapable of processing 2 levels of meaning simultaneously or of generating fully abstract concepts about behavior.The use of simple (1-component) adhesives is ancient; for example, birch-bark tar was found on 2 flakes from Ϸ200,000 years (200 ka) ago at a site in Italy (3). At Ϸ40 ka, bitumen was found on stone tools in Syria (4), and a similarly aged site in Kenya yielded tools with red ochre stains that imply the use of multicomponent glue (5). Traces of even earlier (Ϸ70 ka) compound adhesives occur, together with microfractures consistent with hafting, on Middle Stone Age (MSA) stone tools from Sibudu Cave, South Africa (see SI Text and Table S1). Several recipes are evident: sometimes plant gum and red ochre (natural iron oxide-hematite-Fe 2 O 3 ) traces (Fig. 1) occur on tool portions that were once inserted in hafts (6-10). Other tools have brown plant gums and black or white fat, but no ochre ( Fig. 1 and SI Text).We acknowledge the possibility that people at Sibudu colored some of their weapons symbolically, perhaps to signify the blood of prey, but we do n...