The Red Paint People, sometimes referred to as the Maritime Archaic culture of the north Atlantic coast of America, particularly Labrador, got their name from their habit of covering their dead with red ochre. They were a seafaring people who lived around 5000 BC. A similar culture existed in northern Europe and both are claimed, by ‘imaginative’ writers such as Shirley Andrews and Frank Joseph, to have been established by refugees from Atlantis after the destruction of their homeland.

Slate tools of a similar type have been identified in Scandinavia and North America dated to around 3000 BC^(b).

Ivar Zapp & George Erikson recount^[244.309] how bones discovered in similar stone chambers in Labrador and on the island of Teviec off France were both covered with red ochre and both dated to around 5500 BC.  Richard W. Welch refers^[630] to the Red Paint People as just part of a range of evidence to suggest that the Americas were originally settled by Europeans in prehistoric times.

There are suggestions that the use of red ochre at burial sites may go back much further and would have been even more wide spread. The Paviland Cave in south Wales held the skeleton of a young man dated to at the latest 19000 BC. The skeleton of a young child found at Abrigo do Lagar Velho in Portugal, was also discovered with red ochre and dated to 22500 BC^(a). Further examples have been found across Europe and as far as Mesopotamia.

The most ancient pyramid found in Mesoamerica at Chiapa de Corzo in Mexico contained the bodies of two rulers, coated in red pigment from head to toe. The pyramid is dated to around 700 BC. This may indicate a continuance of the same sacred custom over thousands of years.

^(a) http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba45/ba45feat.html

^(b)   http://frontiers-of-anthropology.blogspot.com/2011/03/megalith-builders-red-paint-people-and.html