Scientists have identified what may be the oldest jewelry in the world. They found the perforated 100,000-year-old Nassariusshells in museum collections where they were stored after being gathered during the 1930s and 1940s from the Skhul site in Israel and Oued Djebbana in Algeria. The researchers report in the journal Science that the shells were used as beads for jewelry. From the Association for the Advancement of Science:
“Our paper supports the scenario that modern humans in Africa developed behaviors that are considered modern quite early in time, so that in fact these people were probably not just biologically modern but also culturally and cognitively modern, at least to some degree,” said study coauthor Francesco d’Errico of le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Universite Bordeaux 1 in Talence, France. Until recently, researchers generally believed that the first signs of modern human culture appeared 40,000 years ago, when anatomically modern humans arrived in Europe. The cave paintings, musical instruments, jewelry and other artwork preserved from this time period, the Upper Paleolithic, indicate that humans were capable of symbolic thinking.
Jewelry probably conveyed many aspects of people’s social and cultural identities, and most archeologists agree that personal decoration was one of the most important expressions of modern human culture, according to study coauthor Marian Vanhaeren of University College London in London and CNRS in Nanterre, France…
By studying modern Nassarius shells from Mediterranean beaches, they also determined that shells with single holes in the centre are rare in nature and that Skhul and Djebbana inhabitants must have purposely perforated or deliberately picked out such shells, arguably for symbolic use.
Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)