Stone Age Bling

New York Times
June 23, 2006
Old Shells Suggest Early Human Adornment
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Archaeologists say they have found evidence that in one respect people were behaving like thoroughly modern humans as early as 100,000 years ago: they were apparently decorating themselves with a kind of status-defining jewelry — the earliest known shell necklaces.

If this interpretation is correct, it means that human self-adornment, considered a manifestation of symbolic thinking, was practiced at least 25,000 years earlier than previously thought.

An international team of archaeologists, writing today in the journal Science, reported its analysis of small shells with distinctive perforations that appeared to have been strung together as ornamental beads. Chemical study showed that the two shells from the Skhul rock shelter in Israel were more than 100,000 years old, and the single shell from Oued Djebbana, in Algeria, was about 90,000 years old.

Three shells may not be much to go on, the archaeologists conceded. But they emphasized that the shells were from the same genus of marine snail and were worked in the same manner as those from the Blombos Cave, near Cape Town in South Africa, which were reported two years ago as the earliest jewelry, dated at 75,000 years ago.

The Blombos find was hotly contested because of a lack of corroborating evidence from other sites.

The archaeologists also pointed out that the Israeli and Algerian sites were so far from the seashore that the shells were most likely brought there intentionally for beadworking. A study of modern shells of similar snails, they noted, determined that the chances that the holes occurred naturally were extremely small.

In the journal report, the research team led by Marian Vanhaeren of University College London and Francesco d'Errico of the National Center for Scientific Research in Talence, France, concluded, "These beads support the hypothesis that a long-lasting and widespread beadworking tradition existed in Africa and the Levant well before the arrival of anatomically modern humans in Europe."

The hypothesis challenges the traditional view that modern Homo sapiens underwent a significant behavioral change about 50,000 years ago, possibly the result of some genetic modification that afforded a greater capability for symbolic thinking and creativity in arts and crafts. The change might have prompted human migrations into Europe from Africa. In Europe it underlay the burst of creativity that began about 40,000 years ago and has been glimpsed in human figurines, musical instruments and cave paintings.

Jewelry was probably one of the earliest ways people conveyed aspects of their social and cultural identities, Dr. Vanhaeren said.

Alison S. Brooks, an anthropologist at George Washington University who was not involved in the research, called the findings exciting.

"It shows that human behavior emerges slowly over a long period of time," Dr. Brooks said. "Not that there was no creative revolution 40,000 years ago, but it was a florescence that stems from much earlier developments in Africa."

In a separate journal article, Richard G. Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford who backs the late, abrupt creative-explosion school, was quoted as saying the shell evidence "seems weak" and the interpretation remained "debatable."