Posted on 10/30/2021 11:04:52 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Last week, the discovery of the oldest known piece of artificially colored jewelry in Japan was unveiled. Although the Mainchi reported that the 23,000-year-old bead was actually unearthed five years ago, the finding was made only made public this month in anticipation of its debut at the Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum in Naha, Japan. The bead, which is considered a prime example of early creative development, is expected to provide valuable information about Paleolithic culture.
The bead was carved from a tusk shell and painted with a red pigment, only of which traces remain in the groove of the shell. It was found on the coast of Okinawa in the Sakitari Cave site and is thought to be from the Upper Paleolithic Period at roughly 23,000 years old.
“It appears ancient people took a lot of time and effort to make these objects, from finding the shells to coloring them,” Seiji Kadowaki, a lecturer at the Nagoya University Museum who specializes in prehistoric archaeology, told the Mainichi. “The decorative objects may have been used as tools for communication.”
In the same cave, a couple other notable objects of human history have been found, among them the world’s oldest fishing hook (which is also made of tusk shells) and a lump of pigment that would have been used like a crayon. The cave was continuously inhabited by successive generations of people until the Jomon Period 15,000 years ago.
The bead is currently on view as part of an exhibition devoted to interchanges between humans, Okinawa dugong (an endangered mammal found in nearby waters), and coral which opened earlier this month.
That should be “Bead of Color”.
Thanks for pinging this article...
Macaroni humor aside-I don’t get why it is amazing to some archaeologists-and others-that humans were crafting artistic objects from the beginning- to use for adornment, trade goods, currency, etc-humans were apparently never stupid savages, contrary to what mostly racist, old-style democrats types still seem to think-we have obviously always had the spark of intelligence, curiosity and creativity-remains of pottery and other relics of the Jomon culture have been found in digs on the coast of Ecuador-and the DNA of a subgroup of the present Ecuadorians leads back to the Jomon culture in Japan-so yeah-trade and settling in a new place has apparently been a human thing from day one...
A lot of them don't have children, so (speaking of macaroni) they've never seen macaroni-based elementary school art projects.
ISWYDT......................
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