Posted on 04/02/2004 4:59:27 PM PST by blam
Ostrich beads indicate early symbolic thought
18:25 31 March 04
NewScientist.com news service
Stone Age beads revealed by archaeologists on Wednesday could be the strongest evidence yet that humans developed sophisticated symbolic thought much earlier than once thought.
The ostrich egg beads and numerous other artefacts, including ochre pencils, carved bone and stone tools, were recovered from the Loiyangalani River Valley, in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.
The archaeologists who discovered the relics have yet to date them precisely, but believe they originate from the African Middle Stone Age - between 280,000 and 45,000 years ago. This is because they were found in a sedimentary layer along with many items characteristic of the Middle Stone Age.
The ostrich egg beads are about 5mm in diameter
They believe that the carefully worked ostrich beads, which have no use as tools, provide the clearest evidence to date that humans could think symbolically before 35,000 years ago. That is the time when artwork and sophisticated artefacts start to appear commonly, although so far only outside Africa.
"I'm fairly sure that these items are very old, and if that is so this could be a very important site," says Audax Mabulla, one of the archaeologists behind the find from the University of Dar er Salaam in Tanzania. "The beads are unambiguous examples of symbolic behaviour."
Mental capabilities
The ostrich egg beads were probably made by cracking ostrich eggs, boring holes into the pieces and then smoothing them. Ethnographic records show that similar pieces of jewellery are often used by modern hunter-gatherer groups for trading or other forms of social interaction.
But not everyone is convinced that the Loiyangalani find proves that the earliest "modern" humans had similar mental capabilities and social structures.
"It is certainly debatable whether ostrich egg beads are symbolic," says Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield in the UK. "If they can convincingly date them, they also need to demonstrate that they are symbolic rather than simply decorative."
Pettitt also points out that 70,000-year-old ochre crayons, covered with carvings that might have symbolic relevance, have already been recovered from the Blombos Cave in South Africa. Mabulla and his US colleagues acknowledge this, but argue that the ostrich shell beads are much less ambiguous.
Fossil records show that Homo sapiens evolved in its current physical form around 120,000 years ago. But it took some time for modern behaviour to develop and be expressed in the artefacts that are found today.
The scientists presented the findings from Loiyangalani at the Paleoanthropology Society Meeting in Montreal, Canada on Wednesday. The items were all excavated by an international project known as Serengeti Genesis.
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>That they were used for decoration is much more likely.
I guess the answer to that would depend a lot on how someone defines "symbolic" and "decorative". The way I define "symbolic" (extrapolating from Bernard Lonergan's interpretation of Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key), "decorative" would be a sub-category of "symbolic". I don't know how Mabulla and Pettitt are defining "symbolic", though. The article doesn't really mention why Mabulla finds the beads "symbolic" or why Pettitt argues they're "decorative". I also find confusing the part of the article which says,
Pettitt also points out that 70,000-year-old ochre crayons, covered with carvings that might have symbolic relevance, have already been recovered from the Blombos Cave in South Africa. Mabulla and his US colleagues acknowledge this, but argue that the ostrich shell beads are much less ambiguous.
To me, Pettitt's pointing out the "symbolic" ochre crayons would imply that since the beads were also found near ochre pencils the beads would likewise be "symbolic" (however Pettitt is defining this term); but the second sentence of the above quote seems to imply the opposite, which I don't follow. There's widely-accepted evidence that ochre was frequently used to symbolize blood and associated things like death, burial, the afterlife, etc.:
The notion of an unmolested, prehistoric language also characterizes the interpretation of prehistoric ritual activity. When Mirceal Eliade analyzed the use of red ochre in Paleolithic burials as early proof of a belief in a survival after death, because red ochre has served as a ritual substitute for blood and hence a symbol for life (Eliade 1978 [1976], 9), these first traces of a universally attested ritual practice were considered to speak directly about their original religious impetus.
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