75,000 year old Mardi Gras beads.
Posted on 04/16/2004 8:58:13 AM PDT by balrog666
Oldest Jewelry? "Beads" Discovered in African Cave
Humans may have been wearing jewelry as far back as 75,000 years ago, about 30,000 years earlier than previously thought, if 41 shells found at Blombos Cave in South Africa prove to have been used as beads.
The shells are from a tiny mollusk, Nassarius kraussianus, that lived in a nearby estuary. They have perforations and wear marks consistent with being used as beads, according to scientists excavating the middle Stone Age site.
Beads are considered definitive evidence of symbolic thinking, which many scientists don't think occurred in modern humans until about 45,000 years ago.
If shells (top) from a tiny mollusk found in Blombos Cave (bottom) in South Africa prove to have been used as beads, humans may have been capable of symbolic thinking earlier than thought, according to researchers.
Top photograph courtesy Christopher Henshilwood/Science, bottom photograph courtesy Christopher Henshilwood and F. d'Errico/NSF
Christopher S. Henshilwood has received several grants from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration (CRE) to excavate the middle Stone Age deposits in Blombos Cave, South Africa.
"The beads add to a growing pile of evidence that humans acquired a suite of 'modern' skills much earlier than previously thought," says archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood, director of the Blombos Cave Project.
"There's more and more evidence that they could fish and hunt large mammals, and that they were making fine bone tools. When our ancestors left Africa, they were already modern, already thinking and behaving in many senses the way we do today."
Genetic and fossil evidence indicate anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa around 120,000 years ago. Whether modern behavior evolved gradually in tandem with anatomical modernity, or emerged suddenly around 45,000 years ago, has long been a bone of contention among anthropologists and archaeologists.
A great divide exists in the archaeological record. Waves of modern humans began leaving Africa to colonize the rest of the world around 45,000 years ago. There is extensive evidence that "modern behavior" existed in Europe around 40,000 years ago: cave paintings, jewelry, more elaborate burial rituals, and more specialized tools.
"A creative explosion took place sometime around 40,000 years ago that is strongly expressed in the archaeological record over a very large geographical area," said John Bower, an archaeologist-paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Davis. "The question is whether something happened to affect the architecture of the brain."
Until recently evidence of symbolic thinking at middle Stone Age (roughly 280,000 until 45,000 years ago) sites in Africa has been scant and hotly disputed. Two years ago the Blombos investigators reported finding sophisticated bone tools and two pieces of iron ore with abstract markings at the site.
The question is complicated by the fact that there is no real consensus on how to define "modern" behavior. However, the production of art or jewelry is universally accepted as an indicator of symbolic thinking.
"Beads are tangible evidence of a concept of self," Bower said. "You're not going to decorate yourself if you have no concept of self."
Bower is the project leader at Loiyangalani, a dig site in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. He and colleagues recently reported finding two ostrich-eggshell beads at the site that are tentatively dated to about 70,000 years old. The announcement was made at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in March of this year.
The presence of beads, whether used as trade items, to convey group status, or to identify group members or relationships within a group suggests some form of language existed, says Henshilwood, who is affiliated with the University of Bergen, Norway, and the State University of New York.
"What the beads might symbolize is unknown, but it does imply that there had to be some means of communicating meaning, which plausibly is language," Henshilwood said. "Everyone knew what it meant, just as today if you're wearing Gucci sunglasses or a diamond tennis bracelet, there's a message being put out."
Recent studies have suggested that Khoisan, a southern African language that includes many clicks, could be as many as 100,000 years old. It's possible the people at Blombos were speaking in some form of click language, Henshilwood said.
Weighing the Evidence
When is a bead a bead? The two ostrich-eggshell beads found at the Serengeti site are unquestionably beads, but questions pertaining to the accuracy of their dating at 70,000 years old remain. By contrast, the date of the Blombos artifacts is fairly certain, but some question exists as to whether they are actually beads.
"The photographs [of the Blombos beads] look pretty convincing, but I'd like to see them in the flesh," Bower said. "A lot of shells like that have perforations, where they've been dropped by seagulls or occur through natural agencies. I'm cautiously convinced; it doesn't surprise me they occurred in a middle Stone Age context, since we found [beads] in Serengeti also."
Richard Klein, an anthropologist at Stanford University who has worked extensively at dig sites in South Africa, is a major proponent of the idea that modern behavior appeared rapidly, around 45,000 years ago, possibly as the result of a genetic change that facilitated our use of language. He is not convinced that the shells found at Blombos are actually beads.
"The holes are irregular and look fresh," Klein said. "We need to know why [the investigators at the Blombos site] think they were made by human hand and how they think they were made—were the holes punched out, did they file them, were they drilled out? Shell beads are very common in late Stone Age coastal sites, and you can see they're clearly modified as beads.
"There are ten sites in South Africa that have been excavated, and at only one do we find this kind of evidence for precocious behavior. I don't think the case has been clearly made yet that these are beads."
Klein also notes that the history of archaeology is littered with examples where later deposits of archaeological artifacts have slumped into older layers.
The isolated finds from middle Stone Age sites in Africa, even if correctly dated, don't necessarily indicate widespread "modern" behavior.
"You could have the prehistoric equivalent of a Michelangelo," Klein said. "An individual far ahead of his time, able to come up with innovative ideas that the rest of society doesn't adopt."
The Coastal Advantage
Henshilwood has a different theory to explain why evidence of symbolic thinking or "modern" behavior shows up in only some of the middle Stone Age sites, rather than all of them.
"The answer could be that it's not a behavior that's necessarily required everywhere," he says. Early modern humans living in a region with plenty of land animals, for instance, wouldn't be motivated to develop specialized tools to catch fish.
In addition, Henshilwood thinks the people at Blombos may have had a nutritional advantage. "We know today that fish is brain food," he said. "It's possible that people living in coastal regions just had a lot more going on. Remember, modern humans followed the coastline and reached Australia about 60,000 years ago, and they had to figure out how to build a boat to get there."
He says the "creative explosion" that took place around 45,000 years ago could be merely the result of facing new environmental and social pressures. Such pressures might have included an increase in population and competition with other species outside of Africa, like the Neandertals, who had occupied Europe for several hundred thousand years.
"I hate the use of the word 'modern,'" Bower says. "Modern behavior is talking on the telephone. Clearly that's not what humans were doing a hundred thousand years ago. Emerging evidence suggests that aspects of human technology are now strung out way back in time. Blombos has bone points—you have the famous bone harpoons at Katanga [dated to about 90,000 years old]—long before the creative explosion of 40,000 to 45,000 years ago.
"I'm inclined to think we should get rid of the whole concept of 'modern' behavior," Bower said.
That was my question too. Cause, like if we are the same "form factor" as it were, what tripped the switch to make us self aware (the rational why beads are accepted as instance of "modern" thinking - self decoration).
Anyone had any apples lately?
We bought the nicest stuff from some Ndebele women who had set up on the street in Pilgrims Rest, which is a historic gold mining village in Mpumalanga.
The tourist trap shops were way overpriced.
Maybe a structural weakness in this type of shell. I'd be interested in finding an undamaged one of the same age.
I always laugh at the "invention" of the wheel. Watching a rock roll down a hill is sufficient to cause this invention. The "invention" part of the wheel is use or purpose.
I remember picking up little shells at the seashore when I was a kid and putting them in a box for whatever reason. I suppose if I was real bored, I would have thought of making a necklace out of them or creating a purpose to suit my wants. I didn't though. I did however paint the little flat rocks we found along the shore. One might consider it "creative" or "intelligent" but frankly, I think it's no big deal and thousands before me would think of the same thing.
Back then, women had to cover their breasts to get them.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.