New palaeolithic North African beads from the “Grotte des Pigeons”, Tarofalt.

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

This, for anyone interested in very early “beads” and what archaeologists are planning to use them for.

82,000 year old jewellery found

By Fran Bardsley

4:30pm Monday 4th June 2007

Archaeologists from Oxford have discovered what are thought to be the oldest examples of human decorations in the world.

The international team of archaeologists, led by Oxford University's Institute of Archaeology, have found shell beads believed to be 82,000 years old from a limestone cave in Morocco.

Institute director Prof Nick Barton said: "Bead-making in Africa was a widespread practice at the time, which was spread between cultures with different stone technology by exchange or by long-distance social networks.

"A major question in evolutionary studies today is 'how early did humans begin to think and behave in ways we would see as fundamentally modern?' "The appearance of ornaments such as these may be linked to a growing sense of self-awareness and identity among humans and cultural innovations must have played a large role in human development."

The handmade beads were found at the Grotte des Pigeons, Taforalt, in Eastern Morocco during a four to five year excavation in the region.

Prof Barton said the finds suggest that humans were making purely symbolic objects 40,000 years before they did it in Europe.

The beads themselves comprise 12 Nassarius shells - Nassarius are molluscs found in warm seas and coral reefs in America, Asia and the Pacific - which had holes in them and appeared to have been suspended or hung. They were covered in red ochre.

Similar beads have been found at sites in Algeria, Israel and South Africa which are thought to date back to around the same time or slightly after the finds from Taforalt.

The team, which includes archaeologists from Morocco, France and Germany as well as the UK, believe that similar shells are present in other sites in Morocco.

Dating results from the shells are still awaited, but the team believe some may be even older than those found in Taforalt.

The team has recently secured funding for a further four to five years of research in the area from the Natural Environment Research Council. Further research will look at early humans in Africa and how they spread around the world.

A paper on the team's findings is featured in this month's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published today.

For a look at the original article and uninformative pictures, click HERE

For additional mention of palaeolithic “beads”, do a Forum search for “beads”. As for the promised PNAS article, I guess we’ll have to wait a bit.

Jacques

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

The "beads" paper is finally out, and I have yet to read it in detail.

Abdeljalil Bouzouggar, Nick Barton, Marian Vanhaeren, Francesco d'Errico, Simon Collcutt, Tom Higham, Edward Hodge, Simon Parfitt, Edward Rhodes, Jean-Luc Schwenninger, Chris Stringer, Elaine Turner, Steven Ward, Abdelkrim Moutmir, and Abdelhamid Stambouli. 2007. 82,000-year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of modern human behavior. PNAS 104(24): 9964–9969.

Abstract:
The first appearance of explicitly symbolic objects in the archaeological record marks a fundamental stage in the emergence of modern social behavior in Homo. Ornaments such as shell beads represent some of the earliest objects of this kind. We report on examples of perforated Nassarius gibbosulus shell beads from Grotte des Pigeons (Taforalt, Morocco), North Africa. These marine shells come from archaeological levels dated by luminescence and uranium-series techniques to {approx}82,000 years ago. They confirm evidence of similar ornaments from other less well dated sites in North Africa and adjacent areas of southwest Asia. The shells are of the same genus as shell beads from slightly younger levels at Blombos Cave in South Africa. Wear patterns on the shells imply that some of them were suspended, and, as at Blombos, they were covered in red ochre. These findings imply an early distribution of bead-making in Africa and southwest Asia at least 40 millennia before the appearance of similar cultural manifestations in Europe.

Keywords:
anatomically modern humans | Nassarius shells | modern behavior | Middle Palaeolithic | optically stimulated luminescence

Subscribers can have access to the paper by clicking HERE. For interested others, there are ways to get around this problem.

Jacques