Jewelry worn 100,000 years ago, experts say

Scientists believed that modern human culture began 40,000 years ago.
SCRIPPS HOWARD
A new analysis of beads made out of seashells shows that even the earliest modern humans made personal decorations at least 100,000 years ago.
The findings by an international team of researchers, published in the journal Science, pushes back the earliest use of jewelry by at least 25,000 years and shows that the concept was likely widespread in Africa and the Middle East.
Human remains excavated in Ethiopia show that physically modern humans were living in Africa at least 160,000 years ago, but there has been heated debate for years about whether the earliest Homo sapiens thought and behaved in advanced ways.
"Our paper supports the scenario that modern humans in Africa developed behaviors that are considered modern quite early in time, so that in fact these people were probably not just biologically modern, but also culturally and cognitively modern, at least to some degree," said Francesco d'Errico of the National Center for Scientific Research, a co-author of the report.
Until recently, scientists generally believed that the first signs of modern human culture hadn't appeared until about 40,000 years ago, when anatomically modern humans arrived in Europe. The cave paintings, jewelry, musical instruments and carvings they left behind there at numerous sites demonstrated that these humans were capable of symbolic thought.
Significance
"Symbolically mediated behavior has emerged as one of the few unchallenged and universally accepted markers of modernity," said Marian Vanhaeren, an expert in prehistoric cultural behavior at the University College London, lead author of the study.
She and d'Errico were part of another team that reported, in 2004, finding a cache of shells perforated by humans for jewelry in a cave near the Indian Ocean in South Africa. The material was dated to about 75,000 years ago.
Hoping to prove that find wasn't a fluke, the researchers and several colleagues began searching museum collections for shells with holes worn through them in the same manner.
So far, they've found three, two from a site in Israel, another from a location in Algeria.
Archaeologists excavated the site in Israel, called Skhul, in the 1930s using less-detailed techniques than are common today. That required more detective work to prove where the shells came from and how old they were.
One layer of the site had several human skeletons, which recent dating efforts have put at 100,000 to 135,000 years old. Sarah James, another co-author and a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, where the Skhul material is held, analyzed the sediment stuck to one of the two shells and found that they came from the same layer as the skeletons had.
Deliberate selection
The Algerian site, called Qued Djebbana, was worked in the late 1940s, and only one radiocarbon date was obtained from the dig, putting material there at more than 35,000 years old. But the researchers say based on the technology and style of the stone tools found there, the site could be up to 90,000 years old.
Both the new sites were a considerable distance from the ocean -- more than 150 miles in the case of the Algerian location -- indicating that they were deliberately selected and transported there by humans.
All the shells are from the same species of scavenging marine snails that live in shallow salt water and are now found only in the central and eastern Mediterranean. The sample shells are somewhat larger than modern ones, seeming to confirm their old age, since the species is known to have grown larger 100,000 years ago than it does today.
Vanhaeren said it appears that unlike the personalized adornments of today, the earliest African beads were likely used as some form of trade token, since they were so uniform.
"We think the African evidence may point to the beads' being used in gift-giving systems which function to strengthen social and economic relationships. The [more recent] European evidence suggests beads were used as markers of ethnic, social and personal identity."