75,000 years old jewellry found

[Brian G Turner]

The oldest pieces of jewellery made by modern humans have emerged in Africa. Shell beads found in Blombos Cave on the southern tip of the continent are 75,000 years old, scientists say.

The pea-sized items all have similar holes which would have allowed them to be strung together into a necklace or bracelet, the researchers believe.

Christopher Henshilwood and his team have told Science magazine the find is probably one of the first examples of abstract thought seen in our ancestors.

"The beads carry a symbolic message. Symbolism is the basis for all that comes afterwards including cave art, personal ornaments and other sophisticated behaviours," Professor Henshilwood, of the University of Bergen, Norway, told BBC News Online.

"Even in today's world, where you're talking about computers - it's about storing information outside of the human brain. The evidence from Blombos Cave is that humans were using symbolism 75,000 years ago."


More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3629559.stm

 

[Esioul]

Cool- thanks for that Brian, I can put that in the prehistoric row in my chart on material culture.

Do you reckon they are jewellry? I can't off hand think of anything else they might me, unless they made those holes in order to get something out of the shell. Or unless those types of shells all had a weakness there etc etc... but I suppose they've eliminated that.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I think it's been complained of before around here, that all too often we imagine that our ancestors, because of their lak of modern civilisation, were therefore too thick to do much of interest.

There's currently a general consensus that human cognitive development experienced a sudden and inexplicable growth around 50,000 years ago, resulting in a wide range of finds of ornamental objects.

However, a recent criticism I saw claimed that idea was mostly based on excavations in Europe, which apparently diddn't see an influx of modern humans until around that very period.

Which I have to say on conceptual grounds alone seems to speak volumes.

 

[littlemissattitude]

I find this to be tremendously interesting. It has always made sense to me that symbolic thought goes way, way back. I mean, what did they think, some Cro-Magnon just suddenly woke up one morning and invented cave-painting, full-blown at the height of its glory?

And I think your point is well-taken, Brian, that the ideas of a later beginning for symbolic thought is based mostly on European investigations. Granted, it was closer to home for European archaeologists to dig in Europe, but their assumption that whatever was in Europe was earliest plays right into the mindset that anything "intelligent" sprang up first in Europe and that early humans in other parts of the world were too "primitive" to have made such strides toward full human consciousness.

Of course, some people are still clinging to this idea and trying to discount this find. For example, in the article I found in the Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/articles/2004/04/20/what_made_humans_modern_the_urge_to_adorn_scholars_say/), it says:

Anthropologist Richard G. Klein, who has also worked extensively at excavations in South Africa, said he things the shells could be 75,000 years old, but he's not yet convinced they were beads. The holes might have been an accident of nature, rather than man-made.

"It seems strange that the perforations [in the shells] show no wear or marks from pressing against cord or string," said Klein, a professor at Stanford University, adding that he wishes Henshilwood had addressed that point in his article.

However, in the article on this story in our local Fresno paper, it states that such wear was evident. (I'll try to find a link to this article online later.) Klein also is quoted in the Boston Globe article as clinging to the 40,000-year cutoff for the advent of symbolic thinking. He seems quite dismissive of Henshilwood's conclusions.

Edited to add that the point that there was some wear where the shells would have been strung is also addressed in the BBC article Brian linked to in his original post:

"The leather or the twine that was used [to hold them together] has left a very distinctive wear pattern on the shells," Professor Henshilwood said.

This is just the point I made earlier, in one of the threads on the introductions board, where we got around to talking about archaeology, that archaeologists (and anthropologists in general) are sometimes quite vicious - albeit in dressed-up, civil-sounding language - when a controversial or paradigm-changing find is made.

 

[Esioul]

True, but mistakes have been made in archaeology before. For example, Richardson Gill's ideas about the Maya collapse were pretty much a product of the time. (Worries abour global warming etc). I don't suppose they were thick, but whether they were going in for symbolic thought at that time is difficult to say. It's a bit like the debate about the Venus figurines- what exactly were they?

Heh heh, for vicious archs read the footnotes in arch books....

 

[littlemissattitude]

Well, yeah, mistakes have been made. That is clear enough. I certainly think that I'd like to see more evidence on the dating of this particular find. But to say that Henshilwood hadn't addressed an issue when it has been clearly reported that he had done so is disingenuous at best and malicious misdirection or worse if said in a conscious attempt discredit the find without bothering to write a detailed refutation. Which, unfortunately, is a tactic used all too often in archaeology and anthorpology.

If you really want to read some vicious back and forth, try getting into the literature concerning the question of when humans first came to North America. I once started to write a paper on this topic for an archaeology course and ended up writing about how the archaeologists fight over the evidence instead. It's absolutely fascinating. I discovered that they recycle arguments in about an eight year cycle - they run through them all and then start over again. It's really hilarious. You get some of it in the popular treatments, but the real dirt occurs in the actual journal articles.

 

[Esioul]

And the divide into different groups of archs, too. It's possible to see from their footnotes who is friends with who, and who hates who. It probably didn't do me much good when applying to Oxford to concentrate on the Cambridge and American academics in my essay on Socrates, especially as I used certain classisicts who were dissing some of the Oxford ones. Oh well!

 

[littlemissattitude]

Oops!

But, yeah, you're right. You can tell by whose work a particular scholar depends on by who they footnote the most. Because, you know, they'll quote the ones they agree with and make sure to do the proper attribution, but if it's someone they don't agree with they're more likely to paraphrase and not be so scrupulous about footnoting - they'll do an informal attribution in the text, so as not to be accused of anything academically shady, but won't always actually cite them formally. Which is really frustrating when you're looking for further sources by combing through monographs and journal articles. This also protects them when they take their opponents out of context - makes it harder to find the original source to see if they've actually characterized ideas they don't agree with properly or have taken them out of context.