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With Ancient Jewelry, It’s the Thought That Counts

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Times Staff Writer

In a handful of pierced seashells found in a South African cave, scientists believe that they have discovered the world’s oldest known jewelry and the earliest reliable evidence of creative symbolic thought at work.

The 41 tiny shells, unearthed at Blombos Cave, were strung as beads more than 75,000 years ago, making them at least 30,000 years older than any other reliably dated personal ornaments, an international team of researchers said Thursday.

As ancient jewelry, the orange and black beads are a priceless curiosity -- decorative tokens of prehistoric vanity that are the forerunners of hip-hop bangles and all the cultured glitter of Tiffany’s and Cartier.

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But to those trying to understand the origins of the human mind, the pea-sized shells also are tangible evidence of one of the most mysterious events in the history of evolution: the advent of symbolic thought.

More than simple adornment, the beads may be the earliest known insignia of individual identity.

“The find is riveting,” said archeologist Sally McBrearty at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, who studies prehistoric tools and human evolution.

The beads “scream out symbolic behavior,” she said. “It is the expression of identity, of selfhood, of aesthetics.”

Several other authorities on human origins, who have yet to examine the find firsthand, said the researchers might be overreaching. They insisted on stronger evidence of the beads’ antiquity and clearer signs of tool marks.

But if the claim holds up under sustained scientific scrutiny, the beads will demonstrate that early humans exercised a capacity for abstract thought and symbolic thinking tens of thousands of years earlier than previously believed.

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Through personal decoration, several experts said, these early people expressed concepts of beauty and vanity that arise only from self-awareness. As a means of social communication, the ornaments also suggest that these early humans had developed language and a sense of tribal belonging.

“If we are looking for evidence that people are mediating their behavior through symbolism, these beads provide absolute evidence,” said lead researcher Christopher Henshilwood at the University of Bergen in Norway, whose findings were published today in the journal Science.

As such, other researchers said, the beads are telling evidence that the mental machinery of abstract thought, creativity and complex behavior evolved first in Africa, not in Europe as many scientists have long believed.

“It argues for a very early emergence of symbolic behavior in Africa,” said archeologist Alison Brooks, chairman of the anthropology department at George Washington University. “I think they have made a very strong case.”

Anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa about 160,000 years ago but, as far as scientists have been able to determine from the fossil record, their behavior was no different from that of their more primitive forebears throughout much of their history.

Artifacts, however, reveal an abrupt flowering about 40,000 years ago in Europe of art, decoration and spiritual activity such as funeral rites.

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Something triggered a fundamental capacity for innovation that led in short order to the advent of agriculture and settled civilization. Barely 15,000 years separated the invention of the bow and arrow from the construction of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Some experts have theorized that a genetic mutation rewired the brain, causing the seemingly sudden appearance of higher thought.

Others have argued that mental abilities developed more gradually and broadly across the ancient world.

Whatever the cause, the creation of personal ornaments was a sharp departure from the manufacture of utilitarian stone tools that had occupied humanity’s ancestors for more than 2 1/2 million years.

Archeologists have been working at the Blombos Cave at the southern tip of Africa since 1991. Only recently did they recognize the significance of the clusters of mollusk shells that workers had discovered over the years.

“A couple of years ago, I looked at them under a microscope and wondered whether they were beads,” Henshilwood said. “We saw that they had been manufactured. There were very distinctive wear marks.”

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Researchers determined that the nearest likely habitat for the mollusks was an estuary 10 miles away. The shells appeared to have been selected for size, and they all were perforated at the same end. The holes appeared to be deliberate and not the work of predatory snails, he said.

The shells were too small to be the leftovers of a seafood dinner. There was no evidence they had been carried to the cave by predators or mixed in the kelp that the early inhabitants used as bedding.

They were trinkets, the researchers concluded.

“Beads really say something when you talk about humanness,” said John Yellen, program director for archeology at the National Science Foundation, which funded the research. “Decorating yourself is a really essential piece of being human.

“The person who wore these beads must have had a sense of themselves as an individual human being. Monkeys don’t have that sense. They don’t recognize themselves in the mirror.”

The previously oldest known human ornaments are a set of perforated teeth and collections of eggshell beads from Bulgaria and Turkey, dating to 41,000 to 43,000 years ago, and 40,000-year-old ostrich eggshell beads from Kenya.

This year, scientists working in Tanzania announced the discovery of two ostrich eggshell beads believed to be of even earlier vintage -- 45,000 to 110,000 years ago. The age of those eggshell shards, however, is widely disputed by experts in the field.

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Some respected authorities on human origins have expressed technical reservations about the newest find.

“My initial reaction is that the claims are incredibly premature,” said archeologist Randall White at New York University, author of “Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind.”

Having examined enlarged digital images of the shells, White said he was not able to identify any tool marks, suggesting that the holes might be natural. He has not examined the shells.

He also was not willing to rule out the possibility that the beads worked their way down into the older sediments by accident.

Stanford University anthropologist Richard Klein, who believes that behavioral advances were caused by biological change, has worked at the Blombos site. He shared White’s skepticism.

“This is a serious claim, but there is a lack of support,” Klein said. “I don’t think the evidence is compelling.”

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But Henshilwood is confident that the discovery will hold up.

Researchers dated the age of the site in two ways.

The sand surrounding the artifacts was dated with a technique called optically stimulated thermoluminescence, which shows that the items were last exposed to sunlight at least 75,000 years ago. Scorched stones found nearby also were independently dated to about 77,000 years ago, the researchers reported.

The shells retained traces of red ochre, suggesting that the beads had been painted or sewn on fabric that had been coated with the iron oxide pigment.

“This is someone making a statement about themselves to other people, about their individuality,” Yellen said. “For me, that is the significant part.

“That makes you human.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The dawning of the mind

Archeologists are searching for evidence of the moment when early humans first developed creative and symbolic thinking Ñ a breakthrough that came long after the appearance of stone tools 2.5 million years ago and the mastery of fire 1 million years ago.

Timeline

90,000 years ago: Sophisticated blades -- barbed harpoons in Congo.

77,000 years ago: Early artistry -- a piece of engraved red ochre in South Africa.

75,000 years ago: Early ornaments -- seashell jewelry in South Africa.

40,000 years ago: Early jewelry -- ostrich eggshell beads in Kenya.

30,000 to 40,000 years ago: Early imagery -- cave paintings of animals in Chauvet Cave in France and elsewhere.

20,000 to 30,000 years ago: Early fabric -- A carved stone figurine with a skirt of loose strings in Europe.

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12,000 years ago: Development of farming in Mesopotamia.

9,000 years ago: Early music -- bird bone flutes in China.

5,500 years ago: Development of writing in Egypt and Babylonia.

Source: Times research

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