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may have emerged 80,000 years ago in the form of shell beads
London:
A new study by an international team of researchers from
France, South Africa, Germany, Israel and the UK has confirmed
that 80,000-year-old shell beads found in caves in North Africa
represent some of the earliest evidence of the use of personal
ornamentation, which also points to the dawn of modern human
behaviour. According to a report carried out by the Planet Earth
Online, the beads provide evidence that the people alive at
the time were acting much like modern humans. "There is a problem
with linking anatomically modern humans with behaviourally modern
humans," said Professor Nick Barton of the University of Oxford
UK, and one of the authors of the study. "These people may have
looked like us, but were they behaving the same?" he added.
The presence of the beads suggests the people who made and wore
them behaved in ways we would recognize. Using symbolic items
like shell beads to communicate ideas about the wearer requires
skills found only in modern humans, including a well-developed
language and the ability to use abstract concepts. The researchers
analyzed 25 beads from four sites in North Africa from the Middle
Palaeolithic period. The beads, consisting of the shells of
sea snails called Nassarius, had been transported some distance
from the marine environment in which they're usually found,
and showed evidence of deliberate alterations. "We found evidence
they had been strung together as in a necklace or bracelet,"
said Barton. The shells had been deliberately perforated using
stone tools and the researchers found distinctive wear patterns
which suggested they had been rubbing together. Wear marks around
the perforations indicated the shells had been threaded on a
string. Several had also been covered with a pigment called
red ochre and one shell showed evidence of heating, possibly
to alter its colour. As to what purpose the coloured beads served,
Barton said, "What they were signalling, we're not entirely
sure. Possibly, they were an insurance policy, if you had shared
access to certain resources and wanted to identify yourself
to members of another group." The beads may also have let wearers
identify members of the same social group, preventing unnecessary
conflicts. Alternatively, the beads might have provided personal
information about the wearer, such as the wearer's position
in the social hierarchy, or that they had passed through puberty
and into adulthood. These beads might have also represented
the origins of today's fashions.
-August
28, 2009
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