82,000-year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of modern human behavior

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 Ϸ82,000 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.anatomically modern humans ͉ Nassarius shells ͉ modern behavior ͉ Middle Palaeolithic ͉ optically stimulated luminescence

Human origins: Out of Africa

“…The same deposits also yielded small gastropod shells that were apparently pierced for stringing (45). Body ornamentation is widely considered a reliable proxy for symbolic behavior patterns, and the Blombos evidence is supported by similar ''beads'' found at other African Middle Stone Age sites, including the 82 Ka Grotte des Pigeons in Morocco (46). Interestingly, a possible occurrence of similar kind has been reported outside Africa at the Ͼ100 Ka Israeli site of Skhu l (47).…”

Neandertal-Modern Human Contact in Western Eurasia: Issues of Dating, Taxonomy, and Cultural Associations

“…This was to be expected, given the paleontological and genetics evidence for signifi cant admixture and, therefore, species sameness, between Neandertals and early moderns. It is also something that should have been realized ever since ornaments were uncovered in the Aterian culture of North Africa, which, in this time range (~100 ka BP), was inhabited by people who, while not Neandertal, were not fully anatomically modern either-as apparent, namely, in the cranial, mandibular and dental anatomy of the Dar-es-Soltan fossils (Klein 1992 ;Wolpoff 2002 ;Trinkaus 2005 ;Bouzouggar et al 2007 ;Bouzouggar and Barton 2012 ;Hublin et al 2012b ).…”

Are there alternative adaptive strategies to human pro-sociality? The role of collaborative morality in the emergence of personality variation and autistic traits

“…Such evidence appears after the emergence of our own species around 200 to 150,000 years ago in Africa, appearing after 100,000 years ago in south African and north African archaeological sites (Bouzouggar et al 2007). Global expansion after 100,000 years ago is argued to also reflect collaborative morality (Spikins 2015b).…”

“…These include the heat treatment of flint to improve knapping precision (Brown et al 2009), new standardised and precise project point technology (Shea 2006), microlithic and compound technology (Brown et al 2012), complex adhesives demanding an understanding of chemical reactions (Wadley, Hodgskiss, and Grant 2009), and poisons (d 'Errico et al 2012). Novel precise and standardised beadworking, interpreted as evidence of large-scale networks, appears in northernmost Africa at around 80,000 years ago (Bouzouggar et al 2007).…”