Early Middle Stone Age personal ornaments from Bizmoune Cave, Essaouira, Morocco

Abstract

Ornaments such as beads are among the earliest signs of symbolic behavior among human ancestors. Their appearance signals important developments in both cognition and social relations. This paper describes and presents contextual information for 33 shell beads from Bizmoune Cave (southwest Morocco). Many of the beads come as deposits dating to ≥142 thousand years, making them the oldest shell beads yet recovered. They extend the dates for the first appearance of this behavior into the late Middle Pleistocene. The ages and ubiquity of beads in Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites in North Africa provide further evidence of the potential importance of these artifacts as signals of identity. The early and continued use of Tritia gibbosula and other material culture traits also suggest a remarkable degree of cultural continuity among early MSA Homo sapiens groups across North Africa.

A late Middle Pleistocene Middle Stone Age sequence identified at Wadi Lazalim in southern Tunisia

“…170 43 . The late Middle Pleistocene in this region also features early occurrences of the Aterian at Ifri n’Ammar at ca.145 43 ka and at Bizmoune cave ≥ 142 ka 44 .…”

“…Along with scrapers, end-scrapers, denticulates, retouched points, the assemblages revealed Levallois point reduction, backed pieces and a crudely tanged artefact standing among the main distinguishing features, for they are very infrequently found in late Middle Pleistocene North African contexts 6 . Backed pieces from site 15/1 could find some parallels at a similar chronological framework with the Sangoan and Lupemban tranchets at Sai 8-B-11 29 , 48 , while the earliest North African tangs from Ifri N’Ammar 43 and Bizmoune Cave 44 would postdate the one found at Wadi Lazalim 15/1.…”

Language, Childhood, and Fire: How We Learned to Love Sharing Stories

“…The degree to which sapiens but no other hominins can mark individuals as members of a particular cultural group is shaped by the ability of humans to narrativize information into stories. If the cultural and biological evolution of Homo sapiens in Africa occurred as a mosaic of local developments (Scerri et al, 2018;Sehasseh et al, 2021), language might be assumed to have evolved from a signaling tool into the hominin ability to understand intentions of others and further into understanding others as mental agents holding complex beliefs and norms.…”

Animals for Tools: The Origin and Development of Bone Technologies in China

“…The distribution of each type presents a marked pattern of regionalization with bone knives and smoothers found in Northeast Africa (Bouzouggar et al, 2018;Hallett et al, 2021), barbed points in Central Africa (Yellen, 1998), and awls, wedges and hunting implements in South Africa (Henshilwood et al, 2001;d'Errico and Henshilwood, 2007;d'Errico et al, 2012a;Bradfield et al, 2020). In Africa, the emergence of formal bone tools is broadly contemporaneous with the appearance of personal ornaments (d 'Errico et al, 2005;d'Errico et al, 2008;d'Errico et al, 2009;Vanhaeren et al, , 2019Bouzouggar et al, 2007;Bar-Yosef Mayer et al, 2009;Val et al, 2020), although recent discoveries from Bizmoune Cave, Morocco, indicates personal ornaments may have been manufactured up to 50 millennia prior to the first bone tools in this particular region (Sehasseh et al, 2021). Interestingly, both personal ornaments and formal bone tools disappear from the African archaeological record c. 60 ka.…”