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

Abdeljalil Bouzouggar; Nick Barton; Marian Vanhaeren; Francesco d'Errico; Simon Collcutt; Tom Higham; Edward Hodge; Simon Parfitt; Edward Rhodes; Jean-Luc Schwenninger; Chris Stringer; Elaine Turner; Steven Ward; Abdelkrim Moutmir; Abdelhamid Stambouli

doi:10.1073/pnas.0703877104

Communicated by Erik Trinkaus, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, April 28, 2007 (received for review March 23, 2007)

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 ≈82,000 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.

Footnotes

^cTo whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: nick.barton{at}arch.ox.ac.uk
Author contributions: A.B., N.B., M.V., F.d., S.C., and C.S. designed research; A.B., N.B., M.V., F.d., S.C., T.H., E.H., S.P., E.R., J.-L.S., C.S., E.T., S.W., A.M., and A.S. performed research; A.B., N.B., M.V., F.d., S.C., T.H., E.H., S.P., E.R., J.-L.S., C.S., E.T., S.W., A.M., and A.S. analyzed data; and A.B., N.B., M.V., F.d., S.C., E.H., S.P., E.R., J.-L.S., C.S., E.T., and S.W. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0703877104/DC1.
Abbreviations:
MSA,
Middle Stone Age;
OSL,
optically stimulated luminescence;
TL,
thermoluminescence.
© 2007 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA