Science: News of the Week

ARCHAEOLOGY:
First Jewelry? Old Shell Beads Suggest Early Use of Symbols

Michael Balter

A high school ring, a string of pearls on Oscar night--how we decorate our bodies says a lot about who we are. Archaeologists think such symbolic communication marks the mental leap that made art and language possible. But when did it begin? On page 1785, researchers claim that three grape-sized shells from the Levant and North Africa were worn as beads 100,000 or more years ago. If true, this would push back the earliest evidence for symbolism by at least 25,000 years.

"This is an important and exciting contribution," says archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen in Norway. Two years ago, Henshilwood reported finding 75,000-year-old marine shell beads at Blombos Cave in South Africa, then the earliest claimed ornaments (Science, 16 April 2004, p. 369). Yet archaeologists who were skeptical about Blombos also question the new claim. "The evidence seems weak to me," says Richard Klein of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who has long argued that the symbolic explosion took place in Europe and Africa about 40,000 years ago.

The team, led by archaeologists Marian Vanhaeren of University College London and Francesco d'Errico of the research agency CNRS in Talence, France, found the beads in museum drawers. Two came from 1930s excavations at the Skhul rock shelter in Israel, where 10 burials of early Homo sapiens had been found. The other one came from the open-air site of Oued Djebbana in Algeria, excavated during the 1940s. Vanhaeren and d'Errico retrieved the shells and examined them for signs of use as ornaments.
All three suspected beads are shells of the marine snail Nassarius gibbosulus. Each has a distinctive type of indented perforation that turns up only rarely in reference collections. The team concluded that humans either made the holes or picked out perforated shells to string together as ornaments.

Recent dating of the Skhul burials has shown that they are 100,000 to 135,000 years old. (Oued Djebbana is poorly dated but is at least 35,000 years old and possibly much more.) To be sure that the Skhul shells came from the burial layer, Vanhaeren and d'Errico's team used scanning electron microscopy, x-ray diffraction, and chemical analysis to examine sediments stuck to one of the shells. The sediments matched those from the burial layer, suggesting that early modern humans did indeed create shell beads 100,000 or more years ago.

The team's findings are "particularly compelling evidence for symbolic use of the shells as beads," says anthropologist Alison Brooks of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Such personal ornaments, Henshilwood adds, are "expressions of modern cognitive abilities" and also indirect evidence "for the acquisition of articulate oral language." And because neither Skhul nor Oued Djebbana was very close to the sea, says Steven Kuhn, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, humans must have carried the small shells--which have almost no food value--to the sites for symbolic purposes.

Nevertheless, Kuhn cautions that the Skhul shells could have come from a younger stratigraphic layer and picked up older sediment after they "filtered down" into lower layers. And Klein argues that even if they are beads, such artifacts are so rare at sites older than 40,000 years that their interpretation as full-blown symbolic behavior remains "debatable." Yet some researchers think more evidence will turn up--and not just in museum drawers. Says Henshilwood: "I believe this is the tip of the iceberg."