75,000-year-old

jewellery discovered

A find of shell jewellery in Blombos Cave in South Africa provides new evidence that “modern man” came from Africa.

The discovery, which was made by Chris Henshilwood of the Centre for Development Studies, was announced in the journal “Science” in 2004.

Archaeologists found 41 shells that look like small beads pierced with holes. With the aid of a unique dating, they have come to the conclusion that the shells are about 75,000 years old, i.e. some 30,000 years earlier than any previously recognised personal adornments.

Using symbols

Blombos Cave lies in the De Hoop Nature Reserve on the east coast of South Africa, about four hours’ drive from Cape Town, where Henshilwood has already made some remarkable discoveries. Bone implements and parts of abstract engravings presented in 2002 reinforced the theory that not only anatomically modern humans but “modern man” had their origins in Africa . Even though there is no longer any doubt that the anatomically modern Homo sapiens originated in Africa between 300,000 and 150,000 years ago, it has been widely assumed that modern behavioural traits developed for the first time in Europe about 40,000 years ago. The finding of these 75,000-year-old personal adornments provides yet more evidence to the contrary.

“This indicates that people were already using symbols in the same way as we do, as a communication strategy. We might say that the bead jewellery is the earliest evidence of storage of information outside the human brain,” maintains Henshilwood.

New dating method

The shells, which were found in clusters of up to seventeen beads, are from a tiny mollusc known as Nassarius kraussanius which lives in river mouths and must have been brought from a nearby river 20 km either east or west of the cave where they were found. The shells seem to have been selected on the basis of size, and the holes that turned them into beads were probably made on the spot, before they were brought to the cave. Traces of red ochre suggest that the shells, or a surface that they had been in contact with, were coated in this widely used pigment.

Chris Henshilwood mentions the technique known as Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL), the new, highly accurate method used to date the shells.

“Put simply, we can say that we have stimulated the grains of sand that surrounded these objects by means of a special light source in the laboratory, causing them to release the energy that they absorbed when they were exposed to sunlight. Measuring this energy in thousands of individual grains has enabled us to establish with a fair degree of precision that the sand has been buried for 75,000 years”

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