Indications of Civilization...

I can't sleep and am doing some light reading. Here is an article about beads and civilization:

Tiny African Shells May Be Oldest Beads
by John Noble Wilford

It was a long time ago and far away from Tiffany. But even then, 75,000 years ago in a cave in southern Africa, people apparently had a mind to make a statement about themselves with jewelry, some 30,000 years earlier than any previously identified personal ornaments used by human ancestors.

At least that is what archaeologists have concluded after finding an array of tiny shells pierced with holes, as if prepared for stringing as primeval beads. The 41 pea-size shell beads were uncovered in clusters arranged by their similar sizes and shades, each cluster probably representing a single piece of jewelry.

If these are indeed remains of strings of beads, the discoverers reported last week in the journal Science, they represent the oldest well-dated examples of people making and wearing jewelry. This is further evidence, they said, that these people had a language capable of sharing the symbolic meanings of these objects.

In short, people may have been thinking and acting long before it has been generally supposed.
The shell beads were described in the report by a team of scientists led by Dr. Christopher S. Henshilwood, a South African archaeologist affiliated with the University of Bergen in Norway and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The discovery was made at Blombos Cave on the shore of Cape Town.

Two years ago, Dr. Henshilwood reported finding other evidence of possibly complex symbolic thinking by the inhabitants of Blombos Cave, including abstract engravings and finely worked bone tools and weapon points.

Not all scholars agreed with the interpretation that these first artifacts were expressions of a modern type of creativity. The recent discovery also has cautious skeptics. Several archaeologists said they were not convinced that the shells were actually beads.

Until now, the earliest undisputed African personal ornaments were 13 ostrich eggshell beads from Kenya, dated at 40,000 to 45,000 years ago. Other evidence includes 43,000 year old perforated teeth from Blugaria and 41,000-year-old marine beads from Turkey.

Last month, scientists reported finding more ostrich eggshell beads in the Serengeti National Park of Tanzania. Their bead like nature is widely accepted, but their age is undetermined. One tentative estimate of 70,000 years for the eggshell beads appears to strengthen the case for emergent modern behavior among Africans well before the burst of artistic and creativity that swept Europe, beginning about 40,000 years ago.

From the cave art evidence, scholars have usually inferred that the transition to modern human behavior occurred late and rather abruptly. Dr. Richard G. Klein, a Stanford paleoanthropologist, has proposed that this "creative explosion" probably stemmed from a genetic change that also enhanced human speech.

The shell beads of Blombos Cave were from a small snail-like mollusk, Nassarius kraussianus. The people must have brought them from rivers more than 10 miles away. They were too tiny to be dinner leftovers, Dr. Henshilwood's team said, and could not have been brought there by animals. Their only known predators could not leave water.
In their report, the archaeologists said a microscopic analysis showed the use-wear pattern of the shells to be "consistent with friction from rubbing against thread, clothes or other beads."

So the Blombos people, it seems, invested in the shell of a common snail something of their mind and spirit, perhaps to project relationships, status and self-image. It was their pearl and their gold.