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Latest News [ Back To News Index ] For more news articles click the News Index link above. Collection of 41 perforated Shell Beads from the Middle Stone Age The remarkable discovery of a collection of 41 perforated shell beads from the Middle Stone Age at the Blombos Cave site near Cape Town, South Africa, has been dated at 75,000 BP, making them 30,000 years older than the cave paintings of Chauvet in the Ardeche area of France.  The beads were found in clusters, the largest of which contained 17 shells, and appear to have been selected for size. The snail is called Nassurius kraussianus and is found in estuaries. It is possible that the holes are not truly man-made as there are no tool traces on the surface of the shell. However, the shells carry traces of red ochre and show similar patterns of wear suggesting that they were strung together and worn as a bead necklace. The ochre could either have been painted on the shells deliberately or rubbed on when the necklace was worn against a human breast that had been daubed with ochre paint mixed with fat. Chris Henshilwood, director of the Blombos Cave Project, states "the shells provide powerful evidence for modern thought and the earliest storage of information outside the human brain.The wearing of a necklace indicates symbolically organised behaviour suggesting that the people who made them 75,000-years-ago were able to communicate using a detailed and precise language. Once symbolically mediated behaviour was adopted by our ancestors it meant communication strategies rapidly shifted, leading to the transmission of individual and widely shared cultural values, traits that typify our own behaviour". Homo sapiens became anatomically modern about 160,000-years-ago and the Blombos discoveries point towards our brains having acquired the capacity to think in abstract ways at least 75,000-years-ago. Comment by Bradshaw Foundation Coordinator John Robinson Estuary feeding birds open snail shell by breaking them open in exactly the same spot as the Thrushes open garden snails today. Oyster catchers are professional mollusc openers. Other types of predators bore holes drilled in shells and our sea beaches are littered with clam shells pierced in this way. The Blombos snails could have been food to a variety of predators and then collected from a beach by modern humans. Whether the holes were man-made or not is not as important as the evidence of similar wear patterns, suggesting a necklace, with the red ochre residue remaining on the surface. [ Back To News Index ] |
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