NYT: Earliest Jewelry

 

From the 23 June 2006 New York Times:

Old Shells Suggest Early Human Adornment

Archaeologists say they have found evidence that in one respect people were behaving like thoroughly modern humans as early as 100,000 years ago: they were apparently decorating themselves with a kind of status-defining jewelry -- the earliest known shell necklaces.

If this interpretation is correct, it means that human self-adornment, considered a manifestation of symbolic thinking, was practiced at least 25,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Jewelry was probably one of the earliest ways people conveyed aspects of their social and cultural identities.