82,000-year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of modern human behavior

Abstract

The first appearance of explicitly symbolic objects in the archaeological record marks a fundamental stage in the emergence of modern social behavior in Homo. Ornaments such as shell beads represent some of the earliest objects of this kind. We report on examples of perforated Nassarius gibbosulus shell beads from Grotte des Pigeons (Taforalt, Morocco), North Africa. These marine shells come from archaeological levels dated by luminescence and uranium-series techniques to approximately 82,000 years ago. They confirm evidence of similar ornaments from other less well dated sites in North Africa and adjacent areas of southwest Asia. The shells are of the same genus as shell beads from slightly younger levels at Blombos Cave in South Africa. Wear patterns on the shells imply that some of them were suspended, and, as at Blombos, they were covered in red ochre. These findings imply an early distribution of bead-making in Africa and southwest Asia at least 40 millennia before the appearance of similar cultural manifestations in Europe.

Fig. 1.

Schematic stratigraphy with the position of N. gibbosulus marine shell beads and dates. Bold lines indicate erosive unconformities at sediment group boundaries. Dashed lines indicate selected in-group bedding planes. Gray fill indicates principal floor speleothems. (A) Gray series including anthropogenic cut features (ashy stony beds). (B and C) Upper Laminated group including Yellow series (finely and continuously laminated silty to fine sandy loams and finest scree with some finer partings, cf. Raynal Niveaux 1–11), upper and lower subgroups. (D) Pink group (stony, patchily cemented loams, traces only of lamination but some scour structures, minor speleothem at summit, cf. Raynal Niveaux 12–15). (E) Lower Laminated group (coarsely laminated often ashy silty to sandy loams, cf. Raynal Niveaux 16–23). (F) Calcareous group (interstratified floor speleothem and clayey to sandy loams, cf. Raynal Niveaux 24–32?). Full dating details and superscripted serial numbers are given in SI Table 2. Numbers in brackets indicate that the values are problematical (see text). ▵, C¹⁴; □, OSL; ○, TL; ◇, uranium-series; ∗, Nassarius shells.

Fig. 2.

Bayesian age model results of the 13 OSL, TL, and uranium-series samples used to constrain the age of pierced Nassarius shells; numbers refer to the serial number for each sample in SI Table 5. The raw age distribution from each sample is shown with an open symbol, and the Bayesian age model distributions are shown with filled symbols. Boundaries indicate the analysis structure; up to four hierarchical levels of sequences and phases are indicated by the vertical lines at the left of the plot. The best age estimate for the main group of shells is provided by the boundary titled “Horizon Shell Beads.” All ages are shown in thousand years (kyr) before present.

Fig. 3.

Five aspects of the N. gibbosulus shells (nos. 1–13) from the Middle Paleolithic layers of the Grotte des Pigeons, Morocco, and a modern specimen (no. 14) of the same species from Djerba, Tunisia. Contextual and analytical data are provided in Table 1.

Fig. 4.

Width and parietal shield thickness (PST) of N. gibbosulus shells collected from modern biocoenosis at Djerba Island, Tunisia (A and C) and Grotte des Pigeons (B and D). Arrows indicate the width and PST of the N. gibbosulus from Skhul and Oued Djebbana.

Fig. 5.

Perforation types (Upper) recorded on the dorsal and the ventral sides of N. gibbosulus shells and their frequency (Lower) in a modern thanatocoenosis from Djerba, Tunisia, and the archaeological specimens from Taforalt.