© Bar-Yosef Mayer et al/Plos One/PA Wire
Photo of shells from Qafzeh Cave in Israel. Humans living around 120,000 years ago collected shells with holes in them and strung them together as beads, scientists have discovered.
People living on the Israeli coast 120,000 years ago strung ocher-painted seashells on flax string, according to a recent study in which archaeologists examined microscopic traces of wear inside naturally occurring holes in the shells.
That may shed some light on when people first invented string — which hints at the invention of things like clothes, fishing nets, and maybe even seafaring.
Seashells by the seashore
Picking up seashells has been a human habit for almost as long as there have been humans. Archaeologists found clam shells mingled with other artifacts in Israel's Misliya Cave, buried in sediment layers dating from 240,000 to 160,000 years ago. The shells clearly weren't the remains of Paleolithic seafood dinners; their battered condition meant they'd washed ashore after their former occupants had died.
For some reason, ancient people picked them up and took them home.
Shell collectors at Misliya seemed to like mostly intact shells, and there's no sign that they decorated or modified their finds. But 40,000 years later and 40km (25 miles) away, people at Qafzeh Cave seemed to prefer collecting clam shells with little holes near their tops. The holes were natural damage from scraping along the seafloor, but people used them to string the shells together to make jewelry or decorations. Tel-Aviv University archaeologist Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer and her colleagues examined five shells from Qafzeh and found microscopic striations around the edges of the holes — marks that suggest the shells once hung on a string.
Archaeologists even have a good idea of what that 120,000-year-old jewelry looked like. Wear marks around the holes suggest hanging on a string, and other wear marks on the edges of the shells suggest that the shells rubbed against each other, so they probably hung close together. And four of the shells still carried traces of red ocher pigment. The only thing missing is also the most interesting piece: the string.
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