World's oldest Jewels - discovered in Morocco

Photo credit: Ian Cartwright, Institute of Archaeology, Oxford University

"The beads themselves comprise 12 Nassarius shells - Nassarius are molluscs found in warm seas and coral reefs in America, Asia and the Pacific - which had holes in them and appeared to have been suspended or hung. They were covered in red ochre."

Grotte des Pigeons

Abdeljalil Bouzouggar, from the Moroccan Institut National des Sciences de l'Archéologie et du Patrimoine. (Institute of Archaeology), and colleagues found the shells in the Grotte des Pigeons, a limestone cave in eastern Morocco, alongside burnt stone remains in well-layered soil. An Institute of Archaeology team from Oxford University has been working with their Moroccan colleagues on the site for some time. The beads are thought to be 84,000 to 86,000 years old.

The twenty handmade beads, discovered at the Grotte des Pigeons, in the region of Taforalt, and are thought to be the world's oldest jewels although similar beads have been found at sites in Algeria, Israel and South Africa which are thought to date back to around the same time or slightly after the finds from Taforalt.


The team has also uncovered similar shells at other sites in Morocco and are currently awaiting dating results.

These beads are even older than a dozen of ornamental beads, which were discovered in the cave in 2003. Institute director Prof Nick Barton said: "Bead-making in Africa was a widespread practice at the time, which was spread between cultures with different stone technology by exchange or by long-distance social networks.

The shells come from a genus of marine snail called Nassarius, which is not found along the Moroccan shoreline today. The nearest place where the snails live is an island off Tunisia that lies more than 800 miles (1,280 kilometers) away.

"It is possible that these beads were brought here from Tunisia and were very special objects," Barton said.

"A major question in evolutionary studies today is 'how early did humans begin to think and behave in ways we would see as fundamentally modern?' "The appearance of ornaments such as these may be linked to a growing sense of self-awareness and identity among humans and cultural innovations must have played a large role in human development."

"Shells from other sites may turn out to be even older," Barton said, "and we may well be looking at ornamentation beyond a hundred thousand years ago." Prof Barton said the finds suggest that humans were making purely symbolic objects 40,000 years before they did it in Europe.

The team has also discovered five children's graves, which date back to 12,000 years.


Tags: Moroccan Morocco Fes, Maghreb news