Re: [asa] Fwd: Adornment history

Here's the review article from Science:

A high school ring, a string of pearls on Oscar night--how we decorate
our bodies says a lot about who we are. Archaeologists think such
symbolic communication marks the mental leap that made art and
language possible. But when did it begin? On page 1785, researchers
claim that three grape-sized shells from the Levant and North Africa
were worn as beads 100,000 or more years ago. If true, this would push
back the earliest evidence for symbolism by at least 25,000 years.

"This is an important and exciting contribution," says archaeologist
Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen in Norway. Two
years ago, Henshilwood reported finding 75,000-year-old marine shell
beads at Blombos Cave in South Africa, then the earliest claimed
ornaments (Science, 16 April 2004, p. 369). Yet archaeologists who
were skeptical about Blombos also question the new claim. "The
evidence seems weak to me," says Richard Klein of Stanford University
in Palo Alto, California, who has long argued that the symbolic
explosion took place in Europe and Africa about 40,000 years ago.

The team, led by archaeologists Marian Vanhaeren of University College
London and Francesco d'Errico of the research agency CNRS in Talence,
France, found the beads in museum drawers. Two came from 1930s
excavations at the Skhul rock shelter in Israel, where 10 burials of
early Homo sapiens had been found. The other one came from the
open-air site of Oued Djebbana in Algeria, excavated during the 1940s.
Vanhaeren and d'Errico retrieved the shells and examined them for
signs of use as ornaments.

All three suspected beads are shells of the marine snail Nassarius
gibbosulus. Each has a distinctive type of indented perforation that
turns up only rarely in reference collections. The team concluded that
humans either made the holes or picked out perforated shells to string
together as ornaments.

Recent dating of the Skhul burials has shown that they are 100,000 to
135,000 years old. (Oued Djebbana is poorly dated but is at least
35,000 years old and possibly much more.) To be sure that the Skhul
shells came from the burial layer, Vanhaeren and d'Errico's team used
scanning electron microscopy, x-ray diffraction, and chemical analysis
to examine sediments stuck to one of the shells. The sediments matched
those from the burial layer, suggesting that early modern humans did
indeed create shell beads 100,000 or more years ago.

The team's findings are "particularly compelling evidence for symbolic
use of the shells as beads," says anthropologist Alison Brooks of
George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Such personal
ornaments, Henshilwood adds, are "expressions of modern cognitive
abilities" and also indirect evidence "for the acquisition of
articulate oral language." And because neither Skhul nor Oued Djebbana
was very close to the sea, says Steven Kuhn, an archaeologist at the
University of Arizona in Tucson, humans must have carried the small
shells--which have almost no food value--to the sites for symbolic
purposes.

Nevertheless, Kuhn cautions that the Skhul shells could have come from
a younger stratigraphic layer and picked up older sediment after they
"filtered down" into lower layers. And Klein argues that even if they
are beads, such artifacts are so rare at sites older than 40,000 years
that their interpretation as full-blown symbolic behavior remains
"debatable." Yet some researchers think more evidence will turn
up--and not just in museum drawers. Says Henshilwood: "I believe this
is the tip of the iceberg."

On 6/23/06, Charles Carrigan <CCarriga@olivet.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> Anyone seen this article and able to comment on its validity?
>
> Best Regards,
> Charles
>
> _______________________________
> Charles W. Carrigan, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor of Geology
> Olivet Nazarene Univ., Dept. of Physical Sciences
> One University Ave.
> Bourbonnais, IL 60914
> PH: (815) 939-5346
> FX: (815) 939-5071
> ccarriga@olivet.edu
> http://geology.olivet.edu/
>
> "To a naturalist nothing is indifferent;
> the humble moss that creeps upon the stone
> is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the
> valley or the mountain:
> but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of the rocks the annals of a
> former world,
> the mossy covering which obstructs his view,
> and renders indistinguishable the different species of stone,
> is no less than a serious subject of regret."
> - James Hutton
> _______________________________
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Max Reams" <MReams@olivet.edu>
> To: "Aaron Covey" <acovey@olivet.edu>, "Alyse Frank" <afrank@olivet.edu>,
> "Brock Schroeder" <BSchroed@olivet.edu>, "Charles Carrigan"
> <CCarriga@olivet.edu>, "Carin Hoffmann" <choffma1@olivet.edu>, "David
> Taylor" <dtaylor1@olivet.edu>, "David VanHeemst" <DVHeemst@olivet.edu>,
> "Georgia English" <genglish@olivet.edu>, "Jorden Cupp" <jcupp@olivet.edu>,
> "Joseph Robertson" <jrobert1@olivet.edu>, "Jonathan Rubin"
> <jrubin@olivet.edu>, "Kevin Brewer" <kbrewer2@olivet.edu>, "LaDonna
> Schisler" <lschisle@olivet.edu>, "Monica Nontell" <mnontell@olivet.edu>,
> "Max Reams" <MReams@olivet.edu>, "Polly Root" <proot@olivet.edu>, "Priscilla
> Skalac" <pskalac@olivet.edu>, "Ryan Alexander" <ralexan1@olivet.edu>,
> "Robert Hegna" <rhegna@olivet.edu>, "Stephen Hollenberg"
> <shollenb@olivet.edu>, "Susan Leib" <sleib@olivet.edu>, "Stephen Lowe"
> <SLowe@olivet.edu>, "Timothy Eddy" <teddy@olivet.edu>, "Theodore Lausted"
> <tlausted@olivet.edu>, "William Dean" <WDean@olivet.edu>
> Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:06:55 -0500
> Subject: Adornment history
>
> Old Shells Suggest Early Human Adornment
> from the New York Times (Registration Required)
>
> 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.
>
> An international team of archaeologists, writing today in the journal
> Science, reported its analysis of small shells with distinctive perforations
> that appeared to have been strung together as ornamental beads. Chemical
> study showed that the two shells from the Skhul rock shelter in Israel were
> more than 100,000 years old, and the single shell from Oued Djebbana, in
> Algeria, was about 90,000 years old.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/science/23shell.html
>
> http://tinyurl.com/lcmk6
>
>
>
>
>
>

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Received on Fri Jun 23 18:31:48 2006