- More on Ancient Beads -

I just love these articles, like this one from the New Scientist:

Archaeologists have discovered that 100,000-year-old shells found in Israel and Algeria were decorative beads. This suggests that modern human forms of behaviour, such as language, developed earlier than previously thought.

"Personal ornaments are a powerful tool of communication," says Francesco D’Errico at the Institute of the Prehistory and Geology of the Quaternary in Talence, France, one of the team that studied the beads. "They can indicate social or marital status, for example. But you need to have a complex system of language behind that. To me [these beads] are very powerful archaeological evidence that these people were able to speak like us."

Cyberbeader

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