SOCIETY × ART

A Network of Beads

~50,000 to 33,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

Tiny discs ground from ostrich eggshell carry a fashion whose spread can still be traced: the same styles turn up in eastern and southern Africa, three thousand kilometres apart, from about 50,000 to 33,000 years ago, the oldest social network anyone has mapped. In highland Lesotho, strontium isotopes show beads arriving from distant, drier country for tens of millennia, tokens of a gift exchange that served as insurance, in the way the hxaro partnerships of the Kalahari still do.

Why it matters

A bead is a promise you can wear: these networks buffered foragers against drought and hunger by binding distant groups in obligation, social security invented tens of thousands of years before the state. Their reach, and the break that followed, in which climate seems to have had a hand, show that connection and disconnection have been shaping human genes and cultures since deep in the Pleistocene. The gift economy has a fossil record, and it is made of eggshell.

Dating & uncertainty

Comparing ostrich eggshell bead styles between eastern and southern Africa shows a single connected fashion from about 50,000 to 33,000 years ago, then a break that broadly coincides with a southward shift of the rain belt and the repeated flooding of the Zambezi catchment; the two regions stayed apart until herders arrived after 2,000 years ago. In highland Lesotho, strontium isotopes place the origin of many beads well outside the region, across more than 33,000 years.

Sources

1. Miller & Wang (2021), Nature · Ostrich eggshell beads reveal 50,000-year-old social network in Africadoi:10.1038/s41586-021-04227-2
2. Stewart et al. (2020), PNAS · Ostrich eggshell bead strontium isotopes reveal persistent macroscale social networking across late Quaternary southern Africadoi:10.1073/pnas.1921037117
3. d'Errico et al. (2012), PNAS · Early evidence of San material culture represented by organic artifacts from Border Cave, South Africadoi:10.1073/pnas.1204213109

Our species’ history as one day

20:11:253 h 49 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day