SOCIETY × ART
The Ostrich Eggshell Bead Network
~50,000 to 33,000 years ago
Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial
Between about 50,000 and 33,000 years ago, ostrich eggshell beads of shared styles linked eastern and southern Africa, three thousand kilometres apart.
The ostrich eggshell bead network designates a set of ornament styles shared between eastern and southern Africa, three thousand kilometres apart, between about 50,000 and 33,000 years ago. It constitutes the oldest exchange network whose diffusion has been mapped. Highland Lesotho documents the transport: the strontium contained in a shell comes from the ground on which the ostrich fed, transmitted through the plants consumed, and its isotopic composition varies with the geological substrate, so that the isotopes indicate a region of origin. Beads reached the highlands in this way from distant and more arid country over tens of millennia.
Why it matters
These circulations are interpreted as the vehicle of reciprocal obligations between distant groups, providing a form of compensation in case of drought or local shortage, on the model of the hxaro partnerships documented among Kalahari populations. Their extent, and their subsequent interruption, to which climate appears to have contributed, indicate that connection and disconnection between populations shape genetic and cultural diversity from the Pleistocene onwards.
Dating & uncertainty
Comparison of styles between the two regions establishes a connected fashion between about 50,000 and 33,000 years ago, followed by a break broadly coinciding with the southward displacement of the rain belt and repeated flooding of the Zambezi catchment; the separation persists until the arrival of pastoral populations, less than 2,000 years ago. In Lesotho, strontium isotopes place the origin of many beads outside the region, over a span exceeding 33,000 years.
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