ART

Bizmoune Cave: the Oldest Beads

~142,000 years ago or more

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Saalian glacial

In Bizmoune Cave, in Morocco, thirty-three perforated shells at least 142,000 years old make up the oldest known set of ornaments.

Bizmoune Cave, near Essaouira in south-west Morocco, has yielded thirty-three perforated marine gastropod shells that constitute the oldest known ornaments, dated to at least 142,000 years. Several bear traces of ochre. The criterion distinguishing a bead from food waste is the perforation and the wear surrounding it: prolonged rubbing by a cord produces a smoothed facet there that consumption does not create. The same two or three species were made into beads over tens of thousands of years across North Africa, and sometimes carried far inland, documenting a practice of remarkable constancy among Middle Stone Age groups.

Why it matters

An ornament differs from a tool in having no mechanical function and existing only to be seen: it conveys information about its wearer to interlocutors distant enough for that information to require signalling. The appearance of such signs, and their maintenance over millennia at a regional scale, is interpreted by many authors as evidence of cognitive capacities compatible with language and of social networks extending beyond the local group.

Dating & uncertainty

The Bizmoune beads come from deposits dated to at least 142,000 years by the uranium-series method applied to the associated stalagmitic floors. This is a minimum age, the calcite having formed above the layer and therefore establishing only that the beads are older. Comparable ornaments, made from the same small marine gastropods, designated Nassarius in the older literature and Tritia today, occur across North Africa and the Levant during the last interglacial: the practice constitutes a horizon rather than a dated event.

Our species’ history as one day

13:10:5110 h 49 min before midnight

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