The ancient man started wearing jewelry 40 thousand years ago:

According to American archaeologists, beads from shells and an ostrich egg shell indicate that man began to torture jewelry to create social connections

By: Tamara Traubman, Haaretz

American archaeologists who tried to find out why people started wearing jewelry, say that the practice arose as a result of a need for communication between people from different population groups, when meetings between such groups became more frequent. Their claim is based on chains about 40 years old, which were recently discovered at three different sites in Asia, Africa and Europe.

The research was presented at the recent conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Boston. According to the main author of the study, Dr. Mary Steiner from the University of Arizona in Tucson, "We see that jewelry began to appear more or less simultaneously, on three different continents. They became popular just as the human population grew, and began to spread outside its original territory. Then the likelihood that different groups would meet each other increased, and the need to mark group affiliation and social boundaries became even more important."

Dr. Steiner and her colleagues discovered that people who lived about 40 years ago in Africa, in the area where Kenya is today, wore beads and pendants made from ostrich eggshell. In archaeological sites in Turkey and Lebanon, it was found that people used to decorate themselves with necklaces made of shells.

In an interview with the BBC network, Dr. Steiner said that the ancient inhabitants of the Mediterranean basin region were quite picky about what they wore: "The main emphasis was on shell beads," she said. "These are small, very attractive marine shells, which they used to sort them according to sizes, and make necklaces made of shells of a similar size. Humans were very particular about what they chose.

"The jewelry indicates the group affiliation"

The jewelry, says Dr. Steiner, helped humans easily identify which people belong to their group, who are their suitable mates, and who has undergone an initiation ceremony that confers different social rights depending on age or sex.

According to Steiner, "This is still true today - whether it's a pearl necklace worn by Jackie Onassis or a seed necklace worn by a woman in Africa - ornaments say a lot about who you are, both as an individual and in terms of your group affiliation."

Steiner points out that the most likely possibility is that a sudden biological change in the brain occurred in only one place, while the decoration appeared simultaneously and independently in at least three different areas. She implies that the same relationship between the size of the population and jewelry exists even today - the more people are crowded into modern cities, the more elaborate their jewelry.

"The theory is possible and intriguing," said Dr. Frank Hall, an archaeologist from Yale University, to the scientific journal "Science." However, he noted that Steiner and her colleagues' claim is based on a combination of circumstances only. "There are other cases where people live together closely, and did not wear jewelry ", he said.

In the photo: pierced seashells that were used to make jewelry from Lebanon and Turkey. Photography - Or University

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