76 Old Beads Hint at Dawn Of Culture

An international team of researchers identified grape-size shell beads dated between 100,000 and 135,000 years old as the world's oldest known jewelry. The finding pushes back the date that people started making adornments by at least 25,000 years.


Courtesy of Vanhaeren and d'Errico
The beads (right), made of perforated sea snail shells, were found in the 1930s and 1950s in Israel and Algeria but languished for decades in museum collections. Recently, Francesco d'Errico, director of research at France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and Marian Vanhaeren of University College London reexamined them and determined that the holes had been drilled by people, not by nature.

Many anthropologists have argued that around 40,000 years ago the human mind changed suddenly, developing abstract thought and the ability to use decorative objects. D'Errico's finding supports an alternate view: Art and body decoration may have arisen gradually, long before modern humans arrived in Europe. Symbolic-revolution proponents remain unconvinced. "It would take more than a few shell beads to decide the issue," says Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist in Germany.


Andrew Curry

Read about Turkey's oldest known civilization.

78 Mongolian Ice Yields Scythian Mummy

Last summer an international team of researchers led by Hermann Parzinger of the German Archaeological Institute recovered a 2,200-year-old Scythian male mummy from permafrost on the Mongolian highlands. The mummy—so well preserved that tattoos are still visible on its skin—offers rare insight into a nomadic culture that once stretched from China to the outskirts of the classical world.

Herodotus, the Greek historian, reported details of Scythian lifestyle, skill in battle, and hallucinogenic religious rituals. The mummy had all the hallmarks of a rich Scythian. It wore felt boots, a fur cloak, and a gold-covered wooden headdress that bore unusual carvings of horses with antlers. Likely an important warrior, the man was found in a wooden chamber underneath a large stone mound. At some point long ago, water seeped through the stones and froze, insulating the grave and forming an ice block that saved most of the body from decay. "The ice block preserved almost all the organic material," Parzinger says.

Andrew Curry

84 Did Figs Beget Agriculture?


Courtesy of Vanhaeren and d'Errico
Experts long thought the first domesticated plants were grains bred from wild grasses in Syria and Turkey around 10,500 years ago. But new research by archaeobotanist Mordechai Kislev and colleagues at Bar-Ilan University in Israel has pushed that date back more than a millennium and pegged the fig as the first crop. The evidence—burned figs found in the 1970s at a dig near Jericho—sat unexamined in a museum for decades. Dated at 11,400 years old, the figs (above) are much smaller than modern ones. Kislev recalled them when he saw similar cultivated figs in a London market. Closer analysis revealed that the ancient figs were seedless. Seedless fig trees, like common modern bananas, could not reproduce without human help, Kislev reasons: "Fig trees could have been the first domesticated plant of the Neolithic Revolution."

Andrew Curry