ART

The First Jewellery

~142,000 years ago or more

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Saalian glacial

Thirty-three small sea snail shells from Bizmoune Cave, in southwest Morocco, are the oldest known personal ornaments: perforated, worn, some stained with ochre, and at least 142,000 years old. The same two or three shell species were made into beads again and again across North Africa for tens of thousands of years, sometimes carried far inland, a remarkably stable fashion among Middle Stone Age groups.

Why it matters

A bead is a message. Unlike a tool, it does nothing except be seen: it signals who you are, to people distant enough to need telling. That such signals appear, then persist across a region for millennia, is read by many researchers as the visible surface of language-ready minds and of social networks wider than the band. Ornament, here, is information technology.

Dating & uncertainty

The Bizmoune beads come from deposits dated to at least 142,000 years by uranium-series on associated flowstone. Similar Tritia and Nassarius shell beads recur across North Africa and the Levant through the last interglacial; the habit is a horizon, not a single dated moment.

Sources

1. Sehasseh et al. (2021), Science Advances · Early Middle Stone Age personal ornaments from Bizmoune Cave, Essaouira, Moroccodoi:10.1126/sciadv.abi8620
2. d'Errico et al. (2009), PNAS · Additional evidence on the use of personal ornaments in the Middle Paleolithic of North Africadoi:10.1073/pnas.0903532106
3. Campmas et al. (2026), PLOS One · Aterian shell beads from the coastal site of El Mnasra Cave (Rabat-Temara, Morocco)doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0338785

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