Some of the twelve shell beads dated to 82,000 years ago that were discovered in Morocco.

Credit: Ian Cartwright

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SYDNEY: The oldest undisputed decorative seashells ever found – dating back 82,000 years – have been discovered in a cave in Morocco. They push back the earliest known date of human use of symbolism.

The shells were found near Berkane in the east of the country, said Abdeljalil Bouzouggar a researcher at the Morocco's National Institute for Archaeological Sciences.

Until recently no such shell decorations older than 50,000 years were thought to exist in Africa. Though in 2002 the discovery in South Africa of perforated shells dating back 75,000 years had "shaken" that view, said Bouzouggar.

Ancient culture

In 2004 researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway reported evidence that these 75,000 year old shells had been worn as jewellery. They argued in the U.S. journal Science that human culture, including complex symbolism and even language, dated back to this time too.

Now the Moroccan find pushes back the potential age of human language and culture even further.

"In 2003 in Morocco we first discovered a single perforated shell, but we worked for four years to arrive at a dozen of the Nassarius gibbolosus (sea-shell) type," said Bouzouggar.

"The perforated shells have a red-ochre colour which they did not originally possess and which was applied to them by the men of that era," he added. "On most of the perforated shells we have observed a slight degree of wear in a position that lends support to the idea that they were worn in a collar round the neck."

The international team behind the find was led by Nick Barton, a researcher from the University of Oxford in England. They publish their findings this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

The researchers discovered the shells at Pigeons' Cave at Taforalt, 20 km from the city of Berkane and subsequently used four different dating systems to confirm their antiquity. These gave the same result – an age of around 82,500 years.

"A major question in evolutionary studies today is 'how early did humans begin to think and behave in ways we would see as fundamentally modern?'," said Barton. "The appearance of ornaments such as these may be linked to a growing sense of self-awareness and identity among humans, and cultural innovations must have played a large role in human development."

Older evidence

London's Natural History Museum in the U.K. last year dated some shell beads discovered in the 1930s at 100,000 years of age. However, this evidence was questioned by some experts as there are only two shells and they are from an over 70-year old excavation, said the museum's Chris Stringer.

"There are many more of the [shells in the] new finds, they have been found during recent excavations, and the sediments containing them have been directly dated," added Stringer, a human origins expert and part of the international team behind the find.

"For me these new finds settle the question whether there was widespread symbolic behaviour by early modern humans by 75,000 years ago." He said.

"It's great to find more early evidence of human symbolic behaviour," commented Peter Brown palaeoanthropologist at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia.

Brown says there is even some evidence of the use of ochre paint in some parts of Africa that dates back to beyond 100,000 years ago, so he wouldn't be surprised if even older jewellery was yet to be discovered.