Perforated shells discovered in a limestone cave in eastern Morocco are the oldest adornments ever found and show humans used symbols in Africa 40,000 years before Europe, the kingdom’s government said.
The small oval Nassarius mollusk shells, some dyed with red ochre, were probably pierced to be strung into necklaces or bracelets 82,000 years ago.
“This classes the adornments in Pigeon’s Cave at Taforalt as older than those discovered previously in Algeria, South Africa and Palestine,” the Culture Ministry said in a statement.
The find represents “a big step in the understanding of cultural innovations and the role they played in human history,” the ministry said.
An earlier find, reported in the journal Science, focused on shells that researchers said were as much as 100,000 years old. However, the dating of those artifacts required some guesswork on the part of the research time.
Morocco has yielded important prehistoric finds, including one of the oldest-known dinosaur skeletons, but little is known of the humans that inhabited the region before Berber farmers settled more than 2,000 years ago.
The shells were found and dated by a team of scientists from Morocco, Britain, France and Germany trying to find out how climate and landscape change affected human behavior between 130,000 and 13,000 years ago.
The work is part of a broader study into whether the Strait of Gibraltar dividing Morocco from Spain acted as a corridor or a barrier for early humans trying to move between Africa and Europe.
