Paleolithic Jewelry: Still Eye-catching After 50,000 Years

Ancient Origins

By Tamara Zubchuk | The Siberian Times
Beads made from ostrich eggs buried in the Siberian cave around 2,000 generations ago reveal amazing artistic (and drilling) skills of our long-ago ancestors.
The fascinating collection of jewelry made of ostrich eggshells is being assembled by archeologists working in the world famous Denisova cave in Altai region. Ostriches in Siberia? 50,000 years ago?
Yes, it seems so. Or, at least, their eggshells made it here somehow.
In a month that has seen disclosures of the fossil of a tropical parrot in Siberia from at least five million years ago in the Miocene era, this elegant Paleolithic chic shows that our deep history (some 2,000 generations ago, give or take) contains many unexpected surprises.
Pictured here are finds from a collection of beads in the Denisova cave, perfectly drilled, and archeologists say they have now found one more close by, with full details to be revealed soon in a scientific journal. They are in no doubt that the beads are between 45,000 and 50,000 years old in the Upper Paleolithic era, making them older than strikingly similar finds 11,500 kilometers away in South Africa.

Beads found inside Denisova Cave in the Altai mountains. Pictures: Maksim Kozlikin

Maksim Kozlikin, researcher at the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography, Novosibirsk, said of the Siberian ostrich egg beads: 'This is no ordinary find. Our team got quite excited when we found the bead.
'This is an amazing piece of work. The ostrich egg shell is quite robust material, but the holes in the beads must have been made with a fine stone drill.

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'For that time, we consider this to be an exquisite jewelry work of a very talented artist.'
The skills and techniques used some 45,000 to 50,000 years ago are remarkable and more akin to the Neolithic era, dozens of millennia later.
He believes the beads may have been sewn into clothing - or formed part of a bracelet or necklace.

The Denisova Cave. Pictures: Vera Salnitskaya

The latest discovery 'is one centimetre in diameter, with a hole inside that is slightly wider than a millimetre,' he said.
Yet he admits: 'As of now, there is much more that we do not know about these beads than we do know. For example, we do not know where the beads were made.
'One version is that the egg shells could have been exported from Trans-Baikal or Mongolia with the beads manufactured here.
'Another possibility is that the beads were purchased elsewhere and delivered to the Altai Mountains perhaps in an exchange.
'Whichever way we look at it, it shows that the people populating the Denisova Cave at the time were advanced in technologies and had very well-established contacts with the outside world.'

Denisova Cave marked on the world map. Picture: The Siberian Times

Today ostriches are an exotic import into a couple of areas in Siberia, but were they endemic 50,000 years ago, or were they brought from afar?
Kozlikin acknowledged there are far more questions than answers.
'We don't know if they (prehistoric people) decorated elements of men, or women, or children or their clothing with these beads,' he said. 'We do not know where the beads were sewn on the clothing, if they were. Did they only decorate wealthy members of society? Were they a sign of a special religious status, or did they signify that the person had more authority than the others?

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'How did the beads, or the material for them get to Siberia? How much did they cost?
'What we do know for sure is that the beads were found in the Denisova Cave's 'lucky' eleventh layer, the same one where we found the world's oldest bracelet made from rare dark green stone. All finds from that layer have been dated as being 45,000 to 50,000 years old.
'We had three other beads found in 2005, 2006 and 2008. All the beads were discovered lying within six metres in the excavation in the eastern gallery of the cave.
'We cannot say if they all belonged to one person, but visually these beads look identical.'

Ostich eggshell beads from Border Cave in South Africa, dated 44,856-41,010. Picture: Lucinda Backwell

Yet they also appear similar to ostrich egg beads found in an area called Border Cave in South Africa that have been dated up to 44,000 years old. The site is in the foothills of the Lebombo Mountains in KwaZulu-Natal.
Dr. Lucinda Backwell, senior researcher in the palaeo-anthropology department at Wits University, has previously highlighted how this African proto-civilisation 'adorned themselves with ostrich egg and marine shell beads'.
The Siberian beads is the latest discovery from the Denisova Cave which is possibly the finest natural repository of sequential early human history so far discovered anywhere on the planet.
The cave was occupied by Homo sapiens along with now extinct early humans - Neanderthals and Denisovans - for at least 288,000 years, and excavations have been underway here for three decades, with the prospect of many exciting finds to come in future.

Archeologists working inside the eastern gallery of the Denisova Cave. Pictures: The Siberian Times

In August, we revealed the discovery of the world's oldest needle in the cave - still useable after 50,000 years.
Crafted from the bone of an ancient bird, it was made not by Homo sapiens or even Neanderthals, but by Denisovans.
Professor Mikhail Shunkov, head of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk, said: 'It is the most unique find of this season, which can even be called sensational. It is a needle made of bone.
'As of today it is the most ancient needle in the word. It is about 50,000 years old.'

Denisova Cave, pictures by Vera Salnitskaya

The article ‘Paleolithic jewellery: still eye-catching after 50,000 years’ originally appeared on The Siberian Times and has been republished with permission

100,000-Year-Old Case of Brain Damage Discovered

By Tia Ghose

A Paleolithic child that died 100,000 years ago may have suffered from brain damage after an injury. Researchers used a 3D reconstruction (shown here) to reveal the compound fracture and surface changes inside the skull Credit: Coqueugniot H, Dutour O, Arensburg B, Duday H, Vandermeersch B, et al. (2014) Earliest Cranio-Encephalic Trauma from the Levantine Middle Palaeolithic: 3D Reappraisal of the Qafzeh 11 Skull, Consequences of Pediatric Brain Damage on Individual Life Condit

An ancient skeleton unearthed in Israel may contain the oldest evidence of brain damage in a modern human.
The child, who lived about 100,000 years ago, survived head trauma for several years, but suffered from permanent brain damage as a result, new 3D imaging reveals.
Given the brain damage, the child was likely unable to care for himself or herself, so people must have spent years looking after the little boy or girl, according to the researchers who analyzed the 3D images. People from the child's group left funerary objects in the youngster's burial pit as well, the study authors said

Those signs of care for a disabled person suggest that the roots of human compassion go way back, said Hélène Coqueugniot, an anthropologist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at the University of Bordeaux in France, and lead author of the study.
"It is some of the most ancient evidence of compassion and altruism," Coqueugniot said.
Young child
The child's skeleton was first uncovered decades ago in a cave site known as Qafzeh in Galilee, Israel, which also contained 27 partial skeletons and bone fragments, as well as stone tools and hearths. [See Images of the Damaged Skull and Skeleton]
The child, whose sex couldn't be determined, was found with a visible fracture in the skull and a pair of deer antlers placed across the chest.
The researchers wanted to know more about the damage to the child's skull, so they created a cast of the interior of it and then used computed tomography (CT) scanning to create a 3D picture of the head.
The images revealed that the child suffered a blunt-force trauma at the front of the skull that created a compound fracture, with a piece of bone depressed in the skull. It wasn't clear whether child abuse or an accident caused the injury, the researchers concluded.
In addition, tooth growth indicated that the youngster was 12 or 13 years old when he or she died, but the child's brain volume was more akin to that of a 6- or 7-year-old — likely because the head trauma permanently halted brain growth, Coqueugniot told Live Science.
The brain injury would have led to difficulties in controlling movements and speaking, as well as caused personality changes and impaired the child's social functioning, the researchers wrote in their study, which was published July 23 in the journal PLOS ONE.
Human compassion?
Yet despite the youngster's severe disability, he or she was apparently cared for, in life and in death. Despite lacking the ability to survive on his or her own, the Paleolithic child lived for several years after the head injury. And when the child died, someone wanted to honor his or her memory by placing the deer antlers in his or her burial — a funerary marker that wasn't found in any of the other burials at the site, Coqueugniot said.
"He was very, very special in this group, and he has a very, very special burial," Coqueugniot said.
The findings are not the oldest example of compassion and care for the disabled in a hominid; a 500,000-year-old fossil human from Sima de los Huesos in Spain shows signs of severe brain deformity starting at birth, but that child still lived to age 5, which mean someone cared for the child despite his or her disorder.
But the Qafzeh child reveals a striking example of compassion and care for the disabled in early modern humans, who are anatomically similar to humans today, said Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the department of human evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
It's not clear that head trauma caused brain development to halt, said Hublin, who was not involved in the study. "There is a large variation in brain size among humans, and this is perceptible already in infancy and childhood," Hublin told Live Science.
Therefore, the child may have simply have started out with a small brain, which would have remained relatively small as he or she grew, he said.
http://www.livescience.com/46955-ancient-brain-damage-unearthed.html