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120,000-year-old necklace tells of the origin of string:
People living on the Israeli coast 120,000 years ago strung ocher-painted seashells on flax string, according to a recent study in which archaeologists examined microscopic traces of wear inside naturally occurring holes in the shells. That may shed some light on when people first invented string—which hints at the invention of things like clothes, fishing nets, and maybe even seafaring.
[...] Shell collectors at Misliya seemed to like mostly intact shells, and there’s no sign that they decorated or modified their finds. But 40,000 years later and 40km (25 miles) away, people at Qafzeh Cave seemed to prefer collecting clam shells with little holes near their tops. The holes were natural damage from scraping along the seafloor, but people used them to string the shells together to make jewelry or decorations. Tel-Aviv University archaeologist Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer and her colleagues examined five shells from Qafzeh and found microscopic striations around the edges of the holes—marks that suggest the shells once hung on a string.
Archaeologists even have a good idea of what that 120,000-year-old jewelry looked like. Wear marks around the holes suggest hanging on a string, and other wear marks on the edges of the shells suggest that the shells rubbed against each other, so they probably hung close together. And four of the shells still carried traces of red ocher pigment. The only thing missing is also the most interesting piece: the string.
To find that missing piece, Bar-Yosef Mayer and her colleagues collected some seashells of their own. The archaeologists rubbed their modern clam shells against sand, wood, clay, stone, leather, reeds, and several different kinds of fibers, and then they used a scanning electron microscope to examine the patterns of pits, polishing, and striations left behind. They even made strings of wild flax and hung shells—with natural holes—on them, then examined the resulting wear marks under a microscope.
The tiny marks left behind by a flax string rubbing against the edges of the hole looked just like the marks on the Qafzeh shells. Even though the string itself didn’t survive, the wear marks on the shells reveal its presence.
Journal Reference:
Daniella E. Bar-Yosef Mayer, Iris Groman-Yaroslavski, Ofer Bar-Yosef, et al. On holes and strings: Earliest displays of human adornment in the Middle Palaeolithic, PLOS ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0234924)
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @03:02PM (6 children)
"People living on the Israeli coast 120,000 years ..."
120,000 years ago there was no Israel and there was no Israeli coast.
That makes about as much sense as claiming that clam digging Indians living along the coast of western North America were really early Californians.
Nice archeology but covering it up with a smear of political chauvinism just makes the whole article look cheap.
To put it all into perspective, in a hundred years the phrase "Israeli coast" probably will make about as much sense as the phrase "Ottoman coast".
Now the Jews are going to claim that they invented string.
Wrong! Nature invented fibers.
~childo
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @03:54PM
true. and the mayans didn't live in South America because Amerigo Vespucci wasn't born yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @04:50PM
Such an awesome name, great choice for someone who clearly needs to grow up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @05:44PM (2 children)
That's like saying 120,000 years ago there was no Earth, because they weren't calling it "Earth".
I think you're just looking to pick a fight over the Israel-Palestine issue, whereas the people who wrote TFA were just trying to tell us where they found things.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 14 2020, @08:41PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 14 2020, @08:54PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory_of_the_Levant#Palaeolithic_period_%281,400,000_-_20,000_BCE%29
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @01:09PM
I disagree, the term Isreali coast tells me we are talking about a line a few hundred miles long, the Ottoman coast means we could be talking about the entire Black sea or a significant part of the Mediterranean.
Do you complain about people claiming that humanity sprung from African because now Africans might claim they are the font of humanity?
We have names for things, including places, the fact that the places might outlive their names (or predate them) is immaterial to the discussion. The point is to tell people what you are talking about, the Isreali Coast does precisely that.
This isn't like the change from AD/BC to CE/BCE which was done to make non-christians feel less uncomfortable. This is a name you can give people and 90% of the readers will immediately know where you are talking about (or maybe I overestimate readers). If instead they had said "Near Carmel Mountain National Park" plenty of people would think this was in the Mid-West instead of the Middle East.