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posted by chromas on Tuesday July 14 2020, @09:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the gull-terminated-sea-strings dept.

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)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @08:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @08:20PM (#1022085)

    Flax is made from linen, not hemp.