World's oldest jewellery found in Africa

[Ayinde]

Tim Radford, science editor
Friday April 16, 2004
The Guardian

Around 75,000 years ago, in a cave near the southern Cape shoreline in South Africa, a human drilled tiny holes into the shells of snails and strung them as beads to make the oldest known jewellery - by at least 30,000 years.

Forty-one shells of the mollusc scavenger Nassarius kraussianus, with holes and marks in similar positions, have been found in a cave overlooking the Indian Ocean in South Africa, archaeologists from France, Britain and Norway report in today's issue of the journal Science.
www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0%2c3604%2c1192998%2c00.html