Neanderthals and ornaments, birds of a feather?

© Mauro Cutrona.

M. Peresani and colleagues (2011) report on the discovery of cut-marked bird bones from the latest Mousterian levels at Grotta di Fumane, located in the Veneto region of NE Italy. They interpret the fact that these cutmarks are almost exclusively found on wing bones of only a subset of the 22 species of birds found at Fumane as evidence that Neanderthals there specifically targeted wings and feathers to be used in the manufacture of ornaments (check out Cutrona's fantastic picture of what they may have looked like just above).

Alert readers will remember that I've talked about Fumane before on this blog, mainly in reference to its early Aurignacian art and its transitional industry that's been likened to the Uluzzian. This new finding makes Fumane even more remarkable by providing strong evidence for Neanderthal use of personal ornamentation. Equally important, in my view, is that Neanderthals were somehow able to procure birds, a topic I'll return to below.

But first, let's talk ornamentation. The authors claim that a decorative use of the feathers targeted by Neanderthals is the most likely interpretation. Specifically, they rule out the use of these feathers in fletching since Neanderthal spears would not have benefited from it. Likewise, they rule out an alimentary interpretation since the cut mark are found almost only on wing bones, which yield relatively little meat. They also emphasize that some of the birds whose feathers were sought were raptors which are rarely consumed by humans. They therefore rule out the two main alternative interpretations of their findings.

To sum up, Neanderthals clearly were collecting feathers, specifically remiges, the long and sturdy flight feathers of four main types of birds, including bearded lammergeiers, red-footed falcons, common wood pigeons, and Alpine choughs. A cutmarked bone of the European black vulture was also found in a lower Mousterian level (A9) at the site. What is interesting here is that the collected feathers create a visual palette of colors that include gray, blue-gray, orange-slate gray, and black. These are visually striking but certainly more subdued colors than the reds and orange recently identified in ochres used by slightly older (ca. 50kya) Neanderthals in southern Spain (Zilhao et al. 2010), which I discussed in an earlier post and that would have been complemented by the hues of seashells. The reason why the Fumane color scheme is interesting is that it is very different from that identified for southern space. From there, it is only one step to start thinking that maybe these color preferences had some kind of cultural meaning, especially considering the much wider range of birds available around Fumane than the five species from which remiges were collected.

To expand on that idea a bit, the use of feathers as parts of ornaments at Fumane also indicate that the behavior of decorating one's body among Neanderthals was fairly flexible. Up to now, we only had evidence of coloring minerals like the ochre I just mentioned but also including manganese in SW France and of shells being used as bodily decorations. By adding feathers to the roster of items used by Neanderthals to adorn themselves, the Fumane evidence suggests that Neanderthals were able to use a fairly broad range of materials to embody and visually broadcast some dimension(s) of their identity. The fact that you see some regional variability in what material were used in what region also suggest that maybe these choices reflect social conventions bound by the resources available in specific region, maybe even in a way that anticipates similar decisions about what kinds of materials to manufacture beads from during the Aurignacian (Vanhaeren and d'Errico 2006). Admittedly, this is speculative, but the ever widening array of materials used by Neanderthals to decorate themselves certainly suggests that this was a well ingrained behavior that was filtered by locally available resources. In this, it severely undermines the credibility of the idea that Neanderthals were only able to pick up the idea of personal ornamentation from modern humans during the Transition Interval, a point Peresani et al. (2011) themselves emphasize in their conclusions.

Another thought-provoking question raised by the ca. 660 bird bones recovered from these Mousterian deposits is just how Neanderthals caught them. By all appearances, most of their hunting technology would have been, quite literally, overkill for hunting birds. Heavy spears could have also damaged the feathers that were the ultimate goal of the Neanderthals. The authors suggest that maybe they collected dead birds, though the amount of processing manifest on the bones suggests to me that this is unlikely, as all of these birds would have had to be extremely fresh if they had been scavenged, which seems a bit unrealistic. So this opens the possibility that Neanderthals were actively procuring birds, though exactly how is still very much an open question. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it's likely that Neanderthals had some form of cordage, and that maybe they were able to fashion nets out of it.

Now, why does it matter if Neanderthals directly procured birds? It matters a great deal in the context of recently proposed views that state that Neanderthals lacked sexual division of labor (Kuhn and Stiner 2006). In large part, that view is based on the apparent lack in Neanderthal sites of plants and fast-moving small game that could reflect the labor of one segment of the population as opposed to the large game hunting practice by the other, presumably male segment. Well, if Neanderthals procured birds, that provides some fairly clear evidence of small game hunting, and when you consider the recent direct evidence for Neanderthals having consumed (and cooked!) a diverse array of plants (Henry et al. 2010), you've got some data that could be used to challenge the view of Neanderthals as lacking sexual division of labor.

And to think, all of this from some cutting, scraping and snapping marks on bird bones!

References:

Henry, A., Brooks, A., & Piperno, D. (2010). Microfossils in calculus demonstrate consumption of plants and cooked foods in Neanderthal diets (Shanidar III, Iraq; Spy I and II, Belgium) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (2), 486-491 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1016868108

Kuhn, S., & Stiner, M. (2006). What’s a Mother to Do? The Division of Labor among Neandertals and Modern Humans in Eurasia Current Anthropology, 47 (6), 953-981 DOI: 10.1086/507197

Peresani, M., Fiore, I., Gala, M., Romandini, M., & Tagliacozzo, A. (2011). Late Neandertals and the intentional removal of feathers as evidenced from bird bone taphonomy at Fumane Cave 44 ky B.P., Italy Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1016212108

VANHAEREN, M., & DERRICO, F. (2006). Aurignacian ethno-linguistic geography of Europe revealed by personal ornaments Journal of Archaeological Science, 33 (8), 1105-1128 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2005.11.017

Zilhao, J., Angelucci, D., Badal-Garcia, E., d'Errico, F., Daniel, F., Dayet, L., Douka, K., Higham, T., Martinez-Sanchez, M., Montes-Bernardez, R., Murcia-Mascaros, S., Perez-Sirvent, C., Roldan-Garcia, C., Vanhaeren, M., Villaverde, V., Wood, R., & Zapata, J. (2010). Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (3), 1023-1028 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914088107

Portrait of the artist as a Neanderthal

In a recent paper, O. Moro Abadia and M.R. Gonzales Morales (2010) argue that an important component of the 'multiple species model' (MSM) that sees Neanderthals as having essentially 'modern' behavioral capacities and that originated in the late 90's is based not so much on new discoveries as it is on new ways of looking at the archaeological record. Specifically, they make the case that part of why Neanderthals have become associated with artistic capacity signaling 'modern' behavior is a growing awareness over the past 30 years or so of the fact that personal ornaments and mobiliary (i.e., portable) art such as statuettes and engraved pieces are intrinsically symbolic in nature. This has resulted in what they claim is a paradigmatic shift away from considering cave art as the sole diagnostic of developed artistic (and by extension symbolic) capacities, to one that sees ornaments and mobiliary art as fundamental markers of that capacity. In turn, the association of Neanderthals with ornaments - based especially on Chatelperronian assemblages from Arcy-sur-Cure and Quincay - has likewise shifted the general perception of them towards a more 'human' prehistoric hominin over the past generation.

This is an interesting paper that makes some worthwhile points and provides some good food for thought. First, even though the idea of a Neanderthal authorship of the Chatelperronian has recently come under fire, the fact that pierced shells and coloring material have been found in even older Mousterian contexts renders moot the question of whether Neanderthals had the capacity to use and produce such technology in the absence of H. sapiens stimulus. Second, it's noteworthy that recent claims (i.e., in the past decade) about the much greater time depth of archaeologically visible traces of symbolic behavior in Africa are all based on this kind of evidence (e.g., engraved ochre at Blombos, early ochre use at PP13 and other sites, pierced shells in South and North Africa, etc.). In fact, prior to what Moro Abadia and Gonzales Morales consider the 'reconceptualization' of Paleolithic art, it was widely agreed that the Middle Stone Age and the Middle Paleolithic were very similar.

To their analysis, I would only add observations about two other aspects of the fundamental impact of considering ornaments as reflective of artistic and symbolic behavior. First, part of why personal ornaments and ochre became the focus of so much attention beginning in the 80's was that they were argued by people like Randy White to characterize the Aurignacian, in contrast to the Mousterian which lacked them (White 1992, 2006). This was in part driven by the observation that Paleolithic cave art was essentially absent from the Aurignacian record even though that technocomplex was argued to be the expression of the arrival of symbolically-enhanced modern humans in Europe. Even if one includes the Fumane and Chauvet art, we're hardly talking about a very abundant record, especially compared to later periods of the Paleolithic. Therefore, rightfully broadening the definition of 'art' to include personal ornaments at first distinguished Neanderthals from  modern humans, though that kind of evidence soon made it clear that Neanderthals also were symbolic beings, at least to an extent. In an unexpected twist, though, this reconceptualization of what is 'art' combined to a renewed interest in the MSA record during the 2000's ultimately ended up establishing that artistic behavior was a integral component of the behavior of at least some modern human groups much earlier than for Neanderthals as a whole.

My second observation is about the durability of ornaments. Ornaments are more resilient than cave art, since they don't need the exceptional preservation conditions of the latter to preserve in the archaeological record. If bones are present in a Paleolithic deposits, odds are that any associated ornaments made of, say, ivory, will also preserve, unlike most cave art which requires unusually stable temperature and humidity to preserve longer than a few hundred years.  By extension, considering ornaments 'art' means that, on purely probabilistic grounds, the first expressions of symbolic behavior would be traced back much further in time than if only identified on the basis of parietal art. The recent discoveries in Africa pushing ornament use to about 82kya clearly underscore the underappreciated importance of their sheer relative durability although, unlike for parietal art, human agency in perforating these early shells needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed.

Clearly, then, the authors are right in emphasizing the impact on paleoanthropological research of redefining Paleolithic artistic behavior to include personal ornaments (and portable art more broadly). This is true for an even wider range of reasons than even they discuss. I like this snippet of their concluding paragraph, which I think neatly sums up one of their fundamental points:

"While some specialists have a tendency to believe that science develops through the accumulation of discoveries and inventions, the MSM illustrates how scientific research is also influenced by theoretical paradigms that generate and sustain knowledge, determining the questions that are asked and those that are excluded. The latter statement does not imply that science is exclusively driven by conceptual propositions. Rather, we suggest that conceptual, technical and factual developments are interlinked... We have focused upon the theoretical dimension of the new discourses about Neanderthals and art to argue that scientific developments are not part of an ever-growing piecemeal process, but one influenced by a set of factual discoveries, previous knowledge, current beliefs and disciplinary paradigms."

References

MORO ABADÍA, O., & GONZÁLEZ MORALES, M. (2010). REDEFINING NEANDERTHALS AND ART: AN ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETATION OF THE MULTIPLE SPECIES MODEL FOR THE ORIGIN OF BEHAVIOURAL MODERNITY Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 29 (3), 229-243 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0092.2010.00346.x

White, R. (1992). Beyond Art: Toward an Understanding of the Origins of Material Representation in Europe Annual Review of Anthropology, 21 (1), 537-564 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.21.100192.002541

White, R. (2006). The Women of Brassempouy: A Century of Research and Interpretation Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 13 (4), 250-303 DOI: 10.1007/s10816-006-9023-z

Aterian artifacts at 175,000 BP at Ifri n’Ammar, Morocco

The Moroccan Ministry of Culture has a press release (in French) about the cave site of Ifri n’Ammar, about 50km south (i.e., away from the coast) of Nador, indicating that the Moroccan-German team that has been working there for the past seven years has identified Aterian levels dating to about 175,000 BP. If these dates are correct, they push back the age for the earliest Aterian assemblages by some 65,000 year, since to date, the oldest Aterian levels had been identified at the Moroccan site of Dar es-Soltan, where they date to as old as 110,000 BP (Barton et al. 2009) . This is significant in and of itself by showing that the Aterian industry may be much longer than had previously been believed. And based on the press release, the Ifri n’Ammar does look very credibly Aterian, whose stone tool technology is generally defined by the presence of distinctive 'tanged' artifacts, especially points:

© Moroccan Ministry of Culture.

This is also significant because of what the Aterian is usually taken to mean in terms of prehistoric human adaptations. For some, it is associated with some of the earliest evidence for projectile technology, which confers the advantage of allowing prey to be brought down at a distance, hence minimizing the risks of hunting to whoever uses it (e.g., Shea 2006). Other researchers have also argued that some of the bifacial points associated with the Aterian "may be adaptive systems focused on hunting in grassland ecosystems" (Banks et al. 2006: 76, 78). Specifically, these authors have argued that such grassland ecosystems are established in North Africa (where the Aterian is found) beginning with Oxygen Isotope 5e, some 130,000 years ago, while before that bifacial lanceolate points are mostly found clustered much further to the SW. if the ages from Ifri n’Ammar are correct, then, this provides some evidence against a simple link between ecology and the emergence of the Aterian industry.

Also of interest is that the Aterian sequence at Ifri n’Ammar is reported to be some 6.3m thick, with much more recent Aterian levels as well. Here, it bears emphasizing that Aterian deposits about 82,000 years old elsewhere in Morocco, have been associated with pierced shells most likely used as personal ornaments, the earliest evidence for that behavior anywhere in the world (as I discussed previously on this blog). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the site has yielded in more recent levels

"two Nassarius gibbosulus et Nassarius sp. shells used as ornaments by the Aterians. They are older than 80,000 years BP. Both are similar in size and display identical intentional perforations. Microscopic and mineralogical analyses have revealed wear traces clearly resulting from their having being worn as ornaments, and traces of red ochre with which they had been intentionally covered" (my translation).

Pierced Nassarius shells from Ifri n’Ammar. © Moroccan Ministry of Culture.

Overall,if the preliminary findings reported in this press release are borne out by future publications, Ifri n’Ammar definitely looks like it offers the potential to greatly refine our understanding of the Aterian and its origins as a whole.

References:

Banks, William E., Francesco d'Errico, Harold L. Dibble, Leonard Krishtalka, Dixie West, Deborah I. Olszewski, A. Townsend Peterson, David G. Anderson, J. Christopher Gilliam, Anta Montet-White, Michel Crucifix, Curtis W. Marean, María-Fernanda Sánchez-Goñi, Barbara Wohlfarth, and Marian Vanhaeren. 2006. Eco-Cultural Niche Modeling: New Tools for Reconstructing the Geography and Ecology of Past Human Populations. PaleoAnthropology 2006:68-83

Barton, R., Bouzouggar, A., Collcutt, S., Schwenninger, J., & Clark-Balzan, L. (2009). OSL dating of the Aterian levels at Dar es-Soltan I (Rabat, Morocco) and implications for the dispersal of modern Homo sapiens Quaternary Science Reviews, 28 (19-20), 1914-1931 DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.03.010

Shea, J. (2006). The origins of lithic projectile point technology: evidence from Africa, the Levant, and Europe Journal of Archaeological Science, 33 (6), 823-846 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2005.10.015

Colorful Neanderthals on the half shell

There’s been a lot of buzz about the new paper by Zilhão et al. (2010) on the use of pierced shells and pigments by Neanderthals at the sites of Cueva de los Aviones and Cueva Antón, in southern Spain some 50,000 years ago, so I thought I’d give a few comments about it here.

This is a very significant study in that it strengthens the conclusions of previous research that suggests that Neanderthals habitually used pigments (e.g., Soressi and d’Errico 2007, which I discussed here). Importantly, it also broadens the range of color of these pigments to include, beyond black, yellows, reds, and orange. This matters because of the contention by some (e.g., Watts 2002) that the red color of ochre has important symbolic connotations that black pigments couldn’t have (e.g., blood, life, menstruation, etc.), and that this is an important distinction between Neanderthal and ‘fully modern’ use of coloring. Credibly establishing the presence of a range of colorful pigments derived from external sources at both these sites (their mineral sources are at least 3-5km distant from either cave) is therefore a major contribution to our knowledge of Neanderthal behavior and some of its symbolic underpinnings.

It of major interest in this paper is the description of a fragmented horse metatarsal with a pointed tip that bears traces of orange pigment at Cueva de los Aviones. The authors argue that “this naturally pointed bone may have been used as a stiletto for the preparation or application of mineral dyes or as pin or awl to perforate soft materials (e.g., hides) that were themselves colored with such dyes.” The relevance of this observation is highlighted by the manganese ‘crayons’ that were found at the Mousterian site of Pech de l’Aze, France (Soressi and d’Errico 2007), since it establishes that Neanderthals were not only using pigments in a range of color, but also that they had a range of manners of applying it to surfaces. This strongly hints at Neanderthal pigment use being a flexible behavior that varied from context to context, in contrast to their oft-repeated characterization of people who knew how to do only a limited range of things but do them quite well (which was one of the recurrent sound bites in the Human Spark documentary recently shown on PBS and which I will discuss on this blog in coming days).

Of course, in this ornament-obsessed period of paleoanthropological research, much of the buzz the paper has been getting derives from the fact that pierced shells were also recovered from both sites, many of which bore pigments. Early shell ornaments and associated pigments, of course, have recently been in the news (and discussed on this blog) and the focus of much attention in helping identify behavioral modernity (e.g., d’Errico et al. 2009). The authors make a strong case for the pierced shells having been purposefully selected by humans as ornaments (even if it’s a bit hard to get a clear idea of the trends in other periods based on the graph in the supplementary info), even if some of the perforations appear natural, artfully pointing out the interpretive double-standard that is sometimes applied to evidence associated with Neanderthals as opposed to that associated with modern humans.

The discussion of Cueva Antón’s Pecten maximus upper shell valve as most likely representing an ornament is also very good. By describing that it was the external surface of this comparatively flat valve that was colored, and by stressing that Antón is currently 60km distant from the shore, the authors make a strong case for this interpretation. Even the most ardent critic is going to have to explain why and how this large and comparatively fragile colored marine shell reached this site, and the patterning of its coloration. From a parsimony standpoint, viewing it as an ornament is imminently reasonable.

Overall, I think the authors are fully justified in concluding

"that these innovations were fulfilling a need—aiding in thepersonalor social identification of people—that did not exist in the preceding two million years of human evolution. Our findings therefore support models of the emergence of behavioral modernity as caused by technological progress, demographic increase, and social complexification and show that there is no biunivocal correlation between “modern” anatomy and “modern” behavior" (Zilhão et al. 2010:5).

They also argue that the null hypothesis about the authorship of ornaments found with ‘transitional industries’ can now reasonably argued to be Neanderthals. The argument about population pressures driving social innovation is a convincing one in this context, since the northern Mediterranean shore appears to have served repeatedly as a Neanderthal refugium during their evolutionary history and the range of food resources available in these more mesic regions likely could have sustained larger populations than elsewhere across their range.

As is usual in studies of early ornaments, however, the sample size remains low, and we must remain careful about inferring too much from them. At present, what these new discovery establish is that Neanderthals used pigments in different parts of their range and applied them in different ways. As well, it establishes that Neanderthals in southern Spain used pierced shells as ornaments at least for a moment of their evolutionary history. This raises the thorny question of why such evidence has not been found in other Neanderthal sites. Is it because archaeologists were not looking for it? Or is it because this was a short-lived phenomenon that emerged in response to localized demographic conditions? And given that there are no transitional industries documented in Spain, is it warranted to link the ornaments from Los Aviones and Antón to those found in France, Italy and East-Central Europe during the transition interval? Whatever the case may be, it now is clear that archaeologists need to pay extra attention when dealing with Mousterian sites yielding shells, as we have convincing evidence that Neanderthals did, in some cases, use shell ornaments well before the transition.

References

d'Errico, F., M. Vanhaeren, N. Barton, A. Bouzouggar, H. Mienis, D. Richter, J.-J. Hublin, S. P. McPherron, and P. Lozouet. 2009. Additional evidence on the use of personal ornaments in the Middle Paleolithic of North Africa. PNAS 106:16051-16056.

Soressi, M., and F. d’Errico. 2007. Pigments, gravures, parures: Les comportements symboliques controversées des Néandertaliens. In Les Néandertaliens. Biologie et cultures (B. Vandermeersch and B. Maureille, eds.), pp. 297-309. Editions du CTHS, Paris.

Watts, I. 2002. Ochre in the Middle Stone Age of Southern Africa: Ritualised Display or Hide Preservative? South African Archaeological Bulletin 57:1-14.

Zilhao, J., Angelucci, D., Badal-Garcia, E., d'Errico, F., Daniel, F., Dayet, L., Douka, K., Higham, T., Martinez-Sanchez, M., Montes-Bernardez, R., Murcia-Mascaros, S., Perez-Sirvent, C., Roldan-Garcia, C., Vanhaeren, M., Villaverde, V., Wood, R., & Zapata, J. (2010). Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914088107

Shelling it out

Very old pierced shells are back in the headlines, heralding a new paper by a group of archaeologists working in Morocco. As the paper’s still unavailable at PNAS, I can only really comment on what’s in the press reports, but the paper in question likely builds on two earlier reports that more pierced shells had been found at Grotte des Pigeons over the past couple of years.

I’ve discussed early pierced shell ornament earlier on this blog, so I won’t really reiterate the argument for why they matter. That these shells can be referred to as ornaments is based on the presence of intentional perforations, use wear along the edges of those holes, and some of the beads having been covered in ochre. Another report suggests that there is even evidence that at leats one shell was burned in order to change its color, which would be pretty cool in light of recent reports about heat-treating of silcrete dating to ca. 75,000BP in South Africa (Brown et al. 2009).

Similar items of roughly the same age are know from both South Africa (Henshilwood et al. 2004) and from North Africa and the Near East (Vanhaeren et al. 2006, Bouzouggar et al. 2007), so that’s not the main novelty here. Rather, the real news is that similar shell ornaments (all made on Nassarius gibbosolus shells) have been found in roughly contemporaneous deposits in four distinct sites in Morocco. This is a pretty big deal because it suggests that people at more than one point in space and time were using ornaments, which provides some much needed empirical support for the notion that these ornaments represent some kind of visual language shared by several groups of hunter-gatherers at that time. Obviously, if you’re hoping to make an argument about the social implications of ornaments at a specific moment in prehistory, you have to be able to demonstrate with some degree of certainty that these objects were found distributed pretty widely. Otherwise, you might be talking about an idiosyncratic behavior that might actually not have a social dimension at all, no matter what referents tell us about ornament use in ethnographically documented foragers. So, on that level, it seems that this paper establishes this. I can see people raising quibbles about the fact that we’re only talking about ca. 25 shells across four sites spanning a period of 15,000 years (these all apparently date to between 85-70,000 BP), but really, for these time periods, this is a pretty decent argument for contemporaneity in behavior within a relatively small area.

One especially interesting aspect of this study is that some of these sites seem to be located relatively far inland, far enough to imply that humans must have brought these shells there from quite far away. In the newsreport, F. d’Errico is quoted as saying

“Either people went to sea and collected them, or more likely marine shell beads helped create and maintain exchange networks between coastal and inland peoples. This shows well-structured human culture that attributed meaning to these things… Organised networks would also assist trading of other items, as well as genetic and cultural exchange – so these shells help reveal the connections between cognition and culture.”

This provides a testable hypothesis for the existence of such networks, namely that some ‘inland’ material would need to have made its way to the coastal sites. If this can be shown to have occurred, you also have the most solid evidence for the oldest trade networks in the archaeological record. Of course, what may have been traded need not have left archaeologically-visible traces (i.e., it could have been knowledge of resource distribution further inland, rituals, etc.). But if it did, this is an even bigger deal than has been suggested so far in the reports.


References:

Bouzouggar, A., N. Barton, M. Vanhaeren, F. d'Errico, S. Colcutt, T. Higham, E. Hodge,S. Parfitt, E. Rhodes, J.-L. Schwenninger, C. Stringer, E. Turner, S. Wardo, A. Moutmir, and A. Stambouli. 2007 82,000-year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of modern human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:9964-9969.

Brown, K. S., C.W. Marean, A.I. R. Herries, Z. Jacobs, C. Tribolo, D. Braun, D. L. Roberts, M. C. Meyer, and J. Bernatchezet. 2009 Fire As an Engineering Tool of Early Modern Humans. Science 325:859-862.

Henshilwood, C., F. d'Errico, M. Vanhaeren, K. van Niekerk, and Z. Jacobs. 2004.Middle Stone Age Shell Beads from South Africa. Science 304:404.

Vanhaeren, M., F. d'Errico, C. Stringer, S. L. James, J. A. Todd, and H. K. Mienis. 2006. Middle Paleolithic Shell Beads in Israel and Algeria. Science 312:1785 - 1788.

New pierced shells from Grotte des Pigeons

From: http://www.minculture.gov.ma/Images/Taforalt1.jpg

It appears, that they have found yet more pierced Nassarius gibbosulus shells in Grotte des Pigeons (near Taforalt, Morocco) during excavation conducted in March and April 2008. That would be 20 more shells, to be precise, which may be as old as 85,000 years BP, or slightly older than the ones Bouzouggar et al. (2007) published last year.

From: http://www.minculture.gov.ma/Images/Taforalt02.jpg

From the news report:

In 2007, Bouzouggar and Barton discovered 14 perforated shells in the same cave.

"This discovery shows that the making and use of objects of finery is very anchored in the traditions of Morocco's prehistoric people," said Bouzouggar, in whose opinion the country is the original centre of artistic and symbolic creation.

Objects of finery discovered in Morocco are "now considered to be even more ancient than those discovered in Algeria, South Africa and in Palestine", said the culture ministry.

Well, I don't know that these new finds do anything to establish that the practice of piercing and wearing shells is older in Morocco than it is at Skhul (ca. 100-135kya), but we can't say without seeing more information on the finds. From what I gather from a press release by the Moroccan Ministry of Culture (in French), this claim may be based on an assessment that the two shells from Skuhl cave (which I talked about here) "are difficult to date due to uncertainties about the context in which they were found," in part because they were recovered so long ago, in the 1930's. If you buy this, then the earliest shell beads would, in fact, be from Morocco.

The burials of five children dated to at least 12kya were also apparently found during the same field season. The children's remains were covered in ochre, buried under stone blocks with animal bones. Can't wait to hear more about these finds!