Ice age humans also liked to show off a little bling
Jewelry discoveries date back 30,000 years
@usatodayweather USA TODAY
Ancient humans didn’t go to Jared, or even to Kay Jewelers.
Scientists in Indonesia unearthed remarkable pieces of handmade jewelry, art and artifacts from 30,000 years ago, around the last ice age, a new study reports.
Some of the world’s earliest known “cave artists” created the objects. The items, found in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, include beads made from the tooth of a babirusa, also called a deer-pig, and a pendant made from the finger bone of a bear cuscus. Both animals are found only in that region.
The early examples of art and jewelry shed new light on ice age human culture and symbolism, the study says. The artifacts also suggest that the spiritual beliefs of modern humans may have transformed as they came across new forms of animal life on the journey from Asia to Australia, researchers say.
“Sulawesi, in particular, is renowned ... for its extremely high rate of species ‘endemism’ — essentially all of the island’s land mammals, except for bats, occur nowhere else on Earth,” said study lead author Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.
“This may indicate that the conceptual world of these people changed to incorporate exotic animals,” Brumm said.
The archaeologists also found evidence of rock art production at the site, including discarded ochre pieces and ochre stains on tools.
The find comes after the discovery in 2014 of 40,000-year-old cave art on Sulawesi, which contains some of the world’s oldest known art.
“Scientists have long been curious about the cultural lives of the first Homo sapiens to inhabit the lands to the immediate north of Australia sometime prior to 50,000 years ago — part of the great movement of our species out of Africa,” Brumm said.
The study appeared Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.