A Polish Cave Gives Up One Old Jewel

A pendant carved from a woolly mammoth tusk and found in the Stajnia Cave of southern Poland has been radiocarbon-dated at 41,500 years old. Per a news report in the journal Nature, this makes it “the oldest known example of decorated jewellery in Eurasia made by humans.” The find was fully described and analyzed by Sahra Talmo (University of Bologna, Italy) and colleagues in Scientific

Reports and is said to pre-date similar ornaments by some 2,000 years.

The design is simple: a thumb-shaped nub of ivory with two drilled holes and some 50 indentations in a roughly S-shaped curving pattern with no obvious meaning or representation. Still, that has not dissuaded Talmo and her colleagues from speculating about the so-called “punctate motif.” Perhaps those 50 dots represent some sort of lunar cycle. Perhaps they record the bragging rights of each mammoth killed by the owner. Or is it an archaic counting system?

Who knows?! Let’s just appreciate that our long-distant ancestors took the same delight that contemporary lapidary artists do when presented with suitable material from which to craft art for the ages during a long winter’s night.