Origins of Jewelry

From the beginning of civilization, man has had a fascination with adorning their bodies with some form of jewelry.  Recent discoveries now confirm that man's love affair with jewelry began even earlier than historians originally predicted.  For some time now archaeologists have possessed 195,000 year old fossil remains of species with like-anatomy to modern man.¹  Despite that fact, the oldest fossils of jewelry only dated back to between 25,000 and 18,000 BC; the prehistoric Paleolithic and Neolithic periods.  The oldest of those discoveries was excavated outside of Monaco at a grave site and was three necklaces made of fish vertebrae.  The second of the oldest discoveries was excavated at a communal grave site in Eastern Europe at Predmosti.  The grave site was lined with jaw-bones of Mammoths and each body was adorned with a necklace of ivory beads.²

However, in 2006 and then again in 2007, a major discovery took place.  Beads made of shell were uncovered among the collections of artifacts at   the Museum of London and the Museum of Man in Paris.  The beads were originally excavated during the 1930s and 1940s from Skhul Cave on the slopes of Mount Carmel in Israel and Oued Djebbana in Algeria.  Once dated by archaeologists, the beads were found to be between 82,000 to 100,000 years old.³  This discovery has created a major shift in how scientists and archaeologists view early species similar to humans.  Never the less, with each new discovery, it leads historians and archaeoloigists to believe, as some had previously thought, jewelry may well be as old as man.