One of the questions that fascinates me most is considering when early humans transitioned from using materials in their environment for basic survival, to adding decorative pieces of shells, stones, and bones purely for personal decoration. They used animal skins and natural fibers to craft clothing and baskets and shelter and created stone tools. There is clear evidence they also manipulated natural materials using tools to create primitive beads, jewelry, and body adornment such as body paint and dyes. Today, whether we are pinning a pin to our jacket, stringing colorful cereal on yarn in preschool, applying makeup, or precision mounting a flawless diamond in a ring, we are carrying on this ancient tradition, and our understanding of these origins continues to grow.
A recently published archaeological study from Üçağızlı II Cave on the Mediterranean coast of Türkiye offers another remarkable piece of the story. Researchers examining layers dating between roughly 77,000 and 47,000 years ago found that both Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and early modern humans (Homo sapiens) appeared to live in similar ways. They hunted many of the same animals, selected flint from the same local sources to produce nearly identical stone tools, and, perhaps most intriguingly, collected marine snail shells that seem to have been valued not for food, but for personal ornamentation.
In the Üçağızlı II Cave, 29 of these shells were found, many naturally or intentionally pierced, and some deliberately heated, changing their color before being worn. These small natural shell beads hint that personal expression may have crossed the boundaries we once imagined existed between different human species.
For many years archaeologists treated symbolic behavior as one of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens. That picture has steadily changed over the past two decades. Excavations in Spain have uncovered Neanderthal shells stained with mineral pigments and modified for use as ornaments, suggesting that our close relatives also collected beautiful objects and attached meaning to them long before they disappeared from Europe.
Likewise, perforated shell beads from the Levant and North Africa demonstrate that early modern humans were making and wearing personal adornments well over 100,000 years ago. Rather than representing a sudden invention, ornamentation now appears to have developed gradually across multiple populations, with ideas, materials, and traditions moving through networks of contact that were likely far more connected than we once imagined.
As someone who spends countless hours working with stones, shells and bones and studying ancient jewelry designs, I am fascinated by these finds. Those twenty-nine little shells are reminders that the desire to decorate ourselves, communicate culture, identity, and use our bodies as canvases for expression stretches back tens of thousands of years.
Whether suspended from leather cord, stitched onto clothes, or worn as jewelry, these ornaments speak to a shared human impulse that survived collapsing empires, famines, wars, invasions and colonizations, migrations, and apparently encounters between different human species. The materials have changed, but the instinct remains.
Every new discovery seems to blur the line we once drew between "them" and "us." The more archaeologists uncover, the more Neanderthals emerge not as primitive “Caveman” caricatures but as skilled craftspeople, adaptable hunters, and people who appreciated beauty and symbolism in much the same way we do today. Somewhere along the Mediterranean coast, nearly 60,000 years ago, someone picked up a shell because it caught their eye.
Maybe it was the color, maybe the size, or the pattern, but they took it home because it was pretty; not food, or a weapon, or a tool...just because it looked nice. We can imagine a migratory tribe or family group living in the area 60,000 years ago, heading out to hunt, fish, and forage for food and materials every day. Was it an adult man out spearing fish on the shoreline who brought them home for his partner, a teen girl gathering seaweed with her friends who collected a handful of interesting shells in her foraging basket? Could it have been a new grandmother, gathering the shells as a gift to celebrate the birth of a new grandchild?
It is interesting to consider the social and possible cultural contexts that may have prompted these early humans to turn these shells into primitive beads. Perhaps they placed some on the edge of a fire, intentionally or accidentally discovering that heat deepened their color. Whether heating also made the shells easier to work is still unknown, but the altered color suggests that they experimented. They used their flint tools to drill a hole and strung the shell, maybe on a leather cord, or a length of cordage. We will never know who made or wore these, but in so many ways, the process and story is timeless.
As social and group dynamics evolve, it's easy to see how these regional styles, perhaps unique to locations where certain shells frequently washed up on the shore, may have been adopted by members of the family or tribal group. Within a few years, these styles of adornment can begin trending, for lack of a better word, creating regional and cultural styles and becoming the style used to identify members of specific tribal or family groups. This process, which has its roots in ancient caves, continues to happen throughout the world on a micro and macro scale.
Of course, we may never know exactly why those twenty-nine shells were collected or who wore them. Archaeology rarely gives us the names, voices, or stories of the people behind the artifacts. What it does preserve are the traces of choices they made. A shell picked up from a shoreline, heated in a fire, carefully perforated, and worn speaks to something deeply familiar.
Across tens of thousands of years, our materials have changed from shell and sinew to copper, silver, gemstones, and plastic, but the impulse remains remarkably constant. We create not only to survive, but to express who we are, where we belong, what we believe, and what we find beautiful. That quiet thread of creativity may be one of the oldest traditions our species, and perhaps our closest relatives, have ever shared.
References
Bouzouggar, A., Barton, R. N. E., Vanhaeren, M., d'Errico, F., Collcutt, S., Higham, T., Hodge, E., Parfitt, S., Rhodes, E., Schwenninger, J. L., Stringer, C., Turner, E., & Ward, S. (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(24), 9964-9969. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0703877104
d'Errico, F., Vanhaeren, M., Barton, N., Stringer, C., et al. (2009). Additional evidence on the use of personal ornaments in the Middle Paleolithic of North Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Hoffecker, J. F. (2024). The dawn of ornamentation: Personal adornment in the Paleolithic. Annual Review of Anthropology, 53, 1-20.
Live Science. (2026, July). Modern humans and Neanderthals may have shared long-term cultural continuity, cave finds suggest. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/neanderthals/modern-humans-and-neanderthals-may-have-shared-long-term-cultural-continuity
Zilhão, J., Angelucci, D. E., Badal-García, E., d'Errico, F., et al. (2010). Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neanderthals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(3), 1023-1028. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914088107
