The birth of jewellery took place at least 80,000 years ago, when it was being made across Africa, according to a study of a dozen ancient, battered seashells.

These handmade beads, found in a limestone cave in Morocco, along with similar shell beads from Skhul Cave in Israel, tentatively dated to around 100,000 years, and 75,000-year-old pea-sized seashell beads found three thousand miles away in the Blombos Cave in South Africa, provide overwhelming evidence that humans were fashioning purely symbolic objects in Africa long before they did in Europe.

The shells may have been “bling” and, given the wear found on the perforations, worn in necklaces to reveal status. They may have been used as burial goods, or as “love letters” to impress the opposite sex or turned into pendants to ward off evil spirits. They may even mark the birth of money, to boost trade and relationships, and earliest storage of information outside the human brain. Whatever their original use, they tell a fascinating story about the birth of modern behaviour.

Although the skull and brain form — hardware — of modern humans first emerged in Africa about 200,000 years ago, some experts maintained that the software — culture — only emerged about 50,000 years ago in Africa and spread to Europe soon after, when our ancestors began to adorn their bodies with beads and pendants, played simple instruments and painted representations of animals, people and magical hybrids in caves.

Now, an international team of experts report in the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences what is seen as conclusive evidence that the cultural revolution occurred much earlier, in Africa, and much closer to the birth of modern human anatomy.

The discovery of beads at the Grotte des Pigeons, Taforalt, in Eastern Morocco — in a site that was once 40 km from the coast — was made by archaeologists from the UK, Morocco, France and Germany, led by Oxford University’s Institute of Archaeology and Morocco’s National Institute for Archaeological Sciences.

Twelve Nassarius shells were holed in their centres, and showed signs of being suspended or hung. They also appeared to have been covered in red ochre, as is found to be the case with later examples of African beads.

Co project director Prof. Nick Barton, director of Oxford’s Institute of Archaeology, said that the team is confident of the dates, based on four independent methods. “We now have absolutely cast iron evidence,” he said.

The pea-sized seashell beads provide strong evidence that humans were fashioning jewellery in Africa long before they did in Europe

“Bead making in Africa was a widespread practice at the time, which was spread between cultures with different stone technology by exchange, or by long-distance social networks,” said Barton. “The shells found in Morocco and Israel are from the same group of species (genus) though not the same species… and it is quite remarkable that they should be using this particular sort of shell in Africa over such a wide area. They have a got a very alluring shape, about the size of a Fox’s Glacier mint (a popular confectionary in the UK).”

Preliminary work by the team has also shown that these Nassarius shells are not isolated occurrences, but are present at various other sites in Morocco. Some may be even older than the discovery at Taforalt.

Last year, Prof. Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London, and some members of the same team came up with evidence that bling may date back even further when they re-examined shell beads that were excavated decades ago from sites in Israel and Algeria in the early half of the 20th century.

The date of the shells was found by chemically matching the sediment stuck to one with that from the levels of the human burials at Skhul, Israel.

“The evidence we published last year was for shell beads from Skhul Cave, Israel, that were probably at least 100,000 years old, thus older than our new Moroccan finds,” said Stringer.

“But some workers questioned the Israeli evidence because there were only a couple of shell beads and they were from old excavations, whereas there are many more of the new finds — which have been found during recent excavations — and the sediments containing them have been directly dated.

“For me these new finds settle the question whether there was widespread symbolic behaviour by early modern humans 75,000 years ago.

“If you draw a triangle covering the three furthest known locations of Homo sapiens from 75,000-125,000 years ago, that triangle stretches from South Africa to Morocco to Israel. Shell beads are now known at all three points of that triangle, with three different stone tool industries.

“So such behaviour had probably spread right across the early human range by this time, and would have been carried out by modern humans as they dispersed from Africa in the last 100,000 years.”