Paper short abstract:

In tracing the evolution of hominin cognition, beads and pendants are among the most important material evidence in archaeology. They provide excellent information about the technology required making them, they demonstrate self-awareness and identity, and they are purely symbolic entities.

Paper long abstract:

Among all the evidence archaeology is capable of providing about the cognitive evolution of hominins, beads and pendants are perhaps the most instructive. Other reportedly symbolic remains can in many cases be challenged, but perforated objects that are too small or too fragile to have served as pulling handles or similar can be safely described as beads. Several hundred such specimens have been excavated from Lower Palaeolithic strata in Libya, Israel, Austria, France and England. In many cases specific microwear has been detected on them that indicates that they were worn threaded onto string for prolonged periods of time. Their study and replicative experimentation have also provided empirical information about their technology, how they were made. But their most important scientific testimony is what they can tell us about the cognition of their makers and wearers. Beads and pendants demand self-awareness and a theory of mind in their users, as well as complex meanings of individual status, and research has shown that concepts of perfection were clearly involved in their production of use. The same applies to the oldest currently known rock art, located in India, which suggests that Lower Palaeolithic humans had developed relatively sophisticated cultural practices and advanced cognition several hundred millennia ago. This finding, confirmed by several others, shows that the hitherto dominant model of cultural evolution during the second half of the Pleistocene must be false, and that essentially modern human behaviour did not appear in the last third of the Late Pleistocene, but much earlier, during the Middle Pleistocene period.

ROBERT BEDNARIK, IFRAO, AUSTRALIA