Around 75,000 years ago, in a cave near the southern Cape shoreline in South Africa, a human drilled tiny holes into the shells of snails and strung them as beads to make the oldest known jewellery - by at least 30,000 years.
Forty-one shells of the mollusc scavenger Nassarius kraussianus, with holes and marks in similar positions, have been found in a cave overlooking the Indian Ocean in South Africa, archaeologists from France, Britain and Norway report in today's issue of the journal Science.
The shells appear to have been selected according to size, and they must have been brought to the Blombos cave from rivers a dozen miles away. The shells are marked with traces of red ochre, so they were either decorated with iron oxide pigment or they were worn by someone wearing such primitive makeup.
The beads are dramatic evidence of modern human behaviour 75,000 years ago. They are at least 35,000 years older than the earliest undisputed African ornaments - some ostrich eggshell beads found in Kenya - and around 30,000 years older than some perforated teeth ornaments from Bulgaria and a string of sea shell beads from Turkey. They are the first evidence of artistic creativity and symbolism in a creature otherwise known only for stone tools and weapons.
"The Blombos beads present absolute evidence for perhaps the earliest storage of information outside the human brain," said Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen in Norway, the director of the cave project.
"Agreement is widespread that personal ornaments such as beads incontrovertibly represent symbolically mediated modern behaviour. Until now, the oldest beads in Africa date to about 45,000 years. The discovery of 41 shell beads in sand layers at Blombos cave, accurately dated as 75,000 years old, provides important new evidence for early symbolically organised behaviour in Africa."
The first hominids in Africa date back millions of years. Homo erectus, a human ancestor, emerged at least 2 million years ago and began to spread into Europe and Asia. Some 500,000 years ago, Europe and Britain were colonised by a species known as Homo heidelbergensis. The first anatomically modern humans, more slender and graceful than the Neanderthals, emerged less than 200,000 years ago. These people cooperated, hunted and made stone tools and weapons.
But around 40,000 years ago, something dramatic happened. Humans became interested in art, ornament and beauty, and the things they left behind in caves in Europe and Africa marked them out as not just anatomically modern, but modern in behaviour too.
The Blombos cave discovery however, means that the theorists will have to think again. The Breakfast at Tiffany's urge for jewellery has turned out to be far older.
Two years ago, Prof Henshilwood found ochre, marked with abstract geometric representations, in the Blombos cave, along with bone tools and fishing equipment. But the beads provide far stronger evidence of abstract thought.
"Beads are an unequivocal argument that people are employing symbols to signify who they are," said Alison Brooks of George Washington University. "Body ornamentation seems to be a way humans symbolise status."