Archaeologists say they have found evidence that in one respect people were behaving like thoroughly modern humans as early as 100,000 years ago: they were apparently decorating themselves with a kind of status-defining jewelry - the earliest known shell necklaces. If this interpretation is correct, it means that human self-adornment, considered a manifestation of symbolic thinking, was practiced at least 25,000 years earlier than previously thought. An international team of archaeologists, writing today in the journal Science, reported its analysis of small shells with distinctive perforations that appeared to have been strung together as ornamental beads. Chemical study showed that the two shells from the Skhul rock shelter in Israel were more than 100,000 years old, and the single shell from Oued Djebbana, in Algeria, was about 90,000 years old. Three shells may not be much to go on, the archaeologists conceded. But they emphasized that the shells were from the same genus of marine snail and were worked in the same manner as those from the Blombos Cave, near Cape Town in South Africa, which were reported two years ago as the earliest jewelry, dated at 75,000 years ago. The Blombos find was hotly contested […]