Ancient pearls, the jewels of the ancient nobles, circulated through the channels of trade, its charm can not be copied, people wear it on the body, more tasteful, now let's take a look.
The earliest beads come from a French cave from 38,000 BC and belonged to neanderthals. Neanderthals were not our ancestors, they were bulky, Homo erectus who developed on another line.
Archaeological data show that Neanderthals, who used flowers and beads in tombs to accompany burials, had enough awareness of death and expressed this understanding.
Between two and fifty thousand years later, they were replaced by new Homo sapiens, the human beings who are closely related to our modern man.
In a cave overlooking the Indian Ocean in Blombos, South Africa, stone-age shell beads from about 7.5 million years ago have been found, with artificial perforations, which may be the oldest ornaments to date. Perhaps with new archaeological discoveries, this record can be pushed forward.
The earliest beads in China on which archaeological formations can be based belong to the Zhoukoudian Mountaintop Cave People in Beijing 18,000 to 20,000 years ago.
Their ornaments are some beast teeth, bone tubes, shells, gravel, small stone beads, and some have also been decorated with ochre paint.
Artificially perforated beast teeth have also been found in a Paleolithic cave dating back 12,000 to 15,000 years in Puding County, Guizhou, which are used to wear.
We don't fully understand the true meaning of these ornaments, and perhaps in addition to beauty, they have a spiritual dimension and a religious function.
They may be status symbols or a sign of a certain belief, such as the cave people on the top of the mountain not only have tombs, but also scatter hematite powder and some burial items with ochre paint around the skull and torso of the deceased.
Red is one of the earliest colors used by humans, of which the nature of ochre is relatively stable, while cinnabar and male yellow will change color at high temperatures and disappear with increasing temperature, so most prehistoric faience pottery uses ochre as a painted pigment.
The custom of using cinnabar in tombs continued from prehistory to our Han Dynasty, and this burial custom may be because people discovered the antiseptic effect of cinnabar.
The reasons why earlier ancestors used red minerals may have been more psychological and spiritual, perhaps because colors such as hematite and cinnabar are reminiscent of blood, symbolizing both life and death.
We can see beads in archaeological data and tombs in different parts of the world, whether it is prehistoric or civilized society, different groups of people invariably punch holes in certain materials they can obtain, for wear, decoration and even some kind of symbol.
Anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and even psychologists have made many interesting speculations about these ancient human ornamentation behaviors, and perhaps some theories can be used to explain the origin of ornaments such as beads.