Trade Beads

Trade Beads

Beads are one of the oldest human artifacts identified and as they were often made from durable materials (glass, ceramic, stone, shell) they last both in the ground and underwater. Some of the oldest identified beads were located in Morocco in cave deposits nearly 82,000 years old and there are some that seem to stretch back over 125,000 years. Anthropologists are excited by this inasmuch as it shows symbolic behaviors were present in early modern human groups at least that long ago.