Bushmen woman of the San people making jewelry of ostrich egg shell, Kalahari, Namibia.Credit: Matjaz Corel / Alamy Stock Photo
Archeologists have found an ancient connection between populations in Africa. Using ostrich eggshells (OES) beads to study ancient social networks, a team from Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History revealed 50,000-years of population connection and isolation in southern and eastern Africa, driven by changing rainfall patterns.
As the oldest fully manufactured ornaments, ostrich egg shells beads are ideal artefacts for understanding ancient social relationships. Instead of relying on their natural size and shape, humans transformed the shells to produce beads, explains the study published in Nature.
A team led by Jennifer Miller at Max Planck, compared OES bead characteristics from a sample of more than 1,500 individual beads from 31 sites across southern and eastern Africa. They found that between 50,000 and 33,000 years ago, people across these sites were using almost identical beads.
The findings suggest a long-distance social network spanning more than 3,000 kilometres once connected in the two regions.
“Throughout the 50,000 years we examined, this is the only period the bead characteristics are the same,” said Yiming Wang, who co-authored the paper.
