Sehasseh et al., Sci. Adv. 2021; 7 : eabi8620 22 September 2021 SCIENCE ADVANCES | RESEARCH ARTICLE 1 of 10 ANTHROPOLOGY Early Middle Stone Age personal ornaments from Bizmoune Cave, Essaouira, Morocco El Mehdi Sehasseh 1 , Philippe Fernandez 2 *, Steven Kuhn 3 *, Mary Stiner 3 , Susan Mentzer 4 , Debra Colarossi 5 , Amy Clark 6 , François Lanoe 3 , Matthew Pailes 7 , Dirk Hoffmann 8 , Alexa Benson 5 , Edward Rhodes 9,10 , Moncef Benmansour 11 , Abdelmoughit Laissaoui 11 , Ismail Ziani 12 , Paloma Vidal-Matutano 12 , Jacob Morales 12 , Youssef Djellal 13 , Benoit Longet 2 , Jean-Jacques Hublin 5,14 , Mohammed Mouhiddine 15 , Fatima-Zohra Rafi 15 , Kayla Beth Worthey 3 , Ismael Sanchez-Morales 3 , Noufel Ghayati 1 , Abdeljalil Bouzouggar 1,5 * Ornaments such as beads are among the earliest signs of symbolic behavior among human ancestors. Their appearance signals important developments in both cognition and social relations. This paper describes and presents contextual information for 33 shell beads from Bizmoune Cave (southwest Morocco). Many of the beads come as deposits dating to ≥142 thousand years, making them the oldest shell beads yet recovered. They extend the dates for the first appearance of this behavior into the late Middle Pleistocene. The ages and ubiquity of beads in Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites in North Africa provide further evidence of the potential importance of these artifacts as signals of identity. The early and continued use of Tritia gibbosula and other material culture traits also suggest a remarkable degree of cultural continuity among early MSA Homo sapiens groups across North Africa. INTRODUCTION Symbolic artifacts and other behavioral indicators of hominin cogni- tive complexity appear quite early within Middle Stone Age (MSA) and Middle Paleolithic contexts in North Africa, South Africa, and southwest Asia. The most common and earliest material indicators of symbolic behavior are beads and other personal ornaments, fre- quently made from marine shells. Some of the earliest evidence for use of marine shells in symbolic contexts comes from the eastern Mediterranean Levant. In Qafzeh Cave, layers dating to ca. 100 thousand years (ka) yielded Glycymeris insubrica shells with natural perforations (1). Clearer examples of shell beads were identified in Skhul Cave, on Mt. Carmel (2). The age of these artifacts could be between 100 and 135 ka (3). In South Africa, a large series of perforated Nassarius kraussianus shells from Blombos Cave (4) is dated to be between ca. 76 and 100 ka (5), while more varied assemblages of shell beads from the site of Sibudu date to somewhat later (6). In North Africa, Tritia gibbosula shell beads occur in many MSA sites (7–10). A total of 33 perforated T. gibbosula shells have been recorded from a MSA/Aterian context at Grotte des Pigeons at Taforalt, with a most likely date of ~82.5 ka (7). Excavations at Contrebandiers Cave (8) identified a total of 151 shell beads in a context dated to ca. 115 ± 3 ka (9). At El Mnasra Cave, 234 T. gibbosula shells were collected from three MSA/Aterian layers (10). The age of this context was estimated to span the period ~107 to ~112 ka (11). At Ifri n’Ammar, in Eastern Morocco, single perforated specimens of Tritia and Columbella rustica were found in an MSA/ Aterian context dated to 83 ka (12). Another single perforated Tritia shell was identified in Oued Djebbana, Algeria (13), although its age is poorly constrained (14). Recent archeological excavations at Bizmoune Cave have docu- mented the presence of perforated marine shells in MSA/Aterian contexts dating back to ≥142 ka. This extends the earliest date for this behavior into the late Middle Pleistocene. RESULTS Bizmoune Cave (31°39′96″ N, 9°34′09″ W) lies ~12 km from the present Atlantic coast of southwest Morocco (Fig. 1). The cave is situated at an elevation of ~171 m on the flanks of Jebel Lahdid. The cave formed in Upper Cretaceous limestone. It has a southeast- facing entrance and an open plan, measuring some 20 m deep by 6 m wide, with a vault between 2 and 4 m high. The site was found in 2004 during a survey of the Essaouira area and was subject to limited test excavations in 2007 and 2008 (15). Research beginning in 2014 expanded the excavation to an area of 30 m 2 . The stratigraphy of the site is based on lithostratigraphic and micromorphological descriptions supported by archeological data. 1 Origin and Evolution of Homo sapiens in Morocco research group, Institut National des Sciences de l'Archéologie et du Patrimoine, Hay Riad, Madinat Al Irfane, Angle rues 5 et 7, Rabat-Instituts, 10 000 Rabat, Morocco. 2 CNRS, Aix Marseille Univ, Minist Culture, LAMPEA UMR 7269, Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l'Homme, 5 Rue du Château de l'Horloge BP 647, F13094, Aix-en-Provence, France. 3 School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0030, USA. 4 Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment (HEP-Tübingen), Geoarchaeology Working Group Institute for Archaeological Sciences, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Rümelinstr. 23, 72070 Tübingen, Germany. 5 Department of Human Evo- lution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany. 6 Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, 11 Divinity Avenue, Peabody Museum 575A, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 7 Depart- ment of Anthropology, The University of Oklahoma,455 West Lindsey, Dale Hall Tower Room 521, Norman, OK 73019, USA. 8 Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Geowissenschaftliches Zentrum, Abteilung Isotopengeologie Goldschmidtstraße 1, 37077 Göttingen, Germany. 9 Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK. 10 Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, 595 Charles Young Drive East, Box 951567, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1567, USA. 11 Centre National de l’Energie des Sciences et Techniques Nucléaires (CNESTEN), B.P. 1382 R.P. 10001 Rabat, Morocco. 12 Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, ULPGC, Departamento de Ciencias Históricas, Spain Department of Historical Sciences, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Pérez del Toro 1, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. 13 Departmento de Historia, Geografia y Filosofia, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras. Universidad de Cadiz, 11003, Cadiz, Spain. 14 Collège de France, 11 Place Marcellin Berthelot, 75005 Paris, France. 15 Université Hassan II, Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, Hay El Baraka Ben M'sik Casablanca, BP 7951, 20800 Casablanca, Morocco. *Corresponding author. Email: abdeljalil.bouzouggar@insap.ac.ma (A.Bo.); philippe.fernandez@univ-amu.fr (P.F.); skuhn@email.arizona.edu (S.K.) Copyright © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). Downloaded from https://www.science.org on September 23, 2021