Univalve (Snail-shaped) shells are easier eaten if you bash them on the top, rather than try to winkle them out.

This photo shows large univalve shells (Strombus and Cowry) cracked on dorsum and eaten by Siargao islanders (March 2005)

The beads from Üçagizli and Blombos, though separated by some 30,000 years and about 5000 miles are both made from Nassarius sp shells, normally found in inter-rock sand patches, or shallow water estuaries or creeks. (They are very common in the Philippines, but few people eat them, because they are so fiddly).

These Nassaria are not nice little curly snails, but flattened ventro-dorsally, with a very strong lip. It would be very difficult to winkle them out with a pin. The best way would be to pierce the dorsum near the lip, then push, suck, or blow the meat out. just as the bead pictures show.

All the shells found at Blombos could have come from a single picnic snack – see Shoreline Foraging

Besides that, the picture of a thanatocoenosis, shown in the report of the discovery, shows a large number of shells, naturally almost as badly perforated as the Blombos shell beads.

Using long technical words like thanatocoenosis (trans: 'dead shell collection') is what gives scientific paper writers, especially palaeoanthropological ones, a malenomenia (trans: 'bad name')

The Blombos beads show microscopic wear patterns suggesting wear, over a long period, by a string. The Blombos shells also show traces of ochre, suggesting they may have had some more purposeful use than just as souvenirs of a nice lunch.

I make beads, and shell beads in particular, for a living, and I've never come across 'use-wear', but that may be because I'm a charlatan (trans: 'modern commercial trader'). I don't expect my products to last a lot longer than the tourist season, for the very good reason that if I made them durable, no one would have a need to buy more of  them next year.

If the Blombos beads show 'use-wear', then they didn't just decorate some lady's neck. They were handled and used over a very long period indeed.

We'll come to that point later.

I don't know about you, but shape of a cowry reminds me of something. It has an obvious sexual connotation. Cowry shells have been used as beads, and later, as money, for millennia.

Collected loose in bags or strung into strands, (cowries) were the earliest forms of currency used in many countries. The Chinese, so far as we know, were the first people to use cowries as currency. There, cowries have been found in prehistoric Stone Age sites. Examples of other country's native money-strands are the diwara in New Guinea, rongo in the Melanesian islands and sapisapi in Africa. The image of the cowrie as a type of currency was so strong that the first oval metal coin minted in the Greek colony of Lydia around 670 B.C. was modeled after that shell. By the eighteenth century, approximately 400 million cowries were being traded per year mostly for the purchase of black slaves. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it could take up to 100,000 cowries just to buy a young wife. Inflation, it seems, was the main demise of the cowrie currency.

Man and Molluscs  

You may have noticed that if you, or a local boy is talking to them, they seem to finger their neck pendants nervously and shyly, as if they are lost for words.  That is not the full story at all.

The island girls are far from being truly shy and nervous, but they are demure.  They wear Tingali shells to allow them to say many things, without speaking out loud, indelicately, or improperly.  The Tingali pendant is a single cowry shell, mounted so that it turns round easily, hung on a simple coconut or wood bead necklace, just right at that tender spot just below the throat.  

The island girls wear all kinds of different shells, to match their characters, or eyes, or even their zodiac signs, and most have collections of several different ones to match their moods. Their moods are a lot more changeable than their characters.   

A cowry shell can imply softness and warmth, a gold ringer or a very rare shell means she doesn't come cheap. A dark cowry suggests seriousness and purpose, and if she doesn't really want to meet anyone at all, she can wear a spiky white comb shell.   

Clam shell beads were used by native Americans as 'wampum', a form of money, made from the clam Venus mercenaria and its relatives, strung onto pendants.

The Latin name of the shell denotes its major use, and even now Americans refer to a "a hundred clams" as "a hundred dollars". "Shelling out" came to mean paying in coins or bills.

Finding, breaking into small pieces, drilling, making round, and finishing individual beads is a complete waste of time.

This ostrich shell bead, recovered from a rock shelter in the Loiyangalani River Valley, in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, is thought to originate from the African Middle Stone Age - between 280,000 and 45,000 years ago.

Someone spent a lot of time "finding, breaking into small pieces, drilling, making round ... etc", this particular bead.

Anyone who spent their time making this thing in a rock shelter, when they could have been doing something useful, like hunting or gathering food, was wasting her time, unless the product, the bead itself, had important significance.

The bead itself is quite useless, except as a decoration, or as a symbol or token of something different.

There's quite a lot of this about in our prehistory.

Handaxes - I've seen one, a full 20" long, very well made, about 50mya in Cyprus, from a beautiful honey-coloured flint, that must have been quite useless for any practical purpose at all. Richard Mithen has suggested that such objects were 'phallic symbols' used to demonstrate male prowess and win mates (see

Why Cowries for the feminist side).

12,000 years ago, in what is now Washington state, the Clovis people developed some marvellously long chert blades. The only problem -- they break far too easily. They were useless for cutting. The flints were being made "for the sheer enjoyment" -- or for some other purpose that had nothing to do with cutting.

Nick Szabo

This 'necklace' comes from a burial at Sungir, Russia, 28,000ya. Each interlocking and interchangeable mammoth ivory bead may have required one to two hours of labour to manufacture. 10,000 of them were found, with 3 bodies, representing some 540 European working weeks or 10 years' continuous effort.

So, useless 'artistic' or 'symbolic' work has a very long history.

Nick Szabo tells a nice story about 'reciprocal altruism' (trans: 'trade'):

The vampire bat...sucks the blood of prey mammals. On a good night, they bring back a surplus; on a bad night, nothing. Their dark business is highly unpredictable. As a result, the lucky (or skilled) bats often share blood with the less lucky bats in their cave. They vomit up the blood and the grateful recipient eats it.

The vast majority of these recipients are kin. Out of 110 such regurgitations witnessed by the strong-stomached biologist G.S. Wilkinson, 77 were cases of mothers feeding their children, and most of the other cases also involved genetic kin. There were, however, a small number that could not be explained by kin altruism. To demonstrate these were cases of reciprocal altruism, Wilkinson combined the populations of bats from two different groups. Bats, with very rare exception, only fed old friends from their original group. Such cooperation requires building a long-term relationship, where partners interact often, recognize each other, and keep track of each other's behavior. The bat cave helps constrain the bats into long-term relationships where such bonds can form.

It's not what you know, it's who you know.

Richard Dawkins suggests, "Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism"

There have always been palaeoanthropological adherents of the 'dismal science', economics, who have suggested such daft ideas as: "Male hunters provided meat to 'buy' sex from their partners, and their partners responded by hiding their oestrus so as to be always available when the poor fellow turned up at the door with a slab of kudu over his shoulder".

But trade and money isn't always quite as dismal as that.

Few other species cooperate on the order of even Paleolithic humans. In some cases -- brood care, the colonies of ants, termites, and bees, and so forth, animals cooperate because they are kin -- because they can help copies of their "selfish genes" found in their kin. In some highly constrained cases, there is also ongoing cooperation between non-kin, which evolutionary psychologists call reciprocal altruism. As Dawkins describes it, unless an exchange of favors is simultaneous (and sometimes even then), one party or the other can cheat. And they usually do. This is the typical result of a game theorists call the Prisoner's Dilemna -- if both parties cooperated, both would be better off, but if one cheats, he gains at the expense of the sucker. In a population of cheaters and suckers, the cheaters always win. However, sometimes animals come to cooperate through repeated interactions and a strategy called Tit-for-Tat: start cooperating and keep cooperating until the other party cheats -- then defect yourself. This threat of retalation motivates continued cooperation.

Nick Szabo

So:

"For that slab of kudu, my old friend, I'll give you a cowry shell (that my wife thinks very highly of), or if you prefer, I'll give you a handaxe (that my mistress thinks very highly of).

When you want something from me, you can give it (or something that I like just as much), back".

And that works, usually very well.

The need to remember faces and favours is a major cognitive hurdle, but one that most humans find relatively easy to overcome. Recognizing faces is easy, but remembering that a favour took place when such memory needs to be recalled can be harder. Remembering the specifics about a favour that gave it a certain value to the favoured is harder still. Avoiding disputes and misunderstandings can be improbable or prohibitively difficult.

As engineers would say, barter "doesn't scale". Barter works well at small volumes but becomes increasingly costly at large volumes, until it becomes too costly to be worth the effort. If there are n goods and services to be traded, a barter market requires n² prices. Five products would require twenty-five prices, which is not too bad, but 500 products would require 250,000 prices, which is far beyond what is practical for one person to keep track of. With money, there are only n prices -- 500 products, 500 prices. Money for this purpose can work either as a medium of exchange or simply as a standard of value -- as long as the number of money prices themselves do not grow too large to memorize or change too often. (The latter problem, along with an implicit insurance "contract", along with the lack of a competitive market may explain why prices were often set by long-evolved custom rather than proximate negotiation).

Barter requires, in other words, coincidences of supply or skills, preferences, time, and low transaction costs. Its cost increases far faster than the growth in the number of goods traded. Barter certainly works much better than no trade at all, and has been widely practiced. But it is quite limited compared to trade with money.

The proto-money used by many hunter-gatherer tribes looks very different from modern money, now serves a different role in our modern culture, and had a function probably limited to small trade networks and other local institutions. I ... call such money collectibles instead of money proper.

Collectibles had very specific attributes. They were not merely symbolic. While the concrete objects and attributes valued as collectible could vary between cultures, they were far from arbitrary. The primary and ultimate evolutionary function of collectibles was as a medium for storing and transfering wealth.

Voluntary spot trades are not the only kinds of transactions that benefit from lower transaction costs. This is the key to understanding the origin and evolution of money. Family heirlooms could be used as collateral to remove the credit risk from delayed exchanges. The ability of a victorious tribe to extract tribute from the vanquished was of great benefit to the victor . The victor's ability to collect tribute benefited from some of the same kinds of transaction cost techniques as did trade. So did the plaintiff in assessment of damages for offenses against custom or law, and kin groups arranging a marriage. Kin also benefited from timely and peaceful gifts of wealth by inheritance. The major human life events that modern cultures segregate from the world of trade benefited no less than trade, and sometimes more so, from techniques that lowered transaction costs. None of these techniques was more effective, important, or early than primitive money -- collectibles.

When H. sapiens sapiens displaced H. sapiens neanderthalis, population explosions followed. Evidence from the takeover in Europe, c. 40,000 to 35,000 B.P, indicates that H. sapiens sapiens increased the carrying capacity of its environment by a factor of ten over H. sapiens neanderthalis -- i.e., the population density increased tenfold. Not only that, the newcomers had spare time (or spare people) to create the world's first art -- such as the wonderful cave paintings, a wide variety of well crafted figurines -- and of course the wonderful pendants and necklaces of seashells, teeth, and eggshell.

These objects were not useless decorations. Newly effective wealth transfers, made possible by collectibles as well as other probable advance of the era, language, created new cultural institutions that quite likely played the leading role in the increase of carrying capacity.

H. sapiens sapiens took pleasure from collecting shells, making jewelry out of them, showing them off, and trading them. H. sapiens neanderthalis did not. The same dynamic would have been at work, tens of thousands of years earlier, when H. sapiens sapiens first appeared in that dynamic maelstrom of human evolution, Africa.

All these kinds of value transfer occured in many cultures of human prehistory, probably from the beginning of homo sapiens sapiens. The gains to be made, by one or both parties, from these major life event transfers of wealth, were so great that they occurred despite high transaction costs. Compared to modern money, primitive money had a very low velocity – it might be transferred only a handful of times in an average individual's lifetime. Nevertheless, a durable collectible, what today we would call an heirloom, could persist for many generations and added substantial value at each transfer – often making the transfer even possible at all. Tribes therefore often spent large amounts of time on the seemingly frivolous tasks of manufacturing and exploring for the raw materials of jewelry and other collectibles.

While many Europeans even in the Palaeolithic enjoyed wearing shell necklaces, many lived farther inland and made necklaces instead out of the teeth of their prey. Flints, axes, furs, and other collectibles were also quite likely used as media of exchange.

Trade-based division of labor in hunting between tribes is consistent with (although not securely confirmed by) the archaeological evidence from the Paleolithic in Europe.

Large herd animals migrated through a territory only two times a year, with a window most often of one or two months. Without any other source of protein besides their own prey species, these specialist tribes would have starved. The very high degree of specialization demonstrated in the archaeological record could only have occurred if there was trade.

Another form of wealth, hidden from the archaeologist, were titles to offices. Such social positions were more valuable than the tangible forms of wealth in many hunter-gatherer cultures. Examples of such positions included clan leaders, war party leaders, hunting party leaders, membership in a particular long-term trading partnership (with a particular person in a neighboring clan or tribe), midwives, and religious healers. Often collectibles not only embodied wealth, but also served as a mnemonic, representing the title to a clan position of responsibility and privilege. Upon death, to maintain order, the heirs to such positions had to be quickly and clearly determined. Delays could spawn vicious conflicts. Thus, a common event was the mortuary feast, in which the deceased was feted while both his tangible and intangible forms of wealth were distributed to descendants, as determined by custom, clan decision-makers, or the will of the deceased.

Many kinds of wealth transfers -- one-way and mutual, voluntary and coerced -- face transaction costs. In voluntary trades both parties gain; a truly free gift is usually an act of kin altruism. These transactions create value for one or both parties as much as the physical act of making something. Tribute benefits the victor and a judgment of damages can prevent further violence as well as benefiting the victim. Inheritance made humans the first animals to pass wealth to their next generation kin. These heirlooms could in turn be used as collateral or payment in trade for goods, for food to stave off starvation, or to pay a marriage bride price. Whether the costs of making these transfers -- transaction costs -- are low enough to make the transfers worthwhile is another matter. Collectibles were crucial in making these kinds of transactions possible for the first time.

Nick Szabo

The first forgeries?

Glass trade beads, made in Venice in the 16th or 17th century, excavated from Mali, Africa.

Cheap junk beads used by unscrupulous traders, particularly in West Africa, are now once again sought-after 'collectibles'.

Primitive money was not modern money as we know it. It took on some of the function modern money now performs, but its form was that of heirlooms, jewelry, and other collectibles. The use of these is so ancient that the desires to explore, collect, make, display, appraise, carefully store, and trade collectibles are human universals -- to some extent instincts. This constellation of human desires might be called the collecting instinct. Searching for the raw materials, such as shells and teeth, and manufacturing of collectibles took up a considerable portion of many ancient humans' time, just as many modern humans expend substantial resources on these activities as hobbies. The results for our ancient forebears were the first secure forms of embodied value very different from concrete utility -- and the forerunner of today's money.

Nick Szabo

And that's how money, hard cash, Gross Domestic Products, the New York Stock Exchange, the Dow Jones Index, outrageous wealth of a few individuals, and embezzlement by them, going broke, and a few more modern afflictions, began.

Funny how money, or even just talking about it, corrupts one.