The oldest jewellery known so far was found in Southern Africa* some years ago, and consists in a series of shells with holes in them. They are 75 000 years old. We don’t really know how the holes have been drilled, with what kind of tool.

These holes make the shells fundamentally specific : we know that these shells have been chosen among others and worn as pieces of jewellery.

To wear a shell on my body and to make this gesture relevantly different from just picking one up, holding it in my hand because I like its shape, colour, touch, requires a physical link : most commonly some kind of string or chain.
In the case of our shells that element has disappeared.

So what if the most important element in those shells would be… the hole itself ? Does this not refer to the mental, spiritual dimension which makes Man a unique being on earth ? Consciousness, the awareness that I am a distinctive entity, that there are other persons and other things around me, that I am not « the world », although part of it, in other words that I am, is what jewellery is specifically based on and what it reveals.

Before being a special object (adorning this or that part of the body, made of this or that material, in this or that style, etc…), before anything else, jewellery is this proper gesture through which I appropriate the world by abstracting « something » of it, making it my own. Doing so, I make myself a distinctive, « distinguished » person (as french sociologist Pierre Bourdieu could define).

A gesture at the same time always addressed to my fellows, the other Humans. A gesture that would have been, without the presence of those holes in the shells, totally ignored.
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*Found in 2002 in the Blombos Cave, South Africa

Check out also Christophe's earlier writing here