This may well be the origin of everything you know
New Scientist - Ostrich Beads Indicate Early Symbolic Thought
I've long held that the notion of a uniquely European "creative explosion" in the Upper Paleolithic was an absurdity, an artifact arising from the fact that most of those who'd bothered to look for evidence from the period happened to be Europeans looking on their home-ground. Earlier finds from South Africa dating back to c. 77,000 BC had already begun to cast doubt on the old story, but this latest news makes it even less plausible than before that modern human creativity post-dated the dispersal out of Africa 50,000 years ago.
In the article Abiola links to, a scientist casts aspersions on the importance of this find, to which aspersiona Abiola replies:
Paul Pettitt is simply splitting hairs; what difference is there between saying something is symbolic as opposed to decorative? Is it even meaningful to speak of a thing being decorative without carrying symbolic meaning? I rather doubt it.
However one chooses to parse this find, the bottom line is that it is evidence of behavior that is simply unheard of amongst earlier species of men; to date, not a single item of a decorative nature, or even one made of anything other than stone, has been found that could be unambigously attributed to Neandertals, H. Erectus or any other archaic populations. These ostrich egg beads, ochre pencils and carved bone tools are indisputably hallmarks of a modern sensibility.
