The Oldest Jewelry in Europe

Over a century ago, excavation workers discovered ancient human remains near the town of Krapina in northwest Croatia. Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger, a prominent Croatian geologist, paleontologist, and archaeologist, was called in to excavate the site, which has since been dated as 130,000 years old. Over the next six years, Gorjanović-Kramberger's team recovered and catalogued hundreds of Neanderthal bones and stone tools, as well several thousand animal remains. Gorjanović-Kramberger's research on the Krapina collection helped demonstrate the evolution of the human species. New research using collection, which is curated by the Croatian Natural History Museum in Zagreb, has shown that Neanderthals may have been making jewelry 80,000 years before modern humans appeared in Europe.

The museum's Davorka and Jakov Radovčić, together with Ankica Sršen of the Croatian Academy of Science and Arts and David Frayer of the University of Kansas, studied eight white-tailed eagle talons preserved in the Krapina collection. They found cut marks on four of the talons, and all eight of them have polished surfaces. The researchers argue that these cuts were unlikely to have been made during butchering, and the abraded, polished surfaces may have resulted from the talons rubbing together, suggesting that they were mounted in a piece of jewelry like a necklace or a bracelet.



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"It's really a stunning discovery. It's one of those things that just appeared out of the blue. It's so unexpected and it's so startling because there's just nothing like it until very recent times to find this kind of jewelry," said Frayer. The authors also point out that white-tailed eagles are uncommon birds with an aggressive personality. Modern white-tailed eagles can weigh up to 6kg and have a two-meter wingspan, making them challenging animals to catch. While the birds (or their remains) may have found their way to the site without human help, it's an unlikely scenario, given that the birds usually build large nests in trees or on cliffs, rather than nesting in caves such as the Krapina site.

The talons probably come from three or four eagles. The Krapina Neanderthals may have hunted these majestic birds, perhaps as part of a ceremony of some kind, or they may have collected them from carcasses they found. Even if the talons are from carcasses, the authors argue that "it would have taken keen eyes to locate the dead birds as rare as they were in the prehistoric avifauna." However they were acquired, it's clear that the talons were important to these Neanderthals, showing that they had a symbolic culture and valued art and jewelry long before modern humans appeared in Europe.

Ref
Radovčić D, Sršen AO, Radovčić J, Frayer DW. Evidence for Neandertal Jewelry: Modified White-Tailed Eagle Claws at Krapina. PLoS ONE 10(3): e0119802. (2015) doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0119802

Image credit
The image of the eagle talons is by Luka Mjeda (Zagreb) and was distributed with the press release from PLOS under a CC-BY license.