About 75 000 years ago someone living in a cave overlooking the Indian Ocean bored holes in a set of shells and strung them as beads -- the earliest known human jewellery.
The newly found beads are more than 30 000 years older than any other known human jewellery.
The discovery of the Stone Age beads in South Africa supports the theory that traits associated with modern people, such as using symbolic items, developed early, rather than thousands of years later after humans migrated to the Middle East and Europe.
The previously oldest known human ornaments are perforated teeth and eggshell beads from Bulgaria and Turkey, 41 000 to 43 000 years old, and 40 000-year-old ostrich-shell beads from Kenya.
Another South African story (Jane Flanagan, in the London Telegraph): African voters return Boer farmer who defected to ANC
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An Afrikaner farmer who was born into the party that created apartheid in South Africa has become an MP for the mostly black African National Congress.
Hannes Combrink, 33, a grape farmer from the Northern Cape province, lost most of his friends and divided his family when he defected from the National Party to the
ANC, which won a landslide victory in the country's third democratic election last week.
'People refused to talk to me at farmers' meetings and wouldn't sit with me at church,' said Mr Combrink, who was the chairman of the pro-apartheid National Party youth council.
'I felt intimidated and they felt betrayed, but I just couldn't be part of all that 'whites against the blacks' stuff any more. I lost a lot of white friends, and now I mix mostly with black or brown people, which is unusual were I come from.'
