Dear Henk

Many thanks for your detailed response to my original message.

The reason for you getting several messages was total confusion on my part.
I'm a 'new' (well, revived) member of the Conch-L list, so I'm quite
properly under moderation.

I didn't know that Linda Brunner, our moderator, was, very unfortunately,
suffering pneumonia as my first message was sent, so I thought it was my
fault, and sent it again. And again.

Another message I sent (about Alan Hinton) somehow got through without
moderation, so I was doubly confused.

I never received your earlier responses.

If it appeared from my message that I was criticising your team that
evaluated the Skhul and Algeria finds, then I assure you that wasn't my
intention, at all.

Your single paper puts the date of human consciousness of symbolism, etc,
back into the past by about 60 - 90 thousand years, and that's very much
something.

Quite properly, academic papers are 'moderated' by peer-review, so they
can't make wild speculations. I'm not a publishing scientist, with a career
at risk, so I can.

The main thing that strikes me about these beads is the extraordinary
coincidence that (almost) identical beads, of a not otherwise extraordinary
shell, were found in South Africa and the Mediterranean, a whole continent
apart.

The answer I got in the paleo group was that similar shells are found all
down the East African coast, thus connecting the two. I'm not at all
familiar with this genus in East Africa, but I doubted that, and proposed
that cowries (moneta and annulus) might have been the connection.

If it took seventy years for the Skhul bead to be recognised as such, then
I'm not at all surprised that no cowry beads dating to before the
Epipaleaolithic have yet been found. (Were the Epipaleaolithic cowry beads
moneta or annulus, or lurida - very different?)

That means, perhaps, that no one has really looked, or that not many East
African sites of around this date have been properly excavated and recorded.

Thanks for explaining the Tyrrhenian stage, that I got totally wrong. Is
there somewhere on the internet that I could find a table that compares the
marine, oxygen isotope, glacial, pluvial and other stages?

regards

Richard

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