A broken pendant carved from a 41,500-year-old piece of woolly mammoth tusk could be the oldest known example of decorated jewellery in Eurasia made by humans. Discovered in 2010 among animal bones and a few Upper Paleolithic stone tools during fieldwork in Stajnia Cave, a natural rock shelter in southern Poland, the oval-shaped pendant has two drilled holes and is decorated with at least 50 smaller puncture marks that create a looping curve. The largest piece is 4.5 centimetres long and 1.5 centimetres wide, while the thickness varies between 3.6 and 3.9 millimetres. The diameter of the fully preserved hole is 2.3 millimetres. Radiocarbon dating puts the piece of mammoth tusk used to make the pendant between 41,730 and 41,340 years old - within the record of the earliest dispersals of Homo sapiens in Europe, and 2,000 years older than similarly decorated artefacts from Germany, France, Russia, and the Siberian Arctic.
     Separate short term occupations by Neanderthals and Homo sapiens groups have been identified from the cave, within a large collection of bones of Late Pleistocene steppe-tundra species, and Middle and Upper Paleolithic artefacts, including a 7-centimetre-long awl made from a piece of horse bone, dated to around 42,000 years ago.
     Upon their dispersals in Central and Western Europe by around 42,000 years ago, groups of Homo sapiens started to manipulate mammoth tusks for the production of pendants and portable objects, at times decorated with geometric motifs. In addition to lines, crosses, and criss-crosses, a new type of decoration - the alignment of punctuations - appeared in some ornaments in south-western France and figurines in Swabian Jura in Germany. Until now, most of these adornments were from older excavations, so their dates were uncertain and questions regarding the emergence of human body augmentation and the diffusion of mobiliary art in Europe remained strongly debated.

Edited from PhysORG (25 November 2021), Nature magazine (29 November 2021)