Taforalt Cave: Early Shell Beads and Burials in Morocco

Taforalt Cave, also called the Grotte des Pigeons, is a limestone cave in the mountains of north-eastern Morocco. It is known for perforated marine shells, dated to about 82,000 years ago, that are among the oldest known personal ornaments made by humans. Much later, around 15,000 years ago, the cave became a burial ground for Iberomaurusian hunter-gatherers whose remains have yielded some of the oldest human DNA from Africa.

The site

The cave lies near the village of Taforalt (Tafoughalt) in the Beni Snassen mountains, in Morocco’s Oriental region, about 40 kilometres from the Mediterranean coast. Its large entrance faces out over a valley, and its deep deposits record human visits over a long period.

The French archaeologist and priest Jean Roche excavated the cave in the 1950s, and again between the late 1960s and 1970s. He uncovered a long sequence of layers and, in the back of the cave, a large number of human burials. Since 2003 an Oxford-led team, directed by Nick Barton and the Moroccan archaeologist Abdeljalil Bouzouggar of the National Institute of Archaeological Sciences and Heritage (INSAP), has carried out new excavations.

The shell beads

In 2007 Bouzouggar, Barton and colleagues reported 13 shells of the small sea snail Nassarius gibbosulus from the lower, Middle Stone Age layers of the cave. Each shell has a perforation, and several show wear around the hole consistent with being strung on a cord. Some were coated with red ochre.

The beads come from layers associated with the Aterian, a Middle Stone Age culture of North Africa known for tools with a tang, a narrow stem for attaching a handle. The layers were dated using several methods, including luminescence and uranium-series dating, to about 82,000 years ago.

The cave lay some distance inland at the time, so the shells must have been carried from the coast. Their selection, perforation and colouring suggest that they were not food remains but ornaments worn on the body.

Why beads matter

Personal ornaments are widely seen as evidence of symbolic thinking. A bead can signal identity, group membership or status, so its wearers must share an understanding of what it means. For this reason, archaeologists treat early beads as one marker of behaviour like that of living humans.

When published, the Taforalt beads were among the oldest known, comparable in age to Nassarius beads from Blombos Cave in South Africa, about 75,000 years old. Similar beads have been found at other North African sites. In 2021 researchers reported shell beads from Bizmoune Cave in western Morocco dated to at least 142,000 years ago, making North Africa a key region in the history of ornaments.

These finds fit with fossils showing that Homo sapiens lived in North Africa very early, such as the remains from Jebel Irhoud, dated to about 315,000 years ago.

The Iberomaurusian cemetery

Much later, between roughly 15,000 and 14,000 years ago, people of the Iberomaurusian culture used the back of the cave as a cemetery. Roche’s excavations recovered the remains of many individuals, and the more recent excavations have found further burials. It is one of the largest Late Pleistocene burial sites known in Africa.

The burials reveal details of life and custom. Many individuals had their upper central incisors removed during life, a practice common among Iberomaurusians. A 2014 study found very high rates of tooth decay, which the researchers linked to a diet rich in starchy wild plants such as acorns and pine nuts, long before farming.

Ancient DNA

In 2018 a team led by Marieke van de Loosdrecht and Johannes Krause published genomes from seven Taforalt individuals about 15,000 years old. The results showed that these people had about two-thirds of their ancestry from a population related to the later Natufians of the Levant, and the rest from a source related to sub-Saharan African populations. They were the first Pleistocene genomes obtained from North Africa and among the oldest from anywhere in Africa.

Timeline

• c. 82,000 years ago: People at Taforalt leave perforated, ochre-coloured Nassarius shells in Aterian layers.
• c. 15,000 to 14,000 years ago: Iberomaurusian hunter-gatherers bury their dead in the back of the cave.
• 1950s: Jean Roche begins excavations at the Grotte des Pigeons.
• 2003: A new Oxford and INSAP excavation project begins.
• 2007: The 82,000-year-old shell beads are published.
• 2014: A study links high rates of tooth decay to a starchy plant diet.
• 2018: Genomes from Taforalt individuals are published in Science.

Why it matters

Taforalt shows two important chapters of human prehistory in a single cave. Its shell beads helped establish that symbolic ornaments were being made in North Africa by around 82,000 years ago, not only in southern Africa or Europe. Its cemetery and ancient DNA, meanwhile, give a rare view of the people, diet and ancestry of North Africa at the end of the last ice age.