Scientists Discovered The 50,000-Year-Old 'Ancestral' Social Network, Preceding Facebook & Tiktok, In Africa

The world's oldest social network has just been discovered by scientists, formed 50,000 years ago and stretching thousands of kilometers across Africa.

Source: Nature

Unlike modern electronic media, the ancient social network was a network of social links using a much more traditional medium. The connection is based on the sharing and trading of beads made from ostrich eggshells (OES) - one of mankind's oldest forms of personal jewelry.
According to the results, published in the journal Nature, scientists in Germany studied more than 1,500 of these beads, collected from more than 30 sites across Southern and Eastern Africa.

Source: Nature

The beads are thought to have been created and worn by hunter-gatherers in what is now Africa. As a result, the bead-makers exchanged them on a large area scale of nearly 1,158 square miles, in order to share symbolic messages and strengthen alliances.
Ancient social groups and communities were separated by geographical distance, which further showed the existence of a long-distance social network stretching thousands of kilometers, connecting people in remote areas together.
"The result is surprising, but the pattern is clear," said study co-author Yiming Wang, at Germany's Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

Source: Alamy

Beads made from ostrich eggshells are some of the oldest forms of self-decoration found in the archaeological record, although they are not the first to be adopted by Homo sapiens.
Scientists believe that men and women began to decorate their bodies with red lipstick about 200,000 years ago, before starting to wear beads 75,000 years ago.
However, the decoration industry really took off about 50,000 years ago in Africa, with the production of the first ostrich eggshell beads - the earliest form of standardized jewelry known to archeology.

Source: Nature

It is the world's first bright spot, and its use represents one of mankind's oldest cultural traditions, regarding the expression of identity and relationships. "These tiny beads have the power to reveal big stories about our past," said lead author Jennifer Miller.
The point about ostrich eggshell jewelry is that instead of relying on the size or natural shape of an item, people started to shape the shell directly and create a multitude of styles of expression.

Source: What Is Find

The resulting patterns provided researchers with a route through which they could trace cultural associations, although it is unclear whether the ostrich eggshell particles that Miller and Wang studied, along with the knowledge of how they were produced, were exchanged between groups.
However, the world's first social network did not last long. About 33,000 years ago, the pattern of wearing beads suddenly changed, disappearing from southern Africa only to travel to the east of the continent. Miller and Wang suggest that climate changes were behind this, leading to the end of the planet's oldest social network, which has been around for 17,000 years.
H/T: The Guardian