The World’s Oldest Jewelry
Researchers were astonished to find that some of the oldest jewelry discovered was made from eagle talons. In 2013, Davorka Radovcic, one of Croatia’s Natural History Museum’s curators, came up with this revelation while studying the Krapina Neanderthal collection.
These fossils were not a new discovery, however. As a matter of fact, they had been sitting for 115 years before they were analyzed by Radovcic, having been discovered in 1899 by Dragutin Gorjanovic-Kramberger, a Croatian Palaeontoligst.
Even though decades upon decades of scientists and researchers had studied the fossil collection, Radovcic was quite humble when she said that her “fresh eye” was the reason for her putting two and two together.
Radovcic was teamed up with three other researchers, Jakov Radovcic and Ankica Oros Srsen from Croatia and U.S. Professor David Frayer from the University of Kansas. Together, they worked for months studying the facets, marks and abrasions on the fossils and concluded that they were used for jewelry.
What the researchers could not conclude was exactly how these fossils were worn (whether they were used for bracelets or necklaces), nor could they determine the symbolism of the fossils to Neanderthals. But, they were able to determine that the fossils came from eagle talons.
