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HumOur

hoW anD When

JeWelleRy CaughT on

by JaMeS ClaRke

Archaeologist, Brian Stewart, of the University of Until the dress was invented, the only places a
Michigan and his colleagues have found ostrich eggshell woman had to hang or attach adornments - and
oh, how she loved adornments - were her ears,
beads in southern Africa that date back at least 33 000 nose, lips, hair, neck, waist, upper arms, lower
arms, wrists, 10 fingers, 10 toes, ankles, calves
years. According to the American Proceedings of the and thighs.
National Academy of Sciences, other examples of this But ostrich egg beads were not enough. With
form of jewellery may date back 200 000 years. the advent of the dress she now had new
places on which to attach pretty baubles.
i It needs very little stretch of the imagination
have often pondered why women like
jewellery. If I could discover what it is
to understand how adornments must have
then somebody could start working on an
dramatically reshaped relationships between
antidote.
men and women. Up until that point, the
primeval hunter, Ignatius Ug (not his real
There comes a time in every man's life when
name), would have taken an interest in animals
he has bought his wife just about everything
mainly to get at their innermost being (i.e.
she needs ... a scrubbing board, a carrot grater, their liver and sirloin). Now, with the advent of
spanners, drain cleaners and so on. And so, as jewellery, things became more serious.
they get older, men are forced to start buying
jewellery, the sure-fire stand-by to please the Amelia-Anne Ug, seeing her neighbour,
little woman. It is a sad stage of life.
Gareldene Fothergill-Onk wearing a warthog
tusk through her cute little nose, would
It has been said (Beano 1951) that women, want something equally chic, if not chicker.
long before they wore clothes, were probably Geraldine might well have flashed the odd lion
satisfied with adorning themselves with ochre, tooth too.
mud and stuff. Clothes came in when the
earliest couturiers hit on the idea of flattening
Ug now found himself having to chase sabre-
out animal skins, scraping all the blood and toothed cats, lions and other non-edibles,
fat off the inside (couturiers, from the word go, simply to extract the teeth and claws with which
were ever fussy) and then making a hole for to adorn his beloved. Just as jewellery costs
the female to shove her head through.
today so finding one’s own often cost an arm
and leg.
Wet and cold though the first dress was, the
idea was a smash hit.
This pursuit of dangerous and uncooperative
animals naturally instilled a certain amount of
What has this got to do with jewellery? I am unwillingness on the part of the hunter and so
about to tell you.
women had to become more conniving.
A typical female-to-female cave conversation
might have gone: "I've told Ug that if he
brings me back a pair of tiger teeth earrings
I'll make him his favourite dish - warthog
placenta garnished with caterpillars. If he
fails, he'll have left-overs from last night and
the night before."

"What did you cook last night?"
"My grandmother.”

Modern women have become even more
inventive about jewellery. A London store
offers live, jewel-encrusted beetles which
can be tethered to a dress by gold chains.
Some women use miniature dogs for
displaying their surplus diamonds and
older women have the ultimate adornment
draped over their forearm - a toy boy. Even
he wears earrings and gold chains.

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