Who was this girl, and why was her burial so special?
Those are the questions archaeologist Hala Alarashi and her colleagues ask in a new paper published in PLOSONE that details the burial of an 8-year-old girl in an ancient Jordanian town sometime between 7,400 and 6,800 B.C. Interred with her bones in the village of Ba‘ja, they found the piecemeal remains of some sort of intricate jewelry that had no precedent at this point in neolithic history.
“The making of the necklace appears to have involved meticulous work,” a statement says, “as well as the import of certain exotic materials from other regions.”
The team decided to reconstruct the ornamentation, which appeared to have been a necklace threaded with some string or “organic material” that had long ago decomposed.
They had much to work with: The team had collected and carefully recorded the positions of 2,500 colorful stone and ...
