Among the finds from the lowest layer of Kostenki 17, on the banks of the Don, there is a small yellowish rod, half see-through like amber, with a hole drilled through it. Someone made that hole more than 40,000 years ago.
The rod is a belemnite, the inner skeleton of a squid relative that sank to a sea floor when dinosaurs and plesiosaurs were alive. The sea floor became rock, and the ravines around Kostenki cut straight through it. Country people have a name for these rods: devil's fingers. Archaeologist Ksenia Stepanova says the first settlers of the open plains of Eastern Europe saw them in the ravine walls, pried them out, and carried them home. They did the same with fossil corals.
Go to a museum and you will find a Stone Age person in a scrap of fur, with beads on a string around the neck. The wear on these objects tells another story. Beads that clack together on a necklace pick up one kind of scratch. These carry the marks of something sewn onto cloth. The ornaments sat on the clothes, and the clothes mattered. The Pleistocene was cold and dry and windy. Stepanova mentions a pathologist she once heard on a podcast, who said you can freeze to death at +8°C if you are dressed wrong. These people were dressed right.
These were people who collected fossils. They were very curious; you could say they were the first palaeontologists.
Это ребята, которые собирали окаменелости, они были очень любопытными, можно сказать, что это первые палеонтологи
— Ksenia Stepanova, Osnova, 60:25
Other researchers have read wear the same way elsewhere. A review by Ian Gilligan in Science Advances in 2024 reports use-wear showing that beads may have been sewn onto clothing at Üçağızlı Cave in southwest Asia about 41,000 years ago, and at Shuidonggou 2 in East Asia about 34,000 years ago.
Sewing makes sense once you ask what dress was for. In traditional societies a costume announces who you are: a girl wears one set of ornaments, a married woman another, and neighbouring groups tell each other apart by theirs. Hidden under a coat, that message goes unread. Today a cross is worn under the shirt. In a traditional culture, identity is worn where everyone can see it.
The fossils that could not be drilled got different treatment. Some are small, old, snail-like shells, shaped like dumplings and older than the chalk itself. Someone painted them red. A fossil that is already interesting can be made more interesting.
Stepanova's verdict on the whole picture is blunt, and it settles an old quarrel. In the nineteenth century one researcher, Kelsiev, pictured the people of Kostenki as scavengers drifting from place to place, driven on by the smell of rotting meat. Ivan Polyakov, who found the site, said they were skilled enough to hunt mammoths and live well. Polyakov was right. Those who failed left no camps for anyone to dig. We know about these people because they succeeded.
Fossils appear in jewellery elsewhere too. A study by Francesco d'Errico in PLOS ONE in 2025 notes that after about 45,000 years ago, ornaments of many materials start turning up together across Eurasia: amber, bone, ivory, shell, teeth, and fossils among them.
Then there are the pouches. In one season Aleksandr Bessudnov's team at Kostenki found tight little clusters sprinkled with red paint. One held several human teeth, some fossils and an unfinished pendant, drilled from one side only. Another held fossils and an unfinished pendant. Stepanova's reading is that these were pouches, perhaps holding charms, perhaps tools for telling fortunes, perhaps something else. The wear on the pendants says they were not abandoned. Rubbing from the pouch lies on top of the marks left by the drill. Somebody stopped halfway on purpose and carried the half-made thing around with the other curiosities.
Why? "Don't ask," Stepanova says. The archaeology does not say.
