Shell Game

Archaeologists say they have found evidence that in
one respect people were behaving like thoroughly modern humans as early
as 100,000 years ago: they were apparently decorating themselves with
a kind of status-defining jewelry – the earliest known shell necklaces.

If this interpretation is correct, it means that human self-adornment,
considered a manifestation of symbolic thinking, was practiced at least
25,000 years earlier than previously thought.

from the New York Times

Now wait one Paleolithic minute! How can they be so sure that these
three shells with holes in them were the product of human craftsmanship
and not just happenstances of nature?  Barring of course the possibility
that they are going by the snake-like engravings resembling the letter
"S".

We mean, those Nassarius gibbosulus shells are just about the most common
shells in the world. There must be literally billions of them sloshing
around in the ocean all the time. A lot of them must end up with roughly
round perforations in their centers.

Of course, we are not completely brain dead. We realize that
the lithologists think they can identify the unmistakable markings
of human
craftsmanship, but can they really? These primitive human craftspeople,
if they existed, used what for tools? Rocks! And out of the billions
of rocks and billions of shells in the sea, don’t the odds favor, eventually,
a series of knocks of stone against shell which exactly duplicate the
efforts of our putative caveman? On the theory of a million monkeys at
a million typewriters?

Although we are not ready to junk evolution and the fossil record, it
seems sane to approach scientific speculation of this sort with a certain
skepticism.