This is Cool: A big discovery in South Africa tells us this:

Some 75,000 years ago, in a Stone Age cave overlooking the ocean, someone collected shells and bored holes in them, producing the oldest known evidence that humans had fashioned an ornament.

Discovery of the set of beads pushes back by some 30,000 years the first indications of the ability to make and use such symbolic materials.

The find, reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science, adds support to the idea that such symbolic thought developed very early among humans.

75,000 years is a split second in evolutionary terms, so I don't find it at all surprising that shared symbols -- the basis of language -- were pretty well developed. Whoever made the jewelry had the same kind of brain you have. It's easy to knock institutional memory and bureaucracy when you stand in the DMV; but that, in its rudimentary form of saving and sharing knowledge, is what brought us here from that cave overlooking the ocean in South Africa.