Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald,

currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world

and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination.

The Emerald.

All that's happening on this green jewel in space. Imagine this.

82,000 years ago, on what is now the Moroccan coastline, someone sat on a beach, gathering shells.

Think of it.

Here in this world, situated in a vast spiraling arm of stars.

In the midst of great spiraling necklaces of time, someone, a small girl perhaps, sat collecting shells.

Little welk shells which themselves grow in spirals.

So there, by the spiraling sea, within the great spiral of time, she held a single shell between her thumb and forefinger, and punctured it with a sharpened stone, and strung it with others on a little string of hide, and placed that beaded string around her neck.

In an act so simple, all it could be is inherent, innate,

a reflection of a universe that itself adorns in endless necklaces of spirals.

For human beings, adorn.

The oldest adornments go back, how far?

Keeps getting older and older, right?

Now they're saying 160,000 years.

The earliest graves we know of are adorned with flowers and beads. Bodies draped in jade, sprinkled in jasper, ringed in bone, scattered in shell, powdered in ochre.

A scarab pendant adorns the heart of the pharaoh. Tattoos adorn the flaking skin of ice mummies.

Bodies everywhere across all time are dotted, strung, emblazoned with shiny things.

Quote, anything that shimmers holds a special attraction for us.

This fascination is as old as human existence, says Kathleen Martin.

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