Long before being used for trade, beads were the first thing that man used to adorn themselves (and even their clothes and weapons). They were worn as much for magical as for decorative purposes. Most were made from nuts, seeds, shell, bone, teeth, wood, ostrich egg shells (usually made into discs) etc, and they were pierced for threading onto handmade string.
In prehistoric times, beads were worn not only around the neck but around the hips, over the ears, threaded through the nose, and even attached to the eyelashes!
In the Stone Age, the earliest beads were probably plant seeds.
By Acheulian times, collars of seashells and small fossils were strung.
From the Aurignacian and Magdalenian periods, whole necklaces of pierced shells have survived, some of them carried long distances from the sea. Collars made of the pierced canine teeth of Arctic foxes and of chamois and human teeth pierced for stringing also have been found.
A type of bilobed bead (meaning a kind of double bead, or figure 8) carved out of mammoth ivory was often worn in Siberian Paleolithic settlements. It was perhaps ancestral to a bone or stone bead of double-ax shape that was popular in the Neolithic period, especially in northern Europe, Britain, and southern France. Beads of stone, bone, and amber, pierced through their narrower ends, became common in the Late Neolithic Period in Scandinavia and are found in Megalithic graves of western Europe.
Then man began to make beads from soapstone, clay and eventually glass. See Part 2 ...