Men's Necklaces: A History That Goes Back 150,000 Years

A Neanderthal in what's now Croatia collected eight eagle talons from three or four different white-tailed eagles — massive birds that aren't easy to catch. He cut notches into each claw, polished the surfaces, and strung them together into something he wore around his neck. That was roughly 130,000 years ago. The history of men's necklaces doesn't start where most articles say it does.

It starts before our species even existed.

Before Jewelry Was Even Human

The Krapina eagle talon necklace sat in a Croatian museum for over a century before anyone noticed what it was. Excavated in the early 1900s, the eight talons were filed away until 2013, when researcher Davorka Radovčić spotted cut marks under magnification. Four talons had edge-smoothed cuts. Eight showed polishing facets. Three had notches at roughly the same position — evidence they'd been strung on a cord.

The findings, published in PLOS One in 2015, pushed the origin of jewelry back by roughly 80,000 years. And the makers weren't Homo sapiens. They were Neanderthals.

Even older: 33 shell beads from Bizmoune Cave in western Morocco, recovered between 2014 and 2018. Each bead half an inch wide, with holes carved through the center, stained red with ochre. Age: 142,000 to 150,000 years. The oldest jewelry ever found on Earth.

A 2023 breakthrough at Denisova Cave in Siberia went further. A Max Planck Institute team extracted ancient human DNA from a pierced deer tooth pendant — without damaging it. By slowly heating the artifact in a chemical solution, they pulled out enough genetic material to identify the wearer. First time anyone identified a specific prehistoric individual through their jewelry.

The richest male burial from this era? Varna Man, discovered in Bulgaria in 1972 by an excavator operator digging a cable trench. Grave 43 held a man in his mid-40s surrounded by 990 gold objects — necklaces, beads, rings — totaling 6 kilograms. More processed gold than had been found in the entire rest of the world from that period. Combined.

Necklaces You Had to Kill For

In 361 BC, a Roman soldier named Titus Manlius challenged a Gallic chieftain to single combat. He won. Then he pulled the bloody torc from the dead man's neck and put it on his own. The act earned him the permanent surname "Torquatus" — literally "the one with the torc." After that, gold torques became standard Roman military awards. Commanders would call soldiers forward during public ceremonies and physically tie a torque to their armor.

The Egyptians had their own version — shaped like a fly. The Order of the Golden Fly was a military decoration awarded for persistence in battle. The logic: flies keep coming back no matter how many times you swat them. Queen Ahhotep I received three golden flies on a necklace from her sons for her role in the war against the Hyksos. Individual soldiers documented receiving up to six.

Egypt also had the shebyu collar — disc-shaped gold beads strung into a necklace that could only be received from the pharaoh himself, in a public ceremony. Introduced around 1400 BC under Thutmose IV, it was the ancient Egyptian equivalent of the Medal of Honor.

The most unsettling warrior necklaces belonged to the Konyak Naga of northeast India. A warrior earned one brass head pendant for each enemy he decapitated. The mouths on each pendant were shown stitched shut — not decorative stitching, but spiritual necessity. The Naga believed stitching the mouth trapped the defeated warrior's spirit inside. Only men who'd taken heads could tattoo their faces.

Half a world away, the Ifugao of the Philippines reserved boar tusk necklaces exclusively for successful headhunters. The tusks were believed to transfer the boar's "strength, speed, endurance, and ferocity" to the wearer. In Borneo, Dayak warriors gave the jawbones of their kills to women as skull and bone pendants — a final humiliation, based on the belief that the slain would serve their killer in the afterlife.

This tradition of wearing earned necklaces didn't end in the ancient world. During the American Civil War, soldiers improvised identification tags from coins, paper, and stenciled cloth — driven by the fear of dying in an unmarked grave. By 1906, the U.S. Army issued official aluminum discs. The second tag on a shorter chain came during WWI: one stays with the body, one goes with the burial detail. The line between men's necklaces and warrior identity runs straight from Roman torques to the dog tags soldiers wear today.

When Your Necklace Was Your Pharmacy

For most of recorded history, necklaces weren't just decoration. They were supposed to keep you alive.

Roman boys received a bulla — a hollow metal locket — nine days after birth. Inside sat a phallic amulet, a standard good-luck symbol in Roman culture. Boys wore the bulla on a cord around their necks every day until the Liberalia festival, typically between ages 14 and 16. At the ceremony, the boy removed his bulla, dedicated it to the household gods, and put on the toga virilis — the garment of a citizen. Gold bullae for the wealthy. Leather for everyone else.

In ancient Mesopotamia, men wore cylinder seals drilled through the center and strung on necklaces. These were three things at once: jewelry, magical amulet, and official signature. When a document needed signing, you removed the seal from your neck and rolled it across wet clay. Made from hematite, obsidian, lapis lazuli, or carnelian — some capped in gold. Everyone wore them, from slaves to kings.

During Europe's plague years, pomander balls became essential neck jewelry. These hollow metal spheres — gold, silver, or brass — opened on a hinge and held solid aromatics: ambergris, musk, cloves, camphor. The prevailing theory was that disease spread through foul smells, so a pomander around your neck was essentially a 13th-century respirator. Some were cast in the shape of skulls — an early example of memento mori jewelry that the gothic tradition later embraced.

Pliny the Elder wrote that peasant women in northern Italy wore amber necklaces to treat sore throats. But amber amulets went to Roman soldiers heading into battle too — protection against both disease and misfortune. During the Black Death, amber beads were carried as plague protection and amber smoke was burned to purify the air. As late as WWII, German mothers were still putting amber necklaces on teething babies.

The Laws That Banned Them

The oldest known European legal code — written by Zaleucus of Locri in the 7th century BC — includes a specific ban: "No man was to wear a gold ring." The same code banned gold for free women, unless she was "a professed and public prostitute." The first written jewelry law in Western history was about controlling who got to display wealth.

Spartans went further. They couldn't own gold or silver at all — their currency was iron. Athenians considered men who wore earrings or necklaces "effeminate" and called jewelry on men "a dangerous foreign innovation." The history of men's earrings ran into the same resistance. In 215 BC, after the disaster at Cannae, Rome passed the Lex Oppia restricting gold possession to half an ounce. It took a public protest in 195 BC to get the law repealed.

Medieval Florence was more hands-on. State officials stationed themselves at taverns, markets, and the entrance of the Duomo. Their job: physically catch people wearing prohibited jewelry. Contemporary accounts describe officials who "pinched and ripped off forbidden jewellery and accessories from people's necks and arms." Florence passed new dress regulations 14 times between 1550 and 1650.

The irony? Tudor England actually reserved heavy gold chains exclusively for men. Henry VIII owned a chain weighing over 98 ounces — roughly 2.8 kilograms of gold around his neck. He also owned 700+ rings. When it came to jewelry as a statement of authority, the Tudors weren't subtle.

The $10.75 Billion Comeback

Puka shell necklaces entered American men's fashion through surf culture in the early 1960s. Surfers traveling to Hawaii brought back cone snail shells as souvenirs. When David Cassidy wore one on television in the early '70s, it went from niche to national overnight. Hippies adopted shells because they broke every rule of 1950s conformity — and men didn't consider them feminine.

Punk flipped the script. Sid Vicious wore a padlock on a bicycle chain around his neck. Safety pins became necklaces — cheap, accessible, deliberately ugly. The look came partly from Richard Hell in New York, partly from Vivienne Westwood's SEX boutique in London, where both Glen Matlock and Sid Vicious worked before joining the Sex Pistols.

Hip-hop built on the warrior necklace tradition in its own way. Kurtis Blow wore gold chains on his debut album cover in the late 1970s. Slick Rick's layered jewelry was compared to the Asantehene — the ruler of Ghana's Asante Empire. Notorious B.I.G.'s last chain was a Jesus piece designed by Tito the Jeweler. Heavy statement chains — whether gold, sterling silver dragon links, or platinum — carry the same weight-as-status signal that Celtic chieftains understood 2,500 years ago.

The current shift is toward silver and mixed metals. Harry Styles made single-strand pearl necklaces his signature, normalizing pearls as men's necklaces on red carpets. A$AP Rocky proved pearls could work with streetwear. And when BTS member V was announced as Cartier's global ambassador in 2023, his campaign wearing a Panthère de Cartier necklace crashed the website and sold out the piece instantly.

The numbers are hard to argue with. The U.S. men's jewelry market hit $5.45 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $10.75 billion by 2032 — growing at 8.4% annually, double the overall jewelry market rate. 73% of millennial and Gen Z men now own at least three pieces of jewelry, up from 45% in 2020. Pendant necklaces are the fastest-growing category. If you're looking at sterling silver chains and pendants, you're not early — but you're not late either.

150,000 years of men's necklaces. The idea that they're "for women" is a blip — a couple of centuries of Victorian propriety against 150 millennia of evidence. Whether you're drawn to a Byzantine silver chain, a 125-gram skull link chain, or a sterling silver cross pendant, you're connecting with something older than agriculture, older than writing, older than our species itself.