This tiny bead may be the world's oldest gold artifact

It may be just a tiny gold bead — 4 millimetres (1/8 inch) in diameter — but it is an enormous discovery for Bulgarian archaeologists who say they have found Europe's — and probably the world's — oldest gold artifact. The bead, found at a pre-historic settlement in southern Bulgaria, dates back to 4,500-4,600 B.C., the archaeologists say, making it some 200 years older than jewellery from a Copper Age necropolis in the Bulgarian Black Sea city of Varna, the oldest processed gold previously unearthed, in 1972. "I have no doubt that it is older than the Varna gold," Yavor Boyadzhiev...

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