It is enough to look for a moment at a beautiful pearl to imagine how our ancestors perceived pearls in the early days of civilization. Can you imagine having encountered even one of these exquisite natural beauties without knowing anything about them and without ever having seen or held such a pearl? As with many other things in antiquity, people did not have the necessary information about pearls to be able to properly understand their true nature, so they valued them for their own, made-up reasons for their existence. Throughout human...