First of all, I want to point out that 2000 years ago was essentially still the height of the Roman Empire, who were far from unknowledgeable about a number of topics, including the human body. In fact, the Romans are actually closer to us modern people than to the first humans who wore body jewellery - any type of jewellery that required body modification (such as, a needle cutting through flesh to create a tunnel).

The oldest ear piercing evidence for example goes back 7000 years, around 5000BC, pre-dating even the Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures. The oldest mummy ever found had its ears pierced.

As to how this came to be… I think it’s pretty straightforward. Humans have liked pretty jewellery since the dawn of time, and there’s even proof that such items were used to barter, as a pre-currency, pre-coin form of money. This includes gold and silver and other precious metals, but even pretty shells and stones.

However the main issue with jewellery is that it’s easy to take from your body. How do you make it harder? By embedding it in your body.

What I think happened is that a group of humans discovered the generally antiseptic properties of silver (potentially a silver arrowhead or similar item embedded itself into a human, it wasn’t removed due to fear of bleeding out, and the wound didn’t get infected days later, allowing it to heal around the item), and began utilising it as a way to provide more protection for their jewelry - after all it’s much harder to remove an ear, nose, lip, or nipple ring than a bracelet or necklace.

Such practices spread easily with trade, so it’s no surprise that in a few hundred years it was all over the place that you can, in fact, cause a bit of pain to yourself to have some permanent value added to your body.

Some fun facts:

• Romans did indeed wear nipple rings as a symbol of status (no, not as a way to attach their otherwise quite heavy cloaks!)
• while in India, nose rings were more common (both septum and nostril rings)
• in (mostly sub-Saharan) Africa, lip rings, lip and ear stretching were “the big thing”
• in the furthest parts of SE Asia - modern day Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea - a number of tribes marked adulthood and other major life achievements with genital piercings, primarily for men (mostly foreskin and frenulum piercings), but also some women (labia and clitoral hood piercings).
• In the western world, piercings fell out of fashion between 1400-1600, partly because of the discovery of the Americas, where more intricate body piercings (tongue piercings for example) were used in religious rituals that the Europeans considered barbaric or even downright demonic.
• Their popularity was restored partially by the unsubstantiated rumours of Queen Victoria I’s husband, Prince Albert, after whom the piercing was named, having a ring in his glans to contain his enormous size in the back then fashionable trousers (the Victorian equivalent of skinny jeans). Mind you these rumours started a solid hundred years after his death… in the 1950-1960s
• the 1960-70s were the resurgence years in western culture for body piercings, in part thanks to the hippie movement, and in part thanks to the gay subculture (which was already pretty big on body piercings as a differentiating factor) becoming more mainstream (Stonewall etc.).