Archaeologist Stephen Munro almost fall off his hot seat when henoticedpatterns of unbowed lines purposefully etch on a fossilized grapple . The engraving were half a million years old , which imply they ’d been made by a Homo erectus — an extinct human specie that predated Homo sapiens by upwards of 300,000 old age .
In accession to the engravings , Munroe and his colleagues found shells that were carefully craft into specialized tools . Taken together , these discovery suggest that Homo erectus was far more advanced than antecedently believed and capable of symbolic opinion .
“ It is a captivating discovery,”saysColin Renfrew , an archeologist at the University of Cambridge . “ The earliest nonobjective ornament in the world is really big news . ”
The shells , which previously had been sitting in a museum , were garner more than a hundred ago by Dutch archaeologist Eugene Dubois on the Indonesian island of Java . Dubois had incur the specimens from the same archeological site site where , in the 1890s , he let out the first - known remains of Homo erectus . In 2007 , Leiden University archaeologist Josephine Joordens get studying the shell , face for clues about what the environs had been like for humanity ’s ancestors . It was then that her confrere , Munro , noticed the etchings .
In the seven years since , a team of scientists led by Joordens have been studying the shell , confirming their years and that the lines had not been made by animals . The results of their research have been published in Nature .
As NPRreports :
“ It ’s not that we just have this one keep apart etching , but it spring part of a much more across-the-board and taxonomical exercise and victimisation of these fresh water shells , ” say Joordens .
Many of the plate have one or two hole right at a particular spot . The holes appear to be made with a pointed object like a shark tooth , using a rotating movement . The research squad did experiments show that practice into this spot would prod the muscle of this shellfish and make it open .
Also , they launch one shell that appears to have been form to be a dick for cutting or scraping .
And they did blanket microscopical analyses on the evident etching . Joordens notes that when the shell was fresh , it would have had a black exterior ; the engraver would have produce a outstanding pattern of clean line on a blackened scope .
“ It ’s very carefully done,”saysAndrew Whiten , a psychologist and primatologist at the University of St Andrews in the UK . “ There is a wonderfully straight segment and the [ etch ] turns in one uninterrupted line . That ’s not just intentional but careful in what strikes as a very modern style . Apes are n’t doing that . It would be stupefying if they did . ”
What the etchings meant is anyone ’s guess . And other scientist are skeptical .
“ mayhap it ’s not as intentional a design as they inculpate , ” say Alison Brooks , a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University . She speculate that a Homo erectus child could have picked up a tool a parent used to open a shell , and try out it out .
Still , she says , “ It raises the possibility that the development of human noesis — human civilisation — was a very long process . It was not a sudden development . ”
anthropologyArchaeologyEvolutionHomo sapiens
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