500,000 year old engraving discovered

Credit: Wim Lustenhouwer, VU University Amsterdam

Homo Erectus engraved this mussel shell, a total surprise to researchers
who thought only modern humans produced "art".  The zig zag pattern
that can only be seen with oblique lighting, and is clearly older than the
weathering processes on the shell arising from fossilization. 
Homo erectus on Java was already using shells of freshwater mussels as tools half a million years ago, and as it turns out, as a 'canvas' for an engraving. An international team of researchers, led by Leiden archaeologist José Joordens, published this discovery on 3 December in Nature.

Not only Homo sapiens made engravings
"Until this discovery, it was assumed that comparable engravings were only made by modern humans (Homo sapiens) in Africa, starting about 100,000 years ago," says lead author José Joordens, researcher at the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University.

A team of 21 researchers studied hundreds of fossil shells and associated finds and sediments from the Homo erectus site Trinil, on the Indonesian island of Java. The shells are part of the Dubois Collection that has been held at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center since the end of the 19th century. The shells were excavated by the Dutch physician and researcher Eugène Dubois, the discoverer of Pithecanthropus erectus -- now known as Homo erectus.

Engravings older than weathering
The discovery of an engraved geometrical pattern on one of the shells came as a total surprise. The zig zag pattern, that can only be seen with oblique lighting, is clearly older than the weathering processes on the shell arising from fossilisation. The study has excluded the possibility that the pattern could have been caused by animals or by natural weathering processes and shows that the 'zigzag' pattern is the work of Homo erectus.

Click on image
to order from
Powells.com
Five hundred thousand years old
By applying two dating methods, researchers at the VU University Amsterdam and Wageningen University have determined that the shell with the engraving is minimally 430,000 and maximally 540,000 years old.This makes the engraving is at least four times older than the previously oldest known engravings found in Africa.

Purpose or meaning of the engraving?
"It's fantastic that this engraved shell has been discovered in a museum collection where it has been held for more than a hundred years. I can imagine people may be wondering whether this can be seen as a form of early art," says Wil Roebroeks, Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology at Leiden University. He was able to finance this long-term research with his NWO Spinoza Prize. "At the moment we have no clue about the meaning or purpose of this engraving."

Early human-like mussel collector
This research has shown that these early human-like people were very clever about how they opened these large freshwater mussels; they drilled a hole through the shell using a sharp object, possibly a shark's tooth, exactly at the point where the muscle is attached that keeps the shell closed. "The precision with which these early humans worked indicates great dexterity and detailed knowledge of mollusc anatomy," says Frank Wesselingh, a researcher and expert on fossil shells at Naturalis. The molluscs were eaten and the empty shells were used to manufacture tools, such as knives.

Related posts:
*  *  *  *  *
Story Source:  Joordens J.C.A., d’Errico F., Wesselingh F.P., Munro S. de Vos, J., Wallinga, J. Ankjærgaard, C., Reimann, T., Wijbrans, J.R., Kuiper K.F., Mücher H.J., Coqueugniot, H., Prié, H.V., Joosten, I., van Os, B., Schulp, A.S., Panuel, M., van der Haas V., Lustenhouwer W., Reijmer J.J.G., Roebroeks, W. Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving. Nature, December 2014

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Greek Bronze Age ended 100 years earlier than thought

Image
Source: www.shef.ac.uk The charred remains of Assiros Toumba in Greece. Writing historical fiction set in the Greek Bronze Age?  Or simply enjoy reading this genre'?  Here's a study you may find interesting. C onventional estimates for the collapse of the Aegean civilization may be incorrect by up to a century, according to new radiocarbon analyses. While historical chronologies traditionally place the end of the Greek Bronze Age at around 1025 BCE, this latest research suggests a date 70 to 100 years earlier. www.weather-forecast.com Archaeologists from the University of Birmingham selected 60 samples of animal bones, plant remains and building timbers, excavated at Assiros in northern Greece, to be radiocarbon dated and correlated with 95.4% accuracy using Bayesian statistical methodology at the University of Oxford and the Akademie der Wissenschaften Heidelberg, Germany. Researcher Dr Ken Wardle says, 'These new results tell a story that is totall
Read more

How the lives of Georgian gaolbirds and highwaymen shaped modern Britain

Image
Writing historical fiction requires solid research of available materials and databases.  The key word here is available.   So news of a new publicly accessible database that allows an author to research a very interesting past era is priceless almost beyond words.   I expect some exciting fiction to come out of this announcement. Here's the story, with a link to the source in the attribution. *  *  *  *  * London Lives, a landmark project led by Professor Bob Shoemaker from the University of Sheffield and Professor Tim Hitchcock from the University of Sussex, has uncovered a mass of extraordinary new evidence which reveals how the lives of thousands of 18th-century poor and criminal Londoners helped shape modern Britain. Based on evidence made available in a publicly available database, the study sheds new light on the everyday lives of thieves, prostitutes, vagrants, highwaymen, con-men, paupers and jailbirds, revealing how their daily fight for survival led to t
Read more

Mood Instability and Your Characters

Image
You're putting together a character who's mood simply bounces all over the place, happy one moment, in a fit of rage the next.  Researchers at King's College London note that this sort of mood instability is part of a number of mental health disorders.  So how do you structure the personality and behavior of a character like this?  Below is the King's College report, along with a brief description from mentalhealth.com, of typical behavior, sometimes in the extreme, of a person who is very emotionally unstable.  This is offered strictly as a guide for crafting character in fiction - and NOT for the amateur diagnosis of the state of someone's mental health.  That is always best left to trained professionals. Another note about emotionally unstable behavior:  as any parent will tell you, this is how adolescents and teen-agers often behave.  It's a normal part of growing up - but it is a matter of degree .  In the extreme, however, this behavior can be diag
Read more

SciFi: Introducing "Technofossils" the legacy of modern humans for future generations to explore

Image
Source:  blogs.miaminewtimes.com  Daniel Fiorda's "Nostalgic Hardware" Techno-Fossil Art Imagine what a future archaeologist would think finding any of the myriad bits and pieces of technology we bury in modern middens, aka garbage dumps.  So now we have a name for it:  Technofossils, coined recently to describe the stuff humanity tosses out. T he fossil impact humans make on the planet is vast and unprecedented in nature -- there's been nothing remotely like it since the Earth formed over four and half billion years ago. The researchers argue that, like dinosaurs, who left their bones and footprints behind for future generations to discover, humans will also leave a footprint behind -- one made up of material goods unique to humankind that are so different from anything else produced by animals in the history of Earth that they deserve their own name: technofossils. Dr Zalasiewicz said: "Palaeontologists call preserved animal-made structures trace f
Read more

Remember faces but not names? You got it wrong.

Image
Source:   Daily Excelsior So, you think you're good at remembering faces, but terrible with names? New research has revealed we are actually better at remembering names than faces The cringe-worthy experience of not being able to remember an acquaintance's name leads many of us to believe we are terrible with names. However, new research has revealed this intuition is misleading; we are actually better at remembering names than faces. With the Christmas party season fast approaching, there will be plenty of opportunity to re-live the familiar, and excruciatingly-awkward, social situation of not being able to remember an acquaintance's name. This cringe-worthy experience leads many of us to believe we are terrible at remembering names. However, new research has revealed this intuition is misleading; we are actually better at remembering names than faces. The authors of the study, from the University of York, suggest that when we castigate ourselves f
Read more