Case in Point from National Geographic
World's Oldest Art Identified in Half-Million-Year-Old Zigzag
Our Homo erectus ancestors may have been smarter and more creative than we thought.
A jagged line etched on a fossil mussel shell may be the oldest evidence of geometric art.
PHOTOGRAPH BY WIM LUSTENHOUWER, VU UNIVERSITY AMSTERDAM
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 3, 2014
A zigzag engraving on a mussel's shell may transform scientific understanding of what has long been considered a defining human capacity: artistic creativity.
Until now, the earliest evidence of geometric art was dated from 70,000 to 100,000 years ago. Scratched into rocks found in South African caves, those engravings signified behavioral modernity: Homo sapiens' unique cognitive journey into a sophisticated world of abstraction and symbol.
But new analysis of an engraving excavated from a riverbank in Indonesia suggests that it's at least 430,000 years old—and that it wasn't made by humans, scientists announced Wednesday. At least it wasn't made by humans as most people think of them, meaning Homo sapiens.
Rather, the earliest artist appears to have been one of our ancestors,Homo erectus. Hairy and beetle-browed, H. erectus was never before thought to have such talents.
"The origin of such cognition, such abilities," said archaeologist Josephine Joordens, "is much further back in time than we thought."
Joordens, of Leidens University in the Netherlands, and colleaguespublished their findings Wednesday in Nature.
Secrets of the Shells
The engraving belongs to a trove of fossils unearthed in 1891 by Dutch paleoanthropologist Eugène Dubois. Among them were the first specimens of what Dubois called Pithecanthropus erectus, later known as Homo erectus: They were the first in their lineage to leave Africa and founding members of the family that eventually included us.
Dubois didn't describe the engraving, though. It was first noticed seven years ago by Joordens and Steven Munro, a collaborator and anthropologist at the National Museum of Australia.
Joordens's group, which now numbers 21 researchers, spent the intervening time painstakingly dating the shell to between 430,000 and 540,000 years ago. They also ruled out alternative explanations for the engraving and for holes in other shells that suggest they were opened by tool—using H. erectus.
In a field where researchers endlessly second-guess how best to interpret stories told by stone fragments, "the methodology is very well developed," said paleoanthropologist Alison Brooks of the Smithsonian Institution. "It reads like a good detective story."
'Profound Implications' for Human Evolution
It's a story with profound implications, said Brooks, for understanding both H. erectus and ourselves. It's generally thought that humans became anatomically and behaviorally modern between 100,00 and 200,000 years ago, in a relatively quick stroke of evolutionary inspiration.
In subsequent millennia would come cave paintings and sculpted figures, the full flowering of an ostensible cognitive uniqueness reflected in our very name: H. sapiens, or "wise man." Neanderthals may also have possessed a rich symbolic culture, but theirs was relatively recent, and they are arguably not so evolutionarily distinct from modern humans as H. erectus.
A geometric artmaking H. erectus challenges the narrative of dramatic human exceptionality. "What we think of as typically modern human behavior didn't suddenly arise, in sparklike fashion," Joordens said. "Something like that seems to have been in place much earlier." (Learn more about H. erectus smarts in "Homo Erectus Invented "Modern" Living?")
In their Nature paper, Joordens's group avoids terms like art, symbolism, and modernity. It's hard to know, she said, the intentions of the engraver. But if the shell was 100,000 years old and found amongHomo sapiens fossils, "it would easily be called symbolic or early art."
"This raises the big, hairy question of what is 'modern human behavior' all over again," said paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman of Pennsylvania State University.
Indeed, the very notion of modern humans as being cognitively unique is now "up for reconsideration," said Joordens.
That will likely be argued for years to come. In the meantime, the researchers plan to further study the collection and revisit the excavation site.
"We're certain we haven't found everything yet," Joordens said.
Follow Brandon Keim on Twitter.
19 comments
"Hairy and beetle-browed, H. erectus was never before thought to have such talents."
Dear NG - PLEASE fire these writers. This is ASININE - and harmful. Fire them NOW.
So- Erectus was "hairy"? Show me ONE piece of evidence to support that hairiness.
Let alone your unstated assumption that obviously, "hairy" equates to "not intelligent" or "haw-haw" dumb. Nor does "beetle-browed" - equate to anything but skull structure; nor is it true that "golly, nobody ever suspected!". B.S. Ask an evolutionary biologist, please; and not a grad student, either. Many, many scholars have long stated that a) there is NO evidence, and b) there is no REASON to have "low expectations" regarding other species.
The fact that Neanderthals and Cro Magnons did not build Edsels, or Tokyo; does not make them dumb.
The harmful part? Thousands of impressionable English majors absorb this BS, and continue to write movie scripts that are bogged in this philosophical wasteland.
I guarantee you- the story would sell just as many ads without this drivel- the finding of the engraving is quite wonderful- without the "Gollee, Goober.".
We have to give Eugene Dubois credit for finding what he was looking for ( although the use of a chain gang is frowned upon in modern archaeology), and Joordens for re-interpreting the finds. A lot of work can still be done using the old finds (dug up more than a century ago!) and using present knowledge. The century seems to go fast-forward / rewind when I see creationist stomp already in the 3rd repy! Just goes to show that evolution is a slow proces, as is the acceptance of scientific evidence.
Good luck with the follow up research!
An inference piled atop a supposition after making a guess. And this passes for science?
The scratched could have been man made, or maybe not. There's no way to prove it one way or the other. The shell may be very old, but to date the scratches to that age is bogus. To also state categorically that a sharks tooth was used to make the scratches is not in evidence and is pure BS.I could just as well state categorically that I made the scratches using a router yesterday and there would be just as much proof of that as what these "scientists" are saying. Read More…
@Kathrina Lewis Well, "Kathrina", it looks like you operate under the nom de guerre of Bill Gradwohl as I saw exactly the same comment made on another website by Bill (Discovery News, to be specific).
Seriously, the Conservative Caucus must really be grasping for straws to be so intellectually lazy as to have to continually repost the same War on Science bloviations on multiple sites and articles without so much as altering a single word.
@Kathrina Lewis aka Bill Gradwohl - (Two can play at this game.)
If you are going to make such a claim with such certainty then you should surely be able to point out the specific flaws in the study. Otherwise it just seems you are making a knee-jerk reaction typical of young-earth Creationists. Is there a specific part of the study you take issue with? Did you attempt to understand their methods for arriving at their date or the method for determining that the cutting instrument was actually a shark tooth? If you haven't done these things and have good reasons why you object, then you are guilty of the same malfeasance that you are calling the scientists out for.
@Kathrina Lewis There was a link to the Nature article mentioned above. Did you read it?
The researchers used multiple independent dating methods. You seem to have missed that part.
The possibility that a shark's tooth was used as a tool was suggested because there were shark's teeth found in the deposit with the shells.The researchers then made experimental engraved lines in similar shell using a sharks tooth, and the internal structure of the groves matched the archaeological lines.
The researchers used multiple independent dating methods. You seem to have missed that part.
The possibility that a shark's tooth was used as a tool was suggested because there were shark's teeth found in the deposit with the shells.The researchers then made experimental engraved lines in similar shell using a sharks tooth, and the internal structure of the groves matched the archaeological lines.
@Dr. GS Hurd @Kathrina Lewis No, the person in question probably did not read the article or care to understand the evidence. They are merely an evidence immune troll. The same commenter is spouting similar nonsense at Discovery: http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/oldest-art-was-carved-onto-shell-540000-years-ago-141203.htm
@Kathrina Lewis I don't know who you are, or why you did it, but you plagiarized my post on Discovery news and placed it here under your name. You did a copy & paste. Why would you do such a thing? I'm reporting your conduct to this site and hope they cancel your ability to post.
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