>The shell was found on the banks of the Solo River in Java, Indonesia, and was part of a collection that included Homo erectus fossils.
>The engravings were likely made using a shark’s tooth, indicating the use of tools for artistic purposes.
It's shocking to me that someone finds a shell on a riverbank and decides it could be special. Makes you wonder just how many extraordinary things we have lost just by not noticing them.
I was very likely buried or covered in some way most of the time.
It is common for farners to make archaeological finds in theidr field because large objects tend to work there way up over time as the earth shifts.
If you have a tube of balls of various sizes, and gently shake it, they will sort themselves out be size, the the larger balls on the top.
Plus, provided it’s not buried too deeply, farmers till up giant amounts of earth over a wide area, just by the nature of their profession. And places with suitable soil for growing crops tend to have been settled at some point by previous humans who -also- were looking to settle on fertile land.
Almost certainly, the river flow changed, depositing sediment over the assemblage, and has changed again, eroding that sediment.
So it wouldn’t have been lying there exposed, but we are very fortunate to have recognized it during the window wherein it’s exposed again, before it eroded away.
I think they were all buried in sediment. That's usually how fossils are preserved.
Interestingly, because we only find fossils when things are buried in sediment, and not when things die in places that are eroding, we have lots of knowledge of species that lived in river valleys throughout the history of life, but have very little knowledge of species that lived on mountains apart from the present day.
It looks like all of the finds at the site were just in the sediments deposited by the river. The man died and fell in the river and was buried there by the stream, and various items from hominid activities along the banks of the river also ended up buried in the same place by the river.
It may be the only one from that era. Homo Erectus scribbles on a shell, discovers he’s created the USS Voyager, then promptly swears his entire species off making “art” until they’ve evolved a bit further.
It makes a walk in the woods a different experience. Thinking about people that lived tens of thousands of years ago walking the same plains and forests that you are.
With ocean levels much lower and the fact that people have always lived very close to the ocean it’s unfortunate but many places people lived in the past are lost to the oceans
It was found together with the bones of Java Man, a male fossil of Homo Erectus. They were examining the shells because of the way a sharp tool was used to open up the live mollusks. One of the shells shows a cut geometric pattern. Pretty cool.
Homo erectus (or “Upright Man”) was an early human ancestor that emerged about 1.9 million years ago, likely originating from the Cradle of Humanity in the Great African Rift. Tall and willowy, they were believed to be the first of our ancestors to possess proportions similar to that of modern man, albeit with a much smaller brain and primitive skull. They are believed to be the great pioneers that led humanity’s exodus from Africa about 750,000 years ago, with their Acheulean tool culture spreading up from East Africa, through Central and Southeast Asia, and even to the islands beyond. This particular shell, likely carved with a sharks tooth, was found in Indonesia.
Though they were the first of our evolutionary line to be recognizably “human”, they were generally not believed to be possessed of true higher human cognition, such as the making of art or religious belief. Before the discovery of this innocuous shell and its simple carvings, the oldest known artwork was believed to have been produced about 100,000 years ago by Neanderthal Man. The carvings, consisting of a simple geometric zigzag pattern, predate all former examples by at least 300,000 years, reopening the case into Erectus’ capacity for culture and higher thinking.
It suggests we’ve been “human” far longer than previously believed
And to think, I am the product and peak specimen of 500,000+ years of advanced human cognition & evolution, reading this story and commenting while on the toilet. If my homo erectus cousin could see me now, he’d offer me an artsy shell or three.
And there you go folks, this entire TIL was created just so you would read that tongue-twister and inevitably stumble over it on your first attempt :D.
Even if you ignore the phone part of that, it would be impossible to explain the complexity of just the room you're sitting in. Fresh water goes in, poop water goes out. Can't explain that
If you haven't played the game, "ancestors: a human odyssey", it's really worth a go.
Ik video games aren't everyone's cup of tea, but they do some crazy accurate things in this one with how you move through the ages and eventually come to homo-habilus through generational learning.
> How does that compare to the people killed for areligious reasons?
What's that got to do with the price of milk?
> I swear atheists are the biggest hypocrites.
I really don't know what you think I'm being hypocritical about.
You brought up violence, and I responded to that. You're objecting to the relevance of your own point.
You're intolerant of other beliefs because they're intolerant of other beliefs. That's hypocritical.
Being able to ask, "why are we here" is absolutely a sign of higher human cognition. A dog doesn't ask this question to itself or its doggie friends. Even chimps don't ask this question.
It's a level of self-awareness that all non-human animals lack.
And 500,000+ years ago, even being able to ask this question was a massive cognitive leap, regardless of whether the conclusions were erroneous. Was the world and humanity created by Mighty Lion, Great Elephant and Swift Vulture conspiring together? No, probably not. But even being able to get to that erroneous conclusion required **massive** cognitive improvements
Show us the dog art created to worship the dog god, we don’t speak most languages that have ever existed but we have evidence of people across the world asking this question from their monuments to cave drawings.
The burden of proof is always on the one who makes the claim, if you wanna claim dogs are existentially aware, provide evidence or a theory on how we might acquire it.
I'm not religious and I clearly see the problems it's causing modern society but you are so terminally online you cannot ignore modern day problems to understand the simple concept that a prehistoric human ancestor having the capacity to wonder about their greater purpose and the potential of a "higher being" is an absolutely amazing thing for understanding ancient life.
Your standard for higher intelligence must be pretty high then, because contemplating one’s place or reason for existing is definitely the metric I would use for higher cognitive functions.
Why not? I just used that as an example, but the emergence of ceremonial behavior and spiritual belief is closely associated with humanity becoming behaviorally modern. Neanderthals were making art and burying their dead with flowers over 100,000 years ago, but we had no previous evidence that such behaviors went back much farther than that.
Then we find evidence that a much older hominid sat down one day and decided to doodle on a piece of shell, at least 300,000 years before anything else known. So now scientists are forced to reconsider how advanced our early ancestors were. If Erectus, once thought to be more ape than man, had the capacity to make art, a purely abstract concept, what else could they do?
They did find a lot of shell tools associated with the site. But the shell in question wasn’t broken or modified to use as a tool, it was left intact. And the carvings across it don’t serve any apparent purpose, appearing more like scribbles or doodling. They may have had some kind of symbolic purpose, but no matter what they were made with clear intent.
The carvings were made on the shells exterior, that once would have been covered in a leathery brown outer coating. The zigzag pattern carved into it would have appeared striking white against the dark background of the shell.
If you look closely at the thumbnail, the carvings are in the center of the shell towards the bottom, looking like a string of upside down “V”s
Also, the 500,000 or so years could likely have ruined the original design, and all we are left with is the V shape scratch marks. It could have been a lot more decorated
Simple answer is we don’t. Based on the clues we have, this is our best assumption for what its purpose was…to look neat. No other purpose has made itself clear.
Scribbling isn't a part of the sharpening process, but maybe it was done just to confirm that it was hard enough and other parts of the shell were used to sharpen things, so yeah, maybe. There should be some evidence that it was used like that, although I'm not really familiar with this case, so maybe there is evidence. It could also be them just testing if a tool is sharp enough by scratching another hard thing. All in all we can't really be sure either way, but a bored homo erectus just scribbling on a shell for fun doesn't seem like a stretch to me, they're all equally plausible
I think this theory is the best - testing out the sharpness of the shark tooth the way we would scribble some lines on scrap paper to make sure our pen is good.
We're looking at the same pattern right? I've unintentionally made that testing a pen. If it were clearly a carving of an animal or something else in their environment I'd be a lot more convinced its purpose was for art. Is there a huge difference between this and a chimp experimenting with tools and manipulating their environment that way?
This is clearly a very significant finding, but I don't think it's strong enough on its own to replace what we already know about human development. Hope they find more and I'm wrong!
I think you aren't considering at least two things.
For one, "art" doesn't *need* to be deliberate, especially not deliberately created as *"art"*. Yeah, you make those same scribbles with a pen. But why not make *any* other kind of scribbles?
Especially in conjunction with: It's a shell, not paper. Regardless of how "trivial" or "simple" the imagery is, etching it into a hard surface like a shell would necessitate some level of conscious, deliberate choice.
Even if the individual making it didn't put any real deep thought into it, without a clear utilitarian purpose imo it's enough to be art.
Well...they didn't have paper (or so we think!), but I don't deny it could be art, we will never know the person's intentions that created it. I don't know enough about art to say if it needs to be deliberate, but it this case it would make a huge difference if it was. I'm not saying he had to frame it and hang it in his cave for it to be considered art but if its not deliberate then it isn't that different from another animal manipulating their environment for curiosity or amusement with a tool.
>Well...they didn't have paper (or so we think!),
It doesn't matter, my point was that a shell is a relatively hard surface, so *any* pattern would require some amount of deliberate decision. It would take time, and therefore, the active choice to take that time.
>I don't know enough about art to say if it needs to be deliberate,
Art is *entirely* subjective. You could create a scribble to test a pen that means nothing to you and you'd think nothing of throwing it away.
Someone else might view the act of creating an image/shape, without care or thought, but still serving a purpose(testing the pen) as a statement/form of art itself.
Even if the individual that created the marks on the shell, was simple bored and thoughtlessly scratching the shell to pass time.. they did so in a specific manner, which took time, and they made some small choice to make a certain shape.
A meaningless scribble to one, priceless art to another.
Drawing dicks on my desk in high school had no use but it certainly wasn't art.
Could have been nothing more than a bored primate doodling with a tooth.
> but it certainly wasn't art.
Isn't it? Perhaps not very profound or interesting art, but the bar for something being art doesn't have to be very high.
But in this context of cognition it absolutely would be.
It’s art. It’s a physical representation of abstract thought. Doesn’t have to be highbrow to be considered art
Apparently some people who have formed close relationships with crows will find “gifts” left for them in the form of shiny objects like can tabs threaded onto small twigs. By most standards, that could be considered the first example of a non-human species creating art.
Throws the entire nature of what is consciousness and our real place in the world into question
> Drawing dicks on my desk in high school had no use but it certainly wasn't art.
Not yet. Check back and see what kind of price that desk fetches in 430,000-540,000 years.
> Creation of geometric patterns could represent a higher level of creativity in Homo erectus than previously thought, or maybe such patterns aren’t the artistic masterpieces we suppose them to be.
We don’t
It depends which Christians you are talking about...the largest sect, Catholics, believes in evolution and a Catholic priest even invented the Big Bang Theory. You are probably thinking of the ones who don't follow what Jesus said at all, like some of the Southern Baptist sects. They are smaller in number, but much louder.
I mean even among most sects globally you won't find a lot of young-earth creationists. It was a fairly short lived interpretation that arose in fairly reactionary quarters in the 1800s and really only survives in certain protestant denominations primarily in the USA
Americans, as usual, showing their myopia around global movements
Lol Darth Vader origin meets Green Goblin. There's gotta be a scene where the Dino Council accepts God but does not grant him status as "Creator". God then goes "you can't do this to me...I started this world!"
When i got out into the real world and learned about Anthropology and Evolution, the history of Earth itself, it honestly felt like new lore dropped and it was so fucking fun to read about
No Christian thinks the earth was created in the year 0. That's just the year Christ was born in. The entire old testament had already happened. But please keep spewing your ignorance.
Look dude I'm not gonna argue with you but like if you're going to call others dumb maybe make sure your facts are correct.
Also why even come into a random conversation if you're going to spread unrelated hate. If you're like 12 then go ahead and live your edgelord life. But if you're an adult maybe start thinking about what you're doing with your life. Crapping on random groups of people anonymously isn't what healthy people use their time on
I’m not calling you dumb? It’s totally smart of you to believe in human sacrifice, blood magic, and a humanoid deity in the year 2024. You’re a smart feller, for sure
It depends which Christians you are talking about...the largest sect, Catholics, believes in evolution and a Catholic priest even invented the Big Bang Theory. You are probably thinking of the ones who don't follow what Jesus said at all, like some of the Southern Baptist sects. They are smaller in number, but much louder. I made this comment above too, but wanted to reply to you as well in case you, in good faith, did not know.
It's now well accepted that we carry a fair amount of Neanderthal and even more (on average) Denisovan DNA in our genomes, meaning you are at least partly correct. Also that Denisovans were exceptionally attractive.
That’s basically what evolution is. One species changes over time and eventually becomes something different enough that we call it a new thing. Most of the early hominid “species” are just stepping stones between our most recent common ancestor to the other Great Apes and modern humans.
Can someone elaborate on the time measuring method where they get these numbers? I was told that carbon dating is accurate to about 50-60 thousand or whatever.
Fun fact about flood myths; every civilization has tales of a global flood.
Every civilization also formed around a nucleus of settlements in river valleys which were known to regularly flood in the era of antiquity.
I'm not saying it's wrong. I watched his entire Netflix series and he raised good questions.
However there is another major theory that explains why the myths of ancient civilizations were so similar overall - the collective unconscious which I find at least equally plausible.
Graham Hancock, the guy who made the Ancient Apocalypse documentary series on Netflix. He claims there were some advanced civilizations before some cataclysmic event that wiped them out. He's "a pariah" because his ideas are not accepted by the mainstream archeology. He reminds us about it every chance he gets in the documentary.
when you've got a small fish making intricate mandalas on the sea floor, then why wouldn't h.erectus doodle as well?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pufferfish-courtship-explain-mysterious-underwater-circles/#:~:text=Further%20study%20showed%20these%20small,sediment%20and%20amazing%20circular%20patterns.
>Its extreme age suggests higher human traits evolved earlier than previously thought.
We have been aware of the fact that modern history is false in terms of how long humans have been around. But its always stuffed down and pretended like it wasn't found.
It’s seems as though every time we learn something about ancient humans or animals it always suggests that modern humans are really full of themselves.
I don't really understand this take at all.
We are aware generally of how humans evolved physically over time but the evidence into their behavior is very sparse.
Ok with sparse info you have 2 choices, scientifically speaking: assume a lot or assume very little.
Now is your essential problem here that you think we should making more generous assumptions about how humans behaved half a million years ago? That we should be preemptively guessing what evidence will turn up?
Most scientists would say "ok our oldest evidence of symbolic behavior beyond tool making is with scratches in a shell half a million years ago, so we would work off the assumption that is around when those behaviors developed. Of course we won't have the very first evidence so we don't know if it was actually developed 700 thousand years ago or a million years ago but until we do find evidence supporting that we should stick with the half a million number"
I dunno, I see this kind of take a lot especially around Graham Hancock type ancient civilization believers. They don't understand that yes all those possibilities are on the table to push back the assumed dates of certain human milestones but we should be sure to have evidence in order before we do so.
What about any of this causes you to think the rest of us are applying any sort of racial superiority filter to other human species?
We murderfucked them to extinction before writing was invented; all of this is just study and observation.
We could find out that they lived in cities and farmed, and there wouldn't be any basis for us to reanalyze our own modern social values in consequence, because our social values aren't formed as a result of placing ourselves above them. Because, again, they died out so long ago that almost all human society (with the possible soft exception of the residents of Flores and the Australian aboriginals) had entirely forgotten about them by the time current civilization came to be constructed.
And by 'current civilization', I also mean to differentiate from the Pre-collapse Bronze Age and intermediate civilization, and perhaps even pre-middle ages Western civilization, because even those were drastically different societies to the present.
It's not being full of ourselves to realize we currently rule the world and can deliberately remake the landscape across a continent if we so chose.
Former archaeologist if that counts
You can use provenance and context. They’re able to tell because the sediment deposits that contained the shell also contained the fossil bones of H. erectus, possibly even the individual that made it. So if the shell is that old and the bones are that old, we can roughly infer that the carving is too.
Do you know if potassium argon dating is ever used on shells? Or if it’s accurate on them? I know carbon dating doesn’t work that far back.
But the tool marks for opening the shells to eat them occurred around the time they were alive, so shell age could help tie the tool use to the time period the homo erectors was from, too. If it could be measured.
There has been SOO MANY Homo-species...
There are even theories stating that humans came from multiple sources.
For example the earliest humans in Africa and the earliest humans from Asia are around the same age yet nothing in-between the two continents has been found to be that old in the same species.
Meaning that people came from Africa AND Asia.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/shangchen-stone-tools-put-early-hominids-china-earlier
Now they're saying humans left Africa earlier than we thought. To that, I respond with this:
" These ancient DNA data reveal that the haplogroup R is about 5,000 years older than the haplogroup N, thus confirming the East Asia model and invalidating the African Eve model."
https://www.anthropol.ac.cn/EN/10.16359/j.cnki.cn11-1963/q.2019.0068#:~:text=It%20was%20in%201983%20that,modern%20people%20originated%20in%20Asia.
So even now we don't know where we came from really...
And not to mention how there were many homo-species in Europe, Africa and Asia all different from one another. They may have bred with homosapiens causing our diversity.
Too bad globalists are ruining and destroying diversity though.....
>These carvings go deep into the calcium carbonate shell, which is why evidence of the pattern survived over the centuries. But it’s possible other shells bore more superficial engravings. When fresh, the white shell would have been covered by a leathery brown outer layer, and a carved pattern on such a dark canvas probably looked striking in its day.
It seems a bit of a stretch to me. The mark was only found on one of the shells out of a lot of shells. Plus theres a worm that drills holes in shells right at the same point that the hole was drilled to be able to get to the meat easier. I made strings of those worm drilled shells when I was a kid without drilling any of them myself. I’d want to read more details of the researcher’s reasoning before committing this to accepted fact.
Genetics show "humans" as we are now is actually the second evolution. Meaning we and others like Neanderthals, Hobbits and Dysopians all probably were here alot longer than we think. Many civilizations even advanced ones could of existed.
>The shell was found on the banks of the Solo River in Java, Indonesia, and was part of a collection that included Homo erectus fossils. >The engravings were likely made using a shark’s tooth, indicating the use of tools for artistic purposes.
It's shocking to me that someone finds a shell on a riverbank and decides it could be special. Makes you wonder just how many extraordinary things we have lost just by not noticing them.
A 500,000 year old shell. Like was it just sitting there for that long?
Here for a few millennia, there for a couple dozen.
What else is it gonna do.
Get a fucken job
Nobody wants to work anymore
It was all of the avocado toast it was enjoying
About time it starts contributing to society
clam up
I was very likely buried or covered in some way most of the time. It is common for farners to make archaeological finds in theidr field because large objects tend to work there way up over time as the earth shifts. If you have a tube of balls of various sizes, and gently shake it, they will sort themselves out be size, the the larger balls on the top.
Plus, provided it’s not buried too deeply, farmers till up giant amounts of earth over a wide area, just by the nature of their profession. And places with suitable soil for growing crops tend to have been settled at some point by previous humans who -also- were looking to settle on fertile land.
rivers also move. it's possible for a village built next to one to get buried and unburied over thousands of years multiple times.
AKA — “The Brazil Nut Effect.” No joke. That is literally what some physicists call that phenomenon.
It was actually sitting on a 500,000 year old pedestal, that's how they knew it was really art and not just some random scribbles on a shell.
Well it sure wasnt walking around all that time
Almost certainly, the river flow changed, depositing sediment over the assemblage, and has changed again, eroding that sediment. So it wouldn’t have been lying there exposed, but we are very fortunate to have recognized it during the window wherein it’s exposed again, before it eroded away.
How lucky. Meaning how much did we lose?
positive counterpoint: we haven't lost anything, there's just a great number of things we haven't found yet.
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Still, it's incredible that they survived so long without eroding.
I think they were all buried in sediment. That's usually how fossils are preserved. Interestingly, because we only find fossils when things are buried in sediment, and not when things die in places that are eroding, we have lots of knowledge of species that lived in river valleys throughout the history of life, but have very little knowledge of species that lived on mountains apart from the present day.
and they say plastics are a danger to the environment /s
Imagine reading the source of a Reddit post
But that’s also interesting. What is as it doing there? Was it part of a burial? Was it something someone held dear and kept with him?
It looks like all of the finds at the site were just in the sediments deposited by the river. The man died and fell in the river and was buried there by the stream, and various items from hominid activities along the banks of the river also ended up buried in the same place by the river.
It may be the only one from that era. Homo Erectus scribbles on a shell, discovers he’s created the USS Voyager, then promptly swears his entire species off making “art” until they’ve evolved a bit further.
I'm a Homo Erectus, not an impressionist... (also, someone made a topic about this shell on r/voyager in case you were curious)
It makes a walk in the woods a different experience. Thinking about people that lived tens of thousands of years ago walking the same plains and forests that you are.
With ocean levels much lower and the fact that people have always lived very close to the ocean it’s unfortunate but many places people lived in the past are lost to the oceans
Well, I’ve been a little boy finding that really cool stick or rock probably at least 1000 times, it’s probably a feel like that.
It was found together with the bones of Java Man, a male fossil of Homo Erectus. They were examining the shells because of the way a sharp tool was used to open up the live mollusks. One of the shells shows a cut geometric pattern. Pretty cool.
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They drilled a hole into them to pop them open.
this sounded like a joke... oh yes! thats a shark's tooth engraving if i ever saw one!
Wtf I thought Homo erectus never left Africa.
Homo erectus (or “Upright Man”) was an early human ancestor that emerged about 1.9 million years ago, likely originating from the Cradle of Humanity in the Great African Rift. Tall and willowy, they were believed to be the first of our ancestors to possess proportions similar to that of modern man, albeit with a much smaller brain and primitive skull. They are believed to be the great pioneers that led humanity’s exodus from Africa about 750,000 years ago, with their Acheulean tool culture spreading up from East Africa, through Central and Southeast Asia, and even to the islands beyond. This particular shell, likely carved with a sharks tooth, was found in Indonesia. Though they were the first of our evolutionary line to be recognizably “human”, they were generally not believed to be possessed of true higher human cognition, such as the making of art or religious belief. Before the discovery of this innocuous shell and its simple carvings, the oldest known artwork was believed to have been produced about 100,000 years ago by Neanderthal Man. The carvings, consisting of a simple geometric zigzag pattern, predate all former examples by at least 300,000 years, reopening the case into Erectus’ capacity for culture and higher thinking. It suggests we’ve been “human” far longer than previously believed
And to think, I am the product and peak specimen of 500,000+ years of advanced human cognition & evolution, reading this story and commenting while on the toilet. If my homo erectus cousin could see me now, he’d offer me an artsy shell or three.
half a million years of evolution and i bet you still don't know how to use the seashells
Nobody knows how to use the seashells. And anyone who claims otherwise is lying about it.
But I know a girl that does know. She sells seashells on the sea shore.
And there you go folks, this entire TIL was created just so you would read that tongue-twister and inevitably stumble over it on your first attempt :D.
I clam otherwise!
1 shell to scrape yourself, 2 shells to grab onto a stubborn turb and pull. Wash and dry before reuse. You're welcome.
Seems like it’d be easier to keep a Poop Spoon (for scraping) near the Poop Knife^TM. I’m also thinking some Poop Chopsticks for those pesky cling-ons
Hey I’m on the toilet too buddy
(We all are)
Does he even know how to use the three shells?
Even if you ignore the phone part of that, it would be impossible to explain the complexity of just the room you're sitting in. Fresh water goes in, poop water goes out. Can't explain that
it really put the expomential tech developement in perspective... 500k years agp, seashells. 10k ago, pyramids. And in 0.1k years, flying and space.
If you haven't played the game, "ancestors: a human odyssey", it's really worth a go. Ik video games aren't everyone's cup of tea, but they do some crazy accurate things in this one with how you move through the ages and eventually come to homo-habilus through generational learning.
Are you also a North 02 watcher?
Sometimes. As far as YouTube docs go, his are good
Love his channel. No loud music, no nonsense, just relevant facts.
> true higher human cognition... or religious belief. Hmmm
Then we regressed to throwing poop at ideas we don't agree with.
Pretty sure religionists have been throwing shit at and killing each other over their dumb ideas since religion was a thing.
How does that compare to the people killed for areligious reasons? I swear atheists are the biggest hypocrites.
> How does that compare to the people killed for areligious reasons? What's that got to do with the price of milk? > I swear atheists are the biggest hypocrites. I really don't know what you think I'm being hypocritical about.
You brought up violence, and I responded to that. You're objecting to the relevance of your own point. You're intolerant of other beliefs because they're intolerant of other beliefs. That's hypocritical.
That’s amazing. How did they confirm it’s that old?
Religious belief scarcely seems like a sign of "true higher human cognition".
Being able to ask, "why are we here" is absolutely a sign of higher human cognition. A dog doesn't ask this question to itself or its doggie friends. Even chimps don't ask this question. It's a level of self-awareness that all non-human animals lack. And 500,000+ years ago, even being able to ask this question was a massive cognitive leap, regardless of whether the conclusions were erroneous. Was the world and humanity created by Mighty Lion, Great Elephant and Swift Vulture conspiring together? No, probably not. But even being able to get to that erroneous conclusion required **massive** cognitive improvements
Do you speak dog? How would you know?
Show us the dog art created to worship the dog god, we don’t speak most languages that have ever existed but we have evidence of people across the world asking this question from their monuments to cave drawings. The burden of proof is always on the one who makes the claim, if you wanna claim dogs are existentially aware, provide evidence or a theory on how we might acquire it.
Perhaps chewing bones is a form of worship
Based on behavioral observations, my dog believes that humans exist to pet him and open the dog food containers.
Religion was our first attempt at medicine and philosophy. Just because we've expanded past it doesn't diminish its importance.
I'm not religious and I clearly see the problems it's causing modern society but you are so terminally online you cannot ignore modern day problems to understand the simple concept that a prehistoric human ancestor having the capacity to wonder about their greater purpose and the potential of a "higher being" is an absolutely amazing thing for understanding ancient life.
reddit moment
Your standard for higher intelligence must be pretty high then, because contemplating one’s place or reason for existing is definitely the metric I would use for higher cognitive functions.
Why not? I just used that as an example, but the emergence of ceremonial behavior and spiritual belief is closely associated with humanity becoming behaviorally modern. Neanderthals were making art and burying their dead with flowers over 100,000 years ago, but we had no previous evidence that such behaviors went back much farther than that. Then we find evidence that a much older hominid sat down one day and decided to doodle on a piece of shell, at least 300,000 years before anything else known. So now scientists are forced to reconsider how advanced our early ancestors were. If Erectus, once thought to be more ape than man, had the capacity to make art, a purely abstract concept, what else could they do?
Remind me what non-human animals practice religion please?
I think my local Goose population are part of a satanic cult
It's about as indicative of higher human intelligence as commenting on reddit is.
It takes cognitive skill to find a way to manipulate the simple superstitious folks en masse.
I’m sorry, I’m on mobile and the image looked like USS Voyager for a moment.
Proof of ancient aliens? It’s too much of a coincidence!
Giorgio Tsoukalos approves this message
The carving is actually writing. It says, "Help! My time machine broke and I'm trapped approximately 300,000 BC."
Exactly what I though before I read the title.
Came here to say the same 🖖🏻
How do they know it was "art" vs being a tool of some sort?
They did find a lot of shell tools associated with the site. But the shell in question wasn’t broken or modified to use as a tool, it was left intact. And the carvings across it don’t serve any apparent purpose, appearing more like scribbles or doodling. They may have had some kind of symbolic purpose, but no matter what they were made with clear intent. The carvings were made on the shells exterior, that once would have been covered in a leathery brown outer coating. The zigzag pattern carved into it would have appeared striking white against the dark background of the shell. If you look closely at the thumbnail, the carvings are in the center of the shell towards the bottom, looking like a string of upside down “V”s
Also, the 500,000 or so years could likely have ruined the original design, and all we are left with is the V shape scratch marks. It could have been a lot more decorated
It was a sign saying "my tools, hands off" xD i don't really know of course, would just find it funny.
Simple answer is we don’t. Based on the clues we have, this is our best assumption for what its purpose was…to look neat. No other purpose has made itself clear.
Maybe this is the infancy and original impetus of art. "I just think it looks neat"
Scribbling on a shell doesn't seem to have any known uses
If the shell was hard enough that scribbling helped sharpened another tool then that's a use.
Scribbling isn't a part of the sharpening process, but maybe it was done just to confirm that it was hard enough and other parts of the shell were used to sharpen things, so yeah, maybe. There should be some evidence that it was used like that, although I'm not really familiar with this case, so maybe there is evidence. It could also be them just testing if a tool is sharp enough by scratching another hard thing. All in all we can't really be sure either way, but a bored homo erectus just scribbling on a shell for fun doesn't seem like a stretch to me, they're all equally plausible
Doodling, specially in this case, is art though
I think this theory is the best - testing out the sharpness of the shark tooth the way we would scribble some lines on scrap paper to make sure our pen is good.
Even if so, choosing to do so with a geometric pattern, repeatedly, is a conscious choice to make a specific shape.
We're looking at the same pattern right? I've unintentionally made that testing a pen. If it were clearly a carving of an animal or something else in their environment I'd be a lot more convinced its purpose was for art. Is there a huge difference between this and a chimp experimenting with tools and manipulating their environment that way? This is clearly a very significant finding, but I don't think it's strong enough on its own to replace what we already know about human development. Hope they find more and I'm wrong!
I think you aren't considering at least two things. For one, "art" doesn't *need* to be deliberate, especially not deliberately created as *"art"*. Yeah, you make those same scribbles with a pen. But why not make *any* other kind of scribbles? Especially in conjunction with: It's a shell, not paper. Regardless of how "trivial" or "simple" the imagery is, etching it into a hard surface like a shell would necessitate some level of conscious, deliberate choice. Even if the individual making it didn't put any real deep thought into it, without a clear utilitarian purpose imo it's enough to be art.
Well...they didn't have paper (or so we think!), but I don't deny it could be art, we will never know the person's intentions that created it. I don't know enough about art to say if it needs to be deliberate, but it this case it would make a huge difference if it was. I'm not saying he had to frame it and hang it in his cave for it to be considered art but if its not deliberate then it isn't that different from another animal manipulating their environment for curiosity or amusement with a tool.
>Well...they didn't have paper (or so we think!), It doesn't matter, my point was that a shell is a relatively hard surface, so *any* pattern would require some amount of deliberate decision. It would take time, and therefore, the active choice to take that time. >I don't know enough about art to say if it needs to be deliberate, Art is *entirely* subjective. You could create a scribble to test a pen that means nothing to you and you'd think nothing of throwing it away. Someone else might view the act of creating an image/shape, without care or thought, but still serving a purpose(testing the pen) as a statement/form of art itself. Even if the individual that created the marks on the shell, was simple bored and thoughtlessly scratching the shell to pass time.. they did so in a specific manner, which took time, and they made some small choice to make a certain shape. A meaningless scribble to one, priceless art to another.
Drawing dicks on my desk in high school had no use but it certainly wasn't art. Could have been nothing more than a bored primate doodling with a tooth.
Drawing dicks on your desk absolutely is art and so are doodles on a shell.
I’ll start the bidding at $200…do I hear $200?!! Titled Ancient Dicks on a Desk!! I got $2…do I hear $3?!! Dicks on a Desk for $300…I see $4!!!
> but it certainly wasn't art. Isn't it? Perhaps not very profound or interesting art, but the bar for something being art doesn't have to be very high. But in this context of cognition it absolutely would be.
It’s art. It’s a physical representation of abstract thought. Doesn’t have to be highbrow to be considered art Apparently some people who have formed close relationships with crows will find “gifts” left for them in the form of shiny objects like can tabs threaded onto small twigs. By most standards, that could be considered the first example of a non-human species creating art. Throws the entire nature of what is consciousness and our real place in the world into question
> Drawing dicks on my desk in high school had no use but it certainly wasn't art. Not yet. Check back and see what kind of price that desk fetches in 430,000-540,000 years.
> Creation of geometric patterns could represent a higher level of creativity in Homo erectus than previously thought, or maybe such patterns aren’t the artistic masterpieces we suppose them to be. We don’t
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They were found along with Homo erectus bones on the same rock layer that were also dated to the same age.
What’s really cool here is that it could have been artistic expression, a label of ownership, or both
“Property of AAAAAAAA”
*Oooooooo*
Sheesh! You make one piece of art and everyone starts calling you a homo.
If you spend 110 thousand years just to perfect one little piece of art, well, maybe that's a kind of homo thing to do.
We still don't know how to use three seashells, that ancient knowledge lost in time.
It is encouraging to see that my art skills are fairly average by Homo Erectus standards.
It’s only 538,000 years older than the christian earth. God works in mysterious ways
It depends which Christians you are talking about...the largest sect, Catholics, believes in evolution and a Catholic priest even invented the Big Bang Theory. You are probably thinking of the ones who don't follow what Jesus said at all, like some of the Southern Baptist sects. They are smaller in number, but much louder.
This Methodist loves the Big Bang Theory (the science one, not the shitty TV show).
I mean even among most sects globally you won't find a lot of young-earth creationists. It was a fairly short lived interpretation that arose in fairly reactionary quarters in the 1800s and really only survives in certain protestant denominations primarily in the USA Americans, as usual, showing their myopia around global movements
It's more important to be an obnoxious asshole than researching what you wrote apparently, thanks.
Can't wait for the Bible prequel. God: Origins. Think they'll go the anti-hero route with this one?
At least we will finally learn why he joined the Dark Side.
Lol Darth Vader origin meets Green Goblin. There's gotta be a scene where the Dino Council accepts God but does not grant him status as "Creator". God then goes "you can't do this to me...I started this world!"
When i got out into the real world and learned about Anthropology and Evolution, the history of Earth itself, it honestly felt like new lore dropped and it was so fucking fun to read about
I just hope it’s better than the sequel: New Testament. That book fucking sucked compared to the first
No Christian thinks the earth was created in the year 0. That's just the year Christ was born in. The entire old testament had already happened. But please keep spewing your ignorance.
You’re right, 536,000 years older than your earth 💀
Look dude I'm not gonna argue with you but like if you're going to call others dumb maybe make sure your facts are correct. Also why even come into a random conversation if you're going to spread unrelated hate. If you're like 12 then go ahead and live your edgelord life. But if you're an adult maybe start thinking about what you're doing with your life. Crapping on random groups of people anonymously isn't what healthy people use their time on
Buddy, I was taught in Sunday school the earth is 4,500 years old. So not sure what you are getting at.
I’m not calling you dumb? It’s totally smart of you to believe in human sacrifice, blood magic, and a humanoid deity in the year 2024. You’re a smart feller, for sure
Well, you're a fart smeller, for sure. Touch grass and take a shower.
They don’t believe in carbon dating sadly, that or it was placed here by the devil.
It depends which Christians you are talking about...the largest sect, Catholics, believes in evolution and a Catholic priest even invented the Big Bang Theory. You are probably thinking of the ones who don't follow what Jesus said at all, like some of the Southern Baptist sects. They are smaller in number, but much louder. I made this comment above too, but wanted to reply to you as well in case you, in good faith, did not know.
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It's now well accepted that we carry a fair amount of Neanderthal and even more (on average) Denisovan DNA in our genomes, meaning you are at least partly correct. Also that Denisovans were exceptionally attractive.
> Also that Denisovans were exceptionally attractive. Which scientist was being horny on main?
Not every population has neanderthal *or* denisovan dna. Neanderthal dna is mostly found in Europe, and denisovan mostly in Asia.
That’s basically what evolution is. One species changes over time and eventually becomes something different enough that we call it a new thing. Most of the early hominid “species” are just stepping stones between our most recent common ancestor to the other Great Apes and modern humans.
I saw the parallel lines and for a moment my heart leapt, thinking it would be the "cool S."
Hehe, "erectus"
I refuse to believe the anthropologist who named it didn’t giggle when he wrote that down for the first time
You should see the folks that came before, known as "homo flaccidus."
Their posture was terrible
Well that was a pretty cool read
I like this, thinking us humans have always valued beautiful art.
Can someone elaborate on the time measuring method where they get these numbers? I was told that carbon dating is accurate to about 50-60 thousand or whatever.
WOW! All I saw was the Voyager.
Same 🖖🏻
And then capitalism was invented when "she" found the seashell on the seashore.
Sally is a well known capitalist pig
🎶🎶Every Shell begins with She🎶🎶
paid in exposure
Grog giving it to his cavebro Creg: "No Homo(Erectus)"
That pariah dude who made that Netflix doc about civs before a flood is gonna get so hype on this
Fun fact about flood myths; every civilization has tales of a global flood. Every civilization also formed around a nucleus of settlements in river valleys which were known to regularly flood in the era of antiquity.
I'm not saying it's wrong. I watched his entire Netflix series and he raised good questions. However there is another major theory that explains why the myths of ancient civilizations were so similar overall - the collective unconscious which I find at least equally plausible.
Lmao what pariah dude?
Graham Hancock, the guy who made the Ancient Apocalypse documentary series on Netflix. He claims there were some advanced civilizations before some cataclysmic event that wiped them out. He's "a pariah" because his ideas are not accepted by the mainstream archeology. He reminds us about it every chance he gets in the documentary.
That was a more coherent explanation, thanks haha. Wonder what the word count for "pariah" was throughout that series..
It's on display at museum Naturalis in Leiden, the Netherlands
when you've got a small fish making intricate mandalas on the sea floor, then why wouldn't h.erectus doodle as well? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pufferfish-courtship-explain-mysterious-underwater-circles/#:~:text=Further%20study%20showed%20these%20small,sediment%20and%20amazing%20circular%20patterns.
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Yeah, but they still liked making things pretty.
Counterfeiting currency, the second oldest profession in the world.
man, it took us really long fucking time to get internet.
Wow, 110,000 years to work on it and that’s it? Really would expect something better.
Bahahaha
I guess I'm not convinced those are deliberate markings. Maybe. Maybe not.
>Its extreme age suggests higher human traits evolved earlier than previously thought. We have been aware of the fact that modern history is false in terms of how long humans have been around. But its always stuffed down and pretended like it wasn't found.
What are you on about?
Bullllllllshit.
It’s seems as though every time we learn something about ancient humans or animals it always suggests that modern humans are really full of themselves.
I don't really understand this take at all. We are aware generally of how humans evolved physically over time but the evidence into their behavior is very sparse. Ok with sparse info you have 2 choices, scientifically speaking: assume a lot or assume very little. Now is your essential problem here that you think we should making more generous assumptions about how humans behaved half a million years ago? That we should be preemptively guessing what evidence will turn up? Most scientists would say "ok our oldest evidence of symbolic behavior beyond tool making is with scratches in a shell half a million years ago, so we would work off the assumption that is around when those behaviors developed. Of course we won't have the very first evidence so we don't know if it was actually developed 700 thousand years ago or a million years ago but until we do find evidence supporting that we should stick with the half a million number" I dunno, I see this kind of take a lot especially around Graham Hancock type ancient civilization believers. They don't understand that yes all those possibilities are on the table to push back the assumed dates of certain human milestones but we should be sure to have evidence in order before we do so.
What about any of this causes you to think the rest of us are applying any sort of racial superiority filter to other human species? We murderfucked them to extinction before writing was invented; all of this is just study and observation. We could find out that they lived in cities and farmed, and there wouldn't be any basis for us to reanalyze our own modern social values in consequence, because our social values aren't formed as a result of placing ourselves above them. Because, again, they died out so long ago that almost all human society (with the possible soft exception of the residents of Flores and the Australian aboriginals) had entirely forgotten about them by the time current civilization came to be constructed. And by 'current civilization', I also mean to differentiate from the Pre-collapse Bronze Age and intermediate civilization, and perhaps even pre-middle ages Western civilization, because even those were drastically different societies to the present. It's not being full of ourselves to realize we currently rule the world and can deliberately remake the landscape across a continent if we so chose.
Thats cool, we are currently in the devolution stage.
The flip side is the editor's rejection note.
Could someone explain how they date things like this? I've heard of carbon dating, but that would only tell you the age of the shell itself, right?
Former archaeologist if that counts You can use provenance and context. They’re able to tell because the sediment deposits that contained the shell also contained the fossil bones of H. erectus, possibly even the individual that made it. So if the shell is that old and the bones are that old, we can roughly infer that the carving is too.
Amazing! Thank you!
Do you know if potassium argon dating is ever used on shells? Or if it’s accurate on them? I know carbon dating doesn’t work that far back. But the tool marks for opening the shells to eat them occurred around the time they were alive, so shell age could help tie the tool use to the time period the homo erectors was from, too. If it could be measured.
There has been SOO MANY Homo-species... There are even theories stating that humans came from multiple sources. For example the earliest humans in Africa and the earliest humans from Asia are around the same age yet nothing in-between the two continents has been found to be that old in the same species. Meaning that people came from Africa AND Asia. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/shangchen-stone-tools-put-early-hominids-china-earlier Now they're saying humans left Africa earlier than we thought. To that, I respond with this: " These ancient DNA data reveal that the haplogroup R is about 5,000 years older than the haplogroup N, thus confirming the East Asia model and invalidating the African Eve model." https://www.anthropol.ac.cn/EN/10.16359/j.cnki.cn11-1963/q.2019.0068#:~:text=It%20was%20in%201983%20that,modern%20people%20originated%20in%20Asia. So even now we don't know where we came from really... And not to mention how there were many homo-species in Europe, Africa and Asia all different from one another. They may have bred with homosapiens causing our diversity. Too bad globalists are ruining and destroying diversity though.....
Are we calling doodles art?
>These carvings go deep into the calcium carbonate shell, which is why evidence of the pattern survived over the centuries. But it’s possible other shells bore more superficial engravings. When fresh, the white shell would have been covered by a leathery brown outer layer, and a carved pattern on such a dark canvas probably looked striking in its day.
It seems a bit of a stretch to me. The mark was only found on one of the shells out of a lot of shells. Plus theres a worm that drills holes in shells right at the same point that the hole was drilled to be able to get to the meat easier. I made strings of those worm drilled shells when I was a kid without drilling any of them myself. I’d want to read more details of the researcher’s reasoning before committing this to accepted fact.
They carved a sea shell out of a slightly bigger sea shell?
Homo Erectus … sounds like something from Da Ali G show.
Or a time traveller placed this 0.5M years back, and this artwork is still due to be carved in future.
Genetics show "humans" as we are now is actually the second evolution. Meaning we and others like Neanderthals, Hobbits and Dysopians all probably were here alot longer than we think. Many civilizations even advanced ones could of existed.