Artist half a million years ago

Its is evident now after the study of José Joordens, researcher at the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University, that Homo sapiens has a competitor now! It was earlier believed that Homo sapiens was the 1st species to produce abstract designs using their creative minds, not even the Chimpanzees have been able to acquire this ability, but now after the successful study of the engravings of an ancient shell, lt is now evident that these were made by the Homo erctus of that time!

So our primitive ancestors on the bank of river Java didn’t just eat shellfish, they used its shell as a canopy to burgeon their creativity. These half million years old engraving reflect that they were created by a remarkably steady arm.

Using two dating methods (do not confuse with the DATING in general) of the tiny grain pulled from the cracks, researchers at the VU University Amsterdam and Wageningen University have determined that the shell with the engraving is from 430,000 to 540,000 years old.

Also the study has excluded the fact that the engraving was caused by some animal or weathering. Its a Homo erectus who caused it, thus becoming evolution’s first ever artist as it has outdated the previously found oldest engraving by four times, in Africa.

The shell was one of many fossils found along with the bones of Homo erectus and other animals dug up in Trinil, Indonesia, in 1890 by a Dutch geologist Eugene Dubois. For 100 years the shell was waiting in Leiden, Netherlands to reveal its secret until seven years ago a PhD student, Stephen Munro, now at Australian National University, Canberra, observed the strange engravings.

It can be inferred that these shells were used as a tool with sharpen edges used for scraping. The engravings are definitely not unintentional as they take a lot of effort to be made.

So it was Homo erctus, not us! What next, engravings made by dinosaurs?

#fact