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nancylebovhttp://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429983.200-shell-art-made-300000-years-before-humans-evolved.html?full=true#.VKYB3THF-Sr
If you want to see the image in the article at a reasonable size, right click on it, then choose "view in new tab".
Link thanks to Mick Clancy, who usually posts excellent landscape photos.
If you want to see the image in the article at a reasonable size, right click on it, then choose "view in new tab".
A shell etched by Homo erectus is by far the oldest engraving ever found, challenging what we know about the origin of art and complex human thought
THE artist – if she or he can be called that – was right-handed and used a shark's tooth. They had a remarkably steady hand and a strong arm. Half a million years ago, on the banks of a calm river in central Java, they scored a deep zigzag into a clam shell.
We will never know what was going on inside its maker's head, but the tidy, purposeful line (pictured above right) has opened a new window into the origins of our modern creative mind.
It was found etched into the shell of a fossilised freshwater clam, and is around half a million years old – making the line by far the oldest engraving ever found. The date also means it was made two to three hundred thousand years before our own species evolved, by a more ancient hominin, Homo erectus.
Link thanks to Mick Clancy, who usually posts excellent landscape photos.
