The Ancestor of Humans Was an "Artist" 500,000 Years Ago 59
brindafella writes Our ancient ancestor, Homo erectus, around 500,000 years ago, has been shown to make doodles or patterns. So, it seems that we Homo sapiens have come from a thoughtful lineage. The zig-zag markings cut into the covering of a fossil freshwater shell were from a deposit in the main bone layer of Trinil (Java, Indonesia), the place where Homo erectus was discovered by Eugène Dubois in 1891, says Dr Stephen Munro, a palaeoanthropologist with the Australian National University. The team's testing shows the erectus doodling was from 0.54 million years to a minimum of 0.43 million years ago. This pushes back the thoughtful making of marks by hundreds of thousands of years. The thoughtful gathering of shellfish and their nutrients also points to possible explanations for the evolving of bigger brains.
Neat (Score:5, Funny)
I look forward to the History channel telling me the zigzag is clearly a representation of electromagnetic waves and attributing it to aliens.
Re:Neat (Score:5, Funny)
I can remember the good old days of the History channel, when they'd have demonstrated how the could be rearranged into swastikas.
Re: (Score:2)
They may well do so, but they would, as always, be missing the point, which is that somebody, half a million years ago, did this deliberately; the surface of a shell is hard, so it is not likely that it happened by accident, and it does not seem likely that this pattern could have had an obvious utility for the shell's use as a tool. So, somebody deliberately did this for no practical reason - perhaps just for the joy of doing it? It also seems like a very well controlled scratch - I haven't tried myself (y
Re: (Score:2)
Whoosh. You missed the AC's point. It was sarcasm, a crack at all of the psudo-history and outright science fiction that is today's History Channel most of the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks, 'j'. You got the point of this discovery. It jumped out at me in the same way. The report makes the point that the covering of the shell would have probably been green so the marking down into the white shell underneath would have made the scoring stand out. If it had only been one scratch then it would be called an incidental mark, but it we
Art expands thought, science limits it (Score:1)
Science limits people with its rules that facts must be proveable. Art has no limits, and allows people to explore everything that can be imagined. Both have there place though, and it would be a shame for market forces to favor one above the other.
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, but talking about art is a language of pseudo intelligence for people who don't know anything to make themselves sound smart based on their emotional reaction to things. This is proven by the fact that they use lengthy words to describe things that can actually be communicated in very simple terms. It's also a language based on the popularity of the person being discussed, if you're good and you copy someone, you have referenced them, you have created allusion, you've paid homage to the person before y
Re:Art expands thought, science limits it (Score:5, Interesting)
Urinals in a fucking art gallery.
Is just symbol that annoys both of us.
Re: (Score:1)
The context of which is that the artist was taking the piss out of the "art fascists" of the day and was making a very valid, excellent, point.
Moaning that "it's just urinals in a gallery" simply displays your ignorance.
You're the sort of person who scoffs at a computer user that doesn't compile their own kernel. Stuck in your own little rut and utterly unable to comprehend anything outside of it.
Now go away or I will taunt you a second time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Wish I had mod points. Thats one of the best summing ups of art critics I've read in years.
Re: (Score:2)
do you have a compound I can come live on?
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Art expands thought, science limits it (Score:4, Insightful)
Science (with a small 's') is a process.
Hypothesis: The fact that Science works leads people to believe it is not a philosophy.
Re: (Score:2)
Quip at bottom of page:
Logic is the chastity belt of the mind!
inb4 homoerectus jokes (Score:2)
oops too late
Drawing doodles (Score:1)
I dunno
Ever since I was a little kid, every time I pee into the urinal I drew doodles with the pee streams
Re: (Score:2)
If they get fossilized and buried for millennia, then its art. You did have them fossilized, yes?
Re: (Score:2)
Clerical error. It was designed by lager brains, not larger ones. Happens all the time.
Re: (Score:1)
What did you expect from a species named "homo erectus?"
Alternative (Score:2)
The researchers also found that one of the shells had clear evidence of being turned into a tool.
"It had a deliberately-made sharp cutting edge," says Munro.
One shell could have been used to sharpen the edge of another shell.
What I want to know (Score:1)
...is that since all our ancestors were artists, how did science and progress get started?
Re: (Score:2)
Da Vinci was both artist and scientist, and I'm sure quite a few modern day scientists have hobbies that would fall under the 'art' category.
Metallica (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly from the image... that first letter is an "M" and it's quite stylized...
I think it's rather clear they were trying to carve Metallica, like most of us did to our desks in highschool.
So clearly wherever this was found was an ancient school.
And please, before you shun these proto-humans, keep in mind that this was half a million years ago. Long before anyone could have possibly imagine Metallica would turn into a bunch of Douchebags.
Who said it's "Art"? (Score:2)
To me, this looks more like a form of accounting.
Each mark represents something owed or something paid: In effect, it's a "chit".
(Was unsure of the exact meaning of chit, so I googled it:
Chit: A short official note, memorandum, or voucher, typically recording a sum owed.)
Capuchin monkeys can be taught the concept of money. They understand debt:
http://scholar.google.com/scho... [google.com]
I haven't seen any studies where they spontaneously create art, though, which leads me to believe that accounting could appear earli
Re: (Score:2)
To me, this looks more like a form of accounting.
If we're all descended from a bunch of accounts, that explains a lot about the world.
Re: (Score:2)
"If we're all descended from a bunch of accounts, that explains a lot about the world."
Exactly
My unfounded personal theory is that we get art from our Neanderthal ancestors.
Re: (Score:2)
Accountants, TV Producers, Hair Dressers, Management Consultants, Telephone Sanitizes...
They all came from the B Arch, where all the Middle men where, The A Arch had all the achievers and great thinkers and the C Arch had all the people who actually did things useful.
However they were eaten by a Mutant Star Goat.
Re: (Score:2)
Rolling Rolling Rolling... (Score:1)
This is just a early ad campain for ZigZag rolling papers. It was aimed at surfers at the beach.
Wow (Score:2)
Then again, with some of the modern "art" out there, I guess maybe it qualifies as among the best.
Re: (Score:2)
Making a tool is in itself a thoughtful act. It's not a big leap to crude doodling or 'art' with one of those tools.
Word shortage? (Score:2)
unimpressed (Score:2)
I have higher expectations from proto-humans than some zigzag lines scratched into a shell. Come on, you really expect me to accept that as art?
Pushes back discovery, not reality (Score:2)
Fossil finds are a very sparsely sampled distribution, which means that while the earliest evidence for art has been pushed back hundreds of thousands of years, the earliest making of art almost certainly predates it by a much longer span: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=... [tjradcliffe.com]
This is not a new idea, but it's one that continually evades reporters in this area. The data of first discovery of a sparsely sampled distribution is almost certainly much, much later than the first instance of the thing being sampled.
Evolution (Score:3)