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The Ancestor of Humans Was an "Artist" 500,000 Years Ago
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.
I look forward to the History channel telling me the zigzag is clearly a representation of electromagnetic waves and attributing it to aliens.
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.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
oops too late
I dunno
Ever since I was a little kid, every time I pee into the urinal I drew doodles with the pee streams
...of larger brains here at Slashdot.
Having now read the full article, they seem to be basing it off the fact that the marks/holes matched those that could be made with a sharks tooth similar to the one that was with the collection, and that the marks were made before weathering.
co-incidentally the first cases of primate homosexuality also began 500,000 years ago.
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.
...is that since all our ancestors were artists, how did science and progress get started?
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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.
hmmmmmm. rodin?
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...
I haven't seen any studies where they spontaneously create art, though, which leads me to believe that accounting could appear earlier.
"Deliberate Markings", yes, which is significant and amazing, but undoubtedly some fool is going to claim that it is "unmistakeable proof that the ancients worshiped the ocean waves" or that it was carved by a shaman as a form of divination.
-- My Weblog.
This is just a early ad campain for ZigZag rolling papers. It was aimed at surfers at the beach.
That's a wild leap of scientific assumption from very little evidence. He could've simply been trying to sharpen (or maybe dull) a blade. There's really no way to prove that this was "thoughtful", and I'd hardly think of it as art.
Then again, with some of the modern "art" out there, I guess maybe it qualifies as among the best.
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it says "Back in 15 minutes".
This just looks like a classic case of finding images where there are none. If I found a bunch of random scratches like that on a modern day object I would know it happened unintentionally while the object was being used otherwise, like being rubbed back and forth against something or other.
No reason to assume this is any different. Maybe one of them just sat on a shell and the scratches appeared during random movement. It could have happened so many different ways, and they seem way too irregular to pin them as "deliberate markings" of all things.
Such a 'thoughtful' summary! Surely there must be more and better words with which 'thoughtful' could be substituted?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
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?
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=...
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.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
If Humans evolved from artists, why are there still artists?
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.