ART BEFORE ART

Art is said to be a key defining feature of the human species – so when did it begin? The usual assumption has been that it bloomed with the advent of modern humans, Homo sapiens – we think of the fabulous painted Palæolithic caves of France, Spain and elsewhere. There have also been (controversial) indications that the earlier Neanderthals knew something of symbolic representation, but nothing earlier. Until now: a hint has emerged of the intentional making of marks, showing some kind of symbolic behaviour, that goes way back – half a million years back.

The hint comes from an archæological site called Trinil on the Indonesian island of Java, where a distant human ancestor, Homo erectus, was already using shells of freshwater mussels as tools. After sifting through a museum collection of many of these mussel shells collected from the site many decades ago, an international research team has discovered one engraved with a zigzag pattern older than the weathering on the shell. Using two different dating methods, scientists at the VU University Amsterdam and Wageningen University have determined that the shell is between 430,000 and 540,000 years old. This makes the incised markings fully four times older than the previously oldest known engravings, found in Africa. “At the moment we have no clue about the meaning or purpose of this engraving,” commented Wil Roebroeks, Professor of Palæolithic Archæology at Leiden University. Because this finding currently challenges accepted scholarship, it is, of course, controversial. Nature, Dec 2014; BBC News, 4 Dec 2014.