Javan fossil shell suggests Homo erectus smarter than believed

Adam Khor

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2859438/Shell-engraving-rewritten-human-history-540-000-year-old-mollusc-reveals-early-man-smarter-thought.html

Sad shipwrecked H. erectus is sad...

Wibbs

The polished edge is no big deal, lots of tools have polished edges, but the fact the "engravings" are on the outside of the shell is harder to explain as happenstance alright. If they were inside one could posit they were just a fluke of meat removal. Very interesting alright.

I've long been convinced that earlier folks were into symmetry, maybe as a hard wired brain preference* and compounded by tool use and "design". That said the vast majority of lithics are asymmetrical and rough. It's only collector and modern human preferences that tend to preselect for the tools that end up being collected and displayed in museums and the like(especially in the past).

Then again we do find extremely well honed and symmetrical tools in assemblages. Outliers? Or examples that were singled out to show off skill and appreciation of symmetry and beauty? Given that all things being equal a half arsed non symmetrical tool is just as as good as one that had much more effort put into it, suggests to me that the "beautiful" ones were not so much a fluke. I see this in some of my collection of pre Sapiens lithics, where you can see clear effort towards symmetry, where one side was knapped far more so as to balance up the other side. It made no sense as an effort to knap a practical tool. And on that point, such lithics I have that display this, also display little to zero edge wear, which suggests they weren't used much.





*possibly even sexual selection based as modern folks find symmetry a very attractive feature indicative of good genes and well nourished growth in early life