Scientists believe they have uncovered the earliest example of a human engraving, surpassing the previous record holder by hundreds of thousands of years.
According to BBC News, the engraving is a zig-zag pattern on a fossilized shell from Indonesia that dates back some 430,000 years to the era of Homo erectus. Previously, the oldest known manmade engravings were 130,000 years old.
One of the authors of the study, published in the journal Nature, told BBC News the discovery could go so far as to "rewrite human history." Perhaps literally, as man needed first to sketch lines and shapes before he could record history.
"This is the first time we have found evidence for Homo erectus behaving this way," Stephen Munro, a researcher from Australian National University, told BBC News.
Eugene Dubois, a Dutch scientist, first dug up the fossilized shells in the 1890s and they sat in storage ever since. While trying to complete his PhD in May 2007, Munro photographed the shells and their engravings turned up when he analyzed them digitally.
"Immediately when I saw the markings there I thought, those are human engravings, there's no other explanation," Munro said. "We see this type of behavior, whether it's art or symbolic expressions, we reserve that behavior for ourselves. As something quite uniquely human.
"With this finding, we might say there are definitely difference between us and Homo erectus. But they might be more like us than we previously thought."
John Shea, a professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University, said this may well mean that Homo erectus was capable of symbolic thought.
"This is a find that is problematical in several ways," he told NPR. "It sits there in the archaeological record with nothing like it around for hundreds of thousands of years, and thousands and thousands of miles. If this is symbolic behavior by Homo erectus, then it's basically the only evidence we've got for a species that lived for a million-and-a-half years on three continents."
