If you find something precious in the usual life, could you imagine how your life turn into being exciting? I had dreamed finding secret treasures or ancient relics which could be recorded in the real history. This world still is full of mystical unknown things which are waiting their findings.
The BBC News article “Indonesian shell has ‘earliest human engraving’” reports that the zig-zag patterns found on a fossilized shell may be engraved by Homo erectus, although it is not clear whether the patterns were art or symbolic expression for special purpose.
When I first saw Paleolithic stone tools in a prehistoric museum, I wondered how people could find these were tools because it seemed to be difficult to identify tools amongst many regular stones, especially comparing with rubbles. Before they were categorized as tools, they seemed to be just stones. In this article’s case, the finder is a person who prepared his PhD research and found the pattern after taking digital photos of the shells. The shells already excavated and collected in Java in the 1890s. Nobody noticed the patterns with naked eyes, so it would be a fortune to find a historical evidence if it is confirmed.
The patterns remind me the prehistoric engraved wall cliff which was submerged by building artificial dam in Korea. The engravings were estimated the Bronze Age’s works, which had some patterns of lines and circles. In some case, we see the ideas that developing overrides other priorities for the more economic merits. And also, there are some cases that people intentionally destroy the sites when the sites are found under construction working since if the place have value to research, the construction should hold until finishing excavation. It’s so sad to bury history under the developing purpose putting aside finding new things.
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I have no time to think what I wrote, because my computer seems to have some problems, I am using my daughter's computer which she suggested limited timeline. I think most of an important ability in this time is to know how the computer works in web. I'm worrying that my com has a virus.
ReplyDeleteI agree that basic computer literacy, including typing, certainly seem to me a useful set of skills in today's environment, which is as competitive as every environment of every living thing from bacteria to carrots to cats to humans has ever been.
DeleteI don't think that there was ever a time when environmental factors did not mean that everything living in the environment was not constantly in competition, especially with other members of its own species, whether plant or animal.
But I rely fairly blindly on my anti-virus program to protect me from the nasty intent of others in the online environment. I don't want viruses using my computer or other devices to breed and further their own goals by gobbling up my limited computing resources.
DeleteI'm glad Katie saw and decided to respond to this story. I also noticed it and emailed it to myself as a reminder because it's so directly relevant to what we've been reading, but I'm glad that someone else has responded to it in a blog post.
ReplyDeleteThe thing that most impressed me is that these shells are much, much older than the 30,000 year old cave paintings in France - Katie reports that the embellishments, the carvings, on the shells are by our earlier ancestor Homo erectus, who lived in the much earlier Lower Palaeolithic, which Hartmann and Blass refer to in their excerpt from Kottak (lines 1 - 7) without giving the dates: Katie's chosen article in the BBC News reports the engraved shells as being between 430,000 and 540,000 years ago," or about ten times earlier than the cave paintings done by our more modern ancestors in France some 30,000 years ago.
I think this adds some information that might also be relevant to a couple of the essay questions. It seems to suggest that the artistic urge was present long before we started painting deep in caves.
As a useful summary of the accepted knowledge on these areas of study, you might also like to have a look at the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic.