Oldest engraving

In the 1890s, Dutch palaeontologist Eugene Dubois brought home a collection of Homo Erectus skulls and freshwater shells from the site of Trinil, on Java, Indonesia. The shells lay in a museum until Josephine Joordens, a biologist at Leiden University, decided to study them in 2014 as part of a research project into Homo Erectus’s use of marine life. By chance, it was discovered that one of the shells had a faint zigzag pattern on it. When examined under the microscope, it became clear that this pattern had been carved carefully and deliberately – making it an intentional creation. Sand grains embedded in the shell were dated to 500,000 years ago, making the half-a-million-year-old Trinil carving the world’s earliest known engraving. The dating means that Homo Erectus, an early ancestor of both modern humans and Neanderthals (which became extinct 140,000 years ago), made the carving. It is the earliest example of abstract ideas ever found and has led to a reassessment of the likelihood of "human" behaviour in early hominid species.