When humans were believed to have suddenly appeared, brought to earth by a divine breath and separated from the rest of the animals, it was possible to study their nature by observing how they behaved in contemporary societies. The situation became complicated when we learned, in the light of the theory of evolution, that we were just another branch of the tree of life and that, although we and other animals are millions of years apart, we have common ancestors. To search for the spark that gave birth to this species capable of gathering knowledge, communicating it, and transforming its environment like never before, scientists had to go beyond academic speculation and get their hands dirty in the search and scratching the floors of caves and ravines for answers.
One of the places where efforts are being made to reconstruct the origins of human culture is the Ubeidiya site in northern Israel. Excavations since the 1960s have found the oldest Acheulean-type hand axes outside of Africa, as well as hundreds of enigmatic-looking stones that appear to be in the shape of a sphere the size of a tennis ball. These spheroids, which formed 1.7 million years ago in Africa, have been found around the world in places thousands of kilometers apart, from the Rift Valley to South Korea or the Orce sites in Spain. They have been known for decades. but their nature remains a mystery. There is still debate as to whether they were made intentionally or are an accidental product of hitting other stones, or what purpose they served.
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This week, a team from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) in Tarragona and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem presented work suggesting they were carved intentionally. Using new 3D analysis techniques and tracing the markings on the rocks, the researchers reconstructed the order in which these hominins would have evolved. Their conclusions suggest that, unlike what happens when a shape is the result of erosion, such as a rock rolling down a river, the objects do not soften but become more spherical. “We found a regularity in our analysis, and this regularity suggests that the intent was to arrive at these types of shapes,” says Deborah Barsky, IPHES researcher and one of the authors of the paper. “These spheres would be the first geometric shapes to be intentionally recreated in stone,” he claims.
Now, as part of a long-term project Barsky is involved in to study the spheroids, they will continue working to find out why these objects were made. It has been suggested that they could be used to treat vegetables, remove bone marrow, or as projectiles for hunting, and it has also been suggested that they could have symbolic value, which would be more likely if, as some authors suggest, they were difficult to make, requiring hours of labor compared to the minutes in which one of the versatile hand axes that typically accompany these stone balls at sites can be completed.
Lower Paleolithic archaeological samples collected in Qesem, Israel.
The axes and spheres show us one of the most interesting episodes in the history of evolution and open a gap through which we can glimpse the emergence of the human mind. The first stone tools used by our ancestors, the Oldowan technology, associated with Homo habilis, are produced in large quantities, looking for a useful form, but without thinking about anything precise. “Acheulian axes, however, require the ability to imagine the desired shape and impose it on the rock. It is a little similar to the idea of Michelangelo, who said that the sculpture was already in the stone and he only removed what was still abundant, “points out Juan Manuel Jiménez Arenas, who studies the spheroids found in the Orce deposit in Granada has.
“Oldowan kernels and flakes do not require great cognitive ability or manual dexterity; “We now see primates, like the capuchin monkeys of Brazil, unintentionally producing flakes that are indistinguishable from what we find in the Oldowan.” “Acheulean is a whole different ball game,” explains CSIC scientist Ignacio de la Torre, who reminiscent of an experiment testing how modern humans can make tools. “Through imitation they were able to make Oldowan tools without explaining anything to them, but in the Acheulean they had to explain the process, something that implied the existence of a social context in which there were masters and apprentices and where possible “Be true craftsmen,” says De la Torre.
Marrow extraction experiment with the bullet. Photo: J. Rosell
If the spheroids were created intentionally, it shows the penchant for symmetry of these new people, Homo erectus, who walked the planet in the company of the longest-lived technology known. For a million and a half years, the same axes and the same spheres appear in places thousands of kilometers apart. This ubiquity of technology also raises new unknowns. “The spheroids appear in Orce, in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, 400,000 years before the rest of Europe. This leads us to questions about the spread of people on this continent,” says Jiménez Arenas.
The emergence of technology in Africa, at the eastern end of Asia and the western edge of Europe, also makes us think about how it got there. Barsky believes that this “does not mean that there was contact between populations” and is inclined to suggest that members of this species “reached a cognitive and cultural level that caused them to exhibit the same responses to similar environmental conditions.” .
For a million and a half years, axes and probably stone balls on half the planet demonstrated a surprising cultural cohesion that was no longer possible with the arrival of the inventor Homo sapiens. The rapid introduction of new technologies and cultural practices increased geographical heterogeneity. “The ability to innovate [de los erectus] It was small, but the fact that Acheulean technology was effective is proven by the fact that it lasted a million and a half years. It is said that the hand ax was a type of Swiss army knife that was used for almost everything, from fleshing animals to cutting tubers,” says De la Torre. “Our species is innovative by definition, and when Homo sapiens emerges, archaeological cultures survive less and less,” continues the researcher, who warns: “Although they were less innovative, they survived for a million and a half years, which remains to be seen.” it will reach our species.”
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