Early human relatives purposefully crafted stones into spheres 1.4 million years ago, study claims

[admin]

The stone spheres were crafted by early hominins who were trying to create symmetry in the objects, a new study suggests.

Early human relatives purposefully crafted stones into spheres 1.4 million years ago, study claims : Read more

 

[FirstCrusader 1]

The stone spheres were crafted by early hominins who were trying to create symmetry in the objects, a new study suggests.

Early human relatives purposefully crafted stones into spheres 1.4 million years ago, study claims : Read more

In the history of ancient human-carved
stone spheres worldwide, I believe that one answer to the existence/original purpose of the spheres has been ignored. I propose that there are multiple reasons for the spheres but two main ones of which one has been totally ignored - that of territoriality.
In my view the most finished spheres and the largest spheres were used as territorial markers. I further propose that a spoken world-wide culture existed until a few thousand years ago and the use of the spheres for the purposes of marking territory was universal across the world.
A perfect example of this idea is the huge stone sphere found in Israel some years ago buried in many feet of ground. This sphere could have marked the limits between the modern humans and Neanderthals or their partial descendants as a visible border. It stood untouched for thousands of years performing that duty, gradually being buried by the deposits created over time that raised the ground level but unmoved by anyone as a sacred boundary not to be violated. In time with movements of people's, invasions the original purpose was forgotten and the sphere buried over time.
With the massive movements of people in the last several thousand years traditional knowledge related to specific geographic
areas was lost so that the reasons for the spheres was lost too as were the histories of the regions and it's peoples.

 

[Daniel+]

In Uruguay, Argentina and southern Brazil there are thousands of stone spheres of indigenous origin, between 500 and 15,000 years old. They are called boleadoras, and were used for hunting and fighting, tied in the amount of three by leather or fiber ribbons. They are almost perfectly spherical and their diameter varies between 5 and 10 centimeters. They have a groove in their largest diameter to be tied. There are examples in all the museums of these countries.

 

[CRSmith]

Maybe they were bowling balls. I saw that once on the Flintstones.

 

[Hartmann352]

Ah, the round balls from a million years ago.

An analysis of 150 round, baseball-sized stones found at a site where early humans lived 1.4 million years ago shows that they were intentionally knapped into spheres. This rules out the idea that they became round after being used as hammers, but doesn’t tell us why they were shaped.

“Unfortunately, we still can’t be confident about what they were used for,” says Antoine Muller at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Signs of ancient occupation at ‘Ubeidiya, in what is now northern Israel, were discovered in 1959. A few human bones and thousands of stone tools have been uncovered there. The site is thought to have been used by some of the first members of our ancestor species Homo erectus to move out of Africa.

The finds include nearly 600 stone balls made of flint, basalt and limestone. Similar discoveries have been made at many other early human sites dating as far back as 1.8 million years ago. The objects, known as spheroids, were made by knapping, but why this was done remains a mystery.

It has been suggested that they are a byproduct of the creation of other stone tools, or that they are stones deployed as hammers that became round as they were used rather than being deliberately shaped.

To test this idea, Muller and his colleagues scanned 150 limestone spheroids from ‘Ubeidiya, which are of varying degrees of roundness and around 8 centimetres in diameter, roughly the size of a baseball. They worked out the sequence of strikes responsible for each ball’s shape.

The researchers conclude that these spheroids required similar levels of skill and planning to make as hand axes, rather than being accidental creations. But the team can’t say if the same is true of any other spheroids, says Muller.

“Clearly, whoever made these objects was working hard to make them spheres,” says Andrew Wilson at Leeds Beckett University, UK, who in 2016 showed that the shape and weight of typical spheroids are suitable for throwing.

“To my mind, this certainly looks more like they were crafting projectiles than, say, hammers,” says Wilson. “I know from my work that these rocks would make good hunting weapons for a group of humans.”

See: Royal Society Open Science DOI: 10.1098/rsos.230671

Archaeologists have long debated exactly how the tennis ball-sized “spheroids” were created. Did early hominins intentionally chip away at them with the aim of crafting a perfect sphere, or were they merely the accidental byproduct of repeatedly smashing the stones like ancient hammers? Research led by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests our ancestors knew what they were doing. The team of scientists examined 150 limestone spheroids dating from 1.4m years ago that were found at the ’Ubeidiya archaeological site in the north of modern-day Israel. Using 3D analysis to reconstruct the geometry of the stones, the researchers determined that their sphericalness was “likely to have been produced intentionally”.
Hartmann352