New Scientist reports on the discovery of the oldest know work of art: a pattern of lines scratched on a freshwater clamshell 300,000 years before humans evolved.
The experiments showed that the line is too deep and straight to have been made by an idle hand. Fresh Pseudodon clam shells have a dark brown coat, so the etch would have made a striking white line. All this suggests that it was made deliberately, and yet, unlike tools, the mark has no obvious function. It may have been a decoration, or a practice run for a decoration on another object.
That's important because Homo sapiens was thought to be the first species to produce abstract, non-functional designs. No other animal, not even a chimpanzee, has ever been known to make non-functional markings.
"It's very carefully done," says Andrew Whiten, a psychologist and primatologist at the University of St Andrews in the UK. "There is a wonderfully straight section and the [etch] turns in one continuous line. That's not just intentional but careful in what strikes as a very modern way. Apes aren't doing that. It would be staggering if they did."
