The Trinil engraving
Homo erectus scratches a zigzag into a mussel shell half a million years ago.
- When
- Known to
- ± 50 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
A freshwater mussel shell from Eugene Dubois's Trinil collection, re-examined in 2014, carries a deliberate zigzag of connected lines cut with a sharp point, and sediment in the shell dates it to around 500,000 years ago. Other shells in the collection were opened by drilling precisely through the adductor muscle, and one was worked into a tool. It is the oldest known engraving by roughly 300,000 years, and it was made by Homo erectus, not by us.