Early human ancestors turned stones into spheres on purpose, study suggests | Hacker News Reader

Early human ancestors turned stones into spheres on purpose, study suggests

theguardian.com

20 pointsc42021 comments

This doesn't seem as mysterious to me as the article suggests. We were still primarily roaming hunters 1.4m years ago. It's not difficult to imagine the uses a more aerodynamic rock would have...namely, you could be more accurate throwing it.

But I'm sure this occurred to researchers, so maybe they're expressing this as "there is no evidence of how they were used" and not "we don't have some good ideas."

But then they should be found all over - thrown weapons were lost all the time.

Witness arrowheads - every plowed field in the American midwest has arrowheads. Because they were used for thousands of years, and lost for thousands of years.

Perhaps if you see such a piece of rock outside a place where it is likely it is an artefact (eg. a camp or burial site among other belongings) you wouldn't even consider it as man made.

Maybe you have passed such things multiple times without ever recognizing their true origins!

Spheres are an unlikely shape in nature according to the article.

"Spheres"

Have look at the pic in the article, not exactly polished ball bearings.

Those would be easy to ignore and nature makes plenty of more spherical rocks. Most rivers have shores with better looking "spheres".

The article claims that the rocks while not as polished are much closer to perfect spheres than anything nature produces.

I don't have the expertise to comment on if that is correct or not. I'm just repeating what 'facts' that I trust the reporter verified, though i'll admit to seeing enough examples of reporters not verifying facts to have doubt.

A very interesting point

There's a huge difference in population density between the two groups; there was no place in the US that wasn't inhabited even before projectile points were fully diffused across the area.

Combine that with the fact that we're temporally very close to the Indigenous occupation. Whereas there's over a million+ years of geological processes to affect those artifacts original provenance.

Also, if we haven't been looking for crudely rounded stones we aren't going to have much of a sample size to say whether or not they are, to use archeologist's favorite word, ubiquitous.

I'd wager most people aren't aware that spheres aren't common in nature.

Interesting point - population density when such spheres were being manufactured was low. Which leads to the next idea: when population density increased, spheres were no longer manufactured. Why? Something replaced them. Arrowheads?

We can start to unpick the mystery with insights like that.

Kind of makes you wonder if the first arrow heads were formed when someone was trying to make a sphere and struck the rock with flint (or one of the other suitable stones) and accidentally cut themselves on the sharp resulting shard.

I'm not sure you need a utilitarian justification at all. For example: My 4 year old daughter makes playdoh & modeling clay into spheres for fun. She also makes cubes and snakes.

Point taken, though from my understanding hunter gatherer groups didn't have a ton of time for leisure...especially anything involving carrying a heavy object with them as they roamed that didn't have utility.

Not all hunter gatherer groups are purely nomadic, and in general they have more free time than farmers.

That decrease in free time is one way some theories tie farming to alcohol production. As substance is far more difficult when farming.

Here is a study with modern people:

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/farmers-have-less-leisur...

This is not inaccurate. Play seems to have been a fundamental part of the social life of basically any human group we can discern record of. The best research we have indicates that these groups had more free time than most of us engaged in modern employment.

Is the lack of cubes evidence of utility? I mean, if they're just doing it for fun, like your daughter, wouldn't there be more that just spheroids?

Those look a hell of a lot like sling shot to me.

Wikipedia says: "The sling is an ancient weapon known to Neolithic peoples around the Mediterranean, but is likely to be much older. It is possible that the sling was invented during the Upper Palaeolithic at a time when new technologies such as the spear-thrower and the bow and arrow were beginning to emerge."

Seems unlikely, though - 1.4m years vs 50k years.

> 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.

I mean David/Goliath wasn't totally made up for fun, slings were a key weapon in early warfare. They work.

Why not just because they could? When I got my lathe one of the first things I did was turn wooden spheres. It's a lot of fun figuring out how to make them as perfectly round as you can.

The Diquís people of Costa Rica also made these huge stone spheres that are extremely impressive!

They aren't kidding about them being used as lawn decorations for ticos, in my neighborhood there were at least three, and one in a park.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_spheres_of_Costa_Rica

Of course its to throw them at animals and/or each other. Only academics would say "attempted to achieve the Platonic ideal of a sphere.", ha.

I believe the term we are looking for here is balls.

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