Ancient rocks unearthed from a site occupied by early humans some 1.4 million years ago may represent an attempt to achieve perfect geometry.
limestone spheres from Ubaydiya Archaeologists say Israel’s prehistoric ruins were deliberately shaped and show signs of improvement the more they are studied. This suggests that the creator had a specific goal in mind when carving, and that goal was something very round.
This discovery doesn’t get us much closer to figuring out what the ball was used for, but it does show that there was a reason the ball was made the way it was.
“During fabrication, the spheroid does not become smooth, but becomes noticeably spherical. It approaches an ideal sphere, but this probably required skilled knapping and predetermined goals.” write a team It is led by archaeologist Antoine Muller of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
“The deliberate manufacture of spherical objects at Ubaydiya similarly provides evidence that Athur hominids desired and achieved deliberate geometry and symmetry in stone.”
The spheroid is one of the fascinating puzzles of prehistory. They appear in various degrees of sphericity in archaeological sites in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East dating back about 2 million years. And I don’t know what they were for.
Some studies suggest that early humans used spheroids as a thrown projectile. Other researchers speculate that they may have gotten used to it. crush the marrow of the bones.But their Function remains vaguedespite extensive and thorough investigation of various methods.
Rather than study the ball’s specific functions, Muller and his colleagues decided to take a step back. Instead, they investigated whether the balls were created intentionally or if they were an accidental byproduct of manufacturing other tools.
The study focused on 150 spheroids recovered from ‘Ubaydiya’. Estimated to be approximately 1.4 million years old, these are the oldest objects found outside of Africa and represent an unusually large collection from a single site.
The team scanned in high-resolution 3D and generated a mesh model that can be analyzed without damaging the original artifacts. Software was then used to calculate the angle of the spheroid’s surface, the location of the center of mass, and the surface curvature of each ball. The researchers also used a mathematical function called . spherical harmonics We reconstructed the shape of each spheroid and performed an analysis of flaws on the surface of each spheroid to determine how they were created.
According to the data, the spheroid was intentionally broken, and the creators carefully removed material from a precise point on the object’s surface. The more surface is removed, the rounder the ball will grow.
However, the rocks did not grow more smoothly, which the researchers believe was intentional.
“Surface curvature had no correlation with reduction strength, so the Ubaydiya knappers did not want smooth, nearly round objects.” Muller and his colleagues write:.
“Nor did they create a smooth surface by chance by intensive percussion. Instead, they seem to have sought to achieve Plato’s spherical ideal and approached this ideal by following a spheroid reduction sequence.”
This discovery has important implications even if we don’t know what the spheroids were used for. These suggest intentional cognitive processes and the skills to carry them out.
This means that the spheroid represents a complex formal technique, the earliest known attempt to impose a symmetrical geometric shape on a stone tool, the researchers said.
This study Royal Society Open Science.