Thank you Harry for this link....the article was really interesting. Vicky

----- Original Message -----
From: "Harry Lee" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thursday, December 4, 2014 1:40:57 PM
Subject: [CONCH-L] Pushing back the dawn of hominid art

Listers,

Early yesterday evening, I heard an NPR commentary on the scientific 
report treated here: 
<http://www.nature.com/news/homo-erectus-made-world-s-oldest-doodle-500-000-years-ago-1.16477>http://www.nature.com/news/homo-erectus-made-world-s-oldest-doodle-500-000-years-ago-1.16477>.

Unless I had a lapsus, the report, which ran several minutes and 
included interviews with more than one responsible anthropologist, 
never elaborated beyond the term "mussel," which imprecision I found 
a bit confusing and possibly inaccurate.

Now I see, thanks to the pearly freshwater mussel (Order Unionoida) 
specialist John Jenkinson, via the Unio Listserve, that the putative 
artistic medium was a the shell of a unionid, which family is almost 
as well represented in the Indotropics as it is in North America.

Could it be that the first collector of a shell for its abstract 
value wasn't even a member of our species .... and, among the 
mollusks, that seashells weren't the original such keepsakes?

Harry

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