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Feb. 4, 2021
About 120,000 years ago, in what is today Israel, somebody devoted great effort to etching six parallel lines on the bone of an aurochs. This discovery in the open-air Middle Paleolithic site of Nesher Ramla in Israel is the oldest evidence of deliberate decoration in the Levant.
The bone and the few similar objects found to date support the theory that both early modern humans and the hominins predating them were capable of behavior associated with symbolism, suggests the team led by Marion Prévost of the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology, with Yossi Zaidner, Iris Groman-Yaroslavski and Kathryn Crater Gershtein of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, and José-Miguel Tejero of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique de France. The study was published this week in Quaternary International.