THE FIRST PALEONTOLOGISTS?

THE FIRST PALEONTOLOGISTS? They may have been the Neanderthals (or even earlier humans) a quarter MILLION years ago, who carefully knapped hand axes to frame and highlight fossils. What were they thinking as they worked on these beautiful pieces? They almost certainly recognized the shells as formerly-living beings, now encased in rock. So did the fossiliferous axes carry special, perhaps sacred, significance? Were the tools treated with reverence and passed down to later generations? And there are other, similar examples as well: Marin et al. (2015) documented bivalve and snail fossils, pyrite, and an ochre-stained geode that were purposefully collected by Neanderthals and brought into a Romanian cave. For 99.7% of our tool-making history, we used no metal – just stone, wood, antler, or bone. During that time, our language evolved in tandem with our tool-making abilities (Uomini and Meyer, 2013). Symbolic thought and language are known to be highly interrelated (Orr and Geva, 2015), so as humans became increasingly adept at tool-making, they made more esthetically-pleasing and meaningful pieces. Many today would even say that well-made tools were the first art. Collectors like myself are fond of pyritized, opalized or other beautiful fossils and petrified wood. There’s a definite overlap between fossils, exquisite mineral specimens, and art. And the ancient craftspeople who made these hand axes were among the first to merge fossils with art. Neil Bockoven