Scientific breakthroughs can happen in the strangest ways and places. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin because of mould growing on a Petri dish left out while he was on holiday. Chinese monks in the 9th century wanted to make a potion for immortality: instead, they discovered gunpowder.Our own remarkable discovery happened on a rugged, remote stretch of coastline east of Still Bay on South Africa’s Cape south coast. It was low tide, and three members of our ichnology team (people who study tracks and traces) were in search of newly exposed Pleistocene vertebrate tracksites in aeolianites (cemented dunes).Ahead we saw a large rock that had tumbled down from the cliffs above. On its surface was a pattern of linear groove features in a large triangular shape, complete with an almost perfect bisecting groove. The sides of the triangle were close to a metre in length. After extensive research, we concluded that these grooves must have been made on a dune surface of unconsolidated sand by our human ancestors in the Middle Stone Age. The patterns are likely between 143,000 and 91,000 years old.It was an important find in a significant place. Multiple lines of evidence on this coastline indicate that it’s an area where our distant ancestors became truly modern, using fire as an engineering tool and creating abstract images. Read more: What triangular patterns on rocks may reveal about human ancestors But there was a problem. On a followup visit we found a smaller rock close by with a similar triangular feature. Subsequently, it was destroyed, likely by storm surges or high tides buffeting and overturning it. We knew that the larger rock inevitably awaited a similar fate if we did nothing. From our perspective this is one of the most important rocks in the world: it takes us back to our roots as a species and indicates the kind of “proto-art” we were capable of …
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[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnScientific breakthroughs can happen in the strangest ways and places. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin because of mould growing on a Petri dish left out while he was on holiday. Chinese monks in the 9th century wanted to make a potion for immortality: instead, they discovered gunpowder.Our own remarkable discovery happened on a rugged, remote stretch of coastline east of Still Bay on South Africa’s Cape south coast. It was low tide, and three members of our ichnology team (people who study tracks and traces) were in search of newly exposed Pleistocene vertebrate tracksites in aeolianites (cemented dunes).Ahead we saw a large rock that had tumbled down from the cliffs above. On its surface was a pattern of linear groove features in a large triangular shape, complete with an almost perfect bisecting groove. The sides of the triangle were close to a metre in length. After extensive research, we concluded that these grooves must have been made on a dune surface of unconsolidated sand by our human ancestors in the Middle Stone Age. The patterns are likely between 143,000 and 91,000 years old.It was an important find in a significant place. Multiple lines of evidence on this coastline indicate that it’s an area where our distant ancestors became truly modern, using fire as an engineering tool and creating abstract images. Read more: What triangular patterns on rocks may reveal about human ancestors But there was a problem. On a followup visit we found a smaller rock close by with a similar triangular feature. Subsequently, it was destroyed, likely by storm surges or high tides buffeting and overturning it. We knew that the larger rock inevitably awaited a similar fate if we did nothing. From our perspective this is one of the most important rocks in the world: it takes us back to our roots as a species and indicates the kind of “proto-art” we were capable of …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
