Scientists find earliest engravings in human history - at 500,000-years-old

Anthropologists said they had found the earliest engraving in human history on a fossilised mollusc shell some 500,000 years old, unearthed in colonial-era Indonesia.

The zigzag scratching, together with evidence that these shells were used as a tool, should prompt a rethink about the mysterious early human called Homo erectus, they said on Wednesday.

The discovery comes through new scrutiny of 166 freshwater mussel shells found at Trinil, on the banks of the Bengawan Solo river in East Java, where one of the most sensational finds in fossil-hunting was made.

It was here in 1891 that an adventurous Dutch palaeontologist, Eugene Dubois, found "Java Man." With a couple of army sergeants and convict labour to do the digging, Dubois excavated part of a heavy-browed skull, a tooth and a thigh bone.

He interpreted these as being the remains of a gibbon-like hominid that was the long-sought "missing link" between apes and humans.

Palaeontologists eventually categorised the find as a Homo erectus, or "upright human" - a hominid that according to sketchy and hugely debated fossil evidence lived from around 1.9 million years ago to about 150,000 years ago.