![]() Analysis of the grooves on the shell show they were made with a hard tool, and that they were made before the shell fossilized. Now the scientists had evidence that the shells had been deliberately assembled, and that they had been assembled by Homo erectus. “If you pierce the shell and damage the muscle, it is easy to open the shell, and you can eat them,” said Joordens. Trying this ancient technique for themselves, the researchers found that if they poked a clam shell with a shark tooth at just the right spot, they could cut through the muscle that holds the shell shut. After ruling out all the options - including otters, rats, birds and octopus - they concluded that only Homo erectus could have made this hole, probably using a shark tooth as a tool. Next they asked what animals living at this time could have made the hole. ![]() This led the researchers to surmise that the shells had been collected by an animal that got to the meat in the shell by poking the hole. They noted that one-third of them had one or two small holes in the same area. To figure out what these marks were, and how they got there, Joordens and her colleagues began by taking a closer look at all the shells in the collection. “As soon he photographed it, he saw it right away.” “He couldn’t stay in the collection, so he was just photographing all of it,” said Jose Joordens, researcher at the Faculty of Archeology at Leiden University and the lead author on the paper. The collection is housed in the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the city of Leiden.ĭubois described a species of clam from the shells he found, and at least one other researcher did extensive work on the shells in the 1930s, but the marks on the surface of the shell defied detection until May 2007 when an Australian doctoral student started photographing the shells so he could study them at home. When he returned, he brought back fossils of Homo erectus, as well as a wide range of other fossils, including elephants, fish bones and a few hundred shells. Dubois traveled to the Indonesian island in search of fossils that would link man and ape on the evolutionary tree. The fossilized shell was collected in Java in 1891 by Dutch physician and anthropologist Eugene Dubois. ![]()
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