"After washing and displaying them, I invited my colleagues to observe them. One colleague seemed very angry after examining them, picked up a piece straight away, hit it hard on the other stone fragments, and exclaimed, 'These kinds of broken stones can be seen everywhere on the road!' But later that fall, the French archaeologist Henri Breuil examined the crystals and agreed with Wenzhong: The crystals were not just stones, but artifacts collected by the early humans who lived in the cave."
"Homo erectus and Homo sapiens collected crystals that were too small to be tools. Rather, these early hominins were attracted to the stones for some other reason. García-Ruiz, who studies crystallography at the Donostia International Physics Center in San Sebastián, Spain, has hypothesized that crystals were an early catalyst of abstract thinking, symbolism, and consciousness in hominins."
Paleontologist Pei Wenzhong discovered quartz crystals alongside Homo erectus remains in a Beijing cave over a century ago. Initially dismissed by colleagues as ordinary stones, French archaeologist Henri Breuil later confirmed they were deliberately collected artifacts. Subsequent excavations across Asia, Africa, and Europe revealed similar crystal collections at early human sites. Researcher Juan Manuel García-Ruiz hypothesizes that crystals served as catalysts for abstract thinking, symbolism, and consciousness development in early hominins. To test this theory empirically, García-Ruiz studied chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, to determine if they experience similar attraction to crystals, exploring whether this behavior provides insight into early human cognitive evolution.
#early-human-behavior #crystal-collection #abstract-thinking-evolution #archaeological-discovery #hominin-consciousness
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