Prehistoric humans even older than the Neanderthals deliberately produced stone tools with fossils and geodes at their center. According to researchers, these exceptional items were probably infused with a kind of spiritual “potency”, hinting at the existence of ritual practices and abstract beliefs among early members of the Homo lineage.
The incredible lithic assemblage was first discovered in the Sakhnin Valley in Israel by local independent researcher Muataz Shalata, who then contacted Professor Ran Barkai from Tel Aviv University. Describing the moment when the pair met, Barkai told IFLScience how “Muataz took a handaxe out of his bag and gave it to me with the fossils facing down, so the face I saw looked like a regular handaxe. But when I turned it around, I was really shocked.”
“It’s the first time I’d seen something like that, and in fact I think no one has seen something like that, so It was a really, really impressive moment,” he said.
Palaeolithic handaxes are extremely common worldwide, and are typically knapped from flint or chert. Only a few “exceptional” examples have ever been found, including one in England that features a shell at its center and one from the famous Sima de los Huesos site in Spain, which is made of brown-veined quartzite.
In the Sakhnin Valley, however, Barkai and Shalata went on to discover 10 extraordinary handaxes featuring fossils and crystals. They also found a spheroid shaped from a geode – a task that would have been extremely difficult to accomplish, given the almost impossibility of knapping such crystals.
While the Sakhnin Valley is unusually rich in fossils and geodes, Barkai says that it also contains an abundance of high-quality flint – and indeed, the team have so far uncovered around 200 regular flint handaxes bearing no exceptional features. The fact that some tools were made from less amenable materials therefore suggests that this was an intentional act that was performed for a particular reason.
Hellbound and Down 