'History shaken' by 150 strange objects of 1.4 million-year-old ape

While excavating the remains of an ape in the Middle East, scientists were puzzled by strange, spherical limestone objects.

The owner of the strange objects is believed to be Homo erectus - or "upright man" - although belonging to the same genus Homo (Human) as our "wise man" Homo sapiens, still has a very similar appearance to our ape ancestors.

Three of the strange objects excavated at a 1.4 million-year-old site in Israel - (Photo: Royal Society Open).

They are described as having ape-like faces but walking and standing like humans, and may have been the first species in human history to know how to make tools.

But the 150 strange objects at a site called Ubeidiya in northern Israel are truly shocking: " They are deliberately shaped into perfect round spheres. That is almost absurd for a 1.4 million year old."

Homo erectus - (Photo: Smithsonian Institution).

It was a period when humanity had long assumed that tools were at an extremely primitive level, long before humans developed their brains to the point of creating something like a work of art or a geometric object for their own purposes.

According to Dr. Antonie Muller from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), the research team thinks that it cannot be a work of art, but perhaps created by these round stones having some better function than the slightly round stones in nature.

It is possible that they were some kind of hammer used to smash large stones. But all that remains just a hypothesis.

Yet these ancient examples of symmetrical geometrical object making certainly suggest that the apes - or perhaps very primitive humans - who lived here had advanced in skill much earlier than scientists had previously thought.

Archaeologists are also cautious that this is not evidence that the early hominins here deliberately crafted them with a clear intention. It is possible that they tried, but they themselves were not really clear about their purpose.

The new discovery, just published in the journal Royal Society Open , leaves many questions.