It is not the most elaborate piece of art ever discovered but it may be the oldest. A fossilized, freshwater clamshell with a zigzag patern carved into it with a sharks tooth appears to have been created by one of mankind ancient ancestors.

It was originally found by geologist Eugene Dubois in Trinil, Indonesia in the 1890s along with a variety of other fossils including the bones of Homo erectus. From there it sat in a museum in the Netherlands for over a century until it was rediscovered by archeologist Josephine Joordens and then PhD student Stephen Munro.

Sediments inside the shell and engravings show that they were buried at some point between 430,000 and 540,000 years ago. Palaeoanthropologist Francesco d’enrico, of the University of Bordeaux determined attempted carving clam shells with a variety of pointed tools to determine what was used to make the markings. The closest markings were made by a sharks tooth, which made since because they were a number of them were found at the original archeological site.

The remarkable thing is not the artwork itself, which consists of a zigzag pattern on the back of a shell. However, no species other than man is known to create abstract, non functional designs. Even among humans the earliest known artwork appeared about 40,000 years ago. Artwork, of any description, dating back 500,000 years suggests a previously unguessed complexity to homo sapiens ancient ancestors.

“Whether the zigzag pattern had a specific meaning or was merely a sort of doodle seems irrelevant. Regardless of intent, the very process of rendering a geometric form would seem to indicate the workings of a mind no longer tethered solely to the here and now, but capable of a uniquely abstract form of conscious ‘wandering’,“ said David Edelman, a neuroscientist who was most recently at Bennington College in Vermont to New Scientist.

Homo erectus, meaning upright man, is a species that lived in the Pleistocene era. The earliest known H. erectus fossils appear 1.9 million years ago and the species appears to have vanished about 12,000 years ago. It is not known how they interacted with Homo sapiens, or humans when we first appeared in our modern form about 200,000 years ago.

Relatively little is known about H. erectus. The fossils, bones and tools tell us something about when and where they lived as well as what they looked like. This discovery sheds rare light on who they were and how they thought. According to a statement from Leiden University, “this discovery from the historical Dubois collection sheds unexpected new light on the skills and behaviour of Homo erectus, and indicates that Asia is a promising and, so far, relatively unexplored area for finding intriguing artefacts.”