This stone is probably a 130 thousand year old statue!

Researchers speculate that probably around 130,000 years ago, an artist found the remains of a fish bite in the sand of the beach and then made a similar sculpture out of sand, which turned into stone after thousands of years.

According to Faradid, in 2018, a citizen interested in science named Emily Brink was exploring near Steel Bay (a city on the southern coast of South Africa) when a strange stone caught her attention. This symmetrical stone had four protruding points like a kite.

Now, researchers say the rock may be a sand sculpture inspired by a bite of a fish; An animal that is usually found in southern Africa. If so, the find could be the first known example of human artistry inspired by other species, according to a study published in the journal Rock Art Research.

The material of this stone is aoleanite, which is formed when sediments solidify due to wind. Researchers believe the fragment is an ammoglyph, a fossilized work of art created by early humans.

According to Charles Helm and Alan Whitfield, co-authors of the study, an artist may have seen the corpse of a real stingray, possibly a small immature male or female, and was inspired to create this piece, because the proportions of this piece are exactly like a stingray. It is real and its shape is almost completely taken from this fish. The stone has a tail-like bottom, which may have been intentionally broken by the artist.

Helm is a paleontologist at Nelson Mandela University and Whitfield is a senior scientist emeritus at the South African Institute of Aquatic Biodiversity.

Researchers emphasize that no definite conclusions can be reached about this piece, even its age cannot be determined directly, because dating may damage or destroy this work of art. They used a technique called radiant dating to date the nearby rocks, which showed that the artwork may be as old as 13,000 years.

“It's very unlikely that something like this would be preserved and interpretable for us, so this is probably the only example identified so far, but one can always hope that more will be found,” says Helm.

But why a bite of fish? One reason is that these creatures are relatively smooth and easier to track than other animals. Perhaps their poisonous bites aroused the fear and respect of the people of that era and caused them to become valuable art subjects of that era.

Previously, the oldest known artwork depicting an animal was a 45,000-year-old painting of a pig in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Other rare examples include a painting of a cow-like animal found on the island of Borneo, which is about 40,000 years old, and a painting of a pig deer in Indonesia, which is 35,400 years old.

If the researchers guessed correctly, this stone, which looks like a bite of fish, is the oldest example of human art to represent animals.

However, it may not be possible to prove that the stone actually depicts a fish bite, according to the researchers.

The researchers say: “Firstly, we cannot prove our interpretation and others cannot find it false either. Therefore, what we say is speculation, albeit a fully informed speculation based on our understanding of tens of thousands of such stones. Second, paleoarts are rare in the archaeological record and harder to identify than recent art. “We don't know what there is yet to discover, and we don't know about it.”