In my previous post I mentioned the stone balls, or "bolas" found in Miramar, Argentina, originally claimed to be 2 or even 3 million years old in the early 1900s, they are now believed to be either a hoax, or later, Paleoindian tools. However, genuinre and uncontroversial stone balls h ave been unearthed in the Old World, dating back to Oldowan and Acheulean times, meaning that they are around 1.5 million years old, and were made by Homo erectus or even older ancestral hominins.
Red Crag Stone from Bramford, England
Pictured below, (Red Crag stone. Source) this stone is not a sphere, instead it has an elongated shape, and unlike the other Old World finds, it has been quite controversial.
J. Reid Moir wrote an article about the stone three years after it was found by one of his assistants, by the name of John Baxter. It came from Pliocene sediments at Red Crag, Bramford, a site near Ipswich, in England, UK. The 1929 article titled "A Remarkable Object from Beneath the Red Crag". It was roughly egg shaped. Henri Breuil, who was a witness of the discovery wrote: "While I was staying in Ipswich with my friend J. Reid Moir, we were examining together a drawer of objects from the base of the Red Crag at Bramford, when J. Reid Moir showed me a singular egg-shaped object, which had been picked up on account of its unusual shape. Even at first sight it appeared to me to present artificial striations and facets, and I therefore examined it more closely with a mineralogist's lens. This examination showed me that." Rather than a South American bola, this ovoid was thought to be a sling stone like the ones used in "New Caledonia". TWhe Pleistocene to Eocene sediments at Bramfored are over 2 million years old.
However, Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, 2011 warns that even thouth the age is correct, the setting may be wront: "the Red Crag deposits date from the Gelasian chrono-stratigraphic phase, 2,588,000 to 1,806,000 years ago during the earliest phase of the Lower Pleistocene, when this part of Britain was under a shallow sea, and it seems most likely that the “sling-stone” is a simple case of misidentification, its natural grooves being mistaken for human manufacture by an expert who was overtaken by his colleague’s enthusiasm for finding objects in the deposit in question."
Below is a Melanesian Sling stone , the resemblance is striking, yet this one is evidently manmade, and polished.
Sling stone from New Caledonia. Source
Olduvai stone balls, Tanzania
The Museum of Stone Tools shows the following image captioned as a quartzite spheroid from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, age: Early Pleistocene Oldowan-Acheulean 0.4 to 1.9 million years ago.
Another example can be seen here, online, at the British Museum, which in its description cautions, that although Louis Leakey suggested that these rounded stones were used as bolas, like the throwing stones from the Pampas, "experiments have shown that such pieces can be produced by repeatedly using the same quartz pebble as a knapping hammer"
The Oldowan tools, are crude, like struck pebbles, and believed to be the work of Homo habilis, manufacturing spheroidal stone balls seems to be beyond their cognitive abilities. Could primitive hominins like them fashion sinew cords or treat leather adequatly to be able to fasten them to stone balls like the bolas or boleadoras of the Pampas?
An excellent summary of the Olduvai spheroids can be found in Ignacio de la Torre & Rafael Mora, 2010, which I summarize below:
Clark reported them in 1955, and their deliberate manufacture by flaking and battering to shape the speroids. He suggested they were used as missiles, and also as hammerstones for stone tool manufacture and to crack nuts open.
Willoughby proposed in 1987 that they were the result of flaking that began with the typical choppers, and that ended up as speroids, or, altermtively that they were used as hammers, an unintentional outcome of their use was the shaping of rounded spheroids.
Texier and Roche (1995) consider them as deliberate objects that arose from a method of knapping flakes. A core is battered, through controlled reduction to produce flakes and this results in a polyhedron, or a spheroid.
Java stone balls made by H. erectus
Leaving Africa, and the Oldowan, stone balls were found in sites associated to Homo erectus, who has been in Eurasia for around two million years. Weidenreich, 1943 describes in Indonesia at the Homo erectus site in Solo: "The most interesting specimen illustrated by Oppenoorth is a stone ball from
Ngandong. Similar stone balls have been found at several places in our excavations in the Solo Valley. They are made of andesite, are perfectly round, and are never polished. According to Oppenoorth, their diameters range from 67 to 92 mm... [2.6 - 3.6 in], and some may be even a little larger. They closely resemble primitive stone cannon balls as used in Java in medieval times for the old bronze cannons. They occur so regularly in the layers that they might actually represent "implements" used by Solo men." He attributes them a Mousterian, and therefore Neanderthal similarity, citing similar stones found in La Quina, France, Techik Tach, Russia. Adding that "Mousterio-Levalloisian of Florisbad, South Africa, Dreyer and Lyle mention "dozens of round balls" about 3 inches in diameter made mostly of dolorite, and also a few of blue shales." Weidenreich mentions that the oldest balls were Acheulean, from Kenya, reported by Leakey, who found them "in many cases in groups of three strongly indicating the use of the bolas, still used as a hunting weapon in South." Weidenreich suggests that although their purpose is unknown they were either sling stones or bolas.
According to Bartstra (1983), cited in van Heteren & de Vos, 2012 describes tools and remains found at the Ngebung site in Java, belonging to H. erectus there are three levels, the deepest (lowest) has tools that are absent in the upper ones of Upper Pleistocene age: "elongated choppers, spherical balls (so called sling stones or bolas) and crude axes, all made of andesite. The larger stone tools, like the bolas are considered to be Upper Pleistocene/Lower Holocene of age." No explanation given for assigning a more recent age to the bolas.
Acheulean bolas in Israel
My own research into these primitive bolas has revealed other sources, for instance, outside of Africa, made by Homo erectus in Ubeidiya, Israel, with an age of 1.4 million yearws, as reported by Muller et al., 2023 with a clear spherical shape. The paper suggests that they were deliberately fashioned that way, to resemble speheres and its title echoes that suggestion: The limestone spheroids of ‘Ubeidiya: intentionalimposition of symmetric geometry by early hominins? Some of the stone balls studied in this paper are pictured below:
This article points out that their shape has bewildered archaeologists, as they can't understand what was their use. Furthermore, they have been used for millions of years, starting with the crude Oldowan stones industry, and into the Acheulean, and Mousterian, their use in Southern South America persisted until the late 1800s. Their widespread geographic dispersion, from Africa, to Asia, Europe, and America is notable.
There are two schools of though about these balls: (1) that they were the byproduct of a flake producing technique that left spheroids as waste, a totally unintentional production of stone balls. (2) That the hominins that made them selected a nodule and then deliberately fashioned it into a polyhedron, and gradually into a spheroid or bola. The balls found in Israel, according to the authors , "are a complex formal technology that represent a manifestation of the complex cognitive and skilful capacities of Early Acheulean hominins. If similar intentional shaping can be demonstrated on Oldowan spheroids, this would likely represent the earliest evidence of hominins imposing a desired symmetrical geometry on their tools." In other words, Homo habilis and Homo erectus were much smarter than we imagined.
Ancient or Modern?
S. J. de Laet mentions stone balls in the History of Humanity Volume I (see p. 454) in line with what I have mentioned further, up, but he questions their antiquity in Indonesia, suggesting a modern Homo sapiens origin:
"round stone balls (resembling small stone cannon-balls) that are allegedly found in terrace sediments along the Solo. They are made of andesite, are not polished and measure on average 10 cm in diameter. They are associated with Homo soloensis(on account of their assumed stratigraphical position), and they are regarded as a primitive hunting weapon, which is why these stone balls are oftenreferred to as bolas or sling-stones. Von Koenigswald even saw in them evidence for theNeanderthal character of the Solo hominids: similar stone balls do occur at such famousNeanderthal sites as La Quina (France) and Teshik-Tash (Uzbekistan) (von Koenigswald,1951). In Sangiran too these stone balls are found (and they are displayed in the local museum); but around the hill of Ngebung it can be demonstrated that they certainly do not lie buried in high-terrace sediments. In Ngebung the stone balls can be associated with young, post-Pleistocene alluvial deposits (Bartstra, 1985). The question therefore ariseswhether the stone balls found along the Solo do not in fact originate also from recent sediments, and reflect the activities of Holocene hunters rather than those of ancient Homo soloensis"
Spheres with symbolic purposes
There are some intriguing rounded stone ballls that were discovered in a site known as El Guettar, in Tunisia, first explored by Gruet in 1954) (S. J. de Laet, see p. 352). The stones were found, accomodated in the shape of a cairn!
"El Guettar did yield the best evidence for symbolic behaviour in the constructed heap of stone balls (Gruet,1954, pp. 67–77). The site had some 7 m [23 ft.]of Middle Palaeolithic deposits around a spring, and the stone heap was found near the base of the sequence, built on a flat surface by the edge of the spring pool. The heap was conical, with a basal diameter of about 130 cm [4.2 ft] and a height of about 70 cm [2.3 ft.], and was built of about sixty balls, almost all of them oflimestone, which were graded from large (18 cm in diameter [3.1 in]), rather roughly shaped one sat the base to small (4.5 cm in diameter [1.8 in]), perfectly shaped ones at the top. The interior of the cone was filled with a mass of bones and flaked stone artefacts (approximately 2,000 ofthe latter, including a typical tanged point). The bones and artefacts seemed to have been simply gathered up from the surrounding surface (they do not differ overall from those found elsewhere in the excavation), but some care was taken to reserve the finest artefacts for the upper part of the fill. At the base of the interior of the heap were two thin plaques of a non-local limestone.The detectable method and consistency in the construction of the heap suggest that it was built on one occasion, rather than over a period of time. That the heap stood undisturbed thereafter until it became buried indicates that it was not just a convenient way of storing stone balls. The excavator believed that it represented an offering to the genius loci of the spring. Practical explanations have not been forthcoming and we too are brought to conclude that its purpose must have been symbolic."
I must add that Gruet believed the site was of people with a Mousterian culture, i.e. Neanderthals, however other scholars, like Clark, consider it to be later, belonging to the more recent Aterian culture, of modern Homo sapiens and about 40 ky old.
Below is a picture of the stone cairn at El Guettar
Cairn found at Guettar. Source
Hammers?
A recent article by Assaf, Preysler, and Bruner, 2023 analyzes the shape, size and flaking used to fashion them and concludes that "Based on the current data available, we link the development of SSBs [shaped stone balls] with an increased consumption and extraction of fat of large-medium sized herbivores in the Lower Paleolithic period. Indeed, SSBs may also have been used as percussion tools for processing vegetal material, perhaps similarly to handaxes, which were primarily used for butchering, but were occasionally used for woodworking. However, current functional and experimental data associate these items with marrow extraction activities, as well as some contextual data linking these items with faunal remains. We thus argue that these are designated tools shaped in a complex procedure—a technological solution invented during the LP in order to respond to the growing need for fat consumption."
Closing Comments
The use of stone balls is ancient, dating back to the first stone tools used by our ancestors in Africa. They survived across species (H. erectus, Neanderthals, and modern humans), and vast distances. They ended up in America where they were used for tens of thousands of years in the Pampas and Patagonia.
Were they introduced into the New World by H. erectus? and if so, is their great antiquity (as suggested by Ameghino at Miramar) could be an indication of that origin.
Finally, the Patagonian myth of Tachwull, them proto-human maker of bolas may be a memory of the presence of erectus in America.
Patagonian Monsters -
Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia
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