Colorful pebbles, handaxes studded with fossils and flint tools already ancient when picked up may have been the first souvenirs. A Tel-Aviv University team proposes in Evolutionary Anthropology that early humans in what is now Israel kept such objects as keepsakes, a practice the release dates to as early as half a million years ago. The authors frame it as a hypothesis, not a demonstrated fact.
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The group spans several disciplines: Dr. Yoav Ram of the School of Zoology, archaeologists Prof. Ran Barkai and Dr. Ella Assaf, psychologist Prof. Liad Mudrik, and Dr. Bar Efrati of Oxford University. Their argument is that objects with no obvious practical job could have helped people remember places and events, and that the habit may have shaped autobiographical memory and the sense of self over generations.
Qesem Cave pebbles and the Sakhnin Valley handaxes
The evidence the authors point to comes from Israeli sites. At Qesem Cave, colorful pebbles were brought in from various locations, and in the Sakhnin Valley some handaxes include fossils or unusual geological features. The Tel-Aviv University release adds old, resharpened flint tools from Revadim, Jaljulia and Qesem Cave to the list. Qesem is a Tel Aviv University excavation in the Judean Hills foothills, roughly 12 kilometers east of the city. The university’s site page says it was occupied about 400,000 to 220,000 years ago, in the Lower Paleolithic, and holds a hearth dated near 300,000 years ago.
A photo caption supplied with the release describes colorful patinated old flint items recovered from Qesem Cave, gathered by the cave’s inhabitants from landscapes outside it. Most were resharpened while keeping their original outline and patina. Behind the proposal sits a long-running excavation. Qesem Cave belongs to the Acheulo-Yabrudian complex, a transitional period between the Acheulean, whose oval and pear-shaped handaxes are linked to Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis, and the later Mousterian, associated with Neanderthals and modern humans. Thousands of animal bones show the inhabitants hunted and carried their prey back to the cave, so the people who picked up odd pebbles were also managing a busy domestic site.
Keepsakes as an external memory device
Ram describes keepsakes as something like an external memory device. A pebble or fossil carried back to camp could anchor a story about where it was found and who was there, and stories repeated across generations could strengthen the capacity to recall one’s own past. That is the chain of reasoning the authors lay out, and each link is a proposal rather than a measurement.
Barkai ties the story to a changing environment. The disappearance of large animals, particularly elephants, he says, forced early humans to devise new hunting methods, and the paper places the keepsake habit inside that period of upheaval. Ram and colleagues argue that objects collected over generations could have become a shared archive. Old flint tools were a special case: by choosing aged, patinated pieces and resharpening them, people preserved something of an earlier maker’s work as well as the material itself. The authors read that selectivity as a sign that the objects mattered for more than their cutting edge.
Dating also shapes how much weight the proposal can bear. Handaxes are the signature tool of the Acheulean, a long-lived tradition, and the release does not say which site supports the oldest end of the proposed timeline. The half-million-year mark is the authors’ framing of when keepsake behavior may have begun, and the examples from Qesem and Sakhnin are offered as illustrations of a habit that, if real, would predate the species Homo sapiens.
Open questions for the keepsake hypothesis
The full paper is available under the DOI 10.1002/evan.70051 and on the journal’s Wiley page. The release gives no experiment that could separate a deliberately kept object from one that was simply dropped at a site or reused for its sharp edge, and that gap is the obvious open question. Timing is the second. The half-million-year figure belongs to the hypothesis as the release states it, while the Qesem material cited here comes from a cave that Tel Aviv University dates to between 400,000 and 220,000 years ago. Whether the older end of the proposed timeline rests on the Sakhnin Valley handaxes or other sites is not spelled out in the summary, and readers should treat the half-million mark as the authors’ upper estimate.
The researchers also stop short of claiming that every odd object at these sites was a keepsake; their case is that the pattern of collecting, carrying and reusing old or unusual items is hard to explain by practical use alone, and that psychologists and archaeologists should test the idea against other sites and periods. Ram and Mudrik bring the memory-science side to that test, while Barkai and Assaf bring decades of excavation data from the Israeli caves.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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