Man, the rolling stones really have been around forever.

The early stages of football were tedious and full of broken toes.

Wow, we did that as far back as 1.4 million years ago? I saw a documentary recently where they found rounded stones on Orkney made by stone(?) age people. Seems to be long tradition ^__

From the very beginning we yearned to be ballin’

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Early ancestors of humans 1.4m years ago deliberately made stones into spheres, according to a study – though what the prehistoric people used the balls for remains a mystery.

Did early hominins intentionally chip away at them with the aim of crafting a perfect sphere, or were they merely the accidental byproduct of repeatedly smashing the stones like ancient hammers?

The team of scientists examined 150 limestone spheroids dating from 1.4m years ago that were found at the ’Ubeidiya archaeological site in the north of modern-day Israel.

The early hominins – exactly which human lineage they belonged to remains unknown – had “attempted to achieve the Platonic ideal of a sphere”, they said.

While the spheroids were being made, the stones did not become smoother but did become “markedly more spherical”, said the study in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Julia Cabanas, an archaeologist at France’s National Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the research, said this meant that the hominins had a “mentally preconceived” idea of what they were doing.

The original article contains 383 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 54%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Look at those pictures, those aren’t spheres, they’re just flat planes. /s

Did they think it was an accident before?

No human would sphere stones like this…

but why it was done remains a mystery

I bet the author has like 20 spheres