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"The cut marks aren't a classic sign of cannibalism," White said while showing the skulls to a TIME reporter in Addis Ababa. "If you wanted to get at the brain in order to eat it, you'd just smash open the skull." Instead, he suspects, the scratches might be a form of decoration. As for the polished areas, he says, "we know they weren't caused by the environment, because the marks go across the breaks between the recovered pieces. The child's skull looks as though it has been fondled repeatedly."
Despite this evidence of ritualistic behavior, Homo sapiens still had a long way to go. What may be the earliest art, for example--pieces of red ocher engraved with abstract designs found in South Africa--would not appear for nearly 80,000 more years, while the spectacular cave paintings in Spain and France would not be created for another 40,000 years after that. Clearly, being like us physically was not enough by itself to trigger the cultural complexity--innovation, creativity, symbolism and perhaps spoken language--that distinguishes us from all other animals.
So what triggered those changes? Theories include hardships of the last Ice Age or random genetic mutations, but nobody really knows. Which is why paleontologists like White and Asfaw are going back to search for new clues in the ancient soil of eastern Africa.