97g Red Jasper Skull – Trace of Origin

In the late 1870s, the Scottish doctor Henry Faulds held shards of ancient ceramics in his hands in Japan, recovered from a prehistoric shell heap near Tokyo. In them he discovered something that had been overlooked until then: the fingerprints of the potters who had shaped the clay thousands of years ago. Faulds began comparing the fine lines on the hands of his contemporaries and found no two alike. In 1880 he proposed in the journal Nature that people could be identified by their fingerprints. His idea rests to this day on a simple insight: no single line reveals a person. Only the interplay of all their endpoints, bifurcations, and curves makes him unmistakable. At the back of this skull lies such a impression, drawn not by a hand, but by the earth itself. Infinitely delicate veins trace their paths through the deep red, each one singular in its own way. Yet together they condense into a pattern whose clarity no single line could ever attain. Red jasper owes its color to finely distributed hematite, which permeates the cryptocrystalline quartz rock. Such fine lines usually form when tiny fractures in the rock open and are sealed again by mineral solutions. Each vein is thus the trace of a small, individual event. Material: Red jasper Origin: India Dimensions: 5.0 x 3.5 x 3.3 cm Weight: 97 g Special features: Prominent, fingerprint-like fine-veining, especially at the back of the head; gray-beige area on the cheek and jaw

Estimation:€3

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