Why do we love rocks

It seems that every pleasure I indulge myself in needs some sort of explanation and a reasoning, especially since the pleasure is mundane, strange, silly or childish. My inner child is a rebel but I’m an adult. Responsible and down to earth and I wouldn’t be myself if not questioning my love of rocks, drifted wood, dead leaves, bark, trees and lots of other things.
So I dived into the web trying to figure it all out, ones and for all. And according to scientists, there may be evolutionary reasons why we gravitate towards such objects, therefore, our attraction to them may be related to the urge to survive.
Some explanations make perfect sense such is our love for trees. Once upon a time our ancestors were basically monkeys and they used to live on trees. Trees were our homes and home is the best place ever!
I can totally relate to that, and maybe finally understand why I can’t get rid of this very old idea of mine to grow a big tree into my house!!! Didn’t do it yet, but there’s still time.

But what reason would drive the brain to be attracted to a completely inanimate object and want to keep it?
Apparently the love for rocks is called petrofilia and it can manifest as a part-time interest in geology or a lifelong obsession, me belonging into the latter category.

I was one of those children that collected small rocks that caught my eye, whether on the beach or along a country path. It could seem strange to have a sentimental attachment to a rock – a cold fragment of the Earth. But every time I found one I felt the urge to take it home. Sometimes my friends will make fun of me and secretly place heavy stones into my school bag to carry. Luckily I was born with a strong sense of humour and fortunately, I was smart enough to figure that out most of the time and persuade my friends-all boys, to carry my bag home.
I grew old but not out of it. On the contrary, my obsession becomes fascination, the rocks bigger and I’m still carrying stones in my backpack and many times through airport security. Except for the ones I can’t possibly carry. Regrettably.

It seems that in our deepest subconscious, we may be attracted to rocks, much like our primitive attraction to fire. These elements have been an integral part of our ancestors’ lives, so it may not be a surprise that, like a moth, we are instinctively drawn to rocks just as we are to fire. Live Science says we are attracted to fire because we did not practice controlling it as children as our ancestors would have. As a result, our fascination continues into adulthood.
Hell yeah! My parents were obsessed not to leave matches or lighters around the house because we were equally obsessed with starting a fire ! Even later in my late teens when I started sneaking out for a cigarette with my older sister, our problem wasn’t so much finding a cigarette but finding a lighter! So we lost that battle and now we collect stones!

As a side note, some people are heavily attracted to shiny rocks such as diamonds and other gemstones, much more difficult to collect, I dare say. Don’t be so quick to judge, it’s still petrofilia, just a more expensive one. And according to the same studies this attraction may also be related to the urge to survive since all those gems resemble the glossy sheen of a body of water. That being said, nobody’s a gold digger here, just extremely thirsty and in a survival mode. I am not thirsty at all and I don’t do shiny and sparkly. I’m just a humble country girl in love with mundane rocks.

One of the greatest ancient monuments that mark our connection to rocks is Stonehenge, where stones have a symbolic meaning that we know nothing about. Archaeology has revealed much about the people who placed these stones, but the theories of what Stonehenge was used for are still debated to this day.

Many years ago after I emigrated from Transylvania I brought back home a lot of rocks collected from various beaches and one summer I’ve helped my parents build a pizza oven in the back of their garden. My mum specifically wanted the exterior of that concave oven decorated with stones and I’ve put there some of mine, thinking that in millions of years to come, some archaeologists will be intrigued and baffled about how some stones from the Atlantic Ocean ended up far away from it, in a different part of the continent. Thinking that maybe it will remain a mystery, a message in a bottle drifting across space and time. Like Stonehenge. But now my secret is out and the future archaeologists (probably not human) will find this random clue in this virtual space and solve the puzzle.

Our connection with rocks has lived on from ancient cultures to the present day. I suppose, collecting them is one of the most natural things we can do, connecting us to the moments that our ancestors did it too. We love to collect them, but across thousands of years, we have needed rocks to survive and evolve as human civilization.
All I can say now, after reading tons of information, most of them unrelated, because is what the internet does to you, is that everything about us is biology. We’re all a tiny part of the evolution from a single cell.
And that evolutionary memory is etched into our DNA.
That explains a lot. Including the fact that, sometimes, despite our evolved intelligence, we still basically act like monkeys!

Note: It is either pointless to say or well worth mentioning that the text belongs to Simona while perfectlight provided the photos.