Illustration of modern humans who lived in Europe about 45,000 years ago
Tom Björklund
Modern humans and Neanderthals interbred over a sustained period of around 7000 years, probably in the eastern Mediterranean. That is according to two studies that trace how these two hominins hybridised in unprecedented detail.
“The vast majority of the Neanderthal gene flow… occurred in a single, shared, extended period,” says Priya Moorjani at the University of California, Berkeley.
The studies confirm that modern humans acquired important gene variants by mixing with Neanderthals,…
The discovery of ancient cities in Asia and the Americas point to earlier bouts of social and climatic upheavals. The good news is that humanity survived, says Annalee Newitz
More than just fossils show us how humans have evolved through time
Ivan M / Alamy Stock Photo
This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month.
This month, Our Human Story turns 50 (months old). For the 50th instalment, I thought I would do something a little different: take stock of what’s happened, and look ahead. I emailed 10 researchers, asking them two questions:
What has been the biggest advance in human evolution of the past five years? This could…
An artist’s reconstruction of the toddler with his mother consuming mammoth meat
Eric Carlson/Ben Potter (UAF)/Jim Chatters (McMaster University)
An analysis of the bones of a boy who died in what is now Montana 12,800 years ago shows that nearly half of his diet came from mammoth meat.
“To have it turn out to be 40 per cent, it’s just like, wow!” says James Chatters at McMaster University in Canada. In fact, when compared with other animals alive at this time, the boy’s diet was more similar to that of the carnivorous scimitar-toothed cat than that of…
Modern and Mesopotamian people embody emotions in different ways
Modern/PNAS: Lauri Nummenmaa et al. 2014, Mesopotamian: Juha Lahnakoski 2024
The inhabitants of Mesopotamia must have known grief, fear, love and awe – but they didn’t necessarily think about them in the same way we do. An analysis of cuneiform texts shows that these ancient people felt disgust in their shins, suffering in their armpits and sexual arousal in their ankles. The work reveals the important hold that culture and knowledge have over our understanding of our own feelings.
This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month.
One hundred years ago, on 28 November 1924, anthropologist Raymond Dart opened a crate. It held a consignment of fossils from Taung, a quarry in South Africa, including a small skull that looked part-ape, part-human. Dart named it “Australopithecus africanus: The Man-Ape of South Africa”. It was the first Australopithecus specimen to be identified, and the first evidence that early humans evolved in…
Sheep skulls modified by ancient Egyptians so that their horns grew upward instead of outward
B. De Cupere
Sheep with deformed horns are among the more mysterious animal remains discovered at an ancient Egyptian burial site dating back to around 3700 BC. They also represent the oldest physical evidence of humans modifying the horns of livestock.
“The sheep were deliberately made ‘special’ by castration,” says Wim Van Neer at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. “In addition, their horns were directed upward, and in one case, the horns were removed.”
There are few things more irritating in everyday life than getting something stuck between your teeth. Thankfully, we can reach for a toothpick – and it seems our ancient ancestors did the same. In fact, a fragment of a 1.2-million-year-old toothpick is perhaps the earliest direct evidence we have of hominins using plants as tools.
Our ancient ancestors probably made frequent use of implements made from plants. But finding evidence of this is extremely tough because botanical materials are so quick to rot away. This means the archaeological record of human tool use is deeply skewed towards the much hardier stone.
All this suggests that the origins of human technology could have been profoundly misunderstood.
Stone Age
The conventional view is it all started with the first stone tools and the dawn of the Stone Age over 3 million years ago. But what if, even before that, there was a botanical age, one based on woodworking and weaving of plant materials? For some researchers, it is absurd not to think that plants would be part of the story. “Perishable material culture is an essential element in our evolutionary past,” says Linda Hurcombe at the University of Exeter in the UK.
Now, we are finally getting a clearer view of this lost age. New techniques are making it possible to find traces of plant-based tools that would otherwise have been missed. And by studying the way modern primates use plants,…
A skeleton from a Gallo-Roman grave in Belgium is made up of bones from at least seven individuals
Photograph courtesy of Paumen, Wargnies, and Demory; Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles
A complete skeleton found in a Gallo-Roman grave in western Belgium is not a Roman individual after all, but rather a bizarre mix of people spanning thousands of years.
Laid to rest on the right side with tucked-up legs, the remains feature long bones from seven unrelated Stone Age men and women – of varying ages and separated by several centuries – and the skull of a Roman woman who died…
A skeleton from a Gallo-Roman grave in Belgium is made up of bones from at least seven individuals
Photograph courtesy of Paumen, Wargnies, and Demory; Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles
A complete skeleton found in a Gallo-Roman grave in western Belgium is not a Roman individual after all, but rather a bizarre mix of people spanning thousands of years.
Laid to rest on the right side with tucked-up legs, the remains feature long bones from seven unrelated Stone Age men and women – of varying ages and separated by several centuries – and the skull of a Roman woman who died…
Article amended on 4 November 2024
The number of people whose bones make up the skeleton was corrected in the headline.
