These ancient swords have been modified by forgers
Alex Rodzinka
Imaging technology has revealed that ancient swords smuggled into the UK recently have been altered by modern-day forgers, who replaced many of the original iron blades with bronze ones. What’s more, many similar swords in museums worldwide may also be tainted by modern forgery.
The swords in question come from what is now Iran and date to an important moment in history: the end of the Bronze Age and beginning of the Iron Age. As the names suggest, this marked a technological shift as iron became the metal of…
Mark Twain famously (although possibly apocryphally) said we should never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Archaelogists might beg to differ, particularly when the story in question is a dramatic rewriting of human history that – as the president of the Society of American Archaeology, Daniel Sandweiss, has noted – has a long-standing link with racist ideologies.
This narrative claims that the familiar ancient civilisations of Eurasia, Africa and the Americas drew inspiration from a mysterious advanced culture that predated them all. Archaeologists are confident that no such civilisation ever existed, but they are also aware that persuading believers to reject the story is a tough task.
However, as we explore in our interview with archaeologist Flint Dibble in “The archaeologist fighting claims about an advanced lost civilisation”, they may have found a winning strategy in the form of the “truth sandwich”. In this debating technique, archaeologists first begin by discussing real information, what their research has revealed about the past. Then they tackle the false information – in this case explaining how the facts leave no room for this lost civilisation – before returning to and re-emphasising the real information.
Truth sandwiches’ appear to be good at fighting misinformation in some contexts but not others
The truth sandwich gained popularity after it was formalised by linguist George Lakoff in 2018. It is tempting to assume that it can convince audiences to abandon belief in false narratives. But can it? The best way to find out, of course, is through controlled experiments. The first such research has now been conducted, and it presents a mixed picture. Truth sandwiches appear to be effective in certain contexts but not in others, where different ways to structure an argument are more persuasive.
These conflicting results might seem problematic, but they are actually evidence of scientific inquiry at work – a process that involves testing ideas and refining hypotheses in light of new data. It is only this approach that can really discover the best way to tackle misinformation. Or, to put it another way, science should never let a good story get in the way of the truth.
Archaeological research has helped us understand the complicated story of our species’ past, from the earliest hominins to the dawn of civilisation and beyond. But some people are convinced that it has overlooked an important chapter. They believe there was an advanced global civilisation some 20,000 years ago during the last glacial maximum, often referred to as the ice age – but that it was mysteriously destroyed, with its impressive settlements and monuments drowned by rising seas.
Flint Dibble, an archaeologist at Cardiff University in the UK, is doing all he can to make it clear that such ideas aren’t supported by the evidence. Earlier this year, he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast to take part in a high-profile debate with Graham Hancock, a writer who has spent years arguing for the existence of this forgotten society and who discusses the idea in his Netflix show, Ancient Apocalypse.
Dibble spoke to New Scientist about the reasons for the enduring appeal of mythical lost civilisations, why belief in them can be so harmful, and how to persuade people to reject the ideas promoted by Hancock and others through the use of “truth sandwiches”.
Colin Barras: Why do you think the myth of an advanced lost civilisation generates so much interest?
Flint Dibble: That’s a tough one. You have to appreciate that Graham Hancock’s idea isn’t new: it stems directly out of …
Spear-throwing tools called atlatls allow humans to launch projectiles over great distances, but Neanderthals apparently never used them – and an experiment involving a 9-metre-tall platform may explain why
Around 41,000 years ago, the very last Neanderthal took their final breath. At that moment, we became the only remaining hominins, the sole survivors of the once diverse family of bipedal apes.
We will never know exactly when or where this momentous event took place, but we do know the Neanderthals died out suspiciously close to the time when modern humans arrived in their territory. Exactly why they vanished has long been hotly debated, but astonishing revelations from the genomes of the last Neanderthals and hidden in a remarkable cave in France are now painting a detailed picture of these first encounters – and what might have happened next.
“This is a major turning point in our understanding of Neanderthals and their extinction process,” says Ludovic Slimak at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse, France.
Our species, Homo sapiens, and Neanderthals share a common ancestor, but Neanderthals split from our lineage at least 400,000 years ago, evolving in Eurasia, from the Mediterranean to Siberia. Our species is younger, first appearing in Africa some 300,000 years ago and evolving into hominins that were anatomically much like us by at least 195,000 years ago. Modern humans left the continent in waves from around 170,000 years ago, and were thought to have reached western Europe roughly 43,000 years ago, when – according to the…
The skeleton of an infant uncovered at Grotta delle Mura in Apulia, Italy
Mauro Calattin
Ancient DNA analysis has revealed a detailed picture of the life of a toddler who died in southern Italy 17,000 years ago, possibly due to a congenital heart condition.
In 1998, researchers discovered the skeletal remains of a child carefully laid under rock slabs in the floor of the Grotta delle Mura cavern in Apulia, southern Italy. It was the only burial in the cave, which also included signs of daily life and human occupation, says Alessandra Modi at the University of Florence…
Ancient DNA unearthed from a European rock shelter suggests that local herders tended goats and sheep more than 5000 years ago, but switched to primarily pigs 2000 years later – right about when the surrounding forests became much less biodiverse.
Although further research is needed, the findings hint that keeping pigs – which root the ground and are far less picky eaters than goats and sheep – might have played a role in how modern forests took shape. The discovery provides strong evidence that analysing ancient sedimentary DNA can…
Ancient humans are said to have evolved to leave the trees, where our primate ancestors lived, in favour of open grassy savannahs – but we may have this idea wrong
A humerus fragment excavated at Mata Menge in Flores, Indonesia
Yousuke Kaifu
Hominins living on an Indonesian island 700,000 years ago were even smaller than Homo floresiensis, the so-called hobbits that lived on the same island much more recently. Newly analysed fossils may represent the hobbits’ ancestors – but the evolutionary story of these small-bodied hominins is still shrouded in mystery.
Fossils of H. floresiensis were first discovered in 2003 in Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores. The hobbit bones date from between 90,000 and 50,000 years ago.
In 2016, Yousuke Kaifu at the University of Tokyo and his colleagues uncovered hominin remains from Mata Menge, an open-air site further east on Flores that was once a riverbed. The remains are about 700,000 years old and include part of a skull, a piece of jawbone and six teeth, all unusually small for a hominin.
The obvious interpretation was that the Mata Menge hominins were the ancestors of the hobbits. But because the remains were so fragmentary, it wasn’t possible to be confident.
Kaifu and his colleagues have now described three new remains from Mata Menge: two teeth and, crucially, a piece of an upper arm bone, or humerus. With this limb bone, “we could finally determine the body size,” says Kaifu.
Unfortunately, the humerus isn’t complete: the shaft is snapped. To determine exactly how far along the break occurred, the team looked for key markers, including a groove that supports a nerve and the attachment point for a muscle. Using these clues, they determined that the bone had broken about halfway along – enabling them to estimate its total length as between 20.6 and 22.6 centimetres.
There are telltale features of the microstructure of the bone that confirm it is from an adult. Extrapolating from the humerus to the entire body, the team estimates the Mata Menge hominin was between 93 and 121 cm tall, with a best estimate of 100 cm. That is a little shorter than the H. floresiensis specimens from Liang Bua, which Kaifu says were at least 6 cm taller – and would make it the smallest adult hominin ever found.
The findings point to a likely explanation for the evolution of H. floresiensis, says Kaifu. It has long been suspected that the species was descended from large-bodied hominins called Homo erectus, which are the first hominin species known to have lived outside Africa – including on Java in Indonesia about a million years ago. “I’m almost sure that they are derived from those populations,” says Kaifu. This is because of similarities between the teeth from Mata Menge and those of H. erectus from Java, and the close proximity of the dates and locations.
The suggestion is that a small population of H. erectus reached Flores, possibly by accident, and lived there in isolation. They must have then evolved a smaller body size within 300,000 years, says Kaifu. “They were small early and then they remained small for a long, long time,” he says.
It’s common for island-dwelling animals to shrink through evolution, because food resources are limited and the lack of large predators means there’s no advantage to being bulky. In line with this, Flores was home to dwarf elephants and other species that had shrunk over many generations.
Argue points out that the Mata Menge teeth don’t look especially similar to the H. floresiensis teeth from Liang Bua. For instance, a molar from Mata Menge has five pointed “cusps”, while H. floresiensis molars have four. “There’s no clear indication of anyone evolving into anyone else,” she says, and it’s not clear why the later H. floresiensis would have evolved slightly larger bodies than their Mata Menge ancestors. Furthermore, “there’s no evidence for Homo erectus from the island.”
For these reasons, Argue says we shouldn’t assume that the Mata Menge hominins are the ancestors of the hobbits. “I would be considering another hypothesis, that the Mata Menge hominins are a new unknown species.” If island life could cause one hominin population to evolve smaller bodies, it could do so twice, she suggests.
In 2017, Argue and her colleagues compared H. floresiensis with other hominins and concluded that their closest known relatives weren’t H. erectus, but instead an older species called Homo habilis, which is only known from Africa. On this basis, they proposed that H. floresiensis actually evolved in Africa, from the same ancestral population that gave rise to H. habilis. Later, some of them migrated east, ending up on Flores. Argue says we probably need more fossils to resolve the question of the hobbits’ origins.
Is it in the way we live, laugh and love? Or maybe it is our dislike of cheesy clichés? Deep within each of us, there must be something that makes us distinctly human. The trouble is, after centuries of searching, we still haven’t found it. Perhaps that’s because we have been looking in the wrong place.
Ever since researchers began unearthing ancient hominin bones and stone artefacts, their work has held the tantalising promise of identifying the moment long ago when our ancestors made the transition to become human. Two of the most important fossil discoveries in this quest celebrate significant milestones this year. It is 100 years since the very first “almost human” Australopithecus fossil came to light in South Africa, overturning established thinking about our place of origin. And it is 50 years since the most famous Australopithecus of them all – Lucy, also known as “the grandmother of humanity” – emerged from a dusty hillside in Ethiopia. Both fossils led researchers to believe we really could identify humanity’s big bang: the time when a dramatic pulse of evolution saw the emergence of our human genus, Homo.
But today, the story of humanity’s birth has become far more complicated. A string of discoveries over the past two decades suggests the dawn of our genus is harder to pin down than we had thought. So why did it once seem like Lucy and her ilk allowed us to define humanity and pinpoint its emergence? Why do we now find ourselves as far as ever from establishing what, exactly, a human is?…
