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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00507-9
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Nature, Published online: 20 February 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-00428-7
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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A reconstruction of the skull of a Homo naledi child
Brett Eloff Photography/Wits University
This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox for free every month.
The word “fossil” is one that I type out rather frequently. You’ll often read stories about new hominin remains in which they are described as fossils. But hang on. Fossils take a long time to form, so how old does a human bone or tooth need to be before it counts as a fossil? Should…
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Remains of a dog and a baby girl laid to rest at Seminario Vescovile near Verona, Italy
Laffranchi et al. (CC-BY 4.0)
Late Iron Age people in northern Italy were sometimes buried with their dogs or horses – possibly just because they loved them.
Archaeologists have often suspected that the ancient, worldwide custom of including animals in human graves was associated with higher socioeconomic status, beliefs about the afterlife or traditions in certain families. But after thorough investigation, researchers are now starting to wonder whether such “co-burials” were simply an expression of love to a devoted non-human family member, says Marco Milella at the University of Bern in Switzerland.
He and his colleagues revisited the bones excavated from the 2200-year-old Seminario Vescovile burial ground just east of Verona in Italy, where the Cenomani people lived in metal-making communities before and during the Roman conquest.
Most of the 161 graves found at the site contained just the remains of a person, but 16 also included animals, either whole or in parts. Of those, 12 were pork or beef products, apparently meant as food offerings to the deceased, says Zita Laffranchi, also at the University of Bern.
The other four people, however, were buried with dogs or horses or both of these animals, which weren’t used for food in that population. They included a middle-aged man with a small dog, a young man with parts of a horse, a 9-month-old baby girl side-by-side with a dog and – most unexpectedly – a middle-aged woman with a pony laid on top of her and a dog’s head above her own.
“At first the excavators were surprised to find human legs under a horse, and the first idea was: we have a horse rider here, we have a warrior,” says Laffranchi. But the woman was buried without weapons, suggesting her relationship with the 1.3-metre-tall pony wasn’t related to warfare.
The team found no particular trends in the ages of the people who were buried with animals, and DNA analyses suggested they weren’t genetically related to each other. Chemical analysis of these cadavers didn’t reveal any differences in diet – which would be linked to socioeconomic status – compared with those in human-only graves, either.
The findings point to the possibility that people from ancient populations felt so connected with their animals that their loved ones chose to bury them together, say the researchers. “And why not?” says Milella. “We definitely cannot exclude that.”
Another explanation could be that the animals had symbolic meaning for the afterlife, the researchers add. For example, in the Gallo-Roman religion, the Celtic goddess of horses, Epona, was believed to protect individuals after death. And Gallo-Romans also apparently sometimes linked dogs with the afterlife. In fact, burying dogs with infants might even have been intended to protect the parents from the loss of future babies.
Even so, the animals in the graves seem to have benefited from good human care rather than being disposable stock – especially the dogs, which appear to have been fed human food and show signs of wound treatment and healing.
As such, it is also possible that people were buried with animals for both symbolic and affectionate reasons, says Milella.
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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00409-w
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Graphical reconstruction of the stone wall as a hunting structure in a glacial landscape
Michał Grabowski
A low stone wall nearly a kilometre long has been found 21 metres below the surface of the Baltic Sea off the German coast. The wall is thought to have been built around 11,000 years ago to channel reindeer into places where they could more easily be killed, and could be the largest Stone Age megastructure in Europe.
The discovery was made by chance. In 2021, students on a training exercise with geophysicist Jacob Geersen at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde in Germany used a multibeam sonar to map the seafloor 10 kilometres offshore from the town of Rerik.
“Afterwards, in the lab, we realised that there was this structure that looks not natural,” says Geersen.
So in 2022, he and his colleagues lowered a camera down to the structure, which revealed a row of stones. “It was only when we contacted the archaeologists that we understood it could be something significant,” says Geersen.
There’s no reason or evidence for a modern structure to have been built underwater at this site, says team member Marcel Bradtmöller, an archaeologist at the University of Rostock, Germany. Nor can the team think of any natural process that could create such a structure.
This suggests the wall was built when this area was dry land, meaning it must be between 8500 and 14,000 years old, says Bradtmöller. Before that, the area was covered by an ice sheet that would have destroyed any stone structure, while, later, rising sea levels submerged the area.
The wall runs alongside what was once a lake. It contains around 10 large rocks up to 3 metres across and weighing several tonnes, connected by more than 1600 smaller stones mostly under 100 kilograms in weight. The stones are placed next to one another rather than on top of each other, and the wall is less than a metre high in most places.
The big stones are all found where the wall zigs or zags. So the team thinks the structure was built by linking large stones that were too heavy to move with smaller stones that could be shifted.
Bradtmöller believes it was probably made by hunter-gatherers belonging to what is known as the Kongemose culture, named after a site in Denmark where artefacts such as stone tools have been found.
The most likely explanation is that the structure was used to channel reindeer, he says. “The hypothesis that, at the moment, fits best is a driving wall for hunting.”
While these hunter-gatherers are thought to have lived and travelled around in small groups, they might have assembled in larger numbers at the lake when reindeer came to the area, says Bradtmöller.
Similar low walls, sometimes called desert kites, have been found in many places in Africa and the Middle East, and also beneath the Great Lakes in North America. Some are up to 5 kilometres long, and it is now widely agreed they were used for hunting.
Although these walls are typically low enough that animals such as antelope could jump over them, they usually avoid them when running in herds, says Marlize Lombard at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, who has discovered similar structures. “In such circumstances, they tend to run parallel to obstacles such as low fences, instead of traversing them,” she says.
Many desert kites consist of two walls in a V-shape to funnel animals, but a single wall can still be an effective driving line, says Lombard. One possibility with the newly discovered wall is that it was used to drive reindeer into the lake, where they were hunted from boats, says Bradtmöller.
It is also possible that there is a second wall covered by sediment nearby, says Geersen. He plans further investigations, including diving, to try to find direct evidence of Stone Age people, but, so far, the researchers have been thwarted by bad weather.
Other experts also agree with their conclusions. “I think the case is well made for the wall as an artificial structure built to channel movements of migratory reindeer,” says archaeologist Geoff Bailey at the University of York in the UK.
“Such a find suggests that extensive prehistoric hunting landscapes may survive in a manner previously only seen in the Great Lakes,” says Vincent Gaffney at the University of Bradford in the UK. “This has very great implications for areas of the coastal shelves which were previously habitable.”
Modern activities such as trawling, cable-laying and wind farm construction can destroy such sites, says Geersen, so more exploration is needed to find them before they are lost.
No other structures of this kind have been discovered in Europe, says Bradtmöller. He thinks it is likely that many once existed, but they were destroyed by human activities.
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The winners of the Vesuvius Challenge grand prize used technology to decipher a damaged papyrus scroll
Vesuvius Challenge
Artificial intelligence has helped decipher an ancient papyrus scroll, which was transformed into a lump of blackened carbon by volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. The first passages of readable text reveal never-before-seen musings from a Greek philosopher.
The discovery nabbed the $700,000 grand prize in the Vesuvius Challenge, and used a combination of 3D mapping and AI techniques to detect ink and decipher letter shapes within segments of scrolls known as the Herculaneum papyri, which had been digitally scanned. The combined efforts of the winning team members – Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor and Julian Schilliger – could pave the way for more discoveries from additional papyrus scrolls that were once housed in a library in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum.
“I think it’s going to be a huge boon to our knowledge of ancient philosophy, just gigantic – a staggering amount of new text,” says Michael McOsker at the University College London, who was not involved in the discovery.
The winning submission met the Vesuvius Challenge criteria of deciphering more than 85 per cent of characters in four passages consisting of 140 characters each – and as a bonus, it included another 11 columns of text for a total of more than 2000 characters.
Those rediscovered Greek letters reveal the thoughts of Philodemus, who is thought to have been the philosopher-in-residence at the library that housed the Herculaneum papyri. The deciphered text focuses on how the scarcity or abundance of food and other goods impacts the pleasure they deliver. That fits Philodemus’s Epicurean school of philosophy, which prioritised pleasure as the main goal in life. His 2000-year-old writing even appears to possibly take a dig at the Stoic school of philosophy that has “nothing to say about pleasure”.
And the Vesuvius Challenge isn’t over. Its 2024 goals include figuring out how to scale up the 3D scanning and digital analysis techniques without becoming too expensive. The current techniques cost $100 per square centimetre, meaning that it could cost between $1 million and $5 million to virtually unroll an entire scroll – and there are 800 scrolls waiting to be deciphered.
“Realistically, the vast majority of the known, already unrolled library is Epicurean philosophy and that’s what we should expect, but there are also important Stoic texts, maybe some history and some Latin literature. Complete texts of authors like Ennius or Livius Andronicus, early Roman authors [whose works] did not survive, would be great,” says McOsker. “Epicurus’s Symposium, in which he wrote about the biology of wine consumption, would be a lot of fun.”
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Text from the Herculaneum scroll, which has been unseen for 2,000 years.Credit: Vesuvius Challenge
A team of student researchers has made a giant contribution to solving one of the biggest mysteries in archaeology by revealing the content of Greek writing inside a charred scroll buried 2,000 years ago by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The winners of a contest called the Vesuvius Challenge trained their machine-learning algorithms on scans of the rolled-up papyrus, unveiling a previously unknown philosophical work that discusses senses and pleasure. The feat paves the way for artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to soon decipher the rest of the scrolls in their entirety, which researchers say could have revolutionary implications for our understanding of the ancient world.
The achievement has ignited the usually slow-moving world of ancient studies. It’s “what I always thought was a pipe dream coming true”, says Kenneth Lapatin, curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, who was not involved in the contest. The newly revealed text discusses sources of pleasure including music, the taste of capers and the colour purple. “It’s an historic moment,” says classicist Bob Fowler at Bristol University, UK, one of the prize judges. The three students, from Egypt, Switzerland and the United States, who revealed the text share a US$700,000 grand prize.
The scroll is one of hundreds of intact papyri excavated in the 18th century from a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum, Italy. These lumps of carbonized ash — known as the Herculaneum scrolls — are the only library that survives from the ancient world, but are too fragile to open.
The winning entry, announced on 5 February, reveals hundreds of words across more than 15 columns of text, corresponding to around 5% of an entire scroll. “The contest has cleared the air on all the people saying will this even work,” says Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, and co-founder of the prize. “Nobody doubts that anymore.”
In the centuries after the scrolls were discovered, many people have attempted to open some of them, destroying some and leaving others in pieces. Papyrologists are still working to decipher and stitch back together the resulting, horribly fragmented, texts. But the chunks in the worst condition — the most hopeless cases, adding up to perhaps 280 entire scrolls — were left intact. They’re held mostly in the National Library of Naples, Italy, with a few in Paris, London and Oxford, UK.
The Herculaneum scroll was burnt and buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius.Credit: Vesuvius Challenge
Seales has been trying to read these concealed texts for nearly 20 years. His team developed software to “virtually unwrap” the surfaces of rolled-up papyri using three-dimensional computed tomography (CT) images. In 2019, he carried two of the scrolls from the Institut de France in Paris to the Diamond Light Source particle accelerator near Oxford to make high-resolution scans.
Mapping the surfaces was time consuming, however, and the carbon-based ink used to write the scrolls has the same density as papyrus in CT scans, so it was impossible to differentiate in imaging. Seales and his colleagues wondered whether machine-learning models might be trained to unwrap the scrolls and distinguish the ink. But making sense of all the data was a gigantic task for his small team.
Seales was approached by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nat Friedman, who had become intrigued by the Herculaneum scrolls after watching a talk by Seales online. Friedman suggested opening the challenge to contestants. He donated $125,000 to launch the effort and raised hundreds of thousands more on Twitter, and Seales released his software along with the high-resolution scans. They launched the Vesuvius Challenge in March 2023, setting a grand prize for reading four passages, of at least 140 characters each, before the end of the year.
Key to the contest’s success was its “blend of competition and cooperation”, says Friedman. Smaller prizes were awarded along the way to incentivize progress, with the winning code released at each stage to “level up” the community so contestants could build on each other’s advances.
A key innovation came over the summer, when US entrepreneur and former physicist Casey Handmer noticed a faint texture in the scans, like cracked mud — he called it “crackle” — that seemed to form the shapes of Greek letters. Luke Farritor, an undergraduate studying computer science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, used the crackle to train a machine-learning algorithm, revealing the word porphyras, “purple”, which won him the prize for revealing the first letters in late October. An Egyptian PhD student in Berlin, Youssef Nader , who followed with even clearer images of the text, came second.
A team of researchers used machine-learning to image the shapes of ink on the rolled-up scroll.Credit: Vesuvius Challenge
Their code was released with less than three months for contestants to scale up their reads before the deadline for the final prize of 31 December. “We were biting our nails,” says Friedman. But in the final week they received 18 submissions. A technical jury checked entrants’ code, then passed twelve submissions to a committee of papyrologists who transcribed the text and assessed each entry for legibility. Only one fully met the prize criteria: a team formed by Farritor and Nader, along with Julian Schilliger, a Swiss robotics student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
The results are “incredible”, says judge Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II. “We were all completely amazed by the images they were showing.” She and her colleagues are now racing to analyse fully the text that has been revealed.
The content of most of the previously opened Herculaneum scrolls relates to the Epicurean school of philosophy, and seems to have formed the working library of a follower of the Athenian philosopher Epicurus named Philodemus. The new text doesn’t name the author but from a rough first read, say Fowler and Nicolardi, it is probably also by Philodemus. As well as pleasurable tastes and sights, it includes a figure called Xenophantus, possibly a flute-player of that name mentioned by the ancient authors Seneca and Plutarch, whose evocative playing apparently caused Alexander the Great to reach for his weapons.
Lapatin says the topics discussed by Philodemus, and his predecessor Epicurus, are still relevant today. “The basic questions Epicurus was asking are the ones that face us all as humans. How do we live a good life? How do we avoid pain?” But “the real gains are still ahead of us,” he says. “What’s so exciting to me is less what this scroll says, but that the decipherment of this scroll bodes well for the decipherment of the hundreds of scrolls that we had previously given up on.”
There is likely to be more Greek philosophy in the scrolls: “I’d love it if he had some works by Aristotle,” says papyrologist and prize judge Richard Janko at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Meanwhile some of the opened scrolls, written in Latin, cover a broader subject area, raising the possibility of lost poetry and literature by writers from Homer to Sappho. The scrolls “will yield who knows what kinds of new secrets”, says Fowler. “We’re all very excited.”
The achievement is also likely to fuel debate over whether further investigations should be conducted at the Herculaneum villa, entire levels of which have never been excavated. Janko and Fowler are convinced the villa’s main library was never found, and that thousands more scrolls could still be underground. More broadly, the machine learning techniques pioneered by Seales and the Vesuvius Challenge contestants could now be used to study other types of hidden text, such as “cartonnage”, recycled papyri often used to wrap Egyptian mummies.
The next step is to decipher one entire work. Friedman has announced a new set of Vesuvius Challenge prizes for 2024, with the aim of reading 85% of a scroll by the end of the year. But in the meantime, just getting this far “feels like a miracle”, he says. “I can’t believe it worked.”
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A carved piece of ivory possibly used by ancient humans to make ropes
Conard et al, Sci. Adv. 10, eadh5217 (2024)
A 37,000-year-old piece of mammoth ivory with four carved holes found in a cave in Germany was a tool for making ropes, researchers have concluded, not an artwork as previously thought.
“You can make rope with it very easily, and the rope’s very strong,” says Nicholas Conard at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “Of course, that doesn’t mean that’s the only thing it could be. But compared to saying that it’s a symbol of power or some sort of artwork, I think the rope hypothesis is a pretty good one.”
The piece of ivory was found in 2015 in the Hohle Fels cave in the Ach valley in south-west Germany. It hasn’t been dated directly to avoid damaging it, but based on where it was found it must be at least 35,000 years old, and is most likely around 37,000 years old, says Conard, and it was probably made by modern humans. Another study published today shows that modern humans were living in a part of Germany as early as 45,000 years ago.
The artefact consists of a flattened stick of ivory split from a mammoth tusk. It is around 21 centimetres long, with four holes with spiral grooves carved in a row along one end.
“To me it looked like these spirals were indicative of putting something through it,” says Conard. Sure enough, a microscopic examination revealed traces of plant fibres in the grooves. The end without holes looked like a handle, he thought.
So Conard’s colleague Veerle Rots at the University of Liège in Belgium tried using a replica to make rope from a variety of materials, including sinew from deer, flax, hemp, cattail, linden, willow and nettles. She found it worked best with cattail, also known as reedmace or bulrush.
Her team fed three or four strands of twisted cattail into the holes, which combined into a rope on the other side. Using the tool required one person for each strand, plus one to hold the tool and move it along the strands, so four or five in total.
They were able to make 5 metres of rope in around 10 minutes. Experienced ropemakers would have done much better, says Conard.
Similar ivory objects with four or two holes, or just one hole, have been found at other sites in the region. Conard thinks these were used for ropemaking as well. “I think they’re kind of high-tech tools,” he says.
It is likely that ropes were being made much further back than 37,000 years ago, he says, but for now this is the earliest evidence of ropemaking yet found. However, a 50,000-year-old piece of string has been found at a Neanderthal site in France.
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Early European humans may have hunted mammoths in a frozen landscape
Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images
When modern humans first began settling in Europe, they went straight to the cold north. A challenging excavation in Germany places our species in the region at least 45,000 years ago – and supports earlier claims that our ancestors were in Britain not long after.
“These guys came into a landscape which was quite hostile,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “It was like northern Finland [today].”
Modern humans (Homo sapiens) are the most recent hominin to permanently settle in Europe, around 45,000 years ago. Previously, the continent was dominated for hundreds of thousands of years by Neanderthals, who vanish from the fossil record about 40,000 years ago. Modern humans and Neanderthals may have overlapped in France and Spain for 1400 to 2900 years.
“The replacement of all archaic humans by Homo sapiens, between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago, is something that occurred all over Eurasia,” says Hublin. It was a crucial period because for millions of years there had been multiple hominins coexisting, but now only one survived.
“This is the start of one species invading all the possible habitable niches on the Earth,” says Hublin. “We know it happened… but we don’t know why and how it happened.”
The transitional period is mysterious. There are several types of stone artefacts from the period that could have been made by Neanderthals or modern humans. One, found in several sites in northern Europe, is the Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician (LRJ) – characterised by long, leaf-shaped points that may have been fitted to spears. They had never been found in association with confidently identified hominin bones. “We had no clue who made them,” says Hublin.
To find out, Hublin and his colleagues visited several sites that had yielded LRJ artefacts. Unfortunately, previous archaeologists had destroyed the sites with crude excavation methods. The one exception was a cave called Ilsenhöhle near Ranis, Germany. It collapsed thousands of years ago, so the initial excavations in the 1930s were difficult and some of the site remained undisturbed. Hublin’s team re-excavated it, digging a deep shaft down to the relevant sediment layer.
So-called LRJ stone tools found at Ilsenhöhle cave in Germany
Josephine Schubert, Museum Burg Ranis, (CC-BY-ND 4.0)
It was an “exceptionally difficult” excavation, says Marie Soressi at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Buried in the sediments, Hublin’s team found many fragments of bone. They also re-examined similar fragments from the original excavations. By analysing the collagen protein in the bones, they determined that 13 belonged to hominins. To identify them more precisely, the team extracted mitochondrial DNA, which people inherit solely from their mothers, from 11 of the fragments. “They are Homo sapiens,” says Hublin.
The techniques used were “top-notch”, says Soressi. She wants to see nuclear DNA as well, to be sure, because it is possible the individuals were hybrids with Neanderthal fathers – which mitochondrial DNA wouldn’t show. However, she says this is “very unlikely”.
The timing of H. sapiens occupying the Ilsenhöhle fits with existing evidence. Hublin’s team previously showed that modern humans lived in Bacho Kiro cave in Bulgaria about 45,000 years ago. However, Ilsenhöhle is much further north.
In a second study, Hublin’s colleagues used chemical evidence from preserved horse teeth to show that the climate in this part of Germany was cold at the time, especially between 45,000 and 43,000 years ago. Again, this fits prior evidence: in 2014, Hublin’s team showed that modern humans were living in Willendorf, Austria, north of the Alps, in a cold steppe-like environment 43,500 years ago.
A third study examines the animal bones from Ilsenhöhle, revealing that the cave was mostly inhabited by cave bears and hyenas. The implication is that modern humans were only there intermittently.
This points to a “quick occupation by small groups of ‘pioneers’”, says Soressi.
Similar claims have been made for the cave of Grotte Mandrin in France: it may have been briefly inhabited by modern humans 54,000 years ago, before Neanderthals reclaimed the site.
Now that the LRJ tools at Ilsenhöhle have been associated with modern humans, it is reasonable to assume that other LRJ artefacts were also made by H. sapiens, says Hublin. This implies modern humans made it to Britain early on. Part of a jawbone found in Kents Cavern in Devon, England, had been tentatively identified as a modern human and dated to around 43,000 years ago – and was found with LRJ artefacts.
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