Philippa Kaur

The ˁAin Samiya silver gobletThe Israel Museum, Jerusalem/Ardon Bar Hama
The artwork on a 4300-year-old silver goblet unearthed in the Palestinian West Bank appears to show the universe forming out of primordial chaos – making it the oldest known visual representation of a creation myth.
“I think it’s an ingenious design,” says Eberhard Zangger at the Luwian Studies Foundation, a non-profit based in Switzerland. “With very few lines, it tells a very complex story.”
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The ˁAin Samiya goblet stands about 8 centimetres tall. It was found 55 years ago in an ancient tomb a few miles to the north-east of Ramallah at the western tip of the Fertile Crescent – a region where early civilisations flourished.
There appear to be two scenes depicted on the goblet. In the first, a large snake rears up and faces a chimera with a human torso and the legs of an animal, who stands over a small flower-like circle. In the second, a snake lies on the ground beneath a much larger flower-like circle with a smiling face. The circle is being held up, probably by two fully humanoid figures – although only one is visible today because the goblet is broken.
Archaeologists in the 1970s suggested the two scenes came from Enūma Eliš, a Babylonian creation myth in which a primordial entity named Tiamat is defeated in battle by the god Marduk, who then turns Tiamat’s body into the heavens and Earth. But, Zangger says, other researchers have pointed out flaws with this idea. Not only is there no battle scene on the goblet, but it was also made about 1000 years before Enūma Eliš was first written down.

Because of this, other researchers have suggested alternative interpretations – for instance, that the goblet is a symbolic representation of the birth of the new year and the death of the old one.
But Zangger and his colleagues – Daniel Sarlo, an independent researcher in Toronto, and Fabienne Haas Dantes at the University of Zurich, Switzerland – think the original interpretation was nearer to the mark. They argue that the scenes do show the formation of the world and cosmos, but that they come from a creation story far older than Enūma Eliš.
The images engraved on the goblet depict deities, snakes and the sunIsrael Museum, Jerusalem/Florika Weiner
In the first scene, according to Zangger’s team, there is chaos. The chimera represents a weak god, fused with the animals. Beneath its legs, the small flower-like circle represents a powerless sun. Ruling over all of this chaos is a monstrous snake. But in the second scene, order has emerged peacefully from the chaos. The gods have been separated from the animals, becoming powerful humanoid characters. They hold the equally powerful sun aloft in a “celestial boat”, indicating that the heavens have now been separated from Earth. The monstrous serpent of chaos, defeated, lies beneath the sun.
Zangger points out that there are cuneiform texts from elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent that are similar in age to the goblet and that describe how the gods separated the heavens from Earth. As such, we know that the inhabitants of the region had developed stories about the creation of the world by the time the goblet was fashioned. “But the incredible thing about the goblet is that we now have a picture of what they imagined this creation to have looked like,” he says.
Jan Lisman, an independent researcher based in the Netherlands, is unconvinced by the interpretation. “What may be depicted is the daily movement of the sun,” he says. “But definitely not ‘origin’ or ‘chaos’.”

Silvia Schroer at the University of Bern in Switzerland is more willing to accept the possibility that the goblet shows the creation of the world. But she sees problems with another aspect of the new analysis.
Zangger and his colleagues say that some of the images on the ˁAin Samiya goblet – such as a monstrous snake – appear in ancient cosmological stories from across the Fertile Crescent and nearby regions. They argue that this hints at deep connections among all of these creation myths, suggesting they may all draw from a single, even older myth. In line with this, they point out that a celestial boat similar to that on the goblet is carved onto a pillar at the 11,500-year-old site of Göbekli Tepe in what is now Turkey, to the north-west of the Fertile Crescent. “That’s 7000 years earlier than the goblet,” says Zangger.
But Schroer thinks it’s far too speculative to suggest all of the region’s creation stories are deeply connected like this. “Even if there are similarities, there is not always a demonstrable influence,” she says.
Journal reference:JEOL – Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society “Ex Oriente Luxˮ DOI: in press

Scientific pioneers of the ancient world, Cairo and Alexandria: Egypt

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Adolf Hitler’s genome has been sequenced for a TV documentaryRoger Viollet via Getty Images
If you resort to mentioning Adolf Hitler, some say, you have lost the argument. If you resort to sequencing Hitler’s DNA to try to get more eyeballs for your TV channel, I would say you have just plain lost it.
And yet the UK’s Channel 4 has done just that with Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a dictator, which will be broadcast this Saturday. I have forced myself to watch it, so you don’t have to.
The DNA came from a blood-soaked piece of fabric cut from the sofa on which Hitler shot himself in 1945, which now resides in a US museum. The genome obtained has gaps due to the age of the sample, but the Y chromosome is said to match that of a male relative of Hitler, suggesting it is genuine.Advertisement

If this had been done purely as an academic effort, to add a little to our knowledge by, for instance, revealing whether Hitler had a Jewish grandfather as rumoured (he didn’t, according to the DNA), it would arguably be OK. Instead, we have a sensationalist two-part documentary claiming this DNA evidence “will change the way we think about Hitler”.
The trouble with this is that it implies genetic determinism – that Hitler was somehow destined to do the terrible things he did because of his genes. To be clear, the documentary doesn’t make this specific claim, but it comes pretty close – what else could “Blueprint of a dictator” mean?

This is equivalent to arguing that if we made lots of Hitler clones, they would all end up killing millions, too. This isn’t an experiment we can – or would ever want to – do, but there are plenty of clones in the world, in the form of identical twins, who share the same DNA. Twin studies have been used to estimate the extent to which all kinds of traits and conditions are due to genes rather than the environment.

Now, there are many issues with twin studies, not least that twins usually grow up in the same environment, so it is impossible to completely disentangle genetic and environmental influences. Even so, the highest twin-based estimates for the heritability of criminality – probably the closest we can get to being a genocidal dictator – are less than 50 per cent. So there is no reason to think most Hitler clones would be monsters.
Then there is the fact that our understanding of the human genome is very much in its infancy. We still can’t predict simple traits such as eye colour with 100 per cent accuracy, let alone much more complex traits involving the interaction of the brain with the environment.

What we can do is look for genetic variants that have been statistically linked to a higher risk of conditions such as autism. People can then be given a “polygenic score” for each condition. The thing is, getting a very high polygenic score for autism doesn’t necessarily mean an individual definitely is autistic. There are many reasons for this: environmental factors matter too, the association between trait and variant might be spurious, we haven’t identified all the variants that matter, and so on.
“Due to inconsistent associations and limited generalizability, it must be emphasized that the autism polygenic score in its current state does not have clinical utility,” a meta-analysis concluded earlier this year.
According to the documentary, Hitler’s genome scores very highly for autism, along with the mental health conditions schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and antisocial behaviour or psychopathy. It also has an above-average score for ADHD. But there is already a long history of claiming Hitler had these kinds of mental conditions on the basis of his behaviour. The genetic evidence doesn’t prove anything and the diagnostic criteria for these conditions don’t include genetic data.
Hitler’s DNA came from a blood-soaked piece of fabric from the sofa that he killed himself on, which was taken by US army colonel Roswell P. Rosengren and is now on exhibit at The Gettysburg Museum of History in PennsylvaniaGettysburg Museum of History
But more to the point, so what if he did have any of these conditions? Do any of these labels explain anything? As Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge says in the documentary, the neglect and abuse Hitler experienced at the hands of his alcoholic father is “much more relevant to understanding why he grew up with hate and anger”.
Later, we are told that schizophrenia-related traits can be linked to creativity and unconventional thinking, which might explain his political and military successes. Really? This is pure speculation.
To me, that is the issue with analysing Hitler’s genome. You can make all these plausible-sounding connections with what we know about his personality and actions, but they could all be completely spurious. What’s more, it risks worsening the stigma already associated with conditions like autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

This documentary gives the lie to its own claims in that most of it simply rehashes what we already knew about Hitler. The only new thing is the claim that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome, which affects sexual development. But the physical effects of this condition vary widely and we do already have documentary evidence stating that Hitler had an undescended testicle, so, again, history is more informative than genetics.
There is also a wider issue that this documentary feeds into, the idea that Hitler was somehow uniquely evil and solely to blame for the second world war and the Holocaust. But, unfortunately, genocidal, warmongering dictators aren’t in short supply – and none could succeed without the support of many other people.
Millions voted for Hitler, other politicians backed the laws that enabled him to seize power and many officials helped implement the racist laws that led to the Holocaust. There is no need to look to genes to explain why many individuals try to become dictators – the far more pressing question is why we let them.

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People of the Karo tribe looking over the Omo River Valley in EthiopiaMichael Honegger/Alamy
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.
Near the eastern shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya, there is a hill called Namorotukunan. A river once flowed past it, but it has long since dried up. The undulating landscape is dry, dotted with scrubby vegetation.
Between 2013 and 2022, researchers led by David Braun at George Washington University in Washington DC excavated the layers of clay left behind by the river. There they found 1290 stone tools made by ancient humans between 2.44 and 2.75 million years ago. They reported their finds in Nature Communications last week.

The tools were of a type known as Oldowan, which have been found in many sites across Africa and Eurasia. They are some of the earliest and simplest stone tools. Furthermore, the ones from Namorotukunan are some of the oldest Oldowan tools yet found.
The thing that leapt out to Braun and his colleagues was the consistency of the objects. Despite these items spanning 300,000 years, the hominins that were making them created pretty much the same kinds of tools, and they were systematically choosing the best rocks for their purposes. This suggests these early uses of tools were not short-lived one-offs, invented and then quickly forgotten. Instead, tool-making was something early hominins did habitually.

The Namorotukunan tools are just the latest discovery to come out of one of the most important places on Earth for understanding our origins: the Omo-Turkana basin.
Basin, cradle and rift
Beginning in the 1960s, the Omo-Turkana basin has been at the heart of studies of human evolution.
It begins in the white sands of southern Ethiopia, where the Omo River flows south into Lake Turkana. One of the largest lakes in the world, Lake Turkana is long and thin, extending far to the south into Kenya. Two other rivers, the Turkwel and Kerio, drain into its southern reaches.
There are fossil-bearing regions dotted all over the basin. On the lake’s west side is the Nachukui Formation, while to the east lies Koobi Fora. There are also sites along the rivers, including the Usno Formation near the Omo in the north, and Kanapoi near the Kerio in the south.
Map of the fossil and tool sites in the Omo-Turkana basinFrançois Marchal et al. 2025
Researchers led by François Marchal at Aix-Marseille University in France have drawn together all the known hominin fossils from the Omo-Turkana basin. They’re developing a database to showcase them all, and in the meantime they have described the overall patterns in the Journal of Human Evolution. The compilation is both a time capsule of research into palaeoanthropology and a goldmine of information about human evolution.
Research in the Omo-Turkana basin began with “early expeditions to the Omo Group deposits by a joint French, American, and Kenyan team led by Camille Arambourg, Yves Coppens, F. Clark Howell, and Richard Leakey”. Leakey also led a team that explored Koobi Fora in the east, and then western areas like Nachukui.
Richard Leakey might ring a bell – he was a big figure in human evolution research in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. He was the son of Louis and Mary Leakey, who did pioneering research in Oldupai (formerly Olduvai) gorge in Tanzania – and his daughter Louise is still a palaeoanthropologist today.
However, the study of the Omo-Turkana basin is much bigger than one man or even one family. From the sites in the region, Marchal and his colleagues totted up 1231 hominin specimens from an estimated 658 individuals, which they say is about one-third of all the hominin remains known from Africa.
Along with the Great Rift valley in East Africa (which includes Oldupai gorge and many other sites) and the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa, the Omo-Turkana basin is one of the three most productive hominin fossil localities in Africa.

The discoveries
In the north, near the Omo River, researchers found some of the oldest remains of our species (Homo sapiens) on the planet. At Omo Kibish, researchers found two partial skulls and various other bones, plus hundreds of teeth. The more we study these remains, the older they seem to be. Originally claimed to be 130,000 years old, a 2005 study pushed them back to 195,000 years ago – and a 2022 follow-up indicated they were at least 233,000 years old. Of all the remains of Homo sapiens, only the Jebel Irhoud fossils from Morocco, which are around 300,000 years old, are more ancient.
The Omo Kibish and Jebel Irhoud fossils are some of the key evidence our species is significantly older than we once thought. Instead of evolving around 200,000 years ago, we may have been evolving independently for several hundred thousand years.
Something similar appears to be true of the Homo genus, which includes us as well as other groups like Homo erectus and the Neanderthals. Precisely when Homo first evolved is tricky to nail down. There are definitely Homo by 2 million years ago, but as we go further back in time the record becomes murkier.
By drawing together all the fossils from the Omo-Turkana basin, Marchal and his colleagues found Homo is well-represented in the region from 2.7 to 2 million years ago.

The oldest-known Homo specimens from the basin are from the Shungura Formation and are 2.74 million to 2.58 million years old. However, despite having been announced in 2008, they have still not been described in detail.
Despite such frustrating gaps, Marchal’s team found “no fewer than 45 individuals of early Homo arising from 2.7 to 2.0”. If they were to add in the undescribed material, they suggest, “there are likely to be 75 individuals of early Homo, making this a substantial and significant assemblage” – or, as they say, “more than a smattering of fossils”.
The implication is the Homo genus was pretty well-established in the Omo-Turkana basin between 2.7 and 2 million years ago. They weren’t dominant – another genus called Paranthropus, which had smaller brains and bigger teeth, was twice as common. There were also a lot of Australopithecus, though their time was drawing to a close. The basin was a place where many hominin species lived side by side. But Homo were there, and they may have made some of those Oldowan tools.
Findings like these are only possible through this sort of sustained study over decades. I expect the Omo-Turkana basin will keep telling us more about our origins for many years.

Neanderthals, ancient humans and cave art: France

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Aerial photo of the Band of Holes in Monte Sierpe, PeruJ.L. Bongers
A hillside in Peru covered by more than 5000 aligned holes may have been a giant Inca accounting device – a spreadsheet, but on a monumental scale.
Tracing across the slopes of Monte Sierpe (Serpent Mountain) in a snake-like shape, the “Band of Holes” has mystified archaeologists since an aerial photo of it was published in 1933. Various hypotheses have been put forward for the holes’ purpose, including suggestions that they are graves or defensive structures, or were used for water storage or gardening during the Inca Empire, which ran from 1438 to 1533.
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“This 1.5-kilometre-long band of holes has baffled people for decades,” says Jacob Bongers at the University of Sydney.
To get a clearer idea of the purpose of the holes, Bongers and his colleagues analysed sediment samples from within 19 holes and used drones to provide the clearest aerial picture yet of the array of depressions, which are each about 1 to 2 metres across and between 50 centimetres and 1 metre deep.
The analysis revealed pollen from food crops, including maize, amaranth, chilli peppers and sweet potato, and from wild plants such as Typha (bulrush), which are traditionally used for constructing baskets and rafts.

The holes are too far from the fertile areas where the plants would grow for the pollen to have been delivered by wind, says Bongers. He suggests that local groups from the Chincha culture – which lasted from about AD 900 to 1450 – lined the holes with plant materials and deposited goods in them, brought up in woven baskets loaded onto llamas.
“The data support the idea that people brought goods to the site and deposited them in the holes,” he says, and the use of baskets would also explain why there isn’t much pottery at the site. “We think it was initially a barter marketplace. That was then turned into a sort of large-scale accounting device under the Inca.”
Around 1480, the Chincha came under Inca rule, retaining their autonomy, but historical sources indicate they also paid levies, says Bongers. The accounting device idea comes from the aerial imagery, which allowed a more precise counting of the number of holes – revealing there are about 5200 of them – and of the variation in their layout.
The holes are organised into at least 60 sections or blocks. The researchers say their layout mirrors some Inca counting devices made from knotted strings, known as khipus, which have been compared to calculators or abacuses. But Bongers says a better analogy for the hole layout might be a spreadsheet to record the collection of tributes of food or goods from local communities.
A group of holes at Monte Sierpe, PeruC. Stanish
“There are these interesting mathematical patterns. You have some [sections with] multiple rows of eight holes, and then you have other sections that have alternating counts. Eight holes, then seven, then eight and seven, then eight. It hints that there was some sort of intention behind it,” says Bongers.
He thinks the different sections correspond to distinct groups of people from the heavily populated and productive agricultural region around Monte Sierpe. Sources suggest some 100,000 people lived in the neighbouring Pisco and Chincha valleys, he says.
The particular khipu said to resemble the layout of the holes was found in the Pisco valley, and is divided into sections approximately similar to the holes at the site, but that khipu has 80 divisions overall.
“The 5200 holes are certainly big enough to put goods into, but they are not arranged in a clear-cut decimal pattern and the Inca had a decimal system, so I would expect things to be strongly organised in groups of 10,” says Karenleigh Overmann at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. “The holes are organised into 60-some sections and the khipu is organised into 80, and that’s a pretty big difference in numbers.”

Bongers accepts that, but adds that we don’t actually know over what period of time the site was built, and the layout or use of holes might have evolved, along with any matching khipus. “We’re seeing the final form, but it could have started out as just a couple of sections and changed over time with the population,” he says.
The goods might have been gathered here rather than in an urban area because it is near the intersection of a network of pre-Hispanic roads, and in between two major Inca administrative sites: Tambo Colorado and Lima La Vieja.
Overmann says the study does a good job of looking at and discounting alternative ideas for the purpose of the holes, but she says there might be a simpler explanation. “There is a lot of tradition in Peru of making giant petroglyphs that can be seen from a distance,” she says. “Maybe they were just doing that.”
That could indeed have been one purpose, says Bongers. “But two things can be true at the same time. It’s a big, giant snake, but it served a functional purpose, so I see this site as a sort of social technology. They didn’t have internet, they didn’t have cell phones, so how are people figuring out when and where to meet? Let’s build a giant site that you can see from kilometres away.”

Historic Herculaneum – Uncovering Vesuvius, Pompeii and ancient Naples

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The Roman road network mapped by Itiner-eItiner-e
A comprehensive new map of Roman roads has boosted the known size of the empire’s land transport network by almost 60 per cent – and it is available for anyone to explore online.
The project, called Itiner-e, brings together topographic mapping, satellite imagery and centuries of historical records in what its creators say is the first open dataset of its kind.
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“It emerged from enormous frustration,” says Tom Brughmans at Aarhus University in Denmark. “It’s like the most enigmatic topic in Roman archaeology. We even have proverbs that say, ‘All roads lead to Rome’. So why on Earth can’t I download all the Roman roads? Where are they?”
Brughmans and his colleagues incorporated evidence from a large set of studies and traced more realistic paths for previously known routes to produce a map of the road network as it might have looked around AD 150. They also gave the placement of each stretch of road a confidence rating, based on the quality of the source.
According to their data, the total length of the road network at this time was around 299,171 kilometres – much more than the previous estimate of 188,555 kilometres given by the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World.

The dataset also reveals that, although we have strong evidence for the starts and ends of many roads, only 2.8 per cent of the network’s length can be located precisely – within 50 metres in mountains and 200 metres on flat land.
The Roman roads through mountain passes leading to Delphi in ancient GreeceItiner-e
For Brughmans, this reflects how difficult it can be to get funding to excavate entire Roman roads, which means a lot of work simply hasn’t been done. Major roads have also been built over many times throughout history, so it can be difficult to uncover the original path.
Although Roman roads are famous for being straight, it is a myth that they always were, says Catherine Fletcher at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Straight wasn’t always cheap or practical, especially through mountainous terrain,” she says. “Often, where there was a pre-existing route in place, the Romans would adapt it rather than build anew.”

Improved knowledge of the Roman road network can potentially inform our understanding of many highly impactful events in European history. The emergence of early Christianity, mass migration and continent-wide pandemics are all phenomena that were influenced by the Roman road system, says Brughmans.
Despite their importance, roads often get overlooked because they aren’t as glamorous as amphitheatres and gladiators, says Fletcher. “[It’s like that] famous scene in Monty Python,” she says, “where they’re talking about what the Romans did for us, and they go, ‘And the roads… Well, obviously the roads! The roads go without saying’.”

Historic Herculaneum – Uncovering Vesuvius, Pompeii and ancient Naples

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The skull now identified as Béla of MacsóBorbély Noémi/Tamás Hajdu et al. 2025
More than 700 years ago, a Hungarian duke was murdered in a brutal and very bloody head-on attack in a convent. Now, researchers studying an ancient skeleton excavated in Budapest have confirmed it belonged to the duke and revealed shocking details of his assassination.
“There were so many more serious injuries than would be necessary to kill somebody,” says Martin Trautmann at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

Archaeologists uncovered the man’s remains — which had been buried in dismembered pieces in the convent floor — during a 1915 excavation of a Dominican convent on Margaret Island, in the middle of the river Danube in Budapest. At the time, the researchers suspected it might be the body of 29-year-old Béla of Macsó, the grandson of King Béla IV, who had built the convent.
Historical records from 13th-century Austria indicate the young duke was assassinated on the island over a feud for the Hungarian throne in November 1272. The bones showed multiple signs of trauma, but the scientists lacked the tools and technology to confirm their suspicions.
The skeleton was apparently lost during the second world war, says Tamás Hajdu at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, but it resurfaced in 2018 in a wooden box at the Hungarian Museum of Natural History. Its re-discovery prompted investigations with modern techniques, including a facial reconstruction last year.

The skeleton had nine injuries to the head and face and another 17 to the rest of the body, all occurring at the time of death, says Hajdu. To determine how the attack unfolded, Trautmann and his colleagues marked an educational model skeleton with the same cuts and played out various scenarios. “It was step by step, injury by injury, like a stop-motion movie,” he says.
The injuries suggested two or three people accosted the man from the front and the sides, and he used his arms to block the blows, Trautmann says. “They were flanking the victim, so there was no easy way to escape.”
Eventually he fell and cracked open his skull, but continued to fight with his left leg, lying on his side, until someone stabbed though his spinal column. His attackers then inflicted multiple injuries to the head and face.
Those might have been fatal, but it is also possible the man bled to death. “There was a lot of bleeding,” Trautmann says.
Radiocarbon dating placed the death in the mid-13th century. Dental plaque analyses revealed a luxurious diet that included cooked wheat semolina and baked wheat bread.
DNA analyses identified the man as a fourth-generation descendant of King Béla III of Hungary and an eighth-generation relative of a 13th-century regional Russian prince, Dmitry Alexandrovich – aligning with historical records about the duke’s family history.

Additional genetic analyses showed Eastern Mediterranean origins on the individual’s mother’s side and Scandinavian origins on the father’s side — consistent with historical knowledge about the duke’s ancestry — and that he probably had dark skin, dark curly hair and light brown eyes.
The study sheds “convincing” light on a poorly understood historical event that has few recorded details, says Tamás Kádár, an independent medieval historian in Budapest. With no firsthand witnesses, the Austrian text mainly states the duke “was struck down in miserable slaughter on an island near Buda” with his limbs “cut into pieces” that were gathered by his sister and aunt.
The new scientific work attests to the passion of the murder, says Kádár, who wrote a biography of Béla of Macsó. “The fact that his body was hacked apart, and perhaps even further mutilated after death, undoubtedly indicates great hostility and hatred,” he says. “The primary aim was to kill Béla, to eliminate him. The main goal was his prompt and certain death.”

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Historical accounts say Ingólfr Arnarson was the first Norse settler of Iceland, arriving in the 870s, but this may not be truePublic domain
Norse people may have lived in Iceland almost 70 years earlier than historians thought, and their arrival might not have been the environmental disaster it is often portrayed as.
Historical accounts suggest that people first settled in Iceland in the 870s. This early migration is often depicted as an ecological disaster driven by Viking raiders or Norse settlers as they cleared the island’s forests for fuel, building material and fields. Forests now cover just 2 per cent of the country.

Firm evidence for when the first settlers arrived has been hard to come by. Archaeologists have unearthed an ancient wooden longhouse near the fjord of Stöðvarfjörður in the east of Iceland dating to around AD 874, underneath which is an older longhouse thought to be a summer settlement built in the 800s rather than a permanent home, but this finding hasn’t yet been reported in a scientific paper.
Now, Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and his colleagues have examined environmental DNA (eDNA) extracted from two sediment cores drilled at Lake Tjörnin in central Reykjavík, one of Iceland’s earliest and longest-occupied settlements, to see which species were present when. By examining layers of volcanic ash and using radiocarbon dating and plutonium isotope analysis, the researchers put together a timeline spanning from about AD 200 to the modern day, aligned with known historical events.
One key marker they used is known as the Landnám tephra layer, the ash and fragments left over from a volcanic eruption in about AD 877. Most evidence of human occupation in Iceland sits above this layer, so it was laid down after the eruption.

“Signs below the tephra are like the smoking gun that there was earlier human activity,” says Chris Callow at the University of Birmingham, UK, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Willerslev and his colleagues suggest people arrived almost 70 years before that mark: about AD 810. That is because at this point, they saw an increase in a compound known as levoglucosan, an indicator of biomass burning, as well as a rise in viruses associated with sewage.
“If it had been 850, I wouldn’t have been so surprised, but 810 is early for Viking expansion in the North Atlantic,” says Callow. “Overall, this is a nice confirmation of what we might have suspected, but it’s still quite controversial to have a date as early as 810.”
Putting together this comprehensive environmental history of the region is phenomenal, but the evidence for such an early date isn’t conclusive, says Kathryn Catlin at Jacksonville State University in Alabama. “When it comes to sewage biomarkers, there is a little bump around 800 and then nothing until 1900. Where are all the indicators of humans in sewage biomarkers and the intervening time period?” she says. And although biomass burning can indicate the presence of people, fires can also be caused by natural sources like lightning, she adds.
Willerslev and his colleagues, who declined to speak to New Scientist, also found that the arrival of settlers coincided with an increase in local biodiversity. The DNA record suggests they brought grazing livestock with them, grew hay meadows and practised small-scale barley cultivation for brewing beer.

Contrary to the conventional view of rapid deforestation, eDNA from pollen revealed that birch and willow trees expanded during the settlement period. For example, birch pollen grains increased fivefold between AD 900 and 1200, which the researchers think could have been down to deliberate management, keeping livestock away from trees to ensure settlers continued to have easy access to wood for timber and fuel.
“This is the nail in the coffin for that old just-so story of the Vikings getting to Iceland and then, suddenly, ‘oh no, the environment is destroyed’,” says Catlin.
Noticeable numbers of sheep, cattle, pigs and horses don’t appear until several decades after the initial settlement, which Willerslev and his colleagues suggest is because it would have taken about 20 years to build big enough herds to be detectable in the eDNA record.
Callow suggests an alternative reason: it could be that the first people didn’t bring many animals with them because they were coming just for the summer season in search of walrus ivory. “They could have been killing a few walruses and then going home again,” he says.
The eDNA suggests that pronounced loss of biodiversity, including birch and willow trees, didn’t occur until after 1200. Willerslev and his colleagues suggest this was associated not with the presence of settlers, but with climate cooling related to the Little Ice Age – a period of colder conditions from about 1250 to 1860 – plus volcanic eruptions and storm surges.

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