Philippa Kaur

The moai statues on Easter IslandMaurizio De Mattei/Shutterstock
Easter Island’s monumental stone statues may have been created through a decentralised artistic and spiritual tradition, with many different communities making their own carved stone giants, rather than a unified effort coordinated by powerful rulers. That is the finding of an attempt to definitively map the island’s main stone quarry.
Also known as Rapa Nui, Easter Island, in the Pacific Ocean, is thought to have been inhabited by Polynesian seafarers since around AD 1200.
Advertisement
Archaeological evidence suggests that the Rapa Nui people were not politically unified, but there is debate over whether the hundreds of stone statues known as moai were coordinated by a centralised authority.
The island had only one quarry supplying the volcanic rock from which the statues were carved, a site called Rano Raraku.
Carl Lipo at Binghamton University in New York and his colleagues used drones and high-tech mapping equipment to create the first 3D map of the quarry, which contains many unfinished moai. Previous studies have come to varying conclusions about the number of moai that remain in the quarry, says Lipo.

Lipo and his colleagues recorded 426 features representing moai at various stages of completion, 341 trenches cut to outline blocks for carving, 133 quarried voids where statues were successfully removed, and five bollards that probably served as anchor points for lowering moai down slopes.
They also found the quarry was divided into 30 work areas that each appeared to be separate from the others and featured different carving techniques, says Lipo.
Combined with previous evidence showing that small crews could have moved the moai, and that groups marked out separate territories at freshwater sources, Lipo says it appears the statue carving was not the result of a centralised political authority.
“The monumentality represents competitive display between peer communities rather than top-down mobilisation,” he says.
There has been debate among historians about the supposed decline of the Rapa Nui people, with some claiming that overexploitation of resources led to a devastating societal collapse, but others question that narrative.
Lipo says the collapse story assumes centralised leaders drove the construction of the monuments and this led to deforestation and societal failure. “But if monumentality were decentralised, and that emerged from community-level competition rather than chiefly aggrandisement, then the island’s deforestation could not be blamed on megalomaniacal leadership,” says Lipo.

However, other researchers are not so sure this interpretation is correct. Dale Simpson at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign agrees there was not one overarching chief as there were in other Polynesian cultures such as Hawaii or Tonga. But, he says, the clans were not as separate and decentralised as Lipo and his colleagues have proposed, and there must have been collaboration between groups.
“I just wonder if they’re drinking a little too much Kool-Aid and not really thinking about the limitation factors on a small place like Rapa Nui where stone is king and if you’re not interacting and sharing that stone you can’t carve moai just inside one clan,” he says.
Jo Anne Van Tilburg at the University of California, Los Angeles, says further research is underway to clarify how the Rapa Nui people used Rano Raraku and Lipo’s team’s conclusions are “premature and overstated”.

Machu Picchu and the science of the Inca: Peru

Immerse yourself in the Inca civilisation’s most important archaeological sites, including visiting Machu Picchu twice as you discover how the story of the Inca is so much more than just one site.

Learn more

Topics:archaeology More

The ancient human foot bones have been a mystery since they were discovered by scientists in 2009Yohannes Haile-Selassie
The provenance of 3.4-million-year-old foot bones in Ethiopia may have finally been solved – and could prompt a rethink into how our various ancient human ancestors coexisted.
In 2009, Yohannes Haile-Selassie at Arizona State University and his colleagues found eight hominin bones, that once made up a right foot, at a site known as Burtele in the Afar region of north-eastern Ethiopia.

The find, christened the Burtele foot, included a gorilla-like opposable big toe, suggesting that whichever species it belonged to was able to climb trees.
Although another ancient hominin species, Australopithecus afarensis, was known to live nearby – most famously represented by the fossil Lucy, also found in the Afar region – the Burtele foot seemed to be from a different one. “We knew from the very beginning that it didn’t belong to Lucy’s species,” says Haile-Selassie.
The two main possibilities that gnawed at Haile-Selassie were whether the foot belonged to another species within the genus Australopithecus or a much older, more primitive one called Ardipithecus, which inhabited Ethiopia more than a million years earlier, but also had an opposable big toe.

In the meantime, the recovery of jaw and teeth remains from the same locality led the researchers to announce the discovery of a new-to-science hominin species in 2015, which they named Australopithecus deyiremeda. They suspected that the mysterious foot bones belonged to A. deyiremeda, but these were a different age to the jaw and teeth remains, so the team couldn’t be sure.
But the next year, the researchers found an A. deyiremeda’s lower jawbone within 300 metres of where the foot was recovered, with both remains being the same geological age. Based on this, the team has concluded that the foot bones belonged to A. deyiremeda.
The Burtele foot (left) and the bones embedded in an outline of a gorilla foot (right), which was similar to that of Australopithecus deyiremedaYohannes Haile-Selassie
In another part of the experiment, where the researchers studied the carbon isotopes of the A. deyiremeda teeth, they determined that the species mostly consumed material from trees and shrubs, whereas teeth of A. afarensis indicate a diet much richer in grasses.
The discoveries prove that two species of hominin lived together in the same environment, says Haile-Selassie. The groups weren’t competing for food, so it is possible they coexisted peacefully, he says.
“They must have seen each other, spent time in the same area doing their own things,” he says. “One may have seen members of Australopithecus deyiremeda in the trees while members of A. afarensis were roaming in the grasslands nearby.”

The findings also expand our knowledge of human evolution. “Some had argued that there was only one hominin species at any given time giving rise to a newer form,” says Haile-Selassie. “Now, we know that our evolution was not linear. There were multiple closely related hominin species living at the same time even in close geographic proximity and living in harmony, suggesting that coexistence is deep in our ancestry.”
Carrie Mongle at Stony Brook University in New York says it is “exciting we are starting to get a better understanding of hominin diversity in the Pliocene [around 3 million years ago]”.

Topics:human evolution/ancient humans More

Cereal farming produced excess food that could be stored and taxedLUIS MONTANYA/MARTA MONTANYA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
The cultivation of cereal grains probably led to the emergence of the first states – which operated mafia-like protection rackets − and to the adoption of writing for the purposes of recording taxes.
There is wide debate over how the first large human societies emerged. Some scholars see agriculture as the root of civilisation, while others see it as an invention born of necessity when the traditional hunter-gathering life became untenable. But many propose that the intensification of agriculture provided a surplus which could be stored and taxed, and that this enabled the formation of states.

“By using fertilisation and irrigation, [early farming societies] could hugely increase the output and, therefore, there was this surplus that was available for the construction of the state,” says Kit Opie at the University of Bristol, UK.
However, the timeline for these developments doesn’t quite match up. Our first evidence of agriculture popping up is from about 9000 years ago, and it was invented at least 11 separate times on four continents. But large-scale societies didn’t emerge until about 4000 years later, first in Mesopotamia, then in Egypt, China and Mesoamerica.
To look for more evidence, Opie and Quentin Atkinson at the University of Auckland in New Zealand turned to a set of family trees mapping out the evolution of the world’s languages, representing the relationships between cultures, and borrowed statistical methods from phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary relationships.

The pair used the language data in conjunction with information from anthropological databases on hundreds of pre-industrial societies to assess the probability that events such as the emergence of a state, taxation, writing, intense agriculture and the cultivation of cereal grains emerged in a specific order.
They found that the use of intensive agriculture was indeed coupled with the emergence of states, but the relationship wasn’t straightforward. “It looked more likely that it was the states causing the intensification, rather than the intensification causing the states,” says Opie.
A previous study of Austronesian societies also found that political complexity was more likely to have driven intensive agriculture than to have been a result of it.
“It makes sense that once you’ve got a state with money and people at its disposal, it can start doing irrigation,” says Opie.
But he and Atkinson also found that states were very unlikely to emerge in societies that didn’t already have widespread production of cereal grains such as wheat, barley, rice and maize, whereas they were very likely to emerge in societies with cereal grains as their main crop.
The results show that grain production and taxation were often associated, and taxation was less likely to arise in societies without grain.

This is because cereal grains have great taxable potential, says Opie. They can be easily assessed because they are grown in fixed fields, above ground, ripen at predictable times and can be stored for long periods. “Root crops like cassava or potatoes were hopeless for taxation,” he says. “The argument is that states, or protection rackets, would defend these fields from external states in exchange for tax.”
When it came to writing, Opie and Atkinson found that the practice was very unlikely to be adopted in societies without a tax system but very likely in those that did have one. Opie suggests that writing was invented and adopted to record those taxes. The elites of societies who raked in the taxes then created institutions and laws, maintaining the emerging hierarchical social structure.
The results also indicate that once formed, states were more likely to stop producing non-grain crops than non-states. “I would argue that we find strong evidence that they actually got rid of roots, tubers and fruit trees so that all the possible fields could be used for grain because none of the other things were good for taxation,” says Opie. “People were forced into using these kinds of crops, and it had a bad effect on us and, I would argue, still does.”
Although the move towards cereal cultivation was associated with a population boost in the Neolithic period, it also led to a decline in overall health, height and dental health.
“Applying phylogenetic methods to cultural evolution is innovative, but it may oversimplify the complexity of human history,” says Laura Dietrich at the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna. Archaeological evidence shows that in south-west Asia, intensified agriculture in prehistoric times culminated in sustained state formation, whereas in Europe it didn’t, she says. To her the crucial question is why these regions diverge so markedly.
David Wengrow at University College London says that “from an archaeological perspective, it has been clear for decades that there was no single ‘prime mover’ for the emergence of early states in different parts of the world”. In Egypt, for example, he says, the first stirrings of bureaucracy seem to be linked more closely to the logistical organisation of royal rituals than to routine needs of taxation.

Topics:archaeology More

Romantic kissing may go a long way back in our evolutionary pastATHVisions/Getty Images
Early humans like Neanderthals probably kissed, and our ape ancestors could have done so as far back as 21 million years ago.
There is wide debate over when humans began kissing romantically. Ancient texts hint that sexual kissing was practised in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt at least 4500 years ago, but because such kissing has been documented in only about 46 per cent of human cultures, some argue it is a cultural phenomenon that emerged relatively recently in human history.

However, there are hints that Neanderthals exchanged oral bacteria with Homo sapiens, and chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans have all been observed kissing. So it is possible that the behaviour goes back far further than historical texts reveal.
To look for answers, Matilda Brindle at the University of Oxford and her colleagues have attempted to work out the evolutionary history of kissing. “Kissing seems a bit of an evolutionary paradox, she says. “It probably doesn’t aid survival and could even be risky in terms of helping pathogen transmission.”
The researchers first came up with a definition of kissing that would work across many species, settling on mouth-to-mouth contact that is non-antagonistic and involves movement of the lips, but not the transfer of food.

This leads to many smooches being excluded, including kisses elsewhere on the body. “If you kiss someone on the cheek, then I would say that is a kiss, but by our definition, it isn’t kissing,” says Brindle. “Humans take kissing to a new level.”
The team then searched the scientific literature and contacted primate researchers to seek out reports of kissing in modern monkeys and apes that evolved in Africa, Europe and Asia.
To estimate the likelihood that various ancestral species also engaged in kissing, Brindle and her colleagues mapped out this information in a family tree of primates and ran a statistical approach called Bayesian modelling 10 million times to simulate different evolution scenarios.
They found that kissing probably evolved in ancestral apes some 21.5 million to 16.9 million years ago and there is an 84 per cent chance that our extinct human relatives, Neanderthals, engaged in kissing too.
“Obviously, that’s just Neanderthals kissing; we don’t know who they’re kissing,” says Brindle. “But together with the evidence that humans and Neanderthals had a similar oral microbiome and that most humans of non-African descent have some Neanderthal DNA, we would argue they were probably kissing each other, which definitely puts a much more romantic spin on human-Neanderthal relations.”

There isn’t enough data yet to tell why kissing evolved, says Brindle, but she does suggest two hypotheses.
“In terms of sexual kissing, it could enhance reproductive success by letting animals assess mate quality. If someone has bad breath, then you can choose not to reproduce with them,” she says.
Sexual kissing could also help with post-copulation success by promoting arousal, she says, which can speed up ejaculation and change the vaginal pH to make it more hospitable to sperm.
The other main idea is that non-sexual kissing developed from grooming and is useful for strengthening bonding and mitigating social tension. “Chimpanzees will literally kiss and make up after a fight,” says Brindle.
“I think from the evidence that they have, kissing definitely has this affiliative function,” says Zanna Clay at Durham University, UK. “We know, for example, in chimps that it does seem to form this important role in repairing social relationships. But to me, the sexual aspect is a little bit of a question mark.”
As to the issue of whether kissing is an evolved behaviour or a cultural invention, “I think our results show very clearly that kissing has evolved,” says Brindle.
Troels Pank Arbøll at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who traced early records of kissing in cuneiform writing from ancient Mesopotamia, agrees. “This provides a more well-developed basis to argue that kissing has been with humans for a long time,” he says.
But that is unlikely to be the whole story, given that many groups of people don’t kiss. “I’m sure there’s a strong cultural element to it and it’s probably come and gone with different cultural preferences,” says Clay.

Ancient caves, human origins: Northern Spain

Discover some of the world’s oldest known cave paintings in this idyllic part of Northern Spain. Travel back 40,000 years to explore how our ancestors lived, played and worked. From ancient Paleolithic art to awe-inspiring geological formations, each cave tells a unique story that transcends time.

Find out more

Topics: More

An ancient skull has finally shown us what the Denisovans looked like. Now it turns out they, not Neanderthals, might be our closest relatives, redrawing our family tree and transforming the hunt for Ancestor X.

Topics: More

Artists painted in places where echoes and resonance created otherworldly sonic effectsPatrick Aventurier/Getty Images
Deep underground, thousands of years of silence are abruptly broken by a researcher singing. His voice seems to awaken the walls of the cavern as the intimate space comes alive with the sound of our ancestors. Then he follows the cave’s resonant response, until the beam of his headlamp falls upon a panel of ancient paintings.
This crude experiment, performed decades ago, led to a remarkable discovery: that prehistoric rock art, created from 40,000 to 3,000 years ago, was meant to be heard as well as seen. “The oldest painted sites have this low, strange resonance, where if you sing, suddenly the cave sings back to you,” says Rupert Till at the University of Huddersfield, UK.
Getting solid scientific evidence to support this idea hasn’t been easy. Now, however, a seven-year study into the acoustic properties of rock art sites around the globe has provided it. The Artsoundscapes project leaves little doubt that prehistoric artists deliberately painted in places where echoes, resonance and sound transmission created otherworldly sonic effects. “I was completely amazed,” says archaeologist and project leader Margarita Díaz-Andreu at the University of Barcelona, Spain, recalling her experiments at Valltorta gorge in eastern Spain. “Before the paintings, there was barely any reverberation, but as soon as we reached the paintings, the sound changed immediately.”
And that’s just the start. By studying the peculiar soundscapes in which ancient artworks are embedded, Díaz-Andreu, Till and other archaeoacoustic researchers are beginning to reconstruct the ways in which these ancient, multisensory illustrations amplified the potency of prehistoric rituals, storytelling and shamanic musical performance – and, perhaps, even altered listeners’ states of consciousness.
Listening for echoes
That first researcher who used song to bring a new dimension to our understanding of Stone Age people was a French musicologist called Iégor Reznikoff, now a professor emeritus at Paris Nanterre University. He spent years vocalising inside palaeolithic caves in use from 18,000 to 11,000 years ago in his homeland before documenting his findings in the late 1980s. Counting the seconds between echoes, he noted a relationship between the placement of rock art and acoustic phenomena. “Iégor can go into a cave and make noises and guide you to rock art by listening for echoes,” says Till. “I’ve been into these caves with him.”
Reznikoff’s methods of talking to the walls lacked rigour, and his conclusions were largely ignored by archaeologists. But his ideas reverberated around the fringes of academia, where the emerging field of archaeoacoustics was struggling for recognition. Among the first to expand upon his findings was Steve Waller at the American Rock Art Research Association, who recorded echoes of up to 31 decibels at some decorated spots in deep caves in France, while unpainted walls in the same caverns were acoustically dead.

“
In deep caves, the echoes blur together like thunder, and it gives you this vision of a stampede of hoofed animals
“

“In deep caves, the echoes blur together like thunder, and it gives you this vision of a stampede of hoofed animals,” says Waller. Writing in Nature in 1993, he pointed out that more than 90 per cent of European rock art depicts hoofed mammals like horses and bison, and suggested that echoing caves might have been interpreted as the homes of the thunder gods, who were embodied by these stampeding beasts.
Two decades later, with archaeoacoustics still largely overlooked as a legitimate field, Till launched the Songs of the Caves project to study the acoustics of painted caverns in northern Spain. Rather than just timing the delay between echoes, he and his colleagues took a measurement called the impulse response, which entails quantifying the movement of sound waves through a space when a short, sharp sound is played to give a so-called sonic fingerprint. “We did 250-odd acoustic samples in the caves, both next to rock art and where there was no rock art,” says Till. “And we showed that there was a  statistical relationship between the likelihood of there being a piece of rock art and an ‘unusual’ acoustic phenomenon that was associated with it.”

Around the same time, Díaz-Andreu began investigating the soundscapes at Stone Age sites across Europe, providing more nuanced insights into these acoustic relationships. In Spain’s Sierra de San Serván, for instance, she noted that art was predominantly found in rock shelters with “augmented audibility”. “This means that the places that had been chosen to be painted were those from which you could acoustically control the landscape,” she says. To give a sense of what this might mean, she recounts being able to hear a distant dog-walker’s phone conversation with astonishing clarity while standing at one of the decorated spots.
Although these findings helped to advance the field of archaeoacoustics, many scholars continued to regard it as a fringe discipline. So, in 2018, Díaz-Andreu initiated Artsoundscapes, which introduced cutting-edge methods to systematically measure sonic phenomena at painted sites across the world. Among the techniques pioneered by her team was the use of a dodecahedron featuring 12 loudspeakers to create a dynamic, omnidirectional impulse response. The researchers also used computerised models like geographic information systems to map the connections between rock art and acoustic effects.
Equipment used to measure acoustics in Cuevas de la ArañaN. Santos da Rosa
Since wrapping up the project earlier this year, the team has published a series of studies from sites across four continents. They reveal that prehistoric cultures around the world used sound in strikingly different ways. In Siberia’s Altai mountains, for example, amplification and unusually high clarity of sound were detected at potential gathering spots, where rituals and offerings involving music may once have taken place. In Mexico’s Santa Teresa canyon, there is rock art at sites where pre-Hispanic cultures are thought to have held ritual dances. And at Spain’s Cuevas de la Araña, the researchers report finding paintings primarily where the caves’ acoustics “could have intensified the sensory effect and emotional impact of ceremonies likely performed with musical accompaniment”.
The team also visited White River Narrows, a canyon in Nevada where Waller had previously noted an unusual sonic connection between painted rock faces. “Some of the rock art sites can actually communicate with each other, so if you’re at one, you can hear the echoing coming to you from another,” he says. Building on this, the Artsoundscapes researchers discovered that certain painted spaces outside the canyon lack reverberation but possess exceptional sound transmission, reproducing sounds with great clarity and amplification. Therefore, they concluded, these sites would have been more suitable for storytelling than shamanic rituals.
Only in South Africa’s Maloti-Drakensberg mountains – which are famous for their San rock art – did the team fail to find a connection between paintings and sound. “We were expecting fantastic results – something new and exciting,” says Díaz-Andreu. “We didn’t find them.”
Perceiving a “presence”
Although there is no universal pattern, there is a growing consensus that painted sites worldwide were often chosen for their extraordinary acoustic properties and the impact these would have had on people’s consciousness. In Finland’s lake district, for example, prehistoric hunter-gatherers were inspired to leave their mark on cliffs that produced a disorienting sonic reflection. “The [wall] repeats, or doubles, every sound that you make in front of it, so that you experience a kind of doubled reality that is not normal,” says Riitta Rainio at the University of Helsinki in Finland. “It’s not a long echo like in caves, but a single reflection that’s very short, sharp and strong.”
Rainio and her colleagues have conducted psychoacoustic experiments to measure the subjective response of modern listeners to this auditory illusion. They found that people tend to perceive a “presence” at these painted sites. In one recent paper, they wrote that the sounds seem to “emanate from invisible sources behind the paintings” and that “a prehistoric visitor, who marvelled at the voices, music, and noises emanating from the rock, would have recognised them as coming from a human-like source, perhaps some kind of apparition or living person inside the rock”.
Speaking of her own experiences at the lakeside rock faces, Rainio says: “I was often quite scared, because I really thought that there was someone else there. There’s this phenomenon where it seems like someone is approaching you as you approach the cliff.”

“
There’s this phenomenon where it seems like someone is approaching you as you approach the cliff
“

Similarly, the Artsoundscapes team has investigated the psychoacoustic impact of rock art sites in both Siberia and the Mediterranean. Using the impulse response data from decorated caves in the Altai mountains, the team created “auralizations” of natural sounds – including animal calls, weather phenomena and the crackling of a bonfire – as if heard from within these spaces. In laboratory tests, participants reported that these digitised soundscapes evoked feelings of “presence”, “closeness” and “tension”.
Teaming up with neuroscientists at the University of Barcelona’s Brainlab, Díaz-Andreu’s group also used electroencephalography (EEG) to study the ways in which certain sounds influence human brain activity. Their findings suggest that our brainwaves tend to synchronise with music that has a tempo of 99 beats per minute, potentially triggering altered states of consciousness. How this discovery relates to ancient shamanic rituals at rock art sites is a matter of conjecture, however. “We don’t know for sure what the meaning of those sites was, but they are generally regarded as sacred, religious or ritual places,” says Rainio. “And ritual usually means some kind of sound-making, which is often music.” Tellingly, some of the paintings in Finland depict people playing drums.
Prehistoric sounds
Another clue about the sorts of sounds prehistoric people made at these decorated rock faces comes from the painted Isturitz cave in France, where 35,000-year-old flutes made from vulture bones have been found. By playing replicas of these prehistoric instruments inside the caverns where they were discovered, Till became the first person since the Stone Age to experience their ritual potential. “Previously, I’d only ever heard these bone flutes in classrooms or in concert halls, where they have quite a polite sound, a small sound,” he says. “But then you take them into the cave and they produce this enormous, soaring sound, which transforms the cave into a space that sings.”
Listen: Vulture bone replica of the Hohle Fels flute being played by Anna Friedericke Potengowski in the Hohle Fels cave More

Drone photograph of the archaeological site of SemiyarkaPeter J. Brown
A large 140-hectare settlement dating back 3600 years has been discovered in the plains of north-eastern Kazakhstan, transforming our understanding of life in prehistoric Eurasia. It hints that the open grasslands of Central Asia once held a Bronze Age community as connected and complex as much better-known ancient civilisations.
“It’s not quite a missing piece of the jigsaw; it’s the missing half of the jigsaw,” says Barry Molloy at University College Dublin, Ireland, who wasn’t involved in the work.

The Bronze Age featured many notable civilisations, including the Shang and Zhou dynasties in China; the Babylonians and Sumerians in what is now Iraq; and numerous cultures around the Mediterranean, including the Egyptians, Minoans, Mycenaeans and Hittites.
The Central Asian steppes, however, were thought to be the domain of highly mobile communities living in tents or yurts. Semiyarka, or the “City of Seven Ravines”, seems very different and could have played a crucial role in the spread of bronze items between civilisations.
This is because the site – first identified in the early 2000s – overlooks the Irtysh river, which rises up in the Altai mountains in China, comes down onto the plains of Kazakhstan and goes all the way to the Arctic through Siberia.

Miljana Radivojević at University College London and her colleagues have been mapping and surveying the site since 2016. They have discovered that Semiyarka featured long banks of earth, conceivably for defence; at least 20 enclosed household compounds, probably built with mud bricks; and a central monumental building, which they suggest might have been used for rituals or governance. The types of pottery they found there indicate the site dates to around 1600 BC.
Crucially, the crucibles, slag and bronze artefacts at the site indicate a large area was dedicated to the production of copper and tin bronze – an alloy that is mainly copper but contains more than 2 per cent tin.
Compositionally, the elements in the slag from the crucibles correspond to tin deposits from part of the Altai mountains in east Kazakhstan about 300 kilometres away, says Radivojević.
The tin may have been brought there by people traversing the steppes or by boat along the Irtysh, or it may have been panned from the water, she says. “The Irtysh is the most important tin-bearing river in the Bronze Age of Eurasia and the flooding of the river’s flood plain that was happening seasonally would have been very helpful for panning the tin.”
The large size and neat lines of Semiyarka are very different from what is seen in the scattered camps and small villages usually associated with the mobile communities of the steppes.

Without detailed excavations – which are planned – we can’t know if the buildings were all there at the same time or were successive constructions over many years, says team member Dan Lawrence at Durham University, UK. “But the layout is very clear, and normally that would mean that it’s all contemporary, because you wouldn’t find these things in a neat line if they have been built one after the other.”
Due to its position on the river near major copper and tin deposits, the researchers suggest Semiyarka wasn’t only a production hub for bronze, but also a centre of exchange and regional power, a key node in the vast Bronze Age metal networks linking Central Asia with the rest of the continent.
“The Irtysh river was a very busy transport corridor,” says Lawrence. “It is basically laying the foundations for the Silk Roads as we know them today, a kind of pre-modern globalisation.”
The site transforms our understanding of Bronze Age steppe societies, says Radivojević, showing that they were just as sophisticated as other contemporaneous civilisations.
“This tells us that they were organised, that they were capable of resourcing and defending,” says Molloy. “Bringing materials like ores and metals to a centralised space speaks of a level of social organisation that goes beyond immediately local, and it fits back into the wider networks that we know were crisscrossing Eurasia, where metals were moving and they’re the key connector in terms of those wider networks.”

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

Embark on an unforgettable journey through Egypt’s two most iconic cities, Cairo and Alexandria, where ancient history meets modern charm.

Find out more

Topics:archaeology More