Philippa Kaur

A reconstruction of the famous hominin LucyFrank Nowikowski/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.
One hundred years ago, on 28 November 1924, anthropologist Raymond Dart opened a crate. It held a consignment of fossils from Taung, a quarry in South Africa, including a small skull that looked part-ape, part-human. Dart named it “Australopithecus africanus: The Man-Ape of South Africa”. It was the first Australopithecus specimen to be identified, and the first evidence that early humans evolved in… More

A perforated pebble from the Nahal Ein Gev II archaeological site, which may be an ancient spindle whorlLaurent Davin
A set of 12,000-year-old pierced pebbles excavated in northern Israel may be the oldest known hand-spinning whorls – a textile technology that may have ultimately helped inspire the invention of the wheel.
Serving as a flywheel at the bottom of a spindle, whorls allowed people to efficiently spin natural fibres into yarns and thread to create clothing and other textiles. The newly discovered stone tools represent early axle-based rotation technology thousands of years before the first carts, says Talia Yashuv at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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“When you look back to find the first vehicle wheels 6000 years ago, it’s not like it just came out of nowhere,” she says. “It’s important to look at the functional evolution of how transportation and the wheel evolved.”
Yashuv and her colleague Leore Grosman, also at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studied 113 partially or fully perforated stones at the Nahal Ein Gev II site, an ancient village just east of the Sea of Galilee. Archaeologists have been uncovering these chalky, predominantly limestone artefacts – probably made from raw pebbles along the nearby seashore – since 1972.
3D scanning revealed that the holes had been drilled halfway through from each side using a flint hand drill, which – unlike modern drills – leaves a narrow and twisting cone-like shape, says Yashuv. Measuring 3 to 4 centimetres in diameter, the holes generally ran through the pebble’s centre of gravity.

Drilling from both sides would have helped balance the stone for more stable spinning, says Yashuv. Several of the partially perforated stones had holes that were off-centre, suggesting they might have been errors and thrown out.
The team suspected that the stones, weighing 9 grams on average, were too heavy and “ugly” to have been beads and too light and fragile to be used as fishing weights, says Yashuv. Their size, shape and balance around the holes convinced the researchers that the artefacts were spindle whorls.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers created replicat whorls using nearby pebbles and a flint drill. Then they asked Yonit Kristal, a traditional craftsperson, to try spinning flax with them.
“She was really surprised that they worked, because they weren’t perfectly round,” says Yashuv. “But really you just need the perforation to be located at the centre of mass, and then it’s balanced and it works.”
If the stones are indeed whorls, that could make them the oldest known spinning whorls, she says. A 1991 study on bone and antler artefacts uncovered what may be 20,000-year-old whorls, she adds, but the researchers who examined them suggested the pieces were probably decorative clothing accents. Even so, it is possible that people were using whorls even earlier, using wood or other biological materials that would have since deteriorated.

The finding suggests that people were experimenting with rotation technology thousands of years before inventing the pottery wheel and the cart wheel about 5500 years ago – and that the whorls probably helped lead to those inventions, says Yashuv.
Carole Cheval at Côte d’Azur University in Nice, France, is less convinced, however. Whorls work more like a top than a wheel, she explains.
And while the artefacts might very well be whorls, the study lacks microscopic data that would reveal traces of use – as yarns would have marked the stones over time, Cheval says.
Trace analysis was “beyond the scope” of the current study, says Yashuv.
Ideally, researchers studying ancient whorls would be skilled in spinning themselves – which the study authors were not, says Cheval. “It really changes the way you think about your archaeological finds,” she says.

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Plaster casts of people who died in Pompeii. DNA tests show the adult on the right was a male unrelated to the small child on his lap.Archeological Park of Pompei
Pompeii’s plaster cast human figures aren’t who they were assumed to be, genetic tests have revealed, highlighting the way idealised stories can be projected onto archaeological evidence.
The analysis also reveals that the demography of Pompeii was also far more complicated and diverse than previously thought.
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When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, it buried several Roman towns, including Pompeii. Many of Pompeii’s residents were completely smothered in compacted ash during the eruption and, as their bodies decayed, cavities formed that perfectly preserved their positions in their final moments.
In the 19th century, archaeologists developed a method of pouring plaster into the cavities to make life-like casts. Since then, more than 100 of these casts have been made, preserving the victims’ shapes along with any remaining bones that hadn’t decayed over the centuries.
However, it has long been known that many of the plaster casts were manipulated into different poses and sometimes placed together to add to the drama of the Pompeii story, says Valeria Amoretti at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii in Naples, Italy.
To learn more about who these people were, Amoretti and her colleagues examined 14 of the plaster casts and extracted DNA from bones in five of them.
What they found has completely altered the established interpretations of who they were. An adult wearing a golden bracelet with a child on their lap was long believed to be the child’s mother. The DNA analysis shows they are actually an adult male who is biologically unrelated to the child. A nearby figure, formerly interpreted as being the father, was also unrelated to the supposed mother and child.
Another pair, who were thought to be sisters or a mother and daughter who died in an embrace, included at least one genetic male and were also unlikely to have been related.
The genetic analysis further revealed that the people of Pompeii had diverse ancestry, with components related to modern eastern Mediterranean, Levantine and North African Jewish populations.

Amoretti says it is no surprise that the Roman world was multicultural, and that the Mediterranean and its ports united people.
“But it is extremely interesting to discover the extent of this melting pot, even in an average provincial town like Pompeii, and to have scientific proof of it from ancient DNA,” she says.
Alissa Mittnik at Harvard University says the study highlights the importance of applying science before interpreting archaeology at face value.
“Ultimately, it reminds us that the most intuitive, dramatic or sensational explanations do not always hold true, encouraging us to stay aware of and question our preconceived notions,” she says.

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Sheep skulls modified by ancient Egyptians so that their horns grew upward instead of outwardB. De Cupere
Sheep with deformed horns are among the more mysterious animal remains discovered at an ancient Egyptian burial site dating back to around 3700 BC. They also represent the oldest physical evidence of humans modifying the horns of livestock.
“The sheep were deliberately made ‘special’ by castration,” says Wim Van Neer at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. “In addition, their horns were directed upward, and in one case, the horns were removed.” More

Bitter/iStock
There are few things more irritating in everyday life than getting something stuck between your teeth. Thankfully, we can reach for a toothpick – and it seems our ancient ancestors did the same. In fact, a fragment of a 1.2-million-year-old toothpick is perhaps the earliest direct evidence we have of hominins using plants as tools.
Our ancient ancestors probably made frequent use of implements made from plants. But finding evidence of this is extremely tough because botanical materials are so quick to rot away. This means the archaeological record of human tool use is deeply skewed towards the much hardier stone.
All this suggests that the origins of human technology could have been profoundly misunderstood.

Stone Age
The conventional view is it all started with the first stone tools and the dawn of the Stone Age over 3 million years ago. But what if, even before that, there was a botanical age, one based on woodworking and weaving of plant materials? For some researchers, it is absurd not to think that plants would be part of the story. “Perishable material culture is an essential element in our evolutionary past,” says Linda Hurcombe at the University of Exeter in the UK.
Now, we are finally getting a clearer view of this lost age. New techniques are making it possible to find traces of plant-based tools that would otherwise have been missed. And by studying the way modern primates use plants,… More

A cylinder seal and its design imprinted onto clayFranck Raux © 2001 GrandPalaisRmn (Musée du Louvre)
The world’s oldest known writing system may have had its origins in the imagery on decorated cylinders used to denote ownership. Some of the symbols on these cylinder seals correspond to those used in proto-cuneiform, a form of proto-writing used in Mesopotamia.
The finding indicates that the invention of writing in Mesopotamia was a decentralised process, in which many people across a wide area contributed to the set of symbols used.
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“There’s been this longstanding reconstruction of how writing appeared in Mesopotamia, which is arguably the earliest invention of writing in the world,” says Silvia Ferrara at the University of Bologna in Italy. “We’re retracing the trajectory in a way that’s more, I would say, colourful, less straitjacketed.”
The oldest known true writing system is cuneiform, invented around 3200 BC in Mesopotamia. It was preceded by a simpler system called proto-cuneiform, which was in use from 3350 to 3000 BC.
Proto-writing like proto-cuneiform is distinguished by a lack of grammatical rules, which means it cannot convey complex meanings, says Amy Richardson at the University of Reading in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the research. For instance, proto-cuneiform can be used to label something as “seven bushels of wheat”, but only true writing like cuneiform can say “seven bushels of wheat will be delivered to you”.
The origins of proto-cuneiform have often been traced to clay tokens. These came in a variety of shapes, such as discs and spheres, and were often engraved with patterns. The tokens could be pressed into wet clay, creating a symbol. Some of the symbols on the tokens are similar to those found in proto-cuneiform, as documented by Denise Schmandt-Besserat at the University of Texas at Austin in her two-volume book Before Writing in 1992.
There is some evidence for a role of tokens in the origin of proto-cuneiform, says Ferrara. “But you cannot explain all the signs.”
Ferrara and her colleagues Kathryn Kelley and Mattia Cartolano, also at the University of Bologna, have instead explored another source of symbols: cylinder seals. These cylindrical objects have patterns and images embossed on them, and leave a rectangular collection of symbols when rolled over sheets of wet clay. The symbols often referred to goods being transported, or to administrators involved in transactions, says Cartolano.
Two sides of a proto-cuneiform tabletCDLI
The team examined cylinder seals from a wide area of south-west Asia, including Mesopotamia, that dated to 4400 to 3400 BC. They found several symbols that corresponded to proto-cuneiform symbols.
“One of the clearest examples that we found is the use of the images of fringed cloth and vessel in a net,” says Cartolano. These have well-understood meanings: they refer to the transport of goods. And they are found both on cylinder seals and proto-cuneiform tablets.
The idea that the symbols on cylinder seals led to some of the symbols in proto-cuneiform was previously suggested by Holly Pittman at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in a 1994 book chapter and developed in later publications. “I am gratified that, 30 years after I first proposed the fundamental role of seal imagery in the origins of proto-cuneiform script, that a new generation of scholars have taken up my idea and, with their expertise in cuneiform script, have put details to my argument,” says Pittman. She adds that in the 1990s her idea was dismissed “without serious consideration”.

“I find it to be very convincing,” says Richardson. “There does seem to be a really neat correlation in the particular examples that they’re illustrating in this article.” Her own research has found that cylinder seals were also used to record interactions between cities.
This doesn’t mean that tokens didn’t play a role. “I think there’s still some strong arguments to make that those tokens really are part of the foundation of abstraction,” says Richardson. In particular, they seem to have been important for the development of counting systems.
If proto-cuneiform really did arise in this hodge-podge way, drawn from tokens, cylinder seals and possibly other sources, it may tell us something about who was inventing it, says Ferrara. “There is evidence for making a claim that the invention of writing in Mesopotamia was, in fact, much more decentralised than we think,” she says. While powerful people in the major city of Uruk no doubt played a role, perhaps so did other administrators and tradespeople scattered over the region. “I think there’s evidence for having a more widespread… and more distributed prompt to writing,” she says.
Writing was first used for administration, not for storytelling. “Those first written records tend to be about trying to organise materials, goods, people, things,” says Richardson. “It’s very much about trying to find ways of creating a social system.”

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