Philippa Kaur

The more we discover about our species’ family tree, the harder it becomes to pinpoint when exactly Homo sapiens emerged, raising questions over what it really means to be human. “If we look along the sapiens lineage,” says Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, “we see there’s lots of diversity. So it’s not easy to make a cut-off point when we can say, this is Homo sapiens.” Fossils from China may push our common ancestor with Neanderthals back in time, says Stringer. The split is commonly placed at 600,000 years ago, but “the separation may go back even further, towards a million years”, he suggests.

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Jonathan Chen/CC BY-SA 4.0
If the history of our species to date was represented as a single day, then civilisation would have begun in the final half-hour. At least, that’s assuming Homo sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago and civilisation began 6000 years ago with the first cities in Mesopotamia. In this tale, civilisation represents a seismic cultural shift that traces its roots back to the start of farming, some 5000 years earlier, and flows inexorably through settlement, population expansion and social stratification to urbanisation.
These days, we tell a different story. For a start, we no longer see Mesopotamia as ground zero for urbanisation: cities were springing up in other places, including India, China, Egypt and central Europe, at around the same time. What’s more, agriculture wasn’t the catalyst for civilisation we once thought. Instead, it appears to have been an invention born of necessity when the traditional hunter-gathering life became untenable – and there are plenty of examples of groups reverting when farming didn’t work out. This means we must redraw the timeline that saw our ancestors shift away from the lifestyle that had worked well for most of human history. It also requires us to question the very definition of civilisation.

An obvious place to start looking for answers is Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey. Archaeologists digging there since 1995 have unearthed a series of circular enclosures containing huge, T-shaped stone pillars. Dating back almost 12,000 years, these are the oldest known megalithic monuments. Building them would have required cooperation between many workers, along with leaders to coordinate and… More

John Bavaro Fine Art/Science Photo Library
For the vast majority of our planet’s history, there were no humans. Today, there are more than eight billion of us. Logically, then, there must have been a moment when Homo sapiens became a distinct species. Yet that moment is surprisingly hard to pin down. The problem, for once, isn’t a lack of fossils. Instead, disagreement about when to mark the origin of humanity comes down to the speciation process itself.
We often imagine the human evolutionary tree as a grander version of a personal family tree – indeed, researchers tend to talk about parent, daughter and sister species. In this picture, our parent species is equivalent to our biological parents, and the birth of H. sapiens becomes an event that is as easy to define as our own birth. But speciation isn’t really like that.

For evidence of this, look no further than a study posted online last year. Trevor Cousins and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge suggest our supposed parent species, Homo antecessor, split away from its parent, Homo heidelbergensis, more than a million years ago. About 600,000 years ago, H. antecessor gave rise to two branches: one led to the Neanderthals and Denisovans – another kind of hominin – the other to H. sapiens. Then comes the twist. Our evolutionary grandparents, H. heidelbergensis, stuck around to see the birth of the H. sapiens lineage – and about 300,000 years ago, the two interbred in a big way. In fact, the researchers’ model indicates that about 20 per cent of our… More

Humans

Pompeii only came under Roman control around 160 years before its destruction – and its traffic-worn streets show how the locals adjusted their business operations

By Colin Barras

17 February 2025

Cart wheels left deep ruts in the stone streets of PompeiiimagoDens/Shutterstock
A close look at Pompeii’s stone-paved streets has shown how traffic through the ancient city changed dramatically after it was incorporated into the Roman world.
Although often seen as a quintessentially Roman place, Pompeii was anything but. For several centuries it was actually governed by a different people known as the Samnites – and even after it fell to the Romans in 89 BC, Pompeii retained traces of its Samnite identity right up until its destruction by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. More

One thousand years ago, people along Israel’s Mediterranean coast dug deeply enclosed plots in the sand, filled them with 80,000 tonnes of trash and used the fertile soil that formed for farming, allowing them to produce crops that would otherwise fail on such harsh ground.
This represents the oldest-known, large-scale plot-and-berm system that allows crop-growing in sand, putting it among multiple, less clearly dated sites across the globe. It might even be the origin of such oasis-like agricultural sites in deserts, some of which still exist today, says Joel Roskin at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. More

The Great Ziggurat of Ur, in present‑day IraqMohammed Al ali/Alamy
Between Two RiversMoudhy Al-Rashid (Hachette (UK, 20 February); W. W. Norton (US, 12 August))
A new and spellbinding book tells the history of the very ancient past of Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Between Two Rivers by Moudhy Al-Rashid, a researcher at the University of Oxford, weaves together the many strands of the story of the region, which covers much of what is now Iraq.
Ancient Mesopotamia has languished in obscurity, at least compared with the better-known Greek, Roman and Egyptian civilisations. So… More

Reconstruction of Lucy, the most famous skeleton of Australopithecus afarensisMLouisphotography/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.
Whenever we think about the process of evolution, there’s a risk of falling into the trap of telling stories. Human minds are prone to interpret the world in terms of stories: it’s just one of our biases, along with the one that causes us to see faces in clouds and on pieces of toast. So we always have to be… More