Philippa Kaur

A fresco from the Theban necropolis depicting potters in ancient EgyptDeAgostini/Getty Images
For the first time, the complete genome of a person from ancient Egypt has been sequenced. The DNA was collected from the remains of an older man, possibly a potter, who lived over 4500 years ago.
The ancient Egyptian inherited about a fifth of his DNA from ancestors living in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, more than 1000 kilometres east of Egypt. This suggests that the societies in Egypt and Mesopotamia were connected, despite their distance.
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The body was excavated in the early 1900s from Nuwayrat, a necropolis near Beni Hasan in Egypt. It was found in a pottery vessel, which had been placed in a rock-cut tomb. Today, the remains are kept at the World Museum in Liverpool, UK.
“We could actually directly radiocarbon date the remains of this individual,” says Adeline Morez Jacobs at Liverpool John Moores University. He died sometime between 2855 and 2570 BC. That means he lived fairly early in the history of ancient Egypt, which spanned from around 3150 to 30 BC.
The skeleton and DNA both showed the individual was male. Based on the man’s arthritis and other signs, he was estimated to be between 44 and 64 years old – probably on the older side. “He’s probably in his 60s at the time of death, which is incredibly old for that time period,” says Joel Irish, also at Liverpool John Moores University.

The social position of the man is unclear. “He was in what would have been an upper-class burial,” says Irish. But his skeleton shows that he had a hard, physical life. Based on the specific damage, he spent a lot of time looking down, leaning forward and holding his arms out in front of him, says Irish. He also sat for long periods of time on hard surfaces. Based on preserved images of different Egyptian occupations, the researchers think his most likely occupation was a potter.
Using samples from the roots of his teeth, the team was able to sequence the man’s entire genome. Previously it had only been possible to obtain partial genomes from three ancient Egyptians, who lived over 1000 years more recently.
“We have so little genetic sequencing from ancient Egypt,” says Shirly Ben-Dor Evian at the University of Haifa in Israel.
This is because the region’s warm climate degrades DNA more quickly. “It’s just way too hot,” says team member Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute in London, who calls the sequencing “a long shot”.
“We hypothesised that the pot burial, in combination with the rock-cut tomb into which the pot burial was placed, provided a stable environment,” says Linus Girdland-Flink at the University of Aberdeen in the UK.

About 80 per cent of the man’s genetic ancestry was North African, as might be expected. But the remaining 20 per cent matched people from the eastern Fertile Crescent, a geographical area that encompasses present-day Iraq, western Iran and parts of Syria and Turkey.
There are several possible explanations, says Ben-Dor Evian. “I’m thinking that explorers were always a thing,” she says. Also, long after farming became commonplace, “there were always populations that continued to be nomadic or semi-nomadic,” she says. Those peoples may have carried DNA between the Fertile Crescent and Egypt.
Archaeologists have already found links between ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. “There was quite a bit of cultural connections with Mesopotamia based on sharing artistic motifs,” says Irish, and goods like lapis lazuli were traded.
There could even be implications for the origin of writing. “The first writing systems emerged almost contemporaneously in the two regions,” says Morez Jacobs: cuneiform in Mesopotamia and Egyptian hieroglyphics just 300 years later.
“Was it a local invention of writing in both places, [or] were they, in some way, affecting each other?” asks Ben-Dor Evian. If one society invented writing, “the idea could have been transmitted through this movement of people,” she says. However, she stresses that one genome is nowhere near enough to draw such a sweeping conclusion: “I would like to see more Egyptian material in Mesopotamia in this time and vice versa.”

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A modern recreation of garum, a fermented fish sauce dating back to Roman timesAlexander Mychko / Alamy
Fermented fish sauce, or garum, was an incredibly popular condiment throughout the Roman Empire. For the first time, ancient DNA – scraped from vats used to produce the sauce – has revealed exactly which fish species went into the culinary staple.

Roman fish sauce was prized for its salty and umami flavours – although the philosopher Seneca famously described one version as “the overpriced guts of rotten fish”. It came in several forms, including a liquid sauce called garum or liquamen, as well as a solid paste known as allec. To prepare the condiment, fish-salting plants crushed and fermented fish, a process that can make visual identification of the species difficult or impossible.
“Beyond the fact that bones are extremely small and fractured, the old age and the acidic conditions all contribute to degradation of DNA,” says Paula Campos at the University of Porto in Portugal.
Campos and her colleagues ran DNA sequencing tests on bony samples from roughly the 3rd century AD, extracted from a Roman fish-salting plant in north-west Spain. They were able to compare multiple overlapping DNA sequences and match them to a full fish genome, giving the team “more confidence that we identify the correct species”, says Campos.
The effort identified the fish remains as European sardines – a finding that aligns with previous visual identification of sardine remains in other Roman-era fish-salting plants. Other garum production sites have also contained remnants of additional fish species such as herring, whiting, mackerel and anchovy.

This proof that “degraded fish remains” can yield identifiable DNA “might help identify with more precision some regional variations in the main ingredients of the ancient fish sauces and pastes”, says Annalisa Marzano at the University of Bologna in Italy, who did not participate in the study.
The study also compared the DNA of ancient and modern sardines to show there was less genetic mixing of sardine populations from different ocean regions in ancient times. That insight could help “assess the effects of human-environment interaction over the centuries”, says Marzano.
For their next step, Campos and her colleagues plan to analyse other fish species from additional Roman-era garum production sites. “We are expanding the sampling locations to see if the results are consistent across the entire Roman Empire,” she says.

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3D models of the skulls from a modern human and from a NeanderthalCourtesy of Kimberly Anne Plomp
A skull abnormality that squeezes the lower brain, often causing headaches and other neurological problems, might be part of our genetic inheritance from Neanderthals.
People with Chiari malformations have a smaller and flatter base of the skull around the area where it connects to the spine. As a result, part of the brain – the cerebellum – is squashed into the spinal canal in the neck.

Type 1 Chiari malformations, the mildest form, are thought to affect up to 1 in 100 people. They can cause symptoms like headaches, neck pain, sleep apnoea and numbness, but some people never show signs at all.
About 15 years ago, Yvens Barbosa Fernandes, a neurosurgeon at the State University of Campinas in Brazil, noticed that the base of his Chiari patients’ skulls resembled those he had seen in Neanderthal specimens in European museums, especially in the mild slope of the occipital bone, where the cerebellum rests. While Neanderthal brains were larger than modern humans’ are, they slanted back more from the forehead and across the base, giving them a flatter shape compared with the rounder form of modern human skulls.
In 2013, Barbosa Fernandes published a hypothesis proposing that the Chiari skull shape might have been inherited from extinct humans who interbred with Homo sapiens. “I started to think there was a lost link between anthropology and medicine in Chiari cases,” he says.

Inspired by this suggestion, Kimberly Plomp at the University of the Philippines Diliman in Quezon City and her colleagues built digital 3D models of the skulls of 46 people with Chiari type 1 and 57 without Chiari, based on their CT scans. Their detailed mathematical analyses confirmed that the Chiari-affected skulls had a smaller occipital bone with a flatter angle, and more brain compression at the base of the skull where the cerebellum sits.
Next, the team examined how those modern skulls compared with digital models of eight fossil heads from Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis and ancient Homo sapiens.
They found that the skull bases of Neanderthal heads had remarkably similar measurements to those of modern humans with Chiari, while all the other ancient cranial bases resembled those of modern humans without Chiari. “It highlights the idea that these are Neanderthal traits – not just early traits,” she says. “It looks like this is just another way that Neanderthal genes might be influencing our health – and in this case, in a negative way.”

For Barbosa Fernandes, the study provides strong evidence in support of his theory. “It makes sense: if you have less angulation, you have less space for the modern human brain,” he says. “I didn’t have the science to prove my hypothesis. This paper is a big step closer towards that proof.”
As a next step, the team hopes to analyse the DNA of people with Chiari malformations to look for Neanderthal genes, Plomp says.
Other types of Chiari malformations – types 2 to 4 – are thought to have different causes. Type 2 is linked to a severe form of spina bifida, while types 3 and 4 are extremely rare and may be life-threatening.

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Harriet Lee-Merrion
It was a lonely and cold life. In the chilly wastes of northern Europe during the last glacial period, when the ice sheets had spread from the poles and the forests had been driven far south, a small group of humans clung to existence.
They roamed widely, between the British Isles in the west and what is now Poland in the east, yet there were only a few hundred of them. They hunted reindeer and woolly rhinoceros, and made distinctive leaf-shaped stone tools.
And then they disappeared. No living person carries DNA from this little population, so the leaf-shaped stones and a few bones are just about all that is left of them. We don’t know what they called themselves or what happened to them. All we know is that they didn’t make it.

We are now realising that stories like this are surprisingly common in prehistory. While it can be tempting to think of human evolution as a tale of progress and success, ultimately leading to a global population, the reality is that many lineages of our species died out and left no descendants.
Now, thanks to insights from ancient DNA, we are finally able to tell some of their stories. These lost peoples are also shining a light on why our once-insignificant branch of the wider human family tree survived and thrived.
Human evolution and exodus
The oldest known Homo sapiens – or what we call modern humans – lived in Africa, perhaps 350,000 years ago. Our understanding of the earliest members of our species is fragmentary, because we have hardly any fossils. But we know from genetics that all non-African people alive today seem to be descended from a single wave of migrants, who came out of Africa 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. After entering western Asia, some went east towards what are now India, China and Russia, while others headed north and west, to Europe.
All these lands were already inhabited by other species of human. The Neanderthals had been living in Europe and western Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. To the east were the mysterious Denisovans, and in the islands of South-East Asia there lived the diminutive Homo luzonensis and the “hobbits”, or Homo floresiensis. These would all soon disappear. The Neanderthals may have been the last survivors, clinging on in southern Spain until around 40,000 years ago.

We can see traces of the expansion of modern humans in the archaeological record. On the banks of the Don river in south-west Russia, archaeologists uncovered the remains of a man dubbed Kostenki-14, who lived 37,000 years ago. In 2014, DNA analysis revealed that he was closely related to today’s Europeans, and to some of the earliest modern humans in Europe. Further to the east, DNA from the 40,000-year-old remains of a man from Tianyuan cave in China showed that he belonged to a population that contributed to modern Asian peoples.
It is easy to interpret this as a story of modern humans triumphing. Thanks to our unique advantages – whether that is language, better tools, a more cooperative nature or something else – we outcompeted the Neanderthals and others, and today we reign supreme. We are the only remaining species of human, and there are over 8 billion of us.
Interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans
Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as that. For one thing, modern humans interbred with the Neanderthals and Denisovans and many people today carry their DNA, so, in some sense, these extinct hominins are still with us.
And more to the point, modern humans didn’t have it all their own way. The first groups to enter Europe don’t seem to have endured there. At Bacho Kiro cave in Bulgaria, for instance, there are H. sapiens bones from 46,000 to 42,000 years ago. A 2021 genomic analysis found that they are related to present-day East Asian people, but there is no trace of their DNA in modern Europeans. They may have lived in Europe, but they didn’t survive there in the long term. The same seems to be true of modern humans who lived around 40,000 years ago in a cave in Romania.
“There is strong evidence that some early Homo sapiens groups that initially entered Europe did not contribute genetically to later populations,” says Priya Moorjani at the University of California, Berkeley. “Only molecular data revealed the absence of genetic continuity.”
One such lost group made those leaf-shaped artefacts. The distinctive tools were first discovered in the 1800s – at distant locations. British examples were called “Lincombian”, after Lincombe Hill in Torquay: set into this hill is Kents Cavern, where the artefacts were found. In Germany, the tools were discovered in Ilsenhöhle cave near the town of Ranis, so they were called “Ranisian”. In Poland, similar artefacts were found in a cave in the village of Jerzmanowice, so they were dubbed “Jerzmanowician”.
Leaf-shaped stone artefacts made by some of the earliest modern humans to reach Europe, found in Ilsenhöhle cave in GermanyJosephine Schubert, Museum Burg Ranis
By the 1980s, archaeologists realised that these seemingly disparate objects were essentially identical, so they renamed them Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician, or LRJ for short.
For a long time, we couldn’t be sure who made these tools, because they weren’t unambiguously associated with human remains. The mystery was finally solved in 2024, when a team led by Jean-Jacques Hublin at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, re-excavated Ilsenhöhle and recovered fragments of bone. The mitochondrial DNA within these revealed them to be from modern humans, who lived there around 45,000 years ago.
Archaeological evidence of lost lineages
The LRJ tools, it seems, were made by modern humans. Suggestive evidence from elsewhere now made sense: for instance, a 43,000-year-old jawbone from Kents Cavern had been tentatively identified as that of a modern human.
Later in 2024, researchers led by Arev Sümer, also at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, managed to obtain six nuclear genomes – the DNA from the heart of cells, as opposed to the more limited genetic material from mitochondria – from the Ilsenhöhle remains. Two seemed to be mother and daughter, and a third female was more distantly related to them. There were also three males who weren’t close relatives of the three females, but did belong to the same lineage.
There was a surprise, however. The team also sequenced a genome from a second site: Zlatý kůň in the Czech Republic, over 200 kilometres to the south-east. This individual proved to be a relative of two of the people from Ranis, despite living so far away. In other words, the people of Ranis and Zlatý kůň all belonged to the same extended family.
Furthermore, the team was able to estimate the size of the group by examining how similar the genomes were. They estimated that there were around 200 breeding adults in the Ranis/Zlatý kůň clan, and this had been steady for 15 generations. This figure was “extremely low given the large range from UK to Poland at the time”, study co-author Johannes Krause, also at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said in a press conference.
The implication is both eerie and incredible: that a population that barely numbered in the hundreds was scattered over a distance of over 1500 km.
Who were these people? Their DNA points to them having dark skin, eyes and hair – exactly what we would expect for people whose recent ancestors lived in Africa. Based on animal bones found in Ilsenhöhle, the cave was mostly used by hibernating cave bears and denning hyenas, which indicates that the people only stayed there intermittently. Bones with cut marks, suggestive of butchery, point to the LRJ people eating a lot of reindeer, horse and rhinoceros (which still lived in Europe at the time).
Wolf and deer bones from Ilsenhöhle cave in Germany show that early Homo sapiens in Europe butchered these animalsGeoff M. Smith
What happened to them? We don’t know for sure, but can hazard some guesses.
The LRJ people were far from humanity’s ancestral home in Africa, in ecosystems that were relatively new to them. The planet was in a glacial period, and while the Mediterranean and Africa were sheltered from the worst of it, northern Europe was feeling the chill. “These groups were living really at the extremes, and were also vulnerable to climate change,” says Katerina Harvati at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
Then there is their tiny population. “When you have a small group, if you lose an individual that hunts very well or who socially keeps the group together, everything can easily fall apart,” says Sümer. “If there are only a few hundred of you, a few strokes of bad luck can spell doom – and if you don’t have any friendly neighbours, no one will come to your aid.”
In other words, the odds were stacked against the LRJ people and the other small bands of modern humans who were among the earliest waves to reach Europe. “For a very long time, we thought that [Homo] sapiens arrived in Europe by 42,000 years ago,” says Ludovic Slimak at the University of Toulouse in France. But it is clear that some modern humans got there earlier. “This colonisation is very likely to work as waves of populations coming to the west.”
In 2023, Slimak argued that there were three waves of modern humans that entered Europe between 55,000 and 42,000 years ago. The third was the one that established our species throughout Europe. Its members made distinctive “Proto-Aurignacian” artefacts. “We find it everywhere, in all Europe,” he says. “It’s a very large wave.”

Over and over, groups that get cut off from the network of the societies around them find themselves in trouble

The first two waves, in contrast, were smaller and less successful. “They go for some generations, some centuries, some millennia, in a part of Europe and then we lose their traces, and the genetics says we have no descendants of this population,” says Slimak. He says the LRJ people look to have been from the second wave.
The three waves all came from the eastern Mediterranean, argues Slimak. After migrating from Africa, modern humans lived continuously in that area, and from time to time some of them wandered further afield. This can be seen at Ksar Akil, a rock shelter near the coast of Lebanon. It contains 22.6 metres of sediments, divided into 36 layers, giving an unprecedented record of changing stone tool technology between about 50,000 and 30,000 years ago. The most recent layers contain Proto-Aurignacian tools; older layers harbour tools resembling the LRJ.
Evidence from a French cave
One such early migration has been documented at Grotte Mandrin, a cave overlooking the Rhône valley in southern France. Neanderthals lived there from before 80,000 years ago until 54,000 years ago. But then modern humans pop up in the archaeological record of the cave, in the form of one baby tooth from about 54,000 years ago. There are also distinctive stone points, which may have been arrowheads. Traces of soot from fires suggest that modern humans were there for about 40 years – after which they either died or left, and the Neanderthals returned. Only around 44,100 years ago – during Slimak’s third wave – did modern humans return to this area in numbers and permanently.
Larger and more connected populations may also help explain why the third wave succeeded in Europe. “This one is certainly a very large wave of population,” says Slimak. The archaeological record suggests Aurignacian populations were bigger, perhaps partly because of warmer conditions at 43,000 and 41,000 years ago. “They have a real success in terms of reproduction,” says Slimak. As populations became more dense, some people would have felt pressure to move, rapidly expanding their presence in the region. “You have a generation of people that have to move somewhere else where there are more proteins and less people.”
The larger populations may have also enabled Aurignacian people to maintain their cultural practices even as they moved long distances, which Slimak says is reflected in the uniformity of Aurignacian tools from different regions.

What about modern human groups elsewhere in the world? Did some of them also die out? There is tentative evidence from the Americas (see “Extinction in the Americas”), but for the most part we are stymied by bias in the archaeological record due to the fact that DNA doesn’t preserve well in hot and humid environments. “We have really good preservation of DNA in colder climates,” says Harvati, hence the many examples of local extinctions in Eurasia. “We don’t know what’s going on elsewhere.”
In particular, we have very little ancient DNA from Africa, the modern human heartland. “If you’re in one of the core areas, there’s always going to be other people around,” says Harvati. This may mean that African populations were safer, because they were always part of a network and could get help if they ran into trouble. But without DNA we can’t be sure.
Nevertheless, one lesson is clear: isolation is deadly. Over and over, groups that get “cut off from the bigger network of the societies around them” find themselves in trouble, says Harvati. And once the group size starts shrinking, their culture may die even if some of the people survive. “If you have a certain level of population collapse, then you also have loss of cultural knowledge as well,” she says. “If only a handful of individuals survive, then a lot of the traditions and the cultural knowledge of that group don’t necessarily make it, even if those people get absorbed in another group.”
People, it turns out, need people. And for our lineage – just one branch on a once-diverse family tree – this seems to have been the key to our survival and global ascendency.

North and South America were the last continents reached by our species, apart from Antarctica. People first entered the north-western part of North America in what is now Alaska, which is only a few tens of kilometres from the north-eastern corner of Eurasia.
However, there is a lot of disagreement and uncertainty about when and how people got there. In a 2022 review, Ben Potter at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and his colleagues argued that the evidence to date suggests that people began entering no earlier than 16,000 years ago and spread rapidly across both continents.
Other researchers have claimed that modern humans were there earlier. At Chiquihuite cave in Mexico, sediments laid down 33,000 years ago contained what appear to be stone tools. Meanwhile, footprints from White Sands National Park in New Mexico seem to be 21,000 to 23,000 years old – and earlier this year, the same site yielded marks that may have been left by crude wooden vehicles.
One interpretation is that there were early migrations into the Americas and those groups died out, just like the first modern humans in Europe. However, Potter is sceptical, arguing for instance that the Chiquihuite tools are so crude, they may be the result of natural processes such as rockfall, rather than human activity.
Fossilised footprints at the White Sands National Park in New Mexico from around 23,000 years agoAssociated Press/Alamy
Nevertheless, evidence is emerging of lost lineages in the Americas. A study published in May looked at DNA from 21 people who lived in Colombia between 6000 and 500 years ago. This revealed a previously unknown group of hunter-gatherers, closely related to the first people to enter South America. They appear not to have contributed to any modern populations, and were ultimately replaced by groups that came from Central America.

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An artefact made from a mammoth tusk is the oldest known boomerangTalamo et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0
The world’s oldest known boomerang may be 22,000 years older than previously thought, suggesting it was crafted during a period when early humans displayed an increase in artistry.
In 1985, archaeologists unearthed a 72-centimetre-long ivory boomerang buried beneath six layers of sediment in Obłazowa cave in Poland. Later sediment sieving revealed a Homo sapiens thumb bone nearby, as well as antler tools, a bone bead and pendants made from fox teeth. In the 1990s, radiocarbon dating suggested the thumb was 31,000 years old – but surprisingly, the boomerang was dated to just 18,000 years old, several millennia younger than the artefacts in higher layers.
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Sahra Talamo at the University of Bologna in Italy suspected contamination. “Even a trace amount of modern carbon – from glue or conservation products – can throw off the radiocarbon date by tens of thousands of years,” she says. Analyses of the thumb’s carbon-nitrogen ratios showed signs of altered collagen, indicating that the preserved samples weren’t high enough quality for reliable radiocarbon dating.
Re-dating the contaminated boomerang would have been futile – and would have damaged the precious artefact needlessly, says Talamo. Instead, she and her colleagues dated 13 nearby animal bones, re-dated the human thumb bone and used statistical modelling to reconstruct the timeline. Their results showed that the entire sediment layer – and hence the boomerang and thumb as well – dates to between 39,000 and 42,000 years ago.
“In a way, this is an advertisement to museums that when you find something extraordinary, you should not cover it with glue or other restoration materials before completing all your analyses,” she says.
Its new age means the ivory boomerang predates the second-oldest known boomerangs – made from wood by Indigenous Australians – by 30,000 years. Unlike simpler throwing sticks, such as a 300,000-year-old wooden implement found in Schöningen, Germany, boomerangs are curved and aerodynamically shaped, even if they don’t always return to the thrower, says Talamo.
Indeed, although the ancient boomerang could most likely fly, its size and design probably made it unlikely to return to sender. Instead, it may have served a symbolic or ceremonial purpose, says Talamo, based on its decorative engravings, reddish pigment and smooth polish – combined with its placement beside a human thumb bone in a circle of imported stones.
The finding offers a glimpse into early humans’ cognitive abilities and craftsmanship during a burst of artistic expression that occurred during the Early Aurignacian period, starting around 40,000 years ago. During this time, symbolic artefacts such as mammoth ivory figurines, rock art and aesthetically crafted tools first appeared in Europe, says Talamo.

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Adobe Stock
My son is a wizard. He walks into the kitchen, looks at me and utters the magic words: “Can I have a cheese and tomato sandwich, please?” A few minutes later, just such a snack appears in front of him.
Other young animals can communicate their desire for food through grunts, tweets and growls. But only humans have the sophisticated system of grammar and vocabulary that allows us to communicate in precise terms.

This story is part of our Concepts Special, in which we reveal how experts think about some of the most mind-blowing ideas in science. Read more here

In fact, with studies of animals increasingly showing that they share many characteristics once thought to be the preserve of humans – from culture to emotions and even morality – language may seem like the one thing that truly sets us apart. “I think language makes us feel special as a species,” says Brian Lerch at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Given all that, one of the key things researchers want to know about language is how it evolved, and why it only did so in our human lineage.
Psychologist Shimon Edelman at Cornell University in New York state thinks language’s magical power has a fairly straightforward evolutionary explanation. With his colleague Oren Kolodny, now at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he argues that it may have emerged 1.7 million years ago, when ancient humans began making stone hand-axes that are beyond the ability of non-human animals to produce.
The idea is that novice tool-makers would have required guidance from an expert to make their own hand-axes, so tool-making sites became classrooms. Proto-language might have emerged as a way for teachers to communicate to students – which could explain why both language and tool-making seem to require the brain to arrange and order thoughts into structured sequences.
But about a decade ago, a key experiment challenged that view. In 2014, Shelby Putt at Illinois State University and her colleagues tasked 24 volunteers with learning to make hand-axes from an expert who either talked them through the process or merely made the tools in the volunteers’ presence while occasionally pointing to direct their attention. Surprisingly, both methods were effective, suggesting verbal language isn’t necessary for complex tool-making.
This doesn’t mean Putt sees language and tool-making as completely unconnected. She thinks complex tool-making really did require humans to arrange and order their thoughts to stay on task. This, she argues, led to the expansion of the brain regions involved in working memory, which we use to briefly hold and manipulate ideas.
But Putt suspects it was only at some later date that humans used this ability to structure and order their thoughts to develop language – presumably because it helped them communicate better and boosted their chances of survival.

These scenarios all assume that language is fundamentally a tool for communicating with others. But that might not be the case. A third way to think about the evolution of language focuses almost exclusively on the way it can help individuals “talk” to themselves and organise their thoughts to undertake complex tasks.
According to some, including the influential linguist Noam Chomsky, this is what drove the evolution of language, meaning it had nothing at all to do with tool-making. Instead, these researchers think language emerged as recently as 70,000 years ago, perhaps simply because of a random genetic mutation that prompted brain rewiring.
Truth be told, there is still little consensus about quite how language arose. But if Chomsky and his ilk are right, though it didn’t involve magic, it might at least have involved a little luck.

Read the other stories in this series using the links below:

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