Philippa Kaur

Cut marks on a foot bone from El Mirador cave in SpainIPHES-CERCA
Butchered human remains found in a cave in northern Spain suggest that Neolithic people may have eaten their enemies after killing them in combat.
Francesc Marginedas at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) in Tarragona, Spain, and his colleagues studied 650 fragments of human remains belonging to 11 people, which were found in El Mirador cave in the Atapuerca mountains and dated back 5700 years.

All of the bones had signs that these individuals had been eaten by fellow humans. Some had chop marks, indicating that the people’s skin was cut off with stone tools, while others were translucent with slightly rounded edges, suggesting they had been boiled. Some of the longer bones had been broken open with stones, probably to extract and eat the marrow, while smaller ones like metatarsals and ribs featured human teeth marks.
The study adds to evidence that cannibalism was more common than previously thought throughout human history.
El Mirador is at least the fifth site with strong evidence of cannibalism in Spain in the Neolithic period, when people switched from foraging to farming, says Marginedas. “We are really starting to see that this kind of behaviour was more common than what we expected.”

Why humans ate each other so much is less certain. At some sites, evidence including skull cups suggests that cannibalism may have had a ceremonial purpose. At others, it appears to have been a means of survival during extreme famine.
Marginedas and his colleagues say the evidence at El Mirador instead points to war. An abundance of animal remains and no signs of nutritional stress in the humans indicate this early farming community didn’t face famine, the researchers say. They found no telltale signs of ritual, with the human remains mixed in with animal bones.
The age of the individuals ranged from under 7 to more than 50 years old, suggesting a whole family had been wiped out in conflict. Radiocarbon dating revealed that all 11 people were probably killed and eaten in a matter of days.
The researchers say this mirrors signs of conflict and cannibalism also seen at two other Neolithic sites: Fontbrégoua cave in France and Herxheim in Germany. This period increasingly looks like it was defined by instability and violence, as communities clashed with neighbours or newly arrived settlers over territory.

Marginedas and his colleagues are less sure why these people then ate their adversaries, but ethnographical studies of humans eating each other in war throughout history suggest cannibalism was a form of “ultimate elimination”. “We think this one group killing the other group and then consuming it is a way of humiliating them,” says Marginedas.
“The degree to which the remains were processed and consumed is striking,” says Paul Pettitt at Durham University in the UK. “Whether or not they were consumed by kin or strangers, the violence practised on these remains is redolent of a process of dehumanisation during the process of consumption.”
Silvia Bello at the Natural History Museum in London agrees the deaths were probably the result of conflict, but isn’t convinced they were eaten as a form of humiliation. While the cannibalism may have been fuelled by aggression or hatred rather than kindness, as one would expect in funerary practices, it could still have been ceremonial, she says.
“I think it could be more complicated. Even if it was warfare, the fact that they eat them still has a sort of ritualistic meaning,” she says.

Neanderthals, ancient humans and cave art: France

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Patrick Reymer
In 1881, zoologist John Murdoch took part in an expedition to Point Barrow, Alaska, at the northernmost tip of the US. The goal was to conduct a two-year, unbroken observation of meteorological and magnetic phenomena and to document the nature and wildlife of the Arctic along the way. Travelling north through Alaska, Murdoch and his crew witnessed a peculiar act: an Iñupiat family captured two wolf pups and took them back to camp. The family carefully fed and nurtured the pups, raising them to adulthood before killing them for their fur. Murdoch was observing an ancient tradition. It turns out this Iñupiat practice might also hold the key to understanding the origin of modern dogs.  
How ancestral grey wolves were transformed into humanity’s best friend has long been debated. For the past several decades, the prevailing hypothesis has been that wolves domesticated themselves. They initiated the process by first wandering around the periphery of human settlements and feeding on rubbish tips. Over time, they became habituated to the presence of people and formed mutually beneficial relationships with them. Only then did curious humans select and breed individuals with traits like docility and gregariousness, eventually giving rise to the pet canines we know and love today.   
Through this unguided and unintentional process, wolves scavenged their way to domestication. Or so the theory goes. Recent evidence, however, has led many scientists to abandon the idea of self-domestication. If the revisionist thinking is correct, then humans, not wolves, were the driving force – and the domestication of dogs is evidence that humanity has a deep and complex relationship with wild animals that was born long ago.  

Popular perceptions of dog domestication have been shaped in large part by the late Raymond and Lorna Coppinger, who wrote a series of highly readable books on the subject at the beginning of the 21st century. The husband-and-wife team of biologists based much of their argument on “pariah” dogs that prowl human garbage dumps, feeding off leftovers and sometimes receiving direct aid from local people. “These animals are ownerless and survive largely on scraps of food waste from human settlements,” says archaeologist Loukas Koungoulos at the University of Western Australia. “They make up a majority of the species Canis familiaris worldwide – in some estimates up to 70 per cent of all dogs presently alive.”   
Pariah dogs are the perfect analogue for wolves at the beginning of their domestication, the Coppingers argued. The idea they championed was that self-domestication occurred when humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming. This was when our ancestors became sedentary, living in larger groups and producing enough waste to attract wolves, in much the same way that pariah dogs are attracted to settlements today. This shift began around 12,000 years ago in the Middle East.   

“Finds of considerably earlier dogs would naturally disprove the idea,” says Koungoulos. And such finds have now emerged.   
Evolution of the first dogs
Palaeontologists have discovered around two dozen fossil specimens of dogs ranging in age from 35,500 to 13,000 years old across Eurasia, in countries including Spain, France, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Ukraine and Russia. These Palaeolithic dogs have a variety of physical characteristics that distinguish them from wolves. They weigh 31.2 kilograms on average, while Pleistocene wolves weighed around 41.8 kilograms. They also have shorter snouts, a slightly wider palate and shrunken canine teeth. These differences in morphology represent a changing body form that many scientists argue illustrates the budding signs of domestication. In addition, genetic analysis of ancient canid DNA points to south-west Asia and East Asia as the original centres of domestication. Although scientists are still calibrating the exact dates, it now seems clear that dogs emerged over 36,000 years ago in several locations independently. In other words, domestication long predates the transition from hunting and gathering to farming.  
Could these grey wolf pups hold the secret to how domestic dogs evolved?Debbie Steinhausser/Alamy
Some supporters of the self-domestication idea have tried to salvage it by pointing out that palaeolithic hunter-gatherers killed large mammoths and herd animals like bison and deer, so they could have generated enough leftovers to attract and feed meat-hungry carnivores, including wolves. But this argument also has its problems. For one, we know Stone Age people were experts at using all kinds of animal resources and seldom left surplus waste, especially not close to where they were living. Besides, the practices of modern hunter-gatherers suggest that if our ancestors kept excess meat, they would have stored it away from scavengers on platforms or up in trees.   
An even bigger obstacle is research showing that wolves are often seen as dangerous pests. If they get too close and comfortable with humans, they will occasionally prey on young children or other vulnerable members of society. There are documented instances of people killing wolves when they feel threatened by their presence.  
It was evidence like this that turned Koungoulos firmly away from the self-domestication model. “I became pretty convinced that there are deep, consistent, almost structural barriers to self-domestication posed by the innate behaviour of wolves and the typical attitudes of traditional societies towards canids, which are, for the most part, rightly considered dangerous animals,” he says. “[Self-domestication] might make sense for some other domesticated species, but not for large carnivores like this.”  
If not self-domestication, then what?  
The appeal of puppies
One clue pointing to a different origin story comes from a growing understanding of wolf behaviour. Wolves are born blind and don’t develop eyesight until they are about 2 weeks old. During this critical period, they are highly adaptable and able to habituate to humans, which means they can form an attachment to a human caretaker, allowing pups to be safely nurtured and making it less likely they will attack anyone in the future. “If people are willing to put in the work, they can handle practically any type of canid as a companion,” says evolutionary biologist Raymond Pierotti at the University of Kansas, who has raised wolf pups himself. The key is to begin when they are still very young.  
Other clues can be found in the archaeological record. “Palaeolithic dogs are generally, but not always, found in Palaeolithic sites,” says archaeozoologist Mietje Germonpré at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. But they don’t just occur in close association with ancient humans and their settlements; there are also signs that these people had deep connections to dogs and other canids. At a site called ‘Uyun al-Hammam in Jordan, for instance, a fox was buried alongside two humans around 16,000 years ago. The excavators of this grave hypothesised the canine wasn’t a grave good, but a companion, buried together with its owners like part of the family. Numerous sites across Europe, Asia and North America suggest similar relationships.  
The red fox buried alongside two people in a 16,000-year-old grave appears to have been a companion animalMaher et al
Germonpré’s work on Palaeolithic dogs has made her an early and prominent advocate of an alternative model of domestication that is now taking hold among a growing body of academics. It sees wolf pups slowly becoming domesticated after first being adopted by humans as pets. Stone Age people would have taken wolf pups from the wild and nurtured them to adulthood. Then, later, by selectively breeding those with the most desirable traits, domestication would have gradually been achieved. Germonpré calls this the human-initiative model of dog domestication.  
In fact, it isn’t a new idea. Probably the earliest and simplest version of it comes from Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin. Galton, a Victorian polymath most notorious for founding the field of eugenics, was an extensive traveller and documentarian. This, along with his many connections to the elite of his day, made him aware of the practices of Indigenous populations – including ones who took young wild animals as pets. Galton wrote about Indigenous peoples in North America who captured bear cubs and wolf pups, South Americans who caught and raised birds, and African populations who adopted young buffalo and antelope. This practice of taking young pets, thought Galton, could be the origin of domestication.  

Modern ethnographic reports paint a similar picture. There are accounts from Russia of groups, including the Khanty and Mansi, keeping fox pups as pets and later killing them for their fur. In North America, the Inuit regularly adopted bear cubs into their families, allowing them to play with children and even sleep in their igloos. The Siberian Ket families also adopted young bear cubs, particularly if they had no children. The Ainu of northern Japan and eastern Russia did something similar, adopting and raising young bear cubs to later sacrifice in ritual ceremonies. 
Anthropologists have recorded many instances of hunters taking young carnivores back to camp and these animals being breastfed by women, a practice also mentioned by Galton. We now also know the tendency for cross-species adoption isn’t even confined to humans. Dolphins have been observed to adopt individuals from other species, as have monkeys. This hints that the desire to affiliate with and care for the young of another species has deep evolutionary origins.  
Sacred animals of the Stone Age
However, the modern version of Galton’s hypothesis goes beyond humanity’s fondness for puppies. Germonpré became interested in the earliest manifestations of canid domestication when studying the relationship that Stone Age hunter-gatherers had with cave bears (Ursus spelaeus). Cave bear bones, including skulls, were often burned, painted with ochre and deposited beneath rock slabs, indicating that these fearsome beasts were imbued with symbolic and ritual meaning. This might have given people another reason to want to adopt and raise bear cubs from an early age. “My interest in the pet model as a hypothesis grew from there,” she says, “with the idea that other carnivores, such as wolves, must have had symbolic value for Palaeolithic people, together with other worths and utilities.”  
Archaeological evidence supports this idea. Many excavated prehistoric sites reveal that Stone Age people had a wide variety of uses for wolves. Their teeth were turned into ornaments, perforated skulls hint at ancient rituals and cut marks suggest people ate wolves and fashioned their long bones into tools. But perhaps the most important resource a wolf provided was its pelt.   
Wolf pelts have long been valued as a source of super-warm clothing by the InuitWerner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Like other species that live at high latitudes, wolves are adapted to thrive in cold conditions, and this includes sporting super-insulated fur with a mixture of long and short hairs. Historical reports recount hunter-gatherers living in northern latitudes across North America, Europe and Asia using wolf fur to line hoods, collars and other clothing. The Inuit historically captured wolf cubs, raised them and killed them for fur, which was also the fate of the Alaskan wolves adopted by the Iñupiat in Murdoch’s record. Likewise, wolf fur would have been a precious resource for people living during the last glacial maximum between around 26,000 and 19,000 years ago. For tens of thousands of years around this time, people had to endure some of the coldest and harshest climates of the past few million years. It is also the period to which many of the fossils of Palaeolithic dogs date.
Exactly how the process of domestication might have unfolded is unclear. “The specific Asian wolf that was ancestral to today’s dogs is gone forever, so the domestication of the dog can never be recreated under experimental conditions,” says Koungoulos. Nevertheless, he and others think there may have been parallels with a much more modern interaction between humans and wild canids. “One of the best analogues we have is the dingo and its relationship to Australian Aboriginal people – some of the only traditional hunter-gatherer peoples to have, until recently, maintained domestic relations with a wild canid,” he says.   
Living with dingoes
The dingo provides a clear illustration of what happens when small bands of mobile people adopt young wild canines but don’t selectively breed them. Until recently, Aboriginal Australians regularly captured dingo pups and cared for them, but then let them go once they reached adulthood. Dingoes haven’t become domesticated despite thousands of years of this sort of association with people. “But this modern example hints at how a long-term tradition of keeping wild-born canid pups as pets could alter the behaviour of the free-living population, or at least parts of it,” says archaeologist Adam Brumm at Griffith University in Australia.  
 
In a paper co-written with Koungoulos and Germonpré, Brumm speculates that when returned to the wild to breed, dingoes may have taken up residence near Aboriginal camps, forming a sort of human-associated subpopulation apart from other dingoes. Their pups then also tend to be the ones taken from nearby dens and adopted as pets. “Perhaps something similar happened tens of thousands of years ago with the grey wolf, giving rise to the first canids we would recognise as dogs,” says Brumm.  
We may never know for sure, but there are still looming questions that canid researchers hope to answer, including exactly where and when domestication originated. Germonpré wants to address these with further studies of ancient canid DNA. Whatever future studies reveal, however, the old story no longer seems plausible. “The self-domestication model still has a number of supporters and popular books out there,” says Koungoulos, “but my feeling is that, in the face of contrary evidence, they take increasingly fringe positions.”
Pierotti’s assessment is more direct: “Do not let yourself be beguiled by the Coppingers and their way of thought.” 

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A stone tool found on Sulawesi, Indonesia, made by an unknown ancient homininBudianto Hakim et al.
Seven stone tools found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are the earliest evidence ever discovered of ancient humans making a sea crossing, dating back up to 1.4 million years.
They may provide clues to how a tiny human species, nicknamed “hobbits”, ended up on the nearby island of Flores.

The first of the artefacts was found embedded in a sandstone outcrop at a site called Calio by Budianto Hakim at the National Research and Innovation Agency in Indonesia in 2019, and a full excavation uncovered six more tools in the same outcrop.
In the same deposit as the stone tools, Hakim and his colleagues found part of the upper jaw, with teeth, of an extinct giant pig known as Celebochoerus, along with a tooth fragment from an unidentifiable species of juvenile elephant.
While the researchers couldn’t directly date the stone tools, they were able to come up with an estimated age of between 1.04 million and 1.48 million years old by analysing the sediments and the fossil pig’s teeth. Until now, evidence of hominins on Sulawesi only stretched back to 194,000 years ago.

At least one of the newly discovered artefacts is a flake that was struck off a larger flake and then had its edges trimmed, says team member Adam Brumm at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. While non-human primates like chimpanzees have been known to use stones like a hammer to break open nuts, they don’t carefully work flakes to produce tools.
“This is a very early kind of human intelligence from a species that no longer exists,” says Brumm. “We don’t know what species it was, but this is a human intelligence behind these stone artefacts at the site of Calio.”
The remains of a metre-tall hominin named Homo floresiensis were discovered on Flores in 2003. Archaeological evidence shows that hominins were on that island more than 1 million years ago, but it has been a mystery how an early human species could have made their way there.
Both Flores and Sulawesi had large expanses of sea separating them from mainland South-East Asia, even during the periods of lowest sea levels. Brumm says the distances between the mainland and Sulawesi were too great to swim and it is almost certain that these early hominins weren’t capable of building ocean-going vessels.
“It may have been some sort of freak geological event, like a tsunami, for example, washing some hominins out to sea clinging to floating trees or vegetation mats of some kind, and then winding up on these islands in large enough numbers to give rise to these isolated populations,” he says.

Martin Porr at the University of Western Australia says Homo erectus was the most likely candidate to have made the sea crossings, as this species was in South-East Asia at this time and made tools similar to those found in Sulawesi.
He says while the new work is consistent with this hypothesis, it also raises many new questions, especially whether the capabilities of these early hominins need to be revised.
The late archaeologist Mike Morwood, who led the team that identified Homo floresiensis, was the first to suggest that Sulawesi was an important place to search for potential ancestors of the hobbits, says Kira Westaway at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. This is due to the path of the Indonesian throughflow, a strong current that flows from Sulawesi to Flores.
“But I think that even Mike would be pleasantly surprised by the antiquity of the stone tools found at this site,” she says. “It could be argued that seven tools is not a large enough assemblage to support large claims, but it certainly represents an early hominin presence.”

Neanderthals, ancient humans and cave art: France

Embark on a captivating journey through time as you explore key Neanderthal and Upper Palaeolithic sites of southern France, from Bordeaux to Montpellier, with New Scientist’s Kate Douglas.

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Topics:ancient humans More

The Retreat of Napoleon’s Army from Russia in 1812 by Ary SchefferIanDagnall Computing / Alamy Stock Photo
When Napoleon’s half-million-strong army retreated from Russia in 1812, around half the men were wiped out by disease, starvation and the extreme cold. Now, state-of-the-art DNA analysis has revealed which pathogens contributed to the catastrophe.
In the summer of 1812, Napoleon gathered as many as 600,000 troops for his invasion of Russia. However, the Tsar’s forces had abandoned Moscow and emptied the city of supplies, forcing Napoleon to retreat to the Polish border for the winter. Between October and December 1812, at least 300,000 French soldiers perished from starvation, cold and disease.

Historical reports from survivors suggested that typhus and trench fever were the main causes of death and illness among the troops, and this was backed up by genetic testing nearly two decades ago.
Now Nicolás Rascovan at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and his colleagues have examined DNA from the teeth of 13 of the soldiers buried in Vilnius, Lithuania, where many soldiers died during the retreat, and found no evidence of either typhus or trench fever.
Instead, the team confirmed the presence of Salmonella enterica, which causes paratyphoid fever, and Borrelia recurrentis, which is transmitted by body lice and causes relapsing fever.

The earlier studies relied on a technique that amplifies specific DNA sequences already suspected to be present. Rascovan and his colleagues used more advanced metagenomic analysis, which can detect the genetic material of any pathogens in a sample, making it much more comprehensive.
“In light of our results, a reasonable scenario for the deaths of these soldiers would be a combination of fatigue, cold and several diseases, including paratyphoid fever and louse-borne relapsing fever,” write Rascovan and his colleagues in their report, which is yet to be peer-reviewed. The team declined to comment for this story.
While not necessarily fatal, the louse-borne relapsing fever could significantly weaken an already exhausted individual, say the researchers.
Sally Wasef at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia says the symptoms recorded in historical accounts could match several infectious diseases besides the ones suggested in the new study.

The microbial DNA recovered from the ancient individuals was in low quantities, says Wasef. “In my view, this means the results are more suggestive than conclusive.”
Wasef says more soldiers who died in 1812 need to be studied to confirm which diseases were present, as Rascovan and his colleagues also state in their study.
The research highlights the potential of new tools to identify possible infectious agents in historical populations, says Wasef. She would like to see the methods used to study diseases in post-contact populations in the Americas or Australia.
“This kind of work has strong potential to clarify the role of disease in past population declines, particularly where written records are incomplete or biased,” says Wasef.

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A 3D model of the tattooed mummy. The top image features textures derived from photographs that were captured using light visible to the human eye, while the bottom image’s textures were derived from photography in the near-infrared, which we cannot seeM. Vavulin
Elaborate tattoos featuring tigers, birds and a fantastical animal have been revealed on an ice mummy from more than 2000 years ago. The mummified woman was from the Pazyryk culture of Siberia, part of the wider Scythian world.
Knowing the prevalence of tattoos during prehistory is hard, because few bodies dating back that far still have skin on them. But there are a few notable exceptions, including Ötzi “the Iceman”, who lived about 3300 BC and was preserved in ice.

Now, Gino Caspari at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany and his colleagues have examined the body of a semi-nomadic Iron Age pastoralist from the Altai mountains in Siberia, who was aged about 50 when she died in the 3rd or 4th century BC. She is one of a handful of people in that area whose deep burial chambers were encased in permafrost, which turned them into “ice mummies”, preserving their skin, but leaving it dark and desiccated.
The tattoos were composed of creatures that seemed to be both real and fantasticalD. Riday
“The tattoos are not visible when looking at the mummy with the naked eye,” says Caspari. So, his team used high-resolution, near-infrared photography to uncover an extraordinary array of hidden images.

“We have herbivores being hunted by tigers and leopards, and in one case by a griffin, and on the hands, we have depictions of birds,” says Caspari. “Due to their age and the vivid art style, the Pazyryk tattoos are something really special.”
One bird looks like a rooster, says team member Aaron Deter-Wolf at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology, but he says tattooed Pazyryk bodies are marked with a mix of realistic and fantastical animals, so it may be that the artist didn’t intend the bird to be a representation of a living creature.
The team also learned how the tattoos were made. “Our analysis shows that the tattoos were created using the direct puncture method, as opposed to being incised or ‘stitched’ into the skin,” says Deter-Wolf.
One of the tattoos seems to feature a roosterD. Riday
Cross-cultural data suggests this was done using a method that is known today as hand-poking, where a needle is dipped in ink and then poked into the skin, creating an image dot by dot. Her tattoos were also made with carbon pigments, probably derived from charcoal, soot or ash.
Those on the woman’s right forearm were more technical and detailed than those on the left, so they may have been done by different people with varying levels of skill, says Caspari. “Our study shows that tattooing was not only a widespread practice on the Eurasian steppes over 2000 years ago, but also makes it clear that it was a specialised craft which involved a lot of knowledge and practice,” he says.

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