Philippa Kaur

A life-sized camel engraving at Jebel Misma, Saudi ArabiaSahout Rock Art and Archaeology Project
Ancient inhabitants of the Arabian desert created monumental works of rock art on cliff faces, including life-sized images of camels, perhaps as a way to mark sources of water.
Michael Petraglia, at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues discovered 176 engravings on 62 panels in the Nefud desert in Saudi Arabia in 2023. There are 90 life-sized images of camels, another 15 smaller camel engravings and two camel footprints.

One of the rock art sites, featuring a 3-metre-tall dromedary, was more than 40 metres up the cliff and impossible for members of the team to safely reach and survey without deploying a drone.
“It would have been dangerous to make these engravings,” says Petraglia. “There’s no way I would go up there.”
Alongside the camels, and highlighting how much more benign the climate must have been, are other large animals including ibex, horses, gazelles and aurochs. The team also found engraved human figures and face masks.

“It’s not just doodling or marking the landscape,” says Petraglia. “These are engravings of things that would have been iconic for them culturally.”
The researchers say the images were possibly carved to warn any outsiders that the land was already occupied or to act as a signpost for ephemeral water sources. The new discoveries add to evidence of extensive past occupation of Saudi Arabia in prehistoric times.
Indicating the antiquity of the images, a natural varnish had formed over the engravings, a process that researchers know would have taken around 8000 years. However, it wasn’t possible to directly date the artwork, so the team excavated in the sediments under the rock art panels.
Excavation of a trench directly beneath a rock art panel at Jebel Arnaan, where engraving tools were discoveredSahout Rock Art and Archaeology Project
There, they found stone points, beads and ochres indicating links with Late Neolithic people in the Levant, as well as tools that would have been used to make the engravings. These objects were able to be dated and ranged in age from 12,800 to 11,400 years old.
Excavations were also undertaken in the small temporary lakes, called playas, near the engravings, which the ancient people would have relied on. Sediments and pollen records confirmed that the region would have been much wetter and greener.
But, even so, the environment was challenging and unlikely to be a place where people could settle and stay for long periods of time, says Petraglia.
“These were likely very mobile people and highly innovative,” he says. “These are sophisticated hunter-gatherers and definitely not people just sort of figuring it out.”

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The Yunxian 2 skull was squashed, but has now been reconstructed and appears to be an early DenisovanGary Todd (CC0)
The origins of our species may lie much further back in time than we thought, and the same may be true of our extinct Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins. According to a new analysis of fossil remains, the shared ancestor of the three groups lived over a million years ago – more than twice as old as previously believed.
“It does mean that we are missing a huge bit of the early story of these lineages, if we’re correct about these ancient branching points,” says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London.

The results could potentially help settle the search for Ancestor X: the population that gave rise to modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. They could also mean that the Denisovans were our closest relatives – even closer than the Neanderthals, though not everyone is convinced on this last point.
Stringer and his colleagues, including Xijun Ni at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China, re-examined a fossil hominin from Yunxian in central China.
Two partial skulls were uncovered in a terrace above the Han River in 1989 and 1990, and described in 1992. Both skulls had been squashed during their time in the ground. However, the second, Yunxian 2, was less badly damaged.

Stringer, Ni and their colleagues used the latest methods to reconstruct Yunxian 2, including a technique that can use CT scans to digitally separate individual fragments of bone from the surrounding “matrix” of rock and sediment. “It’s long and low, with a big brow ridge,” says Stringer. It also has “a bit of a beaky nose”, and while the teeth are large, the third molars are small.
The Yunxian 2 cranium is 940,000 to 1.1 million years old. Hominins of that age are often thought to belong to Homo erectus, which emerged in Africa around 2 million years ago before spreading to southern Asia, including Indonesia, where it survived until perhaps 108,000 years ago. However, Stringer says it doesn’t fit the profile. Many of its features are typical of later groups, like the Neanderthals.
To figure out what Yunxian 2 is, the team compared it to 56 other hominin fossils. Based on the shapes of the remains, they drew a family tree, with similar fossils being closely related. On this basis, they identified three major groups, which include most of the fossils from the past million years.
The first was modern humans (Homo sapiens). The second was Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), who lived in Europe and Asia during the past few hundred thousand years, vanishing around 40,000 years ago. The third was Denisovans, from eastern Asia.

Denisovans were originally discovered in 2010 using DNA from a bone fragment, and it has taken 15 years to identify larger fossils. Stringer was involved in the description of a skull from Harbin in China, dubbed Homo longi, which was identified as a Denisovan using molecular evidence in June. Yunxian 2 appears to be an early Denisovan, as do several other Asian fossils.
It is helpful to tie all these fossils into the Denisovan lineage, says geneticist Aylwyn Scally at the University of Cambridge. “We can get a better idea about where the Denisovans were, how they lived, and what kind of species they were.”
The finding that Yunxian 2 is Denisovan rewrites the story of recent human evolution in two ways. First, it appears to change how the three populations emerged. The conventional story, as revealed by genetics, is that an ancestral population – Ancestor X – split into two: one half became modern humans, and the other half became Neanderthals and Denisovans, who split from each other a bit later. However, in this reconstruction, it was the Neanderthals who broke away first, 1.38 million years ago, with modern humans and the Denisovans separating 1.32 million years ago.
If that is correct, Denisovans were our closest relatives, instead of being equally close to us as Neanderthals were, as the genetics indicates. However, Scally is dubious. That is partly because the history of these populations seems to be complex. “It isn’t actually well described by a simple tree,” which is the model the researchers used, but rather by a “tangled network”, he says. Furthermore, Scally says genetics is a better guide to such relationships than morphology – especially when you have only partial skeletons – and the genetics tells a clear story.
The second change is bigger: all three groups are much older than we thought. Genetics has suggested that the ancestors of modern humans split from the progenitors of Neanderthals and Denisovans around 500,000-700,000 years ago. But Yunxian 2 indicates that the Denisovan group was already separate over a million years ago.

It may be that there isn’t a single date for any of these splits, says Scally. They could have been protracted, with groups sometimes separating and sometimes coming together. In that case, Stringer and his colleagues could be correct that the divergence began over a million years ago, but it took hundreds of thousands of years to play out.
This longer timeline opens new questions. The oldest known fossils of our species are about 300,000 years old. So, where are all the older ancestors dating back a million years ago? “Either we don’t have them, or they’re there and they haven’t been recognised,” says Stringer.
We also don’t know what Ancestor X was like, or where it lived. “Ten years ago, I would have said probably Africa is the ancestry of most of these groups,” says Stringer. “It looks more likely that the ancestor was outside of Africa, perhaps in Western Asia,” he says. “That would imply that the ancient sapiens ancestor must have gone into Africa and then evolved in Africa for most of the rest of that 1 million years.”
Stringer points out that there are few known fossils from western Asia dating to a million years ago, and India has yielded only one hominin fossil. “There’s many, many places where we really don’t have the evidence,” he says.
One source of data may be the Yunxian site. In 2022, a third skull was found there, apparently in better condition, but it hasn’t yet been described.

Neanderthals, ancient humans and cave art: France

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Ludovic Slimak helped uncover the remains of Thorin, a NeanderthalLaure Metz
The Last NeanderthalLudovic Slimak (translated by Andrew Brown) (Polity Press (UK, 26 September; US, 24 November))
A Neanderthal skeleton spotted by chance under some leaves, calcified soot and a trove of remarkably tiny arrowheads. These assorted finds from Grotte Mandrin in France have not only transformed our understanding of Neanderthals, but also of the first waves of our species, Homo sapiens, to have reached Europe.
Even more remarkably, the cave has revealed secrets about when the two groups first encountered each other, and why one species subsequently thrived, while the other went extinct. That is the question tackled in The Last Neanderthal: Understanding how humans die, a new book by palaeoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak at the University of Toulouse, France, who led the excavations at Grotte Mandrin.
Central to this story is Thorin, a Neanderthal fossil discovered in 2015 just outside the cave entrance, when the sweep of a brush revealed five of his teeth, visible on the soil surface. To preserve every bit of information from this rare find, the bones were painstakingly excavated using tweezers to remove one grain of sand at a time. It took seven years just to recover the remains of his skull and left hand.
The discovery opened up a mystery that took years to solve: different dating techniques produced wildly conflicting results about when Thorin had lived. Eventually, it was confirmed that the fossil was between 42,000 and 50,000 years old, making Thorin one of the last Neanderthals (the species died out entirely around 40,000 years ago). Remarkably, his genome could be sequenced, revealing he was part of a previously unknown lineage that diverged from the main Neanderthal population at least 50,000 years earlier, then existed in extreme isolation.
The Last Neanderthal is a deeply personal and philosophical book that conjures a vivid sense of what it is like to investigate Thorin’s existence and that of the different groups that occupied the cave over millennia. The distinctive smell at Grotte Mandrin, Slimak realises, is from the soot of ancient fires preserved in calcite layers on the walls, forming a black-and-white “bar code”. The bar code can be precisely dated, so bits that have fallen to the floor provide dates for different occupations, revealing that H. sapiens occupied the cave just six months after Neanderthals left. The book conveys Slimak’s astonishment at discovering Thorin hiding in plain sight. “You don’t find a Neanderthal body by taking a stroll through the forest, just like that, lying on the side of the path,” he writes. “It’s crazy.”
The jaw of Thorin, a Neanderthal fossil discovered in 2015Xavier Muth
Which brings us to the question of why the Neanderthals died out. This is much debated, with the finger typically pointed at extermination by the incoming H. sapiens, or climatic upheaval resulting from a volcanic eruption or a flipping of Earth’s magnetic field. But Slimak has a different view, drawing on evidence found at Grotte Mandrin, in particular a layer of tiny, triangular stone points that were probably used as arrowheads by one of the first waves of H. sapiens to reach the region about 55,000 years ago.
These points are almost identical to artefacts made by H. sapiens in roughly the same time period at a site called Ksar Akil in Lebanon, nearly 4000 kilometres away. This indicates that these people were remarkably efficient at preserving and standardising their traditions across vastly distant social networks, leading Slimak to conclude that they had far more efficient “ways of being in the world” than Neanderthals, who lived in small, isolated groups without such standardisation.
We might like to imagine a dramatic face-off between H. sapiens and Neanderthals, but the reality was totally different, he writes. Drawing on accounts of the collapses of numerous Indigenous groups in Africa, Australia and the Americas after colonisation, Slimak argues that Neanderthal groups slowly fell apart when confronted with others who had a much more efficient way of existing. “It is in the collapse of their views on the reality of the world that humans die… not with a bang but a whimper,” he writes.

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The bones were painstakingly excavated using tweezers to remove a grain of sand at a time
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It is a desperately sad eventuality to contemplate, yet immersing yourself in the world of these lost people in The Last Neanderthal is a rare treat.

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A collection of stone tools at the Milovice IV archaeological siteMartin Novák
A set of stone tools found in the Czech Republic appears to be the personal toolkit of a hunter-gatherer who lived about 30,000 years ago. The 29 artefacts, which include blades and points meant for hunting, skinning, basic butchering and cutting wood, offer a rare glimpse into the daily lives of ancient hunters, says Dominik Chlachula at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno.
In 2009, a village road collapsed in the Pavlovské vrchy mountains in the south-east of the country, opening up abandoned cellars that archaeologists began studying. In 2021, they found a deeper level of the site, called Milovice IV, containing charcoal dated to between 29,550 and 30,250 years ago. There, researchers found horse and reindeer bones, and – more recently – a bundle of stone tools, still positioned as if they had been wrapped in a leather pouch that had long since decayed.

The tools showed signs of significant use, says Chlachula. Most of the blades were worn down from cutting and scraping bones, wood and hides, and some bore marks of having been attached to a handle. Some of the points had fractures or microscopic traces of impact, and one had apparently been used as the tip of a spear or arrow.
Several of the pieces had been recycled from older, different tools, suggesting good stone was scarce or that the hunter was mindful of not wasting resources, he says.
Further analyses revealed that about two-thirds of the tools had been crafted from glacial deposit flint stones found at least 130 kilometres northward – and significantly farther if using winding footpaths to reach them. Most of the others appeared to come from western Slovakia, about 100 kilometres south-east. Whether the owner acquired the stones directly from deposits  or through a trade network remains unknown, says Chlachula.

Many pieces were too worn or broken to be used as is, he explains. But it is possible the hunter kept them in the hope of recycling them — or even for their sentimental value.

Neanderthals, ancient humans and cave art: France

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Left: The remains of a middle-aged woman at the Liyupo site in southern China, who was smoke-dried prior to burial about 8000 years ago. Right: A modern smoke-dried mummy of the Dani people in West Papua, IndonesiaZhen Li, Hirofumi Matsumura, Hsiao-chun Hung
Human bodies carefully preserved by smoking up to 14,000 years ago have been found at archaeological sites in South-East Asia, making them the oldest known mummies in the world.
A similar practice continues today among the Dani people in West Papua, Indonesia. The Dani mummify their deceased relatives by exposing the bodies to smoke, then keep and revere them as part of the household. Many of their mummies are tightly bound in crouching poses.
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Similar “hyper-flexed” ancient human remains have also been found in Australia, China, the Philippines, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan.
Hsiao-chun Hung, at the Australian National University in Canberra, says that while she was working on ancient skeletons in Vietnam in 2017, she was struck by the similarity of the burial remains they were excavating to the Dani’s tradition.
Hung and her colleagues studied 54 hunter-gatherer burials from 11 archaeological sites located across South-East Asia, dating from 12,000 to 4000 years ago, to look for evidence of the skeletons having been slowly smoked. Most of the sites were in northern Vietnam and southern China.

Many of the remains showed clear signs of being partially burned, but not enough to have been cremated. The researchers then applied two analytical techniques – X-ray diffraction and infrared spectroscopy – to dozens of bone samples to reveal whether they were exposed to heat and how much.
Over 90 per cent of the 69 skeletal samples showed evidence of having been heated. The results showed that the human remains hadn’t been exposed to high heat but rather to low temperatures, indicating they had been smoked for possibly weeks or even months.
The oldest mummy tested by the team, from Hang Cho, Vietnam, was over 11,000 years old. But similarly singed, tightly bound skeletons were also found at another site in Hang Muoi, Vietnam, dated to over 14,000 years ago. “We did not test this one by X-ray or infrared because it was obviously partly burnt, and could be observed with the naked eye,” Hung says.
Until now, the oldest known mummified humans were from northern Chile, around 7000 years ago, and Ancient Egypt, from 4500 years ago.
Hung says all the evidence points to the likelihood that this type of burial practice was widespread across southern China and South-East Asia, stretching back at least 14,000 years or even earlier, and continuing until about 4000 to 3500 years ago, when farming populations became dominant in the region. The hyper-flexed bindings of the mummified bodies might have made them easier to transport, she says.

Ethnographic records indicate that the tradition persisted in southern Australia into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, says Hung. “And our own ethnoarchaeological studies in the New Guinea Highlands reveal that, in some communities, this practice still continues today.”
“The results show that a unique combination of technique, tradition, culture, and above all, a deep belief and enduring love for the ancestors has persisted for an astonishing length of time and spread across a vast region, from the Palaeolithic era to the present,” she says.
Vito Hernandez at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, says the study challenges long-standing assumptions that early mummification practices arose only in arid areas like Atacama in South America or the Nile valley. “It emphasises the role tropical environments have played in fostering distinct mortuary traditions amongst early modern humans to have spread to the Far East and, potentially, the Pacific,” he says.
“By extending the timeline of mummification by at least 5000 years before Chinchorro culture [of South America], they highlight South-East Asia as an independent centre of cultural innovation and underscore the deep cultural continuities linking early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the region with present-day Indigenous groups in New Guinea and Australia,” says Hernandez.

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

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