Philippa Kaur

Illustration of modern humans who lived in Europe about 45,000 years agoTom Björklund
Modern humans and Neanderthals interbred over a sustained period of around 7000 years, probably in the eastern Mediterranean. That is according to two studies that trace how these two hominins hybridised in unprecedented detail.
“The vast majority of the Neanderthal gene flow… occurred in a single, shared, extended period,” says Priya Moorjani at the University of California, Berkeley.

The studies confirm that modern humans acquired important gene variants by mixing with Neanderthals,… More

We will never know who spoke the first sentence or what they said, but we can have some fun speculating. Perhaps it came out of the mouth of a Stone Age man who hoped to defeat a rival and win the affections of a young woman. He might have sidled up to his love interest and, while furtively pointing at his competitor, whispered gently in her ear something that translates into English as “shit-head”.
Ridiculous? Not if you are guided by the research of linguist Ljiljana Progovac. She points out that although Charles Darwin described language as “half art, half instinct”, most people who study its evolution have neglected the creative element. Her research starts to redress that by homing in on the wordplay involved in compound phrases such as shit-head, skin-flint and lily-livered, many of which are written as single words today. These, she believes, are linguistic fossils that hint at a crucial stage in language evolution: the moment when humans realised that they could string two words together to create very short sentences.
What’s more, after gathering examples of such phrases, Progovac noticed they have something surprising in common. “They are usually derogatory,” she says. And there could be a good evolutionary reason for that too.

Language is central to the human experience, but studying its ancient roots is difficult because it leaves no archaeological traces – at least until the invention of writing. Nevertheless, judging by communication systems in other animals, we can assume that our ancestors started by making simple noises or… More

Adrià Voltà
All over the northern hemisphere, millions of animals are tucked up somewhere safe, hibernating through the cold, ready to come up smiling in spring. Bats, marmots, hedgehogs, bears. And not just in the wintry north: animals in the tropics do it too, such as some fruit bats and one primate, the dwarf lemur. It had long been a dream to copy the process in people – and by the 2050s, it had become a reality.
Animals hibernate at different “depths”, with varied reductions in metabolism and body temperature. Arctic squirrels are the champions, dropping their metabolic rate by 98… More

More than just fossils show us how humans have evolved through timeIvan M / Alamy Stock Photo
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.
This month, Our Human Story turns 50 (months old). For the 50th instalment, I thought I would do something a little different: take stock of what’s happened, and look ahead. I emailed 10 researchers, asking them two questions:

What has been the biggest advance in human evolution of the past five years? This could… More

Bill McConkey
In the 1970s, in a grave in a Bronze Age cemetery in Shahr-i Sokhta, Iran, an incredible object was unearthed next to a human skull: the oldest complete board game ever discovered. Around 4500 years old, it consists of a board with 20 circular spaces created from the coils of a carved snake, four dice and 27 geometric pieces.
The Shahr-i Sokhta game is one of many ancient board games discovered around the world, such as the Roman game Ludus Latrunculorum and the Egyptian game Senet, found in Tutankhamun’s tomb. But we have only been able to guess how to play these games. There are no preserved rulebooks – with the notable exception of the Royal Game of Ur from ancient Mesopotamia, whose long-lost rules were deciphered in 2007 from a cuneiform tablet in the British Museum.

Now, though, another tool is helping to bring these games back to life. In recent years, researchers have been harnessing artificial intelligence to assist in the hunt for likely rules. The goal is to make these forgotten games realistically playable again, while also gaining insights into the evolution of game types. “These games act as a window into the past, offering glimpses into the social and cultural dynamics of the people who played them,” says Eric Piette at the Catholic University of… More

Santa Claus alone is not enough for a happy ChristmasTristan Fewings/Getty Images for Hamleys
He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice, but Santa’s festive surveillance seemingly does nothing to improve children’s behaviour. Instead, it may be that wider Christmas rituals, like putting up a tree and going carolling, can prompt children to be a bit nicer – a finding that may help us better understand how religion influences behaviour.
“The question was, does belief in Santa Claus influence how children behave?” says Rohan Kapitány at Durham University in the UK. “Does this belief,… More