Philippa Kaur

Ancient humans adapted to deeper forests as they migrated out of Africa and away from the savannahLIONEL BRET/EURELIOS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
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.
Humans come from Africa. This wasn’t always obvious, but today it seems as close to certain as anything about our origins.
There are two senses in which this is true. The oldest known hominins, creatures more closely related to us than to great apes, are all from Africa, going back as far as 7 million years ago. And the oldest known examples of our species, Homo sapiens, are also from Africa.
It’s the second story I’m focusing on here, the origin of modern humans in Africa and their subsequent expansion all around the world. With the advent of DNA sequencing in the second half of the 20th century, it became possible to compare the DNA of people from different populations. This revealed that African peoples have the most variety in their genomes, while all non-African peoples are relatively similar at the genetic level (no matter how superficially different we might appear in terms of skin colour and so forth).
In genetic terms, this is what we might call a dead giveaway. It tells us that Africa was our homeland and that it was populated by a diverse group of people – and that everyone who isn’t African is descended from a small subset of the peoples, who left this homeland to wander the globe. Geneticists were confident about this as early as 1995, and the evidence has only accumulated since.
And yet, the physical archaeology and the genetics don’t match – at least, not on the face of it.

Genetics tells us that all living non-African peoples are descended from a small group that left the continent around 50,000 years ago. Barring some wobbles about the exact date, that has been clear for two decades. But archaeologists can point to a great many instances of modern humans living outside Africa much earlier than that.
At Apidima cave in Greece, there is a single skull of a modern human from 210,000 years ago. A jawbone from Misliya cave in Israel is at least 177,000 years old. There are some contentious remains from China that might be modern humans. “And there are debates swirling around the earliest colonisation of Australia,” says Eleanor Scerri at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany. Some researchers claim people were on the continent 65,000 years ago.
What is going on? Is our wealth of genetic data somehow misleading us? Or is it true that we are all descended from that last big migration – and the older bones represent populations that didn’t survive?
Scerri and her colleagues have tried to find an explanation.
African environments
The team was discussing where modern humans lived in Africa. “Were humans simply moving into contiguous regions of African grasslands, or were they living in very different environments?” says Scerri.
To answer that, they needed a lot of data.
“We started with looking at all of the archaeological sites in Africa that date to 120,000 years ago to 14,000 years ago,” says Emily Yuko Hallett at Loyola University Chicago in Illinois. She and her colleagues built a database of sites and then determined the climates at specific places and times: “It was going through hundreds and hundreds of archaeological site reports and publications.”

There was an obvious shift around 70,000 years ago. “Even if you just look at the data without any fancy modelling, you do see that there is this change in the conditions,” says Andrea Manica at the University of Cambridge, UK. The range of temperatures and rainfalls where humans were living expanded significantly. “They start getting into the deeper forests, the drier deserts.”
However, it wasn’t enough to just eyeball the data. The archaeological record is incomplete, and biased in many ways.
“In some areas, you have no sites,” says Michela Leonardi at the Natural History Museum in London – but that could be because nothing has been preserved, not because humans were absent. “And for more recent periods, you have more data just because it’s more recent, so it’s easier for it to be conserved.”
Leonardi had developed a statistical modelling technique that could determine whether animals had changed their environmental niche: that is, whether they had started living under different climatic conditions or in a different type of habitat like a rainforest instead of a grassland. The team figured that applying this to the human archaeological record would be a two-week job, says Leonardi. “That was five and a half years ago.”
However, the statistics eventually did confirm what they initially saw: about 70,000 years ago, modern humans in Africa started living in a much wider range of environments. The team published their results on 18 June.
Jacks of all trades
“What we’re seeing at 70,000 [years ago] is almost kind of our species becoming the ultimate generalist,” says Manica. From this time forwards, modern humans moved into an ever-greater range of habitats.
It would be easy to misunderstand this. The team absolutely isn’t saying that earlier H. sapiens weren’t adaptable. On the contrary: one of the things that has emerged from the study of extinct hominins is that the lineage that led to us became increasingly adaptable as time went on.
“People are in different environments from an early stage,” says Scerri. “We know they’re in mangrove forests, they’re in rainforest, they’re in the edges of deserts. They’re going up into highland regions in places like Ethiopia.”
This adaptability seems to be how early Homo survived environmental changes in Africa, while our Paranthropus cousins didn’t: Paranthropus was too committed to a particular lifestyle and was unable to change.

Instead, what seems to have happened in our species 70,000 years ago is that this existing adaptability was turned up to 11.
Some of this isn’t obvious until you consider just how diverse habitats are. “People have an understanding that there’s one type of desert, one type of rainforest,” says Scerri. “There aren’t. There are many different types. There’s lowland rainforest, montane rainforest, swamp forest, seasonally inundated forest.” The same kind of range is seen in deserts.
Earlier H. sapiens groups were “not exploiting the full range of potential habitats available to them”, says Scerri. “Suddenly, we see the beginnings of that around 70,000 years ago, where they’re exploiting more types of woodland, more types of rainforest.”
This success story struck me, because recently I’ve been thinking about the opposite.

Splendid isolation
Last week, I published a story about local human extinctions: groups of H. sapiens that seem to have died out without leaving any trace in modern populations. I focused on some of the first modern humans to enter Europe after leaving Africa, who seem to have struggled with the cold climate and unfamiliar habitats, and ultimately succumbed. These lost groups fascinated me: why did they fail, when another group that entered Europe just a few thousand years later succeeded so enormously?
The finding that humans in Africa expanded their niche from 70,000 years ago seems to offer a partial explanation. If these later groups were more adaptable, that would have given them a better chance of coping with the unfamiliar habitats of northern Europe – and for that matter, South-East Asia, Australia and the Americas, where their descendants would ultimately travel.
One quick note of caution: this doesn’t mean that from 70,000 years ago, human populations were indestructible. “It’s not like all humans suddenly developed into some massive success stories,” says Scerri. “Many of these populations died out, within and beyond Africa.”
And like all the best findings, the study raises as many questions as it answers. In particular: how and why did modern humans became more adaptable 70,000 years ago?
Manica points out that we can also see a shift in the shapes of our skeletons. Older fossils classed as H. sapiens don’t have all the features we associate with humans today, just some of them. “From 70,000 [years ago] onwards, roughly speaking, suddenly you see all these traits present as a package,” he says.

Manica suggests that the expansion into new niches may have enabled this, by bringing previously separate populations into more regular contact. For instance, if two populations were separated by a desert, they would never have met, never exchanged ideas and genes – until someone figured out how to live in the desert.
“There might also be almost a positive feedback,” says Manica. “You connect a bit more, you become more flexible… You break down some of those barriers, you become even more connected.”
With apologies, here is a pat conclusion. In that story about lost populations, I said that one of the biggest threats to human groups is isolation: if you don’t have neighbours you can call on and your group is small, even a minor misfortune can mean apocalypse. If Manica is right, the exact opposite played out in Africa. Populations grew and became more connected, and that enabled an explosion of creativity that sent our species all over the planet.
In which case, the reason the last out-of-Africa migration succeeded so wildly is: people need people. Without other people, we’re stupid and doomed. Any doomsday preppers hoping to ride out the apocalypse alone in a well-provisioned bunker: you may have the wrong approach.

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Archaeological evidence shows that 30,000 years ago, Palaeolithic people travelled from the island now known as Taiwan to the southern islands of Japan. This voyage would have included crossing the Kuroshio, one of the world’s strongest ocean currents.
Yousuke Kaifu at The University Museum of the University of Tokyo wanted to put this journey to the test, so his team built a dugout canoe using tools available to people at the time and set out from Taiwan. The journey spanned 225 kilometres and took the crew 45 hours before they reached Yonaguni Island. This trip came after previous failed attempts that used rafts made of reeds and bamboo.
The success of the voyage gives some insight into how Palaeolithic people might have made the treacherous crossing.

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The cranium of a girl thought to be the offspring of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens parentsIsrael Hershkovitz
A 140,000-year-old hominin skull from Israel probably belonged to a hybrid child of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens parents, according to an analysis of its anatomy. The 5-year-old girl was buried within the earliest known cemetery, possibly reshaping what we know about the first organised burials and the humans behind them.
The skull was originally unearthed from Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel in 1929. In total, these early excavations uncovered seven adults, three children and an assortment of bones that belonged to 16 hominins – all later assigned to Homo sapiens.

The classification of the child’s skull, however, has been contested for nearly a century, partly because the jaw looks dissimilar to typical Homo sapiens mandibles. Original work hypothesised that it belonged to a transitional hominin called Paleoanthropus palestinensis, but later research concluded it most likely belonged to Homo sapiens.
Anne Dambricourt Malassé at the Institute of Human Paleontology in France and her colleagues have now used CT scanning on the skull and compared it with other known Neanderthal children.
“This study is maybe the first that has put the Skhul child’s remains on a scientific basis,” says John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “The old reconstruction and associated work, literally set in plaster, did not really enable anyone to compare this child with a broader array of recent children to understand its biology.”

Malassé and her colleagues found the mandible had distinct Neanderthal characteristics, while the rest of the skull was anatomically consistent with Homo sapiens. They conclude that this combination of features suggests that the child was a hybrid whose parents were different species.
“I have long thought that hybridisations were not viable and I continue to think that they were mostly abortive,” says Malassé. “This skeleton reveals that they were nevertheless possible, even though this little girl lived only 5 years.”
While the new work significantly advances our understanding of the important Skhul child skull, we can’t definitively identify the child as a hybrid without extracting its DNA, which researchers have not been able to do, says Hawks. “Human populations are variable and there can be a lot of variability in their appearance and physical form even without mixing with ancient groups like Neanderthals,” he says.
We know from analyses of ancient and modern genomes that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals have swapped genes many times during the past 200,000 years. In 2018, a 90,000-year-old bone fragment found in Russia was identified as a hybrid between Neanderthals and Denisovans, another ancient hominin, using DNA analysis.

The Levant may have been a particularly important region for mixing among hominin species, due to its position between Africa, Asia and Europe. The region has been characterised as a “central bus station” for humans living in the Pleistocene, says Dany Coutinho Nogueria at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.
The new study forces us to call into question the attribution of the earliest grave site to Homo sapiens, says Malassé. This ritualised behavior may have come from Neanderthals, Homo sapiens or interactions between the two.
“We do not know who buried this child, whether this place chosen to bury the corpse was that of a single community, or whether communities from different lineages, but which coexisted and established contacts or even unions, shared rites and emotions,” says Malassé.

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The Matarrubilla stone at Valencina in Spain was transported more than 5300 years agoL. García Sanjuán
A 2-tonne megalith in southern Spain was transported to its present location by a hitherto-unknown group of ancient seafarers over 5300 years ago.
The Matarrubilla stone is a solid slab of gypsum about 1.7 metres long by 1.2 m wide, sitting within a tomb-like structure at the Copper Age site of Valencina, near Seville.

It is located within a circular chamber called a tholos, with just enough room to stand around it. Given its unique composition and size, it is thought that the stone was used in rituals, but its provenance has been a mystery until now.
Luis Cáceres Puro at the University of Huelva in Spain and his colleagues performed chemical analysis on the slab and optically stimulated luminescence dating – which approximates the last time light struck sediments – on the soil beneath it to better determine its age and site of origin.
The results suggest the megalith was dragged to its current location between 4544 and 3277 BC, which is hundreds of years – possibly even 1000 years – earlier than previously thought. The new dates also suggest the rock was moved to Valencina long before the tunnel structure was built around it.

The stone’s composition most closely matches a quarry 55 kilometres away on the other side of the Guadalquivir river. At the time, there was a wide estuary between the two sites, suggesting the stone must have been transported by boat.
This is the first evidence of a megalithic stone being transported by boat in the Iberian peninsula, but large stones at other megalithic sites in Europe, such as Stonehenge in the UK and Carnac in France, are also thought to have been transported this way.
“The 4th millennium BC saw rapid evolution in coastal navigation,” says team member Leonardo García Sanjuán at the University of Seville. “The Matarrubilla stone basin is a good piece of indirect evidence, which, in our opinion, proves that these people had advanced raft, canoe or sailing-boat technology.”
Archaeological discoveries from other sites show that communities in the Mediterranean were already building sophisticated, seaworthy boats, he adds.

“The crossing of the formerly existing sea with such a huge stone proves once again the technical savoir-faire of the Matarrubilla builders,” says Ramón Fabregas Valcarce at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Valencina is one of the largest prehistoric sites in Europe, covering an area of more than 460 hectares. Among the site’s rarer artefacts are materials imported from far-flung regions, including amber, flint, cinnabar, ivory and ostrich egg.
“[Valencina] contains megalithic monuments, massive ditches, extensive burial records and refined material culture that reveals connections across Iberia, North Africa and the Mediterranean,” says Cáceres Puro.
Prior work in the area has unearthed numerous details indicating the site’s historical significance, including a centuries-long period from 2900 to 2650 BC when it was largely ruled by women.
“The current study adds intriguing further detail for one of Valencina’s major monuments,” says Alasdair Whittle at Cardiff University, UK.

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Neanderthal culinary skills were more sophisticated than we thoughtGREGOIRE CIRADE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Neanderthals were processing animal bones to extract fat from them 125,000 years ago, nearly 100,000 years before modern humans were known to do anything similar.
The evidence comes from an extraordinary lakeside site at Neumark-Nord in eastern Germany, where over 100,000 fragments of bones from at least 172 individual animals have been found. The remains include horses, bovids, deer, foxes, big cats and an extinct two-horned rhinoceros.

The bones had clear signs of being smashed into small pieces and heated to liberate the grease from the spongy tissue inside them. This fat would have provided a less-perishable, easily transportable, high-calorie food that would have been highly prized by hunter-gatherer groups.
Wil Roebroeks at Leiden University in the Netherlands and his colleagues, who carried out the study, describe the location as a “fat factory” that seems to have been used intensively for only a short period. “The fragmentation of the bones is clearly anthropogenic, not the result of carnivores or geological processes,” he says.
While there is no direct evidence that Neanderthals were responsible for the butchery, they were the only known humans in Europe at that time, says Roebroeks.

Previously, the oldest site where grease rendering had been confirmed was in Portugal 28,000 years ago.
Breaking the bones of large mammals into such a vast amount of small fragments is labour-intensive and time-consuming. “This only makes sense if the fragmentation served a purpose,” says Roebroeks.
Although the team doesn’t have direct evidence of boiling, it is clear that the bones were heated. “Judging from the presence of clearly heated bones, heated flint artifacts and stones, fires burnt at the site,” he says.

The earliest known pottery dates from around 20,000 years ago, so the Neanderthals must have used other kinds of vessels to boil the bones. Recent experiments have shown that containers made out of perishable materials such as deer skin or birch bark, placed directly on a fire, are capable of heating water sufficiently to process food, says Roebroeks.
“It is another addition to the cultural repertoire of these distant cousins and underlines the possibility that these hunter-gatherers did engage in some form of food storage,” he says.

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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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