Philippa Kaur

Ancient human remains are rare and don’t necessarily contain DNAShutterstock/Microgen
It was an otherwise ordinary day in 2015 when Viviane Slon had her eureka moment. As she worked at her computer, the results revealed the sample she was examining contained human DNA. There was nothing so unusual about that in itself: at the time, the ancient DNA (aDNA) revolution was in full swing, and surprising new insights about our ancestors were being gradually unveiled. But Slon’s sample wasn’t from human remains – it was just dirt from a cave floor. That immediately told her she was onto something big.
Many archaeological sites yield tools and artefacts that tell us about human occupation, but few have provided the bones or teeth that could still harbour human aDNA. Even when such remains are present, the chances that genetic material survives within them is slim because DNA is damaged by heat, moisture and acidity. So finding another source of aDNA – the soil itself – was a game changer. “That opens up hundreds of prehistoric sites that we couldn’t work on before,” says Slon.

Besides, humble dirt can reveal a lot about our distant past. Whereas fossils provide snapshots of prehistory, sediment gives a DNA source that can, in theory, generate an unbroken narrative. Researchers can study hominins predating the practice of burial. They can work out which groups created particular tools and other artefacts, learning more about their cognitive and artistic… More

A reconstruction of the dress from an Iron Age grave in the Netherlands, created by Prehistorisch Dorp in EindhovenHanna Geels
A 2800-year-old red and blue checked dress found in an Early Iron Age grave in the Netherlands might be the oldest double-colour woven garment in Europe.
The skeleton of the elite individual who once wore this striking outfit had completely decayed due to harsh, sandy soil. But through mineralisation underneath metallic jewellery, remnants of the much-decayed and now-brown wool dress provide evidence that the dyed textiles came from clothing, says Karina Grömer at the Natural History Museum, Vienna.… More

Skeleton of Homo naledi, found in the Rising Star cave system in South AfricaJohn Hawks/Shutterstock
Blazing the Trail
Australian Museum, University of Sydney, BreakThru Films
It is after 10pm and I am on a cycleway in Sydney returning from dinner with friends. It is a warm evening in the week before Christmas and people are still out on the streets, gathering for end-of-year drinks.
As I cycle, I’m using my Air Pods to listen to a podcast broadcast by Bluetooth from my smartphone. The podcast, downloaded from invisible Wi-Fi, is about the origins of humanity. It strikes me that,… More

The stones that make up Stonehenge came from all over BritainHeritage Image Partnership Ltd /Alamy
Stonehenge may have been built to symbolise a unification in Stone Age Britain. The idea could explain why so many of the stones making up the monument were brought in over huge distances.
Located on Salisbury plain in southern England, Stonehenge seems to have been built in phases between 3100 and 1600 BC. There is an outer ring of vertical sarsen stones topped by horizontal lintels; inside that is a smaller ring of vertical bluestones and a number of other stones, including a horizontal… More

Lucy, the fossil hominin who lived around 3.2 million years ago, would have been no match for modern humans in a running race.
Even an average member of our species would have left her for dead in a 100-metre sprint, and the current world record holder for this distance, Usain Bolt, would have beaten Lucy by somewhere between 50 and 80 metres.

Karl Bates at the University of Liverpool in the UK and his colleagues have, for the first time, attempted to determine how fast Lucy’s species, … More

An adult skull from the Charterhouse Warren mass grave in the UK, featuring cut marks and a blunt force fractureIan R. Carwright/Institute of Archaeology Oxford University
Around 4000 years ago, at least 37 men, woman and children were brutally butchered, dismembered and possibly eaten by their enemies before their remains were tossed into a 15-metre-deep cave shaft with cattle bones.
It is the largest and most extreme episode of mass violence known from prehistoric Britain. The archaeologists behind the discovery think the perpetrators did it to dehumanise, or “other”, the victims, possibly as revenge to send a political message.… More

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