Philippa Kaur

Artificial intelligence has helped decipher an ancient papyrus scroll, which was transformed into a lump of blackened carbon by volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. The first passages of readable text reveal never-before-seen musings from a Greek philosopher. The discovery nabbed the $700,000 grand prize in the Vesuvius Challenge, and used a combination of 3D mapping and AI techniques to detect ink and decipher letter shapes within segments of scrolls known as the Herculaneum papyri, which had been digitally scanned. More

The winners of the Vesuvius Challenge grand prize used technology to decipher a damaged papyrus scrollVesuvius Challenge
Artificial intelligence has helped decipher an ancient papyrus scroll, which was transformed into a lump of blackened carbon by volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. The first passages of readable text reveal never-before-seen musings from a Greek philosopher.
The discovery nabbed the $700,000 grand prize in the Vesuvius Challenge, and used a combination of 3D mapping and AI techniques to detect ink and decipher letter shapes within segments of scrolls known as the Herculaneum papyri, which had been digitally scanned. The combined efforts of the winning team members – Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor and Julian Schilliger – could pave the way for more discoveries from additional papyrus scrolls that were once housed in a library in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum.
“I think it’s going to be a huge boon to our knowledge of ancient philosophy, just gigantic – a staggering amount of new text,” says Michael McOsker at the University College London, who was not involved in the discovery.Advertisement

The winning submission met the Vesuvius Challenge criteria of deciphering more than 85 per cent of characters in four passages consisting of 140 characters each – and as a bonus, it included another 11 columns of text for a total of more than 2000 characters.
Those rediscovered Greek letters reveal the thoughts of Philodemus, who is thought to have been the philosopher-in-residence at the library that housed the Herculaneum papyri. The deciphered text focuses on how the scarcity or abundance of food and other goods impacts the pleasure they deliver. That fits Philodemus’s Epicurean school of philosophy, which prioritised pleasure as the main goal in life. His 2000-year-old writing even appears to possibly take a dig at the Stoic school of philosophy that has “nothing to say about pleasure”.
And the Vesuvius Challenge isn’t over. Its 2024 goals include figuring out how to scale up the 3D scanning and digital analysis techniques without becoming too expensive. The current techniques cost $100 per square centimetre, meaning that it could cost between $1 million and $5 million to virtually unroll an entire scroll – and there are 800 scrolls waiting to be deciphered.
“Realistically, the vast majority of the known, already unrolled library is Epicurean philosophy and that’s what we should expect, but there are also important Stoic texts, maybe some history and some Latin literature. Complete texts of authors like Ennius or Livius Andronicus, early Roman authors [whose works] did not survive, would be great,” says McOsker. “Epicurus’s Symposium, in which he wrote about the biology of wine consumption, would be a lot of fun.”

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A carved piece of ivory possibly used by ancient humans to make ropesConard et al, Sci. Adv. 10, eadh5217 (2024)
A 37,000-year-old piece of mammoth ivory with four carved holes found in a cave in Germany was a tool for making ropes, researchers have concluded, not an artwork as previously thought.

“You can make rope with it very easily, and the rope’s very strong,” says Nicholas Conard at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “Of course, that doesn’t mean that’s the only thing it could be. But compared to saying that it’s a symbol of power or some sort of artwork, I think the rope hypothesis is a pretty good one.”Advertisement
The piece of ivory was found in 2015 in the Hohle Fels cave in the Ach valley in south-west Germany. It hasn’t been dated directly to avoid damaging it, but based on where it was found it must be at least 35,000 years old, and is most likely around 37,000 years old, says Conard, and it was probably made by modern humans. Another study published today shows that modern humans were living in a part of Germany as early as 45,000 years ago.
The artefact consists of a flattened stick of ivory split from a mammoth tusk. It is around 21 centimetres long, with four holes with spiral grooves carved in a row along one end.
“To me it looked like these spirals were indicative of putting something through it,” says Conard. Sure enough, a microscopic examination revealed traces of plant fibres in the grooves. The end without holes looked like a handle, he thought.
So Conard’s colleague Veerle Rots at the University of Liège in Belgium tried using a replica to make rope from a variety of materials, including sinew from deer, flax, hemp, cattail, linden, willow and nettles. She found it worked best with cattail, also known as reedmace or bulrush.
Her team fed three or four strands of twisted cattail into the holes, which combined into a rope on the other side. Using the tool required one person for each strand, plus one to hold the tool and move it along the strands, so four or five in total.
They were able to make 5 metres of rope in around 10 minutes. Experienced ropemakers would have done much better, says Conard.
Similar ivory objects with four or two holes, or just one hole, have been found at other sites in the region. Conard thinks these were used for ropemaking as well. “I think they’re kind of high-tech tools,” he says.
It is likely that ropes were being made much further back than 37,000 years ago, he says, but for now this is the earliest evidence of ropemaking yet found. However, a 50,000-year-old piece of string has been found at a Neanderthal site in France.

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Early European humans may have hunted mammoths in a frozen landscapeDorling Kindersley/Getty Images
When modern humans first began settling in Europe, they went straight to the cold north. A challenging excavation in Germany places our species in the region at least 45,000 years ago – and supports earlier claims that our ancestors were in Britain not long after.

“These guys came into a landscape which was quite hostile,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “It was like northern Finland [today].”Advertisement
Modern humans (Homo sapiens) are the most recent hominin to permanently settle in Europe, around 45,000 years ago. Previously, the continent was dominated for hundreds of thousands of years by Neanderthals, who vanish from the fossil record about 40,000 years ago. Modern humans and Neanderthals may have overlapped in France and Spain for 1400 to 2900 years.
“The replacement of all archaic humans by Homo sapiens, between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago, is something that occurred all over Eurasia,” says Hublin. It was a crucial period because for millions of years there had been multiple hominins coexisting, but now only one survived.
“This is the start of one species invading all the possible habitable niches on the Earth,” says Hublin. “We know it happened… but we don’t know why and how it happened.”
The transitional period is mysterious. There are several types of stone artefacts from the period that could have been made by Neanderthals or modern humans. One, found in several sites in northern Europe, is the Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician (LRJ) – characterised by long, leaf-shaped points that may have been fitted to spears. They had never been found in association with confidently identified hominin bones. “We had no clue who made them,” says Hublin.
To find out, Hublin and his colleagues visited several sites that had yielded LRJ artefacts. Unfortunately, previous archaeologists had destroyed the sites with crude excavation methods. The one exception was a cave called Ilsenhöhle near Ranis, Germany. It collapsed thousands of years ago, so the initial excavations in the 1930s were difficult and some of the site remained undisturbed. Hublin’s team re-excavated it, digging a deep shaft down to the relevant sediment layer.
So-called LRJ stone tools found at Ilsenhöhle cave in GermanyJosephine Schubert, Museum Burg Ranis, (CC-BY-ND 4.0)
It was an “exceptionally difficult” excavation, says Marie Soressi at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Buried in the sediments, Hublin’s team found many fragments of bone. They also re-examined similar fragments from the original excavations. By analysing the collagen protein in the bones, they determined that 13 belonged to hominins. To identify them more precisely, the team extracted mitochondrial DNA, which people inherit solely from their mothers, from 11 of the fragments. “They are Homo sapiens,” says Hublin.
The techniques used were “top-notch”, says Soressi. She wants to see nuclear DNA as well, to be sure, because it is possible the individuals were hybrids with Neanderthal fathers – which mitochondrial DNA wouldn’t show. However, she says this is “very unlikely”.

The timing of H. sapiens occupying the Ilsenhöhle fits with existing evidence. Hublin’s team previously showed that modern humans lived in Bacho Kiro cave in Bulgaria about 45,000 years ago. However, Ilsenhöhle is much further north.
In a second study, Hublin’s colleagues used chemical evidence from preserved horse teeth to show that the climate in this part of Germany was cold at the time, especially between 45,000 and 43,000 years ago. Again, this fits prior evidence: in 2014, Hublin’s team showed that modern humans were living in Willendorf, Austria, north of the Alps, in a cold steppe-like environment 43,500 years ago.
A third study examines the animal bones from Ilsenhöhle, revealing that the cave was mostly inhabited by cave bears and hyenas. The implication is that modern humans were only there intermittently.
This points to a “quick occupation by small groups of ‘pioneers’”, says Soressi.
Similar claims have been made for the cave of Grotte Mandrin in France: it may have been briefly inhabited by modern humans 54,000 years ago, before Neanderthals reclaimed the site.
Now that the LRJ tools at Ilsenhöhle have been associated with modern humans, it is reasonable to assume that other LRJ artefacts were also made by H. sapiens, says Hublin. This implies modern humans made it to Britain early on. Part of a jawbone found in Kents Cavern in Devon, England, had been tentatively identified as a modern human and dated to around 43,000 years ago – and was found with LRJ artefacts.

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The first members of our species to reach China might have entered the region from the northEsteban De Armas / Alamy
Modern humans were living in what is now China by 45,000 years ago. The finding means our species reached the area thousands of years earlier than generally thought, possibly via a northerly route through modern-day Siberia and Mongolia.
A team co-led by Francesco d’Errico at the University of Bordeaux in France re-examined an archaeological site called Shiyu in northern China. It was originally excavated in 1963 during the unrest of China’s cultural revolution. “This was not the best moment to find such an important site,” says d’Errico.

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Shiyu is an open-air site in a river gully. It holds a 30-metre-deep deposit of sands and other sediment, which the original excavators divided into four horizontal layers, the second from bottom of which was found to hold evidence of human occupation.
The excavators found over 15,000 stone artefacts and thousands of animal bones. There was also a single piece of hominin skull, which anthropologist Woo Ru-Kang identified as a modern human (Homo sapiens).
Some of the artefacts were later transferred to the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. But those left at the local facilities – including the hominin bone – were lost. “We have perhaps 10 per cent of the stone tools,” says d’Errico.
D’Errico and his colleagues have re-excavated Shiyu to determine its age. They dated 15 samples of sediment using a technique called optically stimulated luminescence, and carbon-dated 10 animal bones and teeth. The hominin layer is about 44,600 years old.
D’Errico is confident that the skull was correctly identified, as the excavators were “knowledgeable”.
The Shiyu hominins were probably H. sapiens, says Arina Khatsenovich at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk, Russia, who was not involved in the study.
As such, the new study implies modern humans had reached northern China about 45,000 years ago. This pushes back our species’ arrival in China by about 5000 years. D’Errico argues the next oldest H. sapiens site in China is Tianyuan cave, which is 40,000 years old.
Some researchers have claimed our species arrived earlier, potentially up to 260,000 years ago. But d’Errico points out that researchers have critiqued much of the evidence for such an early human presence in the region.
It may be that, as humans entered Asia from Africa, they spread out via multiple routes, says Khatsenovich. As well as exploring the tropical southern regions of Asia, they also went further north. Khatsenovich says there are signs of a modern human presence in this region, including at Obi-Rakhmat Grotto in Uzbekistan from 48,800 years ago. It may be that our species reached Shiyu, and China, via this northern route.

As modern humans reached new areas, they encountered hominins that already lived there like the Neanderthals and, further east, the Denisovans. Genetic evidence has shown we interbred with them. There may also have been cultural exchanges: the artefacts at Shiyu include some that look more like archaic human tools.
There is also evidence of long-distance exchanges. The Shiyu team identified four pieces of obsidian, a volcanic glass. They were able to trace them to sites 800 and 1000 kilometres north-east of Shiyu. D’Errico says it is unlikely the inhabitants travelled these distances themselves, so they were probably part of a network of groups. In line with this, Khatsenovich says some of the Shiyu artefacts resemble pieces found in Korea, far to the east.

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Lidar scans of the Upano valley in Ecuador showing raised platformsStephen Rostain
Aerial surveys have revealed the largest pre-colonial cities in the Amazon yet discovered, linked by an extensive network of roads.

“The settlements are much bigger than others in the Amazon,” says Stéphen Rostain at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. “They are comparable with Maya sites.”Advertisement
What’s more, at between 3000 and 1500 years old, these cities are also older than other pre-Columbian ones discovered in the Amazon. Why the people who built them disappeared isn’t clear.
It is often assumed that the Amazon rainforest was largely untouched by humans before the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus reached the Americas in the 15th century. In fact, the first Europeans reported seeing many farms and towns in the region.
These reports, long dismissed, have in recent decades been backed up by discoveries of ancient earthworks and extensive dark soils created by farmers. One estimate puts the pre-Columbian population of the Amazon as high as 8 million.
Rostain and his colleagues have been studying archaeological sites in the Upano valley of the Ecuadorian Amazon, in the foothills of the Andes, since the 1990s. Traces of ancient settlements were first found there in the 1970s, but only a handful of sites have been excavated.
In 2015, Rostain’s team did an aerial survey with lidar, a laser scanning technique that can create a detailed 3D map of the surface beneath most vegetation, revealing features not normally visible to us. The findings, which have only now been published, show that the settlements were far more extensive than anyone realised.
The survey revealed more than 6000 raised earthen platforms within an area of 300 square kilometres. These are where wooden buildings once stood – excavations have revealed post holes and fireplaces on these structures.
Most platforms are around 10 by 20 metres and 2 metres high, and are thought to be the former sites of houses. The largest is 40 by 140 metres and 5 metres high, and was thought to be the site of monumental buildings used for ceremonies.
Around the platforms were fields, many of which were drained by small canals dug around them. “The valley was almost completely modified,” says Rostain.
Analysis of pottery suggests that maize, beans, manioc and sweet potatoes were grown.
Overall there were five major settlements in the area surveyed. They could be described as garden cities, says Rostain, due to their low density of buildings.
The survey also revealed a network of straight roads created by digging out soil and piling it on the sides. The longest extends for at least 25 kilometres, but might continue beyond the area that was surveyed.
The Upano valley in EcuadorStephen Rostain
What is peculiar is that the Upano people went to great lengths to make the roads straight, says Rostain. In places they dug down 5 metres rather than follow contours, for instance. So the roads probably had symbolic significance, as there was no practical reason to make them straight, he says.
In places there are also signs of defensive structures such as ditches, so there may have been some conflict between groups.
In the rest of the Amazon, many settlements were abandoned after the arrival of Europeans, probably because diseases and violence unleashed by the invaders killed a large proportion of the population.
All the Upano artefacts dated by Rostain’s team are older than 1500 years, however, suggesting the settlements in the valley were abandoned after this time, long before the colonial era. Why isn’t clear, but the team has found layers of volcanic ash, so it is possible a series of eruptions forced people to leave the valley.

“This shows an unprecedented degree of complexity and density of settlement for this early time frame,” says Michael Heckenberger at the University of Florida. “The authors justifiably conclude that the complexity and scale are comparable with better known cases, such as the Maya, at this time.”
“This is the largest complex with large settlements so far found in Amazonia,” says Charles Clement at the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil.
What’s more, it was found in a region of the Amazon that other researchers had concluded was sparsely inhabitated during pre-Columbian times, says Clement.

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