Philippa Kaur

Erta Ale Volcano in EthiopiaShutterstock/Tatyana Druzhinina
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.
So, volcanoes are scary. I have vivid memories of visiting Pompeii and Herculaneum with my parents and seeing the twisted preserved corpses of people that were buried under the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius. The people in question lived in what was, at the time, one of the most technologically advanced societies on the planet – yet they died in their thousands. Volcanoes are one of those… More

The tattooed hand of a 1200-year-old mummy from PeruMichael Pittman and Thomas G Kaye
The intricate details of tattoos inked more than 1200 years ago have been made visible by scanning South American mummies with lasers.
The mummies, belonging to a pre-Hispanic people known as the Chancay, were found in 1981 at the Cerro Colorado cemetery in the Huaura valley of Peru.
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While it was clear to the naked eye that many of the 100 mummies were tattooed, the ink had bled beyond the boundaries of the original designs and also faded, making it impossible to see what the original markings would have looked like.
In a new study, Michael Pittman at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his colleagues ran lasers over the specimens in a dark room and took long-exposure photographs. The lasers caused the skin to glow brightly, producing a stark contrast with the non-fluorescent tattoo ink.
This technique, which causes no damage to the mummies, has never been used on tattoos before. Importantly, it shows not just where ink is on the surface but also in the deeper layers of the skin, says Pittman.
“This helped us to see past the bleed accumulated over the lifetime of the tattoo’s owner to reveal the finer original design of the tattoos,” he says.
The researchers believe the tattoos are so fine that they must have been made using a needle and ink technique with a cactus needle or sharpened animal bone, rather than a “cut and fill” method.
Tattoos seem to have been important to the Chancay, says Pittman, as they are found on a large proportion of known mummified human remains.
A tattooed forearm of a Chancay mummyMichael Pittman and Thomas G Kaye
“Many of the designs, geometric patterns featuring triangles and diamonds, are shared in their other artistic media too such as pottery and textiles, and some pottery human figures even show geometric tattoo designs,” he says.
Some of the tattoos seem to have required special effort due to their intricate designs, while others are small and simple. “So, to some extent, ancient Chancay tattoos show a lot of parallels to the variation in design and significance we can observe among tattoos today,” says Pittman
Pittman says many traditional tattoos made by other ancient people could also be viewed in detail using the laser-stimulated fluorescent technique. “We therefore plan to apply the method to other ancient tattoos from cultures around the world to try and make other interesting discoveries,” he says.

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GunaiKurnai Elder Uncle Russell Mullett on the balcony of Cloggs CaveJessica Shapiro
A recent discovery in Cloggs cave, Australia, revealed something extraordinary about humanity’s relationship with time. Several metres into the limestone grotto, archaeologists working with the Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation found telltale signs of an ancient ritual: two ceremonial sticks covered in animal fat and highly specific burn marks. Here is the amazing part. The sticks were 12,000 years old, and they were almost identical to ones used for rituals in the late 19th century by local mulla-mullung, or sorcerers.
That means the GunaiKurnai people… More

Artist’s impression of a group of Homo floresiensis with a freshly killed stegodon (Stegodon florensis insularis)MAURICIO ANTON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Severe drought caused by climate change may have led to the decline of Indonesia’s pygmy elephants and the “hobbit”-like humans who hunted them.
Until about 50,000 years ago, Homo floresiensis, standing about a metre tall, thrived on the South Pacific island of Flores by consuming meat from dwarf pachyderms called stegodons.

Researchers originally thought that the tiny hominins – whose bones were discovered… More

African wildcats seem to have been part of the human diet in the Levant 10,000 years agoNSP-RF/Alamy
About 10,000 years ago, foxes and wildcats made up a notable part of people’s diets in what is now Western Galilee in Israel.
Archaeologists have long attributed the abundance of small carnivore bones in early Levant settlements to people harvesting fur and to symbolic associations like tooth ornaments.

But now, Shirad Galmor, while at Tel Aviv University in Israel, and her colleagues have found… More

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