Philippa Kaur

The drive to explore has taken humans to most of the habitable planetMarco Bottigelli/Getty Images
The Explorer’s GeneAlex Hutchinson (Mariner Books (UK, 10 April; US, on sale now))
Approximately 50,000 years ago, our ancestors – the first modern humans – set out from their African homeland in droves. We don’t know for sure what prompted this mass uprooting (sometimes known as “the Great Human Expansion”), but our species’ staggering geographic spread is proof of its success.
In relatively short order, humans made it to more or less “every habitable corner of the planet”, writes Alex Hutchinson, a journalist,… More

The thigh and shin bones of Paranthropus robustusJason L. Heaton
A fossilised left leg unearthed in South Africa belongs to one of the smallest adult hominins ever discovered – smaller even than the so-called “hobbit”, Homo floresiensis.
The diminutive hominin was a member of the species Paranthropus robustus. This was one of several species of Paranthropus, a group of ape-like hominins that shared the African landscape with the earliest representatives of our human genus, Homo, between about 2.7 and 1.2 million years ago. Paranthropus had heavily built skulls that housed small brains and large teeth – which some species… More

The racial divide in track events is down to factors other than geneticsHannah Peters/Getty Images
AdaptableHerman Pontzer (Allen Lane)
Fancy eating the real paleo diet? Rotten meat should be top of your menu, preferably with a generous helping of maggots. Dietary records “from every continent and climate are alive with maggots, worms and the soft, smelly flesh of decaying animals. Many groups preferred rotten meat to fresh,” says evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer. “The more it stank, the better.”
In fact, we seem to have evolved to eat rotten meat. Our stomachs are much more acidic than most other… More

A relief from Ashurbanipal’s palace showing him in a chariotBritish Museum/Auday Hussein
It is one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge: a vast library of texts amassed by Assyrian King Ashurbanipal, who ruled ancient Mesopotamia about 2700 years ago. But after his death, it was ransacked and burned to the ground. Luckily, the texts were written on clay tablets, and so were baked and preserved by the heat.
A fragment of the Epic of GilgameshBritish Museum/Camryn Good
When the ruins of the library were found in Victorian times in what is now Iraq, the astonishing richness of this lost world was revealed. A new book, The Library of Ancient Wisdom by Selena Wisnom at the University of Leicester, UK, pieces together a vivid portrait of Mesopotamian life from the shattered remnants of the 30,000 or so tablets in Ashurbanipal’s library.Advertisement
Royal Game of Ur board gameCamryn Good
Written in cuneiform, the world’s oldest form of writing, the tablets not only bring kings and queens to life, but also priests, traders and professional lamenters. They also include magic spells and letters of complaint. Our lives are still influenced by ripples from this ancient world via the 60-minute hour, mathematical discoveries and the invention of the zodiac.
Clay prism with accounts of Ashurbanipal’s military campaignsAnthony Huan/CC BY-SA 2.0
Pictured from top: a relief from Ashurbanipal’s palace showing him in a chariot; a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh, telling the story of a great flood; the Royal Game of Ur board game, which Ashurbanipal enjoyed as a boy, according to letters by his brother; a clay prism with accounts of Ashurbanipal’s military campaigns; and a letter in which his sister berates his wife for her poor cuneiform.
A letter in which his sister berates his wife for her poor cuneiform.Auday Hussein
The Library of Ancient Wisdom is out now in the UK and will be published on 12 May in the US.

Topics:archaeology/ancient humans More

Ancient pyramids in modern-day SudanMartchan/Shutterstock
Archaeologists have long assumed that ancient Egyptian pyramids were reserved for the richest members of society – but an analysis of burials at a site called Tombos suggests low-status workers could merit a place in pyramid tombs too.

Tombos, an archaeological site in northern Sudan, came under ancient Egyptian control about 3500 years ago when the famous civilisation was at its most powerful. By this time, Egyptian royalty no longer favoured pyramid burials. But Egyptian nobles were still keen on them,… More