Philippa Kaur

A collection of stone tools at the Milovice IV archaeological siteMartin Novák
A set of stone tools found in the Czech Republic appears to be the personal toolkit of a hunter-gatherer who lived about 30,000 years ago. The 29 artefacts, which include blades and points meant for hunting, skinning, basic butchering and cutting wood, offer a rare glimpse into the daily lives of ancient hunters, says Dominik Chlachula at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno.
In 2009, a village road collapsed in the Pavlovské vrchy mountains in the south-east of the country, opening up abandoned cellars that archaeologists began studying. In 2021, they found a deeper level of the site, called Milovice IV, containing charcoal dated to between 29,550 and 30,250 years ago. There, researchers found horse and reindeer bones, and – more recently – a bundle of stone tools, still positioned as if they had been wrapped in a leather pouch that had long since decayed.

The tools showed signs of significant use, says Chlachula. Most of the blades were worn down from cutting and scraping bones, wood and hides, and some bore marks of having been attached to a handle. Some of the points had fractures or microscopic traces of impact, and one had apparently been used as the tip of a spear or arrow.
Several of the pieces had been recycled from older, different tools, suggesting good stone was scarce or that the hunter was mindful of not wasting resources, he says.
Further analyses revealed that about two-thirds of the tools had been crafted from glacial deposit flint stones found at least 130 kilometres northward – and significantly farther if using winding footpaths to reach them. Most of the others appeared to come from western Slovakia, about 100 kilometres south-east. Whether the owner acquired the stones directly from deposits  or through a trade network remains unknown, says Chlachula.

Many pieces were too worn or broken to be used as is, he explains. But it is possible the hunter kept them in the hope of recycling them — or even for their sentimental value.

Neanderthals, ancient humans and cave art: France

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Left: The remains of a middle-aged woman at the Liyupo site in southern China, who was smoke-dried prior to burial about 8000 years ago. Right: A modern smoke-dried mummy of the Dani people in West Papua, IndonesiaZhen Li, Hirofumi Matsumura, Hsiao-chun Hung
Human bodies carefully preserved by smoking up to 14,000 years ago have been found at archaeological sites in South-East Asia, making them the oldest known mummies in the world.
A similar practice continues today among the Dani people in West Papua, Indonesia. The Dani mummify their deceased relatives by exposing the bodies to smoke, then keep and revere them as part of the household. Many of their mummies are tightly bound in crouching poses.
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Similar “hyper-flexed” ancient human remains have also been found in Australia, China, the Philippines, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan.
Hsiao-chun Hung, at the Australian National University in Canberra, says that while she was working on ancient skeletons in Vietnam in 2017, she was struck by the similarity of the burial remains they were excavating to the Dani’s tradition.
Hung and her colleagues studied 54 hunter-gatherer burials from 11 archaeological sites located across South-East Asia, dating from 12,000 to 4000 years ago, to look for evidence of the skeletons having been slowly smoked. Most of the sites were in northern Vietnam and southern China.

Many of the remains showed clear signs of being partially burned, but not enough to have been cremated. The researchers then applied two analytical techniques – X-ray diffraction and infrared spectroscopy – to dozens of bone samples to reveal whether they were exposed to heat and how much.
Over 90 per cent of the 69 skeletal samples showed evidence of having been heated. The results showed that the human remains hadn’t been exposed to high heat but rather to low temperatures, indicating they had been smoked for possibly weeks or even months.
The oldest mummy tested by the team, from Hang Cho, Vietnam, was over 11,000 years old. But similarly singed, tightly bound skeletons were also found at another site in Hang Muoi, Vietnam, dated to over 14,000 years ago. “We did not test this one by X-ray or infrared because it was obviously partly burnt, and could be observed with the naked eye,” Hung says.
Until now, the oldest known mummified humans were from northern Chile, around 7000 years ago, and Ancient Egypt, from 4500 years ago.
Hung says all the evidence points to the likelihood that this type of burial practice was widespread across southern China and South-East Asia, stretching back at least 14,000 years or even earlier, and continuing until about 4000 to 3500 years ago, when farming populations became dominant in the region. The hyper-flexed bindings of the mummified bodies might have made them easier to transport, she says.

Ethnographic records indicate that the tradition persisted in southern Australia into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, says Hung. “And our own ethnoarchaeological studies in the New Guinea Highlands reveal that, in some communities, this practice still continues today.”
“The results show that a unique combination of technique, tradition, culture, and above all, a deep belief and enduring love for the ancestors has persisted for an astonishing length of time and spread across a vast region, from the Palaeolithic era to the present,” she says.
Vito Hernandez at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, says the study challenges long-standing assumptions that early mummification practices arose only in arid areas like Atacama in South America or the Nile valley. “It emphasises the role tropical environments have played in fostering distinct mortuary traditions amongst early modern humans to have spread to the Far East and, potentially, the Pacific,” he says.
“By extending the timeline of mummification by at least 5000 years before Chinchorro culture [of South America], they highlight South-East Asia as an independent centre of cultural innovation and underscore the deep cultural continuities linking early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the region with present-day Indigenous groups in New Guinea and Australia,” says Hernandez.

Scientific pioneers of the ancient world, Cairo and Alexandria: Egypt

Embark on an unforgettable journey through Egypt’s two most iconic cities, Cairo and Alexandria, where ancient history meets modern charm.

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Ibex can move nimbly across steep mountain slopesSerge Goujon/Shutterstock
Nearly 300,000 years ago, Neanderthals had already figured out how to hunt mountain goats along vertical cliffs and process them in well-organised camps.
Known for ambushing large animals in Western Europe’s flat meadows and forests, it seems Neanderthals adapted to the hills of Eastern Europe by adding nimble ibex to their hunting regime. The early humans skinned and butchered the animals in a nearby cave before roasting their bones for marrow and grease, showing impressive skill and knowledge far earlier than expected, says Stefan Milošević at the University of Belgrade in Serbia.

“The approach of hunting ibex is completely different, because it lives on a very rugged and steep, barren terrain,” he says. “We now see that early Neanderthals – who had barely differentiated themselves anthropologically as a species – were already exploiting ecological niches that no hominin had ever exploited before.”
Neanderthals evolved about 400,000 years ago, but most of what we know about them comes from sites in Western Europe that are younger than 150,000 years. So finding clues that fill in gaps in the Neanderthal timeline, habitat and culture is critical, says Marie-Hélène Moncel at France’s National Museum of Natural History in Paris, who wasn’t involved in the study.
In 2017, archaeologists found Neanderthal remains in an approximately 290,000-year-old layer of the Velika Balanica cave in Serbia, making them the oldest such remains found in Eastern Europe.

Since then, Milošević and his colleagues have discovered hundreds of stone tools and sifted through about 30,000 animal bone fragments in the cave. Nearly three-quarters of the fragments are slivers less than 2 centimetres long, and most of the identifiable ones are from ibex and red deer killed in spring and summer, suggesting the Neanderthals were seasonal cave dwellers.
Some bones – especially long deer legs – were burned and cracked open, meaning these early Neanderthals were probably heating bones to liquefy the marrow for easier extraction and leaving leftover fragments in the hearth so that bone grease would keep the fire burning. Others showed signs of tendon harvesting, possibly for rope or nets.
Deer skeletons represented older youngsters and adults, a sign of selective hunting that promotes herd survival, says Milošević. But the ibex were killed at all life stages – suggesting the Neanderthals were still “rookies” up against mountain goats, probably hunting with sharpened sticks and rudimentary traps. “They most likely had a lot of unsuccessful attempts,” he says.
In addition to these preferred food sources, the researchers also found a few processed remains from wild boar, cave bears, wolves, foxes, leopards and various birds.

The organised positions of the bones in different sections of the cave point to distinct zones for specialised tasks. The hearth was in the centre, for example, with discarded bones piled up behind it, and the entrance appeared to be used as a tool workshop.
Overall, the findings point to “remarkable cognitive flexibility,” says José Carrión at the University of Murcia in Spain. “It’s a confirmation that Neanderthals were creative problem-solvers, managing complex habitats with ingenuity and skill. Neanderthals were humans – intelligent, social, and extraordinarily adaptive.”
“What emerges from Balanica is the picture of Neanderthals who were not only resilient but already experimenting with strategies and social organisation that we tend to associate with much later periods,” says Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo at the Archaeological Institute of Mérida in Spain. “It reminds us that Neanderthal sophistication was not a late spark, but a deep-rooted flame that ignited surprisingly early in human history.”

Neanderthals, ancient humans and cave art: France

Embark on a captivating journey through time as you explore key Neanderthal and Upper Palaeolithic sites of southern France, from Bordeaux to Montpellier, with New Scientist’s Kate Douglas.

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Archaeological excavations near Aldborough, UK, are helping us understand life after Roman occupationR Ferraby & M.J. Millet
When the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain, the result was not chaos and economic collapse. The metals industry in what is now northern England continued and even expanded in the subsequent centuries, according to an archaeological record of pollution from metalworking.
“The argument has been that, with the disappearance of state apparatus and linked state transport systems, the regional economies collapse totally,” says Christopher Loveluck at the University of Nottingham in the UK. But that isn’t what the archaeology revealed. “We’re seeing an increase in metal pollution products.”
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Loveluck is part of a team that has excavated Roman remains from Aldborough in North Yorkshire, England. Under Roman rule, this town was called Isurium Brigantum, where metals like iron and lead were mined and processed.
The team found aerosol pollution from these metalworking operations had become trapped in the silt accumulating in an ancient riverbed at the archaeological site. By digging through the layers of sediment, the team was able to reconstruct how pollution levels varied between 345 and 1779 AD.
“They get this long chronology, so you really can trace the ups and the downs,” says Jane Kershaw at the University of Oxford, who wasn’t involved in the research but who has studied early medieval metal mining.

In the late 300s and early 400s, the Roman Empire lost control of Britain and withdrew. “The government apparatus goes, the tax collection apparatus goes, no new coinage arrives in Britain, and they almost certainly withdraw all of the field army units as well,” Loveluck says. The subsequent centuries have few written records, and certain industries – notably wheel-thrown pottery – went into steep decline. This gave rise to a narrative of “the society of 5th century Britain just collapsing”, says Loveluck.
The riverbed record tells a different story. Lead pollution was low during Roman times, and fell only slightly in the late 300s and early 400s. It then rose steadily until the mid-500s. Likewise, pollution from ironworking rose during the first half of the 500s.
This, argues Loveluck, suggests continuity in the large-scale production of essential commodities.
The rise in metal production may have been due to internal fighting, suggests Kershaw. “It’s a period where the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms are coalescing,” she says. “There’s a lot of fighting between those different kingdoms.” Many men were buried in graves with swords and knives.

Metal production then declined sharply in the mid-500s, and remained low for several decades. The team suggests this might be due to the Justinianic plague, which cut through the lands around the Mediterranean in 541-549 AD. Ancient DNA evidence from a graveyard in east England shows the plague did reach Britain. However, it is not clear how severe or widespread it was. “We don’t have grave pits full of plague victims, for instance, like we do with later plague events,” says Kershaw.
Anglo-Saxon coins dating from the 10th and 11th centuryAndrew Cowie/Alamy
The apparent resilience of Aldborough metal production in the face of the Roman withdrawal fits with other evidence of economic and political continuity. “Droitwich in Worcestershire [in western England] has an unbroken sequence of salt production from the Roman period to the modern period,” says Loveluck.
The period after the Roman withdrawal has been dubbed the Dark Ages, due to a lack of written records and supposed intellectual decline. However, historians say that is at best an oversimplification.
Some practices did cease, like wheel-thrown pottery and building using stone. But this period also saw the production of spectacular metalwork, often using copper. “If everything was so terrible and dark, how come they’re wearing these amazing brooches and they’ve got colourful bead necklaces,” says Kershaw.

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Acanceh in Mexico is home to many Maya peopleEducation Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
In the past, the quantity of zinc and other trace elements in human diets was determined largely by levels in local soils. Now it has been shown that our ancestors evolved to cope with local variations in micronutrient levels as they migrated around the world.
This might have led to some dramatic side effects – it is possible, for example, that the short stature of some peoples around the world is a byproduct of adaptation to low iodine levels. It is also possible that these past adaptations are causing some people today to get too much or too little of specific micronutrients.
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“For most of human evolution, the micronutrient composition of what you’re eating has been dependent on the underlying soil,” says Jasmin Rees at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her team has scanned nearly 900 genomes of people from all around the world to find evidence of adaptation to local levels of 13 trace elements, including iron, manganese and selenium. To do so, the team looked for signs of positive selection in 270 genes linked to uptake of these elements – that is, for gene variants that became more common in specific populations because they provided an advantage.
The strongest evidence was in iodine-linked genes in Maya peoples of Central America. Similar signatures were also found in the Mbuti and Biaka peoples in Central Africa, who have a shorter stature than most people.

In 2009, it was suggested that the Mbuti and Biaka peoples’ short stature could be due to adaptation to low iodine. This is because iodine-linked genes influence thyroid hormone activity, which has an effect on growth. These peoples are also known to be less prone to goitre – enlargement of the thyroid gland due to an iodine-deficient diet – than neighbouring groups.
Because the Maya population is also very short-statured, says Rees, her findings support the idea that adaptation to low iodine affects size. She and her colleagues also point out that the rainforest soils in the Maya region are known to be low in iodine.
“This is very speculative,” she says. “We can’t say exactly what is causing these short statures, but we’re seeing, at the very least, a coincidence where there seems to be selection on iodine-associated genes in these short-statured populations.”
In the Uyghur and Brahui peoples of Central and South Asia, where soil magnesium levels are especially high, there is strong selection affecting two genes related to magnesium uptake. Some of these gene variants have previously been linked to low levels of magnesium in the body, so the team suggests these changes reduce magnesium uptake to prevent toxicity from high levels in the environment.
These are just two examples – the team found signs of positive selection related to at least one micronutrient in just about every population around the world. “We see really widespread signatures of adaptation,” says Rees.

This study is just the beginning, she says. More work is needed to pin down the effects of the many gene variants the team identified. Now that food is traded globally, it could turn out that people with certain variants need more or less of specific micronutrients. Rees compares it to how in countries such as the UK, people with darker skin are advised to take vitamin D all year round rather than just in the winter.
“It would be important to know if individuals from particular populations are likely to be especially in need of particular micronutrient supplements,” says Mark Stoneking at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
“When it comes to identifying signatures of selection from genomic data, they have done state-of-the-art work,” he says. “But a lot more work needs to be done to verify that these have been truly subject to selection – some of them will inevitably turn out to be false positives.”

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