Philippa Kaur

An ancient skull has finally shown us what the Denisovans looked like. Now it turns out they, not Neanderthals, might be our closest relatives, redrawing our family tree and transforming the hunt for Ancestor X.

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Artists painted in places where echoes and resonance created otherworldly sonic effectsPatrick Aventurier/Getty Images
Deep underground, thousands of years of silence are abruptly broken by a researcher singing. His voice seems to awaken the walls of the cavern as the intimate space comes alive with the sound of our ancestors. Then he follows the cave’s resonant response, until the beam of his headlamp falls upon a panel of ancient paintings.
This crude experiment, performed decades ago, led to a remarkable discovery: that prehistoric rock art, created from 40,000 to 3,000 years ago, was meant to be heard as well as seen. “The oldest painted sites have this low, strange resonance, where if you sing, suddenly the cave sings back to you,” says Rupert Till at the University of Huddersfield, UK.
Getting solid scientific evidence to support this idea hasn’t been easy. Now, however, a seven-year study into the acoustic properties of rock art sites around the globe has provided it. The Artsoundscapes project leaves little doubt that prehistoric artists deliberately painted in places where echoes, resonance and sound transmission created otherworldly sonic effects. “I was completely amazed,” says archaeologist and project leader Margarita Díaz-Andreu at the University of Barcelona, Spain, recalling her experiments at Valltorta gorge in eastern Spain. “Before the paintings, there was barely any reverberation, but as soon as we reached the paintings, the sound changed immediately.”
And that’s just the start. By studying the peculiar soundscapes in which ancient artworks are embedded, Díaz-Andreu, Till and other archaeoacoustic researchers are beginning to reconstruct the ways in which these ancient, multisensory illustrations amplified the potency of prehistoric rituals, storytelling and shamanic musical performance – and, perhaps, even altered listeners’ states of consciousness.
Listening for echoes
That first researcher who used song to bring a new dimension to our understanding of Stone Age people was a French musicologist called Iégor Reznikoff, now a professor emeritus at Paris Nanterre University. He spent years vocalising inside palaeolithic caves in use from 18,000 to 11,000 years ago in his homeland before documenting his findings in the late 1980s. Counting the seconds between echoes, he noted a relationship between the placement of rock art and acoustic phenomena. “Iégor can go into a cave and make noises and guide you to rock art by listening for echoes,” says Till. “I’ve been into these caves with him.”
Reznikoff’s methods of talking to the walls lacked rigour, and his conclusions were largely ignored by archaeologists. But his ideas reverberated around the fringes of academia, where the emerging field of archaeoacoustics was struggling for recognition. Among the first to expand upon his findings was Steve Waller at the American Rock Art Research Association, who recorded echoes of up to 31 decibels at some decorated spots in deep caves in France, while unpainted walls in the same caverns were acoustically dead.

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In deep caves, the echoes blur together like thunder, and it gives you this vision of a stampede of hoofed animals
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“In deep caves, the echoes blur together like thunder, and it gives you this vision of a stampede of hoofed animals,” says Waller. Writing in Nature in 1993, he pointed out that more than 90 per cent of European rock art depicts hoofed mammals like horses and bison, and suggested that echoing caves might have been interpreted as the homes of the thunder gods, who were embodied by these stampeding beasts.
Two decades later, with archaeoacoustics still largely overlooked as a legitimate field, Till launched the Songs of the Caves project to study the acoustics of painted caverns in northern Spain. Rather than just timing the delay between echoes, he and his colleagues took a measurement called the impulse response, which entails quantifying the movement of sound waves through a space when a short, sharp sound is played to give a so-called sonic fingerprint. “We did 250-odd acoustic samples in the caves, both next to rock art and where there was no rock art,” says Till. “And we showed that there was a  statistical relationship between the likelihood of there being a piece of rock art and an ‘unusual’ acoustic phenomenon that was associated with it.”

Around the same time, Díaz-Andreu began investigating the soundscapes at Stone Age sites across Europe, providing more nuanced insights into these acoustic relationships. In Spain’s Sierra de San Serván, for instance, she noted that art was predominantly found in rock shelters with “augmented audibility”. “This means that the places that had been chosen to be painted were those from which you could acoustically control the landscape,” she says. To give a sense of what this might mean, she recounts being able to hear a distant dog-walker’s phone conversation with astonishing clarity while standing at one of the decorated spots.
Although these findings helped to advance the field of archaeoacoustics, many scholars continued to regard it as a fringe discipline. So, in 2018, Díaz-Andreu initiated Artsoundscapes, which introduced cutting-edge methods to systematically measure sonic phenomena at painted sites across the world. Among the techniques pioneered by her team was the use of a dodecahedron featuring 12 loudspeakers to create a dynamic, omnidirectional impulse response. The researchers also used computerised models like geographic information systems to map the connections between rock art and acoustic effects.
Equipment used to measure acoustics in Cuevas de la ArañaN. Santos da Rosa
Since wrapping up the project earlier this year, the team has published a series of studies from sites across four continents. They reveal that prehistoric cultures around the world used sound in strikingly different ways. In Siberia’s Altai mountains, for example, amplification and unusually high clarity of sound were detected at potential gathering spots, where rituals and offerings involving music may once have taken place. In Mexico’s Santa Teresa canyon, there is rock art at sites where pre-Hispanic cultures are thought to have held ritual dances. And at Spain’s Cuevas de la Araña, the researchers report finding paintings primarily where the caves’ acoustics “could have intensified the sensory effect and emotional impact of ceremonies likely performed with musical accompaniment”.
The team also visited White River Narrows, a canyon in Nevada where Waller had previously noted an unusual sonic connection between painted rock faces. “Some of the rock art sites can actually communicate with each other, so if you’re at one, you can hear the echoing coming to you from another,” he says. Building on this, the Artsoundscapes researchers discovered that certain painted spaces outside the canyon lack reverberation but possess exceptional sound transmission, reproducing sounds with great clarity and amplification. Therefore, they concluded, these sites would have been more suitable for storytelling than shamanic rituals.
Only in South Africa’s Maloti-Drakensberg mountains – which are famous for their San rock art – did the team fail to find a connection between paintings and sound. “We were expecting fantastic results – something new and exciting,” says Díaz-Andreu. “We didn’t find them.”
Perceiving a “presence”
Although there is no universal pattern, there is a growing consensus that painted sites worldwide were often chosen for their extraordinary acoustic properties and the impact these would have had on people’s consciousness. In Finland’s lake district, for example, prehistoric hunter-gatherers were inspired to leave their mark on cliffs that produced a disorienting sonic reflection. “The [wall] repeats, or doubles, every sound that you make in front of it, so that you experience a kind of doubled reality that is not normal,” says Riitta Rainio at the University of Helsinki in Finland. “It’s not a long echo like in caves, but a single reflection that’s very short, sharp and strong.”
Rainio and her colleagues have conducted psychoacoustic experiments to measure the subjective response of modern listeners to this auditory illusion. They found that people tend to perceive a “presence” at these painted sites. In one recent paper, they wrote that the sounds seem to “emanate from invisible sources behind the paintings” and that “a prehistoric visitor, who marvelled at the voices, music, and noises emanating from the rock, would have recognised them as coming from a human-like source, perhaps some kind of apparition or living person inside the rock”.
Speaking of her own experiences at the lakeside rock faces, Rainio says: “I was often quite scared, because I really thought that there was someone else there. There’s this phenomenon where it seems like someone is approaching you as you approach the cliff.”

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There’s this phenomenon where it seems like someone is approaching you as you approach the cliff
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Similarly, the Artsoundscapes team has investigated the psychoacoustic impact of rock art sites in both Siberia and the Mediterranean. Using the impulse response data from decorated caves in the Altai mountains, the team created “auralizations” of natural sounds – including animal calls, weather phenomena and the crackling of a bonfire – as if heard from within these spaces. In laboratory tests, participants reported that these digitised soundscapes evoked feelings of “presence”, “closeness” and “tension”.
Teaming up with neuroscientists at the University of Barcelona’s Brainlab, Díaz-Andreu’s group also used electroencephalography (EEG) to study the ways in which certain sounds influence human brain activity. Their findings suggest that our brainwaves tend to synchronise with music that has a tempo of 99 beats per minute, potentially triggering altered states of consciousness. How this discovery relates to ancient shamanic rituals at rock art sites is a matter of conjecture, however. “We don’t know for sure what the meaning of those sites was, but they are generally regarded as sacred, religious or ritual places,” says Rainio. “And ritual usually means some kind of sound-making, which is often music.” Tellingly, some of the paintings in Finland depict people playing drums.
Prehistoric sounds
Another clue about the sorts of sounds prehistoric people made at these decorated rock faces comes from the painted Isturitz cave in France, where 35,000-year-old flutes made from vulture bones have been found. By playing replicas of these prehistoric instruments inside the caverns where they were discovered, Till became the first person since the Stone Age to experience their ritual potential. “Previously, I’d only ever heard these bone flutes in classrooms or in concert halls, where they have quite a polite sound, a small sound,” he says. “But then you take them into the cave and they produce this enormous, soaring sound, which transforms the cave into a space that sings.”
Listen: Vulture bone replica of the Hohle Fels flute being played by Anna Friedericke Potengowski in the Hohle Fels cave More

Drone photograph of the archaeological site of SemiyarkaPeter J. Brown
A large 140-hectare settlement dating back 3600 years has been discovered in the plains of north-eastern Kazakhstan, transforming our understanding of life in prehistoric Eurasia. It hints that the open grasslands of Central Asia once held a Bronze Age community as connected and complex as much better-known ancient civilisations.
“It’s not quite a missing piece of the jigsaw; it’s the missing half of the jigsaw,” says Barry Molloy at University College Dublin, Ireland, who wasn’t involved in the work.

The Bronze Age featured many notable civilisations, including the Shang and Zhou dynasties in China; the Babylonians and Sumerians in what is now Iraq; and numerous cultures around the Mediterranean, including the Egyptians, Minoans, Mycenaeans and Hittites.
The Central Asian steppes, however, were thought to be the domain of highly mobile communities living in tents or yurts. Semiyarka, or the “City of Seven Ravines”, seems very different and could have played a crucial role in the spread of bronze items between civilisations.
This is because the site – first identified in the early 2000s – overlooks the Irtysh river, which rises up in the Altai mountains in China, comes down onto the plains of Kazakhstan and goes all the way to the Arctic through Siberia.

Miljana Radivojević at University College London and her colleagues have been mapping and surveying the site since 2016. They have discovered that Semiyarka featured long banks of earth, conceivably for defence; at least 20 enclosed household compounds, probably built with mud bricks; and a central monumental building, which they suggest might have been used for rituals or governance. The types of pottery they found there indicate the site dates to around 1600 BC.
Crucially, the crucibles, slag and bronze artefacts at the site indicate a large area was dedicated to the production of copper and tin bronze – an alloy that is mainly copper but contains more than 2 per cent tin.
Compositionally, the elements in the slag from the crucibles correspond to tin deposits from part of the Altai mountains in east Kazakhstan about 300 kilometres away, says Radivojević.
The tin may have been brought there by people traversing the steppes or by boat along the Irtysh, or it may have been panned from the water, she says. “The Irtysh is the most important tin-bearing river in the Bronze Age of Eurasia and the flooding of the river’s flood plain that was happening seasonally would have been very helpful for panning the tin.”
The large size and neat lines of Semiyarka are very different from what is seen in the scattered camps and small villages usually associated with the mobile communities of the steppes.

Without detailed excavations – which are planned – we can’t know if the buildings were all there at the same time or were successive constructions over many years, says team member Dan Lawrence at Durham University, UK. “But the layout is very clear, and normally that would mean that it’s all contemporary, because you wouldn’t find these things in a neat line if they have been built one after the other.”
Due to its position on the river near major copper and tin deposits, the researchers suggest Semiyarka wasn’t only a production hub for bronze, but also a centre of exchange and regional power, a key node in the vast Bronze Age metal networks linking Central Asia with the rest of the continent.
“The Irtysh river was a very busy transport corridor,” says Lawrence. “It is basically laying the foundations for the Silk Roads as we know them today, a kind of pre-modern globalisation.”
The site transforms our understanding of Bronze Age steppe societies, says Radivojević, showing that they were just as sophisticated as other contemporaneous civilisations.
“This tells us that they were organised, that they were capable of resourcing and defending,” says Molloy. “Bringing materials like ores and metals to a centralised space speaks of a level of social organisation that goes beyond immediately local, and it fits back into the wider networks that we know were crisscrossing Eurasia, where metals were moving and they’re the key connector in terms of those wider networks.”

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

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The 12,000-year-old clay figurine from Nahal Ein Gev II depicting a woman and a goose, accompanied by an artistic reconstructionLaurent Davin
A tiny, 12,000-year-old clay sculpture of a goose on the back of a woman may depict an animistic ritual involving a gander mating with a human.
The sculpture, which is just 3.7 centimetres tall, was collected in 2019 at an archaeological site called Nahal Ein Gev II in Israel, but its significance wasn’t recognised until 2024.
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Nahal Ein Gev II was inhabited by a group of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers called the Natufians, who had established permanent settlements in the region. The Natufians are regarded as immediate predecessors of the agricultural Neolithic communities that went on to plant crops and domesticate animals throughout the Middle East.
While, to the untrained eye, the elements of the figurine can be hard to distinguish, Laurent Davin at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem says he is “100 per cent confident” that it is a goose on the back of a woman.
“When I took this small block of clay out of its box, I immediately recognised the human figure and then the bird lying on its back,” says Davin. “I then understood that I held in my hand an exceptional piece, both in terms of the subject depicted and the quality of the modelling, created 12,000 years ago.”

Older engravings and paintings of animal-human interactions exist, as do older hybrid animal-human carvings, such as the 40,000-year-old “Lion Man” that was found in Germany. But Davin says the object is the “earliest human-animal interaction figurine” ever discovered.
Geochemical tests revealed that the figurine had been heated to around 400°C. The artist had meticulously modelled the clay with a considerable understanding of both anatomy and how light and shadow would accentuate the scene being captured by the artist, says Davin.
He and his colleagues don’t think the figurine is portraying an objective reality, such as a female hunter carrying a dead goose over her shoulder. Davin says the goose is depicted naturalistically in the posture of a gander in mating position.
“We interpreted the scene as the depiction of the imagined mating between an animal spirit and a human,” he says. “This theme is very common in animistic societies across the world in specific situations such as erotic dreams, shamanistic visions and myths.”

The researchers also identified a fingerprint on the figurine, most likely made by the artist. Its small size meant it must have belonged to either a young adult of either sex or an adult female.
Paul Taçon at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, who wasn’t involved in the study, thinks there is another possible interpretation of the figurine. “Thinking about growing up in Canada and Canadian geese, [it] reminded me of how they attack when they are angry,” he says. “When you turn and run, they will fly up and attempt to land on your back to peck your head or neck.
“It may be that a story about a woman being attacked by a goose was represented rather than an intimate encounter, but we will never really know the exact meaning.”

Ancient caves, human origins: Northern Spain

Discover some of the world’s oldest known cave paintings in this idyllic part of Northern Spain. Travel back 40,000 years to explore how our ancestors lived, played and worked. From ancient Paleolithic art to awe-inspiring geological formations, each cave tells a unique story that transcends time.

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A reconstruction of a Neanderthal faceRyhor Bruyeu/Alamy
The first analysis of a well-preserved nasal cavity in the human fossil record has revealed that the hefty Neanderthal nose wasn’t adapted to cold climates in the way many people thought it was.
Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) lived between about 400,000 and 40,000 years ago, and some specimens have been found with distinct structures in their nasal cavities that have been proposed as defining features for the species. Some researchers have suggested that living through repeated glacial conditions led them to develop these structures to adapt to cold weather, helping them warm up inhaled air inside their distinctive large noses.

However, the structures uncovered so far are generally damaged and good fossil evidence for the complete picture within the Neanderthal nose has been lacking.
The skull of Altamura Man, a Neanderthal fossil encased in rockK.A.R.S.T. PRIN Project
Costantino Buzi at the University of Perugia in Italy and his colleagues have now got such evidence from a Neanderthal specimen known as Altamura Man, which is between 172,000 and 130,000 years old. The skeleton is embedded in rock in Lamalunga cave near the town of Altamura in southern Italy, and is peppered with what are known as popcorn concretions – small nodules of calcite – that give it the appearance of a coral reef.

“It’s probably the most complete human fossil ever discovered,” says Buzi. But the delicate specimen can’t be removed, so he and his colleagues took their equipment through the narrow parts of the cave and used an endoscope to peer inside the skull, allowing them to digitally reconstruct its well-preserved internal nasal bony structures.
“This surely is the first time we have clearly seen these structures in a human fossil,” says Buzi.
Surprisingly, there was no sign of the inner nasal features thought to be a defining feature of Neanderthals, including a ridge of bone known as a vertical medial projection, a swelling on the nasal cavity walls and a lack of a bony roof over the lacrimal groove.
But Altamura Man is undoubtedly a Neanderthal, according to its general morphology, dating and genetics, says Buzi. This means that these nasal structures should no longer be considered defining Neanderthal features, he says, and the large nose and jutting-out upper jaw are unlikely to have been shaped by them. “We can finally say that some traits that were considered diagnostic in the Neanderthal cranium do not exist,” says Buzi.

The large Neanderthal nasal cavity is just related to having a larger cranial structure, he says, although his team did find that the turbinates – scroll-like structures on the walls of the nasal cavity – are quite big, which would help warm the air inside.
“These results indicate that the typical Neanderthal facial shape was not driven by respiratory adaptation to cold, but rather by developmental factors and overall body proportions,” says Ludovic Slimak at the University of Toulouse in France. “The study challenges a long-held idea about Neanderthal evolution and provides the first direct evidence of how their breathing system actually looked and functioned.”
The study also chimes with another from September by some of the same researchers, which suggests that it was a unique neck adaptation, acquired under the selective pressure of glacial environments, that drove the evolution of the Neanderthal face, including their jutting jaw.
“Everything in Neanderthals has been shoehorned into the idea that they’re adapted to cold, which is complete nonsense,” says Todd Rae at the University of Sussex, UK. “My guess is anatomically they were probably struggling with the cold, particularly since, tropical people – us – did fine, and they went extinct by the last glacial maximum.”

Ancient caves, human origins: Northern Spain

Discover some of the world’s oldest known cave paintings in this idyllic part of Northern Spain. Travel back 40,000 years to explore how our ancestors lived, played and worked. From ancient Paleolithic art to awe-inspiring geological formations, each cave tells a unique story that transcends time.

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The ˁAin Samiya silver gobletThe Israel Museum, Jerusalem/Ardon Bar Hama
The artwork on a 4300-year-old silver goblet unearthed in the Palestinian West Bank appears to show the universe forming out of primordial chaos – making it the oldest known visual representation of a creation myth.
“I think it’s an ingenious design,” says Eberhard Zangger at the Luwian Studies Foundation, a non-profit based in Switzerland. “With very few lines, it tells a very complex story.”
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The ˁAin Samiya goblet stands about 8 centimetres tall. It was found 55 years ago in an ancient tomb a few miles to the north-east of Ramallah at the western tip of the Fertile Crescent – a region where early civilisations flourished.
There appear to be two scenes depicted on the goblet. In the first, a large snake rears up and faces a chimera with a human torso and the legs of an animal, who stands over a small flower-like circle. In the second, a snake lies on the ground beneath a much larger flower-like circle with a smiling face. The circle is being held up, probably by two fully humanoid figures – although only one is visible today because the goblet is broken.
Archaeologists in the 1970s suggested the two scenes came from Enūma Eliš, a Babylonian creation myth in which a primordial entity named Tiamat is defeated in battle by the god Marduk, who then turns Tiamat’s body into the heavens and Earth. But, Zangger says, other researchers have pointed out flaws with this idea. Not only is there no battle scene on the goblet, but it was also made about 1000 years before Enūma Eliš was first written down.

Because of this, other researchers have suggested alternative interpretations – for instance, that the goblet is a symbolic representation of the birth of the new year and the death of the old one.
But Zangger and his colleagues – Daniel Sarlo, an independent researcher in Toronto, and Fabienne Haas Dantes at the University of Zurich, Switzerland – think the original interpretation was nearer to the mark. They argue that the scenes do show the formation of the world and cosmos, but that they come from a creation story far older than Enūma Eliš.
The images engraved on the goblet depict deities, snakes and the sunIsrael Museum, Jerusalem/Florika Weiner
In the first scene, according to Zangger’s team, there is chaos. The chimera represents a weak god, fused with the animals. Beneath its legs, the small flower-like circle represents a powerless sun. Ruling over all of this chaos is a monstrous snake. But in the second scene, order has emerged peacefully from the chaos. The gods have been separated from the animals, becoming powerful humanoid characters. They hold the equally powerful sun aloft in a “celestial boat”, indicating that the heavens have now been separated from Earth. The monstrous serpent of chaos, defeated, lies beneath the sun.
Zangger points out that there are cuneiform texts from elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent that are similar in age to the goblet and that describe how the gods separated the heavens from Earth. As such, we know that the inhabitants of the region had developed stories about the creation of the world by the time the goblet was fashioned. “But the incredible thing about the goblet is that we now have a picture of what they imagined this creation to have looked like,” he says.
Jan Lisman, an independent researcher based in the Netherlands, is unconvinced by the interpretation. “What may be depicted is the daily movement of the sun,” he says. “But definitely not ‘origin’ or ‘chaos’.”

Silvia Schroer at the University of Bern in Switzerland is more willing to accept the possibility that the goblet shows the creation of the world. But she sees problems with another aspect of the new analysis.
Zangger and his colleagues say that some of the images on the ˁAin Samiya goblet – such as a monstrous snake – appear in ancient cosmological stories from across the Fertile Crescent and nearby regions. They argue that this hints at deep connections among all of these creation myths, suggesting they may all draw from a single, even older myth. In line with this, they point out that a celestial boat similar to that on the goblet is carved onto a pillar at the 11,500-year-old site of Göbekli Tepe in what is now Turkey, to the north-west of the Fertile Crescent. “That’s 7000 years earlier than the goblet,” says Zangger.
But Schroer thinks it’s far too speculative to suggest all of the region’s creation stories are deeply connected like this. “Even if there are similarities, there is not always a demonstrable influence,” she says.
Journal reference:JEOL – Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society “Ex Oriente Luxˮ DOI: in press

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

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Adolf Hitler’s genome has been sequenced for a TV documentaryRoger Viollet via Getty Images
If you resort to mentioning Adolf Hitler, some say, you have lost the argument. If you resort to sequencing Hitler’s DNA to try to get more eyeballs for your TV channel, I would say you have just plain lost it.
And yet the UK’s Channel 4 has done just that with Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a dictator, which will be broadcast this Saturday. I have forced myself to watch it, so you don’t have to.
The DNA came from a blood-soaked piece of fabric cut from the sofa on which Hitler shot himself in 1945, which now resides in a US museum. The genome obtained has gaps due to the age of the sample, but the Y chromosome is said to match that of a male relative of Hitler, suggesting it is genuine.Advertisement

If this had been done purely as an academic effort, to add a little to our knowledge by, for instance, revealing whether Hitler had a Jewish grandfather as rumoured (he didn’t, according to the DNA), it would arguably be OK. Instead, we have a sensationalist two-part documentary claiming this DNA evidence “will change the way we think about Hitler”.
The trouble with this is that it implies genetic determinism – that Hitler was somehow destined to do the terrible things he did because of his genes. To be clear, the documentary doesn’t make this specific claim, but it comes pretty close – what else could “Blueprint of a dictator” mean?

This is equivalent to arguing that if we made lots of Hitler clones, they would all end up killing millions, too. This isn’t an experiment we can – or would ever want to – do, but there are plenty of clones in the world, in the form of identical twins, who share the same DNA. Twin studies have been used to estimate the extent to which all kinds of traits and conditions are due to genes rather than the environment.

Now, there are many issues with twin studies, not least that twins usually grow up in the same environment, so it is impossible to completely disentangle genetic and environmental influences. Even so, the highest twin-based estimates for the heritability of criminality – probably the closest we can get to being a genocidal dictator – are less than 50 per cent. So there is no reason to think most Hitler clones would be monsters.
Then there is the fact that our understanding of the human genome is very much in its infancy. We still can’t predict simple traits such as eye colour with 100 per cent accuracy, let alone much more complex traits involving the interaction of the brain with the environment.

What we can do is look for genetic variants that have been statistically linked to a higher risk of conditions such as autism. People can then be given a “polygenic score” for each condition. The thing is, getting a very high polygenic score for autism doesn’t necessarily mean an individual definitely is autistic. There are many reasons for this: environmental factors matter too, the association between trait and variant might be spurious, we haven’t identified all the variants that matter, and so on.
“Due to inconsistent associations and limited generalizability, it must be emphasized that the autism polygenic score in its current state does not have clinical utility,” a meta-analysis concluded earlier this year.
According to the documentary, Hitler’s genome scores very highly for autism, along with the mental health conditions schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and antisocial behaviour or psychopathy. It also has an above-average score for ADHD. But there is already a long history of claiming Hitler had these kinds of mental conditions on the basis of his behaviour. The genetic evidence doesn’t prove anything and the diagnostic criteria for these conditions don’t include genetic data.
Hitler’s DNA came from a blood-soaked piece of fabric from the sofa that he killed himself on, which was taken by US army colonel Roswell P. Rosengren and is now on exhibit at The Gettysburg Museum of History in PennsylvaniaGettysburg Museum of History
But more to the point, so what if he did have any of these conditions? Do any of these labels explain anything? As Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge says in the documentary, the neglect and abuse Hitler experienced at the hands of his alcoholic father is “much more relevant to understanding why he grew up with hate and anger”.
Later, we are told that schizophrenia-related traits can be linked to creativity and unconventional thinking, which might explain his political and military successes. Really? This is pure speculation.
To me, that is the issue with analysing Hitler’s genome. You can make all these plausible-sounding connections with what we know about his personality and actions, but they could all be completely spurious. What’s more, it risks worsening the stigma already associated with conditions like autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

This documentary gives the lie to its own claims in that most of it simply rehashes what we already knew about Hitler. The only new thing is the claim that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome, which affects sexual development. But the physical effects of this condition vary widely and we do already have documentary evidence stating that Hitler had an undescended testicle, so, again, history is more informative than genetics.
There is also a wider issue that this documentary feeds into, the idea that Hitler was somehow uniquely evil and solely to blame for the second world war and the Holocaust. But, unfortunately, genocidal, warmongering dictators aren’t in short supply – and none could succeed without the support of many other people.
Millions voted for Hitler, other politicians backed the laws that enabled him to seize power and many officials helped implement the racist laws that led to the Holocaust. There is no need to look to genes to explain why many individuals try to become dictators – the far more pressing question is why we let them.

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