Philippa Kaur

The altar stone lies inside Stonehenge’s two big rings of stonesGavin Hellier/roberthrding/Getty Images
A study of the 6-tonne altar stone at the heart of Stonehenge has shown that it was almost certainly brought there from north-east Scotland, much further than any other stone in the megalithic structure.
“All of us were stunned. We couldn’t believe it,” says geologist Anthony Clarke at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.
How the altar stone was transported all the way from Scotland to the south of England isn’t known, but it is most likely to have been brought by sea, says Clarke. There is evidence that people at this time were making sea journeys, he says.Advertisement

Stonehenge is thought to have been built over about 1500 years, starting around 5100 years ago. It consists of an outer circle of large stones weighing around 25 tonnes each, known as sarsens, and an inner ring and altar made of smaller stones generally of around 3 tonnes, known as bluestones. The term bluestone just means any rock that isn’t a sarsen – the bluestones are made of various kinds of rock.
“The thing that’s unique about Stonehenge is the distance that stones have been transported,” says geologist Richard Bevins at Aberystwyth University, UK. Most stone circles are made from rocks found within a kilometre of the site, says Bevins.
The source of the sarsens, however, has been traced to the West Woods of Wiltshire, around 25 kilometres from the site. And Bevins’s team has shown that almost all the bluestones come from the Preseli hills in Wales, about 280 kilometres away. One idea is that they were part of an even older Welsh stone monument that was moved.
The altar stone at Stonehenge is different to the other bluestones. “By the end of 2021, we’d come to the conclusion that the altar stone didn’t match any of the geology that we knew in Wales,” says team member Nick Pearce, also at Aberystwyth University.
This 5-metre-long stone is embedded in the ground with only one surface showing and is partly covered by two other stones. It is thought to have been put in place about 4500 years ago.
Stonehenge’s altar stone (embedded in the ground under the other stones) came from north-east ScotlandNick Pearce, Aberystwyth University
Now, Clarke has taken sophisticated equipment usually used in the mining industry and analysed samples of the altar stone. It is a sandstone, which means it is made of eroded grains of rock that piled up at the bottom of an ancient ocean and eventually stuck together to form a new rock. The age of each grain varies depending on when the rock it eroded from first formed, so different sandstones have a distinctive mix of grains of different ages.
Clarke analysed individual crystals of the minerals zircon, apatite and rutile within samples of the stone. These minerals contain uranium, which very slowly decays to lead, allowing them to be dated from the ratio of uranium to lead. For instance, the zircon in the stone is between 500 million and 3 billion years old.
The pattern of ages shows with greater than 95 per cent certainty that the altar stone is Old Red Sandstone from the Orcadian basin in north-east Scotland, says team member Chris Kirkland at Curtin University. This basin was once a massive ancient water body called Lake Orcadie.

The nearest matching Old Red Sandstone to Stonehenge is 750 kilometres away in the vicinity of Inverness, and the furthest is in the Shetland Islands up to 1000 kilometres away – hence why the team thinks the altar stone was probably transported by sea.
Glaciers can carry boulders long distances, but the evidence is that during the last glacial period, the flow of ice in the Orcadian region was northwards rather than southwards, says Kirkland.
So why was the altar stone brought such a long distance? “That is the great unanswerable question,” says Clarke. “All we know is it’s a 6-tonne piece of rock that’s come from 750 kilometres away. That, by itself, tells us an awful lot about the Neolithic society and its connectivity.”
“What they’ve done is pretty rigorous,” says David Nash at the University of Brighton, UK, whose team identified the precise source of the sarsens in Wiltshire. “It’s a really sound piece of work.”

Pinning down the source of the altar stone more precisely will be difficult because the Orcadian basin extends over a vast area and is up to 8 kilometres deep, says Nash. “That’s a big, big job, because there’s an awful lot of Old Red Sandstone in northern Scotland.”
With the sarsens, by contrast, there were fewer potential sources, so locating the exact one was easier, he says.
Genetic studies have shown that the people who did most of the construction of Stonehenge were largely replaced by a new wave of migrants by about 4000 years ago. This could be because a plague pandemic wiped out a large proportion of Europe’s inhabitants around this time.

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The Altamura Man skeleton in Lamalunga caveCostantino Buzi
This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox for free every month.
Have you heard of Altamura Man? Since it was new to me, I’m going to guess that you may be unfamiliar with it. Which is peculiar, because it’s an astonishing specimen.
To find Altamura Man you would need to travel to Puglia (also known as Apulia) in southern Italy: if you think of Italy as looking like a boot, Puglia is… More

Excavations at Mololo cave on the island of Waigeo, where ancient plant resin was foundTristan Russell (The Raja Ampat Archaeological Project)
A tiny chunk of plant resin shows humans were living on an island in eastern Indonesia at least 55,000 years ago – revealing the likely route that modern humans took when migrating to Australia.
We know that modern humans journeyed to Australia by heading south-east from mainland Asia, travelling through what is now Indonesia and many other islands of South-East Asia. The exact timing is contested, says Dylan Gaffney at the University of Oxford. Modern genetic evidence suggests humans arrived less than 50,000 years ago, but archaeological evidence points to an earlier arrival, “perhaps 65,000 or even 80,000 years ago”, he says.
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What is more, the exact route they took is also contested because the geography of the region at the time was different. Earth was in a cold glacial period, so more water was locked up in ice sheets and sea levels were lower, meaning some landmasses that are now islands were connected to continents. In the western part of this region, Borneo, Sumatra and Java were all part of mainland Asia – while in the eastern part, New Guinea was joined to Australia.
This means there were two possible routes humans could have taken to reach Australia. The northern route heads directly east from Borneo to Sulawesi and on to New Guinea, then south into Australia. The southern route goes via Java, passing through Bali and Timor to northern Australia.
Possible routes to AustraliaDylan Gaffney/The Raja Ampat Archaeological Project
To help find out how people made the journey, Gaffney and his colleagues excavated Mololo cave on the island of Waigeo, one of the Raja Ampat islands just west of New Guinea and along the northern route. In the sediments on the cave floor, the team found evidence of human occupation such as charcoal and a few stone flakes.
Crucially, Gaffney’s team found a piece of resin just 1.4 centimetres across. It has an angular shape, suggesting it was cut from a tree rather than pooling naturally. Radiocarbon dating indicates it is at least 55,000 years old.
The resin was probably used as fuel for fires, says Gaffney. “It is very flammable and is a good light source in caves.” But there are other possibilities, such as fragrance or adhesive. Whatever its use, it shows that humans were on Waigeo at least 55,000 years ago. “We are demonstrating that people used the northern route,” says Gaffney.
Modern tree resin can help make fire and ancient resin may have been used in the same wayDylan Gaffney/The Raja Ampat Archaeological Project
The finding adds to the evidence that people first reached Australia via the northern route, says Kasih Norman at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Geographical models always pointed to the northern route because the sea crossings are easier. “You have more water crossings between islands to do along the northern route, but the crossings themselves are shorter,” she says. Furthermore, “you can always see to the next island”.
However, most archaeological excavations focused on the southern route, says Norman. Only in recent years have researchers like Gaffney begun exploring the northern option.
One key discovery, published in July, is a 50,000-year-old cave painting of a pig found on Sulawesi, along the northern route. Likewise, a study published in May found that there was no evidence of humans on Timor before 44,000 years ago. Timor lies on the southern route, suggesting this pathway was only used later.

A final intriguing mystery in all this concerns the absence of the Denisovans – an extinct group of humans known to have lived on mainland Asia – from Australia’s fossil record. Many populations in South-East Asia carry Denisovan DNA: this includes people from Papua New Guinea, who have DNA from two distinct Denisovan groups. That hinted, but didn’t prove, that Denisovans lived on New Guinea. Yet there is no sign of Denisovans on Australia. “As far as we’re aware,” says Norman, “there’s never been anyone else [but Homo sapiens] here.”

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Michael Kirkham
I am an only child. Saying this sometimes feels like a confession – not least when people respond with a well-meaning “oh, you don’t seem like it!”. Now, as the mother of a preschooler, I see my daughter navigating the same assumptions. “Does she have older siblings?” one teacher asked recently. “She plays so well with the other kids!”
If it seems like I am bragging about my (or my daughter’s) behaviour, you will have to excuse me: I am, after all, an only child.
For over a century, we have been seen as odd, at best; antisocial, neurotic and narcissistic, at worst. “Being an only child is a disease in itself,” declared 19th-century child psychologist Granville Stanley Hall.

Whether there are actually any differences between the personalities and well-being of singleton children and those with siblings remains a contentious question – one given fresh impetus by the growing trend of one-and-done parenting.
Single-child families have become more common since the 1970s in high-income countries, including the US and UK, whether “by constraint or by choice”, says éva Beaujouan, a demographer at the University of Vienna, Austria. In Europe, nearly half of all households with children have just one child.
Despite their growing popularity, one-child families continue to encounter a long-held view that this arrangement is somehow harmful. Fortunately, delving into contemporary research can offer a degree of clarity – and it hints that being an only child can come with surprising outcomes. The findings may offer some reassurance for one-and-done parents and those still debating how many… More

The Xingu Indigenous Territory in the Amazon may contain over 900 square kilometres of dark earthLeo F Freitas/Getty Images
Rich soil in the Amazon cultivated over centuries by Indigenous communities may store billions of tonnes of carbon, suggesting that the rainforest plays an even larger role in stabilising the global climate than previously thought.
The soil, known as “terra preta” or “dark earth” for its distinctive colour, is formed by people spreading ash and other organic waste around settlements. It is more fertile than the region’s typically sandy, nutrient-poor soils, and stores around double the carbon. In some areas,… More

A humerus fragment excavated at Mata Menge in Flores, IndonesiaYousuke Kaifu
Hominins living on an Indonesian island 700,000 years ago were even smaller than Homo floresiensis, the so-called hobbits that lived on the same island much more recently. Newly analysed fossils may represent the hobbits’ ancestors – but the evolutionary story of these small-bodied hominins is still shrouded in mystery.
Fossils of H. floresiensis were first discovered in 2003 in Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores. The hobbit bones date from between 90,000 and 50,000 years ago.
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In 2016, Yousuke Kaifu at the University of Tokyo and his colleagues uncovered hominin remains from Mata Menge, an open-air site further east on Flores that was once a riverbed. The remains are about 700,000 years old and include part of a skull, a piece of jawbone and six teeth, all unusually small for a hominin.
The obvious interpretation was that the Mata Menge hominins were the ancestors of the hobbits. But because the remains were so fragmentary, it wasn’t possible to be confident.
Kaifu and his colleagues have now described three new remains from Mata Menge: two teeth and, crucially, a piece of an upper arm bone, or humerus. With this limb bone, “we could finally determine the body size,” says Kaifu.
Unfortunately, the humerus isn’t complete: the shaft is snapped. To determine exactly how far along the break occurred, the team looked for key markers, including a groove that supports a nerve and the attachment point for a muscle. Using these clues, they determined that the bone had broken about halfway along – enabling them to estimate its total length as between 20.6 and 22.6 centimetres.
There are telltale features of the microstructure of the bone that confirm it is from an adult. Extrapolating from the humerus to the entire body, the team estimates the Mata Menge hominin was between 93 and 121 cm tall, with a best estimate of 100 cm. That is a little shorter than the H. floresiensis specimens from Liang Bua, which Kaifu says were at least 6 cm taller – and would make it the smallest adult hominin ever found.
The findings point to a likely explanation for the evolution of H. floresiensis, says Kaifu. It has long been suspected that the species was descended from large-bodied hominins called Homo erectus, which are the first hominin species known to have lived outside Africa – including on Java in Indonesia about a million years ago. “I’m almost sure that they are derived from those populations,” says Kaifu. This is because of similarities between the teeth from Mata Menge and those of H. erectus from Java, and the close proximity of the dates and locations.
The suggestion is that a small population of H. erectus reached Flores, possibly by accident, and lived there in isolation. They must have then evolved a smaller body size within 300,000 years, says Kaifu. “They were small early and then they remained small for a long, long time,” he says.
It’s common for island-dwelling animals to shrink through evolution, because food resources are limited and the lack of large predators means there’s no advantage to being bulky. In line with this, Flores was home to dwarf elephants and other species that had shrunk over many generations.

However, there are alternative explanations, according to Debbie Argue at the Australian National University in Canberra, author of Little Species, Big Mystery: The story of Homo floresiensis.
Argue points out that the Mata Menge teeth don’t look especially similar to the H. floresiensis teeth from Liang Bua. For instance, a molar from Mata Menge has five pointed “cusps”, while H. floresiensis molars have four. “There’s no clear indication of anyone evolving into anyone else,” she says, and it’s not clear why the later H. floresiensis would have evolved slightly larger bodies than their Mata Menge ancestors. Furthermore, “there’s no evidence for Homo erectus from the island.”
For these reasons, Argue says we shouldn’t assume that the Mata Menge hominins are the ancestors of the hobbits. “I would be considering another hypothesis, that the Mata Menge hominins are a new unknown species.” If island life could cause one hominin population to evolve smaller bodies, it could do so twice, she suggests.
In 2017, Argue and her colleagues compared H. floresiensis with other hominins and concluded that their closest known relatives weren’t H. erectus, but instead an older species called Homo habilis, which is only known from Africa. On this basis, they proposed that H. floresiensis actually evolved in Africa, from the same ancestral population that gave rise to H. habilis. Later, some of them migrated east, ending up on Flores. Argue says we probably need more fossils to resolve the question of the hobbits’ origins.

Topics:human evolution/ancient humans More