Philippa Kaur

Rectangular buildings became common from about 10,000 years ago, as seen in this reconstruction of the ancient city of Çatalhöyük in Turkeyselimaksan/iStockphoto/Getty Images
Buildings with corners have a much deeper history than we thought, adding an unexpected twist to a curious architectural mystery from the dawn of village life.
Archaeologists have long been aware of a global trend in early architecture. From south-west Asia to the Americas, the very earliest settlements typically contained buildings with a round or oval-shaped ground plan. Then, usually a few thousand years later, these apparently went out of fashion, becoming… More

Wooden spears from Schöningen, Germany, dated to 300,000 years agoMinkusimages; Matthias Vogel, NLD.
Prehistoric people may have used throwing spears to hunt large animals 300,000 years ago – and perhaps as far back as 2 million years ago. A new analysis of preserved wooden spears indicates they could be thrown over medium distances, as well as used for thrusting.
“Traditionally, you would say thrusting is more simple than throwing, as a technological concept,” says Dirk Leder at the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage in Hanover, Germany. “You have to understand aerodynamics for throwing to… More

Illustration of two types of travois, or sledge, that may have been used by ancient people in North AmericaGabriel Ugueto
Drag marks and human footprints made up to 22,000 years ago have been found on several sites at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. These are thought to have been made by people pulling long pieces of wood laden with goods and are the earliest evidence of such activity.
This kind of primitive vehicle is known as a travois. “Basically it’s a wheelbarrow without the wheel,” says Matthew Bennett at the University of Bournemouth in the UK, a member of the team that studied the tracks.
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They were widely used across the world, but this is by far the oldest evidence of their use, says Bennett. “There’s nothing this old.”
An ancient dried-up lake at White Sands has many ancient animal footprints, while human footprints were discovered there in 2017. In 2019, the team found long drag marks in association with human footprints, with several other examples identified since.
“They occur in lots of different areas, so it was widespread,” says Bennett. “It’s not just one inventive family using a travois.”
Some of the drag marks consist of a single line. The team think this was made by a travois consisting of two long pieces of wood joined in a triangle shape, with one end of each piece held in one hand, but only a single contact point with the ground.
Other drag marks consist of two parallel lines. These were probably the result of a travois where two pieces of wood were crossed in an X shape, providing two handles and two ground contact points, which would have been more stable.
The drag marks often go through the footprints of the person assumed to be pulling the travois, as would be expected. In some cases, there are parallel tracks of footprints – often of children – showing other people walking alongside.
Drag marks made by ancient vehicles in White Sands National Park, New MexicoBournemouth University
Elsewhere in the world travois were often pulled by dogs or horses, says Bennett, but there is no evidence that the people at White Sands used animals.
The dating of the footprints, announced in 2021, challenges the conventional idea that humans didn’t move into the Americas until ice sheets began retreating around 15,000 years ago.

“The peopling of the Americas debate is a very controversial one, but we’re fairly confident about the dates,” says Bennett. “The traditional story is that the ice sheets parted and they came, but you can come through before the door closes, too.” Other recent discoveries hint that humans may have reached the Americas as early as 33,000 years ago.
Bennett says there are very likely similar tracks around the world that haven’t been recognised for what they are. In fact, his team has already discovered similar markings elsewhere in the US, he says.

Topics:human evolution More

The more we discover about our species’ family tree, the harder it becomes to pinpoint when exactly Homo sapiens emerged, raising questions over what it really means to be human. “If we look along the sapiens lineage,” says Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, “we see there’s lots of diversity. So it’s not easy to make a cut-off point when we can say, this is Homo sapiens.” Fossils from China may push our common ancestor with Neanderthals back in time, says Stringer. The split is commonly placed at 600,000 years ago, but “the separation may go back even further, towards a million years”, he suggests.

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Jonathan Chen/CC BY-SA 4.0
If the history of our species to date was represented as a single day, then civilisation would have begun in the final half-hour. At least, that’s assuming Homo sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago and civilisation began 6000 years ago with the first cities in Mesopotamia. In this tale, civilisation represents a seismic cultural shift that traces its roots back to the start of farming, some 5000 years earlier, and flows inexorably through settlement, population expansion and social stratification to urbanisation.
These days, we tell a different story. For a start, we no longer see Mesopotamia as ground zero for urbanisation: cities were springing up in other places, including India, China, Egypt and central Europe, at around the same time. What’s more, agriculture wasn’t the catalyst for civilisation we once thought. Instead, it appears to have been an invention born of necessity when the traditional hunter-gathering life became untenable – and there are plenty of examples of groups reverting when farming didn’t work out. This means we must redraw the timeline that saw our ancestors shift away from the lifestyle that had worked well for most of human history. It also requires us to question the very definition of civilisation.

An obvious place to start looking for answers is Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey. Archaeologists digging there since 1995 have unearthed a series of circular enclosures containing huge, T-shaped stone pillars. Dating back almost 12,000 years, these are the oldest known megalithic monuments. Building them would have required cooperation between many workers, along with leaders to coordinate and… More

John Bavaro Fine Art/Science Photo Library
For the vast majority of our planet’s history, there were no humans. Today, there are more than eight billion of us. Logically, then, there must have been a moment when Homo sapiens became a distinct species. Yet that moment is surprisingly hard to pin down. The problem, for once, isn’t a lack of fossils. Instead, disagreement about when to mark the origin of humanity comes down to the speciation process itself.
We often imagine the human evolutionary tree as a grander version of a personal family tree – indeed, researchers tend to talk about parent, daughter and sister species. In this picture, our parent species is equivalent to our biological parents, and the birth of H. sapiens becomes an event that is as easy to define as our own birth. But speciation isn’t really like that.

For evidence of this, look no further than a study posted online last year. Trevor Cousins and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge suggest our supposed parent species, Homo antecessor, split away from its parent, Homo heidelbergensis, more than a million years ago. About 600,000 years ago, H. antecessor gave rise to two branches: one led to the Neanderthals and Denisovans – another kind of hominin – the other to H. sapiens. Then comes the twist. Our evolutionary grandparents, H. heidelbergensis, stuck around to see the birth of the H. sapiens lineage – and about 300,000 years ago, the two interbred in a big way. In fact, the researchers’ model indicates that about 20 per cent of our… More

Humans

Pompeii only came under Roman control around 160 years before its destruction – and its traffic-worn streets show how the locals adjusted their business operations

By Colin Barras

17 February 2025

Cart wheels left deep ruts in the stone streets of PompeiiimagoDens/Shutterstock
A close look at Pompeii’s stone-paved streets has shown how traffic through the ancient city changed dramatically after it was incorporated into the Roman world.
Although often seen as a quintessentially Roman place, Pompeii was anything but. For several centuries it was actually governed by a different people known as the Samnites – and even after it fell to the Romans in 89 BC, Pompeii retained traces of its Samnite identity right up until its destruction by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. More

One thousand years ago, people along Israel’s Mediterranean coast dug deeply enclosed plots in the sand, filled them with 80,000 tonnes of trash and used the fertile soil that formed for farming, allowing them to produce crops that would otherwise fail on such harsh ground.
This represents the oldest-known, large-scale plot-and-berm system that allows crop-growing in sand, putting it among multiple, less clearly dated sites across the globe. It might even be the origin of such oasis-like agricultural sites in deserts, some of which still exist today, says Joel Roskin at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. More