Philippa Kaur

Skeleton of Homo naledi, found in the Rising Star cave system in South AfricaJohn Hawks/Shutterstock
Blazing the Trail
Australian Museum, University of Sydney, BreakThru Films
It is after 10pm and I am on a cycleway in Sydney returning from dinner with friends. It is a warm evening in the week before Christmas and people are still out on the streets, gathering for end-of-year drinks.
As I cycle, I’m using my Air Pods to listen to a podcast broadcast by Bluetooth from my smartphone. The podcast, downloaded from invisible Wi-Fi, is about the origins of humanity. It strikes me that,… More

The stones that make up Stonehenge came from all over BritainHeritage Image Partnership Ltd /Alamy
Stonehenge may have been built to symbolise a unification in Stone Age Britain. The idea could explain why so many of the stones making up the monument were brought in over huge distances.
Located on Salisbury plain in southern England, Stonehenge seems to have been built in phases between 3100 and 1600 BC. There is an outer ring of vertical sarsen stones topped by horizontal lintels; inside that is a smaller ring of vertical bluestones and a number of other stones, including a horizontal… More

Lucy, the fossil hominin who lived around 3.2 million years ago, would have been no match for modern humans in a running race.
Even an average member of our species would have left her for dead in a 100-metre sprint, and the current world record holder for this distance, Usain Bolt, would have beaten Lucy by somewhere between 50 and 80 metres.

Karl Bates at the University of Liverpool in the UK and his colleagues have, for the first time, attempted to determine how fast Lucy’s species, … More

An adult skull from the Charterhouse Warren mass grave in the UK, featuring cut marks and a blunt force fractureIan R. Carwright/Institute of Archaeology Oxford University
Around 4000 years ago, at least 37 men, woman and children were brutally butchered, dismembered and possibly eaten by their enemies before their remains were tossed into a 15-metre-deep cave shaft with cattle bones.
It is the largest and most extreme episode of mass violence known from prehistoric Britain. The archaeologists behind the discovery think the perpetrators did it to dehumanise, or “other”, the victims, possibly as revenge to send a political message.… More

Illustration of modern humans who lived in Europe about 45,000 years agoTom Björklund
Modern humans and Neanderthals interbred over a sustained period of around 7000 years, probably in the eastern Mediterranean. That is according to two studies that trace how these two hominins hybridised in unprecedented detail.
“The vast majority of the Neanderthal gene flow… occurred in a single, shared, extended period,” says Priya Moorjani at the University of California, Berkeley.

The studies confirm that modern humans acquired important gene variants by mixing with Neanderthals,… More

We will never know who spoke the first sentence or what they said, but we can have some fun speculating. Perhaps it came out of the mouth of a Stone Age man who hoped to defeat a rival and win the affections of a young woman. He might have sidled up to his love interest and, while furtively pointing at his competitor, whispered gently in her ear something that translates into English as “shit-head”.
Ridiculous? Not if you are guided by the research of linguist Ljiljana Progovac. She points out that although Charles Darwin described language as “half art, half instinct”, most people who study its evolution have neglected the creative element. Her research starts to redress that by homing in on the wordplay involved in compound phrases such as shit-head, skin-flint and lily-livered, many of which are written as single words today. These, she believes, are linguistic fossils that hint at a crucial stage in language evolution: the moment when humans realised that they could string two words together to create very short sentences.
What’s more, after gathering examples of such phrases, Progovac noticed they have something surprising in common. “They are usually derogatory,” she says. And there could be a good evolutionary reason for that too.

Language is central to the human experience, but studying its ancient roots is difficult because it leaves no archaeological traces – at least until the invention of writing. Nevertheless, judging by communication systems in other animals, we can assume that our ancestors started by making simple noises or… More

Adrià Voltà
All over the northern hemisphere, millions of animals are tucked up somewhere safe, hibernating through the cold, ready to come up smiling in spring. Bats, marmots, hedgehogs, bears. And not just in the wintry north: animals in the tropics do it too, such as some fruit bats and one primate, the dwarf lemur. It had long been a dream to copy the process in people – and by the 2050s, it had become a reality.
Animals hibernate at different “depths”, with varied reductions in metabolism and body temperature. Arctic squirrels are the champions, dropping their metabolic rate by 98… More