Philippa Kaur

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My son is a wizard. He walks into the kitchen, looks at me and utters the magic words: “Can I have a cheese and tomato sandwich, please?” A few minutes later, just such a snack appears in front of him.
Other young animals can communicate their desire for food through grunts, tweets and growls. But only humans have the sophisticated system of grammar and vocabulary that allows us to communicate in precise terms.

This story is part of our Concepts Special, in which we reveal how experts think about some of the most mind-blowing ideas in science. Read more here

In fact, with studies of animals increasingly showing that they share many characteristics once thought to be the preserve of humans – from culture to emotions and even morality – language may seem like the one thing that truly sets us apart. “I think language makes us feel special as a species,” says Brian Lerch at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Given all that, one of the key things researchers want to know about language is how it evolved, and why it only did so in our human lineage.
Psychologist Shimon Edelman at Cornell University in New York state thinks language’s magical power has a fairly straightforward evolutionary explanation. With his colleague Oren Kolodny, now at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he argues that it may have emerged 1.7 million years ago, when ancient humans began making stone hand-axes that are beyond the ability of non-human animals to produce.
The idea is that novice tool-makers would have required guidance from an expert to make their own hand-axes, so tool-making sites became classrooms. Proto-language might have emerged as a way for teachers to communicate to students – which could explain why both language and tool-making seem to require the brain to arrange and order thoughts into structured sequences.
But about a decade ago, a key experiment challenged that view. In 2014, Shelby Putt at Illinois State University and her colleagues tasked 24 volunteers with learning to make hand-axes from an expert who either talked them through the process or merely made the tools in the volunteers’ presence while occasionally pointing to direct their attention. Surprisingly, both methods were effective, suggesting verbal language isn’t necessary for complex tool-making.
This doesn’t mean Putt sees language and tool-making as completely unconnected. She thinks complex tool-making really did require humans to arrange and order their thoughts to stay on task. This, she argues, led to the expansion of the brain regions involved in working memory, which we use to briefly hold and manipulate ideas.
But Putt suspects it was only at some later date that humans used this ability to structure and order their thoughts to develop language – presumably because it helped them communicate better and boosted their chances of survival.

These scenarios all assume that language is fundamentally a tool for communicating with others. But that might not be the case. A third way to think about the evolution of language focuses almost exclusively on the way it can help individuals “talk” to themselves and organise their thoughts to undertake complex tasks.
According to some, including the influential linguist Noam Chomsky, this is what drove the evolution of language, meaning it had nothing at all to do with tool-making. Instead, these researchers think language emerged as recently as 70,000 years ago, perhaps simply because of a random genetic mutation that prompted brain rewiring.
Truth be told, there is still little consensus about quite how language arose. But if Chomsky and his ilk are right, though it didn’t involve magic, it might at least have involved a little luck.

Read the other stories in this series using the links below:

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Exposure to hormones in utero could affect human brain growthPeter Dazeley/Getty Images
The human brain is one of the most complex objects in the universe – and that complexity may be due to a surge of hormones released by the placenta during pregnancy.
While numerous ideas have been proposed to explain human brain evolution, it remains one of our greatest scientific mysteries. One explanation, known as the social brain hypothesis, suggests that our large brains evolved to manage complex social relationships. It posits that navigating large group dynamics requires a certain degree of cognitive ability, pushing social species to develop bigger brains. For instance, other highly sociable animals, such as dolphins and elephants, have relatively large brains too. But the biological mechanism underlying this link has remained unclear.
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Now, Alex Tsompanidis at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues say the answer may be placental sex hormones. During pregnancy, the placenta – a temporary organ that acts as an intermediary between the fetus and the mother – produces hormones crucial for fetal development. These include sex hormones such as oestrogens and androgens.
“I know that seems like a jump – thinking about human evolution and then ending up on the placenta,” says Tsompanidis. “But the reason for that is because we’ve been looking at the fluctuations and variations in the levels of these hormones in the womb and seeing that they predict things like language development and social development.”
Emerging research also shows that these hormones influence the developing brain. For instance, a 2022 study found that administering androgens, such as testosterone, to brain organoids – simplified, miniature versions of the brain made from human stem cells – during a critical developmental period increased the number of cells in the cortex, a brain region crucial for memory, learning and thinking. Other studies in brain organoids have shown that oestrogens are important for forming and stabilising connections between neurons.
There is also some limited evidence that humans are exposed to higher levels of these hormones during pregnancy than non-human primates are. A 1983 study found that gorillas and chimpanzees have four to five times less oestrogen in their urine than humans during pregnancy. The placenta also has more activity in genes that produce aromatase – an enzyme that converts androgens into oestrogens – in humans than in macaque monkeys.
“These hormones have become very important for brain development, and if we look at it comparatively with other primates and other species, there seems to be evidence that these hormones are very high in humans [during pregnancy],” says Tsompanidis.
This influx could also help explain why humans form such large social groups. Some evolutionary biologists believe that we are able to build extensive social networks because the differences between the sexes are more subtle in humans than in other primates. For example, men and women are more similar in body size than male and female Neanderthals, says Tsompanidis. This is probably due to higher oestrogen levels in utero, he says.

“If you have a lot of oestrogen, not only are you a bit less masculinised, but you’re also more likely to have an interconnected brain,” says Tsompanidis. “So the push to increase oestrogen, the push to make everyone social and getting along, is actually what makes the human brain larger and more connected.”
“I agree that placental genes influence human brain development and likely hominin brain evolution,” says David Geary at the University of Missouri. “However, I think they are underestimating the influence of male-male competition on brain and cognitive evolution.”
While it is true that male humans within the same social group tend to be more cooperative and less aggressive towards one another than is seen in other primates, this may have evolved as a result of between-group conflicts, he says. After all, greater coordination and teamwork would be an advantage in a deadly confrontation, he points out.

Our knowledge of placental differences between primates is also limited. Many non-human primates, such as chimpanzees, eat the placenta after giving birth, making it difficult to study, says Tsompanidis.
Identifying which factors shaped human brain evolution is more than just an intellectual pursuit: it could also shed light on neurodiversity.
“Not all humans are social or have incredible language skills – and that is fine. That doesn’t make them any less human,” says Tsompanidis. Understanding how the brain evolved could provide insight on whether certain cognitive traits come with trade-offs, he says.

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Exposure to hormones in utero could affect human brain growthPeter Dazeley/Getty Images
The human brain is one of the most complex objects in the universe – and that complexity may be due to a surge of hormones released by the placenta during pregnancy.
While numerous ideas have been proposed to explain human brain evolution, it remains one of our greatest scientific mysteries. One explanation, known as the social brain hypothesis, suggests that our large brains evolved to manage complex social relationships. It posits that navigating large group dynamics requires a certain degree of cognitive ability, pushing social species to develop bigger brains. For instance, other highly sociable animals, such as dolphins and elephants, have relatively large brains too. But the biological mechanism underlying this link has remained unclear.
Advertisement
Now, Alex Tsompanidis at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues say the answer may be placental sex hormones. During pregnancy, the placenta – a temporary organ that acts as an intermediary between the fetus and the mother – produces hormones crucial for fetal development. These include sex hormones such as oestrogens and androgens.
“I know that seems like a jump – thinking about human evolution and then ending up on the placenta,” says Tsompanidis. “But the reason for that is because we’ve been looking at the fluctuations and variations in the levels of these hormones in the womb and seeing that they predict things like language development and social development.”
Emerging research also shows that these hormones influence the developing brain. For instance, a 2022 study found that administering androgens, such as testosterone, to brain organoids – simplified, miniature versions of the brain made from human stem cells – during a critical developmental period increased the number of cells in the cortex, a brain region crucial for memory, learning and thinking. Other studies in brain organoids have shown that oestrogens are important for forming and stabilising connections between neurons.
There is also some limited evidence that humans are exposed to higher levels of these hormones during pregnancy than non-human primates are. A 1983 study found that gorillas and chimpanzees have four to five times less oestrogen in their urine than humans during pregnancy. The placenta also has more activity in genes that produce aromatase – an enzyme that converts androgens into oestrogens – in humans than in macaque monkeys.
“These hormones have become very important for brain development, and if we look at it comparatively with other primates and other species, there seems to be evidence that these hormones are very high in humans [during pregnancy],” says Tsompanidis.
This influx could also help explain why humans form such large social groups. Some evolutionary biologists believe that we are able to build extensive social networks because the differences between the sexes are more subtle in humans than in other primates. For example, men and women are more similar in body size than male and female Neanderthals, says Tsompanidis. This is probably due to higher oestrogen levels in utero, he says.

“If you have a lot of oestrogen, not only are you a bit less masculinised, but you’re also more likely to have an interconnected brain,” says Tsompanidis. “So the push to increase oestrogen, the push to make everyone social and getting along, is actually what makes the human brain larger and more connected.”
“I agree that placental genes influence human brain development and likely hominin brain evolution,” says David Geary at the University of Missouri. “However, I think they are underestimating the influence of male-male competition on brain and cognitive evolution.”
While it is true that male humans within the same social group tend to be more cooperative and less aggressive towards one another than is seen in other primates, this may have evolved as a result of between-group conflicts, he says. After all, greater coordination and teamwork would be an advantage in a deadly confrontation, he points out.

Our knowledge of placental differences between primates is also limited. Many non-human primates, such as chimpanzees, eat the placenta after giving birth, making it difficult to study, says Tsompanidis.
Identifying which factors shaped human brain evolution is more than just an intellectual pursuit: it could also shed light on neurodiversity.
“Not all humans are social or have incredible language skills – and that is fine. That doesn’t make them any less human,” says Tsompanidis. Understanding how the brain evolved could provide insight on whether certain cognitive traits come with trade-offs, he says.

Topics: More

Hominin cranium from Harbin, China, now identified as a DenisovanHebei GEO University
The Denisovans, a mysterious group of ancient humans originally identified purely from DNA, finally have a face.
Using molecular evidence, Qiaomei Fu at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing and her colleagues have confirmed what many researchers suspected: that a skull from China known as “dragon man” belonged to a Denisovan.

This fits with other evidence suggesting that the Denisovans were large and stocky. “I think we’re looking at individuals that are all [around] 100 kilos [of] lean body mass: enormous, enormous individuals,” says Bence Viola at the University of Toronto in Canada, who was not involved in the study.
The Denisovans were first identified in 2010. In Denisova cave in the Altai mountains of Siberia, researchers found a sliver of finger bone from an unidentified ancient human. Preserved DNA revealed that it wasn’t a modern human (Homo sapiens), nor a Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis), but something hitherto unknown.
Genetic evidence also revealed that Denisovans had interbred with modern humans. Today, populations in South-East Asia and Melanesia carry up to 5 per cent Denisovan DNA, which implies that Denisovans were once widespread in Asia.
After these discoveries, researchers began looking for Denisovan fossils, both in the field and in museum collections. Several have been found, notably a lower jawbone from Baishiya Karst cave on the Tibetan plateau, which was confirmed using proteins from the fossil and DNA from surrounding sediments. In April, a jawbone dredged from the Penghu Channel off the coast of Taiwan was confirmed to be Denisovan, based on preserved proteins.
However, there was still a frustrating disconnect. The fossils confirmed as Denisovans using molecular evidence were all small, so they weren’t very informative. Meanwhile, there were many more complete fossils from Asia that were suspected to be Denisovan, but none had yielded molecular evidence.
Fu and her colleagues set out to obtain preserved DNA or protein from a hominin cranium found in Harbin in north-east China. First described in 2021 after having been kept secret for decades, the cranium is unusually large and bulky, with thick brow ridges and capacity for a brain of a similar size to ours. It was named Homo longi – or dragon man – by its discoverers.
“My impression was, this is the right kind of thing in the right place at the right time to be a Denisovan,” says Viola.
Fu says it was extremely difficult to get preserved molecules from the Harbin cranium. Her team’s attempts to obtain DNA from the bone proved fruitless. However, they did manage to get 95 proteins, which included three variants that are unique to Denisovans.
Feeling that this wasn’t enough to be certain, Fu began testing dental calculus, the hard plaque that forms on teeth. This yielded mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from the mother. It was a “tiny amount”, she says, but enough to confirm that the remains were Denisovan.
“That’s an incredible result, and fantastic that they even tried,” says Samantha Brown at the National Research Center for Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain. “I think most researchers would overlook dental calculus for genetic studies.”

Now that the bulky Harbin skull has been identified as Denisovan, it confirms something long suspected: Denisovans were big.
“There were clues [to] that right from the beginning with their teeth,” says Brown: the handful of molars that were found were unusually large. Known jawbones were also big. “We thought Neanderthals were the stocky ancestor, but actually it might be Denisovans that really were the big boys of the palaeontological record.”
It isn’t clear why this was the case. Neanderthals’ size and build have been linked to the cold climates in Europe and western Asia where they lived. Some Denisovan sites, including Denisova cave and the Tibetan plateau, were also cold – but others were tropical. “I think we’ll have to think about what this really means,” says Viola.
It may be that the Denisovans changed over time. Fragments from Denisova cave reveal two groups: one from 217,000 to 106,000 years ago, and the other from 84,000 to 52,000 years ago. The Harbin cranium is at least 146,000 years old, and Fu found that its proteins and mitochondrial DNA matched the older group. But we don’t have confirmed large fossils of the more recent Denisovans, so we don’t know what they were like.
“There’s just lots of different groups of these guys who are moving around the landscape, kind of independently, that are often separated from each other for probably tens of thousands of years,” says Viola. We shouldn’t expect them to all look alike, he says.

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A colder climate than we have now let ancient people cross the Bering land bridge and enter the AmericasGetty Images/iStockphoto
This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month.
A central plot point in the human story is our species’ worldwide spread. From our homelands in Africa, our ancestors went to Europe, Asia, Australia and, eventually, to the Americas. The last continent they reached was South America (apart from Antarctica, but let’s not worry about that).
This is a curiously understudied chapter in our story. Huge amounts of research effort have gone into figuring out when and where humans first entered Europe, Asia and North America, but there’s been less attention to the first arrivals in South America.
That’s reflected in my own output: looking back through the archive of Our Human Story, I realised the last time I wrote in any depth about South America was June 2023.
However, that’s starting to change. On 15 May, Science published a massive genetic study of South Americans, which sheds a lot of light on the early peopling of the continent. It reveals a four-way split in the population as groups dispersed to different regions of the landmass. It also fits into an emerging story of extraordinary journeys – and the tremendous risks that were sometimes involved in moving to a new continent.

The long and winding road
If you know that Homo sapiens first evolved in Africa, and then look at a globe, it becomes apparent that getting to South America would be a significant undertaking. The vast span of the Atlantic Ocean lies between the two continents and was presumably an impassable barrier. So, humans ended up going the long way around.
Of course, it wasn’t a planned thing. Nobody back then knew South America even existed. People just kept wandering over the horizon to the next place. That took them out of Africa into south-west Asia, and from there to every corner of Eurasia. Some people even ended up in the far north-east of Asia, in the region we now call Chukotka in the Russian Far East.
From there, it was a relatively short hop to what we now call Alaska, in the far north-west of North America. Humans arrived there at least 16,000 years ago. Today, there is a sea crossing of about 82 kilometres, called the Bering Strait. But thousands of years ago the climate was colder and sea levels were lower, so more land was exposed – including an area called Beringia, linking Asia and North America. People may have simply walked across, without realising they were doing anything monumental.
In line with this, a study published in May found that horses regularly moved between North America and Asia via Beringia between 50,000 and 13,000 years ago. If horses could make this journey, people presumably could as well.
So did a species of bacteria that causes leprosy. In late May, we learned that Mycobacterium lepromatosis has been living and evolving in the Americas for almost 10,000 years.
Somehow, groups of the first Americans then made their way south. Some may have used boats to travel down the Pacific coast, while others went inland. Either way, people eventually found their way to the southernmost tip of South America.
These populations have left a rich archaeological record. A study published in February described a large collection of artefacts from the Tacuarembó Department of Uruguay from 10,000 to 11,000 years ago.
Who were these early South Americans? That’s where the new genetic analysis comes in.

On the move
Researchers led by Hie Lim Kim at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore compiled genomic data from 1537 people belonging to 139 ethnic groups. Some were from northern Eurasian populations potentially related to those who first entered the Americas, and some were from the Americas, including South America.
“We showed this humongous migration history,” says Kim.
Between 13,900 and 10,000 years ago, the first people in South America split into four groups with distinct genetic variants. All four genetic patterns can still be found in South Americans today.
It’s “very difficult” to come up with terms to describe this, says Kim. The study identifies genetic differences between populations, but these don’t necessarily correspond to cultural traits. “We didn’t define them as their culture or languages,” she says, but purely by ancestry.
With that caveat in mind, Kim’s team has labelled the four groups Amazonians, Andeans, Chaco Amerindians and Patagonians. The names relate to the regions where the genetic signals are strongest today. For example, the Amazonian ancestry is detectable today in people living in the Amazon rainforest, the Andean in the Andes mountain range, and the Patagonian in, well, Patagonia in southern Argentina. The Chaco Amerindian ancestry is today found in the Dry Chaco, a region spanning parts of Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay. “They are hunter-gatherers living in the desert,” says Kim.
After the groups diverged, there is no sign of significant gene flow between them. It’s very possible that “they never met again”, says Kim. Geographical barriers like the Andes may have contributed to this isolation.
This almost certainly isn’t the full story, though, says Kim. There could well be more groups than just these four. “We have a very limited sample from Brazil,” she says, “And then there are still a lot of ethnic groups in the Amazon jungle.”
Other studies from the last few months hint at the richness of stories still to be uncovered. One, from March, looked at archaeological evidence from the “Southern Cone”: the region, south of the 22nd parallel, that includes the south of Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. There, humans hunted large megafauna, such as giant ground sloths and giant armadillos called glyptodonts, for food and to make bone tools.
Another study published in March described how a people called the Guaraní made a huge journey across South America, travelling 2500 km from south-western Amazonia to south-eastern South America. After hundreds of years, they eventually reached the Río de la Plata estuary on the east coast, which today is the site of both Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
The most recent study, published in late May, highlights the dangers of moving to a new area. Ancient DNA from Colombia revealed a hitherto-unknown population of hunter-gatherers who lived on the Bogotá Altiplano, a plateau that is on average 2600 metres above sea level, around 6000 years ago. By 2000 years ago, they had been replaced by populations from Central America, and today there is no trace of their genetic makeup in any population that has been sampled – suggesting that, for some unknown reason, the group didn’t survive.
South America is a big place, and we’ve only just scratched the surface: there will be many, many more stories like these.

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Tutankhamun’s death mask, fashioned from gold and semi-precious stonesRosemary Calvert/Getty Images
A century ago this October, Egyptologist Howard Carter and his colleagues opened the innermost coffin of the pharaoh Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus for the first time in almost 3250 years. Inside they discovered the boy king’s mummy wearing an incredible mask fashioned from gold and semi-precious stones.
Tutankhamun’s fame today stems largely from the discovery of his tomb, which was filled with lavish goods – not only the magnificent funerary mask, but chariots, statues and even a dagger crafted using iron from a meteorite. In truth, though, he was a relatively insignificant pharaoh with, in turn, a presumably austere burial. That he was interred with such riches raises an intriguing question: What treasures might a truly important pharaoh have taken to their grave?

Carter wondered this, too. “How great must have been the wealth buried with those [other] ancient Pharaohs!” he would later write. Sadly, this is something we still don’t know for sure, as almost all other royal tombs were plundered and their grave goods lost.
But now, one Egyptologist has put forward a surprising explanation for the conundrum of the opulence of Tutankhamun’s interment. According to Peter Lacovara, thanks to an intriguing combination of factors, this obscure king’s tomb may actually be the richest of any pharaoh’s in ancient Egypt’s 3000-year-long existence. “Even King Khufu in the Great Pyramid of Giza would never have had anything approaching the quantity of material in Tutankhamun’s tomb,” he says.
Putting this idea to the ultimate test would require comparing the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb with those of another pharaoh who reigned at about the same time. Remarkably, such a comparison might soon be possible: researchers could be poised to unearth an untouched royal tomb purportedly belonging to Tutankhamun’s great-great-great-great grandfather, Thutmose II.
It was on 28 October 1925 – three years after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb – that Carter and his colleagues were finally ready to open the pharaoh’s solid-gold coffin. Carter was clearly impressed by the richly adorned mummy he found within. “Time… seemed to lose its common perspectives before a spectacle so vividly recalling the solemn religious rites of a vanished civilisation,” he wrote.
Howard Carter and his colleague examining Tutankhamun’s mummyIan Dagnall Computing/Alamy
All the same, it is easy to understand why Carter harboured suspicions that many other pharaohs had enjoyed even wealthier burials. Tutankhamun reigned for less than 10 years, dying in his teens before he could commission grand monuments or make his mark militarily. Nicholas Brown at Yale University says this means he “ranks down near the bottom of the list” of pharaohs in his particular branch of the royal family – known as the 18th dynasty, whose members ruled ancient Egypt from the mid-16th to the early 13th century BC. In line with this, he has one of the smallest tombs in the Valley of the Kings, near modern Luxor, measuring only about 110 square metres.
This is in stark contrast with the vast tombs of the kings known as the Ramessides, who reigned in the centuries after the 18th-dynasty pharaohs. The tomb of Ramesses III in the Valley of the Kings, for instance, has more than four times the footprint of Tutankhamun’s. However, Lacovara suggests that this tomb, despite its size, may never have contained as many grave goods as Tutankhamun’s.
Egyptology insights
Tombs like Ramesses III’s had grand entrances. “They were visibly on show,” says Lacovara, who is the director of The Ancient Egyptian Archaeology and Heritage Fund, a US-based non-profit organisation. He suspects this is because these tombs – unlike Tutankhamun’s – were designed to be visited, probably by priests who would continue to honour the pharaoh even in death. As such, he argues that these tombs were unlikely to have housed many treasures because they would have been an easy target for thieves; Tutankhamun’s treasure-filled tomb, meanwhile, was sealed and carefully hidden. “Certainly, the 18th-dynasty tombs were better hidden than their later Ramesside counterparts,” says Joann Fletcher at the University of York, UK.

Nevertheless, we know Carter was correct to suspect that many other royal tombs contained impressive artefacts. While most of those tombs were plundered in antiquity, a few escaped the attention of ancient robbers.
For instance, back in 1925 – just months before Carter and his colleagues opened Tutankhamun’s gold coffin – a team of researchers working in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza discovered a cache of royal funerary treasures belonging to Queen Hetepheres, a 27th-century BC royal and Khufu’s mother.
Hetepheres’s treasures include finely made silver bracelets inlaid with royal blue lapis lazuli and a gold-covered box. “They are quite beautiful,” says Josef Wegner at the University of Pennsylvania.
Untouched mummies
Then there is an intact royal tomb discovered in northern Egypt in the late 1930s, containing the untouched mummies of three pharaohs from the 11th, 10th and 9th centuries BC. The solid-gold burial mask of one of these pharaohs – Psusennes I – bears a striking resemblance to the famous mask of Tutankhamun.
Treasures like these offer a priceless window into the artisanal skills and belief systems of ancient Egyptians. But they also suggest the objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb are among the finest the civilisation ever produced.
Take Tutankhamun’s iconic gold burial mask. A decade ago, Christian Eckmann and Katja Broschat at the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology in Germany and their colleagues, all specialists in ancient manufacturing techniques, were given the opportunity to study the artefact as part of a restoration project. The researchers, who published their findings in 2022, gained a deep appreciation of the work that went into the mask’s production. “The funerary mask of Tut is made of approximately 1230 individual pieces including inlays and attachments,” says Eckmann. In contrast, Psusennes I’s superficially similar mask “seems to be basically made of two pieces of sheet gold with only a few inlays for the eyes, eyebrows and so on”, he says.
“The artistic excellence reflected in Tutankhamun’s tomb is indeed a zenith,” says Piers Litherland, head of the New Kingdom Research Foundation, a UK-based archaeological research team. That, in part, reflects a broad trend in ancient Egyptian politics.

Down the centuries, ancient Egypt swung from periods of political stability and prosperity to periods of instability. The 18th-dynasty pharaohs ruled at the start of arguably the most stable and economically prosperous period of all, a golden age known as the New Kingdom. Exactly why the New Kingdom was so prosperous is still something of a mystery. In yet-to-be published work, Litherland and his colleagues have found evidence that the climate became wetter at the dawn of the New Kingdom, which might have made farming and hunting easier and provided an economic boost that helped the 18th-dynasty pharaohs become richer. Lacovara, however, is sceptical about this, and instead thinks the prosperity of the dynasty was due to the fact these pharaohs made wise trading decisions and had the good fortune to win territory after successfully battling their neighbours.
Either way, the dynasty reached the peak of its prosperity under the rule of Amenhotep III, Tutankhamun’s grandfather. At that point, the economy was strong enough to provide ample employment opportunities for artists and goldsmiths, explaining why the treasures in Tutankhamun’s tomb are so finely made. “The superb symmetry and refinement of his jewellery and statuary reflect the growing wealth of the dynasty,” says Litherland.

What treasures might a truly important pharaoh have taken to their grave?

But it isn’t just the quality of Tutankhamun’s treasures; it’s their quantity. Inside the young king’s tomb, Carter and his colleagues found about 5400 items. “It was crowded with objects,” says Lacovara.
The list of artefacts from his tomb offers some clues as to why he was buried with so much. It reveals, for instance, that there were several sumptuously decorated wooden beds and chairs.
There is general agreement among Egyptologists about why that was the case: “Tutankhamun had his own funerary furniture, but also a lot of other objects that seem to have been intended for the pharaohs who immediately preceded him,” says Lacovara. Such grave goods may have been kept from the tombs of those preceding pharaohs because those rulers were considered heretics. For most of ancient Egyptian history – up to and including the reign of Tutankhamun’s grandfather Amenhotep III – pharaohs were keen to acknowledge the state’s many gods by building great temples in their honour. But Tutankhamun’s father – the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who later took the name Akhenaten – had a radically different approach. He closed many temples as part of his vision to replace the state’s traditional polytheistic faith with one based on the worship of the sun disc, represented by a single god: the Aten.
Religious revival
Akhenaten’s bold, monotheistic religious plan was, however, a failure. Atenism seems to have remained in place for just a couple of years after his death, an obscure period of ancient Egyptian history in which two more pharaohs may have briefly reigned before Tutankhamun ascended the throne, although we can’t say for sure because later ancient Egyptians tried to erase all records of Atenism from their history. When Tutankhamun became pharaoh as a young boy, his adult advisors evidently saw an opportunity to restore the traditional faith and reopen the temples. “In that sense, Tutankhamun really is a pivotal figure,” says Lacovara.
Earlier this year, Brown published a study in which he identified hints that Tutankhamun – or his advisors – actually invented some new ceremonies as part of this religious restoration, again demonstrating Tutankhamun’s importance. The evidence for this comes from four clay trays and wooden staves found in his tomb, which Brown thinks were the earliest example of a funerary ritual known as the Awakening of Osiris. The ritual is represented in ancient Egyptian artwork dating to several decades after Tutankhamun’s reign.
The outcome was that, when the young pharaoh died in the ninth year of his reign, the traditional polytheistic religion was securely back in place. At that point, a decision seems to have been made to bury Tutankhamun not just with his own personal possessions, but with those of his out-of-favour, Aten-worshiping predecessors. We can see evidence of this in photos from Carter’s excavations a century ago: Tutankhamun’s tomb contained multiple sets of the same elaborate grave goods stacked side by side, giving it the appearance of a well-stocked department store.
Tutankhamun’s tomb conundrum
Exactly why that decision was made is unclear. Some researchers, such as Fletcher, have suggested that the treasures of the Aten-worshippers were considered tainted, so they were buried with Tutankhamun to get rid of them. Brown thinks an alternative is possible: that Tutankhamun was buried with so much treasure as a mark of gratitude for his role in restoring the traditional faith. This might help explain why his tomb contains heavily gilded statues that, going on the evidence of the later pharaoh Horemheb’s tomb, were usually given a simpler, black-resin finish, says Brown. “The amount of gold in Tutankhamun’s tomb is a conundrum,” he says.
A golden chariot, one of the six found in Tutankhamun’s tombCredit: The Print Collector /Alamy
Whatever the explanation, says Lacovara, the main message is clear: Tutankhamun had an unusual funeral because he wasn’t simply buried with grave goods fit for a king, but with grave goods fit for several kings. “I don’t know that there’s anything more out there that would add to this,” he says. But there may, in fact, be a way to further strengthen the case.
Earlier this year, Litherland and his colleagues unearthed an ancient Egyptian royal tomb belonging to Thutmose II, Tutankhamun’s great-great-great-great grandfather. Like Tutankhamun, Thutmose II was an 18th-dynasty pharaoh – but his reign came early in the dynasty, before it had reached its economic and artistic peak. As such, Litherland speculates it is likely that the treasures Thutmose II was buried with were modest compared with Tutankhamun’s. Sadly, we can’t say for sure because the tomb was found empty.
However, Litherland suspects that Thutmose II’s tomb was barren because its contents were moved to a new location by the ancient Egyptian authorities, possibly because the tomb flooded shortly after Thutmose II’s interment. This would explain why there was no tell-tale evidence that grave robbers had plundered the tomb – no bundles of linen bandages, broken mummy remains or smashed clay vessels.
Undiscovered riches?
“The burial had to be moved somewhere,” says Litherland – and he thinks he knows where that is. Close to the empty tomb, he and his colleagues have discovered an enormous debris pile, including layers of human-made mud plaster, which they think conceals the entrance to a second tomb into which the king and his treasures were moved – and where they may remain even today. The researchers will resume their search for this hypothetical untouched tomb later this year.
“My expectation, if we find the tomb, is that we will find a much smaller range of objects than were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, and that the artistry will be, in some cases, cruder,” says Litherland.
Lacovara agrees. “Even when it was intact… the grave goods it contained would be much less lavish and far smaller in number than those found in the tomb of Tutankhamun,” he says. However, he doubts Litherland will make such a discovery. “I’m afraid there is no chance of finding an intact tomb for Thutmose II,” says Lacovara. This is because Thutmose II’s mummy seems to have already been found among a stash of royal mummies in a tomb near the Valley of the Kings, apparently moved there for safekeeping by the ancient Egyptians. One of these mummies was labelled as being that of Thutmose II, though Litherland suspects it isn’t – particularly since it belonged to a man who died at about 30 years of age, when many suspect that Thutmose II died in his late teens or early 20s.
But even without clues from Thutmose II’s tomb, the evidence points to Carter being luckier than he realised, says Lacovara, to have stumbled across possibly the most spectacularly stocked royal burial in ancient Egypt’s sprawling existence.
“It’s an incredibly wealthy tomb,” he says. “And it’s a miracle that it survived more or less intact.”

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