Philippa Kaur

The Great Ziggurat of Ur, in present‑day IraqMohammed Al ali/Alamy
Between Two RiversMoudhy Al-Rashid (Hachette (UK, 20 February); W. W. Norton (US, 12 August))
A new and spellbinding book tells the history of the very ancient past of Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Between Two Rivers by Moudhy Al-Rashid, a researcher at the University of Oxford, weaves together the many strands of the story of the region, which covers much of what is now Iraq.
Ancient Mesopotamia has languished in obscurity, at least compared with the better-known Greek, Roman and Egyptian civilisations. So… More

Reconstruction of Lucy, the most famous skeleton of Australopithecus afarensisMLouisphotography/Alamy
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.
Whenever we think about the process of evolution, there’s a risk of falling into the trap of telling stories. Human minds are prone to interpret the world in terms of stories: it’s just one of our biases, along with the one that causes us to see faces in clouds and on pieces of toast. So we always have to be… More

The Yamna people were ancient herders who came from what is now UkraineAdariukov Oleksandr/Shutterstock
A huge trove of genetic data has revealed the origins of a mysterious people who were the ancestors of all modern Europeans. This crucial population was formed when multiple groups mixed in the region north of the Black Sea, in what is now Ukraine.
Modern humans (Homo sapiens) arrived in Europe in three waves. The first were hunter-gatherers, who arrived from about 45,000 years ago. They were followed by farmers who came from from the Middle East around 9000 years ago. More

The PHerc.172 scroll as revealed by X-ray imagingVesuvius Challenge
An ancient Roman scroll has been read for the first time since it was charred in the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius two millennia ago, thanks to artificial intelligence and a high-powered X-ray facility.
The papyrus scroll was one of 1800 rescued from a single room in an ornate villa in the Roman town of Herculaneum during the 1750s, which is now the Italian town of Ercolano. All of them were carbonised by the heat of the volcanic debris that buried them.
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Initially, locals unknowingly burned the scrolls as firewood, but once it was discovered that they contained text, they were saved. Around 200 have since been painstakingly opened and read by mechanical devices based on clocks, which slowly tick and prise the scrolls open millimetre by millimetre.
Three of these scrolls are kept at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, having been gifted by the future King George IV in 1804. The then-prince of Wales had traded a troop of kangaroos to King Ferdinand IV of Naples in exchange for the scrolls. (The Neapolitan king was constructing an elaborate garden and a collection of animals for his lover.)
One of these three scrolls, known as PHerc. 172, has now been imaged and analysed using machine learning algorithms. It was scanned at Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire, home to an extremely high-powered X-ray machine known as a synchrotron, and the resulting data was made available to participants in the Vesuvius Challenge – a competition with a $700,000 grand prize for interpreting text from scrolls.

This method is much better than trying to open the scrolls mechanically,  says Peter Toth, a curator at the Bodleian Library. “The only problem, or risk, is that the imaging is so special that it cannot be done here, which means that the scroll had to leave the premises. And we were very, very nervous about that,” he says.
Researchers have so far revealed several columns of text, with about 26 lines in each column. Academics are now hoping to read the whole scroll, but can already make out the Ancient Greek word διατροπή, meaning “disgust.” Toth suspects that it will relate in some way to the philosopher Epicurus, as so many of the other scrolls found at the same site have.
PHerc. 172 was the only one of the three scrolls at the Bodleian Library deemed stable enough to travel, and then only in a specially 3D-printed case inside another padded box. “The hope is that the technology can improve so much [in the future] that the items do not have to travel anywhere, but the technology can come to us,” says Toth.

Topics:archaeology/AI More

Today, clothes are a means of self‑expression and group identity – and we wouldn’t go out without themMartin Parr/Magnum Photos
Venus figurines are most famous for their sexual features. These often-voluptuous carvings of female forms, made between around 30,000 and 20,000 years ago, have been interpreted as ritual fertility figures, mother goddesses and self-portraits. One thing they are generally not seen as is fashion plates. Yet some of them provide tantalising glimpses of what the well-dressed Stone Age woman was wearing. One, from Kostenki in Russia, sports a wrap-style robe with straps. Others have string skirts. And the famous Venus of Willendorf wears just a woven hat – but a very fine one.
These statuettes are a far cry from our popular conception of prehistoric humans draped in animal furs. The lavish detail with which their garments are depicted indicates the importance of clothing to societies tens of thousands of years ago, according to archaeologist Olga Soffer, professor emerita at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Something that began as a necessity, to keep people warm, had by then morphed into a canvas for aesthetic expression and meaning. Now, the story of how that happened has taken a twist, thanks to some new discoveries.

Clothing is perishable, and the oldest remains are only around 10,000 years old. But, as the Venus figurines illustrate, we can follow trends back in time in other ways. These archaeological clues reveal the origins of both simple capes and complex tailoring to be remarkably ancient. Most… More