Humans

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

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