Humans

A 3D model of the tattooed mummy. The top image features textures derived from photographs that were captured using light visible to the human eye, while the bottom image’s textures were derived from photography in the near-infrared, which we cannot seeM. Vavulin
Elaborate tattoos featuring tigers, birds and a fantastical animal have been revealed on an ice mummy from more than 2000 years ago. The mummified woman was from the Pazyryk culture of Siberia, part of the wider Scythian world.
Knowing the prevalence of tattoos during prehistory is hard, because few bodies dating back that far still have skin on them. But there are a few notable exceptions, including Ötzi “the Iceman”, who lived about 3300 BC and was preserved in ice.

Now, Gino Caspari at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany and his colleagues have examined the body of a semi-nomadic Iron Age pastoralist from the Altai mountains in Siberia, who was aged about 50 when she died in the 3rd or 4th century BC. She is one of a handful of people in that area whose deep burial chambers were encased in permafrost, which turned them into “ice mummies”, preserving their skin, but leaving it dark and desiccated.
The tattoos were composed of creatures that seemed to be both real and fantasticalD. Riday
“The tattoos are not visible when looking at the mummy with the naked eye,” says Caspari. So, his team used high-resolution, near-infrared photography to uncover an extraordinary array of hidden images.

“We have herbivores being hunted by tigers and leopards, and in one case by a griffin, and on the hands, we have depictions of birds,” says Caspari. “Due to their age and the vivid art style, the Pazyryk tattoos are something really special.”
One bird looks like a rooster, says team member Aaron Deter-Wolf at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology, but he says tattooed Pazyryk bodies are marked with a mix of realistic and fantastical animals, so it may be that the artist didn’t intend the bird to be a representation of a living creature.
The team also learned how the tattoos were made. “Our analysis shows that the tattoos were created using the direct puncture method, as opposed to being incised or ‘stitched’ into the skin,” says Deter-Wolf.
One of the tattoos seems to feature a roosterD. Riday
Cross-cultural data suggests this was done using a method that is known today as hand-poking, where a needle is dipped in ink and then poked into the skin, creating an image dot by dot. Her tattoos were also made with carbon pigments, probably derived from charcoal, soot or ash.
Those on the woman’s right forearm were more technical and detailed than those on the left, so they may have been done by different people with varying levels of skill, says Caspari. “Our study shows that tattooing was not only a widespread practice on the Eurasian steppes over 2000 years ago, but also makes it clear that it was a specialised craft which involved a lot of knowledge and practice,” he says.

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Jay Gorden
The young man, no older than 25, had gone to the afterlife with an opulent assortment of grave goods, including an entire elephant tusk. Archaeologists who excavated his 5000-year-old remains in 2008 from a site near Seville, Spain, dubbed him the “Ivory Man” and suggested that he might have been the most important person on the Iberian peninsula in his lifetime. So it came as a shock when, 13 years later, analysis of proteins in his tooth enamel revealed that he wasn’t male at all. The Ivory Man was, in fact, the “Ivory Lady”. 
Perhaps this re-sexing shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. Of late, the ability to probe ancient biological remains has led to the discovery of prehistoric women in all sorts of unexpected places. It turns out they have occupied roles and positions that would have confounded 20th-century researchers. Whether in the form of Stone Age women spearing bison, Neolithic ones controlling the allocation of land, or the sensational case of a Viking warrior who, like the Ivory Lady, was belatedly identified as female, the new evidence is rocking our understanding of how ancient societies viewed gender roles. 
Nobody is suggesting that women and men were treated as equals in the ancient world, much less that it was a feminist paradise. Indeed, man-centred societies were probably the norm. But enough exceptions have come to light to suggest a breathtaking variety of social organisation. “There’s no one idea of womanhood or masculinity,” says archaeologist Rachel Pope at the University of Liverpool, UK. “Instead, there’s real variation in social norms across time and space.” Finally, we are unearthing prehistory’s powerful women. 

Despite huge leaps in equality over the past century, today’s societies are still largely patriarchal. Archaeologists have long been taught that this status quo got its foothold when farming became widespread, starting around 10,000 years ago. Hunter-gatherer groups are generally seen as egalitarian, albeit with men and women doing different types of work. But, the idea goes, as societies became more sedentary and began generating wealth in the form of surplus food, people started to attach importance to inheritance, and rules were established for transferring wealth from fathers to sons. With wealth came male power and female oppression. Or so argued Karl Marx’s collaborator, the political theorist Friedrich Engels, in the late 1800s. “That model supported a particular political system and was based on no archaeological evidence,” says Penny Bickle, archaeologist at the University of York, UK.  
Beginning of the patriarchy
A rival idea, put forward in the 1960s by Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, suggested that Europe’s oldest farming societies were woman-centric and thrived until 5000 years ago, when herders arrived from the steppes and imposed their patriarchal world view. It has, however, proved equally unfounded. These grand narratives, which invoke a single inflection point, no longer fit the data, says Bickle. The advent of new archaeological tools – notably the ability to analyse not only ancient DNA (aDNA), but also proteins and isotopes, or variants of elements consumed as food – reveal both ideas to be overly simplistic. “We shouldn’t be writing origin stories like these,” she says. Instead, what’s emerging is a more complex picture, showing how economic and historical context powerfully shaped the way men and women lived – and that societies were capable of flipping from one system to another within centuries, if conditions changed.   

Analysis of these societies also highlights the distinction between biological sex – including the ability to bear children – and gender, referring to our habit of assigning people distinct cultural attributes – masculine or feminine – based on their sex. Archaeologist Jennifer French at the University of Liverpool thinks that the concept of gender emerged with symbolic thinking, and that early Stone Age art and burial rites suggest the first modern humans were familiar with it, as were Neanderthals. Despite this, some researchers prefer to talk about “males” and “females” in that period, rather than “men” and “women”. “To me, it seems a little dehumanising,” she says.   
The temple of the Egyptian ruler Hatshepsut remains a testament to one of the most powerful womenUwe Skrzypczak/imageBROKER.com/Alamy
Nevertheless, the early Stone Age is largely a black box when it comes to gender roles. “Sexed burials with accompanying material culture, and iconographic artefacts, are either absent or rare,” says French. The tiny glimpses that archaeology and aDNA have afforded, combined with ethnographic evidence from modern or historical hunter-gatherer societies, hint that patrilocality and female exogamy were the norm. In other words, couples moved to live with the man’s family. However, because these groups tended to be small, they probably had to be adaptable, so matrilocal societies, where women stayed with their kin, may also sometimes have emerged. 
Matrilocal societies tend to give women greater participation in communal life, says anthropologist Carol Ember at Yale University, probably because, with family around, women are less likely to be defined exclusively as wives and mothers. This is especially true if resources – importantly, land – pass through the female line. And this matrilineal system of inheritance often goes together with matrilocality. According to a hypothesis developed by Ember and her husband Melvin Ember, who was also an anthropologist, matrilocality is most likely to emerge when women are the main workers in a subsistence economy – making it preferable that daughters stay at home – and when there is no threat of war, so families have no need to keep their sons close to help defend the household. This suggests that matrilocality would have been the exception in prehistory, because intergroup violence was so common. But there are other factors favouring women-centred societies, including situations where the paternity of children is uncertain and where groups have a history of migration. 

That covers the theory. On the ground, studying gender in prehistoric remains is complicated by the fact that how people were placed in burials may not reflect how they lived. Stable isotope analysis can help, by showing – through the detection of dietary changes – whether people died in the same place where they grew up. Genetics can help too, by revealing biological links among groups that recurred over generations and regions. Even then, interpreting the evidence can be tricky. Power maps onto patterns of post-marital residence and inheritance in different ways. Trickier still, says Pope, is that “there isn’t a demonstrable link between grave wealth and power”. 
Grave goods for women
A case in point is the early farming community that inhabited the 9000-year-old site of Çatalhöyük in modern Turkey. Archaeologists consider this group to have been egalitarian, in that men and women had similar diets and did similar kinds of work. But, in a new genetic study, Eren Yüncü at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara and her colleagues show that the society was matrilocal and that young women were accorded more lavish grave goods than men. This doesn’t necessarily mean that women pulled the strings at Çatalhöyük, however. “Grave goods often express the lost reproductive potential when young women die,” says archaeologist Katharina Rebay-Salisbury at the University of Vienna, Austria. 
Exceptional though they have been, matrilocal or matrilineal societies have now been documented on every inhabited continent in the ancient world. The first humans to reach the remote islands of Oceania, around 3000 years ago, were matrilocal, according to a 2022 study led by geneticist Yue-Chen Liu at Harvard University. The earliest farming societies in Thailand probably were, too. And in 2017, geneticists detected a high-status matrilineal group that persisted for more than 300 years in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico – an important ritual and political centre in North America around the 10th century – whose modern descendants include the matrilineal Zuni and Hopi peoples.  
Fu Hao, one of the wives of King Wu Ding of the Shang dynasty, was a military general and high priestessImaginechina Limited/Alamy
But there is a paradox. “In the matrilocal, matrilineal societies that we have studied in the recent anthropological record, women were never political leaders,” says Ember. They had higher status and more influence than women in patrilocal, patrilineal societies, but they didn’t make the decisions. That was typically the preserve of their brothers, who were often more heavily invested in their sisters’ children than in their own. This prompts the question of what we mean by power. There are famous cases of women who took on the trappings of masculine-coded hard power, with an emphasis on physical strength and domination. The Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut, who reigned in the 15th century BC, sported kingly regalia, commissioned monuments and initiated at least one military campaign. The Mayan ruler Lady K’awiil Ajaw of Cobá presided over a formidable group of warriors and statesmen in the 7th century and is thought to have built a 100-kilometre road to display her authority. In general, though, women have exerted power differently from men. 
Strength in soft power
This is highlighted in a study by political anthropologist Paula Sabloff at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, who compared the roles of royal women across eight pre-modern states. The women included queens who had acted as regents, such as Lady Fu Hao in China’s Shang dynasty more than 3000 years ago, and spouses who had deputised for their royal husbands, like the wives of Zimri-Lim, who led the Mari in what is now eastern Syria in the 18th century BC. The states spanned five continents and more than 4000 years and had different cultural norms regarding inheritance, post-marital residence and female rulers themselves. Yet, Sabloff found that in all eight, women wielded power in the same ways: by influencing policy; influencing the actions of those above and below them in rank; acting as go-betweens; and patronising clients. “That’s real power, too,” says Rebay-Salisbury. 
Understanding this female propensity for soft power lends a different hue to some recent findings from prehistory. For instance, a man and woman found together in a grave in southern Spain, along with 30 precious metal and gemstone artefacts, are among several examples of couples who seem to have ruled jointly in the Bronze Age. They may have had equal status, while deploying different leadership skills. Or consider two kings who ruled over the Celtic Hallstatt culture of south-west Germany around 2500 years ago. Their graves are among the richest burials in European prehistory. A recent aDNA analysis reveals that they were probably a nephew and his maternal uncle, indicating that a woman linked them, even though she wasn’t buried with them.  
Excavation of Durotriges burials found that women’s graves were more lavish than men’sBournemouth University
But not all female power was so indirect, as new findings about another Celtic tribe make clear. The study, by geneticist Lara Cassidy at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland and her colleagues, looked at the Durotriges, who inhabited southern Britain two millennia ago – around the time that the Romans invaded. The genomic analysis of 57 individuals showed that the society was matrilocal and matrilineal, with men joining the group from outside, and that Durotrigian women went to the afterlife with more grave wealth than their male counterparts. Add to this evidence that they took up arms against the Romans and the assertion, by Roman chroniclers, that the Celtic women of Britain were fierce and liberated – most famously Boudica, who led the Iceni tribe in a revolt against the Roman invaders – and there seems little doubt that the Durotriges themselves recognised female power. 
The line between male and female power isn’t always clear-cut, though. Also around two millennia ago, an individual was buried on one of the Scilly Isles off the south-west coast of Britain with a mirror and a sword. “Up to the Roman period, we only find mirrors in graves that we are comfortable saying were female,” says Pope. “We would tend to find swords in male graves.” The combination of the two intrigued archaeologists when they discovered the grave in 1999, but they had to wait almost a quarter of a century for aDNA analysis to show that the individual was biologically female. If her grave goods reflected her role in life, a team led by osteoarchaeologist Simon Mays of Historic England concluded, she may have been a high-ranking woman who participated in active combat. 
Archaeological remains have revealed that female Scythian warriors weren’t just the stuff of mythologyMichael Svetbird/Alamy
She and the Durotriges wouldn’t have been the first warrior women. There are graves of indisputably female fighters in what is now Armenia, south of the Caucasus, dating from 3000 years ago. On the steppes of Ukraine, Iron Age burials identified as Scythian include a woman interred with gold and silver treasure, arrows and her horse – hinting that the Amazons may not have been entirely mythical. Likewise, the Valkyries of Norse mythology find echoes in evidence of Viking women who charged into battle – notably the individual found in a grave at Birka, Sweden, along with weapons including a sword, axe, spear and battle knife, as well as two horses. Assumed for over a century to be a man, geneticists reassigned her in 2017. 
As the discoveries stack up, researchers have been asking what other roles, usually attributed to men, might have been performed by women in the past – and finding that there was really no limit. In the earliest Mexican farming villages, women oversaw ceremonies involving communication with ancestors. The so-called Siberian Ice Maiden, whose tattooed body was buried in the Altai mountains of Central Asia around 2500 years ago, is thought to have been a high-ranking spiritual leader – a shaman. And women also performed shamanic rituals in pre-farming Europe. 
Other prehistoric women, meanwhile, overturned the long-held trope of “man the hunter, woman the gatherer”. One buried with hunting implements points to the presence of female big-game hunters in the Americas 9000 years ago. Millennia later, Indigenous women acted as trackers and guides to the first European fur traders in North America. Indeed, anthropologists Sarah Lacy at the University of Delaware and Cara Ocobock at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, make the case that women hunted throughout the Palaeolithic. In some ways, they say – notably a metabolism built for endurance – they were better adapted to the task than men.  

Bringing all the evidence together, it is becoming clear that few roles have been off-limits to all women for all time. As new tools make fine-grained analysis possible, researchers expect more diversity to come to light. “I think it’s going to be blown wide open in the next few years,” says Cassidy. Already it is clear that, in the past, whole societies have tilted more towards gender equality than many modern ones do. Patriarchal systems damage both men and women, says Bickle, but they aren’t inevitable, and our concepts of man and woman can be reimagined.
“Gender is not stable,” she says. “It’s subject to continuous change.” 

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An ancient Greek bronze jar on display at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford that was found to contain honeyAmerican Chemical Society
The contents of an ancient Greek pot found in a shrine near Pompeii are testament to the longevity of a jar of honey.
In 1954, a Greek burial shrine dating to around 520 BC was discovered in Paestum, Italy, about 70 kilometres south of Pompeii.
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There were eight pots in the shrine containing a sticky residue, whose identity has been a mystery ever since their discovery.
Honey was an early suspect in tests carried out on the contents of one of the pots between the 1950s and 1980s, says Luciana Carvalho at the University of Oxford.
Three separate teams studied the residue but concluded that the jars held animal or vegetable fat contaminated with pollen and insect parts, rather than honey.

Back then, researchers relied on much less sensitive analysis techniques, centring on solubility tests.
Carvalho and her team began by testing the residue’s reflection of infrared light to get a sense of its bulk composition.
The ancient honey residue from the inside of the potLuciana da Costa Carvalho
At first, they thought the contents may be degraded beeswax, because of its outward similarity to modern beeswax and its high acidity.
To confirm whether this was the case, the team used gas chromatography combined with mass spectrometry. But this revealed the presence of sugars including glucose and fructose, which are the main sugars found in honey.
“We discovered a surprisingly complex mix of acids and degraded sugars,” says Carvalho. “The smoking gun for honey was finding sugars right in the heart of the residue.”
Further analysis by Elisabete Pires, also at the University of Oxford, revealed the presence of proteins called major royal jelly proteins, which are secreted by honeybees, as well as some peptides whose closest match was from Tropilaelaps mercedesae, a parasitic mite that feeds on the larvae of honeybees.
“This parasite is thought to have originated in Asian beehives,” says Pires, “so the fragment proteins we found in the residue are probably related to another type of parasite that already affected beehives in ancient Greece.”

Carvalho says the cork seals in the bronze jars would have eventually broken down, letting in air and microbes. “We think that those bacteria consumed [most of] any sugar left over, producing additional acids and breakdown products,” she says. “Over time what remained of the original residue was just an acidic waxy residue at the bottom and along the walls of the jars.”
“Confirming honey offerings in a shrine at Paestum tells us exactly how people chose to honour their deities and what ideas they held about the afterlife,” says Carvalho.

Historic Herculaneum – Uncovering Vesuvius, Pompeii and ancient Naples

Embark on a captivating journey where history and archaeology come to life through Mount Vesuvius and the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

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Maggots in rotting meat could have been an important part of ancient dietsChronicle/Alamy
Neanderthals may not have been the hyper-carnivores we thought they were. It has been claimed, based on the nitrogen isotope ratios in their bones, that our ancient relatives ate little besides meat. But these ratios can also be explained by a more balanced omnivorous diet that included a lot of maggots, as well as plant-based food.
“Masses of maggots are these easily scoopable, collectible, nutrient-rich resource,” says Melanie Beasley at Purdue University, Indiana.
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There is lots of evidence that they were routinely eaten in many societies in the past, and they are still consumed in some places today, she says. Some reindeer hunters regard certain maggots as a treat that they actively cultivate, for instance, while casu martzu, a cheese that contains live maggots, is a delicacy in Sardinia.
Nitrogen has two stable isotopes, nitrogen-14 and nitrogen-15. The lighter isotope is more likely to be lost from living organisms than the heavy one, so, as matter moves up food chains, the ratio of nitrogen-15 to nitrogen-14 increases.
Looking at the isotope ratios in collagen inside fossil bones can therefore tell us about the diet of those animals, with carnivores having higher ratios than herbivores. But when researchers started looking at the ratios in the bones of Neanderthals, they found something surprising: even higher ratios than those seen in lions and hyenas. “So there became this narrative that Neanderthals were these hyper-carnivores very focused on big game hunting,” says Beasley.

But many researchers don’t buy this idea. For one thing, the bones of Homo sapiens living in prehistoric times have similar ratios – and these humans couldn’t have survived on lean meat alone. “It’s actually physically not possible,” says Beasley. “You’ll die of what early explorers called ‘rabbit starvation’.”
The issue is that if a person’s diet is too rich in protein, their body can’t mop up all the toxic breakdown products, such as ammonia.
There is also now plenty of direct evidence that Neanderthals did eat plants, too, for instance from studies of their dental calculus. So why were their nitrogen-15 ratios so high?
Back in 2017, John Speth at the University of Michigan suggested it could be because Neanderthals stored meat and ate it later in a rotten state. As meat rots, gases like ammonia are given off, which should result in nitrogen-15 enrichment.
At the time, Beasley was applying to do research at the “body farm” at the University of Tennessee where human cadavers are studied as they decay to help with crime scene analysis. She realised she could test Speth’s idea alongside the forensic research – and while she was at it, she also looked at the maggots in the bodies.
Together with Speth and Julie Lesnik at Wayne State University, Michigan, Beasley found that nitrogen isotope ratios do increase as muscle tissue rots, but only by a modest amount. There is, however, a much bigger jump seen in the maggots of various kinds feeding on the corpses.

These are just initial results, but they show that eating a diet very high in meat isn’t the only possible explanation for the isotope ratios in Neanderthals and ancient Homo sapiens, says Beasley. She thinks those ratios are probably due to a combination of factors – the storage, processing and cooking of meat, as well as the consumption of maggots.
“This is an exciting new study, and I think it goes a long way toward making sense of the strange results that have come out of isotope studies in Neanderthals and other Stone Age hominins over the last couple of decades,” says Herman Pontzer at Duke University in North Carolina.
“I find the evidence here pretty convincing, that consumption of maggots and similar larvae explains the ‘hyper-carnivore’ signal we’ve been seeing in previous fossil isotope work,” he says.
The work also adds to the evidence that a so-called palaeo diet should include rotten meat and maggots, says Beasley. “All the people who want to go true ‘palaeo’, they need to start thinking about fermenting their meat and letting the flies access them.”

Neanderthals, ancient humans and cave art: France

Embark on a captivating journey through time as you explore key Neanderthal and Upper Palaeolithic sites of southern France, from Bordeaux to Montpellier, with New Scientist’s Kate Douglas.

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Shutterstock/vyasphoto
From a young age, the inevitability and finality of death becomes a shaping force in our lives. Indeed, it could be said that our ability to recognise our eventual demise and the grief that comes with losing those close to us are core elements of what it means to be human. They have also led to symbolic practices that have deep roots in human culture.
We have long assumed that Homo sapiens was the only human species to have gained an awareness of the mortality of living things. But as we report in “What were ancient humans thinking when they began to bury their dead?”, archaeologists are eager to question the idea that a deep and emotional response to death is our sole preserve.
The most challenging of their claims is that ancient humans who were very unlike us developed death rituals. But evidence is mounting that Homo naledi, an ancient human from southern Africa with a brain one-third the size of your own, buried its dead at least 245,000 years ago. Exactly why these small-brained humans may have felt compelled to develop a culture of death is unclear, but one intriguing – if speculative – idea is that they did so to help youngsters come to terms with the loss of a group member.Advertisement
Much controversy surrounds the claim that H. naledi buried its dead, largely concerning the quality of the evidence. But since the mid-20th century, researchers have been busily narrowing the behavioural gap between our species and others, spearheaded by research showing that many animals have emotionally rich lives. Some even develop their own rituals when confronted with the death of community members. Throw in evidence that our ancestors were developing their own artistic culture at least 500,000 years ago and it is easier to accept that H. naledi was capable of developing its own burial traditions.

Archaeologists are questioning whether a deep response to death is our sole preserve

The provocative image of a grief-stricken H. naledi helping its young deal with loss forces as much of a rethinking about these ancient relatives as it does a reckoning of what it means to be human – and whether we are as special as we like to think.

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Ines Papert in Kyrgystan,Ines Papert
Most people would find a 1200-metre wall of ice on a mountain peak intimidating. But for decorated ice climber Ines Papert, scaling the peak of Kyzyl Asker – a remote mountain on the border between China and Kyrgyzstan – was a dream. It took three attempts before she and fellow climber Luka Lindič summitted it in 2016 (pictured above), becoming the first known people to climb a precipitous route the pair dubbed “Lost in China”.
Papert is one of more than a dozen female mountaineers whose daring expeditions to the world’s greatest peaks are featured in Mountaineering Women: Climbing through history by Joanna Croston.
Elizabeth “Lizzie” Le BlondThe Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum, Chanute, KansasAdvertisement
Another is mountaineer Elizabeth “Lizzie” Le Blond, photographed climbing a mountain in the Swiss Alps in 1889 in a full skirt (pictured above). Le Blond, who made 20 record-breaking ascents, also helped form the Ladies’ Alpine Club in 1907 to offer support to female mountaineers in this male-dominated sport.
Lydia Bradey on the first female ascent of Zenith, Halfdome, Yosemite National ParkSteve Monks
Croston’s book also features Lydia Bradey, who was the first woman to climb several routes in California’s Yosemite National Park in the 1980s. Shown above, she is pictured midway up a route on the iconic face of Half Dome. In 1988, she became the first woman to summit Mount Everest without supplementary oxygen. The Tibetan name for Everest is Qomolangma, which means “goddess mother of the world”.
Mountaineering Women: Climbing through history will be released in the UK on 7 August and internationally on 16 September.

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A Roman temple in Ankara, TurkeyPE Forsberg / Alamy Stock Photo
Latin inscriptions from the ancient world can tell us about Roman emperors’ decrees and enslaved people’s thoughts – if we can read them. Now an artificial intelligence tool is helping historians reconstruct the often fragmentary texts. It can even accurately predict when and where in the Roman Empire a given inscription came from.
“Studying history through inscriptions is like solving a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, only this is tens of thousands of pieces more than normal,” said Thea Sommerschield at the University of Nottingham in the UK, during a press event. “And 90 per cent of them are missing because that’s all that survived for us over the centuries.”
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The AI tool developed by Sommerschield and her colleagues can predict a Latin inscription’s missing characters, while also highlighting the existence of inscriptions that are written in a similar linguistic style or refer to the same people and places. They named the tool Aeneas in honour of the mythical hero, who, according to legend, escaped the fall of Troy and became a forebear of the Romans.
“We enable Aeneas to actually restore gaps in text where the missing length is unknown,” said Yannis Assael at Google DeepMind, a co-leader in developing Aeneas, during the press event. “This makes it a more versatile tool for historians, especially when they’re dealing with very heavily damaged materials.”
The team trained Aeneas on the largest ever combined database of ancient Latin texts that machines can interact with, including more than 176,000 inscriptions and nearly 9000 accompanying images. This training allows Aeneas to suggest missing text. What’s more, by testing it on a subset of inscriptions of known provenance, the researchers found that Aeneas could estimate the chronological date of inscriptions to within 13 years – and even achieve 72 per cent accuracy in identifying which Roman province an inscription came from.

“Inscriptions are one of our most important sources for understanding the lives and experiences of people living in the Roman world,” says Charlotte Tupman at the University of Exeter in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the research. “They cover a vast number of subject areas, from law, trade, military and political life to religion, death and domestic matters.”
Such AI tools also have “high potential to be applied to the study of inscriptions from other time periods and to be adapted for use with other languages,” says Tupman.
During testing with inscriptions that were deliberately corrupted to simulate damage, Aeneas achieved 73 per cent accuracy in restoring gaps of up to 10 Latin characters. That fell to 58 per cent accuracy when the total missing length was unknown – but the AI tool shows the the logic behind the suggestions it makes so researchers can asses the validity of the results.
When nearly two dozen historians tested the AI tool’s ability to restore and attribute deliberately corrupted inscriptions, historians working with the AI outperformed either historians or AI alone. Historians also reported that comparative inscriptions identified by Aeneas were helpful as potential research starting points 90 per cent of the time.
“I think it will speed up the work of anyone who works with inscriptions, and especially if you’re trying to do the equivalent of constructing wider conclusions about local or even empire-wide patterns and epigraphic habits,” says Elizabeth Meyer at the University of Virginia. “At the same time, a human brain has to look at the results to make sure that they are plausible for that time and place.”

“Asking a general-purpose AI model to assist with tasks in ancient history often leads to unsatisfactory results,” says Chiara Cenati at the University of Vienna in Austria. “Therefore, the development of a tool specifically designed to support research in Latin epigraphy is very welcome.”
The “dream scenario” is to enable historians “to have Aeneas at your side in a museum or at an archaeological site”, said Sommerschield at the press event. Aeneas is now freely available online.

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Some people will tell you that Homo naledi was a small-brained hominin with some big thoughts. Two years ago, a team led by Lee Berger at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, concluded that H. naledi – a species that lived around 335,000 to 245,000 years ago and had a brain about one-third the size of yours – invented a complex ritual that involved burying its dead in a deep and difficult-to-access cave chamber.  
This idea didn’t go down well: all four of the anonymous researchers asked to assess its merit were sceptical. But Berger and his colleagues were undeterred. Earlier this year, they published an updated version of their study, offering a deeper dive into the evidence they had gathered from the Rising Star cave system in South Africa. The approach paid off: two of the original reviewers agreed to reassess the science – and one was won over. “You rarely see that in peer review,” says John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a member of Berger’s team.  
Many other researchers, however, are still wary. “I’m just not convinced by any of it,” says Paul Pettitt at Durham University, UK. To appreciate why, it is necessary to explore how other ancient hominins interacted with the dead. Doing so can help us figure out which species carried out burials, how ancient the practice is and what it says about the minds and motivations of those doing it. Considering this also reveals why, if H. naledi really did bury its dead, that would fundamentally challenge our understanding of early hominin cognition and behaviour.  

There is one archaeological site that has much in common with Rising Star: Sima de los Huesos (the “pit of bones”) in northern Spain. There, researchers have uncovered the remains of 29 hominins, thought to be an ancestor of Neanderthals, at the bottom of a vertical shaft within a cave. The consensus is that the Sima hominins, who lived between 430,000 and 300,000 years ago, died elsewhere and that their bodies were then dropped into the pit. If so, this represents the oldest clear evidence for some sort of funerary behaviour.   
Such an early date may seem surprising, but in context, it makes sense. We know that chimpanzees show an interest in dead group members, grooming their fur and even cleaning their teeth. “If we have chimpanzees behaving this way, then we might expect similar behaviour deep in our evolutionary past,” says Pettitt. However, the funerary behaviour on show at Sima appears more sophisticated than anything chimps do, says María Martinón-Torres at the National Human Evolution Research Centre (CENIEH) in Spain. “They have chosen a place to put the dead.” What’s more, the excavation also unearthed a stone hand axe, which is sometimes interpreted as a funerary offering – although it could simply have been in a pouch worn by one of the hominins found there, says Pettitt.  

Such elaborate treatment of the dead may have been evolutionarily beneficial. At some point in prehistory – perhaps when brains reached a certain size – hominins must have become aware of their own mortality, says Pettitt. In a 2023 paper, he suggested that complex funerary behaviour might then have arisen to mitigate personal anxiety about death by bringing the community together when a group member died. This scenario could explain what happened at Sima, given that the average brain size of these hominins was 1237 cubic centimetres – only about 100 cubic centimetres less than the average modern human.  
The idea that members of Homo naledi buried their dead is contentious because their brains were so smallImago/Alamy
Others see something more sinister at Sima. Mary Stiner at the University of Arizona points out that many of the skeletons are from adolescents or young adults. “That’s an age group in which individuals choose to take risks and are more vulnerable due to low experience,” she says. Moreover, there are signs on the bones that some of the Sima hominins died violently. Stiner thinks the skeletons may represent youngsters who left their family group, strayed into hostile territory and came to a grisly end – their bodies tossed into the pit by their killers, perhaps to hide the evidence. But as Pettitt points out, that would require an unusually large number of adolescents making the same mistakes and meeting a similar fate.   
For now, it is difficult to know exactly how to interpret the Sima site. Fortunately, more evidence may soon be available. Since 2021, Nohemi Sala at CENIEH and her colleagues have been exploring the archaeological record of funerary behaviour through a project known as DEATHREVOL. Sala says the research suggests that there are other similarly ancient sites in Europe that may preserve evidence of the same behaviour recorded at Sima – although she won’t name them until the work is published. “There are four or five candidates to explore these patterns,” she says. “It’s more than just Sima.”  
Neanderthal burials
Eventually, hominins like those at Sima gave rise to the Neanderthals, who had different ways of treating the dead. Some of the clearest evidence for this comes from Shanidar cave, a site in northern Iraq where, since the mid-20th century, the remains of at least 10 Neanderthals have been discovered. The oldest dates back about 75,000 years, making it among the oldest known Neanderthal burials. Another set of remains was pivotal to us recognising in the late 20th century that Neanderthals shared our humanity, because pollen around this individual’s bones suggested that they had been buried with flowers. Today, while nobody doubts Neanderthals’ humanity, few archaeologists buy the “flower burial” idea. Recent excavations at Shanidar point to an alternative explanation for the pollen. Chris Hunt at Liverpool John Moores University, UK, and his colleagues think the body may have been placed in the ground and then buried under a pile of brushwood rather than dirt. They note that some of the pollen around the skeleton comes from plants with prominent spikes, possibly added to deter scavengers.   
Nevertheless, the Shanidar burials are revealing. One was of a man who managed to live with severe injuries to his face, shoulder and arm. Stiner is among several researchers who think he would have required help to do so, suggesting Neanderthals cared for and valued each other as individuals. If they did, then death wasn’t merely the loss of a pair of hands for sourcing food; it was the loss of someone with a unique personality who would be missed – leading to a new motivation behind funerary behaviour. “These societies were bound by love and affection,” says Stiner.  
Five of the skeletons at Shanidar hint at something else. They were all buried in the same spot in the shadow of a prominent landmark – a 2-metre-high rock inside the cave – over the course of a few decades to a few millennia. Hunt and his colleagues think this might be a sign that Neanderthals tied meaning to landmarks in their environment. More speculatively, burying the dead here may even have played a role in legitimising the right of the living to the nearby land and its resources. Our species can have that sort of relationship with land, says Emma Pomeroy at the University of Cambridge, who was also involved in the recent excavations at Shanidar. “I think it’s very interesting to think about whether Neanderthals had a similar attitude to the landscape.”  
Shanidar cave in Iraq contains some of the oldest and most convincing Neanderthal burialsMatyas Rehak/Alamy
Mysteries remain. A big one is why only a few of the Neanderthals who lived around Shanidar were buried in the cave. “If this was something that hominins did a lot, the caves would be chock-a-block with bodies,” says Hawks. Evidence from elsewhere indicates that other Neanderthal deaths may have been honoured with different funerary treatments, including ritual cannibalism – but for some as-yet-unfathomable reason, very few Neanderthals ended up interred in the cave. Another question is whether Neanderthals devised the idea of burial themselves or learned it from our species, Homo sapiens, whom they met around the time of the Shanidar burials.  
What we do know is that our species began burying its dead around 120,000 to 100,000 years ago. And some early H. sapiens burials appear to differ from those of Neanderthals by the inclusion of grave goods. For instance, a body in Qafzeh cave in Israel appears to have been buried with red deer antlers clasped to its chest – although other interpretations are possible. “Perhaps the antler was used to dig the grave and it’s just a fortuitous association,” says Pettitt. We don’t know how common early grave goods were, in part because human burials were so rare before 28,000 years ago. Neither do we know their exact significance, although in later burials they are generally seen as reflecting things like the status and occupation of the deceased.  
The graves of young children
Rare though they are, early human burials reveal intriguing signs of a pattern. In 2021, a team including Martinón-Torres and Michael Petraglia, now at Griffith University, Australia, described an excavation at Panga ya Saidi cave in Kenya in which they had unearthed the 78,000-year-old burial of a toddler they named Mtoto. The researchers noted that Mtoto is the earliest of three potential H. sapiens burials in Africa, which date to between 78,000 and 68,000 years ago. All three involved young children.   
Childhood mortality was probably relatively high in these early communities, says Petraglia. “We don’t have the evidence to say for sure, but we suspect so because childhood mortality is pretty high in hunter-gatherer societies.” Even so, some children’s deaths might have been “particularly painful”, says Martinón-Torres, motivating early communities to commemorate them with what was, at the time, an unusual funerary ritual: burial. Pettitt has explored this idea. He distinguishes “good deaths”, which usually occur in old age, from “bad deaths”, which occur unexpectedly and often involve children. The latter may have provided an impetus for people to perform special funerary rites, he suggests, which might help explain burials like Mtoto’s.  
Another clue to the thinking of these Stone Age people comes from the fact that Panga ya Saidi cave was a place of human habitation on and off for thousands of years. This suggests a decision was made to inter Mtoto’s small body in close proximity to the community’s living space. “If you bury someone you love, in a way, you don’t want them to go,” says Martinón-Torres. Placing them in an easy-to-visit location may help maintain a close connection, she adds.  

So, what does all this tell us about whether H. naledi buried its dead?   
There are certainly echoes of other sites in Rising Star. The idea that, hundreds of thousands of years ago, hominins placed their dead deep inside a cave draws parallels with Sima de los Huesos. The suggestion that H. naledi repeatedly returned to the same site to inter bodies seems to mirror the situation at Shanidar cave. And the discovery of a crescent-shaped stone near the fossilised hand of one H. naledi skeleton – a possible grave good – looks like behaviour seen at sites like Qafzeh.  
But the burial hypothesis also seems all wrong. The biggest stumbling block is the size of H. naledi’s brain, which, at an average of 513 cubic centimetres, was tiny. For a start, it raises doubts about whether individuals really were aware of their own mortality, inventing elaborate funerary rituals to come to terms with this revelation. There is also no evidence yet that the species cared for its sick, a potential sign that group members were valued as individuals whose deaths were mourned. And although youngsters are overrepresented in the Rising Star cave – potentially consistent with Pettitt’s “bad death” idea – the chamber in which the bones were found doesn’t seem to be an easy-to-visit location that would allow the living to maintain a connection with the dead. “It’s quite anomalous, but also fascinating,” says Stiner.  
Red deer antlers in a grave at Qafzeh, Israel, may have a symbolic meaningUniversal History Archive/Shutterstock
There are two ways to interpret this puzzle. One is to look for non-burial scenarios that could explain the accumulation of the H. naledi skeletons. For instance, in 2021, researchers reported finding the remains of 30 baboons, nine of them mummified, in a cave chamber in South Africa. It seems that the primates had used the cave as a sleeping site over many years, with some occasionally dying there and their bodies gradually accumulating. Perhaps H. naledi used Rising Star in a similar way. “We need to consider whether that might be a factor,” says Pomeroy.   
The other, more radical, option is to ask whether our understanding of how and why hominins developed funerary traditions requires a rethink. “Spirituality, the idea of self-awareness and mortality – all could have arisen many times independently,” says Berger. Hawks points out that analysis of H. naledi skeletons suggests that, like us, they had a long childhood – and that could be the key. “Extended childhoods have an adaptive purpose: they enable kids to integrate into social groups in a way that isn’t sexually competitive,” he says. They may also have encouraged members of H. naledi to develop funerary customs to help their youngsters understand the death of group members. “We have funerals to explain to kids what just happened,” says Hawks.   
Unfortunately, gathering evidence to confirm the burial idea is more difficult than it might seem. Talk of burial may conjure up images of modern cemeteries, but Stone Age graves aren’t like that. “They’re not 6 feet under in well-constructed holes,” says Hawks: the oldest burial pits were usually shallow depressions in the floor. If hominins then returned to inter more dead, they could easily disturb earlier graves and create a jumble of bones that is difficult to interpret as a set of burials.   

The good news, say Berger, Hawks and their colleagues, is that there is plenty more untouched material at Rising Star, which could, in the future, strengthen their burial hypothesis. If they can do that, they may well find a surprisingly receptive audience. As we have seen, ancient burials are open to interpretation, conclusions are provisional and many of the archaeologists working on these sites would like nothing more than new discoveries that challenge their ideas about the prehistory of funerary behaviour.   
“It’s sometimes suggested that the scientific community just doesn’t want to believe that a small-brained hominin would be capable of symbolic treatment of the dead,” says Pomeroy. “That couldn’t be further from the truth. We’d be so excited – if there was good evidence.” 

Topics:human evolution/ancient humans More