Humans

David Oliete
Nearly 2 million years ago, one of our hominin ancestors developed bone cancer in their foot. The fate of this individual is unknown, but their fossilised remains leave no doubt that cancer has been a part of our story for a very long time. It is also clear that, when threatened by our own normally cooperative cells turning against us, we evolved an immune system to help us identify and deal with the enemy within.
But treacherous cancer cells weren’t the only internal threat our ancestors faced. As hypersocial beings, their survival was also jeopardised by selfish individuals attempting to subvert the group – and capable of unravelling society, just as a cancer eventually kills its host. I am interested in understanding how we adapted to this threat. At the heart of the story is this question: is human nature selfish or altruistic, competitive or cooperative? Are we essentially cancers, tamed by culture, or more like healthy cells in the human body, working together for mutual success?
People have debated this for centuries and continue to do so, citing research in primatology, anthropology, psychology and economics to defend their points. The answer has profound implications for how we aim to structure society. If we are born altruists, then institutions and hierarchies are unnecessary. But if selfishness prevails, strong control is essential. To me, both extremes are unconvincing. To understand why, we must appreciate the circumstances under which humanity has evolved. Determining how our ancestors confronted brutish selfishness doesn’t just tell us about our own social past – it can also help us inoculate today’s societies against the threat from within.

Look at the animals to which we are most closely related and you see that each species has its own distinct set of social structures. Among gorillas, for example, groups of unmated males are typically led by aggressive alpha males. Mated gorillas sometimes live in groups of males and females, but more often it is the stereotypical silverback with a harem of females – a group that has its own hierarchy. Chimpanzees and bonobos also display dominance hierarchies, with a lot of emphasis placed on female social rank, particularly among bonobos. Despite the wide variation in sociality among these species, one thing is consistent: where there is social rank, aggressive dominance is the winning attribute. If an alpha can successfully defend resources, whether territory, food or mates, it can dominate a primate society. Access to more resources translates into having more surviving offspring than others, which is the only measure of success for evolution by natural selection.
Human self-domestication
Among our own ancestors – members of the genus Homo – the story is different. Research in anthropology and primatology suggests that, as early people evolved more complex social structures, they did something unseen in other primates: they domesticated themselves. Once they had the cognitive sophistication necessary to create weapons, along with the intelligence required to form alliances, they could fight the large, angry dominants that ruled over their social groups. The primatologist Richard Wrangham at Harvard University argues that this profoundly shaped human society because, along with eliminating the alphas, our ancestors also selected against the human trait of aggression. As a result, humans became more cooperative, and their societies became more egalitarian.

But if that is the case, how do we explain the undeniable and growing inequality in today’s societies, where huge amounts of power and money are concentrated among a small number of people, with the problem particularly pronounced in major economies such as the US, the UK and China? Some researchers argue that humans are not egalitarian by nature, but that living in small, close-knit groups of hunter-gatherers – as people did before the dawn of agriculture – suppressed our tendencies to form dominance-based hierarchies. They see a U-shaped curve of human egalitarianism. The point we started from – which looked a lot like the social structures we see in other great apes – is where we have ended up again, with the middle of the U showing a brief flirtation with social equality.
If human nature were entirely cooperative then state control wouldn’t be required to prevent freeloadingZoonar GmbH/Alamy
I agree that we aren’t naturally egalitarian. In fact, I am not convinced that human societies were ever egalitarian. As anthropologists point out, even living hunter-gatherers have some brutal practices, such as infanticide. But, for me, the explanation for our current unequal circumstances lies not in our ancestors having selected against aggression, but in how the elimination of despotic alpha males allowed other, arguably more insidious people to succeed.
Once humanity was free of the strong grip of strict dominance hierarchies led by alpha males, success in social groups would have become more about skilful manoeuvring within communities. This led to the rise of a particular kind of social intelligence called Machiavellian intelligence, which entails the cunning manipulation of others. In the language of evolutionary biology, we have a cooperation dilemma: there are situations where it is in our interest to work with others, and there are situations where it is not. And, as anyone who has watched an episode of The Traitors will be aware, the need to pull together and the need to betray can come into conflict. As a result, overt rivalry was superseded by what I call “invisible rivalry” – the ability to hide selfish, competitive or exploitative intentions while maintaining the appearance of a cooperative nature. In other words, we evolved to compete in a cooperative world.
The social brain
Support for this idea comes from the size of the human brain. All primates have large brains relative to their body size, and ours is exceptionally big. The social brain hypothesis suggests that these large brains evolved to help individuals manage their unusually complex social systems. Of course, cooperation is part of this, but it can’t be the whole story. Consider ants, which, in terms of numbers and pervasiveness, are probably the most successful group of species on Earth. They are eusocial, which means they cooperate so fully that they seem to act as a single organism. Yet their brains are tiny, and everything they need to work together is programmed within them genetically. So, you don’t necessarily need a big brain to cooperate – but you do need one to compete strategically. Indeed, research suggests that social competition is what best explains the evolution of our enormous brain compared with the big brains of other primates.
To paraphrase Aristotle, we are political animals – not merely social ones. We strategise within our societies to maximise our success, whether that is defined in terms of money, power, mating success, hunting prowess or any of the other qualities associated with prestige around the world. To do so effectively, we evolved to not just be smart enough to cooperate, but to cooperate selectively – and to betray others when it suits us, or even just when we can get away with it.

Studies by economists and psychologists illustrate this. For example, in one set of experiments, participants were paired in a cooperation game in which one person was given $10 and the choice to share it with the other (or not). A lot of research shows that in these circumstances, people generally give some money to their partner, often splitting the pot equally, even when there is no obvious punishment for betraying them. But this time, the researchers gave some participants another option: they could take less money and leave the game without their partner ever knowing that they had been involved in a cooperation game. About one-third of participants took this option. It was as if they were happy to pay to have their betrayal left unknown.
Experiments like this tell us a lot about the human psyche. In social interactions, we often need to be able to predict what others around us are going to do – to learn where to place trust effectively, to win trust when we need it and to hide betrayals of trust on our own part. These abilities require empathy, emotion, language and, perhaps, as some of my colleagues argue, consciousness. Yet those same abilities, and that same intelligence, have a dangerous downside. Our evolved proclivity for maximising resources leads us to exploit those around us – and some people are so effective at deception that they risk damaging their societies. Modern, extreme inequality is an example of this process in action. So too are past political upheavals leading to degradation of the rule of law – and sometimes the fall of civilisations. The Roman Republic, for example, collapsed because of a tremendous internal struggle for power, culminating in Julius Caesar’s Machiavellian machinations, eventually leading to autocracy.
Religion is one institution that societies use to promote cooperationAdam Guz/Getty Images Poland/Getty Images
So, our dual cooperative-competitive nature means that we face an enemy within that may bring down society. And this is where the analogy with cancer arises. Humanity’s long history of living with the disease means we have evolved biological mechanisms to reduce the risk it poses. Many reactions at the cellular level, including attacks by immune cells and programmed cell death, evolved to help our bodies fight off cancers, as well as other, external threats to our survival. It is this stalwart immune system that explains why, although mutations occur all the time and we are frequently exposed to viruses and bacteria, these often don’t lead to symptoms or illness. Similarly, the threats to our social groups posed by the evolution of invisible rivalry led us to develop practices, behaviours and institutions to maximise cooperation and thwart our Machiavellian tendencies. In my new book, Invisible Rivals: How we evolved to compete in a cooperative world, I call this our cultural immune system.
Religion is one institution that can function in this way. Religious teaching can promote cooperation among everyone who practises it – and this is one possible reason that the Golden Rule, often summed up as “treat others as you would like to be treated”, is found independently in scriptures across the world. People who believe these scriptures – who internalise them, as anthropologists say – are more likely to help fellow members of their group.
Everywhere anthropologists look, they find other practices and institutions that bolster cooperation at the local level. In cultures that rely on fishing, there are strong norms against over-fishing, which would deplete the stock for everyone. Where people are dependent on hunting, there are strict rules about how meat is shared and who gets credit for a kill. The Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania have a relationship framework called osotua, rooted in need-based sharing partnerships and relying on mutual help in hard times. For example, if someone needs cattle because theirs have all died, another member of the group will help, not because they get anything directly in return, but simply because their neighbour’s needs are greater at that time. This creates a special bond – osotua translates as “umbilical cord” – and treachery is rare because the bond is seen as sacred.
The Maasai people have a system called osotua whereby they give cattle to others in needSiegfried Modola/Getty Images
Across the world, social norms that guide behaviours have evolved, and they have been refined over thousands of years of trial and error through cultural evolution. However, just as cancers find ways to evade our immune systems, so some individuals use their Machiavellian intelligence to subvert the group’s social norms for their own benefit. This is trickier to do in small-scale societies where people all know each other, making rule-breakers easier to detect and punish. But as societies grew over the past 10,000 years, so did opportunities to act selfishly. Agricultural networks, cities and, finally, nation states made deception much easier to pull off, because it is easy to cheat more people without getting caught in a group where it is impossible to know everyone personally.
Taming our Machiavellian nature
It is this lethal combination of opportunity and invisible rivalry that makes the question of whether humans are cooperative or competitive so relevant today. To fight the enemy within society, we need to understand that both traits are in our nature, and that we evolved to apply whichever suits us best. Thinking that we are either one or the other leaves us vulnerable to facile arguments about how we should structure society. If we are purely selfish, it follows that society should focus on heavy policing and punishment of freeloaders, including those in power. But believing that we are intrinsically altruistic is equally detrimental because it risks ignoring the threat posed by rampant self-interest.
Suppressing humanity’s Machiavellian side is certainly harder in large-scale societies. But there are basic ways that we can boost the cultural immune system, much like how we can improve our biological immune systems through healthy lifestyles and vaccination. The key, I believe, is to learn more about the social norms that small-scale societies have evolved to help them thrive and stave off opportunistic cheaters and then use this knowledge to create policies that promote cooperation at a higher level. For example, within our own communities, we can look to cultures that promote systems like need-based transfers and others that have found ways to share resources more equitably.

But this isn’t going to happen until we first recognise the problem that invisible rivalry poses. In my view, the best way to do that is through education. We are all part of the cultural immune system. If we understand our evolutionary heritage, we will be alert to the danger that freeloaders pose to society and place our trust more discerningly – much as the body’s defence system learns to recognise the agents associated with cancers and other diseases to deal with them. Crucially, we also need to recognise that cooperation is best for everyone in the long term.
A small proportion of people at the most competitive end of the spectrum will always try to game society. We must work together to stay one step ahead of humanity’s opportunistic nature. Without beliefs, norms and a proper understanding of human nature, we are at the mercy of our selfish biological heritage. Evolution has made us this way, but we can learn to overcome it.

Topics:psychology/human evolution More

Ancient humans adapted to deeper forests as they migrated out of Africa and away from the savannahLIONEL BRET/EURELIOS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
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.
Humans come from Africa. This wasn’t always obvious, but today it seems as close to certain as anything about our origins.
There are two senses in which this is true. The oldest known hominins, creatures more closely related to us than to great apes, are all from Africa, going back as far as 7 million years ago. And the oldest known examples of our species, Homo sapiens, are also from Africa.
It’s the second story I’m focusing on here, the origin of modern humans in Africa and their subsequent expansion all around the world. With the advent of DNA sequencing in the second half of the 20th century, it became possible to compare the DNA of people from different populations. This revealed that African peoples have the most variety in their genomes, while all non-African peoples are relatively similar at the genetic level (no matter how superficially different we might appear in terms of skin colour and so forth).
In genetic terms, this is what we might call a dead giveaway. It tells us that Africa was our homeland and that it was populated by a diverse group of people – and that everyone who isn’t African is descended from a small subset of the peoples, who left this homeland to wander the globe. Geneticists were confident about this as early as 1995, and the evidence has only accumulated since.
And yet, the physical archaeology and the genetics don’t match – at least, not on the face of it.

Genetics tells us that all living non-African peoples are descended from a small group that left the continent around 50,000 years ago. Barring some wobbles about the exact date, that has been clear for two decades. But archaeologists can point to a great many instances of modern humans living outside Africa much earlier than that.
At Apidima cave in Greece, there is a single skull of a modern human from 210,000 years ago. A jawbone from Misliya cave in Israel is at least 177,000 years old. There are some contentious remains from China that might be modern humans. “And there are debates swirling around the earliest colonisation of Australia,” says Eleanor Scerri at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany. Some researchers claim people were on the continent 65,000 years ago.
What is going on? Is our wealth of genetic data somehow misleading us? Or is it true that we are all descended from that last big migration – and the older bones represent populations that didn’t survive?
Scerri and her colleagues have tried to find an explanation.
African environments
The team was discussing where modern humans lived in Africa. “Were humans simply moving into contiguous regions of African grasslands, or were they living in very different environments?” says Scerri.
To answer that, they needed a lot of data.
“We started with looking at all of the archaeological sites in Africa that date to 120,000 years ago to 14,000 years ago,” says Emily Yuko Hallett at Loyola University Chicago in Illinois. She and her colleagues built a database of sites and then determined the climates at specific places and times: “It was going through hundreds and hundreds of archaeological site reports and publications.”

There was an obvious shift around 70,000 years ago. “Even if you just look at the data without any fancy modelling, you do see that there is this change in the conditions,” says Andrea Manica at the University of Cambridge, UK. The range of temperatures and rainfalls where humans were living expanded significantly. “They start getting into the deeper forests, the drier deserts.”
However, it wasn’t enough to just eyeball the data. The archaeological record is incomplete, and biased in many ways.
“In some areas, you have no sites,” says Michela Leonardi at the Natural History Museum in London – but that could be because nothing has been preserved, not because humans were absent. “And for more recent periods, you have more data just because it’s more recent, so it’s easier for it to be conserved.”
Leonardi had developed a statistical modelling technique that could determine whether animals had changed their environmental niche: that is, whether they had started living under different climatic conditions or in a different type of habitat like a rainforest instead of a grassland. The team figured that applying this to the human archaeological record would be a two-week job, says Leonardi. “That was five and a half years ago.”
However, the statistics eventually did confirm what they initially saw: about 70,000 years ago, modern humans in Africa started living in a much wider range of environments. The team published their results on 18 June.
Jacks of all trades
“What we’re seeing at 70,000 [years ago] is almost kind of our species becoming the ultimate generalist,” says Manica. From this time forwards, modern humans moved into an ever-greater range of habitats.
It would be easy to misunderstand this. The team absolutely isn’t saying that earlier H. sapiens weren’t adaptable. On the contrary: one of the things that has emerged from the study of extinct hominins is that the lineage that led to us became increasingly adaptable as time went on.
“People are in different environments from an early stage,” says Scerri. “We know they’re in mangrove forests, they’re in rainforest, they’re in the edges of deserts. They’re going up into highland regions in places like Ethiopia.”
This adaptability seems to be how early Homo survived environmental changes in Africa, while our Paranthropus cousins didn’t: Paranthropus was too committed to a particular lifestyle and was unable to change.

Instead, what seems to have happened in our species 70,000 years ago is that this existing adaptability was turned up to 11.
Some of this isn’t obvious until you consider just how diverse habitats are. “People have an understanding that there’s one type of desert, one type of rainforest,” says Scerri. “There aren’t. There are many different types. There’s lowland rainforest, montane rainforest, swamp forest, seasonally inundated forest.” The same kind of range is seen in deserts.
Earlier H. sapiens groups were “not exploiting the full range of potential habitats available to them”, says Scerri. “Suddenly, we see the beginnings of that around 70,000 years ago, where they’re exploiting more types of woodland, more types of rainforest.”
This success story struck me, because recently I’ve been thinking about the opposite.

Splendid isolation
Last week, I published a story about local human extinctions: groups of H. sapiens that seem to have died out without leaving any trace in modern populations. I focused on some of the first modern humans to enter Europe after leaving Africa, who seem to have struggled with the cold climate and unfamiliar habitats, and ultimately succumbed. These lost groups fascinated me: why did they fail, when another group that entered Europe just a few thousand years later succeeded so enormously?
The finding that humans in Africa expanded their niche from 70,000 years ago seems to offer a partial explanation. If these later groups were more adaptable, that would have given them a better chance of coping with the unfamiliar habitats of northern Europe – and for that matter, South-East Asia, Australia and the Americas, where their descendants would ultimately travel.
One quick note of caution: this doesn’t mean that from 70,000 years ago, human populations were indestructible. “It’s not like all humans suddenly developed into some massive success stories,” says Scerri. “Many of these populations died out, within and beyond Africa.”
And like all the best findings, the study raises as many questions as it answers. In particular: how and why did modern humans became more adaptable 70,000 years ago?
Manica points out that we can also see a shift in the shapes of our skeletons. Older fossils classed as H. sapiens don’t have all the features we associate with humans today, just some of them. “From 70,000 [years ago] onwards, roughly speaking, suddenly you see all these traits present as a package,” he says.

Manica suggests that the expansion into new niches may have enabled this, by bringing previously separate populations into more regular contact. For instance, if two populations were separated by a desert, they would never have met, never exchanged ideas and genes – until someone figured out how to live in the desert.
“There might also be almost a positive feedback,” says Manica. “You connect a bit more, you become more flexible… You break down some of those barriers, you become even more connected.”
With apologies, here is a pat conclusion. In that story about lost populations, I said that one of the biggest threats to human groups is isolation: if you don’t have neighbours you can call on and your group is small, even a minor misfortune can mean apocalypse. If Manica is right, the exact opposite played out in Africa. Populations grew and became more connected, and that enabled an explosion of creativity that sent our species all over the planet.
In which case, the reason the last out-of-Africa migration succeeded so wildly is: people need people. Without other people, we’re stupid and doomed. Any doomsday preppers hoping to ride out the apocalypse alone in a well-provisioned bunker: you may have the wrong approach.

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Archaeological evidence shows that 30,000 years ago, Palaeolithic people travelled from the island now known as Taiwan to the southern islands of Japan. This voyage would have included crossing the Kuroshio, one of the world’s strongest ocean currents.
Yousuke Kaifu at The University Museum of the University of Tokyo wanted to put this journey to the test, so his team built a dugout canoe using tools available to people at the time and set out from Taiwan. The journey spanned 225 kilometres and took the crew 45 hours before they reached Yonaguni Island. This trip came after previous failed attempts that used rafts made of reeds and bamboo.
The success of the voyage gives some insight into how Palaeolithic people might have made the treacherous crossing.

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archaeology More

The cranium of a girl thought to be the offspring of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens parentsIsrael Hershkovitz
A 140,000-year-old hominin skull from Israel probably belonged to a hybrid child of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens parents, according to an analysis of its anatomy. The 5-year-old girl was buried within the earliest known cemetery, possibly reshaping what we know about the first organised burials and the humans behind them.
The skull was originally unearthed from Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel in 1929. In total, these early excavations uncovered seven adults, three children and an assortment of bones that belonged to 16 hominins – all later assigned to Homo sapiens.

The classification of the child’s skull, however, has been contested for nearly a century, partly because the jaw looks dissimilar to typical Homo sapiens mandibles. Original work hypothesised that it belonged to a transitional hominin called Paleoanthropus palestinensis, but later research concluded it most likely belonged to Homo sapiens.
Anne Dambricourt Malassé at the Institute of Human Paleontology in France and her colleagues have now used CT scanning on the skull and compared it with other known Neanderthal children.
“This study is maybe the first that has put the Skhul child’s remains on a scientific basis,” says John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “The old reconstruction and associated work, literally set in plaster, did not really enable anyone to compare this child with a broader array of recent children to understand its biology.”

Malassé and her colleagues found the mandible had distinct Neanderthal characteristics, while the rest of the skull was anatomically consistent with Homo sapiens. They conclude that this combination of features suggests that the child was a hybrid whose parents were different species.
“I have long thought that hybridisations were not viable and I continue to think that they were mostly abortive,” says Malassé. “This skeleton reveals that they were nevertheless possible, even though this little girl lived only 5 years.”
While the new work significantly advances our understanding of the important Skhul child skull, we can’t definitively identify the child as a hybrid without extracting its DNA, which researchers have not been able to do, says Hawks. “Human populations are variable and there can be a lot of variability in their appearance and physical form even without mixing with ancient groups like Neanderthals,” he says.
We know from analyses of ancient and modern genomes that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals have swapped genes many times during the past 200,000 years. In 2018, a 90,000-year-old bone fragment found in Russia was identified as a hybrid between Neanderthals and Denisovans, another ancient hominin, using DNA analysis.

The Levant may have been a particularly important region for mixing among hominin species, due to its position between Africa, Asia and Europe. The region has been characterised as a “central bus station” for humans living in the Pleistocene, says Dany Coutinho Nogueria at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.
The new study forces us to call into question the attribution of the earliest grave site to Homo sapiens, says Malassé. This ritualised behavior may have come from Neanderthals, Homo sapiens or interactions between the two.
“We do not know who buried this child, whether this place chosen to bury the corpse was that of a single community, or whether communities from different lineages, but which coexisted and established contacts or even unions, shared rites and emotions,” says Malassé.

Topics:Neanderthals/ancient humans More

The Matarrubilla stone at Valencina in Spain was transported more than 5300 years agoL. García Sanjuán
A 2-tonne megalith in southern Spain was transported to its present location by a hitherto-unknown group of ancient seafarers over 5300 years ago.
The Matarrubilla stone is a solid slab of gypsum about 1.7 metres long by 1.2 m wide, sitting within a tomb-like structure at the Copper Age site of Valencina, near Seville.

It is located within a circular chamber called a tholos, with just enough room to stand around it. Given its unique composition and size, it is thought that the stone was used in rituals, but its provenance has been a mystery until now.
Luis Cáceres Puro at the University of Huelva in Spain and his colleagues performed chemical analysis on the slab and optically stimulated luminescence dating – which approximates the last time light struck sediments – on the soil beneath it to better determine its age and site of origin.
The results suggest the megalith was dragged to its current location between 4544 and 3277 BC, which is hundreds of years – possibly even 1000 years – earlier than previously thought. The new dates also suggest the rock was moved to Valencina long before the tunnel structure was built around it.

The stone’s composition most closely matches a quarry 55 kilometres away on the other side of the Guadalquivir river. At the time, there was a wide estuary between the two sites, suggesting the stone must have been transported by boat.
This is the first evidence of a megalithic stone being transported by boat in the Iberian peninsula, but large stones at other megalithic sites in Europe, such as Stonehenge in the UK and Carnac in France, are also thought to have been transported this way.
“The 4th millennium BC saw rapid evolution in coastal navigation,” says team member Leonardo García Sanjuán at the University of Seville. “The Matarrubilla stone basin is a good piece of indirect evidence, which, in our opinion, proves that these people had advanced raft, canoe or sailing-boat technology.”
Archaeological discoveries from other sites show that communities in the Mediterranean were already building sophisticated, seaworthy boats, he adds.

“The crossing of the formerly existing sea with such a huge stone proves once again the technical savoir-faire of the Matarrubilla builders,” says Ramón Fabregas Valcarce at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Valencina is one of the largest prehistoric sites in Europe, covering an area of more than 460 hectares. Among the site’s rarer artefacts are materials imported from far-flung regions, including amber, flint, cinnabar, ivory and ostrich egg.
“[Valencina] contains megalithic monuments, massive ditches, extensive burial records and refined material culture that reveals connections across Iberia, North Africa and the Mediterranean,” says Cáceres Puro.
Prior work in the area has unearthed numerous details indicating the site’s historical significance, including a centuries-long period from 2900 to 2650 BC when it was largely ruled by women.
“The current study adds intriguing further detail for one of Valencina’s major monuments,” says Alasdair Whittle at Cardiff University, UK.

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Neanderthal culinary skills were more sophisticated than we thoughtGREGOIRE CIRADE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Neanderthals were processing animal bones to extract fat from them 125,000 years ago, nearly 100,000 years before modern humans were known to do anything similar.
The evidence comes from an extraordinary lakeside site at Neumark-Nord in eastern Germany, where over 100,000 fragments of bones from at least 172 individual animals have been found. The remains include horses, bovids, deer, foxes, big cats and an extinct two-horned rhinoceros.

The bones had clear signs of being smashed into small pieces and heated to liberate the grease from the spongy tissue inside them. This fat would have provided a less-perishable, easily transportable, high-calorie food that would have been highly prized by hunter-gatherer groups.
Wil Roebroeks at Leiden University in the Netherlands and his colleagues, who carried out the study, describe the location as a “fat factory” that seems to have been used intensively for only a short period. “The fragmentation of the bones is clearly anthropogenic, not the result of carnivores or geological processes,” he says.
While there is no direct evidence that Neanderthals were responsible for the butchery, they were the only known humans in Europe at that time, says Roebroeks.

Previously, the oldest site where grease rendering had been confirmed was in Portugal 28,000 years ago.
Breaking the bones of large mammals into such a vast amount of small fragments is labour-intensive and time-consuming. “This only makes sense if the fragmentation served a purpose,” says Roebroeks.
Although the team doesn’t have direct evidence of boiling, it is clear that the bones were heated. “Judging from the presence of clearly heated bones, heated flint artifacts and stones, fires burnt at the site,” he says.

The earliest known pottery dates from around 20,000 years ago, so the Neanderthals must have used other kinds of vessels to boil the bones. Recent experiments have shown that containers made out of perishable materials such as deer skin or birch bark, placed directly on a fire, are capable of heating water sufficiently to process food, says Roebroeks.
“It is another addition to the cultural repertoire of these distant cousins and underlines the possibility that these hunter-gatherers did engage in some form of food storage,” he says.

Topics:Neanderthals More

A fresco from the Theban necropolis depicting potters in ancient EgyptDeAgostini/Getty Images
For the first time, the complete genome of a person from ancient Egypt has been sequenced. The DNA was collected from the remains of an older man, possibly a potter, who lived over 4500 years ago.
The ancient Egyptian inherited about a fifth of his DNA from ancestors living in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, more than 1000 kilometres east of Egypt. This suggests that the societies in Egypt and Mesopotamia were connected, despite their distance.
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The body was excavated in the early 1900s from Nuwayrat, a necropolis near Beni Hasan in Egypt. It was found in a pottery vessel, which had been placed in a rock-cut tomb. Today, the remains are kept at the World Museum in Liverpool, UK.
“We could actually directly radiocarbon date the remains of this individual,” says Adeline Morez Jacobs at Liverpool John Moores University. He died sometime between 2855 and 2570 BC. That means he lived fairly early in the history of ancient Egypt, which spanned from around 3150 to 30 BC.
The skeleton and DNA both showed the individual was male. Based on the man’s arthritis and other signs, he was estimated to be between 44 and 64 years old – probably on the older side. “He’s probably in his 60s at the time of death, which is incredibly old for that time period,” says Joel Irish, also at Liverpool John Moores University.

The social position of the man is unclear. “He was in what would have been an upper-class burial,” says Irish. But his skeleton shows that he had a hard, physical life. Based on the specific damage, he spent a lot of time looking down, leaning forward and holding his arms out in front of him, says Irish. He also sat for long periods of time on hard surfaces. Based on preserved images of different Egyptian occupations, the researchers think his most likely occupation was a potter.
Using samples from the roots of his teeth, the team was able to sequence the man’s entire genome. Previously it had only been possible to obtain partial genomes from three ancient Egyptians, who lived over 1000 years more recently.
“We have so little genetic sequencing from ancient Egypt,” says Shirly Ben-Dor Evian at the University of Haifa in Israel.
This is because the region’s warm climate degrades DNA more quickly. “It’s just way too hot,” says team member Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute in London, who calls the sequencing “a long shot”.
“We hypothesised that the pot burial, in combination with the rock-cut tomb into which the pot burial was placed, provided a stable environment,” says Linus Girdland-Flink at the University of Aberdeen in the UK.

About 80 per cent of the man’s genetic ancestry was North African, as might be expected. But the remaining 20 per cent matched people from the eastern Fertile Crescent, a geographical area that encompasses present-day Iraq, western Iran and parts of Syria and Turkey.
There are several possible explanations, says Ben-Dor Evian. “I’m thinking that explorers were always a thing,” she says. Also, long after farming became commonplace, “there were always populations that continued to be nomadic or semi-nomadic,” she says. Those peoples may have carried DNA between the Fertile Crescent and Egypt.
Archaeologists have already found links between ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. “There was quite a bit of cultural connections with Mesopotamia based on sharing artistic motifs,” says Irish, and goods like lapis lazuli were traded.
There could even be implications for the origin of writing. “The first writing systems emerged almost contemporaneously in the two regions,” says Morez Jacobs: cuneiform in Mesopotamia and Egyptian hieroglyphics just 300 years later.
“Was it a local invention of writing in both places, [or] were they, in some way, affecting each other?” asks Ben-Dor Evian. If one society invented writing, “the idea could have been transmitted through this movement of people,” she says. However, she stresses that one genome is nowhere near enough to draw such a sweeping conclusion: “I would like to see more Egyptian material in Mesopotamia in this time and vice versa.”

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A modern recreation of garum, a fermented fish sauce dating back to Roman timesAlexander Mychko / Alamy
Fermented fish sauce, or garum, was an incredibly popular condiment throughout the Roman Empire. For the first time, ancient DNA – scraped from vats used to produce the sauce – has revealed exactly which fish species went into the culinary staple.

Roman fish sauce was prized for its salty and umami flavours – although the philosopher Seneca famously described one version as “the overpriced guts of rotten fish”. It came in several forms, including a liquid sauce called garum or liquamen, as well as a solid paste known as allec. To prepare the condiment, fish-salting plants crushed and fermented fish, a process that can make visual identification of the species difficult or impossible.
“Beyond the fact that bones are extremely small and fractured, the old age and the acidic conditions all contribute to degradation of DNA,” says Paula Campos at the University of Porto in Portugal.
Campos and her colleagues ran DNA sequencing tests on bony samples from roughly the 3rd century AD, extracted from a Roman fish-salting plant in north-west Spain. They were able to compare multiple overlapping DNA sequences and match them to a full fish genome, giving the team “more confidence that we identify the correct species”, says Campos.
The effort identified the fish remains as European sardines – a finding that aligns with previous visual identification of sardine remains in other Roman-era fish-salting plants. Other garum production sites have also contained remnants of additional fish species such as herring, whiting, mackerel and anchovy.

This proof that “degraded fish remains” can yield identifiable DNA “might help identify with more precision some regional variations in the main ingredients of the ancient fish sauces and pastes”, says Annalisa Marzano at the University of Bologna in Italy, who did not participate in the study.
The study also compared the DNA of ancient and modern sardines to show there was less genetic mixing of sardine populations from different ocean regions in ancient times. That insight could help “assess the effects of human-environment interaction over the centuries”, says Marzano.
For their next step, Campos and her colleagues plan to analyse other fish species from additional Roman-era garum production sites. “We are expanding the sampling locations to see if the results are consistent across the entire Roman Empire,” she says.

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