Humans

Rene Bernal/Unsplash
I WAS going to start this article another way. But that was before my 10-year-old daughter intervened. In fact, I had already begun writing when she bounced up and tried to scam me. She offered to bet me £10 that she could make an ordinary pencil write in the colour red. Alas for the budding entrepreneur, I refused the bet: she was too confident, so I suspected she had something up her sleeve. But I did let her reveal her trick. She took a lead pencil and wrote “in the colour red”. Then she laughed like a hyena and went off to try scamming her mother.
Our bright little spark has opinions about everything from video games and sports to books. She is learning basic algebra and coding, and her Taylor Swift expertise vastly outstrips mine. Yet, despite all this knowledge, she has years to go before adulthood. If she lives an average lifespan, a quarter of her years will be spent underage.

The long human childhood is a real oddity. No other primate spends so much time becoming an adult. Over the course of our species’ evolution, along with more obvious physical changes, childhoods got vastly longer. Traditionally, palaeoanthropologists have paid little attention to children, but now that is changing. A spate of intriguing discoveries in the past few years is building a picture about human childhood: when this seemingly unproductive life stage expanded, why it is so long and what prehistoric kids got up to. The findings don’t just throw light on a dark corner… More

International trade may have helped medieval elites acquire the best horses for jousting tournamentsPRISMA ARCHIVO / Alamy
Horses owned by the elite in medieval England were probably imported from continental Europe, possibly travelling hundreds of kilometres, according to tooth analysis of horses unearthed at a cemetery in London.
In the 1990s, commercial excavators stumbled across an unusually large horse burial site in central London. Subsequent digs at the site, now known as the Elverton Street cemetery, have uncovered 70 whole or partial horse remains. Some of the graves have been dated to between 1425 and 1517, but the cemetery may have been used over a wider period.

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“It’s medieval Britain’s only real, good example of a horse cemetery,” says Oliver Creighton at the University of Exeter in the UK. “We usually find [horse remains] scattered across archaeological sites in very small numbers.”
To learn more about the origin and lives of these medieval horses, Creighton and his colleagues collected and analysed the molars from 15 horses buried at the site.
Plants from different parts of the world contain varying levels of carbon, oxygen and strontium isotopes – atoms with different numbers of neutrons. When an animal eats these plants, these isotopes accumulate in their bones and teeth over time. So, by analysing the chemical signatures of the horses’ teeth, the team could pinpoint where they probably came from.
This revealed that at least seven came from abroad, possibly from Scandinavia or the western Alps, says Alexander Pryor, also at the University of Exeter.
“These were also some of the largest medieval horses yet discovered in the UK,” says Pryor, which suggests that English elites may have sought out the best horses from Europe.
The arrangement of their teeth seemed to suggest the use of a special mouthpiece typically reserved for horses groomed for battle or jousting tournaments.
“There’s a good chance the horses could have come from the jousting arena at Westminster Palace, which was just a kilometre away,” says Creighton.
“The nature of horse teeth – with very high crowns that develop over quite a long time – gives them huge potential for studies using isotopes to track movements over the course of an individual horse’s life,” says David Orton at the University of York, UK. “But this is the first paper I’ve seen that really seems to make full use of that potential.”

Topics:archaeology/history More

The cost of housing and fertility treatments may deter people in high-income countries from having childrenER Productions Limited/Getty Images
Think of global population problems and you might think of the growing number of people in the world – currently about 8 billion – and our collective toll on the planet. But due to people having fewer children as countries become more prosperous, the real demographic problem may turn out to be falling populations.
Projecting from current trends, demographers have now predicted that, within about 25 years, three-quarters of countries will have birth rates that are too… More

The canoes are up to 10 metres long and made from hollowed out treesGibaja et al., 2024, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0
More than 7000 years ago, skilled craftspeople constructed wooden canoes that probably transported people, animals and goods across the Mediterranean Sea.
Scientists have identified five boats with signs of advanced seafaring technology, such as transverse reinforcements and towing accessories. Found in a freshwater lake, the canoes – which have been somewhat of an inadvertent secret for decades – probably enabled trade and transportation among Mediterranean farming communities during the Neolithic period, says Niccolò Mazzucco at the University of Pisa in Italy.
Along with the well-preserved village they were found in, the canoes “open a window to the past”, he says.Advertisement

In 1989, Italian researchers discovered the site – which they named La Marmotta – buried under a lake located 38 kilometres upstream from the western coast of the Mediterranean Sea, slightly north-west of Rome. In addition to multiple wooden buildings, they found dugout canoes built from trees that had been hollowed by burning and carving.
Despite these findings, language barriers kept them from becoming well-known internationally, with nearly all related information published only in Italian, says Mario Mineo at the Museum of Roman Civilization in Rome, who participated in the discovery.
Now, Mazzucco, Mineo and their colleagues have taken a fresh look at these canoes using modern methods – and shared their results in English.
Lasse Sørensen at the National Museum of Denmark, who wasn’t involved in the research, says he was unaware of these boats, despite his extensive work with dugout canoes in Scandinavia.
He is particularly intrigued by the wooden T-shaped devices found with the canoes. The holes drilled into them suggest they were probably used for ropes, which implies the boats were towed. This would have allowed them to transport “more people, more animals, more stuff”, says Sørensen. “So, these details are really important because they’re actually a testimony of how they could have transported a lot of goods.”
The team used recent carbon dating technology to place each boat’s origins in the 6th millennia BC: the two oldest were built as early as 5620 BC and the most recent one as late as 5045 BC. Carbon dating one of the T-shaped accessories revealed it was made as early as 5470 BC.

The boats are up to 10 metres long. This size suggests they were used on the sea, says Mazzucco. Recent tests of replicas of these canoes confirmed the originals would have been seaworthy. Foreign grains, livestock remains and stones found at the village indicate the villagers traded across the Mediterranean region.
To identify the trees used to make the boats, the team sliced off nine thin samples of wood from each canoe. Analysing these under a microscope, the researchers determined that two of the boats – including one of the oldest – were made from alder, which is lightweight and doesn’t split or crack easily. The most recent boat was made from oak, which is tough and resistant to decay, while the remaining two boats were made from poplar and beech.
“They probably had enough knowledge about wood species and their properties to choose them and to use them on the basis of those properties,” says Mazzucco. “These people were working wood with the same knowledge as a carpenter today, just with different tools.”

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Josie Ford
Wins for kids
Spectator sports are good for children – good for creating children, that is – according to data in a study by Gwinyai Masukume at University College Dublin, Ireland, and his colleagues.
That data pertains to major American football, Association football (soccer) and rugby union tournaments in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.
“With a few exceptions,” say the researchers, these popular contests “were associated with increases in the number of babies born and/or in the birth sex ratio 9(±1) months following notable team wins and/or hosting the tournament”.Advertisement
Sports events on this level seem to work that way for winners – but not for losers, says the study, which was published in the journal PeerJ. The downside is, no kidding, substantial: “unexpected losses by teams from a premier soccer league were associated with a decline in births 9 months on”.
Celebratory sex
That spectator-sports study begins with a seductive sentence: “Major sporting tournaments may be associated with increased birth rates 9 months afterwards, possibly due to celebratory sex.”
Not many researchers focus on the topic of celebratory sex. But four scholars at the University of South Dakota did, in a 2017 paper called “Sexual behavior in parked cars reported by Midwestern college men and women“.
The foursome write candidly about their observations: “[Some people] would plan ahead for days or weeks for a leisurely, lengthy parking session of ‘celebratory’ sex for birthdays, holidays, graduations, proms, or ‘breaking in’ a new car… sex while parked was primarily a positive sexual and romantic experience for both men and women.”
The study’s abstract climaxes with a simple thought: “The future study of sex in parked cars in urban environments is recommended.”
Timeliness of time
The eternal question “What is time?” has staggered doubly to centre stage – first in a Finnish report about Russian time zones, second in a shifty action by the nation of Kazakhstan.
Nelli Piattoeva and Nadezhda Vasileva at Tampere University in Finland wrote a 20-page assessment called “Taming the time zone: National large-scale assessments as instruments of time in the Russian Federation“.
Russia has 11 time zones. Piattoeva and Vasileva instruct us that: “The presence of multiple time zones evidences the lack of a unified spatio-temporality.” And they express a thought that no one has ever quite put into clear words: “Bureaucratically, the desire for simultaneity and synchronicity takes the form of a meticulous ordering of a sequence of actions through prescriptive documentation.” They reveal that there is a hinge to everything: “In our analysis, we reverted repeatedly to the most difficult question of all: what is time?”
Independently, the government of Kazakhstan added clarification, wonder and, maybe, confusion to the general timely mix. On 1 March, Kazakhstan rendered its two time zones down into a solitary, nationwide time zone.
The Times of Central Asia reported, two weeks prior to the big day, that “not all citizens are happy about it, with some arguing it will impact their health”. The Times interviewed Sultan Tuleukhanov at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, who warned: “There is such a concept as desynchronises, a type of inconsistency. In particular, it’s a change to the chrono-structural parameters of biological rhythms of the human organism.”
Feedback salutes the boldness, if nothing else, of anyone who dares monkey with the chrono-structural parameters of biological rhythms of the human organism.
Unread, un-existent
How many research studies that nobody had read… eventually just disappeared? And how many studies that have disappeared… had never been read by anybody, even before disappearing? Rough answers to both questions – they are not quite the same question! – now exist.
The first question got addressed almost two decades ago, when Lokman I. Meho at Indiana University Bloomington published a paper (which hasn’t yet disappeared) called “The rise and rise of citation analysis“.
Meho wrote: “It is a sobering fact that some 90% of papers that have been published in academic journals are never cited. Indeed, as many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors.”
The second question got a good going-over by Martin Paul Eve at Birkbeck, University of London. His new study (which also hasn’t yet disappeared) is called “Digital scholarly journals are poorly preserved: A study of 7 million articles“. The study did an “appraisal” of 7,438,037 scholarly citations that have unique identification codes called DOIs. Well, the study attempted to do an appraisal. Eve reports that 2,056,492 (27.64 per cent) of those items appear to be missing.
Eve also says that 32.9 per cent of the organisations responsible for digitally preserving documents “seem not to have any adequate digital preservation in place”.
Feedback celebrates and laments that this deepens the meaning of an old ideal: that research should raise more questions than it answers.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is improbable.com.
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An archaeological site in the lowlands of Ethiopia where ancient humans lived 74,000 years agoJohn Kappelman
An campsite in what is now Ethiopia may have been used for a few years before, during and after a huge volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago that altered Earth’s climate.
The eruption of Toba, a supervolcano on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, was the biggest eruption on Earth in the past 2 million years. Some researchers think it caused a volcanic winter that lasted several years and might have wiped out most humans alive at the time, but the magnitude of its impact is disputed.

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Bones found at a site in Ethiopia suggest that the people living there had to adapt their diet to survive during a drier year or two after the eruption, but the impact appears to have been mild.
“It was a pretty lucky find,” says John Kappelman at the University of Texas at Austin, whose team discovered the site in 2002. “There is no question about it.”
Most early human sites are caves that were occupied for tens of thousands of years, he says. But this camp is an open-air site near the Shinfa river, a tributary of the Blue Nile. “Our hunch is that this site was occupied for maybe five to 10 years, something like that,” says Kappelman.
The team has found thousands of stone chips from the making of tools, along with some stone points that may be among the oldest arrowheads ever found. “We have evidence for archery in the form of these little stone points,” says Kappelman.
The researchers have also discovered ostrich egg shells and the bones of many animals, some of which have cut marks and signs of heating. So they think people were bringing animals back to the site to butcher and cook.
In the middle of the layer of sediment containing the stone chips and bones, the team also found volcanic ash in the form of minuscule pieces of glass known as cryptotephra. “They are just tiny, tiny glass shards,” says Kappelman – and their composition matches others from the Toba super-eruption.
An isotopic analysis of the ostrich shells suggests that the climate became drier after the eruption. This coincides with a quadrupling in the amount of fish remains seen and a decrease in other kinds of animal remains.
The team’s explanation for this is that the Shinfa river is seasonal and dries up, leaving waterholes in the dry season. Immediately after the Toba eruption, the dry season was longer, so the fish in the shrinking waterholes were easier to catch. This made up for the fall in terrestrial prey animals, the researchers suggest.
In the following years, food remains returned to pre-eruption levels, with no sign of a mass die-off, says Kappelman.

Other researchers have argued that when conditions got drier, early humans moved to places that were wetter, he says. For this reason, it is also thought that the migration of people out of Africa took place during periods when the climate was wetter, allowing them to survive in the usually arid regions between Africa and Eurasia.
“Our site shows that humans were adapted to seasonally arid conditions,” says Kappelman. This means that the movement of modern humans out of Africa, which may have taken place as recently as 65,000 or 60,000 years ago, could have happened during dry periods, he thinks.
However, Kappelman agrees that earlier migrations out of Africa by less sophisticated peoples may have been limited to wetter periods.
“This is an intriguing paper for many reasons – the possibly precise tie-in with the Toba super-eruption, the environmental evidence, subsistence behaviours including fishing, possible use of bow and arrow, and behavioural adaptations that might have facilitated dispersals from Africa,” says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London.
“I’m sure each of these propositions will fuel debate, but I think the authors have made a plausible – though not definitive – case for each scenario they propose,” he says.
The study also adds to the growing evidence that the global impact of the Toba super-eruption was relatively minor and short-lived, says Stringer.
But Stanley Ambrose at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, one of the researchers who thinks Toba wiped out most humans, disagrees. He says the site may represent a much greater period of time than Kappelman’s team thinks, meaning the effects on people may have been much greater.
“Materials deposited by humans long before and long after the eruption – possibly centuries to more than a millennium earlier or later – could be juxtaposed with the ash layer by well-known processes of disturbance, such as burrowing rodents and cracks that form during the dry season,” says Ambrose.

Topics:human evolution More

The 1000-year-old brain of an individual excavated from a churchyard in Ypres, Belgium. The folds of the tissue, which are still soft and wet, are stained orange with iron oxidesAlexandra L. Morton-Hayward
A study of human brains that have been naturally preserved for hundreds or thousands of years has identified 1300 cases where the organs have survived even when all other soft tissues have decomposed. Some of these brains are more than 12,000 years old.
“Brains of this type, where they’re the only soft tissue preserved, have been found in sunken shipwrecks and in waterlogged graves where the bones are just floating,” says Alexandra Morton-Hayward at the University of Oxford. “It’s really, really strange.”

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“We’re not expecting a brain to preserve in any type of environment, to be honest,” she says. “If, as an archaeologist, I dig up a grave and I find a brain rattling around in a skull, I would be shocked. But particularly, we’re not expecting soft tissues to preserve in waterlogged environments.”
Morton-Hayward first became interested in brain preservation while working as an undertaker. “The brain is known to be one of the first organs to decompose post-mortem. I saw it liquefy pretty quickly. But I also saw it preserve,” she says.
Many researchers have noted that human brains are found preserved more often than expected and in surprising circumstances, says Morton-Hayward. Now, she and her colleagues have done the first ever systematic study of the phenomenon. They have put together a database of more than 4400 preserved human brains found all over the world.
They have also collected and studied many preserved brains themselves. “I did put one in an MRI machine, which was a terrible mistake. I didn’t realise how much iron was in there,” says Morton-Hayward.
In most cases, the brain preservation could be explained by known processes. For instance, the brains of Incan human sacrifices entombed on top of a volcano in South America around AD 1450 were freeze-dried along with the bodies, says Morton-Hayward.
The bodies and brains of bog people such as Tollund Man, who was hanged and dumped in a bog 2400 years ago in what is now Denmark, were preserved by a tanning process similar to that used for leather.
And saponification, where fatty substances turn into a form of soap called grave wax, preserved the brains of some people shot in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War and buried in a mass grave.
But the known processes preserve all soft tissues, not just brains. They don’t explain the 1300 cases where brains are the only soft tissue to survive.
“This unknown mechanism is completely different,” says Morton-Hayward. “The key feature of it is that we only have the brain and the bones left. There’s no skin, no muscle, no gut.”
For instance, Saint Hedwig of Silesia was buried in Poland in 1243. When her body was exhumed in the 17th century, her brain was found to be preserved, which at the time was attributed to divine power.
Alexandra Morton-Hayward holding a 1000-year-old preserved brainGraham Poulter
Morton-Hayward’s working hypothesis is that, in certain circumstances, substances such as iron can catalyse the formation of cross-links between proteins and lipids, forming more stable molecules that resist degradation. The nature of the proteins and lipids found in brains, or their ratio, might be the key.
“The mechanisms are similar to those that we see in neurodegenerative diseases, like dementia,” she says. “So if we can figure out what’s happening to brains after death, we might be able to shed some light on what’s happening in brain ageing in life as well.”
“It is fantastic news that the data is being published,” says Brittany Moller at James Cook University in Melbourne, Australia, one of the researchers who has found that brain preservation is more common than thought. “It may increase awareness among researchers of the likely potential for brain material preservation,” she says.
That is important because preserved brains often have the same colour as surrounding soil. “It is therefore highly likely that brain material is frequently discarded during archaeological excavation as it is not recognised for what it is,” says Moller.
While the study focused on human brains, the findings should apply to animals too. There are at least 700 instances of animal brains preserved in fossils, says Morton-Hayward, with the oldest being arthropods that are half a billion years old.

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An intact hafted axe found under one of the structures that burnt down at the Must Farm siteCambridge Archaeological Unit
The remains of a Bronze Age settlement in eastern England have been exquisitely preserved after being destroyed by a fire 3000 years ago. An examination of the site gives us an extraordinary snapshot of how Britons lived at the time, from what people may have eaten for breakfast to the tools they used to build houses.
Archaeologists first stumbled across ancient wooden posts at Must Farm quarry, near the small town of Whittlesey, in 1999. The small-scale investigations that followed sought to figure out whether there was anything interesting there, says Chris Wakefield at the University of York in the UK. But it wasn’t until 2015 that Wakefield and his colleagues conducted a full-scale excavation of the site.

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The team uncovered the structural remains of four large roundhouses – circular dwellings usually made of wood with thatched conical roofs – dating back to between 3000 and 2800 years ago. Wooden stumps suggest these were built on stilts, connected by wooden walkways, over a small river that ran through the area. Based on the size of the channel, there may have been about 10 roundhouses at the settlement, says Wakefield.
Tree-ring analysis on wood from the structures suggests the settlement was destroyed a year after its construction, with the houses falling into the muddy water below. The waterlogged, oxygen-scarce environment prevented the settlement from degrading, preserving it in unprecedented detail, says Wakefield. Charring on the objects from the fire also provided a protective layer against environmental decay. “Pretty much everything that had been there in time of the fire inside these people’s houses has been preserved to find nearly 3000 years later,” says Wakefield.
The way items fell into the mud gave clues to the layout of each house. As you step through the door, the kitchen area tended to be in the east side of the house, with a sleeping area in the north-west and pens for livestock in the south-east.
Chemical analysis of kitchenware, including pots, bowls, cups and jars, suggests that the settlement’s prehistoric inhabitants probably ate porridge, cereals, honey and stews made with beef, mutton and fish.
“This is the best evidence we have on understanding prehistoric diet and cooking practices,” says Rachel Pope at the University of Liverpool in the UK. “It’s the closest we’ll ever get to walking through the doorway of a roundhouse 3000 years ago and seeing what life was like inside.”

Illustration depicting daily life in one of the Must Farm structuresJudith Dobie/Historic England
Toolboxes filled with axes, sickles and razors were a staple in every household. “One of the most beautiful objects that one of my colleagues found was an incredible two-part hafted axe,” says Wakefield. “What was so amazing about this particular design is that the axe head itself was inserted into an extra bit of wood that you could swap out.”
The garments recovered at the site have a lush, velvety feel – they were made of some of the finest textiles produced in Europe at that time, says Wakefield. Decorative beads, which may have been used in necklaces, were also found across the site, possibly coming from elsewhere in Europe or the Middle East.
The settlement has been likened to the ancient Roman town of Pompeii, which was entombed in ash after a volcanic eruption in AD 79. “Archaeologists sometimes talk of a Pompeii-like discovery – a moment frozen in time – and this is one of those, a burnt-down settlement that gives us an intimate view into people’s lives just before the fire and in the months running up to it around 2900 years ago,” says Michael Parker Pearson at University College London.
“Must Farm is more than a once-in-a-generation site. It is very likely that there will never be a site that tells us more about Bronze Age Britain,” says Richard Madgwick at Cardiff University, UK.

Topics:archaeology/ancient humans More