Humans

The Ellestad stone, inscribed between AD 500 and 700, appears to include encrypted runesUnknown/Creative Commons
People living in Scandinavia may have written encrypted messages in runes – the alphabet later used by the Vikings – several centuries earlier than previously thought.
In runic writing systems, each rune can represent both a sound and a word. For example, in an early runic system called the Elder Futhark, the rune that corresponds to the letter S also means “sun”.
It is generally possible to translate runes into modern languages. But we have long known that … More

Inside the Tabon Caves on Palawan island in the PhilippinesHemis/Alamy Stock Photo
The prehistoric inhabitants of the Philippines were able to make ropes and baskets from plant fibres almost 40,000 years ago, according to an analysis of stone tools. The find suggests the people living then may have been able to produce more sophisticated constructions, such as boats and buildings, than previously thought.
“Mastering fibre technology was a very important step in human development. It allows to assemble different objects together and to build houses, make composite objects, hunt with bows,” says Hermine Xhauflair at the University of the Philippines Diliman. “Eventually, the existence of ropes allows people to attach a sail to canoes and create boats that can be used to go very far away.”
Because of this, archaeologists are keen to study ancient fibres, but their organic nature means few have been preserved – the oldest ever found is a 50,000-year-old piece of string thought to have been made by Neanderthals.Advertisement
This lack of specimens means archaeologists often have to rely on indirect evidence for textile production, such as depiction in art, the seeds of fibre plants, or signs of fibre processing on stone tools.
Xhauflair and her colleagues have done just that, in their case analysing 43 stone tools dating from 33,000 to 39,000 years ago that had been excavated from the Tabon Caves on Palawan island in the Philippines.
To see if these tools had been used to make textiles, Xhauflair learned fibre-processing techniques from modern-day Indigenous inhabitants of the island, the Pala’wan people, then used replicas of the tools, which are made from a stone known as red jasper, to thin the fibres from bamboo, palm and other plants. The researchers examined these replica tools with a microscope to look for patterns of wear created by plant processing, then compared these marks with the ancient tools.
Three stone tools from the cave showed similar marks, suggesting they were once used for transforming rigid plants into supple strips. These signs included a brush stroke-type pattern of striations, micro-polish and micro-scars on the surface of the tools. The team also found residues on one of the cave tools that came from a plant in the Poaceae family, of which bamboo is a member.
Xhauflair isn’t so sure what the prehistoric Filipinos did with these supple strips. Today, the Pala’wan people use them to make baskets and traps or to tie objects together, so they may have had the same use in the past. “What we can conclude is that prehistoric people had the capacity to do all these things as soon as they knew how to process fibres,” she says.

“The study is intriguing as it opens the door to investigating aspects of past human behaviour that is typically not preserved in archaeological sites,” says Ben Shaw at the Australian National University. “Even though the plant remains are long gone, [the team’s] detailed approach has made them visible by looking at the tools used to process them.”
With this evidence of early fibre technology, Shaw says it would be worth re-examining previously excavated sites in the region, as activities such as boat making or building construction may have been overlooked if rope making wasn’t considered part of the ancient inhabitants’ toolkit.

Topics:archaeology More

Bonobos, unlike chimpanzees, aren’t usually violent towards other groupsSergey Uryadnikov/Alamy
The last common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees and bonobos wasn’t especially prone to violence, according to a study attempting to reconstruct the evolution of warlike behaviour among apes. Hostility between groups of this ancestor may have been tempered by bonds between unrelated females, the study suggests – but researchers warn that its conclusions are highly speculative.
The question of whether violence is integral to human nature has been debated for centuries. Biologists have tried to answer it by looking at chimpanzees, which, along … More

A woman from the Dani tribe in Indonesia with a bow and arrowANDREY GUDKOV/Alamy
The idea that men hunt while women stay at home is almost completely wrong, a review of foraging societies around the world has found. In fact, women hunt in 80 per cent of the societies looked at, and in a third of these societies women were found to hunt big game – animals heavier than 30 kilograms – as well as smaller animals.
These findings are likely to be representative of all foraging societies past and present, says Cara Wall-Scheffler at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We have nearly 150 years of ethnographic studies sampled, we have every continent and more than one culture from every continent, and so I feel like we did get a pretty good swathe of what people do around the world,” she says.
There was already growing evidence that women hunted in many cultures in the past. For instance, of 27 individuals found buried with hunting weapons in the Americas, nearly half were women, a 2020 study found. Yet researchers have been reluctant to conclude that these women were hunters.Advertisement
“There is a paradigm that men are the hunters and women are not the hunters, and that paradigm colours how people interpret data,” says Wall-Scheffler. Her team looked at a database called D-PLACE that has records on more than 1400 human societies worldwide made over the past 150 years. There was data on hunting for 63 of the foraging societies recorded and, of these, 50 described women hunting.
For 41 of these societies, there was information on whether women’s hunting was intentional or opportunistic – that is, whether they were going out to hunt rather than catching animals they stumbled upon while gathering plants, say. In 87 per cent of cases, it was intentional. “That number was higher than I expected,” says Wall-Scheffler.
The team also looked at data on the size of animals hunted by women, which was recorded for 45 societies. In 46 per cent of cases it was small game such as lizards and rodents, 15 per cent medium game and 33 per cent large game. In 4 per cent of the societies women hunted game of all sizes.
The analysis found that women’s hunting strategies were more flexible than men’s. “Women use a wider range of tools when they go hunting, they go out with a wider variety of people,” says Wall-Scheffler.

They may hunt alone or with a male partner, other women, children or dogs, for instance, says Wall-Scheffler. While the bow and arrow was commonly used by female hunters around the world, she says, women also used knives, nets, spears, machetes, crossbows and more.
This greater flexibility could be a result of female hunters’ mobility varying when they are pregnant or breast-feeding, she says. In at least some cases women hunted with babies strapped to their backs, for instance.
In some societies there were taboos on women making or using specific tools or weapons, Wall-Scheffler says, forcing them to find alternatives.
“This paper represents a much-needed meta-analysis,” says Randy Haas at Wayne State University in Michigan, whose team carried out the study of burials in the Americas. “The findings, coupled with related archaeological findings, convincingly show that division of subsistence labour is much more variable than previously thought,” he says.
Given that women did and do hunt in so many societies, Wall-Scheffler says she can’t explain why the popular notion is that only men hunt. “I don’t understand it,” she says. “I think it is just as remarkable that women with babies on their back are going out to shoot animals.”

Topics:women/hunting More

Bernard Friel/Education Images/Universal
WHY is society the way it is? We thought we knew. Now, it appears, we have been thinking about it all wrong.
In our special issue on civilisation (see The civilisation myth: How new discoveries are rewriting human history), we explore what has happened to human societies over the past 10,000 years and what came before. It details new evidence on why many of us abandoned hunting and gathering for a life of farming, urbanism and paperwork, and explores why societies became more unequal and hierarchical, including the role war and religion played in such transformations.
The answers are … More

The people of Easter Island have shown that systems of governance aren’t set in stoneGetty Images/iStockphoto
Emerging evidence from the study of human societies past and present reveals a “staggering kaleidoscope of social experimentation”, says David Wengrow at University College London. It is tempting to fit societies into neat categories such as hunter-gatherer versus complex, egalitarian versus hierarchical and democratic versus authoritarian. It turns out to be not that simple. What’s more, a society can change drastically if its members choose.
One such transition took place on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, in the south-east Pacific. The first settlers established sub-chiefs, each with power over one region of the island and all subordinate to an overall chief. “The chief would have been hereditary,” says Jennifer Kahn at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. “It’s an ascribed position like a monarchy, where you are born into gaining that title.” However, this centralised system proved unstable, so around 1600 the people of Rapa Nui overturned it. In its place they established a birdman cult. Every year, warriors competed by swimming through shark-infested waters to a small islet where they collected a bird’s egg and swam back. “The first one that arrives with their egg unbroken becomes chief for the year,” says Kahn. “It’s an achieved position… that warrior could even be somebody from a low rank.”
… More

The civilisation myth: How new discoveries are rewriting human history

In an evolutionary eyeblink, our species has gone from hunting and gathering to living in complex societies. We need to rethink the story of this monumental transition More

Coke Navarro
FOR almost all of human existence, our species has been roaming the planet, living in small groups, hunting and gathering, moving to new areas when the climate was favourable, retreating when it turned nasty. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors used fire to cook and warm themselves. They made tools, shelters, clothing and jewellery – although their possessions were limited to what they could carry. They occasionally came across other hominins, like Neanderthals, and sometimes had sex with them. Across vast swathes of time, history played out, unrecorded.
Then, about 10,000 years ago, everything began to change.
In a few places, people started growing crops. They spent more time in the same spot. They built villages and towns. Various unsung geniuses invented writing, money, the wheel and gunpowder. Within just a few thousand years – the blink of an eye in evolutionary time – cities, empires and factories mushroomed all over the world. Today, Earth is surrounded by orbiting satellites and criss-crossed by internet cables. Nothing else like this has ever happened.
Archaeologists and anthropologists have sought to explain why this rapid and extraordinary transformation occurred. Their most prevalent narrative describes a sort of trap: once people started farming, there was no way back from a cascade of increasing social complexity that led inexorably to hierarchy, inequality and environmental destruction. This bleak view of civilisation’s rise has long held sway. However, the more societies we look at, the more it falls to pieces. Confronted with inconvenient evidence, we are being forced to retell our own origin story. In doing so, we are also rethinking what a society can be.
Our … More