Humans

Antonio Sortino
IF YOU have ever marvelled at the accomplishment of Stone Age cave artists, you are in good company. In 1940, on visiting Lascaux cave in southern France, Pablo Picasso supposedly said: “Since Lascaux, we have invented nothing.” Perspective, movement, impressionism, abstraction, pointillism – it is all there. And these artworks are some 17,000 years old.
Picasso’s remark may be apocryphal. It was certainly premature. In 1994, hundreds of paintings twice the age of those at Lascaux were discovered at Chauvet cave, also in France. The Chauvet paintings are, quite simply, stunning: prowling lions and galloping horses are captured so vividly that the remote Stone Age world becomes almost tangible. Even more astonishingly, this art was created shortly after the dawn of the “cultural explosion”, an event archaeologists have long recognised as marking a surge in creativity that seems to have come out of nowhere. How could these first artists have already been so good?
We now have an answer: the Chauvet artists weren’t the first. Discoveries in recent decades have shattered the assumption that art was invented by our species some 40,000 years ago. Instead, we have increasingly compelling evidence of artistry in other ancient hominins.
Needless to say, this challenges our beliefs about who invented art. But it does more besides. It offers an insight into our forerunners’ appreciation for aesthetics and the value they placed on objects that seem, at first glance, unnecessary for survival. In so doing, it also provides tantalising hints that art has been a vital component of hominin life for millions of years.
To say that humans are the only living artists… More

It may be older users who are driving the rise in cannabis use in the USVolha Shukaila/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
Cannabis is the most used illicit substance in the world, with an estimated 219 million people using it in 2021. Nowhere is it more popular than in the US and Canada.

In 2021, 52 million people aged 12 and older in the US used cannabis, roughly 1 in 5 people in this age group. Those figures have been inching upwards over the last few decades – a fact that isn’t that surprising given the expanded access to legal (or quasi-legal) cannabis and a shift in attitudes towards the drug.

The uptick in use, ease of access and increased social acceptability of the drug have some experts – and parents – worried, particularly about increased use among adolescents. That is with good reason: a growing body of evidence suggests cannabis use during adolescence may affect brain development, potentially increasing the risk for developing various mental health conditions or substance use disorders.Advertisement
Yet so far, fears of a surge in adolescent cannabis use haven’t been borne out by the data. Results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an annual survey conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, showed that rates of past-month cannabis use among teens aged 12 to 17 in the US have actually declined over the past 20 years: from 8.1 per cent in 2002 to 4.8 per cent in 2021.
Instead, the increase in cannabis use is being driven entirely by adults. The 12 to 17-year-old crowd now has the lowest rates of past-month cannabis.

Some health professionals are sceptical that we are seeing the full picture when it comes to teen use, however. “I cannot believe that that is true, that it has not gone up,” says clinical psychiatrist Ryan Sultan at Columbia University in New York. “Every other piece of information would suggest it should be going up.”
For instance, we know that more people now think of cannabis as a relatively benign substance. “In general, when perceptions of things move toward safety… that increases the likelihood” of use, says Sultan. Legalisation of recreational cannabis has also been linked to increased uptick in use of the drug.
Sultan isn’t ruling out the possibility that expanded legalisation has diminished the drug’s allure, or that kids are choosing to wait until they are older to use weed. If those things turn out to be true, it would be welcome news, he says. But he thinks it is more likely there is a missing piece to the puzzle, hidden by a lag in the data collection.

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This ancient skull shows signs of healing within the walls of fracture lines inflicted by a blunt force injuryQian Wang
A man who lived in what is now China 2700 years ago had a hole cut in his skull to treat a head injury and survived. This suggests that shamanic doctors in that era could do advanced brain surgery.
The Yanghai cemetery in Xinjiang, China, is a large, ancient burial ground containing the graves of a clan that practised shamanism, generally defined as a belief system using trance to communicate with the … More

Human remains from 5000 years ago buried at San Juan ante Portam Latinam in SpainJ. I. Vegas
Stone Age people were fighting small-scale wars in Europe over 5000 years ago, earlier than thought. The conflicts took place long before powerful states formed in the region.
The evidence comes from a re-analysis of hundreds of human remains found at a burial site in northern Spain. The bones are predominantly male and many have evidence of injuries from stabbing and blunt-force trauma – suggesting they belonged to a warrior class.
“It’s too large to be conflict within a community,” says Rick Schulting at the University of Oxford. The sheer scale of the conflict points to early warfare, rather than just interpersonal conflicts or skirmishes, he says.Advertisement
The site in question is San Juan ante Portam Latinam, a rock shelter in a valley in northern Spain. It was found by accident in 1985 when a bulldozer uncovered human remains while widening a track. Radiocarbon dating of the bones suggests they were laid down between 3380 and 3000 BC, during the European Neolithic period.
San Juan ante Portam Latinam is about 20 square metres in area. In that small space, researchers found densely packed human bones. They include 90 complete skeletons, over 200 partial skeletons and thousands of seemingly isolated bones.. There were also many stone weapons, including blades, arrowheads and axes. Many of the bones showed signs of injuries, and because they were all dumped together, the site was initially interpreted as the remains of a massacre.
Schulting and his colleagues have systematically re-analysed the remains. They say San Juan ante Portam Latinam probably doesn’t represent a single massacre, but rather evidence of sustained conflict that was mostly conducted by young males – in other words, warfare.
The team concludes there are at least 338 people interred at San Juan ante Portam Latinam. Of those, at least 23 per cent have visible injuries: one of the highest rates of violent injury found in prehistory. The wounds include 65 unhealed injuries and 89 healed, indicating prolonged conflict. The largest proportion of the injuries were attributable to blunt-force trauma, as might be caused by axes, clubs or thrown stones.
“This is a very careful and meticulous study,” says Martin Smith at Bournemouth University in the UK.
The remains contain more males – especially young males – than would be expected in an indiscriminate massacre. Of 153 individuals whose sex could be estimated, 70 per cent were male. Nearly 45 per cent of these males had visible injuries, compared with almost 24 per cent of the females. Furthermore, among remains that could be classified, 97.6 per cent of unhealed injuries were found on males.
Schulting and his colleagues argue that this points to the existence of a male-biased warrior class, something found in many societies.

“The word ‘war’ is such a loaded term,” says Linda Fibiger at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. But the conflicts observed meet many of the criteria. “There’s no doubt that it’s something that happens at large scale, and it’s probably intergroup rather than intragroup,” she says.
We can’t know for sure why the conflicts were happening, but Schulting says there are some hints. People living in the bottom of the valley and those living in nearby foothills seem to have had subtly different diets and to have practised different funerary rites. “That gives us this sense that there are different political communities, different social communities, living quite close to each other,” he says.
The researchers also found evidence of malnourishment and other poor health indicators. “This might have been a stressful period,” says Fibiger.
“This article adds to the emerging picture we have of the early Neolithic as a time of significant stress, likely linked to growing inequality and changes in the structure of society,” says Smith.
Smith and Fibiger are both co-authors of a review published in January that concluded violence was endemic in Neolithic Europe, probably due to competition over arable land, and that it sometimes wiped out entire communities.

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Sea lettuce is an edible alga found on coastlines around EuropeSeaphotoart / Alamy
People in coastal areas across Europe have been eating seaweed for thousands of years, traces of algae on their teeth have revealed.
There are over 10,000 species of seaweeds that grow close to coastlines around the world. Today, many of these organisms are considered a health food, particularly in Asia, with around 145 regularly eaten species.
“Seaweed is great. It’s available, it’s nutritious, it’s local, it’s renewable,” says Karen Hardy at the University of Glasgow in the UK.Advertisement
There is little evidence for seaweed being a part of ancient diets, apart from at one site in Chile from about 14,000 years ago.
Hardy and her colleagues first discovered traces of seaweed in the calcified plaque on human teeth found at a Neolithic burial site in Orkney, Scotland, dating back around 5000 years.
“We were absolutely astonished,” says Hardy. “This is the first time anyone’s ever detected specific evidence for the consumption of seaweed [in dental plaque].”
After these initial findings, the team decided to expand their study to the rest of Europe. In total, they collected dental plaque samples from 74 individuals from 28 ancient sites in countries such as Spain, Portugal, Estonia and Lithuania.
Of these, 33 individuals had the chemical traces of seaweed or freshwater aquatic plants in their plaque. Those who were buried nearer to the coast were more likely to have evidence of seaweed consumption, while those inland tended to eat freshwater aquatic plants.
The results show that people ate seaweed and marine plants from the Mesolithic, around 8000 years ago, right through to the start of the Middle Ages, around 1500 years ago. This suggests that these foods may well have been a staple part of ancient Europeans’ diet for several millennia.

Since then, seaweed seems to have fallen out of fashion in Europe, says Hardy. “But it would be nice if this study could help to encourage a wider consumption of seaweed in Europe today.”
“This study is important for documenting the early consumption of this abundant maritime food source,” says Tom Dillehay at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. “The presence of seaweeds in early European sites does not surprise me. I think that in many previous archaeological studies around the world, it was not a dietary element many people expected and thus [they] likely gave little [notice] to it.”

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The Greek word for “purple” has been extracted from a Herculaneum scrollVesuvius Challenge
Almost 2000 years after they were buried by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, scrolls from a library in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum have begun to reveal their secrets. The tightly wrapped papyrus scrolls were charred in the disaster, which also destroyed the nearby town of Pompeii. But by studying 3D X-ray scans of the scrolls, researchers have deciphered a word on one of them: “porphyras”, meaning “purple”.
The breakthrough came from Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His success involved training an AI to identify nearly invisible ink-like patterns in the 3D scans.
“Seeing Luke’s first word was a shock,” says Michael McOsker at the University of Cologne in Germany, who was not involved in the discovery. “It was immediately convincing, like ‘Good lord, that’s Greek.’”Advertisement

Farritor analysed the 3D scans as a competitor in the open-source Vesuvius Challenge, which is awarding a series of prizes for deciphering the scrolls. He submitted his discovery in August.
At almost the same time, Youssef Nader, a data science graduate student at the Free University of Berlin in Germany, independently discovered the same word using a different AI technique to detect possible letter shapes within the scroll image segments. This provided an even clearer picture of the scroll segment, and is already yielding new, clear images of others. McOsker described Nader’s first word snapshot as “even more impressive” than Farritor’s.
The discovery builds on the work of previous Vesuvius Challenge contributors, who designed computational tools for mapping out segments of scroll. It was also made possible because of the 3D X-ray scans produced by a team led by Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky.
In the past, papyrologists could only study the Herculaneum scrolls by physically unrolling them – a process that inevitably damaged the ancient papyri that had been carbonised by the heat of the volcanic debris that buried them, says McOsker. And even once researchers started using 3D imaging and computational techniques to digitally reveal the hidden contents of the scrolls, “attempts to read the still rolled-up papyri were mirages”, he says.
This latest breakthrough may pave the way for someone to claim the Vesuvius Challenge’s grand prize, worth $700,000, by reading four passages of text from inside two intact scrolls before 31 December 2023.
“I’m confident that Luke, Youssef, and the other competitors can solve a whole roll,” says McOsker. “Up until now, all the unrolled papyri that we study are missing their beginnings and are in bad condition, so the prospect of a reading a complete text, from beginning to end, is really quite something.”

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Illustration of a Homo erectus child with her mother in the Ethiopian highlandsDiego Rodriguez Robredo
Ancient humans were living in the highlands of what is now Ethiopia as early as 2 million years ago. A reanalysis of a fossilised jawbone from the region confirms that it belonged to a Homo erectus, and represents the earliest evidence of hominins living in such high-altitude areas.
The highlands represent “a third pole for human evolution in Africa”, says Margherita Mussi of the Italo-Spanish Archaeological Mission at Melka Kunture and Balchit, based in Rome. Hominins have been found in large numbers in eastern and southern Africa, but not to date in upland areas.
Mussi and her colleagues re-examined the lower jawbone of an infant, which was discovered in 1981 at a site called Garba IV in the Ethiopian highlands. Garba IV is one of a cluster of sites known collectively as Melka Kunture. Mussi has nicknamed the jawbone “Little Garba”.Advertisement
The jawbone had previously been identified as an early member of the genus Homo, which includes our own species Homo sapiens and several now-extinct groups. However, it wasn’t possible to confidently identify the species.
Mussi and her team used synchrotron imaging to study Little Garba’s teeth, which hadn’t yet erupted from the jawbone. They compared the shape of the teeth to those of multiple hominin species. “The teeth are a very good marker, so we can say for sure this is indeed an early Homo erectus,” says Mussi.
In a previous study published in 2021, Mussi’s team also re-dated the Garba IV site. It consists of layers of sediment laid down over time. In the sediments, the researchers found traces of past shifts in Earth’s magnetic field, which could be matched to similar records elsewhere. Based on this, they conclude that Little Garba is 2 million years old. This makes it one of the oldest H. erectus ever found.
It may even be that the species evolved in the highlands. “We don’t know if Homo erectus evolved at lower altitudes and came up, or if it evolved locally,” says Mussi.
Furthermore, the researchers re-examined the stone tools found in the sediments at Garba IV. They say there is a transition from older and simpler Oldowan tools to more sophisticated Acheulean tools between 2 and 1.95 million years ago. The Acheulean tools were harder to make because they required careful planning, but they opened up a wider range of foods.
Putting these lines of evidence together, Mussi argues that the H. erectus population had to adapt to conditions in the highlands, and developed new styles of stone tools to do so.
The identification of Little Garba as H. erectus looks solid, says Clément Zanolli at the University of Bordeaux in France. He is less convinced by the transition from Oldowan to Acheulean, because there aren’t many Oldowan tools in the older layers.

For Zanolli, “the most exciting aspect” of the study is the highland location. “It’s the oldest [hominin] we know to have reached the high plateau of Ethiopia,” he says. While it is possible that future excavations might find even older hominins in the area, “for now it’s the earliest”.
Garba IV is about 2000 metres above sea level, which isn’t so high that low oxygen levels would be a major challenge, says Zanolli. It would have been colder than lowland areas, but the lowlands were also desert, so the highlands may have been more hospitable. “In this high-altitude environment you have more trees, more bushes, probably more animals,” he says. “So it’s very likely easier to find food and to survive there.”
Millennia later, H. erectus became the first known hominin to expand its population beyond Africa, reaching Dmanisi in what is now Georgia by 1.8 million years ago, and Java in what became Indonesia by perhaps 1.3 million years ago. Living in the Ethiopian highlands may have been good preparation, says Mussi. If Homo erectus was able to adapt to this environment, it could also live in other cooler regions away from the equator, she says.

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Illustration of Neanderthals butchering a freshly killed cave lionJulio Lacerda/NLD
Neanderthals sometimes hunted now-extinct big cats called cave lions, which were larger than modern lions. The finding is some of the earliest evidence of ancient humans killing top predators, as opposed to plant-eaters like mammoths.
The evidence is twofold: a cave lion (Panthera spelaea) specimen revealing evidence of hunting and the remains of a cave lion pelt with its claws still attached.
Gabriele Russo at the University of Tübingen in Germany and his colleagues re-examined a 48,000-year-old cave lion skeleton found at Siegsdorf in Germany in the 1980s.Advertisement
Researchers already knew there were cut marks on the bones, suggesting the lion had been butchered after death. Russo has now found a puncture mark on one of its ribs, which seems to have been made by a wooden spear thrust into the animal’s chest. The injury had previously been misidentified as a wound from another carnivore.
Modern humans (Homo sapiens) hadn’t yet established themselves in Europe 48,000 years ago. Instead, the continent was home to Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). It seems they were the hunters.
Russo’s team also uncovered a new cave lion specimen in the Einhornhöhle cave in Germany. In a layer of sediment dated to about 190,000 years ago, they found bones from the tips of the lion’s toes.
These had cut marks consistent with the animal having been skinned “in such a way that the claws were left in the paw of the animal”, says Russo. The team interprets this as evidence that Neanderthals took the cave lion’s skin into the cave, perhaps for a ritual purpose or simply for decoration.
The cave lion remains from Siegsdorf displayed alongside a reproduction of a wooden spear similar to those used by NeanderthalsVolker Minkus/NLD
By this time, hominins had been hunting a wide range of animals for a long time. There is evidence of earlier species like Homo erectus killing the likes of wildebeest in Africa up to 2 million years ago. Later, Neanderthals hunted huge animals like elephants. However, Russo says they probably didn’t target top predators like cave lions very often, partly because they are less common than herbivores, and partly because of the danger involved.
There is also a 2010 study describing the remains of a cave lion found at Atapuerca in northern Spain, from around 350,000 years ago. At the time, the region was inhabited by the ancestors of Neanderthals. In theory, this could push back the evidence for hominins hunting lions even further. However, although the paper is called “The hunted hunter”, Russo says there is no evidence of hunting-related injuries and the animal could have been scavenged.

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