Humans

Simon Prades
Around 41,000 years ago, the very last Neanderthal took their final breath. At that moment, we became the only remaining hominins, the sole survivors of the once diverse family of bipedal apes.
We will never know exactly when or where this momentous event took place, but we do know the Neanderthals died out suspiciously close to the time when modern humans arrived in their territory. Exactly why they vanished has long been hotly debated, but astonishing revelations from the genomes of the last Neanderthals and hidden in a remarkable cave in France are now painting a detailed picture of these first encounters – and what might have happened next.

“This is a major turning point in our understanding of Neanderthals and their extinction process,” says Ludovic Slimak at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse, France.
Our species, Homo sapiens, and Neanderthals share a common ancestor, but Neanderthals split from our lineage at least 400,000 years ago, evolving in Eurasia, from the Mediterranean to Siberia. Our species is younger, first appearing in Africa some 300,000 years ago and evolving into hominins that were anatomically much like us by at least 195,000 years ago. Modern humans left the continent in waves from around 170,000 years ago, and were thought to have reached western Europe roughly 43,000 years ago, when – according to the… More

The skeleton of an infant uncovered at Grotta delle Mura in Apulia, ItalyMauro Calattin
Ancient DNA analysis has revealed a detailed picture of the life of a toddler who died in southern Italy 17,000 years ago, possibly due to a congenital heart condition.
In 1998, researchers discovered the skeletal remains of a child carefully laid under rock slabs in the floor of the Grotta delle Mura cavern in Apulia, southern Italy. It was the only burial in the cave, which also included signs of daily life and human occupation, says Alessandra Modi at the University of Florence… More

Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake has been shortlisted for the Booker prize
Creation LakeRachel Kushner (Jonathan Cape (UK, 5 September); Scribner (US, 3 September))
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner is a thriller, a spy caper, a comedy and also a poetic take on human history all the way back to the time our species, Homo sapiens, shared Earth with the Neanderthals. It is a sensationally enjoyable novel and has deservedly made the Booker prize longlist.
The story is narrated by our anti-hero, Sadie Smith (not her real name). She is a US undercover operative working for shady employers who is sent to France to infiltrate and ultimately destroy Le Moulin, a group of eco-activists whose members are known as Moulinards.Advertisement
Sadie sets about her task in an entirely amoral fashion. First, she seduces a man named Lucien who has contacts within the activists. After a few months, she has secured work among the Moulinards and travels to Lucien’s family house, conveniently placed in an area of Guyenne, south-west France, where Le Moulin is based.

The roof leaks, but the house itself is a great eyrie to spy upon her prey from – a job made easier by her high-powered, military grade binoculars and a caseful of high-tech kit.
The novel’s structure is brilliant. We follow Sadie as she worms her way into the justifiably paranoid Moulinard community. We are also led backwards through her life, rifling through her backlist of operations and lingering resentments against those who are attempting (rightly) to expose her. We gradually realise our apparently super-professional operative takes unnecessary and dangerous risks. Is she, in fact, a vulnerable young woman hanging by a thread, or a grenade with the pin pulled out? Or both?
These two strands, moving forwards and backwards, are equally gripping, each informing the other with perfect dramatic timing. But it is the book’s third strand, relating to a much older man’s emails, that becomes the beating heart of the book.

Sadie has hacked into Le Moulin’s group email account so she can read every message they get from someone named Bruno Lacombe. He is a mentor and inspiration to the group, and it makes sense that she pays his emails particular attention.
In the messages, Bruno talks about his views on the superiority of Neanderthals, the inferiority of H. sapiens and his life living alone in a Neanderthal cave. He also lectures the Moulinards on the history of the Guyenne area.
As a plot device, these emails have every right not to work. But we quickly learn to read them intently, just as Sadie does. Soon we realise that it is the relationship between Sadie and Bruno (albeit a relationship only she knows about) that is at the emotional centre of the novel.
She is more interested in him and what he has to say than any of the Moulinards are. Might she run into him before her operation in France is over?
I found Bruno’s musings on the Neanderthals, however biased and unscientific, particularly gripping – perhaps because I read them while on a New Scientist tour of the prehistoric art of northern Spain. The oldest artwork there is believed to be by Neanderthals, and however different (or not) they were from us, Bruno’s passion is evocatively captured.
I can’t say any more without spoiling the high-octane plot. As for Sadie, does she deserve our sympathy, and where do the book’s events leave her as a person? I look forward to reading this again, and perhaps puzzling that out.
Emily also recommends…
The Ministry for the FutureKim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
Creation Lake is arguably climate fiction. But if you want the ultimate in cli-fi, then read The Ministry for the Future. The book plays out a scenario that is almost upon us as the world heats up. Its structure, made up of fictional eye-witness accounts, is bold and relentlessly brilliant.

New Scientist book club

Love reading? Come and join our friendly group of fellow book lovers. Every six weeks, we delve into an exciting new title, with members given free access to extracts from our books, articles from our authors and video interviews.

Topics:Neanderthals More

A Bronze Age mummy from Xinjiang, ChinaWenying Li
A mysterious white substance found on Bronze Age mummies in China has proven to be the world’s oldest cheese.
The cheese remnants were first found about two decades ago, smeared on the heads and necks of mummies found in the Xiaohe cemetery in Xinjiang province, which date from around 3500 years ago.
Advertisement
It has been long suspected that the substance may have had a fermented dairy origin, but only now have molecular tools become powerful enough to confirm their make-up.
Based on the presence of yeast, lactic acid bacteria and proteins from ruminant milk in the samples, Qiaomei Fu at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and her colleagues have identified the substance as a kind of kefir cheese.
Kefir is a traditional drink made by fermenting milk using kefir grains, which are pellets of microbial cultures, like a sourdough starter.
Fu says the substance was no longer immediately recognisable as kefir cheese. “Due to their age, these pale-yellow cheese samples smelled of nothing and were powdery to touch and a little crumbly,” she says.
While there has been archaeological evidence from pottery of cheese-making technology from as long as 7000 years ago, no one has ever discovered such ancient cheese.
The team found goat and cow DNA in the samples, but it appears that the milk from each of these animals was kept separate – unlike the mixed cheeses in many Greek and Middle Eastern cheese-making traditions. This may have been because goat milk is lower in lactose and so less likely to cause gut problems when consumed.
Fu and her colleagues also recovered the DNA of Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens bacteria from the dairy samples, which they compared with the genomes of modern strains used to make kefir.
The modern strains have evolved in line with the preferences of cheese consumers, says Fu. For example, the DNA analysis suggests the new strains have been selected to cause less of an immune response in the human intestine.

Topics:archaeology More

Martin Parr/Magnum Photos
In the 18th century, philosopher James Beattie compiled a list of 17 common-sense beliefs. A few are incontrovertible: “I exist”; “A whole is greater than a part”; “Virtue and vice are different”. But others seem unnecessarily moralising: “Ingratitude ought to be blamed and punished”; “I have a soul distinct from my body”; “There is a God”. Then, there are the scientifically contestable: “The senses can be believed”; “I am the same being that I was yesterday – or even 20 years ago”; “Truth exists”. Overall, his list seems quaint and outdated. Worse still, it gives no clear idea of what common sense is. Surely, we can do better.
Superficially, common sense seems easy to define: it is generally seen as knowledge or beliefs that are obvious – or should be obvious – to everyone. Yet it is strangely difficult to pin down. Often portrayed as universal, it is also often claimed not to exist. With that in mind, it might surprise you to hear that nobody has tried to measure the “commonness” of this knowledge or its intrinsic properties (its “sensicality”) – until now. Shockingly, this research shows that common sense may not be common at all.

If true, the implications are huge. From parenting to politics and from public health to law, what counts as common sense matters. Increasingly, it is also a technological issue, with computer scientists keen to instil it in artificial intelligence-driven robots to make… More

A 22-metre-long drawing depicting a killer whale holding a knifeMasato Sakai
Hundreds of ancient drawings depicting decapitated human heads and domesticated llamas have been discovered in the Peruvian desert with the help of artificial intelligence. Archaeologists have previously linked these creations to the people of the Nazca culture, who started etching such images, called geoglyphs, into the ground around 2000 years ago.
These geoglyphs are smaller and older than the Nazca lines and other figures found to date, which portray huge geometric shapes stretching several kilometres or wild animals about 90 metres long on average. The newly discovered images typically depict humanoid figures and domesticated animals around 9 metres long. Some even hint at human sacrifice, portraying decapitated heads and killer whales armed with blades.
“On some pottery from the Nazca period, there are scenes depicting orcas with knives cutting off human heads,” says Masato Sakai at Yamagata University in Japan. “So we can position orcas as beings that carry out human sacrifice.”Advertisement

Sakai and his colleagues found the smaller geoglyphs by training an AI model to look for them in aerial photos. The high-resolution photos covered an area about 10 times as large as Manhattan, which encompassed the desert plateau called the Nazca Pampa and its surroundings, located on the UNESCO World Heritage Site for the Nazca lines. The AI then produced a gridded map that categorised the probability of each grid square containing geoglyphs.
Researchers still spent more than 2600 hours manually inspecting the highest-probability photos and doing field inspections at the sites. But they estimate the AI helped speed up the screening process by a factor of 50 “by eliminating 98 per cent of low-probability aerial imagery from consideration and providing probabilities for the remaining 2 per cent”, says co-author Marcus Freitag at IBM Research in New York.
The researchers followed up on the AI suggestions and discovered a total of 303 figurative geoglyphs during field surveys in 2022 and 2023. Of these figures, 178 geoglyphs were individually identified by the AI. Another 66 were not directly pinpointed, but the researchers found them within a group of geoglyphs the AI had highlighted.
An 18-metre-long drawing depicting a humanMasato Sakai
“The AI-based analysis of remote sensing data is a major step forward, since a complete map of the geoglyphs of the Nazca region is still not available,” says Karsten Lambers at Leiden University in the Netherlands. But he also cautioned that “even this new, powerful technology is more likely to find the better visible geoglyphs – the low hanging fruits – than the more difficult ones that are likely still out there”.
Nearly 1000 AI-identified candidates still await inspection during future field surveys, says Sakai. Such smaller geoglyphs generally appear on hillsides near winding trails and probably featured in the “ritual activities of individuals or small groups”. In contrast, the huge line geoglyphs were more likely to be the focus of community-wide rituals, he says.
The AI screening process also offers hope for discovering geoglyphs in the broader region beyond the Nazca lines World Heritage Site, says David Beresford-Jones at the University of Cambridge. Speed is crucial because many geoglyphs “lie on the cusp of erasure through agricultural expansion, urban development and wind-power generation”, he says.

Topics: More

The jawbone of a Neanderthal known as Thorin, who is thought to have been part of an isolated populationXavier Muth
Genetic analysis of a Neanderthal fossil found in France reveals that it was from a previously unknown lineage, a remnant of an ancient population that had remained in extreme isolation for more than 50,000 years. This finding sheds new light on the final phase of the species’ existence.
The fossil, dubbed Thorin after a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, was discovered in 2015 at the Grotte Mandrin in the Rhône Valley in southern France when Ludovic Slimak of the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse uncovered some teeth in the cave’s soil. The skeleton was painstakingly excavated over the next nine years to reveal 31 teeth, the jawbone, part of the skull and thousands of other bone fragments.
Advertisement
This was an incredible discovery in itself, as remains of Neanderthals – who lived in Eurasia from around 400,000 years ago until they went extinct around 40,000 years ago – are exceedingly rate.
Even more surprising was that Thorin’s genome could be obtained from a fragment of one of his teeth, as DNA isn’t typically preserved in warm climates. This revealed that the fossil was from a male, but opened up a mystery that took years to solve.
By comparing his genome with those of other Neanderthals, Slimak and his colleagues estimated Thorin lived around 105,000 years ago. However, archaeological evidence and analysis of the isotopes in his bones unequivocally showed that Thorin lived no more than 50,000 years ago – making him a “late Neanderthal” from the final phase of the species’ existence.
“For a very long time we [geneticists] were convinced that Thorin really was an early Neanderthal, just because his genetic lineage was so distantly related to contemporary Neanderthals in the same region,” says team member Tharsika Vimala of the University of Copenhagen. “On the other side, the archaeologists were convinced that he was a late Neanderthal. It took years of work from both sides to get to the answer.”
Eventually, the researchers realised that they must have discovered a hitherto unknown lineage of Neanderthals. Thorin was part of a small group who lived between 42,000 and 50,000 years ago. The group seems to have been a remnant of a far more ancient Neanderthal population that diverged from the main Neanderthal population around 105,000 years ago, and had then stayed genetically isolated for more than 50,000 years.
The bones of Thorin during excavation at Grotte Mandrin in FranceLudovic Slimak
Thorin’s DNA showed no evidence of interbreeding between his lineage and that of the main Neanderthal population, despite living in close proximity. “Thorin was completely divergent from any other Neanderthals,” says Slimak.
This isolation could have made the group particularly vulnerable. “Long term isolation or inbreeding can be detrimental to a population’s survival as it can reduce the genetic diversity over time, which in turn can have negative effects on our adaptability to changing environments,” says Vimala.

Slimak, Vimala and their colleagues then re-analysed the genome of another Neanderthal that had lived around 43,000 years ago at Les Cottés, France. They found traces of a “ghost population” in its DNA from a breeding event some 15,000 to 20,000 years previously, with another unknown Neanderthal group.
“This means that there must have been not only two populations among late Neanderthals, but very likely three,” says Slimak. Previously it had been thought that at the time before their extinction, the Neanderthals were all part of one genetically similar population.
“The evidence from Grotte Mandrin is fascinating as it gives some intriguing insights into these late Neanderthal populations and their dynamics,” says Emma Pomeroy at the University of Cambridge.

Topics:Neanderthals/fossils More

Easter Island’s famous moai statuesTero Hakala/Shutterstock
DNA analysis of ancient remains from Easter Island shows that the population was in fact increasing when Europeans arrived, rather than collapsing as reported by some historical accounts.
The results also show that there were interactions between the residents of the island and those of South America long before the arrival of Europeans. Both the island and its people are also known as Rapa Nui.
Advertisement
Located in the Pacific Ocean 3500 kilometres from South America, Rapa Nui is one of the most remote inhabited islands on Earth. Polynesian people began settling there around AD 1200, when its 164 square kilometres were covered in palm forests.
By the time Europeans arrived in 1722, the vegetation had been largely destroyed by a combination of rats and overharvesting. The history of the island has often been portrayed as an example of unsustainable ecological exploitation and population growth followed by collapse.
In the latest study, J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and his colleagues looked at 15 sets of human remains kept at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, collected by expeditions in 1877 and 1935.
The researchers worked closely with representatives of the Rapa Nui community. One of their aims was to confirm that the individuals at the museum were, in fact, from the island, as there is an effort being led by modern residents to repatriate the remains.
The results show that the 15 people, who all died over the past 500 years, did originate on Rapa Nui.
A population undergoing a bottleneck from a collapse in numbers will have signals in their DNA showing a drop in genetic diversity, says Moreno-Mayer.
“We are using statistical methods that can reconstruct the genetic diversity in the Rapa Nui population throughout the last few thousand years,” he says. “And interestingly enough, we do not find any evidence of a dramatic population decline around 1600s as expected from the collapse theory.”
Instead, the results suggest that the Rapa Nui population increased steadily until the 1860s, when slave traders kidnapped hundreds of islanders and a smallpox outbreak killed many more.

The study also identified stretches of DNA in the ancient Rapa Nui genomes that have an Indigenous American origin. Their analysis suggests that the mixing of these populations occurred around the 1300s.
“Our interpretation is that the ancestors of Rapa Nui first peopled the island and shortly after made a return journey to the Americas,” says Moreno-Mayer.
Previous studies have also cast doubt on the story of a population collapse. Carl Lipo at Binghamton University in New York says it was “terrific” to learn that a completely independent line of evidence points to the same conclusions his team reached in a paper published earlier this year, using radiocarbon and archaeological evidence.
He says the study confirms that the island was populated with people who lived resiliently and successfully until the arrival of Europeans.

Topics:DNA/history More