Humans

The Læborg runestone has an inscription that mentions Queen ThyraRoberto Fortuna/National Museum of Denmark
A mysterious queen named Thyra who lived during the Viking era may have been one of the founders of what is now Denmark. Multiple commemorative “runestones” mention her by name, suggesting she was a central figure.
“Because of the many runestones erected in honour of Thyra, we can conclude that she must have been very powerful and that she came from a very powerful family,” says Lisbeth Imer at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.
Denmark’s Viking Age lasted from around AD 800 to 1050. A key figure was Harald “Bluetooth”, who was king from about AD 958 until his death in 987. The Bluetooth wireless technology standard is named after him. Harald’s parents were King Gorm, who came to power in around 936, and Queen Thyra.Advertisement
Under these two generations of monarchs, Denmark became a unified state. Previously, it was divided into smaller kingdoms or territories. “We have no idea of how many, and who may have governed them, because of the lack of written sources,” says Imer. The lack of records also means we know almost nothing about Gorm and Thyra.
However, Imer had reason to suspect that Thyra was a major figure. In Viking-era Denmark, powerful people were often commemorated with runestones: tall slabs of granite with runes engraved on them. The name “Thyra” is found on four runestones from the mid-900s. Two are from Jelling, where the monarchs lived, and were erected by Gorm and Harald. The other two, the Læborg and Bække 1 runestones, were found elsewhere and seem to have been carved by an unknown individual called Ravnunge-Tue.
To find out if the runestones referred to the same Thyra, Imer and her colleagues set out to determine if they had all been carved by the same craftsperson. This would suggest that they were all produced around the same time and probably referred to the same person. To find out, the researchers examined the methods of engraving and the sizes and shapes of the runes.
One of the Jelling runestones was too poorly preserved to get reliable results, but the other was in good condition and the style of its engravings matched the Læborg runestone. This suggests that Thyra was commemorated not just by her immediate family, but by other people elsewhere in the country.
Thyra may not have been unusual in Norse societies, says Imer. “Elite women probably had much power,” she says. “A large burial mound in Oseberg in Norway contained the bodies of two women, who must have had some of the highest positions in the community.”

Topics:Archeology More

CONSIDER two scenarios. In the first, you have a life filled with love and meaning and enough money to get by comfortably. However, after you die, something terrible is revealed about you – which may not even be true – and people come to despise you. In the second, you have a life of relative hardship and obscurity, but after you die, it is revealed that you were an incredibly talented artist and your reputation is assured forever. Which option would you choose?
If you picked the second, you aren’t alone, as Brett Waggoner at the University of Otago, New Zealand, discovered when he carried out this thought experiment. It may seem like a counterintuitive choice, but it reveals our deep concern for legacy. Across time and cultures, people seem to have acted with a desire to etch their names into the history books, from the pharaoh Khufu’s Great Pyramid of Giza to acts of scientific discovery, works of art, sporting achievements and public philanthropy. Nevertheless, such behaviour is something of a paradox. Why devote so much time and energy to being warmly recalled when you won’t be around to see the benefits?
Researchers trying to answer this question have come up with some surprising answers. Some suggest it gives individuals an evolutionary advantage. Others see it as a sort of glitch in the way we think – a mistake based on various cognitive biases. Meanwhile, it is becoming clear that our desire to be positively remembered is far more than just self-aggrandisement. Nurtured in the correct way, it could be leveraged to tackle long-term, global issues, including climate change, biodiversity … More

Earthworks made by ancient societies have been found throughout the Amazon rainforestDiego Lourenço Gurgel
There are probably more than 10,000 undiscovered pre-Columbian archaeological sites hidden in the Amazon, researchers have concluded after surveying a fraction of the sprawling rainforest.
The study adds to growing evidence suggesting that the region isn’t a pristine tropical forest, but has been significantly altered by Indigenous societies that have inhabited it for more than 12,000 years.
Luiz Eduardo Oliveira e Cruz de Aragão at the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil and his colleagues surveyed 5315 square kilometres of the Amazon using lidar, a technology that uses reflected laser light to create a 3D representation of a landscape.Advertisement
By beaming pulses of light into the rainforest, usually from planes or drones, lidar records slight variations in topography and has uncovered numerous archaeological sites in recent years.
The team discovered 24 previously unknown earthworks in the areas it surveyed, which are thought to be the remnants of civilisations that lived between 1500 and 500 years ago.
The discoveries include a fortified village in the southern Amazon, a region known to have been densely populated due to the high concentration of earthworks that were connected by ancient roads.
Defensive and ceremonial sites in the southwestern Amazon were also brought to light, along with permanent settlements and ceremonial sites with large stone structures arranged in circular clusters in the northern Amazon.
The survey covered only 0.08 per cent of the Amazon’s 6.7 million square kilometres. Aragão and his colleagues used a computer model to predict how many other sites could remain hidden under the forest canopy, based on the concentration of earthworks in the new data and 937 earthworks previously discovered. They estimate that between 10,272 and 23,648 earthworks may lay undiscovered.
The model analysed the typical characteristics of known earthworks, including the local temperature, rainfall, soil clay content and distance from the nearest river, to predict where others are likely to be. “These are the characteristics needed for building the structures, but also surviving in these regions,” says Aragão.
Most of the predicted structures are in the southwestern Amazon, many in the Brazilian state of Acre.

Emerging evidence indicates that the Indigenous societies that occupied the Amazon for more than 12,000 years were larger than previously thought, at one point numbering as many as 5 million people. It is unclear why the jungle cities disappeared centuries ago.
In common with previous studies, Aragão and his colleagues also found high concentrations of domesticated plants that yield nuts or fruits close to archaeological sites, suggesting these lost societies significantly altered the composition of the rainforest. This might mean predictions about how the rainforest will adapt to climate change could be incorrect, as it isn’t as pristine as previously thought, the researchers say.
“There has always been this bias in Western thought that the Amazon was like a Garden of Eden, a primordial society that was inimical to human society,” says Michael Heckenberger at the University of Florida, who wasn’t involved in the study. “We are now seeing there was a significant degree of human intervention and variation just 500 years ago.”
The growing evidence that there were massive societies in the region before the arrival of Europeans could help protect the Amazon, says Heckenberger. Around 17 per cent of the rainforest has been cleared and some researchers believe it has already reached a tipping point where it no longer generates enough rainfall to support itself.
“If we’ve now demonstrated that even more of the Amazon forest is actually an artefact of cultural influence, the implication of that is that it’s the heritage of living Indigenous peoples and must be protected as these are their ancestors,” says Heckenberger.

Topics:archaeology/The Amazon rainforest More

Location of the Charco Verde II archaeological site in the Piedra river valley, SpainMULTIPALEOIBERIA project team
Excavations at a rock shelter have revealed that humans lived in high and remote regions of what is now Spain during the coldest part of the last glacial period, between 21,400 and 15,100 years ago.
High-altitude regions are colder and more challenging than low-lying zones, but even so, the Spanish plateau probably “hosted a relatively dense human settlement”, says Manuel Alcaraz-Castaño at the University of Alcalá in Spain.
Beginning 2.58 million years ago, Earth has been through alternating periods of cold “glacials”, in which the area covered by ice and snow expands, and warmer “interglacials” where the ice retreats. The last glacial period occurred from about 115,000 to 11,700 years ago. It was at its coldest between 26,500 and 19,000 years ago, a time called the last glacial maximum. This posed a significant challenge for modern humans, who had arrived in Europe about 20,000 years earlier.Advertisement
Conditions were particularly challenging on the meseta, a high-altitude plateau in what is now central Spain. Climate modelling by Ariane Burke at the University of Montréal in Canada and her colleagues concluded that as well as being cold and dry, the meseta was also highly unpredictable – making it harder to permanently settle there.
Nevertheless, people persisted. Since 2020, Alcaraz-Castaño and his colleagues have excavated a site called Charco Verde II in the Piedra river valley, Spain. Located around 1000 metres above sea level, Charco Verde II is a flat platform under an escarpment. Buried in the sediments, the team found fragments of charcoal from fires, animal bones with cut marks and signs of having been heated, and stone tools including blades and scrapers.
Radiocarbon dating suggests Charco Verde II was first inhabited between 21,400 and 20,800 years ago, and the residence ended between 16,600 and 15,100 years ago. It isn’t clear how continuous this was. “Occupations at the site were recurrent during 5000 years, but we still don’t know if there were prolonged periods where the site was not inhabited,” says Alcaraz-Castaño.
Preserved pollen and animal bones suggest the area was dominated by open grasslands, dotted with trees, such as juniper, and populated by herbivores like horses and ibex. Average annual temperatures were about 6 °C lower than today, says Alcaraz-Castaño, so in winter “ice and snow were probably everywhere around the site”. However, the summers were probably fairly mild.
“It’s nice to see people pushing the boundaries and finding new sites,” says Burke, who wasn’t involved in the new study. “In the early Upper Palaeolithic, people were perfectly capable of adapting to very cold environments.”
Her modelling studies identified the Charco Verde II region as relatively suitable for settlement because its climate was less variable than the central meseta. “It makes sense that the sites are where they say they are,” she says.
Burke adds that it is possible people did live even in the very harshest parts of the meseta, but such settlements may have been both scarce and short-lived. “Our chances of finding sites [there] are fairly small,” she says.

Such settlements were made possible by a host of behavioural skills. “Both fire and clothing were regular technologies of Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, as were some sorts of dwellings,” says Alcaraz-Castaño.
So far, Charco Verde II hasn’t yielded direct evidence of clothing. However, Burke notes that the team did find stone tools called burins that were often used to create the eyes in needles – “which means fine sewing skills and tight seams, so waterproof and windproof clothing”, she says.
Social networks were probably just as essential for survival, says Burke. Such networks “provide people with the means to exchange information over quite large territories”, she says, and to take shelter when conditions are harsh.
In line with this, the Charco Verde II dig revealed four perforated shell beads, one of them with traces of an ochre pigment. Such jewellery often served as a marker of identity, says Burke, and is a hint that, even in a sparsely populated region, people were still maintaining social relationships with other groups.

Topics:archaeology/ancient humans More

“I want you to make a substitution in the course of our new IVF research partnership” … An extract from Sebastian Faulks’s new novel The Seventh SonScience Photo Library/ZEPHYR/Getty Images
“I have a proposition.” Parn leant forward and put his hand on Malik Wood’s knee.
“Oh yes?”
Parn sat back again. ‘Did you know I fund a palaeoanthropology research programme? It’s attached to the University of London. They do top genetic work. Looking at old bones. Sequencing the genome of Homo vannesiensis. That kind of thing. I know people there. In the labs. I have access.”Advertisement
“I bet.”
“You know all that work they did in Leipzig a few years back. The Max Planck people. Putting together genomes from scraps of forty-thousand-year-old bone. Brilliant stuff. But those PCR machines they used, they’re pretty old now. We have better kit.”
“And?”
Lukas Parn’s voice had lost all trace of the Outback. “I’m interested in hybrids. What they can tell us about ourselves. How we got to be the way we are. The inexplicable leap. The ‘saltation’, as you call it.”
“My God. You’re not a creationist, are you? You’re not going to try to prove that Homo sapiens was put together all in one go by God?”
“No.” Parn laughed. “No, I’m not a creationist. But I’m an exceptionalist. I believe that the superiority of Homo sapiens hasn’t yet been explained.”
“You’re saying Darwin was wrong?”
“Sure. He was wrong about a lot of things. Women. Genetics.”
“But by the standards of what was known at the time, he—”
“Exactly. ‘The time’ was 1850-something. Getting on for two hundred years ago. Anyway, it’s not about a Victorian with a beard. It’s about genetics, a word unknown to Darwin.”
“How am I involved in this?”
“Your lab. Your touch.”
Dr Wood drank some wine. “I’ll need to know more.”
“You will. In due course. But can I take it that you would be interested in having your salary increased. And a one-off bonus of, let’s say, five times salary on successful completion?”
“It depends on what I need to do.”
“Something well within your capabilities. I want you to make a substitution in the course of our new IVF research partnership with the NHS.”
“A substitution?”
“A simple switch. One guy’s sperm for another. Before it hits the egg.”
“That’s ethically—”
“Extremely important is what it is,” said Parn. “From a scientific point of view. We’re looking at a human hybrid.”
Extract taken from The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson Heinemann, out now), the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here

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A Homo floresiensis skull, centre, found at Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores.JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
As a novelist, you write about what puzzles, inspires and keeps you awake at night. It feels like a one-off adventure and it’s only in retrospect, years later, that you can see a pattern or a link between different books.
My first half dozen novels look like an attempt to locate myself and my generation in history. I grew up in the 60s, when the world wobbled on the edge of mutually assured destruction, and as an adult, I was curious to know how we had come to that pass. After writing them, and in particular Birdsong (1993), I came to the conclusion that Homo sapiens is a very odd creature.
My next half dozen novels, I now think, were therefore concerned less with who we are  than what we are. In Human Traces (2005), I wrote about the early days of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, roughly from 1890 to 1920. The debate was between those who believe our mental frailties have a biological and/or genetic base and those who think they are shaped by the individual’s experience. This needed some research into genetics and the nature of human consciousness.Advertisement
Then, in about 2010, it emerged that we had bred with Neanderthals. My own genome, according to a commercial spit test, is 3.7 per cent that of another species. Then new humans were discovered, on Flores and in a Denisovan cave. It was intriguing to picture these different versions of the human strolling round the Earth together, even if their numbers were small and widely scattered. What made them human in taxonomic or philosophical terms? Are there other, even more interesting or closely related, species waiting to be unearthed?
It seemed such a shame that this fascinating diversity had been reduced to a single surviving expression: us. Suppose natural selection had worked differently and that if there had to be only one survivor of the genus Homo, it had a different admixture of genes, was less fecund, less driven, less destructive and better attuned to the planet.
Now imagine that with sapiens extinct, this last surviving human, similar but different from us, had stumbled one day on a pure sapiens archaeological site. Smaller brains, they’d note, physically a bit weak, but ferocious breeders. And hang on, what’s this? A hecatomb of bodies, millions of them, but killed neither for ritual nor sustenance. Why? And what’s this? A bit of matter rescued from a dead star a billion light years away. Cleverer than we thought, then. And here… The tall spire of a building. Did they hope to somehow climb into the sky to see their ever-absent gods?
The novel that emerged from all this, The Seventh Son, is set a little way into the future, though the science it relies on is all practicable now. It’s a serious book about what sort of creatures we are; I had never expected it to be so insistently comic or to end almost like a thriller in a chase across the barren wilds.
The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson Heinemann, out now) is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here

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9500-year-old Mesolithic baskets from the Cueva de los Murciélagos in SpainMUTERMUR project
Intricate baskets and shoes found in a Spanish cave show that people living in Europe thousands of years ago were skilled at weaving objects from plant fibres.
Cueva de los Murciélagos, or the Cave of the Bats, is a cave system in south-west Spain that was discovered during mining activities in the 19th century. Excavations of the cave have since revealed several mummified corpses alongside objects including baskets, sandals and a wooden hammer.
Francisco Martínez Sevilla at the University of Alcalá in Spain and his colleagues have now analysed 76 of these artefacts. They are considered among the best-preserved plant-based objects from prehistoric Europe, thanks to the low humidity inside the cave.Advertisement
Around 65 of the items were found to be made from a fibre called esparto grass. This includes a set of baskets, with either a flat or a more cylindrical shape, as well as sandals that were made by crushing and twisting the esparto.
A wooden mallet and esparto sandals dated to around 6000 years agoMUTERMUR project
The other artefacts are made of wood and include tools such as a hammer and digging sticks.
The team carbon-dated 14 of these objects and found that they belonged to one of two time periods: 7950 to 7360 BC or 4370 to 3740 BC. The older objects were created by hunter-gatherers during the Mesolithic age, says Martínez Sevilla, while the later ones were probably used by Neolithic farmers.
The oldest dated sandal was found to be around 6000 years old, which makes it the oldest shoe ever found in Europe, says Martínez Sevilla.
“The use of vegetal fibres in Europe is older than we expected,” says team member Maria Herrero-Otal at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. “We imagine the Mesolithic populations as simpler, but it seems that they were much more complex than we thought.” More

A human bone from up to about 5900 years ago found inside the Cueva de los Marmoles cave in Granada, SpainJ.C. Vera Rodríguez, CC-BY 4.0
Prehistoric farmers and herders in southern Spain buried their dead in a large cave – but may have later cut them up to make tools and possibly eat their bone marrow.
Since 1934, scientists, amateur archaeologists and even tomb raiders have been exploring human skeletal remains left in a Granada cave, called Cueva de los Marmoles.
Within the 2500-square-metre cave – which has harboured multiple generations of bodies across three millennia – people have previously found a carefully carved human skull cup, a well-crafted tibia tool and dozens of other bone fragments. New evidence suggests that some remains may have been intentionally broken and scraped up to a year after the individuals died.Advertisement
The findings indicate that people may have been manipulating the deceased’s bones, after the cadavers had decayed slowly for some time in the cave’s cool, humid environment, says researcher Marco Milella at the University of Bern in Switzerland.
Milella, his co-lead researcher Rafael Martínez Sánchez at the University of Córdoba, Spain, and their colleagues went to the cave to collect further artefacts and investigate them using modern methods, such as advanced carbon dating, and hi-tech microscopic and scanning equipment.
They examined 411 bone fragments and 57 teeth that were unearthed in various zones of the cave, some of which they borrowed from a museum. They found that the remains were from at least a dozen human adults and children living in prehistoric agricultural societies. The findings suggest that people used the cave as a burial site during three distinct periods: 3900 to 3750 BC, 2600 to 2300 BC and 1400 to 1200 BC.
The team also found that while 3 per cent of the fragments had been gnawed by animals, nearly a third had been intentionally broken or cut with human tools. These fractures, scrapes and slices occurred when the bones were still “fresh” – probably up to a year after death, according to the researchers.

But the bones show no signs of having been forcefully separated from muscles or tendons. “This suggests that the human remains were already partially decomposed when manipulated, but with the bone still being relatively elastic,” says Millela. “This, in turn, points to action not performed shortly after the death of the individuals, but at least some months after death.”
Notable specimens include a skull – probably from a middle-aged man – that had been scraped with stone tools and fashioned into a bowl or cup, and a teenager’s shinbone that had been broken, polished and rounded into a sort of spatula, possibly for scraping other materials, such as leather. Several long bones had also been fractured and their insides scraped out, suggesting the marrow had been extracted for consumption, or possibly as part of a cultural practice of “cleaning the remains”, says Milella.
Lacking any evidence of violence, the remains are probably not the result of power struggles between different populations, he says. His team is planning to carry out DNA research that will compare the relationships among the individuals buried in the cave.

Topics:humans/burial More