Humans

A reconstruction of the skull of a Homo naledi childBrett Eloff Photography/Wits University
This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox for free every month.
The word “fossil” is one that I type out rather frequently. You’ll often read stories about new hominin remains in which they are described as fossils. But hang on. Fossils take a long time to form, so how old does a human bone or tooth need to be before it counts as a fossil? Should we be hurling this word… More

Remains of a dog and a baby girl laid to rest at Seminario Vescovile near Verona, ItalyLaffranchi et al. (CC-BY 4.0)
Late Iron Age people in northern Italy were sometimes buried with their dogs or horses – possibly just because they loved them.

Archaeologists have often suspected that the ancient, worldwide custom of including animals in human graves was associated with higher socioeconomic status, beliefs about the afterlife or traditions in certain families. But after thorough investigation, researchers are now starting to wonder whether such “co-burials” were simply an expression of love to a devoted non-human family member, says Marco Milella at the University of Bern in Switzerland.Advertisement
He and his colleagues revisited the bones excavated from the 2200-year-old Seminario Vescovile burial ground just east of Verona in Italy, where the Cenomani people lived in metal-making communities before and during the Roman conquest.
Most of the 161 graves found at the site contained just the remains of a person, but 16 also included animals, either whole or in parts. Of those, 12 were pork or beef products, apparently meant as food offerings to the deceased, says Zita Laffranchi, also at the University of Bern.
The other four people, however, were buried with dogs or horses or both of these animals, which weren’t used for food in that population. They included a middle-aged man with a small dog, a young man with parts of a horse, a 9-month-old baby girl side-by-side with a dog and – most unexpectedly – a middle-aged woman with a pony laid on top of her and a dog’s head above her own.
“At first the excavators were surprised to find human legs under a horse, and the first idea was: we have a horse rider here, we have a warrior,” says Laffranchi. But the woman was buried without weapons, suggesting her relationship with the 1.3-metre-tall pony wasn’t related to warfare.
The team found no particular trends in the ages of the people who were buried with animals, and DNA analyses suggested they weren’t genetically related to each other. Chemical analysis of these cadavers didn’t reveal any differences in diet – which would be linked to socioeconomic status – compared with those in human-only graves, either.
The findings point to the possibility that people from ancient populations felt so connected with their animals that their loved ones chose to bury them together, say the researchers. “And why not?” says Milella. “We definitely cannot exclude that.”
Another explanation could be that the animals had symbolic meaning for the afterlife, the researchers add. For example, in the Gallo-Roman religion, the Celtic goddess of horses, Epona, was believed to protect individuals after death. And Gallo-Romans also apparently sometimes linked dogs with the afterlife. In fact, burying dogs with infants might even have been intended to protect the parents from the loss of future babies.
Even so, the animals in the graves seem to have benefited from good human care rather than being disposable stock – especially the dogs, which appear to have been fed human food and show signs of wound treatment and healing.
As such, it is also possible that people were buried with animals for both symbolic and affectionate reasons, says Milella.

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PRISMA ARCHIVO/Alamy
IT IS the ultimate taboo: in most societies, the idea of one human eating another is morally repugnant. Even in circumstances where it could arguably be justified, such as when a plane crashed in the Andes in 1972 and starving passengers ate the dead to survive, we still have a deep aversion to cannibalism. One of the survivors, Roberto Canessa, has since described the passengers’ actions as a “descent towards our ultimate indignity”.
Ethically, cannibalism poses fewer issues than you might imagine. If a body can be bequeathed with consent to medical science, why can’t it be left to… More

Simon Pemberton
IN GOUGH’S cave in Cheddar Gorge, south-west England, archaeologists have found the remains of at least six individuals. Many of the bones were intentionally broken and the fragments are covered in cut marks, the result of people using stone tools to separate them and remove the flesh. What’s more, 42 per cent of the bone fragments bear human teeth marks. There is little doubt: the people who lived in this cave 14,700 years ago practised cannibalism.
Today, cannibalism is a taboo subject in many societies. We see it as aberrant, as is clear in films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. We associate it with zombies, psychopaths and serial killers like the fictional Hannibal Lecter. Positive stories of cannibals are few and far between. But perhaps it is time for a rethink because, despite our preconceptions, evidence is accumulating that cannibalism was a common human behaviour.
Our ancestors have been eating each other for a million years or more. In fact, it seems that, down the ages, around a fifth of societies have practised cannibalism. While some of this people-eating may have been done simply to survive, in many cases, the reasons look more complex. In places like Gough’s cave, for example, consuming the bodies of the dead seems to have been part of a funerary ritual. Far from a monstrous affront to nature, cannibalism may be a way of showing respect and love for the dead, say some archaeologists.

Tales of cannibals can be found throughout human history. In Homer’s Odyssey,… More

Simon Pemberton
IN GOUGH’S cave in Cheddar Gorge, south-west England, archaeologists have found the remains of at least six individuals. Many of the bones were intentionally broken and the fragments are covered in cut marks, the result of people using stone tools to separate them and remove the flesh. What’s more, 42 per cent of the bone fragments bear human teeth marks. There is little doubt: the people who lived in this cave 14,700 years ago practised cannibalism.
Today, cannibalism is a taboo subject in many societies. We see it as aberrant, as is clear in films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. We associate it with zombies, psychopaths and serial killers like the fictional Hannibal Lecter. Positive stories of cannibals are few and far between. But perhaps it is time for a rethink because, despite our preconceptions, evidence is accumulating that cannibalism was a common human behaviour.
Our ancestors have been eating each other for a million years or more. In fact, it seems that, down the ages, around a fifth of societies have practised cannibalism. While some of this people-eating may have been done simply to survive, in many cases, the reasons look more complex. In places like Gough’s cave, for example, consuming the bodies of the dead seems to have been part of a funerary ritual. Far from a monstrous affront to nature, cannibalism may be a way of showing respect and love for the dead, say some archaeologists.

Tales of cannibals can be found throughout human history. In Homer’s Odyssey,… More

Graphical reconstruction of the stone wall as a hunting structure in a glacial landscapeMichał Grabowski
A low stone wall nearly a kilometre long has been found 21 metres below the surface of the Baltic Sea off the German coast. The wall is thought to have been built around 11,000 years ago to channel reindeer into places where they could more easily be killed, and could be the largest Stone Age megastructure in Europe.
The discovery was made by chance. In 2021, students on a training exercise with geophysicist Jacob Geersen at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde in Germany used a multibeam sonar to map the seafloor 10 kilometres offshore from the town of Rerik.
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“Afterwards, in the lab, we realised that there was this structure that looks not natural,” says Geersen.
So in 2022, he and his colleagues lowered a camera down to the structure, which revealed a row of stones. “It was only when we contacted the archaeologists that we understood it could be something significant,” says Geersen.
There’s no reason or evidence for a modern structure to have been built underwater at this site, says team member Marcel Bradtmöller, an archaeologist at the University of Rostock, Germany. Nor can the team think of any natural process that could create such a structure.
This suggests the wall was built when this area was dry land, meaning it must be between 8500 and 14,000 years old, says Bradtmöller. Before that, the area was covered by an ice sheet that would have destroyed any stone structure, while, later, rising sea levels submerged the area.
The wall runs alongside what was once a lake. It contains around 10 large rocks up to 3 metres across and weighing several tonnes, connected by more than 1600 smaller stones mostly under 100 kilograms in weight. The stones are placed next to one another rather than on top of each other, and the wall is less than a metre high in most places.
The big stones are all found where the wall zigs or zags. So the team thinks the structure was built by linking large stones that were too heavy to move with smaller stones that could be shifted.
Bradtmöller believes it was probably made by hunter-gatherers belonging to what is known as the Kongemose culture, named after a site in Denmark where artefacts such as stone tools have been found.
The most likely explanation is that the structure was used to channel reindeer, he says. “The hypothesis that, at the moment, fits best is a driving wall for hunting.”
While these hunter-gatherers are thought to have lived and travelled around in small groups, they might have assembled in larger numbers at the lake when reindeer came to the area, says Bradtmöller.
Similar low walls, sometimes called desert kites, have been found in many places in Africa and the Middle East, and also beneath the Great Lakes in North America. Some are up to 5 kilometres long, and it is now widely agreed they were used for hunting.

Although these walls are typically low enough that animals such as antelope could jump over them, they usually avoid them when running in herds, says Marlize Lombard at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, who has discovered similar structures. “In such circumstances, they tend to run parallel to obstacles such as low fences, instead of traversing them,” she says.
Many desert kites consist of two walls in a V-shape to funnel animals, but a single wall can still be an effective driving line, says Lombard. One possibility with the newly discovered wall is that it was used to drive reindeer into the lake, where they were hunted from boats, says Bradtmöller.
It is also possible that there is a second wall covered by sediment nearby, says Geersen. He plans further investigations, including diving, to try to find direct evidence of Stone Age people, but, so far, the researchers have been thwarted by bad weather.
Other experts also agree with their conclusions. “I think the case is well made for the wall as an artificial structure built to channel movements of migratory reindeer,” says archaeologist Geoff Bailey at the University of York in the UK.
“Such a find suggests that extensive prehistoric hunting landscapes may survive in a manner previously only seen in the Great Lakes,” says Vincent Gaffney at the University of Bradford in the UK. “This has very great implications for areas of the coastal shelves which were previously habitable.”
Modern activities such as trawling, cable-laying and wind farm construction can destroy such sites, says Geersen, so more exploration is needed to find them before they are lost.
No other structures of this kind have been discovered in Europe, says Bradtmöller. He thinks it is likely that many once existed, but they were destroyed by human activities.

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Artificial intelligence has helped decipher an ancient papyrus scroll, which was transformed into a lump of blackened carbon by volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. The first passages of readable text reveal never-before-seen musings from a Greek philosopher. The discovery nabbed the $700,000 grand prize in the Vesuvius Challenge, and used a combination of 3D mapping and AI techniques to detect ink and decipher letter shapes within segments of scrolls known as the Herculaneum papyri, which had been digitally scanned. More

The winners of the Vesuvius Challenge grand prize used technology to decipher a damaged papyrus scrollVesuvius Challenge
Artificial intelligence has helped decipher an ancient papyrus scroll, which was transformed into a lump of blackened carbon by volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. The first passages of readable text reveal never-before-seen musings from a Greek philosopher.
The discovery nabbed the $700,000 grand prize in the Vesuvius Challenge, and used a combination of 3D mapping and AI techniques to detect ink and decipher letter shapes within segments of scrolls known as the Herculaneum papyri, which had been digitally scanned. The combined efforts of the winning team members – Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor and Julian Schilliger – could pave the way for more discoveries from additional papyrus scrolls that were once housed in a library in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum.
“I think it’s going to be a huge boon to our knowledge of ancient philosophy, just gigantic – a staggering amount of new text,” says Michael McOsker at the University College London, who was not involved in the discovery.Advertisement

The winning submission met the Vesuvius Challenge criteria of deciphering more than 85 per cent of characters in four passages consisting of 140 characters each – and as a bonus, it included another 11 columns of text for a total of more than 2000 characters.
Those rediscovered Greek letters reveal the thoughts of Philodemus, who is thought to have been the philosopher-in-residence at the library that housed the Herculaneum papyri. The deciphered text focuses on how the scarcity or abundance of food and other goods impacts the pleasure they deliver. That fits Philodemus’s Epicurean school of philosophy, which prioritised pleasure as the main goal in life. His 2000-year-old writing even appears to possibly take a dig at the Stoic school of philosophy that has “nothing to say about pleasure”.
And the Vesuvius Challenge isn’t over. Its 2024 goals include figuring out how to scale up the 3D scanning and digital analysis techniques without becoming too expensive. The current techniques cost $100 per square centimetre, meaning that it could cost between $1 million and $5 million to virtually unroll an entire scroll – and there are 800 scrolls waiting to be deciphered.
“Realistically, the vast majority of the known, already unrolled library is Epicurean philosophy and that’s what we should expect, but there are also important Stoic texts, maybe some history and some Latin literature. Complete texts of authors like Ennius or Livius Andronicus, early Roman authors [whose works] did not survive, would be great,” says McOsker. “Epicurus’s Symposium, in which he wrote about the biology of wine consumption, would be a lot of fun.”

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