Humans

Santa Claus alone is not enough for a happy ChristmasTristan Fewings/Getty Images for Hamleys
He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice, but Santa’s festive surveillance seemingly does nothing to improve children’s behaviour. Instead, it may be that wider Christmas rituals, like putting up a tree and going carolling, can prompt children to be a bit nicer – a finding that may help us better understand how religion influences behaviour.
“The question was, does belief in Santa Claus influence how children behave?” says Rohan Kapitány at Durham University in the UK. “Does this belief,… More

An artist’s reconstruction of the toddler with his mother consuming mammoth meatEric Carlson/Ben Potter (UAF)/Jim Chatters (McMaster University)
An analysis of the bones of a boy who died in what is now Montana 12,800 years ago shows that nearly half of his diet came from mammoth meat.
“To have it turn out to be 40 per cent, it’s just like, wow!” says James Chatters at McMaster University in Canada. In fact, when compared with other animals alive at this time, the boy’s diet was more similar to that of the carnivorous scimitar-toothed cat than that of… More

A trackway of footprints thought to have been left by a Paranthropus boisei individualNeil T. Roach
Preserved footprints in Kenya appear to record two different species of ancient humans walking over the same muddy lakeshore, probably within days of each other. It is one of the most dramatic demonstrations ever found that the world was once home to multiple hominin species living side by side.
“It’s really exceptional that we find this evidence for two different species walking across that surface,” says Kevin Hatala at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The footprints were found in 2021 in Koobi Fora, Kenya, near the eastern shore of Lake Turkana. They were first spotted by team member Richard Loki at the Turkana Basin Institute, says Hatala: “It was a team of Kenyans who were working there originally.”Advertisement

Preserved in a dried-out layer of sand and silt, the team found a trackway consisting of 12 footprints (see image, above), evidently left by one individual walking in a straight line. There were also three isolated prints near the main group, seemingly made by three different individuals. The lack of signs of mud cracking or overprinting of tracks with others indicate that the prints were all made at about the same time. “These sites probably capture a window of time anywhere from minutes to a few days or so,” says Hatala.
The sediment has been dated to about 1.52 million years ago. The isolated tracks resemble those left by modern humans: the heel struck the ground first, then the foot rolled forwards before pushing off with the sole. Hatala and his colleagues suggest that these were made by Homo erectus, which are known to have lived in the area.
In contrast, the continuous trackway was made by a more flat-footed hominin. Hatala and his colleagues suggest this could have been Paranthropus boisei, another kind of hominin that lived in the region.
The fossil footprint on the left with a deeper heel imprint is thought to have been made by a Homo erectus, the more flat-footed one on the right by a Paranthropus boiseiKevin Hatala/Chatham
“With footprints, you can never be 100 per cent sure who made them,” says Ashleigh Wiseman at University College London, who wasn’t involved in the study. However, H. erectus and P. boisei are the only hominins whose remains have been found preserved in the area, “so we can make an informed guess that it is those two”.
If the trackway really was made by a P. boisei individual, it shows that they walked bipedally, says Wiseman. While skulls, arm and leg bones have been attributed to Paranthropus, she says, “we have never found a skull in association with the rest of the skeleton”. That means we know little about their bodies apart from their heads, and their walking style has been a mystery. The trackway changes that: “It’s unequivocal evidence of walking on two legs.”
These two species were very different. H. erectus was one of the earliest members of our genus, Homo. They had larger brains than earlier hominins and became the first of the clade to travel outside Africa. In contrast, P. boisei were small-brained with large teeth and jaws, apparently adapted to eating chewy foods like grasses and sedges.

Hatala and his team then looked at other known footprints discovered in the same region and time period and found that they seemed to match either one species or the other. “We see a similar pattern at multiple other sites, and they might span more than 100,000 years,” he says. “It seems like these two species were coexisting on this same immediate landscape with one another for a very prolonged period of time.”
“We’re guessing that there was maybe low to neutral levels of competition between them, if they were able to coexist for more than 100,000 years,” says Hatala. Previous research has suggested the two ate different foods. Unlike P. boisei, H. erectus is thought to have eaten a varied diet that included hunting large animals.
“Both of them could carve out their own existence in this shared landscape,” says Hatala. Later, environmental shifts may have driven P. boisei to extinction, while the more adaptable H. erectus survived.

Topics:evolution/human evolution More

Satellite image showing channels that formed part of an ancient fishery, and Mayan sites nearbyGoogle Earth
Archaeologists have discovered a massive network of ancient fisheries in Belize constructed by hunter-gatherers some 4000 years ago.
The system of earthen channels exceeds 640 kilometres in length and dates to the Archaic Period, which preceded the emergence of Maya civilisation centuries later. It is the oldest large-scale fish-trapping facility ever recorded in Central America.

“We were all expecting it to date to a period of sedentary Maya civilisation,” says Eleanor Harrison-Buck… More

A reconstruction of the famous hominin LucyFrank Nowikowski/Alamy
This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month.
One hundred years ago, on 28 November 1924, anthropologist Raymond Dart opened a crate. It held a consignment of fossils from Taung, a quarry in South Africa, including a small skull that looked part-ape, part-human. Dart named it “Australopithecus africanus: The Man-Ape of South Africa”. It was the first Australopithecus specimen to be identified, and the first evidence that early humans evolved in… More

A perforated pebble from the Nahal Ein Gev II archaeological site, which may be an ancient spindle whorlLaurent Davin
A set of 12,000-year-old pierced pebbles excavated in northern Israel may be the oldest known hand-spinning whorls – a textile technology that may have ultimately helped inspire the invention of the wheel.
Serving as a flywheel at the bottom of a spindle, whorls allowed people to efficiently spin natural fibres into yarns and thread to create clothing and other textiles. The newly discovered stone tools represent early axle-based rotation technology thousands of years before the first carts, says Talia Yashuv at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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“When you look back to find the first vehicle wheels 6000 years ago, it’s not like it just came out of nowhere,” she says. “It’s important to look at the functional evolution of how transportation and the wheel evolved.”
Yashuv and her colleague Leore Grosman, also at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studied 113 partially or fully perforated stones at the Nahal Ein Gev II site, an ancient village just east of the Sea of Galilee. Archaeologists have been uncovering these chalky, predominantly limestone artefacts – probably made from raw pebbles along the nearby seashore – since 1972.
3D scanning revealed that the holes had been drilled halfway through from each side using a flint hand drill, which – unlike modern drills – leaves a narrow and twisting cone-like shape, says Yashuv. Measuring 3 to 4 centimetres in diameter, the holes generally ran through the pebble’s centre of gravity.

Drilling from both sides would have helped balance the stone for more stable spinning, says Yashuv. Several of the partially perforated stones had holes that were off-centre, suggesting they might have been errors and thrown out.
The team suspected that the stones, weighing 9 grams on average, were too heavy and “ugly” to have been beads and too light and fragile to be used as fishing weights, says Yashuv. Their size, shape and balance around the holes convinced the researchers that the artefacts were spindle whorls.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers created replicat whorls using nearby pebbles and a flint drill. Then they asked Yonit Kristal, a traditional craftsperson, to try spinning flax with them.
“She was really surprised that they worked, because they weren’t perfectly round,” says Yashuv. “But really you just need the perforation to be located at the centre of mass, and then it’s balanced and it works.”
If the stones are indeed whorls, that could make them the oldest known spinning whorls, she says. A 1991 study on bone and antler artefacts uncovered what may be 20,000-year-old whorls, she adds, but the researchers who examined them suggested the pieces were probably decorative clothing accents. Even so, it is possible that people were using whorls even earlier, using wood or other biological materials that would have since deteriorated.

The finding suggests that people were experimenting with rotation technology thousands of years before inventing the pottery wheel and the cart wheel about 5500 years ago – and that the whorls probably helped lead to those inventions, says Yashuv.
Carole Cheval at Côte d’Azur University in Nice, France, is less convinced, however. Whorls work more like a top than a wheel, she explains.
And while the artefacts might very well be whorls, the study lacks microscopic data that would reveal traces of use – as yarns would have marked the stones over time, Cheval says.
Trace analysis was “beyond the scope” of the current study, says Yashuv.
Ideally, researchers studying ancient whorls would be skilled in spinning themselves – which the study authors were not, says Cheval. “It really changes the way you think about your archaeological finds,” she says.

Topics:archaeology More

Plaster casts of people who died in Pompeii. DNA tests show the adult on the right was a male unrelated to the small child on his lap.Archeological Park of Pompei
Pompeii’s plaster cast human figures aren’t who they were assumed to be, genetic tests have revealed, highlighting the way idealised stories can be projected onto archaeological evidence.
The analysis also reveals that the demography of Pompeii was also far more complicated and diverse than previously thought.
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When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, it buried several Roman towns, including Pompeii. Many of Pompeii’s residents were completely smothered in compacted ash during the eruption and, as their bodies decayed, cavities formed that perfectly preserved their positions in their final moments.
In the 19th century, archaeologists developed a method of pouring plaster into the cavities to make life-like casts. Since then, more than 100 of these casts have been made, preserving the victims’ shapes along with any remaining bones that hadn’t decayed over the centuries.
However, it has long been known that many of the plaster casts were manipulated into different poses and sometimes placed together to add to the drama of the Pompeii story, says Valeria Amoretti at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii in Naples, Italy.
To learn more about who these people were, Amoretti and her colleagues examined 14 of the plaster casts and extracted DNA from bones in five of them.
What they found has completely altered the established interpretations of who they were. An adult wearing a golden bracelet with a child on their lap was long believed to be the child’s mother. The DNA analysis shows they are actually an adult male who is biologically unrelated to the child. A nearby figure, formerly interpreted as being the father, was also unrelated to the supposed mother and child.
Another pair, who were thought to be sisters or a mother and daughter who died in an embrace, included at least one genetic male and were also unlikely to have been related.
The genetic analysis further revealed that the people of Pompeii had diverse ancestry, with components related to modern eastern Mediterranean, Levantine and North African Jewish populations.

Amoretti says it is no surprise that the Roman world was multicultural, and that the Mediterranean and its ports united people.
“But it is extremely interesting to discover the extent of this melting pot, even in an average provincial town like Pompeii, and to have scientific proof of it from ancient DNA,” she says.
Alissa Mittnik at Harvard University says the study highlights the importance of applying science before interpreting archaeology at face value.
“Ultimately, it reminds us that the most intuitive, dramatic or sensational explanations do not always hold true, encouraging us to stay aware of and question our preconceived notions,” she says.

Topics:archaeology More

Sheep skulls modified by ancient Egyptians so that their horns grew upward instead of outwardB. De Cupere
Sheep with deformed horns are among the more mysterious animal remains discovered at an ancient Egyptian burial site dating back to around 3700 BC. They also represent the oldest physical evidence of humans modifying the horns of livestock.
“The sheep were deliberately made ‘special’ by castration,” says Wim Van Neer at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. “In addition, their horns were directed upward, and in one case, the horns were removed.” More