Humans

Archaeologists cleaning excess mud off the Bronze Age spadeWessex Archaeology
A wooden spade from the Bronze Age has been unearthed by archaeologists in the UK. It is incredibly rare to find wooden artefacts preserved from so long ago.
The spade offers a glimpse into life during a time when people were increasingly farming crops and living in settled communities.
“It’s quite tangible,” says Ed Treasure at Wessex Archaeology in Salisbury, UK. “It’s quite an immediate connection with the past.”Advertisement

The spade was found in wetlands near Poole Harbour on the south coast of England, where Wessex Archaeology has been digging for several years. The Moors at Arne Coastal Change Project is working to restore coastal wetlands in the area, and the archaeologists are excavating to ensure that informative artefacts are not inadvertently lost.
The researchers were digging in ring gullies, circular trenches that may have originally surrounded shelters. In one of the ring gullies, they spotted the handle of the spade. “There was almost a moment of disbelief,” says Treasure, who was not there personally. “It was quite immediately apparent that it was a piece of worked wood.” The spade had been carved from a single piece of oak.
The wet conditions meant the shovel was not exposed to oxygen, slowing the decay.
The team has radiocarbon dated the spade to 3400-3500 years ago, using a shard found alongside it. “A very small bit of the spade had become broken off in burial – we used that for dating,” says Treasure. Nearby pottery indicated a similar date. This places the spade’s origins in the Middle Bronze Age.
“It’s quite a big time of change in prehistoric Britain,” says Treasure. People were becoming less nomadic and spending much more time in settled communities, farming a range of cereals and other foods.
However, there is no sign of permanent year-round settlement at the site – unsurprisingly, because it was and is a wetland. “We’re very much thinking this is a seasonal use of this landscape,” says Treasure. People may have brought animals in to graze in the summer, cut peat for fuel or perhaps collected reeds for thatching.
Future studies will try to find out how the spade was made, and what it was used for. “It might have been used to cut peat on the site,” says Treasure. “It may also have been used to dig the ring gully in which it was found.”
Preserved spades from this period are rare. One of the only other examples is the Brynlow shovel, which was found in Cheshire in 1875, rediscovered in the 1950s in a school assembly hall by the fantasy writer Alan Garner and eventually radiocarbon dated to almost 4000 years ago.

Topics:archaeology More

These ancient swords have been modified by forgersAlex Rodzinka
Imaging technology has revealed that ancient swords smuggled into the UK recently have been altered by modern-day forgers, who replaced many of the original iron blades with bronze ones. What’s more, many similar swords in museums worldwide may also be tainted by modern forgery.
The swords in question come from what is now Iran and date to an important moment in history: the end of the Bronze Age and beginning of the Iron Age. As the names suggest, this marked a technological shift as iron became the metal of… More

PurpleHousePhotos/Alamy
Mark Twain famously (although possibly apocryphally) said we should never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Archaelogists might beg to differ, particularly when the story in question is a dramatic rewriting of human history that – as the president of the Society of American Archaeology, Daniel Sandweiss, has noted – has a long-standing link with racist ideologies.
This narrative claims that the familiar ancient civilisations of Eurasia, Africa and the Americas drew inspiration from a mysterious advanced culture that predated them all. Archaeologists are confident that no such civilisation ever existed, but they are also aware that persuading believers to reject the story is a tough task.
However, as we explore in our interview with archaeologist Flint Dibble in “The archaeologist fighting claims about an advanced lost civilisation”, they may have found a winning strategy in the form of the “truth sandwich”. In this debating technique, archaeologists first begin by discussing real information, what their research has revealed about the past. Then they tackle the false information – in this case explaining how the facts leave no room for this lost civilisation – before returning to and re-emphasising the real information.Advertisement

Truth sandwiches’ appear to be good at fighting misinformation in some contexts but not others

The truth sandwich gained popularity after it was formalised by linguist George Lakoff in 2018. It is tempting to assume that it can convince audiences to abandon belief in false narratives. But can it? The best way to find out, of course, is through controlled experiments. The first such research has now been conducted, and it presents a mixed picture. Truth sandwiches appear to be effective in certain contexts but not in others, where different ways to structure an argument are more persuasive.
These conflicting results might seem problematic, but they are actually evidence of scientific inquiry at work – a process that involves testing ideas and refining hypotheses in light of new data. It is only this approach that can really discover the best way to tackle misinformation. Or, to put it another way, science should never let a good story get in the way of the truth.

Topics:archaeology/ancient humans More

Paul Ryding
Archaeological research has helped us understand the complicated story of our species’ past, from the earliest hominins to the dawn of civilisation and beyond. But some people are convinced that it has overlooked an important chapter. They believe there was an advanced global civilisation some 20,000 years ago during the last glacial maximum, often referred to as the ice age – but that it was mysteriously destroyed, with its impressive settlements and monuments drowned by rising seas.
Flint Dibble, an archaeologist at Cardiff University in the UK, is doing all he can to make it clear that such ideas aren’t supported by the evidence. Earlier this year, he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast to take part in a high-profile debate with Graham Hancock, a writer who has spent years arguing for the existence of this forgotten society and who discusses the idea in his Netflix show, Ancient Apocalypse.

Dibble spoke to New Scientist about the reasons for the enduring appeal of mythical lost civilisations, why belief in them can be so harmful, and how to persuade people to reject the ideas promoted by Hancock and others through the use of “truth sandwiches”.
Colin Barras: Why do you think the myth of an advanced lost civilisation generates so much interest?
Flint Dibble: That’s a tough one. You have to appreciate that Graham Hancock’s idea isn’t new: it stems directly out of … More

The genus Citrus refers to a group of flowering shrubs and treesliv friis-larsen / 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 of the most important factors in the evolution of humans and other hominins is their relationship with food, and how it has changed over the millennia.
There are some foods that we can barely imagine living without, but that are quite recent additions to our diet. Take wheat, which we use to make bread, pasta, cake and… More

A reconstruction of male and female Neanderthals based on the La Chapelle-aux-Saints fossilsS. ENTRESSANGLE/E. DAYNES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Extract taken from Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, published by Jonathan Cape, the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up to read along with us here.
NEANDERTHALS WERE PRONE TO DEPRESSION, he said.
He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking.Advertisement
Although it was likely, he said, that these noble and mysterious Thals (as he sometimes referred to the Neanderthals) extracted nicotine from the tobacco plant by a cruder method, such as by chewing its leaves, before that critical point of inflection in the history of the world: when the first man touched the first tobacco leaf to the first fire.
Reading this part of Bruno’s email, scanning from “man” to “touch” to “leaf ” to “fire,” I pictured a 1950s greaser in a white T-shirt and a black leather jacket as he touches a lit match to the tip of his Camel cigarette, and inhales. The greaser leans against a wall—because that is what greasers do, they lean and loiter—and then he exhales.
Bruno Lacombe told Pascal, in these emails I was secretly reading, that the Neanderthals had very large brains. Or at least their skulls were very large, and we can safely infer that their skulls were likely filled, Bruno said, with brains.

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.

He talked about the impressive size of a Thal’s braincase using modern metaphors, comparing them to motorcycle engines, which were also measured, he noted, for their displacement. Of all the humanlike species who stood up on two feet, who roamed the earth for the last one million years, Bruno said that the Neanderthal’s braincase was way out in front, at a whopping 1,800 cubic centimeters.
I pictured a king of the road, way out in front.
I saw his leather vest, his big gut, legs extended, engineers’ boots resting on roomy and chromed forward-mounted foot pegs. His chopper is fitted with ape hangers that he can barely reach, and which he pretends are not making his arms tired, are not causing terrible shooting pains to his lumbar region.
We know from their skulls, Bruno said, that Neanderthals had enormous faces.
I pictured Joan Crawford, that scale of face: dramatic, brutal, compelling.
And thereafter, in the natural history museum in my mind, the one I was creating as I read Bruno’s emails, its dioramas populated by figures in loincloths, with yellow teeth and matted hair, all these ancient people Bruno described—the men too—they all had Joan Crawford’s face.
They had her fair skin and her flaming red hair. A propensity for red hair, Bruno said, had been identified as a genetic trait of the Thal, as scientific advancements in gene mapping were made. And beyond such work, such proof, Bruno said, we might employ our natural intuition to suppose that like typical redheads, the Neanderthals’ emotions were strong and acute, spanning the heights and depths.
A few more things, Bruno wrote to Pascal, that we now know about Neanderthals: They were good at math. They did not enjoy crowds. They had strong stomachs and were not especially prone to ulcers, but their diet of constant barbecue did its damage as it would to anyone’s gut. They were extra vulnerable to tooth decay and gum disease. And they had overdeveloped jaws, wonderfully capable of chewing gristle and cartilage but inefficient for softer fare, a jaw that was overkill. Bruno described the jaw of the Neanderthal as a feature of pathos for its overdevelopment, the burden of a square jaw. He talked about sunk costs, as if the body were a capital investment, a fixed investment, the parts of the body like machines bolted to a factory floor, equipment that had been purchased and could not be resold. The Neanderthal jaw was a sunk cost.
Still, the Thal’s heavy bones and sturdy, heat-conserving build were to be admired, Bruno said. Especially compared to the breadstick limbs of modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens. (Bruno did not say “breadstick,” but since I was translating, as he was writing these emails in French, I drew from the full breadth of English, a wildly superior language and my native tongue.)
The Thals survived cold very well, he said, if not the eons, or so the story about them goes—a story that we must complicate, he said, if we are to know the truth about the ancient past, if we are to glimpse the truth about this world, now, and how to live in it, how to occupy the present, and where to go tomorrow.
——
My own tomorrow was thoroughly planned out. I would be meeting Pascal Balmy, leader of Le Moulin, to whom these emails from Bruno Lacombe were written. And I didn’t need the Neanderthals’ help on where to go: Pascal Balmy said to go to the Café de la Route on the main square in the little village of Vantôme at one p.m., and that was where I would be.

The art and science of writing science fiction

Take your science fiction writing into a new dimension during this weekend devoted to building new worlds and new works of art

Explore more

Topics: More

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