Humans

The civilisation myth: How new discoveries are rewriting human history

In an evolutionary eyeblink, our species has gone from hunting and gathering to living in complex societies. We need to rethink the story of this monumental transition More

Researchers inspect markings made by Neanderthals on the wall of La Roche-Cotard cave in FranceKristina Thomsen, CC-BY 4.0
Neanderthals used their fingers to carve symbols into the wall of a cave in France at least 57,000 years ago. The engravings are some of the oldest known examples of Neanderthal art and are possibly the very oldest.
“The engravings could only have been made by Neanderthals,” says Jean-Claude Marquet at the University of Tours in France, because they are the only hominins to have left artefacts in the cave and the entrance was sealed by sediments until modern times.
La Roche-Cotard cave is situated in the Loire valley and consists of four consecutive chambers. It has been excavated on and off since 1912, with the most recent round beginning in 2008.Advertisement
Neanderthals lived in the front chamber and entered the second and third, says Marquet. Excavations have unearthed many distinctive “Mousterian” stone tools, which are associated with Neanderthals and not with Homo sapiens.
The walls of the third chamber, called the pillar chamber, are made of tuff, a soft rock primarily formed from solidified volcanic ash. Here, the team found eight panels covered with markings. These include a great many lines traced by fingers: often straight lines, but sometimes also circles or ovals. Some seem to be arranged in larger patterns. One panel has a cluster of more than 100 dots. A subgroup of the engravings was made with tools like flint, antler and wood rather than with fingertips.
It isn’t clear whether the engravings “represent symbolic thinking”, Marquet and his colleagues write in their paper. “Interpretation and meaning are very complicated [for us] to imagine,” says Marquet.
The attribution of the engravings to Neanderthals, not modern humans, rests partly on the Mousterian tools found in the cave and partly on the timing. Marquet’s team dated sediments from the cave entrance to at least 57,000 years ago, and probably around 75,000 years ago. This means the entrance was sealed around that time.
Neanderthals lived in Europe and parts of Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. They disappeared around 40,000 years ago, not long after some modern humans began arriving in Europe in large numbers around 45,000 years ago, following their emergence from Africa. This is long after La Roche-Cotard was sealed.
“It’s well dated,” says Paola Villa at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “The fact they’re all Mousterian materials suggests that they are right.”
Engravings made by Neanderthals in La Roche-Cotard cave in FranceJean-Claude Marquet, CC-BY 4.0
While many examples of prehistoric art are known from Europe and elsewhere, most are from the past few tens of thousands of years, and have been attributed to H. sapiens. Claims of Neanderthal art have been highly controversial. Strong evidence finally emerged in 2018, when researchers demonstrated that art found in several Spanish caves was more than 45,000 years old, and in some cases over 60,000 years old.
The story has since become more complicated because evidence has emerged that modern humans did intermittently enter Europe earlier than 45,000 years ago. Some briefly lived at Grotte Mandrin in northern France around 54,000 years ago and others were in Greece 210,000 years ago.
Nevertheless, on the balance of probabilities, Neanderthals were probably responsible for the engravings, says April Nowell at the University of Victoria in Canada. “I have no trouble in accepting these as hominin-produced digital tracings and no trouble accepting that it dates to a period where only Neanderthals were in the region.”

The engravings in La Roche-Cotard add to the growing evidence of Neanderthals producing symbols and symbolic artefacts. Back in 2003, Marquet and his colleague Michel Lorblanchet at the  French National Center for Scientific Research described an artefact from La Roche-Cotard: a piece of flint with a bone splinter driven through it, which they interpreted as an attempt to represent a face, presumably that of a Neanderthal. More recently, a symbol like a hashtag was found in Gorham’s cave in Gibraltar, which was probably made by a Neanderthal.
Clearly, some Neanderthals engaged in these behaviours, says Nowell. “But I do find it interesting that all of these examples seem to be one-offs in a way.” There are no other known Neanderthal sites with engravings like those in La Roche-Cotard or the one in Gorham’s cave – whereas prehistoric art by H. sapiens is more common and contains repeating elements.
In the same way that a person on the beach may doodle shapes in the sand, the Neanderthals may have created symbols with little or no shared meaning, says Nowell. “I think we don’t yet have that kind of community-level symbolic behaviour.”
It may be that modern humans picked up some of Neanderthals’ symbolic behaviours and developed them further, says Villa. “There is clear evidence that they interbred,” she says, so they could also have learned from each other.

Topics:Neanderthals More

Tam Pà Ling cave in northern Laos, where several human fossils dating back tens of thousands of years have been foundFabrice Demeter
Fossils from a Laos cave provide the earliest evidence of modern humans in mainland South-East Asia. Uncovered fragments of bone belonging to Homo sapiens may date back 86,000 years, shedding new light on how our species migrated from Africa to Asia.
Since 2009, several modern human fossils – dating to between 46,000 and 70,000 years ago – have been discovered in Tam Pà Ling, a cave in north-east Laos. Now, Fabrice Demeter at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and his colleagues have added two more fossils to the collection.

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“One of my Laos colleagues saw what we thought was a big piece of stone,” says Demeter. “After we removed it, I realised that it was white. I [then] knew it was a piece of bone.” Upon analysis, the fossil turned out to be small fragment of a human skull. The researchers also unearthed a piece of a human tibia, or shinbone.
Using radioactive isotopes to date the sediment surrounding the fossils in the cave, the team estimates they are between 68,000 and 86,000 years old. “In mainland South-East Asia, this is the first time we’ve got such old specimens,” says Demeter.
The findings suggest that early modern humans travelled to South-East Asia earlier than previously thought. Prior estimates put this at around 50,000 years ago, with these humans migrating out of Africa and beginning to populate the rest of the world, including Asia. Most people alive today are descended from these early humans, aside from Indigenous Australians, whose ancestors may have left Africa even earlier than this.
“Since we now have fossils that go back closer to 80,000 years, it tells us that there were multiple migrations out of Africa,” says co-author Laura Shackelford at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Genetic data suggests that most earlier migrations probably failed, she says. The fossils discovered in Tam Pà Ling could belong to the ancestors of Indigenous Australians, whose remains found in Australia date back much earlier than 50,000 years ago, but with little information about where they came from. More research is needed into this, says Demeter.
“One of the most debated topics in palaeoanthropology today continues to be modern human origins,” says Christopher J. Bae at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. “This particular study shows quite clearly that modern humans were in the region earlier than originally supposed.”

Topics:fossils/humans More

The Chimané people have provided insights into the power of number wordsREUTERS/David Mercado
LAST February, amid the fjords of southern Chile, an elderly woman died – and a language fell silent. Cristina CalderÓn, a much-loved 93-year-old, was the last known native speaker of Yaghan, which could at one time be heard across the Tierra del Fuego – the Land of Fire – that forms the jagged tip of South America. The loss of any tongue is a tragedy, but Yaghan’s extinction will be felt particularly keenly because this was no ordinary language. It was an “isolate”: a language utterly distinct from those used anywhere else in the world.
Language isolates comprise about 200 of the estimated 7400 languages in use today and many are dangerously close to following Yaghan into oblivion. Estimates suggest that 30 per cent of all languages will have vanished by the end of the century. Isolates – some used by just a few hundred people – are particularly vulnerable.
But as their vulnerability has risen, so has an awareness that isolates can tell us a lot about human communication and cognition. In the past few years alone, they have offered us fresh insight into the interplay between cultural and linguistic evolution and provided support for a controversial hypothesis that links our understanding of reality with the language we use. “Each of these isolates is a… whole different window on the mind,” says Lyle Campbell at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
What’s more, there is new hope that the research might also identify better strategies to help us save them from extinction. … More

Fossils of Homo nalediRobert Clark, National Geographic
A species of ancient human with a brain the size of a chimpanzee’s may have engraved symbols on cave walls and deliberately buried its dead. These new discoveries about Homo naledi, a supposedly primitive hominin, could potentially prompt a rethink of the origins of complex behaviours once thought to be only the domain of large-brained humans like us.
“It’s a remarkable thing. My mind is blown,” says Lee Berger at the National Geographic Society in Washington DC, who led the research. “Much of what we thought about the origin of intelligence and the cognitive powers of having a big brain clearly just died,” he says, though other researchers who spoke to New Scientist question this view. 

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H. naledi was discovered in 2013 in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa when two cavers squeezed through an incredibly tight passage into a hitherto-unexplored chamber littered with fossil bones. In 2015, it was declared that these belonged to a new species. We now know that this hominin was around 144 centimetres tall and had a mix of primitive and modern features, with a brain a third of the size of ours.
It isn’t yet known how H. naledi fits in the hominin family tree, but its morphology suggests that its common ancestor with Neanderthals and modern humans dates back a million years or more. Dating of its fossil remains in 2017 showed that it lived relatively … recently, from 335,000 to at least 241,000 years ago, so might have met Homo sapiens, which evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago.
In 2021, the discovery of an infant skull in a narrow fissure that is almost impossible to access indicated that this hominin deliberately interred its dead. The finding also implied that H. naledi must have been able to control fire in order to navigate through the labyrinth of dark passages and, in December last year, Berger announced evidence of extensive use of fire in the Rising Star cave system, such as soot, hearths and burnt bones.
Now, Berger and his colleagues have published more remarkable findings from the Rising Star caves.
Crosshatch engravings thought to have been made by Homo nalediBerger et al., 2023.
The team only discovered engravings in the caves in July last year, when Berger entered them for the first time. He had to lose 25 kilograms of weight in order to squeeze through passages in the rock as narrow as 17.5 centimetres wide.  “It was incredibly hard to get in, and I wasn’t sure I could get back out,” he says.
To his amazement, Berger spotted some engravings on a natural pillar that forms the entrance to a passage connecting the Dinaledi chamber – where H. naledi fossils were first discovered – and the Hill antechamber, where other remains had been found.
In three different areas of the walls, he saw geometric shapes, mainly composed of lines 5 to 15 centimetres long, deeply engraved into the dolomite stone. This is an incredibly hard rock, so the engravings would have taken considerable effort to make. Many of these lines intersect to form geometric patterns, such as squares, triangles, crosses and ladder shapes.
“There was this moment of awe and surprise in seeing these highly recognisable symbols carved into the wall,” says Berger. “Seeing these symbols was entirely unexpected.”
Aside from the 47 people who had recently accessed the caves, there is no evidence that anyone else except H. naledi had ever been inside, so the researchers argue that these extinct hominins must have carved the marks. However, this is only a preliminary report of the findings and the team hasn’t dated them yet.

We know that Neanderthals created similar symbols more than 64,000 years ago, as did modern humans in southern Africa from around 80,000 years ago. If the symbols in the Rising Star caves were indeed made by H. naledi, they could be far older.
Berger argues that to go to the effort of engraving this incredibly hard rock “in what appear to be important positions within these extraordinarily remote places, the interpretation is that they must have some meaning”.

Others are more cautious. “It is premature to conclude that symbolic markings were made by small-brained hominins, specifically H. naledi,” says Emma Pomeroy at the University of Cambridge. “While intriguing, exciting and suggestive, these findings require more evidence and analysis to support the substantial claims being made about them.”
Berger’s team has also detailed new evidence of what could be deliberate burials in the ground – a different mortuary practice to the internment of corpses in niches, such as the infant skull discovered in 2021. At one place in the Dinaledi chamber, the researchers found 83 bone fragments and teeth, seemingly from a single body, in an oval-shaped area of disturbed soil.
Artist’s reconstruction of the burial of an adult Homo naledi found in the Dinaledi ChamberBerger et al., 2023
They also found another possible burial site in the Hill antechamber. In this instance, they encased an area of debris with a high concentration of bone fragments in plaster, allowing them to remove it from the cave system intact and use a CT scanner to reveal its contents.
This showed many bone and teeth fragments, mainly from one juvenile that seemed to have been in a fetal position, an arrangement also found in prehistoric H. sapiens burials, along with some fragmented remains of three other juveniles. Intriguingly, a single stone artefact – a distinctive crescent-shaped stone, 14 cm long, with striations on its surface – was found close to the hand of one of the bodies.
Although these analyses are only preliminary, the researchers argue that the orientation of the bones and patterns of soil disturbance indicate that bodies were interred in pits that had been deliberately dug out, then covered in sediment. If confirmed, these burials would predate the earliest known human burial in Africa by at least 160,000 years.
Other experts aren’t yet convinced. “This is an admirable attempt to demonstrate that the corpses of at least two individuals were deliberately buried in shallow pits, and one can certainly not rule this out,” says Paul Pettitt at the University of Durham, UK. “I’m not convinced that the team have demonstrated that this was a deliberate burial. Let’s walk before we can run.”
Silvia Bello at the Natural History Museum in London points out that the bones are fragmented, while skeletons that are deliberately buried usually show better preservation.

Remarkable behaviour
Further analysis, such as a more detailed scan of the Hill feature, should help clear up this issue. Nevertheless, the new studies are already building an ever-richer picture of H. naledi and its behaviour. “The evidence is impressive,” says Chris Stringer, also at the Natural History Museum.
“These humans were taking carcasses, bodies of fellow naledis, down deep into the cave, and they must have had artificial lighting,” he says. “This is remarkable behaviour for a creature that’s got an ape-sized brain. It suggests organisation, because this is not something a single individual would have done, it must have been a group activity. And it’s obviously happened multiple times. That implies the existence of what we might call a culture – a different species, not closely related to us.”
“There’s a lot of very intentional behaviour in that cave complex,” says Genevieve von Petzinger at the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, Portugal. “It’s not like a bunch of people fell in a hole and scraped some marks.”
These kinds of sophisticated behaviours were only thought to be possible in hominins with large brains, such as Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. “These are challenging finds, and they certainly make us think about what it is to be human,” says Stringer, raising questions about why we developed such large brains.
In the meantime, further research at the Rising Star cave system will be limited while the researchers work out how best to investigate this site without destroying it.
“Homo naledi altered almost every single space. That has caused me to become incredibly cautious about allowing people into that space until we decide exactly how we’re going to approach it,” says Berger, who wants to engage the world’s scientific community in addressing this question. “We, as humans, have to decide how we’re going to approach the space of another species that they clearly saw as critically important to them.”
Reference: bioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/2023.06.01.543133 and 10.1101/2023.06.01.543127

Topics:Homo naledi More

Magnetic resonance imaging scans showing healthy human brainsSIMON FRASER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
The human brain has greater energy demands than that of any other animal, especially in certain important regions, which may have been key to the evolution of our complex cognition. Knowing how energy use differs across the brain could also help us better understand and treat certain conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease and depression.
Some mammals have bigger brains and more nerve cells, or neurons, than humans, making it unclear how we evolved a uniquely advanced ability to think critically … More

A carving at Luxor Temple in Egypt depicting Pharaoh Ramses and Queen Nefertiti embracingAgung Parameswara/Getty Images
Sexual kissing was practised in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt at least 4500 years ago, according to a review of ancient texts.
There is considerable debate about when humans began kissing in a romantic way. Many sources say the earliest evidence of sexual kissing is in Sanskrit texts written in what is now India around 3500 years ago. Some researchers have suggested that sexual kissing spread from there around the world, and the conquests of Alexander the Great are often said to have played a part in this spread.
The idea that sexual kissing spread around the world from one place has, in turn, been linked to changes in the spread of diseases that can be transmitted orally. For instance, a paper published last year suggested that the herpes simplex virus 1, which causes cold sores, became more much common because of “the advent of sexual-romantic kissing”.Advertisement
But evidence from Mesopotamia and Egypt suggests sexual kissing arose independently in many places and didn’t suddenly spread around the world, says Troels Pank Arbøll at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. “It shows it was known in a much wider area in the ancient world than the people formulating these theories have considered,” he says.
This has been known for decades by the few experts who can read the cuneiform writing system used by several ancient civilisations, but not more widely, says Arbøll. “In the general scientific community, people were not aware of this evidence because it’s not cited anywhere.”
So, Arbøll and his wife, biologist Sophie Lund Rasmussen at the University of Oxford, decided to write a paper describing the overlooked evidence.
While kissing is rarely referred to in Mesopotamian texts, those mentions show it was considered an ordinary part of romantic intimacy in ancient times, says Arbøll. For instance, one text from around 3800 years ago describes how a married woman came close to being unfaithful after a kiss. Another text from the same time describes an unmarried woman vowing to avoid kissing and having sex with a man.
“Considering the geographical distribution, I think [sexual kissing] must have had multiple origins,” says Arbøll. “It’s not something that originated in a single place.”
He and Rasmussen also point out that there is tentative evidence that modern humans and Neanderthals kissed, or at least exchanged saliva in some way. What is more, bonobos also engage in mouth-to-mouth sexual kissing. So it is possible that people have been kissing sexually for much longer than written history suggests. “I think it’s very likely that it goes far back,” says Arbøll.

However, a 2015 study by William Jankowiak at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his colleagues found no evidence of sexual kissing in hunter-gatherer societies.
“My hunch is that kissing arose or was discovered amongst the elite in complex societies,” says Jankowiak. The elite were able to pursue pleasure and turn sex into an erotic encounter, he says.
Jankowiak did find that sexual kissing is more common in cold climes. This may be because in places where people’s bodies are covered in clothes, the face is the sole zone available to touch, he says.

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Aerial view of a desert kite from Jebel az-Zilliyat, Saudi ArabiaO. Barge, CNRS
Architects drew up highly precise plans of vast stone-walled hunting traps 9000 years ago, representing the oldest known architectural plans to scale in human history.
The plans were etched into massive stone tablets that have been recently discovered close to the elaborate traps, known as desert kites, which span such wide distances that their shapes are only recognisable from the sky. The findings confirm that Neolithic humans had an “underestimated mental mastery” of landscapes and space, well before they became literate, says Rémy Crassard at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
“There’s no doubt that these Homo sapiens had the same degree of intelligence that we do, but this is the first time we actually have concrete proof of their spatial perception – in both these gigantic kites and now also in their very precise corresponding plans,” he says. “It shows to what extent this way of thinking was anchored into their culture.”Advertisement
Kites in Saudi Arabia and Jordan feature funnelling lines up to 5 kilometres long and up to 10 pointed branches leading to pits as much as 4 metres deep. Named by aeroplane pilots who first discovered them from the air in the 1920s and thought they looked like toy kites, the structures probably lured gazelles or other wild prey into narrower parts of the structure where they would get cornered or fall, says Wael Abu-Azizeh at the French Institute for the Near East.
A stone at Jibal al-Khashabiyeh, Jordan, engraved with a plan of a desert kiteSEBAP & Crassard et al. 2023 PLOS ONE
But despite the complexity of these Stone Age structures, the rare artistic representations of them found so far have been nothing more than rough abstract sketches. Scientists believed that the oldest true architectural plans that were at least intended to be to scale dated to Mesopotamian civilisations 2300 years ago.
In March 2015, Crassard and his colleagues accidentally came across an 80-centimetre-tall, 92-kilogram limestone tablet in an excavated campsite near a 9000-year-old kite in Jordan, with detailed architectural plans etched into it. They could hardly believe it, but, even more surprisingly, they stumbled across a second kite plan only three months later, this time etched into a 3.8-metre-tall sandstone boulder that had fallen from a cliff near a pair of 7500-year-old kites in Saudi Arabia.
“These were really emotional moments for us in our scientific careers,” says Crassard. “Finding one was already exceptional, but finding two was even more exceptional. We were yelling and dancing around!”
Recognising similarities with the kites nearby, the researchers used computer modelling to mathematically compare the engraved images with satellite images of 69 kites. They found that the plans etched into stone were “surprisingly realistic and accurate” depictions of actual kites within a distance of 1 to 2 kilometres, says Crassard. The two plans had been created at scales of 1:175 and 1:425 and even included three-dimensional pitting to represent the kites’ pit traps.
The plans might have helped build the huge, complex structures, but they might also have guided hunters to understand how best to use them, says Abu-Azizeh.

That seems like the most plausible explanation, says Sam Smith at Oxford Brookes University, UK, who wasn’t involved in the study. Like football coaches drawing their tactics on a white board, members of the Neolithic community may have used the scale images to communicate with each other about group hunting strategies. “I can easily imagine that these engravings would have formed a vital element of planning,” he says.
The fact that they were engraved in “such a durable medium” suggests they may have been intended to last for future generations, he adds. “New members of the community, or hunting party, would not have any real way to comprehend the kites without depictions such as these,” says Smith.
How these ancient engineers attained such geometric accuracy without modern tools like GPS or a tacheometer is perplexing, says Olivier Barge, also at the CNRS. “We don’t know how they did it.”

Topics:archaeology/architecture More