Humans

A woman from the Dani tribe in Indonesia with a bow and arrowANDREY GUDKOV/Alamy
The idea that men hunt while women stay at home is almost completely wrong, a review of foraging societies around the world has found. In fact, women hunt in 80 per cent of the societies looked at, and in a third of these societies women were found to hunt big game – animals heavier than 30 kilograms – as well as smaller animals.
These findings are likely to be representative of all foraging societies past and present, says Cara Wall-Scheffler at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We have nearly 150 years of ethnographic studies sampled, we have every continent and more than one culture from every continent, and so I feel like we did get a pretty good swathe of what people do around the world,” she says.
There was already growing evidence that women hunted in many cultures in the past. For instance, of 27 individuals found buried with hunting weapons in the Americas, nearly half were women, a 2020 study found. Yet researchers have been reluctant to conclude that these women were hunters.Advertisement
“There is a paradigm that men are the hunters and women are not the hunters, and that paradigm colours how people interpret data,” says Wall-Scheffler. Her team looked at a database called D-PLACE that has records on more than 1400 human societies worldwide made over the past 150 years. There was data on hunting for 63 of the foraging societies recorded and, of these, 50 described women hunting.
For 41 of these societies, there was information on whether women’s hunting was intentional or opportunistic – that is, whether they were going out to hunt rather than catching animals they stumbled upon while gathering plants, say. In 87 per cent of cases, it was intentional. “That number was higher than I expected,” says Wall-Scheffler.
The team also looked at data on the size of animals hunted by women, which was recorded for 45 societies. In 46 per cent of cases it was small game such as lizards and rodents, 15 per cent medium game and 33 per cent large game. In 4 per cent of the societies women hunted game of all sizes.
The analysis found that women’s hunting strategies were more flexible than men’s. “Women use a wider range of tools when they go hunting, they go out with a wider variety of people,” says Wall-Scheffler.

They may hunt alone or with a male partner, other women, children or dogs, for instance, says Wall-Scheffler. While the bow and arrow was commonly used by female hunters around the world, she says, women also used knives, nets, spears, machetes, crossbows and more.
This greater flexibility could be a result of female hunters’ mobility varying when they are pregnant or breast-feeding, she says. In at least some cases women hunted with babies strapped to their backs, for instance.
In some societies there were taboos on women making or using specific tools or weapons, Wall-Scheffler says, forcing them to find alternatives.
“This paper represents a much-needed meta-analysis,” says Randy Haas at Wayne State University in Michigan, whose team carried out the study of burials in the Americas. “The findings, coupled with related archaeological findings, convincingly show that division of subsistence labour is much more variable than previously thought,” he says.
Given that women did and do hunt in so many societies, Wall-Scheffler says she can’t explain why the popular notion is that only men hunt. “I don’t understand it,” she says. “I think it is just as remarkable that women with babies on their back are going out to shoot animals.”

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Bernard Friel/Education Images/Universal
WHY is society the way it is? We thought we knew. Now, it appears, we have been thinking about it all wrong.
In our special issue on civilisation (see The civilisation myth: How new discoveries are rewriting human history), we explore what has happened to human societies over the past 10,000 years and what came before. It details new evidence on why many of us abandoned hunting and gathering for a life of farming, urbanism and paperwork, and explores why societies became more unequal and hierarchical, including the role war and religion played in such transformations.
The answers are … More

The people of Easter Island have shown that systems of governance aren’t set in stoneGetty Images/iStockphoto
Emerging evidence from the study of human societies past and present reveals a “staggering kaleidoscope of social experimentation”, says David Wengrow at University College London. It is tempting to fit societies into neat categories such as hunter-gatherer versus complex, egalitarian versus hierarchical and democratic versus authoritarian. It turns out to be not that simple. What’s more, a society can change drastically if its members choose.
One such transition took place on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, in the south-east Pacific. The first settlers established sub-chiefs, each with power over one region of the island and all subordinate to an overall chief. “The chief would have been hereditary,” says Jennifer Kahn at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. “It’s an ascribed position like a monarchy, where you are born into gaining that title.” However, this centralised system proved unstable, so around 1600 the people of Rapa Nui overturned it. In its place they established a birdman cult. Every year, warriors competed by swimming through shark-infested waters to a small islet where they collected a bird’s egg and swam back. “The first one that arrives with their egg unbroken becomes chief for the year,” says Kahn. “It’s an achieved position… that warrior could even be somebody from a low rank.”
… More

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

Coke Navarro
FOR almost all of human existence, our species has been roaming the planet, living in small groups, hunting and gathering, moving to new areas when the climate was favourable, retreating when it turned nasty. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors used fire to cook and warm themselves. They made tools, shelters, clothing and jewellery – although their possessions were limited to what they could carry. They occasionally came across other hominins, like Neanderthals, and sometimes had sex with them. Across vast swathes of time, history played out, unrecorded.
Then, about 10,000 years ago, everything began to change.
In a few places, people started growing crops. They spent more time in the same spot. They built villages and towns. Various unsung geniuses invented writing, money, the wheel and gunpowder. Within just a few thousand years – the blink of an eye in evolutionary time – cities, empires and factories mushroomed all over the world. Today, Earth is surrounded by orbiting satellites and criss-crossed by internet cables. Nothing else like this has ever happened.
Archaeologists and anthropologists have sought to explain why this rapid and extraordinary transformation occurred. Their most prevalent narrative describes a sort of trap: once people started farming, there was no way back from a cascade of increasing social complexity that led inexorably to hierarchy, inequality and environmental destruction. This bleak view of civilisation’s rise has long held sway. However, the more societies we look at, the more it falls to pieces. Confronted with inconvenient evidence, we are being forced to retell our own origin story. In doing so, we are also rethinking what a society can be.
Our … 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.

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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.”

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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