Humans

The extinct straight-tusked elephant was even larger than modern African elephants, making it unclear if Neanderthal hunters could take one down, but a newly analysed trove of bones suggests it was possible

Humans

1 February 2023

By Clare Wilson
A reconstruction of the straight-tusked elephantLUTZ KINDLER, MONREPOS
Neanderthals regularly hunted and butchered elephants in Europe thousands of years ago, according to an analysis of marks made by stone tools on a trove of bones.
The find suggests the ancient humans either lived in larger groups than previously suspected or that they had ways of processing the flesh so it didn’t spoil, says Wil Roebroeks at Leiden University in the Netherlands, given the amount of meat involved. “These elephants are really big calorie bombs.”
There has long been debate over whether Neanderthals, distant cousins of modern humans, could have hunted the straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus). These extinct giants stood 4 metres tall, making them larger than modern African elephants and woolly mammoths.Advertisement
To find out more, Roebroeks’s team took a closer look at elephant bones found alongside other animal remains and stone tools in a quarry near Halle, Germany, which was dug out from the 1980s. The bones have been dated to about 125,000 years ago, when Neanderthals were the only humans known to be in the area.
The remains were from more than 70 elephants, with a few found as nearly complete skeletons. The marks left on the bones suggest the animals were thoroughly butchered to obtain every last scrap of meat and fat – including, for instance their brains and all of the bulky fat pads in their feet.
There were also few gnaw marks left by scavenging carnivores, suggesting little food was left on the carcass. “There’s maybe a bit of nibbling on isolated vertebra, but most of these remains were so clean they weren’t attractive for carnivores,” says team member Lutz Kindler at the Museum for Human Behavioural Evolution in Neuwied, Germany.
The team has calculated that all the flesh from one of the elephants would have fed about 100 adults for a month. Some researchers have previously suggested that Neanderthals lived in fairly small groups of up to about 25 people, based on factors such as the size of their caves or analysis of their footprints. “There’s a perception they lived in small groups, but when you look for the evidence, there’s nothing,” says Clive Finlayson at the Gibraltar National Museum, who wasn’t involved in the new study.
If a smaller group of, say, 25 people had killed an elephant, they would have had to spend about three to five days working to strip the carcass of flesh and processing it so that it wouldn’t spoil, for instance by drying or smoking it, says Roebroeks. The marks on the bones mean the meat wasn’t simply left to rot once the Neanderthals had eaten their fill.

The team found a higher proportion of male and older elephants among the remains, suggesting that the Neanderthals were specifically targeting these animals, rather than scavenging from ones that had died of natural causes.
This makes some sense, as in modern elephants older males tend to live alone. Targeting loners would making hunting easier, says Roebroeks, as they could be driven into traps or muddy shores. “Large mammals are [easier] to kill as long as you are able to limit their mobility, and then they are finished off with spears,” he says.
Previous work has shown that Neanderthals may have cleared forests in the region where the bones were found, which also supports the idea they lived in larger groups.

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Mongolia produces 40 per cent of the world’s cashmere supply from its goats, but climate change and overproduction are threatening this unique way of life

Humans

1 February 2023

By Matteo Fagotto
Ganbaatar Davaasuren (known as “Bukhuu”) in Uvurkhangai province, MongoliaMatilde Gattoni
FORTY per cent of the world’s cashmere is sourced from the windswept plateau of Mongolia.
Bukhuu’s 14-year-old son Mungun Huleg gathers the goats before selecting those that need to be combed that dayMatilde Gattoni
The fabric is made from the undercoats of the local goats, which develop a particularly tight fur to survive the harsh winters, where temperatures can drop as low as -40°C. In past decades, cashmere has made a fortune for local herders, becoming the main source of income for a third of the Mongolian population.Advertisement
Tserennadmid Khaltarkhuu cuts a baby goat’s ears to mark them with the help of his childrenMatilde Gattoni
But lately climate change and overproduction have threatened the cashmere supply, and a unique way of life with it. In Mongolia, temperatures have warmed by more than 2°C in the past 80 years, above the world average, and could rise by up to 5°C by the end of the century. Milder winters – which can negatively affect the quality of cashmere – are now followed by long, dry springs and short summers, when not enough rain falls to sustain the pastures.
Bukhuu’s father Davaasuren Tsogt sits outside his ger (a traditional Mongolian dwelling)Matilde Gattoni
The global cashmere boom saw the number of goats skyrocket from 10.2 million to 26.5 million, causing overgrazing and desertification. Seventy per cent of Mongolia’s pastures are already considered degraded.
A herd of goats on a wall built from stones from the Gobi desertMatilde Gattoni
To address the problem, local herders are reviving traditional pastureland management practices. Cooperatives have also been set up to coordinate grazing and rotation between pastures, to give nature the chance to replenish itself, and the national government has imposed a tax on livestock to curb numbers.
Orkhontuya Oidovdagva answers the family mobile phone from the centre of a ger, where the phone is left to hang all dayMatilde Gattoni
But so far, no alternative source of income seems a ready substitute to a fabric that has provided an economic lifeline for a nomadic way of life that would otherwise have been lost.
A goat being combedMatilde Gattoni

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New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

1 February 2023

BEN HUGHES
Listen
Innervate is an EP by composer Liza Bec (pictured above), who almost lost their performance career to a rare epilepsy triggered by playing music. The EP spotlights the roborecorder, an instrument they built. On release 10 February.

Read
The Meaning of Geese is teased out by Nick Acheson, whose epic bicycle adventures trace the incoming paths of pink-footed and brent geese as they arrive from Iceland and Siberia to fill the skies of his native Norfolk, UK. On sale from 9 February.
Dan Weill
Visit
Drug experiments and forays into medicines, narcotics and everyday … More

Veronica Roth’s dystopian take on Sophocles’s 2500-year-old tragedy reminds us that human nature is timeless, finds Sally Adee

Humans

1 February 2023

By Sally Adee
In an unnamed dystopia, citizens face dangerous reproductive rulesGremlin/getty images
Arch-Conspirator
Veronica Roth (Tor)
THERE isn’t much world-building in Veronica Roth’s sci-fi retelling of Sophocles’s classic Greek tragedy Antigone. Then again, in Arch-Conspirator, there isn’t much world. A dusty dystopian city (Thebes in the original, but it isn’t clear where we are in the reboot) is all that remains after a thinly sketched environmental polycrisis has turned humanity into an endangered species.
Or, at least, that is what a reader surmises. The citizens don’t seem to know much about the arid … More

Impulse: The science of sex and desire by psychiatrists Jon Grant and Samuel Chamberlain delivers on its bid to answer our hidden questions about sex, but it can be a little perfunctory

Humans

1 February 2023

By Elle Hunt
Everyone has a question about sex they would like answered – even if it is just “am I normal?”Beatriz Vera/shutterstock
Impulse: The science of sex and desire
Jon Grant and Samuel Chamberlain (Cambridge University Press)
LET’S talk about sex – or not. Many of us have trouble striking the right tone or even finding the right words, caught between obfuscating with the birds and the bees or titillating with undue detail. For the topics too awkward to raise in person, there is always the internet, but its answers are many and highly variable.
Factor … More

A workshop used for mummification at Saqqara in Egypt contains remnants of the substances used to make mummies, revealing many came from southern Africa or South-East Asia

Humans

1 February 2023

By Michael Marshall
Illustration of the underground embalming workshop in Saqqara in ancient EgyptNikola Nevenov
An underground workshop found at an ancient Egyptian burial site contains ceramic vessels with traces of the substances used to make mummies. They include resins obtained from as far away as India and South-East Asia, indicating that ancient Egyptians engaged in long-distance trade.
“We could identify a large diversity of substances which were used by the embalmers,” says Maxime Rageot at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “Few of them were locally available.”
The workshop, dating from around 600 BC, was discovered in 2016 at Saqqara, which was the burial ground of Egyptian royalty and elites for centuries. “It was used as an elite cemetery from the very earliest moment of the Egyptian state,” says Elaine Sullivan at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who wasn’t involved in the study.Advertisement
Close to the pyramid of Unas, archaeologists led by Ramadan Hussein, also at the University of Tübingen, found two vertical shafts dug into the ground. One was 13 metres deep and led to the embalming workshop, while the other was 30 metres deep and led to burial chambers. Hussein died in 2022.
It is the first Egyptian embalming workshop to be found underground, says team member Susanne Beck at the University of Tübingen. This may have been to keep the process secret, but it also had the advantage of keeping decaying bodies cool.
In the workshop, the team found 121 beakers and bowls. Many were labelled: sometimes with instructions like “to put on his head”, sometimes with names of embalming substances and sometimes with administrator titles.
Vessels from the embalming workshop© Saqqara Saite Tombs Project, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
The researchers chose the nine beakers and 22 bowls with the most legible labels for analysis. They studied the chemical residues left in the bowls to find out what substances had been used during embalming and mummification.
A host of substances, including plant oils, tars, resins and animal fats, were discovered. Two examples were cedar oil and heated beeswax. Many of the substances were known to be used in mummification, but some were new.
One new substance was dammar, a gum-like resin obtained from trees in India and South-East Asia. The name “dammar” is a Malay word.
The team also found elemi: a pale yellow resin resembling honey that comes from trees in the rainforests of South Asia and southern Africa.
The dammar and elemi show that Egyptian embalming drove early globalisation, says Philipp Stockhammer at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, another member of the team. “You really needed to transport these resins over large distances.” It fits with other evidence of long-distance trade at the time.
The ancient Egyptian elite liked exotic goods as much as modern capitalists, says Sullivan. At times when the state was powerful and organised, “we see a great interest in the outside world and in connections to the outside world and bringing those things from the outside world together”.
Stockhammer and Sullivan both say that the substances were transported by chains of traders. “The Egyptians don’t have to be going to the eastern side of India themselves,” says Sullivan.

The researchers were also able to translate two new words. Many texts on mummification refer to antiu and sefet. The former had been tentatively translated as “myrrh” or “incense”, and the latter as “a sacred oil”. However, because they were written on pieces of pottery with residue inside, it was possible to identify them. It turns out antiu is a mixture of oils or tars from conifers. Meanwhile, sefet is an unguent – an ointment or lubricant – containing plant additives.
Many of the substances had antibacterial and antifungal properties, and were combined into elaborate mixtures. For Stockhammer, the complexity of the substances displays “enormous personal knowledge that was accumulated through these centuries of experience of embalming human individuals”.
That fits with textual evidence that priests tasked with embalming were important people with considerable skill, says Sullivan. “They would have needed to have a lot of ritual knowledge and a lot of material knowledge,” she says. The body had to be preserved physically and rites had to be performed correctly according to the Egyptian religion. It was “both a spiritual and physical practice”.

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New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

25 January 2023

Star Wars: The Bad BatchDisney
Watch
Star Wars: The Bad Batch returns for its second season. Presumed dead by the Empire, Clone Force 99 must decide whether to live in hiding or risk everything by fighting. Watch the animated series now on Disney+.

Read
Of Ice and Men is historian Fred Hogge’s entertaining take on our relationship with ice. It has shaped civilisations, from freezing our food to saving lives in medicine, as well as via melting glaciers due to climate change. On sale in the UK from 2 … More

It pays to know what you really need from a sophisticated learning machine, particularly if you don’t want a killer robot on your hands, says Simon Ings

Humans

25 January 2023

By Simon Ings
Cady (Violet McGraw) listens as the android M3gan reads to hergeoffrey short/universal studios
M3gan
Gerard Johnstone
On general release
AFTER doing something unspeakable to a school bully’s ear, chasing him through a forest like a wolf and then driving him under the wheels of a passing car, M3gan, the world’s first “Model 3 Generative Android”, returns to comfort Cady, its inventor’s niece. “We’ve learned a valuable lesson today,” it whispers.
So has the audience: before you ask a learning machine to do something for you, it helps if you know what that thing … More