Humans

Australopithecus family in a grassy forestHistoric Collection / 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.
It’s a truism in human evolution that we came down from the trees and out into more open country like grassy savannahs. The open grasslands are supposed to be more favourable habitats for hominins like us. In contrast, dense tropical forests have been thought of as “hostile, unfavourable frontiers” that were “too hostile for humans throughout much of prehistory” (according to a 2022… More

Researchers survey archaeological features in Wandel Dal valley, GreenlandFuuja Larsen
Some 4500 years ago, as the Great Pyramid of Giza was being erected and the Indus Valley civilisation hit its peak, a group of Arctic peoples migrated to a region of northern Greenland now known as Inutoqqat Nunaat, or the “land of the ancient people”.
They were the northernmost culture on Earth at the time, living just 800 kilometres from the North Pole, but little else has been known about their diet, customs and strategies for survival in this polar climate. Now, that is starting to change. More

The trolley problem is a classic dilemma in moral philosophyStefan Lenz/Getty Images
Animals, Robots, GodsWebb Keane (Allen Lane)
No society we know of ever lived without morals. Roughly the same ethical ideas arise, again and again, over time and in different societies. Where do these notions of right and wrong come from? Might there be an ideal way to live?
In Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the moral imagination, anthropologist Webb Keane at the University of Michigan argues that morality doesn’t arise from universal principles but from the human imagination. For him, moral ideas are sparked in… More

The action in Creation Lake is based in Guyenne in south-west FrancePhotononstop/Alamy
Creation LakeRachel Kushner (Jonathan Cape (UK, 5 September); Scribner (US, 3 September))
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner is a thriller, a spy caper, a comedy and also a poetic take on human history all the way back to the time our species, Homo sapiens, shared Earth with the Neanderthals. It is a sensationally enjoyable novel and has deservedly made the Booker prize longlist.
The story is narrated by our anti-hero, Sadie Smith (not her real name). She is a US undercover operative working for shady employers… More

The interior of the monument in Spain known as the Menga dolmenMiguel Ángel Blanco de la Rubia
Neolithic people seem to have understood sophisticated concepts in science, such as physics and geology, using this knowledge to construct a megalithic monument in southern Spain.
Called the Menga dolmen, it is among the earliest European megaliths, dating to between 3600 and 3800 BC. Its roofed enclosure was constructed from 32 large stones, some of which are the biggest used in such structures. The heaviest one weighs in excess of 130 tonnes, more than three times as much as the heaviest stone at Stonehenge in the UK, which was erected more than 1000 years later.
“[In the Neolithic Period], it must have been very powerful to experience this building made with these enormous stones,” says Leonardo García Sanjuán at the University of Seville in Spain. “It still stirs you. It still causes an impression even today.”Advertisement

García Sanjuán and his colleagues have now performed detailed geological and archaeological analyses of the stones to infer what knowledge Menga’s builders would have needed to construct the monument, which is in the city of Antequera.
Paradoxically, they found that the rocks are a type of relatively fragile sandstone. While this means a greater risk of breaking, the team discovered that this was compensated for by shaping the stones so they locked into a very stable overall structure.
Neolithic people would have needed some way to make the blocks fit very tightly together, says Garcia Sanjuán. “It’s like Tetris,” he says. “If you look at the precision involved and how well each stone locks with each other, you have to think that they had an idea of angles, however rudimentary.”
The researchers also found that the 130-tonne stone, which was placed horizontally on top to form part of the roof, had been shaped so that its surface rises in the centre and declines towards the edges. This distributes force in a similar way to an arch, improving the roof’s strength, says García Sanjuán. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the principle of the arch has been documented in human history.”
Menga – whose purpose is unknown – is also aligned to produce distinct patterns of light in the interior during the summer solstice and has stones that are protected from water damage by several layers of carefully beaten clay, which adds to evidence supporting the builders’ knowledge around architecture and engineering.
“They knew about geology and the properties of the rocks they were using,” says García Sanjuán. “When you put all this together – you know, engineering, physics, geology, geometry, astronomy – it is something we can call science.”

There are Neolithic structures in France that rival Menga in size, but how they were built is less well understood, says García Sanjuán. “As it stands today, Menga is unique in Iberia and in western Europe.”
“What’s surprising about this is the level of sophistication,” says Susan Greaney at the University of Exeter, UK. “The architectural understanding of how the weight distribution works, I’ve not seen that anywhere else before.” But she adds that this is perhaps less a demonstration of an understanding of science than of architecture and engineering.

Topics:archaeology More

The interior of the monument in Spain known as the Menga dolmenMiguel Ángel Blanco de la Rubia
Neolithic people seem to have understood sophisticated concepts in science, such as physics and geology, using this knowledge to construct a megalithic monument in southern Spain.
Called the Menga dolmen, it is among the earliest of such structures, dating to between 3600 and 3800 BC. Its roofed enclosure was constructed from 32 large stones, some of which are the biggest used in this sort of monument. The heaviest one weighs in excess of 130 tonnes, more than three times as much as the heaviest stone at Stonehenge in the UK, which was erected more than 1000 years later.
“[In the Neolithic Period], it must have been very powerful to experience this building made with these enormous stones,” says Leonardo García Sanjuán at the University of Seville in Spain. “It still stirs you. It still causes an impression even today.”Advertisement

García Sanjuán and his colleagues have now performed detailed geological and archaeological analyses of the stones to infer what knowledge Menga’s builders would have needed to construct the monument, which is in the city of Antequera.
Paradoxically, they found that the rocks are a type of relatively fragile sandstone. While this means a greater risk of breaking, the team discovered that this was compensated for by shaping the stones so they locked into a very stable overall structure.
Neolithic people would have needed some way to make the blocks fit very tightly together, says Garcia Sanjuán. “It’s like Tetris,” he says. “If you look at the precision involved and how well each stone locks with each other, you have to think that they had an idea of angles, however rudimentary.”
The researchers also found that the 130-tonne stone, which was placed horizontally on top to form part of the roof, had been shaped so that its surface rises in the centre and declines towards the edges. This distributes force in a similar way to an arch, improving the roof’s strength, says García Sanjuán. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the principle of the arch has been documented in human history.”
Menga – whose purpose is unknown – is also aligned to produce distinct patterns of light in the interior during the summer solstice and has stones that are protected from water damage by several layers of carefully beaten clay, which adds to evidence supporting the builders’ knowledge around architecture and engineering.
“They knew about geology and the properties of the rocks they were using,” says García Sanjuán. “When you put all this together – you know, engineering, physics, geology, geometry, astronomy – it is something we can call science.”

There are Neolithic structures in France that rival Menga in size, but how they were built is less well understood, says García Sanjuán. “As it stands today, Menga is unique in Iberia and in western Europe.”
“What’s surprising about this is the level of sophistication,” says Susan Greaney at the University of Exeter, UK. “The architectural understanding of how the weight distribution works, I’ve not seen that anywhere else before.” But she adds that this is perhaps less a demonstration of an understanding of science than of architecture and engineering.

Article amended on 27 August 2024The headline and second paragraph of this article have been changed to correctly refer to the monument that was constructed.Topics:archaeology More

Coca leaves have psychoactive and therapeutic propertiesFabiano Sodi/Alamy
The mummified brain tissue of two people found in a 17th-century crypt in Milan, Italy, contains traces of cocaine, revealing that the drug was being used in Europe 200 years earlier than previously recorded.
Coca leaves, from which cocaine is derived, have been chewed in the plant’s native South America for thousands of years, but the drug only took off in Europe in the 19th century, when it was chemically isolated from the plant.
Spanish conquerors learned of the psychoactive and therapeutic properties of coca leaves, but… More

The altar stone lies inside Stonehenge’s two big rings of stonesGavin Hellier/roberthrding/Getty Images
A study of the 6-tonne altar stone at the heart of Stonehenge has shown that it was almost certainly brought there from north-east Scotland, much further than any other stone in the megalithic structure.
“All of us were stunned. We couldn’t believe it,” says geologist Anthony Clarke at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.
How the altar stone was transported all the way from Scotland to the south of England isn’t known, but it is most likely to have been brought by sea, says Clarke. There is evidence that people at this time were making sea journeys, he says.Advertisement

Stonehenge is thought to have been built over about 1500 years, starting around 5100 years ago. It consists of an outer circle of large stones weighing around 25 tonnes each, known as sarsens, and an inner ring and altar made of smaller stones generally of around 3 tonnes, known as bluestones. The term bluestone just means any rock that isn’t a sarsen – the bluestones are made of various kinds of rock.
“The thing that’s unique about Stonehenge is the distance that stones have been transported,” says geologist Richard Bevins at Aberystwyth University, UK. Most stone circles are made from rocks found within a kilometre of the site, says Bevins.
The source of the sarsens, however, has been traced to the West Woods of Wiltshire, around 25 kilometres from the site. And Bevins’s team has shown that almost all the bluestones come from the Preseli hills in Wales, about 280 kilometres away. One idea is that they were part of an even older Welsh stone monument that was moved.
The altar stone at Stonehenge is different to the other bluestones. “By the end of 2021, we’d come to the conclusion that the altar stone didn’t match any of the geology that we knew in Wales,” says team member Nick Pearce, also at Aberystwyth University.
This 5-metre-long stone is embedded in the ground with only one surface showing and is partly covered by two other stones. It is thought to have been put in place about 4500 years ago.
Stonehenge’s altar stone (embedded in the ground under the other stones) came from north-east ScotlandNick Pearce, Aberystwyth University
Now, Clarke has taken sophisticated equipment usually used in the mining industry and analysed samples of the altar stone. It is a sandstone, which means it is made of eroded grains of rock that piled up at the bottom of an ancient ocean and eventually stuck together to form a new rock. The age of each grain varies depending on when the rock it eroded from first formed, so different sandstones have a distinctive mix of grains of different ages.
Clarke analysed individual crystals of the minerals zircon, apatite and rutile within samples of the stone. These minerals contain uranium, which very slowly decays to lead, allowing them to be dated from the ratio of uranium to lead. For instance, the zircon in the stone is between 500 million and 3 billion years old.
The pattern of ages shows with greater than 95 per cent certainty that the altar stone is Old Red Sandstone from the Orcadian basin in north-east Scotland, says team member Chris Kirkland at Curtin University. This basin was once a massive ancient water body called Lake Orcadie.

The nearest matching Old Red Sandstone to Stonehenge is 750 kilometres away in the vicinity of Inverness, and the furthest is in the Shetland Islands up to 1000 kilometres away – hence why the team thinks the altar stone was probably transported by sea.
Glaciers can carry boulders long distances, but the evidence is that during the last glacial period, the flow of ice in the Orcadian region was northwards rather than southwards, says Kirkland.
So why was the altar stone brought such a long distance? “That is the great unanswerable question,” says Clarke. “All we know is it’s a 6-tonne piece of rock that’s come from 750 kilometres away. That, by itself, tells us an awful lot about the Neolithic society and its connectivity.”
“What they’ve done is pretty rigorous,” says David Nash at the University of Brighton, UK, whose team identified the precise source of the sarsens in Wiltshire. “It’s a really sound piece of work.”

Pinning down the source of the altar stone more precisely will be difficult because the Orcadian basin extends over a vast area and is up to 8 kilometres deep, says Nash. “That’s a big, big job, because there’s an awful lot of Old Red Sandstone in northern Scotland.”
With the sarsens, by contrast, there were fewer potential sources, so locating the exact one was easier, he says.
Genetic studies have shown that the people who did most of the construction of Stonehenge were largely replaced by a new wave of migrants by about 4000 years ago. This could be because a plague pandemic wiped out a large proportion of Europe’s inhabitants around this time.

Topics:archaeology/Stonehenge More