Humans

We will never know who spoke the first sentence or what they said, but we can have some fun speculating. Perhaps it came out of the mouth of a Stone Age man who hoped to defeat a rival and win the affections of a young woman. He might have sidled up to his love interest and, while furtively pointing at his competitor, whispered gently in her ear something that translates into English as “shit-head”.
Ridiculous? Not if you are guided by the research of linguist Ljiljana Progovac. She points out that although Charles Darwin described language as “half art, half instinct”, most people who study its evolution have neglected the creative element. Her research starts to redress that by homing in on the wordplay involved in compound phrases such as shit-head, skin-flint and lily-livered, many of which are written as single words today. These, she believes, are linguistic fossils that hint at a crucial stage in language evolution: the moment when humans realised that they could string two words together to create very short sentences.
What’s more, after gathering examples of such phrases, Progovac noticed they have something surprising in common. “They are usually derogatory,” she says. And there could be a good evolutionary reason for that too.

Language is central to the human experience, but studying its ancient roots is difficult because it leaves no archaeological traces – at least until the invention of writing. Nevertheless, judging by communication systems in other animals, we can assume that our ancestors started by making simple noises or… More

More than just fossils show us how humans have evolved through timeIvan M / Alamy Stock Photo
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.
This month, Our Human Story turns 50 (months old). For the 50th instalment, I thought I would do something a little different: take stock of what’s happened, and look ahead. I emailed 10 researchers, asking them two questions:

What has been the biggest advance in human evolution of the past five years? This could… More

Bill McConkey
In the 1970s, in a grave in a Bronze Age cemetery in Shahr-i Sokhta, Iran, an incredible object was unearthed next to a human skull: the oldest complete board game ever discovered. Around 4500 years old, it consists of a board with 20 circular spaces created from the coils of a carved snake, four dice and 27 geometric pieces.
The Shahr-i Sokhta game is one of many ancient board games discovered around the world, such as the Roman game Ludus Latrunculorum and the Egyptian game Senet, found in Tutankhamun’s tomb. But we have only been able to guess how to play these games. There are no preserved rulebooks – with the notable exception of the Royal Game of Ur from ancient Mesopotamia, whose long-lost rules were deciphered in 2007 from a cuneiform tablet in the British Museum.

Now, though, another tool is helping to bring these games back to life. In recent years, researchers have been harnessing artificial intelligence to assist in the hunt for likely rules. The goal is to make these forgotten games realistically playable again, while also gaining insights into the evolution of game types. “These games act as a window into the past, offering glimpses into the social and cultural dynamics of the people who played them,” says Eric Piette at the Catholic University of… More

Santa Claus alone is not enough for a happy ChristmasTristan Fewings/Getty Images for Hamleys
He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice, but Santa’s festive surveillance seemingly does nothing to improve children’s behaviour. Instead, it may be that wider Christmas rituals, like putting up a tree and going carolling, can prompt children to be a bit nicer – a finding that may help us better understand how religion influences behaviour.
“The question was, does belief in Santa Claus influence how children behave?” says Rohan Kapitány at Durham University in the UK. “Does this belief,… More

An artist’s reconstruction of the toddler with his mother consuming mammoth meatEric Carlson/Ben Potter (UAF)/Jim Chatters (McMaster University)
An analysis of the bones of a boy who died in what is now Montana 12,800 years ago shows that nearly half of his diet came from mammoth meat.
“To have it turn out to be 40 per cent, it’s just like, wow!” says James Chatters at McMaster University in Canada. In fact, when compared with other animals alive at this time, the boy’s diet was more similar to that of the carnivorous scimitar-toothed cat than that of… More

A trackway of footprints thought to have been left by a Paranthropus boisei individualNeil T. Roach
Preserved footprints in Kenya appear to record two different species of ancient humans walking over the same muddy lakeshore, probably within days of each other. It is one of the most dramatic demonstrations ever found that the world was once home to multiple hominin species living side by side.
“It’s really exceptional that we find this evidence for two different species walking across that surface,” says Kevin Hatala at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The footprints were found in 2021 in Koobi Fora, Kenya, near the eastern shore of Lake Turkana. They were first spotted by team member Richard Loki at the Turkana Basin Institute, says Hatala: “It was a team of Kenyans who were working there originally.”Advertisement

Preserved in a dried-out layer of sand and silt, the team found a trackway consisting of 12 footprints (see image, above), evidently left by one individual walking in a straight line. There were also three isolated prints near the main group, seemingly made by three different individuals. The lack of signs of mud cracking or overprinting of tracks with others indicate that the prints were all made at about the same time. “These sites probably capture a window of time anywhere from minutes to a few days or so,” says Hatala.
The sediment has been dated to about 1.52 million years ago. The isolated tracks resemble those left by modern humans: the heel struck the ground first, then the foot rolled forwards before pushing off with the sole. Hatala and his colleagues suggest that these were made by Homo erectus, which are known to have lived in the area.
In contrast, the continuous trackway was made by a more flat-footed hominin. Hatala and his colleagues suggest this could have been Paranthropus boisei, another kind of hominin that lived in the region.
The fossil footprint on the left with a deeper heel imprint is thought to have been made by a Homo erectus, the more flat-footed one on the right by a Paranthropus boiseiKevin Hatala/Chatham
“With footprints, you can never be 100 per cent sure who made them,” says Ashleigh Wiseman at University College London, who wasn’t involved in the study. However, H. erectus and P. boisei are the only hominins whose remains have been found preserved in the area, “so we can make an informed guess that it is those two”.
If the trackway really was made by a P. boisei individual, it shows that they walked bipedally, says Wiseman. While skulls, arm and leg bones have been attributed to Paranthropus, she says, “we have never found a skull in association with the rest of the skeleton”. That means we know little about their bodies apart from their heads, and their walking style has been a mystery. The trackway changes that: “It’s unequivocal evidence of walking on two legs.”
These two species were very different. H. erectus was one of the earliest members of our genus, Homo. They had larger brains than earlier hominins and became the first of the clade to travel outside Africa. In contrast, P. boisei were small-brained with large teeth and jaws, apparently adapted to eating chewy foods like grasses and sedges.

Hatala and his team then looked at other known footprints discovered in the same region and time period and found that they seemed to match either one species or the other. “We see a similar pattern at multiple other sites, and they might span more than 100,000 years,” he says. “It seems like these two species were coexisting on this same immediate landscape with one another for a very prolonged period of time.”
“We’re guessing that there was maybe low to neutral levels of competition between them, if they were able to coexist for more than 100,000 years,” says Hatala. Previous research has suggested the two ate different foods. Unlike P. boisei, H. erectus is thought to have eaten a varied diet that included hunting large animals.
“Both of them could carve out their own existence in this shared landscape,” says Hatala. Later, environmental shifts may have driven P. boisei to extinction, while the more adaptable H. erectus survived.

Topics:evolution/human evolution More

Satellite image showing channels that formed part of an ancient fishery, and Mayan sites nearbyGoogle Earth
Archaeologists have discovered a massive network of ancient fisheries in Belize constructed by hunter-gatherers some 4000 years ago.
The system of earthen channels exceeds 640 kilometres in length and dates to the Archaic Period, which preceded the emergence of Maya civilisation centuries later. It is the oldest large-scale fish-trapping facility ever recorded in Central America.

“We were all expecting it to date to a period of sedentary Maya civilisation,” says Eleanor Harrison-Buck… More

A reconstruction of the famous hominin LucyFrank Nowikowski/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 hundred years ago, on 28 November 1924, anthropologist Raymond Dart opened a crate. It held a consignment of fossils from Taung, a quarry in South Africa, including a small skull that looked part-ape, part-human. Dart named it “Australopithecus africanus: The Man-Ape of South Africa”. It was the first Australopithecus specimen to be identified, and the first evidence that early humans evolved in… More