Humans

P.PLAILLY/E.DAYNES/SCIEN​CE PHOTO LIBRARY
IT ISN’T often that an esteemed professor sets out to investigate a scientific discovery made by a 15-year-old boy, but in 1938 Robert Broom made an exception. The British-born palaeontologist was keenly aware that 1930s South Africa was gaining a reputation for its exceptionally primitive-looking hominin fossils. So, when he heard that schoolchild Gert Terblanche had discovered fragments of a hominin skull in a cave there, he tracked him down immediately. Broom’s visit to the boy’s school paid off – he later recalled that the teenager was sauntering around with “four of what are perhaps the most valuable teeth in the world in his trouser pocket”.
Within months, Broom had finished analysing the fossils. Deciding they were unlike anything discovered before, he gave the ancient hominin a new name: Paranthropus.
But despite his confidence that the remains were valuable, Paranthropus never became famous. Perhaps that is because it was a misfit: it resembled one of our small-brained ancestors, but it was present on Earth long after other ape-like hominins had given way to big-brained humans. Even among palaeoanthropologists, Paranthropus is described as the “forgotten” hominin.
Perhaps not for much longer. Spurred on by the discovery of more fossils, researchers are finally reassessing this addition to our evolutionary tree – and their work suggests it was one of the oddest. Paranthropus may have been a skilled tool-maker, but it also potentially grazed grass like a cow and communicated with low rumbles like an elephant. The question now is, can the research bring us closer to understanding how the last of the ape-people survived in a world that was dominated… More

Dolmen of menga, a megalithic burial mound in SpainimageBROKER.com GmbH & Co. KG/Alamy
This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox for free every month.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: ancient Greek statues weren’t always plain white marble. Many of these sculptures were actually painted in vivid colours. However, most of the pigments have either eroded away or been scraped off by overzealous museum curators, leaving us with just the underlying white stone.
For example,… More

Esteban De Armas/Alamy
IN HIS poem The Conundrum of the Workshops, Rudyard Kipling imagined an early human pausing to admire a drawing he had scratched in the dirt, only to hear a voice whispering: “It’s pretty, but is it Art?”
Archaeologists know a bit about scratching in the dirt, and when their excavations reveal a beautiful ancient object, they find themselves asking the very same question. They are motivated by a desire to step inside the minds of our prehistoric ancestors. In many cases, they want to understand if and when ancient hominins began to create art, as we explore in… More

Antonio Sortino
IF YOU have ever marvelled at the accomplishment of Stone Age cave artists, you are in good company. In 1940, on visiting Lascaux cave in southern France, Pablo Picasso supposedly said: “Since Lascaux, we have invented nothing.” Perspective, movement, impressionism, abstraction, pointillism – it is all there. And these artworks are some 17,000 years old.
Picasso’s remark may be apocryphal. It was certainly premature. In 1994, hundreds of paintings twice the age of those at Lascaux were discovered at Chauvet cave, also in France. The Chauvet paintings are, quite simply, stunning: prowling lions and galloping horses are captured so vividly that the remote Stone Age world becomes almost tangible. Even more astonishingly, this art was created shortly after the dawn of the “cultural explosion”, an event archaeologists have long recognised as marking a surge in creativity that seems to have come out of nowhere. How could these first artists have already been so good?
We now have an answer: the Chauvet artists weren’t the first. Discoveries in recent decades have shattered the assumption that art was invented by our species some 40,000 years ago. Instead, we have increasingly compelling evidence of artistry in other ancient hominins.
Needless to say, this challenges our beliefs about who invented art. But it does more besides. It offers an insight into our forerunners’ appreciation for aesthetics and the value they placed on objects that seem, at first glance, unnecessary for survival. In so doing, it also provides tantalising hints that art has been a vital component of hominin life for millions of years.
To say that humans are the only living artists… More

It may be older users who are driving the rise in cannabis use in the USVolha Shukaila/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
Cannabis is the most used illicit substance in the world, with an estimated 219 million people using it in 2021. Nowhere is it more popular than in the US and Canada.

In 2021, 52 million people aged 12 and older in the US used cannabis, roughly 1 in 5 people in this age group. Those figures have been inching upwards over the last few decades – a fact that isn’t that surprising given the expanded access to legal (or quasi-legal) cannabis and a shift in attitudes towards the drug.

The uptick in use, ease of access and increased social acceptability of the drug have some experts – and parents – worried, particularly about increased use among adolescents. That is with good reason: a growing body of evidence suggests cannabis use during adolescence may affect brain development, potentially increasing the risk for developing various mental health conditions or substance use disorders.Advertisement
Yet so far, fears of a surge in adolescent cannabis use haven’t been borne out by the data. Results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an annual survey conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, showed that rates of past-month cannabis use among teens aged 12 to 17 in the US have actually declined over the past 20 years: from 8.1 per cent in 2002 to 4.8 per cent in 2021.
Instead, the increase in cannabis use is being driven entirely by adults. The 12 to 17-year-old crowd now has the lowest rates of past-month cannabis.

Some health professionals are sceptical that we are seeing the full picture when it comes to teen use, however. “I cannot believe that that is true, that it has not gone up,” says clinical psychiatrist Ryan Sultan at Columbia University in New York. “Every other piece of information would suggest it should be going up.”
For instance, we know that more people now think of cannabis as a relatively benign substance. “In general, when perceptions of things move toward safety… that increases the likelihood” of use, says Sultan. Legalisation of recreational cannabis has also been linked to increased uptick in use of the drug.
Sultan isn’t ruling out the possibility that expanded legalisation has diminished the drug’s allure, or that kids are choosing to wait until they are older to use weed. If those things turn out to be true, it would be welcome news, he says. But he thinks it is more likely there is a missing piece to the puzzle, hidden by a lag in the data collection.

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This ancient skull shows signs of healing within the walls of fracture lines inflicted by a blunt force injuryQian Wang
A man who lived in what is now China 2700 years ago had a hole cut in his skull to treat a head injury and survived. This suggests that shamanic doctors in that era could do advanced brain surgery.
The Yanghai cemetery in Xinjiang, China, is a large, ancient burial ground containing the graves of a clan that practised shamanism, generally defined as a belief system using trance to communicate with the … More

Human remains from 5000 years ago buried at San Juan ante Portam Latinam in SpainJ. I. Vegas
Stone Age people were fighting small-scale wars in Europe over 5000 years ago, earlier than thought. The conflicts took place long before powerful states formed in the region.
The evidence comes from a re-analysis of hundreds of human remains found at a burial site in northern Spain. The bones are predominantly male and many have evidence of injuries from stabbing and blunt-force trauma – suggesting they belonged to a warrior class.
“It’s too large to be conflict within a community,” says Rick Schulting at the University of Oxford. The sheer scale of the conflict points to early warfare, rather than just interpersonal conflicts or skirmishes, he says.Advertisement
The site in question is San Juan ante Portam Latinam, a rock shelter in a valley in northern Spain. It was found by accident in 1985 when a bulldozer uncovered human remains while widening a track. Radiocarbon dating of the bones suggests they were laid down between 3380 and 3000 BC, during the European Neolithic period.
San Juan ante Portam Latinam is about 20 square metres in area. In that small space, researchers found densely packed human bones. They include 90 complete skeletons, over 200 partial skeletons and thousands of seemingly isolated bones.. There were also many stone weapons, including blades, arrowheads and axes. Many of the bones showed signs of injuries, and because they were all dumped together, the site was initially interpreted as the remains of a massacre.
Schulting and his colleagues have systematically re-analysed the remains. They say San Juan ante Portam Latinam probably doesn’t represent a single massacre, but rather evidence of sustained conflict that was mostly conducted by young males – in other words, warfare.
The team concludes there are at least 338 people interred at San Juan ante Portam Latinam. Of those, at least 23 per cent have visible injuries: one of the highest rates of violent injury found in prehistory. The wounds include 65 unhealed injuries and 89 healed, indicating prolonged conflict. The largest proportion of the injuries were attributable to blunt-force trauma, as might be caused by axes, clubs or thrown stones.
“This is a very careful and meticulous study,” says Martin Smith at Bournemouth University in the UK.
The remains contain more males – especially young males – than would be expected in an indiscriminate massacre. Of 153 individuals whose sex could be estimated, 70 per cent were male. Nearly 45 per cent of these males had visible injuries, compared with almost 24 per cent of the females. Furthermore, among remains that could be classified, 97.6 per cent of unhealed injuries were found on males.
Schulting and his colleagues argue that this points to the existence of a male-biased warrior class, something found in many societies.

“The word ‘war’ is such a loaded term,” says Linda Fibiger at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. But the conflicts observed meet many of the criteria. “There’s no doubt that it’s something that happens at large scale, and it’s probably intergroup rather than intragroup,” she says.
We can’t know for sure why the conflicts were happening, but Schulting says there are some hints. People living in the bottom of the valley and those living in nearby foothills seem to have had subtly different diets and to have practised different funerary rites. “That gives us this sense that there are different political communities, different social communities, living quite close to each other,” he says.
The researchers also found evidence of malnourishment and other poor health indicators. “This might have been a stressful period,” says Fibiger.
“This article adds to the emerging picture we have of the early Neolithic as a time of significant stress, likely linked to growing inequality and changes in the structure of society,” says Smith.
Smith and Fibiger are both co-authors of a review published in January that concluded violence was endemic in Neolithic Europe, probably due to competition over arable land, and that it sometimes wiped out entire communities.

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Sea lettuce is an edible alga found on coastlines around EuropeSeaphotoart / Alamy
People in coastal areas across Europe have been eating seaweed for thousands of years, traces of algae on their teeth have revealed.
There are over 10,000 species of seaweeds that grow close to coastlines around the world. Today, many of these organisms are considered a health food, particularly in Asia, with around 145 regularly eaten species.
“Seaweed is great. It’s available, it’s nutritious, it’s local, it’s renewable,” says Karen Hardy at the University of Glasgow in the UK.Advertisement
There is little evidence for seaweed being a part of ancient diets, apart from at one site in Chile from about 14,000 years ago.
Hardy and her colleagues first discovered traces of seaweed in the calcified plaque on human teeth found at a Neolithic burial site in Orkney, Scotland, dating back around 5000 years.
“We were absolutely astonished,” says Hardy. “This is the first time anyone’s ever detected specific evidence for the consumption of seaweed [in dental plaque].”
After these initial findings, the team decided to expand their study to the rest of Europe. In total, they collected dental plaque samples from 74 individuals from 28 ancient sites in countries such as Spain, Portugal, Estonia and Lithuania.
Of these, 33 individuals had the chemical traces of seaweed or freshwater aquatic plants in their plaque. Those who were buried nearer to the coast were more likely to have evidence of seaweed consumption, while those inland tended to eat freshwater aquatic plants.
The results show that people ate seaweed and marine plants from the Mesolithic, around 8000 years ago, right through to the start of the Middle Ages, around 1500 years ago. This suggests that these foods may well have been a staple part of ancient Europeans’ diet for several millennia.

Since then, seaweed seems to have fallen out of fashion in Europe, says Hardy. “But it would be nice if this study could help to encourage a wider consumption of seaweed in Europe today.”
“This study is important for documenting the early consumption of this abundant maritime food source,” says Tom Dillehay at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. “The presence of seaweeds in early European sites does not surprise me. I think that in many previous archaeological studies around the world, it was not a dietary element many people expected and thus [they] likely gave little [notice] to it.”

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