Humans

The Greek word for “purple” has been extracted from a Herculaneum scrollVesuvius Challenge
Almost 2000 years after they were buried by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, scrolls from a library in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum have begun to reveal their secrets. The tightly wrapped papyrus scrolls were charred in the disaster, which also destroyed the nearby town of Pompeii. But by studying 3D X-ray scans of the scrolls, researchers have deciphered a word on one of them: “porphyras”, meaning “purple”.
The breakthrough came from Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His success involved training an AI to identify nearly invisible ink-like patterns in the 3D scans.
“Seeing Luke’s first word was a shock,” says Michael McOsker at the University of Cologne in Germany, who was not involved in the discovery. “It was immediately convincing, like ‘Good lord, that’s Greek.’”Advertisement

Farritor analysed the 3D scans as a competitor in the open-source Vesuvius Challenge, which is awarding a series of prizes for deciphering the scrolls. He submitted his discovery in August.
At almost the same time, Youssef Nader, a data science graduate student at the Free University of Berlin in Germany, independently discovered the same word using a different AI technique to detect possible letter shapes within the scroll image segments. This provided an even clearer picture of the scroll segment, and is already yielding new, clear images of others. McOsker described Nader’s first word snapshot as “even more impressive” than Farritor’s.
The discovery builds on the work of previous Vesuvius Challenge contributors, who designed computational tools for mapping out segments of scroll. It was also made possible because of the 3D X-ray scans produced by a team led by Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky.
In the past, papyrologists could only study the Herculaneum scrolls by physically unrolling them – a process that inevitably damaged the ancient papyri that had been carbonised by the heat of the volcanic debris that buried them, says McOsker. And even once researchers started using 3D imaging and computational techniques to digitally reveal the hidden contents of the scrolls, “attempts to read the still rolled-up papyri were mirages”, he says.
This latest breakthrough may pave the way for someone to claim the Vesuvius Challenge’s grand prize, worth $700,000, by reading four passages of text from inside two intact scrolls before 31 December 2023.
“I’m confident that Luke, Youssef, and the other competitors can solve a whole roll,” says McOsker. “Up until now, all the unrolled papyri that we study are missing their beginnings and are in bad condition, so the prospect of a reading a complete text, from beginning to end, is really quite something.”

Topics: More

Illustration of a Homo erectus child with her mother in the Ethiopian highlandsDiego Rodriguez Robredo
Ancient humans were living in the highlands of what is now Ethiopia as early as 2 million years ago. A reanalysis of a fossilised jawbone from the region confirms that it belonged to a Homo erectus, and represents the earliest evidence of hominins living in such high-altitude areas.
The highlands represent “a third pole for human evolution in Africa”, says Margherita Mussi of the Italo-Spanish Archaeological Mission at Melka Kunture and Balchit, based in Rome. Hominins have been found in large numbers in eastern and southern Africa, but not to date in upland areas.
Mussi and her colleagues re-examined the lower jawbone of an infant, which was discovered in 1981 at a site called Garba IV in the Ethiopian highlands. Garba IV is one of a cluster of sites known collectively as Melka Kunture. Mussi has nicknamed the jawbone “Little Garba”.Advertisement
The jawbone had previously been identified as an early member of the genus Homo, which includes our own species Homo sapiens and several now-extinct groups. However, it wasn’t possible to confidently identify the species.
Mussi and her team used synchrotron imaging to study Little Garba’s teeth, which hadn’t yet erupted from the jawbone. They compared the shape of the teeth to those of multiple hominin species. “The teeth are a very good marker, so we can say for sure this is indeed an early Homo erectus,” says Mussi.
In a previous study published in 2021, Mussi’s team also re-dated the Garba IV site. It consists of layers of sediment laid down over time. In the sediments, the researchers found traces of past shifts in Earth’s magnetic field, which could be matched to similar records elsewhere. Based on this, they conclude that Little Garba is 2 million years old. This makes it one of the oldest H. erectus ever found.
It may even be that the species evolved in the highlands. “We don’t know if Homo erectus evolved at lower altitudes and came up, or if it evolved locally,” says Mussi.
Furthermore, the researchers re-examined the stone tools found in the sediments at Garba IV. They say there is a transition from older and simpler Oldowan tools to more sophisticated Acheulean tools between 2 and 1.95 million years ago. The Acheulean tools were harder to make because they required careful planning, but they opened up a wider range of foods.
Putting these lines of evidence together, Mussi argues that the H. erectus population had to adapt to conditions in the highlands, and developed new styles of stone tools to do so.
The identification of Little Garba as H. erectus looks solid, says Clément Zanolli at the University of Bordeaux in France. He is less convinced by the transition from Oldowan to Acheulean, because there aren’t many Oldowan tools in the older layers.

For Zanolli, “the most exciting aspect” of the study is the highland location. “It’s the oldest [hominin] we know to have reached the high plateau of Ethiopia,” he says. While it is possible that future excavations might find even older hominins in the area, “for now it’s the earliest”.
Garba IV is about 2000 metres above sea level, which isn’t so high that low oxygen levels would be a major challenge, says Zanolli. It would have been colder than lowland areas, but the lowlands were also desert, so the highlands may have been more hospitable. “In this high-altitude environment you have more trees, more bushes, probably more animals,” he says. “So it’s very likely easier to find food and to survive there.”
Millennia later, H. erectus became the first known hominin to expand its population beyond Africa, reaching Dmanisi in what is now Georgia by 1.8 million years ago, and Java in what became Indonesia by perhaps 1.3 million years ago. Living in the Ethiopian highlands may have been good preparation, says Mussi. If Homo erectus was able to adapt to this environment, it could also live in other cooler regions away from the equator, she says.

Topics: More

Illustration of Neanderthals butchering a freshly killed cave lionJulio Lacerda/NLD
Neanderthals sometimes hunted now-extinct big cats called cave lions, which were larger than modern lions. The finding is some of the earliest evidence of ancient humans killing top predators, as opposed to plant-eaters like mammoths.
The evidence is twofold: a cave lion (Panthera spelaea) specimen revealing evidence of hunting and the remains of a cave lion pelt with its claws still attached.
Gabriele Russo at the University of Tübingen in Germany and his colleagues re-examined a 48,000-year-old cave lion skeleton found at Siegsdorf in Germany in the 1980s.Advertisement
Researchers already knew there were cut marks on the bones, suggesting the lion had been butchered after death. Russo has now found a puncture mark on one of its ribs, which seems to have been made by a wooden spear thrust into the animal’s chest. The injury had previously been misidentified as a wound from another carnivore.
Modern humans (Homo sapiens) hadn’t yet established themselves in Europe 48,000 years ago. Instead, the continent was home to Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). It seems they were the hunters.
Russo’s team also uncovered a new cave lion specimen in the Einhornhöhle cave in Germany. In a layer of sediment dated to about 190,000 years ago, they found bones from the tips of the lion’s toes.
These had cut marks consistent with the animal having been skinned “in such a way that the claws were left in the paw of the animal”, says Russo. The team interprets this as evidence that Neanderthals took the cave lion’s skin into the cave, perhaps for a ritual purpose or simply for decoration.
The cave lion remains from Siegsdorf displayed alongside a reproduction of a wooden spear similar to those used by NeanderthalsVolker Minkus/NLD
By this time, hominins had been hunting a wide range of animals for a long time. There is evidence of earlier species like Homo erectus killing the likes of wildebeest in Africa up to 2 million years ago. Later, Neanderthals hunted huge animals like elephants. However, Russo says they probably didn’t target top predators like cave lions very often, partly because they are less common than herbivores, and partly because of the danger involved.
There is also a 2010 study describing the remains of a cave lion found at Atapuerca in northern Spain, from around 350,000 years ago. At the time, the region was inhabited by the ancestors of Neanderthals. In theory, this could push back the evidence for hominins hunting lions even further. However, although the paper is called “The hunted hunter”, Russo says there is no evidence of hunting-related injuries and the animal could have been scavenged.

Topics: More

The Læborg runestone has an inscription that mentions Queen ThyraRoberto Fortuna/National Museum of Denmark
A mysterious queen named Thyra who lived during the Viking era may have been one of the founders of what is now Denmark. Multiple commemorative “runestones” mention her by name, suggesting she was a central figure.
“Because of the many runestones erected in honour of Thyra, we can conclude that she must have been very powerful and that she came from a very powerful family,” says Lisbeth Imer at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.
Denmark’s Viking Age lasted from around AD 800 to 1050. A key figure was Harald “Bluetooth”, who was king from about AD 958 until his death in 987. The Bluetooth wireless technology standard is named after him. Harald’s parents were King Gorm, who came to power in around 936, and Queen Thyra.Advertisement
Under these two generations of monarchs, Denmark became a unified state. Previously, it was divided into smaller kingdoms or territories. “We have no idea of how many, and who may have governed them, because of the lack of written sources,” says Imer. The lack of records also means we know almost nothing about Gorm and Thyra.
However, Imer had reason to suspect that Thyra was a major figure. In Viking-era Denmark, powerful people were often commemorated with runestones: tall slabs of granite with runes engraved on them. The name “Thyra” is found on four runestones from the mid-900s. Two are from Jelling, where the monarchs lived, and were erected by Gorm and Harald. The other two, the Læborg and Bække 1 runestones, were found elsewhere and seem to have been carved by an unknown individual called Ravnunge-Tue.
To find out if the runestones referred to the same Thyra, Imer and her colleagues set out to determine if they had all been carved by the same craftsperson. This would suggest that they were all produced around the same time and probably referred to the same person. To find out, the researchers examined the methods of engraving and the sizes and shapes of the runes.
One of the Jelling runestones was too poorly preserved to get reliable results, but the other was in good condition and the style of its engravings matched the Læborg runestone. This suggests that Thyra was commemorated not just by her immediate family, but by other people elsewhere in the country.
Thyra may not have been unusual in Norse societies, says Imer. “Elite women probably had much power,” she says. “A large burial mound in Oseberg in Norway contained the bodies of two women, who must have had some of the highest positions in the community.”

Topics:Archeology More

CONSIDER two scenarios. In the first, you have a life filled with love and meaning and enough money to get by comfortably. However, after you die, something terrible is revealed about you – which may not even be true – and people come to despise you. In the second, you have a life of relative hardship and obscurity, but after you die, it is revealed that you were an incredibly talented artist and your reputation is assured forever. Which option would you choose?
If you picked the second, you aren’t alone, as Brett Waggoner at the University of Otago, New Zealand, discovered when he carried out this thought experiment. It may seem like a counterintuitive choice, but it reveals our deep concern for legacy. Across time and cultures, people seem to have acted with a desire to etch their names into the history books, from the pharaoh Khufu’s Great Pyramid of Giza to acts of scientific discovery, works of art, sporting achievements and public philanthropy. Nevertheless, such behaviour is something of a paradox. Why devote so much time and energy to being warmly recalled when you won’t be around to see the benefits?
Researchers trying to answer this question have come up with some surprising answers. Some suggest it gives individuals an evolutionary advantage. Others see it as a sort of glitch in the way we think – a mistake based on various cognitive biases. Meanwhile, it is becoming clear that our desire to be positively remembered is far more than just self-aggrandisement. Nurtured in the correct way, it could be leveraged to tackle long-term, global issues, including climate change, biodiversity … More

Earthworks made by ancient societies have been found throughout the Amazon rainforestDiego Lourenço Gurgel
There are probably more than 10,000 undiscovered pre-Columbian archaeological sites hidden in the Amazon, researchers have concluded after surveying a fraction of the sprawling rainforest.
The study adds to growing evidence suggesting that the region isn’t a pristine tropical forest, but has been significantly altered by Indigenous societies that have inhabited it for more than 12,000 years.
Luiz Eduardo Oliveira e Cruz de Aragão at the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil and his colleagues surveyed 5315 square kilometres of the Amazon using lidar, a technology that uses reflected laser light to create a 3D representation of a landscape.Advertisement
By beaming pulses of light into the rainforest, usually from planes or drones, lidar records slight variations in topography and has uncovered numerous archaeological sites in recent years.
The team discovered 24 previously unknown earthworks in the areas it surveyed, which are thought to be the remnants of civilisations that lived between 1500 and 500 years ago.
The discoveries include a fortified village in the southern Amazon, a region known to have been densely populated due to the high concentration of earthworks that were connected by ancient roads.
Defensive and ceremonial sites in the southwestern Amazon were also brought to light, along with permanent settlements and ceremonial sites with large stone structures arranged in circular clusters in the northern Amazon.
The survey covered only 0.08 per cent of the Amazon’s 6.7 million square kilometres. Aragão and his colleagues used a computer model to predict how many other sites could remain hidden under the forest canopy, based on the concentration of earthworks in the new data and 937 earthworks previously discovered. They estimate that between 10,272 and 23,648 earthworks may lay undiscovered.
The model analysed the typical characteristics of known earthworks, including the local temperature, rainfall, soil clay content and distance from the nearest river, to predict where others are likely to be. “These are the characteristics needed for building the structures, but also surviving in these regions,” says Aragão.
Most of the predicted structures are in the southwestern Amazon, many in the Brazilian state of Acre.

Emerging evidence indicates that the Indigenous societies that occupied the Amazon for more than 12,000 years were larger than previously thought, at one point numbering as many as 5 million people. It is unclear why the jungle cities disappeared centuries ago.
In common with previous studies, Aragão and his colleagues also found high concentrations of domesticated plants that yield nuts or fruits close to archaeological sites, suggesting these lost societies significantly altered the composition of the rainforest. This might mean predictions about how the rainforest will adapt to climate change could be incorrect, as it isn’t as pristine as previously thought, the researchers say.
“There has always been this bias in Western thought that the Amazon was like a Garden of Eden, a primordial society that was inimical to human society,” says Michael Heckenberger at the University of Florida, who wasn’t involved in the study. “We are now seeing there was a significant degree of human intervention and variation just 500 years ago.”
The growing evidence that there were massive societies in the region before the arrival of Europeans could help protect the Amazon, says Heckenberger. Around 17 per cent of the rainforest has been cleared and some researchers believe it has already reached a tipping point where it no longer generates enough rainfall to support itself.
“If we’ve now demonstrated that even more of the Amazon forest is actually an artefact of cultural influence, the implication of that is that it’s the heritage of living Indigenous peoples and must be protected as these are their ancestors,” says Heckenberger.

Topics:archaeology/The Amazon rainforest More

Location of the Charco Verde II archaeological site in the Piedra river valley, SpainMULTIPALEOIBERIA project team
Excavations at a rock shelter have revealed that humans lived in high and remote regions of what is now Spain during the coldest part of the last glacial period, between 21,400 and 15,100 years ago.
High-altitude regions are colder and more challenging than low-lying zones, but even so, the Spanish plateau probably “hosted a relatively dense human settlement”, says Manuel Alcaraz-Castaño at the University of Alcalá in Spain.
Beginning 2.58 million years ago, Earth has been through alternating periods of cold “glacials”, in which the area covered by ice and snow expands, and warmer “interglacials” where the ice retreats. The last glacial period occurred from about 115,000 to 11,700 years ago. It was at its coldest between 26,500 and 19,000 years ago, a time called the last glacial maximum. This posed a significant challenge for modern humans, who had arrived in Europe about 20,000 years earlier.Advertisement
Conditions were particularly challenging on the meseta, a high-altitude plateau in what is now central Spain. Climate modelling by Ariane Burke at the University of Montréal in Canada and her colleagues concluded that as well as being cold and dry, the meseta was also highly unpredictable – making it harder to permanently settle there.
Nevertheless, people persisted. Since 2020, Alcaraz-Castaño and his colleagues have excavated a site called Charco Verde II in the Piedra river valley, Spain. Located around 1000 metres above sea level, Charco Verde II is a flat platform under an escarpment. Buried in the sediments, the team found fragments of charcoal from fires, animal bones with cut marks and signs of having been heated, and stone tools including blades and scrapers.
Radiocarbon dating suggests Charco Verde II was first inhabited between 21,400 and 20,800 years ago, and the residence ended between 16,600 and 15,100 years ago. It isn’t clear how continuous this was. “Occupations at the site were recurrent during 5000 years, but we still don’t know if there were prolonged periods where the site was not inhabited,” says Alcaraz-Castaño.
Preserved pollen and animal bones suggest the area was dominated by open grasslands, dotted with trees, such as juniper, and populated by herbivores like horses and ibex. Average annual temperatures were about 6 °C lower than today, says Alcaraz-Castaño, so in winter “ice and snow were probably everywhere around the site”. However, the summers were probably fairly mild.
“It’s nice to see people pushing the boundaries and finding new sites,” says Burke, who wasn’t involved in the new study. “In the early Upper Palaeolithic, people were perfectly capable of adapting to very cold environments.”
Her modelling studies identified the Charco Verde II region as relatively suitable for settlement because its climate was less variable than the central meseta. “It makes sense that the sites are where they say they are,” she says.
Burke adds that it is possible people did live even in the very harshest parts of the meseta, but such settlements may have been both scarce and short-lived. “Our chances of finding sites [there] are fairly small,” she says.

Such settlements were made possible by a host of behavioural skills. “Both fire and clothing were regular technologies of Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, as were some sorts of dwellings,” says Alcaraz-Castaño.
So far, Charco Verde II hasn’t yielded direct evidence of clothing. However, Burke notes that the team did find stone tools called burins that were often used to create the eyes in needles – “which means fine sewing skills and tight seams, so waterproof and windproof clothing”, she says.
Social networks were probably just as essential for survival, says Burke. Such networks “provide people with the means to exchange information over quite large territories”, she says, and to take shelter when conditions are harsh.
In line with this, the Charco Verde II dig revealed four perforated shell beads, one of them with traces of an ochre pigment. Such jewellery often served as a marker of identity, says Burke, and is a hint that, even in a sparsely populated region, people were still maintaining social relationships with other groups.

Topics:archaeology/ancient humans More

“I want you to make a substitution in the course of our new IVF research partnership” … An extract from Sebastian Faulks’s new novel The Seventh SonScience Photo Library/ZEPHYR/Getty Images
“I have a proposition.” Parn leant forward and put his hand on Malik Wood’s knee.
“Oh yes?”
Parn sat back again. ‘Did you know I fund a palaeoanthropology research programme? It’s attached to the University of London. They do top genetic work. Looking at old bones. Sequencing the genome of Homo vannesiensis. That kind of thing. I know people there. In the labs. I have access.”Advertisement
“I bet.”
“You know all that work they did in Leipzig a few years back. The Max Planck people. Putting together genomes from scraps of forty-thousand-year-old bone. Brilliant stuff. But those PCR machines they used, they’re pretty old now. We have better kit.”
“And?”
Lukas Parn’s voice had lost all trace of the Outback. “I’m interested in hybrids. What they can tell us about ourselves. How we got to be the way we are. The inexplicable leap. The ‘saltation’, as you call it.”
“My God. You’re not a creationist, are you? You’re not going to try to prove that Homo sapiens was put together all in one go by God?”
“No.” Parn laughed. “No, I’m not a creationist. But I’m an exceptionalist. I believe that the superiority of Homo sapiens hasn’t yet been explained.”
“You’re saying Darwin was wrong?”
“Sure. He was wrong about a lot of things. Women. Genetics.”
“But by the standards of what was known at the time, he—”
“Exactly. ‘The time’ was 1850-something. Getting on for two hundred years ago. Anyway, it’s not about a Victorian with a beard. It’s about genetics, a word unknown to Darwin.”
“How am I involved in this?”
“Your lab. Your touch.”
Dr Wood drank some wine. “I’ll need to know more.”
“You will. In due course. But can I take it that you would be interested in having your salary increased. And a one-off bonus of, let’s say, five times salary on successful completion?”
“It depends on what I need to do.”
“Something well within your capabilities. I want you to make a substitution in the course of our new IVF research partnership with the NHS.”
“A substitution?”
“A simple switch. One guy’s sperm for another. Before it hits the egg.”
“That’s ethically—”
“Extremely important is what it is,” said Parn. “From a scientific point of view. We’re looking at a human hybrid.”
Extract taken from The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson Heinemann, out now), the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here

Topics: More