Humans

Mudlarking, once a trade of the Victorian poor, has evolved into a modern-day hobby that captivates everyday Londoners and history enthusiasts. What began as a desperate means of survival, scouring the Thames foreshore for anything of value, has become a way to connect with the city’s deep and layered past.
In London Museum’s new exhibition, Secrets of the Thames, over 350 artefacts recovered from the river’s muddy banks, many on public display for the first time, are brought together to tell a remarkable story. Visitors are invited to step into the world of the mudlarks: amateur archaeologists, urban explorers and passionate storytellers who uncover fragments of daily life spanning centuries.
“What mudlarks do is really important to preserve history as soon as it’s found,” says Alessio Chicconi, a palaeontologist who has unearthed thousands of artefacts since taking up mudlarking during lockdown.
The Thames is uniquely suited to mudlarking. The river’s tidal nature, rising and falling twice daily, constantly stirs and reshapes the foreshore, periodically revealing and concealing layers of history. Its anaerobic mud slows the decay of organic materials like leather and wood, creating rare opportunities for preservation. The result is a time capsule stretching from prehistoric flint tools to 17th-century shoes.Advertisement
Beyond the tangible finds, what draws many mudlarks back to the river is a deep sense of connection to Britons of the past. “It’s quite incredible when we find these objects, to think that I am the first person to touch it in 4000 years,” says Chicconi. Each item, no matter how ordinary it might seem, holds the story of a life once lived and offers a glimpse into everyday moments. It invites an appreciation for the supposedly mundane: a clay pipe, a pin, a shard of pottery. And in the quiet ritual of searching the foreshore, Secrets of the Thames reveals not just the artefacts left behind, but the timeless human desire to be remembered. As Chicconi puts it, “History will find a way to bring up your name.”  
London Museum’s Secrets of the Thames exhibition is open until 1 Mar 2026.

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A mammoth skeleton at the State Museum for Natural History in Stuttgart, GermanyDANIEL NAUPOLD/dpa/Alamy
Archaeologists excavating 400,000-year-old rock in western Ukraine have uncovered fragments of what could be the oldest human-made ivory objects ever found. These artefacts would have been too soft to use as cutting tools, but they could have been used as teaching aids, the researchers suggest.
“If the interpretations are correct, they add to an apparently increasing appreciation of the intelligence of pre-modern humans,” says Gary Haynes at the University of Nevada. More

A mammoth skeleton at the State Museum for Natural History in Stuttgart, GermanyDANIEL NAUPOLD/dpa/Alamy
Archaeologists excavating 400,000-year-old rock in western Ukraine have uncovered fragments of what could be the oldest human-made ivory objects ever found. These artefacts would have been too soft to use as cutting tools, but they could have been used as teaching aids, the researchers suggest.
“If the interpretations are correct, they add to an apparently increasing appreciation of the intelligence of pre-modern humans,” says Gary Haynes at the University of Nevada. More

A mammoth skeleton at the State Museum for Natural History in Stuttgart, GermanyDANIEL NAUPOLD/dpa/Alamy
Archaeologists excavating 400,000-year-old rock in western Ukraine have uncovered fragments of what could be the oldest human-made ivory objects ever found. These artefacts would have been too soft to use as cutting tools, but they could have been used as teaching aids, the researchers suggest.
“If the interpretations are correct, they add to an apparently increasing appreciation of the intelligence of pre-modern humans,” says Gary Haynes at the University of Nevada. More

The drive to explore has taken humans to most of the habitable planetMarco Bottigelli/Getty Images
The Explorer’s GeneAlex Hutchinson (Mariner Books (UK, 10 April; US, on sale now))
Approximately 50,000 years ago, our ancestors – the first modern humans – set out from their African homeland in droves. We don’t know for sure what prompted this mass uprooting (sometimes known as “the Great Human Expansion”), but our species’ staggering geographic spread is proof of its success.
In relatively short order, humans made it to more or less “every habitable corner of the planet”, writes Alex Hutchinson, a journalist,… More

The thigh and shin bones of Paranthropus robustusJason L. Heaton
A fossilised left leg unearthed in South Africa belongs to one of the smallest adult hominins ever discovered – smaller even than the so-called “hobbit”, Homo floresiensis.
The diminutive hominin was a member of the species Paranthropus robustus. This was one of several species of Paranthropus, a group of ape-like hominins that shared the African landscape with the earliest representatives of our human genus, Homo, between about 2.7 and 1.2 million years ago. Paranthropus had heavily built skulls that housed small brains and large teeth – which some species… More

The racial divide in track events is down to factors other than geneticsHannah Peters/Getty Images
AdaptableHerman Pontzer (Allen Lane)
Fancy eating the real paleo diet? Rotten meat should be top of your menu, preferably with a generous helping of maggots. Dietary records “from every continent and climate are alive with maggots, worms and the soft, smelly flesh of decaying animals. Many groups preferred rotten meat to fresh,” says evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer. “The more it stank, the better.”
In fact, we seem to have evolved to eat rotten meat. Our stomachs are much more acidic than most other… More

A relief from Ashurbanipal’s palace showing him in a chariotBritish Museum/Auday Hussein
It is one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge: a vast library of texts amassed by Assyrian King Ashurbanipal, who ruled ancient Mesopotamia about 2700 years ago. But after his death, it was ransacked and burned to the ground. Luckily, the texts were written on clay tablets, and so were baked and preserved by the heat.
A fragment of the Epic of GilgameshBritish Museum/Camryn Good
When the ruins of the library were found in Victorian times in what is now Iraq, the astonishing richness of this lost world was revealed. A new book, The Library of Ancient Wisdom by Selena Wisnom at the University of Leicester, UK, pieces together a vivid portrait of Mesopotamian life from the shattered remnants of the 30,000 or so tablets in Ashurbanipal’s library.Advertisement
Royal Game of Ur board gameCamryn Good
Written in cuneiform, the world’s oldest form of writing, the tablets not only bring kings and queens to life, but also priests, traders and professional lamenters. They also include magic spells and letters of complaint. Our lives are still influenced by ripples from this ancient world via the 60-minute hour, mathematical discoveries and the invention of the zodiac.
Clay prism with accounts of Ashurbanipal’s military campaignsAnthony Huan/CC BY-SA 2.0
Pictured from top: a relief from Ashurbanipal’s palace showing him in a chariot; a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh, telling the story of a great flood; the Royal Game of Ur board game, which Ashurbanipal enjoyed as a boy, according to letters by his brother; a clay prism with accounts of Ashurbanipal’s military campaigns; and a letter in which his sister berates his wife for her poor cuneiform.
A letter in which his sister berates his wife for her poor cuneiform.Auday Hussein
The Library of Ancient Wisdom is out now in the UK and will be published on 12 May in the US.

Topics:archaeology/ancient humans More