Humans

Pictograms from Upuigma-tepui rock shelter in Canaima National Park, VenezuelaUNIVERSIDAD SIMON BOLIVAR
An archaeologist has tracked down more than 20 rock art sites in south-eastern Venezuela decorated with evocative geometric designs that may date back several thousand years. The pictograms and petroglyphs offer a rare glimpse into the culture of people who lived in the forested highlands that now make up Canaima National Park, long before the arrival of Europeans.
José Miguel Pérez-Gómez of Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, Venezuela, has collaborated for years with the Indigenous Pemón community to document the remote art, which he… More

Neanderthal reconstruction at the Museum of Natural History Vienna in AustriaNeanderthals/Alamy Stock Photo
A Neanderthal child with Down’s syndrome survived until at least the age of 6, if interpretations of a fossilised ear bone are correct. The find adds to the evidence that Neanderthals, far from being brutish and unfeeling, routinely showed compassion for other members of their society, although researchers disagree on the extent to which the child may have needed extra attention.

“Neanderthals were clearly caring for people in their group, and this is a lovely example that really brings home how much they cared,” says Penny Spikins at the University of York in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the research.Advertisement
The Neanderthal fossil was found in Cova Negra, a cave near the town of Xàtiva in eastern Spain. The cave has been excavated on and off since the 1920s, revealing that it was home to Neanderthals between 273,000 and 146,000 years ago.
Sorting through animal remains from Cova Negra, researchers led by Mercedes Conde Valverde at the University of Alcalá in Spain identified a fragment of hominin bone. It was found in disturbed sediments, so can’t be reliably dated. The bone is part of the temporal bone from the side and base of the skull, and includes parts of the inner ear.
Conde Valverde and her colleagues used CT scans to create a 3D model of the bone. This allowed them to identify it as being from a Neanderthal, not a modern human. Based on its developmental state, the bone belonged to a child who was at least 6 years old, and probably no more than 10.
The team found several distinctive features in the development of the inner ear, specifically in three tubes called the semicircular canals that are involved in hearing and balance. One of the canals was unusually wide. Another was connected to a neighbouring chamber called the vestibular aqueduct, which is normally separate. Furthermore, the cochlea, which is crucial for hearing, was especially small.
This combination of features is found only in people with Down’s syndrome, says Conde Valverde. In this genetic condition, instead of having two copies of chromosome 21, a person generally has three. The condition can cause learning disabilities, problems with hearing and balance, and distinctive facial features.

It has probably existed as long as humans: a study of ancient DNA, published in February, found six cases of Down’s syndrome in babies and young children, one dating back almost 5000 years.
The newly identified child would have needed more care than other Neanderthal children, says Conde Valverde. For instance, moving from place to place may have been difficult due to attacks of vertigo, which can be a symptom in Down’s syndrome.
“We think that probably the mother needs help,” she says, because the time demands of increased childcare would take her and potentially the father away from other key activities, such as obtaining food.

Conde Valverde says the other Neanderthals in the group are unlikely to have expected the child to contribute much practical help, so they must have cared for them out of pure compassion.
Sarah Turner at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, doesn’t think this low expectation is necessarily true. “People with Down’s syndrome contribute in all sorts of ways to modern human societies,” she says. “And I am sure that was true in Neanderthal society too.”
The Neanderthal temporal bone fossil found in Cova Negra, SpainJulia Diez-Valero
“There is a lot of variation in terms of what is considered a disability and how people with disabilities are treated in different human contexts,” says Turner. “Compassion is one possible motivator, but without knowing about someone’s life and how they were treated and behaved, I don’t think we can say too much about how and why they survived.”
Turner has also previously shown that wild primates can survive for a long time even if they are born with disabilities or developmental conditions. This included one instance of a baby chimpanzee born with what appeared to be Down’s syndrome, who survived as long as the mother had help from an older daughter, but died after the daughter had a baby of her own and could no longer help.

The new study adds to the evidence of caregiving and compassion among Neanderthals, says Spikins. For instance, an adult male Neanderthal whose remains were found in Shanidar cave in Iraq had a damaged arm and leg and was “probably deaf and blind in one eye”. He lived another 10 to 15 years after getting these injuries, so “he must have been looked after”.
Conde Valverde and Spikins both dismiss the idea that caregiving behaviour would have been done in the expectation of getting help once a child has grown up.
“It comes very much from our society, this idea of analytically thinking if someone’s going to be productive,” says Spikins. The reality is that we evolved to live in tight-knit groups and an instinct to care for each other was crucial. People with Down’s syndrome are often “tremendously affectionate and very sociable”, she says, “and that counts for such a lot in these kind of small-scale societies”.

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The people of Easter Island built hundreds of monolithic statues called moaiStephanie Morcinek via Unsplash
The widespread claim that the ancient people of Easter Island experienced a societal collapse due to overexploitation of natural resources has been thrown into fresh doubt. Instead, there was a small and stable population that lived sustainably for centuries before the arrival of Europeans, an analysis of historical farming practices suggests.
Famous for its towering stone statues, Easter Island – also known as Rapa Nui – in the Pacific Ocean is thought to have been inhabited by Polynesians since around AD 1200. At that time, its 164-square kilometres were covered in palm forests, but these were quickly destroyed, probably by a combination of rats and over-harvesting.
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According to a narrative popularised by the historian Jared Diamond, the unsustainable use of resources led to runaway population growth and a subsequent collapse before Europeans arrived in 1722.
The islanders mainly supported themselves through rock gardening, a form of agriculture that has been widely practised in places where soils are poor or the climate harsh. Stones are scattered around fields to create microhabitats and wind breaks, preserve moisture and supply important minerals.
Previous studies have suggested that as much as 21 square kilometres of Rapa Nui was covered in rock gardens, supporting a population of up to 16,000 people.
To find out more, Carl Lipo at Binghamton University in New York and his colleagues used satellite imagery combined with machine learning models trained with ground surveys to generate an island-wide estimate of rock gardening sites.
This found that the maximum area of the stone gardens was only 0.76 square kilometres. The researchers estimate that such a system wouldn’t have been able to support more than 4000 people – roughly the population estimated to live there when Europeans arrived. In other words, the team argues, the population remained remarkably stable.
Researcher Robert DiNapoli, from Binghamton University in New York, inspects a rock gardenCarl Lipo
Lipo says that those who continue to use Easter Island as a case study of degradation and collapse need to look at the empirical evidence. “The results we produce continue to support our hypothesis that the island never… [had] a massive population that overconsumed its resources,” he says. “Overall, we do not see evidence in the archaeological record of a population collapse before European arrival.”
Instead, there is growing weight behind the suggestion that islanders transformed their environment in ways that allowed them to live sustainably for generations, says Lipo. “Small populations and low-density, dispersed settlement patterns enabled the communities to reliably produce sufficient food for more than 500 years until the arrival of Europeans.”
Dale F. Simpson at the University of Illinois says more work is needed to evaluate whether the precision and accuracy of the model calculations used in the research fit the archaeological record.
“Overall, this [study] highlights that although the Rapa Nui [people] are often portrayed as a collapsed culture bounded by socio-political competition, ecological overexploitation and megalithic overproduction, the discussion would be better served if it recognised the Rapa Nui as a Polynesian island culture of adaptation and survival that has thrived for almost a millennium,” says Simpson.

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The 2000-year-old wine found in a Roman tomb in Carmona, SpainJuan Manuel Román/University of Cordoba
A reddish liquid found in a 2000-year-old Roman mausoleum in Spain is the oldest known liquid wine in existence, a chemical analysis has revealed.
“I was surprised and full of disbelief,” says José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola at the University of Cordoba in Spain. “It seemed impossible that a liquid could have remained in this state for 2000 years.”
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Until now, a sealed vessel found near Speyer, Germany, and believed to be about 1700 years old, was thought to contain the oldest known wine, but it has never been opened.
The Spanish tomb, accidentally discovered in 2019 in Carmona, near Seville, dates from the 1st century AD and belonged to a wealthy family. Eight burial niches, carved in its walls, held six urns made from limestone, sandstone or glass. Half of them contained the cremated remains of women and the other half those of men. Two urns bore the names of the deceased: Hispanae and Senicio.
One of the glass urns, encased in a lead shell, contained bone remnants of a 45-year-old man, a gold ring bearing the image of the two-faced Roman god Janus, and approximately 5 litres of liquid.
Ruiz Arrebola and his team studied the composition of the reddish liquid by various methods, including liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. They found that it had a pH of 7.5 – much more alkaline than normal for wine, indicating strong decay.
Its mineral profile was similar to that of modern sherry and fino wines from Spain. It also contained seven polyphenols, natural antioxidant compounds, exclusively found in wine.
The entrance to the mausoleum in Carmona where the wine was foundJuan Manuel Román/University of Cordoba
The absence of syringic acid, a compound produced when the main pigment in red wines decomposes, confirmed its identity as a white wine. The wine was probably meant for the deceased to drink on their voyage into the afterlife.
“The discovery of a 2000-year-old liquid presumed to be wine in a Roman urn is rare and significant, providing unique insights into Roman burial practices,” says Davide Tanasi at the University of South Florida. “It demonstrates the continuity between ancient and contemporary wine production.”
Ruiz Arrebola plans to carry out further tests to identify any remains of microbes such as bacteria or yeasts that might be present in the wine.

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Ancient humans occupied the Umm Jirsan lava-tube cave in Saudi ArabiaGreen Arabia Project
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.
The study of rock art, especially cave paintings, used to be strongly focused on Europe. But in recent years, it has expanded after major discoveries in Indonesia and mainland Asia. One of the latest additions to the scientific record comes in the form of giant snakes found in South America.
Along the Orinoco river in Colombia and Venezuela,… More

Adrià Voltà
Do newborn babies consciously hear sounds and feel pain? In the past, infant boys undergoing circumcision were often not given anaesthetic, partly because it was thought that their brains were immature and they couldn’t consciously feel pain. Even today, there remains much uncertainty. Babies cannot tell us what they are experiencing, so it is hard to know what they are conscious of.
Recently, neuroscientists have uncovered evidence suggesting newborn infants perceive the world consciously. When newborns encounter certain surprising stimuli, their brain reacts strikingly similarly to the way conscious adult brains react.
One method to investigate uses the oddball paradigm.… More

Animal etchings into rocks along the Orinoco river in South AmericaPhilip Riris et al.
Prehistoric engravings of giant snakes along South America’s Orinoco river are among the largest examples of rock art we know of anywhere in the world, with some stretching for more than 40 metres.
The Orinoco is one of the world’s largest rivers, flowing through Venezuela and along its border with Colombia. “There’s an outstanding record of rock art along the Orinoco, especially on the Venezuelan side,” says José Oliver at University College London. “Usually, they are paintings found in rock shelters.”
Engravings are common in many open-air sites along the river, he says, but not all of them have been officially recorded.Advertisement

Since 2015, Oliver and his colleagues have taken several trips to areas along the Colombian and Venezuelan margins of the river to build a better picture of its rock engravings.
“It wasn’t difficult to encounter new sites,” says team member Philip Riris at Bournemouth University in the UK. “Every time you go round a corner, there was always more.”
Of the 157 rock art sites that the team has managed to visit, 13 were made up of engravings that were at least 4 metres tall. “Anything that size is monumental in our view,” says Riris. “That means they’re often visible from quite far away, maybe 500 metres to a kilometre.”
Most of the engravings depict people, mammals, birds, centipedes, scrolls and geometric shapes, but snakes were among the largest motifs, with the biggest measuring 42 metres across. In the mythology of the Indigenous Orinoco people, anacondas and boa constrictors are primordial creators, so are held in high regard, says Riris.
The prominence of the rock art along the river suggests that the ancient carvings may have been a territorial marker to signal that a certain group lives there, but not necessarily a warning to stay away. “The engravings may not be exclusionary, but rather an inclusionary practice that was shared among the communities,” says Riris.
Ceramics unearthed in the region and dated to 2000 years ago have similar motifs to the ones on the engravings, which suggests that the rock art was similarly created two millennia ago.

The team hopes to discover even more of these carvings and collect clues about their origins and purpose. For example, many of them appear near rock shelters with burial grounds, which suggests they may be connected to ancient funerary practices.
“This is a valuable piece of research,” says Andrés Troncoso at the University of Chile. “It sheds light about the rock art of a non-well-known area of South America, continuing to fill up our knowledge of this region.”
“Euro-American minds often jump to the mammoths, cave lions and large mammals of Pleistocene cave sites in western Europe when they think of rock art,” says Patrick Roberts at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany. “However, the giant snake engravings studied in the paper are some of the largest single rock art images anywhere in the world and come from the heart of a lowland tropical environment.”

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Joel Redman/Gallery Stock
If you were to take one step to improve your health, what would it be: change what you eat, be more active or invest more time in your friendships?
Most people know that diet and exercise have huge impacts on well-being. Fewer realise that social connection is just as important. A slew of studies has shown that feeling supported and loved can help protect you from common conditions, including diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and heart attack. And the benefits don’t end there. In the workplace, good relationships are linked with greater creativity and job satisfaction – and a lower risk of burnout.
The obvious upshot is that we should put more effort into building strong and meaningful relationships. But many people find the idea of supercharging their social lives daunting. Up to now, science hasn’t been of much practical help because research was focused on environmental factors linked with lonelines, such as increasing urbanisation and reliance on technology. That might help explain why people seeking the secrets of better connection often turn to self-help gurus, whose advice is based on anecdote rather than data. But now there is a better way to think about this problem.
In recent years, researchers have made great strides in revealing the psychological barriers that undermine our attempts to build good relationships, and in discovering ways to overcome them. As I explain in my new book, The Laws of Connection: 13 social strategies that will change your life, most of us are needlessly pessimistic about our capacity to build bridges with those around us, and it is often surprisingly simple to cultivate better habits.
One… More