All posts tagged: ancient humans

The untold story of our remarkable hands and how they made us human

The untold story of our remarkable hands and how they made us human

Published by skeptic

Playing a complex guitar solo ought to be impossible. To elicit the desired torrent of notes, the fingers of one hand must move nimbly around the fretboard, while the other hand plucks the strings, in a dexterous combination of speed and strength. Anyone who has watched an expert player and then picked up a guitar for themselves will understand the degree of skill required. What’s less obvious is that our hands have been shaped by evolution for tasks just like this. It might not feel like it the first time you try out this instrument, but hands with that special combination of precision and strength are a defining trait of our species. In fact, the evolution of the human hand is one of the most important stories in our origin, at least as central as that of our oversized brain. Yet for many decades, the evolution of the hand has been impossible to grasp: there were too few fossil hands and the story they told didn’t make much sense. Now, thanks to a string of …

Which humans first made tools or art – and how do we know?

Which humans first made tools or art – and how do we know?

Published by skeptic

Recent findings have given us a new understanding of when the earliest digging and hunting tools arose RAUL MARTIN/MSF/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY 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. When writing headlines for stories about human evolution, the favourite superlatives are “oldest”, “earliest” and “first”. I have lost count of the number of articles I’ve written that used these. And it’s not just about attracting more readers – even though it usually works that way. If a researcher can find evidence that a species or behaviour is older than previously thought, that is useful information. Figuring out the order in which things happened is crucial to understanding why they happened. For instance, we used to think that all rock art was created within the last 40,000 years. That meant it had to have been created by our species (Homo sapiens), as other groups like the Neanderthals had died out by then. But it turns out that some prehistoric art …

Why did childbirth evolve to be so hard?

Why did childbirth evolve to be so hard?

Published by skeptic

The female pelvis may become too narrow for vaginal childbirth, meaning that caesareans could become the only option for delivering babies. At least, that’s the claim made by a research team last year. Their calculations suggest that in Australia, Mexico and Poland, the average female pelvis is now 4.2 centimetres narrower than it was in 1926. If the trend continues, they wrote, surgery may be the only way for our species to continue. Untangling whether this bold and controversial claim has merit means exploring one of human evolution’s most famous – and most eyebrow-raising – hypotheses: the obstetrical dilemma. The idea is that an evolutionary battle has been raging over the female pelvis for millions of years, with the structure being simultaneously under pressure to be narrower to assist with walking on two legs and wider to make childbirth easier. The new claim is based on an updated version of the dilemma, which argues that modern medical technology allows women to give birth no matter the shape of their pelvis. This, it is suggested, has …

Neanderthals and early humans may have interbred over a vast area

Neanderthals and early humans may have interbred over a vast area

Published by skeptic

An artist’s impression of Neanderthal life CHRISTIAN JEGOU/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were probably interbreeding over a huge area stretching from western Europe into Asia. We have long known that early humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) interbred, which is why most non-African people today have some Neanderthal DNA, typically about 2 per cent of their genome. The interbreeding also saw the Neanderthal Y chromosome lineages replaced by lineages from H. sapiens. But where this interbreeding happened and on what kind of scale has long been a mystery, even if we are now starting to get a handle on when it occurred. The ancestors of Neanderthals left Africa about 600,000 years ago, heading into Europe and western Asia. And the earliest evidence of H. sapiens migrating out of Africa is skeletal remains from sites in modern day Israel and Greece, dating back around 200,000 years. There are signs that H. sapiens contributed genetically to Neanderthal populations from the Altai mountains in what is now Siberia roughly 100,000 years ago, but the main …

Ancient humans were seafaring far earlier than we realised

Ancient humans were seafaring far earlier than we realised

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Malta is one of the Mediterranean’s most remote islands. The nearest land is Sicily, about 85 kilometres north. Today, with ferries and planes, getting there is light work, but in the distant past, Malta was difficult to reach. It’s far enough from Sicily that you can’t see it over the horizon, at least from ground level – and paddling there in a canoe would take over 24 hours, so you would have to navigate by starlight after the day turned dark. In short, if you try to imagine somewhere that Stone Age peoples were able to reach, Malta probably isn’t at the top of the list. Yet reach it they did. We know this because archaeologist Eleanor Scerri at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, and her colleagues excavated a sinkhole in northern Malta, from 2021 to 2023. They found traces of humans: ash from hearths, stone tools and butchered deer bones. Carbon dating showed that people were living there 8500 years ago, the team reported in Nature in April 2025. At …

Stick shaped by ancient humans is the oldest known wooden tool

Stick shaped by ancient humans is the oldest known wooden tool

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Artist’s reconstruction of a Palaeolithic woman making a digging stick from an alder tree trunk G. Prieto; K. Harvati The oldest known wooden tools have been found in an opencast mine in Greece. They are 430,000 years old and were made by an unidentified species of ancient human – perhaps the ancestors of Neanderthals. Prehistoric wooden artefacts are “very scarce”, says archaeologist Dirk Leder at the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage in Hannover, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Every single find is welcome.” Yet it is likely that our extinct relatives used wooden tools for millions of years. “It might be the oldest type of tool that anybody used,” says Katerina Harvati at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Poor preservation and the difficulty of identifying wooden artefacts have limited our knowledge of them. Harvati and her colleagues discovered the tools at a site called Marathousa 1, which they first identified in 2013 in the Megalopolis basin in southern Greece. An opencast lignite mine had exposed layers of sediments, some of …

Ape-like hominin Paranthropus was more adaptable than we thought

Ape-like hominin Paranthropus was more adaptable than we thought

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Illustration of Paranthropus hominins, which lived between 2.7 and 1.4 million years ago JOHN BAVARO FINE ART/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY For the first time, the remains of ancient humans called Paranthropus have been found in the remote Afar region of Ethiopia. The discovery dramatically expands the area over which Paranthropus roamed, and suggests they lived in a wide range of ecosystems. Paranthropus remains are known from eastern and southern Africa, between 2.7 and 1.4 million years ago. They are thought to be closely related to Homo, the group that includes modern humans and Neanderthals. They may have evolved from earlier hominins called Australopithecus. Zeresenay Alemseged at the University of Chicago in Illinois and his colleagues have been excavating a site called Mille-Logya, in the Afar depression in north-east Ethiopia, since 2012. The Afar is a treasure trove of hominin remains, including many Homo and Australopithecus remains. “Paranthropus had been eluding us,” he says. “We had pretty much concluded that it had never made it that far north.” On 19 January 2019, Alemseged’s local assistant brought him …

Revealing the epic story of ancient humans: Best ideas of the century

Revealing the epic story of ancient humans: Best ideas of the century

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What has happened in the field of human evolution over the past 25 years can be summed up in one word: “more”. Archaeologists have found many more fossils, species and artefacts, in more places – from diminutive “hobbits” who lived on an Indonesian island to the mysterious Homo naledi known only from a single deep cave in South Africa. In parallel, researchers have developed more and better techniques for analysing all these remains. There is, quite simply, a huge amount of information about our origins and extinct cousins. Two major lessons have emerged from this blizzard of discoveries. First, since 2000, the hominin fossil record has been extended much further back in time. In the late 1990s, the oldest known hominin was the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus. But in 2000 and 2001, researchers found an even older Ardipithecus, Orrorin tugenensis from 6 million years ago and Sahelanthropus tchadensis from 7 million years ago. A second Orrorin species, Orrorin praegens, was quietly described in 2022; it seems to be a little more recent than O. tugenensis. The discovery of these early hominins was …

The hunt for where the last Neanderthals lived

The hunt for where the last Neanderthals lived

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Neanderthals often found refuge in caves GREGOIRE CIRADE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY 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. It’s early January and south-west Britain is painfully cold. Not that cold, obviously: my friends in Canada and Scandinavia are laughing at my pitiful attempts to deal with near-freezing conditions. But it’s cold enough that I need to wrap up warmly or the chill seeps into my bones. Which brings me to the Neanderthals, our long-extinct cousins, who we have tended to imagine living in frigid environments. A lot of our imagery of the Neanderthals is decidedly Siberian: frozen tundra, driving winds, woolly mammoths plodding through the snow. They have often been described as cold-adapted hominins. Now, if you’ve been paying close attention to New Scientist over the past couple of months, you might remember a hint that that isn’t quite right. In November, we published a story called “Neanderthals’ hefty noses weren’t well adapted to cold climates”. In it, Chris …