Humanity spoke thousands of languages at the dawn of farming — now many of them are lost

Humanity might have spoken tens of thousands of languages between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago, which have dwindled down to the around 7,500 unique languages used today. Researchers estimate that the number of spoken languages ballooned starting at the end of the last glacial period, as humans moved from hunter-gatherer groups into agricultural communities. After peaking around 2,000 years ago, the number began to fall again, possibly because of the spread of powerful, monolingual cultural groups through conquest and trade.

Maya glyph names maths powerhouse

A mathematical formula inscribed on a wall at the Maya site of Xultun in Guatemala has revealed the name of an important Maya mathematician-astronomer. Sak Tahn Waax, or ‘White-Chested Fox’, was a scholar comparable with mathematical giants of the past, researchers suggest. The calculations inscribed in this set of hieroglyphs expresses the relationships between several calendar systems in a playful manner that hasn’t been seen before in Mayan texts, says archaeologist and study co-author Heather Hurst. “I think it was a mathematical flex,” she says.

Mysterious mortuary processing in Iron Age

The remains of an adult buried some 2,000 years ago in what is now Scotland show signs that her brain might have been removed and her bones modified as tools, before her skeleton was carefully reassembled and interred. The finding adds to the mystery of how Iron Age Britons treated their dead: few human remains have survived from that period.

Stonehenge ‘altar’ carried on glacier

A massive slab at the center of Stonehenge somehow travelled 700 kilometres from its origin in northeast Scotland to its current home in the south of England. A model of Neolithic ice flows suggests a glacier might have carried the six-tonne monolith as far as Doggerland — an area that is now beneath the North Sea. Then, roughly 3,000 years before it came to Stonehenge, people may have saved the rock from rising sea levels. “What is exciting about these findings is that they could imply that the people of Doggerland attached cultural significance to the Altar Stone long before it was incorporated into Stonehenge,” says glaciologist and study co-author Remy Veness.

Human evolution sped up after farming

An analysis of DNA evidence from more than 15,000 ancient humans has revealed that human evolution has accelerated over the past 10,000 years. Researchers identified almost 500 gene variants that evolved through natural selection in ancient European and Middle-Eastern people after the dawn of agriculture. Many of those variants are linked to the resistance to diseases, such as tuberculosis. Accelerated evolution could reflect the intensification of lifestyle changes that started in the Neolithic period, such as new foods and pathogens, says population geneticist David Reich.

Genetic record for domestic dogs pushed back by 5,000 years

Researchers have identified the earliest known dog genomes, which push the genetic record for dogs back by more than 5,000 years. They recovered these genomes from remains of between 14,000 and 16,000 years old found at archaeological sites that span Europe and the Middle East. The team also identified an early domestic dog population (Canis lupus familiaris) that spanned Western Eurasia and was kept by diverse human hunter-gatherer groups. The findings show that dogs were exported and exchanged by various human groups, underlying dogs’ importance to early communities with different ways of living.

Debate explodes over age of key South American archæological site

An archæological site that overturned the history of humans in South America might just do it again. Radiocarbon dating pegged artefacts from Monte Verde, in southern Chile, at 14,500 years old — suggesting that people arrived along the continent’s coast, before the ‘Clovis people’ travelled through an ice-free corridor in North America. Not so, says a new study: those artefacts were mis-dated and originated no more than 8,200 years ago.

40,000-year-old German artefacts may display written language precursor

A series of notches carved on a piece of mammoth ivory roughly 40,000 years ago could be an early ancestor of cuneiform, one of the oldest-known forms of written language. “These sign sequences go beyond decoration that was aesthetically pleasing to particular individuals,” says linguist Christian Bentz. He co-authored a new study of the object and more than 200 other Stone Age artefacts that bear these signs. The study found statistical patterns in the Stone-Age marks that are similar to early proto-cuneform — but quite different to the information-dense writing systems of today.

Hunter-gatherers took refuge in European 'water world' for millennia

Ancient genomic data has revealed that inhabitants of the Rhine-Meuse river delta — wetland and coastal areas of modern-day Netherlands, Belgium and western Germany — maintained high levels of hunter-gatherer genetic ancestry for thousands of years after successive migrations from the east transformed most of Europe into farming and animal-herding communities. This group’s eventual mix with communities of people with ancestry from the central Eurasian steppe catalysed the expansion of Bell Beaker culture, which was accompanied by major shifts in the genetic make-up of both Britain and the Rhine–Meuse delta.

Rules of mysterious ancient Roman board game decoded by AI

Researchers say they have figured out the rules of an ancient Roman board game. The team simulated thousands of turns based on more than 100 games that could be played on the linked lines inscribed on a stone found in the Roman settlement of Coriovallum, now Heerlen in the Netherlands. One set of rules best matched the wear-and-tear on the stone: a blocking game they’ve nicknamed Ludus Coriovalli (‘the game from Coriovallum’).

430,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools Are the Oldest Ever Found

Wooden objects carrying the marks of carving and use could be the oldest wooden tools ever found. Researchers dated the artefacts, found in what is now Greece, to 430,000 years ago — and suggest they might have been made by early Neanderthals or their ancestors, Homo heidelbergensis. A separate study describes 480,000-old flint-knapping tools made from antler and elephant bone, from what is now the United Kingdom. Organic artefacts are a rare find because they’re less likely to endure than stone, and show how “bone and wood were probably more valuable for our ancient ancestors,” says archaeologist Thomas Terberger. “Imagine how many tools you can make from a single large bone of an elephant.”

Oldest cave painting of red claw hand could rewrite human creativity timeline

The outline of a hand discovered in an Indonesian cave has been dated to at least 67,800 years ago — the oldest known example of cave art in the world. The researchers who discovered the painting suggest that it was made using a stencil that was altered to give the shape a claw-like appearance. The finding provides circumstantial backing for a controversial theory that early humans had arrived in Sahul — the landmass that once encompassed modern-day Australia and New Guinea — by 65,000 years ago, around 15,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Flowers hint at maths before numerals

Pottery made by people of the Halafian culture, who inhabited northern Mesopotamia between around 6200 and 5500 BC, is painted with flowers that have 4, 8, 16 or 32 petals, and some show arrangements of 64 flowers. These patterns show a clear understanding of symmetry and spatial division long before written numbers came into use around 3400 BC, argue scientists in a new study. The skill might have helped the Halafian people with tasks such as sharing harvests or dividing communal fields, the authors say.

Poison arrows used 60,000 years ago

Traces of toxic compounds have been found on 60,000-year-old arrowheads, providing the oldest chemical evidence that Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers used poison to bring down prey. Chemical analysis revealed a compound called buphandrine, derived from the poison bulb plant (Boophone disticha), on arrowheads discovered in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The use of poisons “shows advanced planning, strategy and causal reasoning” among hunter-gatherers, says archaeologist Justin Bradfield. It also suggests that they had a complex understanding of the properties of plants.

Neanderthals mastered fire — 400,000 years ago

Baked soil, ancient tools and materials that could be used to start fires show that Neanderthals were making fire in the UK 400,000 years ago — the earliest evidence of this skill found so far. Ancient humans are known to have used naturally occurring fires, but evidence of deliberate fire-starting has been hard to come by. A new suite of evidence pushes back the date of fire mastery by 350,000 years. The team behind the finding believes it helps create a more nuanced picture of Neanderthals, who perhaps gathered round fires and told stories in ancient Europe.

Ancient Egyptian pleasure boat found by archaeologists off Alexandria coast

Archaeologists have discovered an ancient Egyptian pleasure boat buried off the coast of Alexandria. Researchers estimate that the 35-metre-long vessel dates back to the early first century AD. The well-preserved cruiser seems to match the description of similar vessels by the ancient Greek historian Strabo, who wrote that they were “luxuriously fitted out” and carried passengers who “play the flute and dance without restraint and with extreme licentiousness”. It’s “phenomenal to have the archaeological correlate” to these ancient descriptions for the first time.

1.5 million-year-old stone tools from mystery human relative discovered in Indonesia

Stone tools found on Sulawesi in Indonesia suggest that ancient hominins occupied the island around 1 million years ago — much earlier than we thought. The small tools were probably created using a percussion-flaking technique, in which a rock is struck with another stone to create sharp edges. Without fossils, researchers can’t tell exactly which early human species made them, but Homo erectus is a potential candidate.

Neanderthals boiled bones in ‘fat factories’ to enrich their lean diet

Archæologists have uncovered evidence that Neanderthals rendered fat from bones 125,000 years ago — 100,000 years earlier than oldest known fat rendering by modern humans. Thousands of bone fragments and other remains from Neumark-Nord in Germany suggest a large-scale operation in which animals were purposely transported to the area.

First human genome from ancient Egypt sequenced from 4,800-year-old teeth

Teeth from the remains of an elderly man who lived approximately 4,800 years ago — around the time that the earliest pyramids were built — have yielded the first full human genome sequence from ancient Egypt. The genome reveals ancestry similar to that of other ancient North Africans, as well as to people from the Middle East. Previous attempts to sequence DNA from ancient Egyptians have used samples from mummies, to mixed results. The remains used in this study pre-date widespread mummification: the person was interred instead in a ceramic pot, a sign of high, but not elite, status.

Early Neanderthal Art Discovered

A close examination of the red ochre dot on this stone, unearthed from the San Lázaro rock-shelter in Spain, revealed that the mark was made by a human finger. This raises the tantalising prospect that a Neanderthal maybe, just maybe, meant the dot to represent a nose (the rock, say researchers, does indeed look like a face in person). “It could represent one of the earliest human facial symbolisations in Prehistory,” write the team that made the discovery.