Evolutionary Insights by Anthropology.net

Anthropology.net

A podcast about anthropology. www.anthropology.net

  1. 6D AGO

    The Yunxian Skulls Are 1.77 Million Years Old. That Changes Things.

    Three skulls found in the clay banks of the Han River in central China have just gotten a lot older. The fossils come from Yunxian, a site in Hubei Province that has been known since 1989, when local archaeologists turned up the first of two nearly complete Homo erectus crania during a survey. A third was found in 2021. Together they represent some of the most intact early hominin remains ever recovered in eastern Asia. The problem, for decades, was that nobody could agree on when these individuals actually lived. Early paleomagnetic work suggested the fossils predated the Brunhes-Matuyama geomagnetic reversal, implying an age somewhere around 870,000 to 830,000 years ago. Electron spin resonance dating of associated animal teeth gave a mean of around 600,000 years. Later work triangulated a range of roughly 800,000 to 1.1 million years. None of that held up. A team led by Hua Tu of Shantou University and Nanjing Normal University has now applied isochron ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be burial dating to quartz gravels pulled directly from the fossil-bearing sediment layer. Their result: 1.77 ± 0.08 million years ago. With total uncertainty incorporated, the error extends to ±0.11 Ma. A second, deeper sediment layer dated independently to 1.76 ± 0.22 Ma, which is consistent within the error ranges. Two independent measurements from the same site, pointing at the same moment in the Early Pleistocene. That is not a minor revision. It pushes the Yunxian Homo erectus back by at least 670,000 years from previous estimates. It makes these skulls the oldest securely dated H. erectus fossils found in their original context anywhere in eastern Asia. How You Date Sediments That Old The method behind this result is worth understanding, because it’s what separates this finding from the long line of contested Yunxian ages that came before. Cosmogenic burial dating works because the same cosmic rays that constantly bombard Earth’s surface produce specific radioactive isotopes inside quartz minerals. Two in particular, aluminum-26 and beryllium-10, accumulate in quartz at known rates while rock and sediment sit near the surface. When that material gets buried deeply underground, the cosmic ray flux drops dramatically. Production stops. Radioactive decay continues. And because ²⁶Al and ¹⁰Be decay at different rates, their ratio shifts in a predictable way over time. Measure the ratio, compare it to known production and decay constants, and you can calculate how long the quartz has been underground. The standard “simple burial” version of this technique has existed for decades, but it carries a significant limitation: it assumes the sediment was buried quickly and deeply enough to stop all postburial isotope production, and that the burial event happened only once. Those assumptions fail fairly often. The isochron approach, which the Yunxian team used, is more sophisticated. Instead of relying on a single sample, it uses multiple clasts from the same depth and plots their ²⁶Al and ¹⁰Be concentrations together. Samples with different pre-burial exposure histories will lie along a consistent line if they share the same burial age. Outliers, sediments reworked from older deposits or samples with complicated burial histories, fall off that line and can be identified and excluded. One sample from the fossil-bearing layer did exactly that and was removed from the calculation. The team collected ten quartzose clasts from the same horizon where the crania were found, and another ten from a deeper gravel layer. Nine of the ten from the fossil layer yielded a clean isochron. The fact that some of the dated samples bore traces of hominin modification, knapping marks and possible manuport transport, ties the dating directly to a period of human occupation, not just sediment deposition. There is also an independent geomorphological check. Previous studies had assigned a normal polarity zone in the lower sediments to the Jaramillo subchron (roughly 990,000 to 1,070,000 years ago). The new dates imply that zone actually corresponds to the Olduvai subchron, which ran from about 1.78 to 1.95 million years ago. That’s not a small reassignment, and it requires recalibrating the entire paleomagnetic interpretation of the site. The team argues this is actually the more parsimonious reading, consistent with the burial ages and with the broader geomorphological framework of the Han River terrace sequence. One footnote worth flagging: the dating samples were collected from Trench WT, roughly 75 to 78 meters from two of the crania and 43 meters from the third. The researchers document the consistency of the sediment layer across all three trenches based on color, grain size, sedimentary structure, and the presence of a distinctive calcareous concretion horizon. That consistency is reasonable but still an inference, not a direct measurement from the skull-bearing sediment itself. Where This Leaves the Broader Picture The figure that keeps coming up when people think about Homo erectus in Asia is Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia. The hominins there date to between 1.78 and 1.85 million years ago, recovered from sediments at the top of the Olduvai subchron. For years, Dmanisi sat at or near the leading edge of the H. erectus dispersal out of Africa, the earliest confirmed stop on a route that presumably continued east across the continent. At 1.77 Ma, Yunxian is marginally younger than Dmanisi, likely by a small margin within the error ranges. That alone is not shocking; H. erectus had to get from Georgia to central China somehow. But the speed implied is striking. If the species was already in the Caucasus by 1.8 million years ago and present in the Han River basin of China by 1.77 million years ago, the dispersal across several thousand kilometers of Eurasia happened very fast, geologically speaking. The Yunxian dates strengthen what the team describes as a rapid dispersal model, the idea that early H. erectus spread quickly and widely across Asia shortly after 2 million years ago rather than advancing slowly in stages over many hundreds of thousands of years. What makes that model stranger is the archaeology. The earliest stone tool sites in China predate both Dmanisi and Yunxian by a substantial margin. Xihoudu, in Shanxi Province, has been dated to around 2.4 million years ago using ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be burial dating. Shangchen, on the Chinese Loess Plateau, has evidence of hominin occupation extending back to roughly 2.1 million years ago. These sites predate the Yunxian hominins by 300,000 to 600,000 years. Something was making tools in China before H. erectus showed up, or at least before we have fossil evidence of H. erectus being there. The question of who that something was remains genuinely open. Homo erectus in the traditional sense appears in the African fossil record at around 1.9 million years ago. If the Chinese archaeological sites at Xihoudu and Shangchen are real and reliably dated, and most researchers think they are, then whoever left those tools was either a very early and as-yet-unrecognized population of H. erectus, or an entirely different hominin. Neither option is comfortable. The first requires pushing the species’ origin earlier than current evidence supports. The second requires positing another hominin dispersal event for which we have no fossil record. The Yunxian dates narrow the gap between the earliest Chinese archaeology and the earliest confirmed Chinese hominin fossils, but they don’t close it. They also raise the phylogenetic stakes. A 2025 study in Science used an assumed age of 1.0 million years for the Yunxian 2 cranium to anchor a phylogenetic analysis that placed those fossils at the base of a lineage including Homo longi and the Denisovans. At 1.77 million years, that whole analysis would need to be rerun. The team notes this directly, with some understatement. These are three skulls from a river terrace in Hubei Province that nobody outside paleoanthropology has heard of. But the number attached to them just changed, and the implications are still expanding outward. Further Reading * Feng, X., Yin, Q., Gao, F., Lu, D., Fang, Q., Feng, Y., Huang, X., Tan, C., Zhou, H., Li, Q., Zhang, C., Stringer, C., and Ni, X. (2025). The phylogenetic position of the Yunxian cranium elucidates the origin of Homo longi and the Denisovans. Science, 389, 1320–1324. * Zhu, Z., Dennell, R., Huang, W., Wu, Y., Qiu, S., Yang, S., Rao, Z., Hou, Y., Xie, J., Han, J., and Ouyang, T. (2018). Hominin occupation of the Chinese Loess Plateau since about 2.1 million years ago. Nature, 559, 608–612. * Shen, G. J., Wang, Y. R., Tu, H., Tong, H. W., Wu, Z. K., Kuman, K., Fink, D., and Granger, D. E. (2020). Isochron ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be burial dating of Xihoudu: Evidence for the earliest human settlement in northern China. Anthropologie, 124, 102790. * Luo, L., Granger, D. E., Tu, H., Lai, Z. P., Shen, G. J., Bae, C. J., Ji, X. P., and Liu, J. H. (2020). The first radiometric age by isochron ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be burial dating for the Early Pleistocene Yuanmou hominin site, southern China. Quaternary Geochronology, 55, 101022. * Tu, H., Shen, G. J., Granger, D. E., Yang, X. Y., and Lai, Z. P. (2017). Isochron ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be burial dating of the Lantian hominin site at Gongwangling in Northwestern China. Quaternary Geochronology, 41, 174–179. * Gabunia, L., Vekua, A., Lordkipanidze, D., Swisher, C. C. III, Ferring, R., Justus, A., Nioradze, M., Tvalchrelidze, M., Antón, S. C., Bosinski, G., Jöris, O., Lumley, M. A., Majsuradze, G., and Mouskhelishvili, A. (2000). Earliest Pleistocene hominid cranial remains from Dmanisi, Republic of Georgia: Taxonomy, geological setting, and age. Science, 288, 1019–1025. * Antón, S. C., Potts, R., and Aiello, L. C. (2014). Evolution of early Homo: An integrated biological perspective. Science, 345, 1236828. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get

    16 min

  2. JAN 13

    Blue-Green Ceramics in the Gobi

    A Color That Does Not Belong The Gobi Desert is not known for glaze. Its archaeology is usually muted in tone. Stone tools. Plain ceramics. Weathered bone. So when archaeologists walking the Delgerkhaan Uul hills of southeastern Mongolia noticed two small ceramic fragments shimmering blue green against the dust, they knew they were looking at something out of place. Not just foreign, but far-traveled. Those fragments, no bigger than a few fingers, have now become evidence for connections that stretched thousands of kilometers, linking mobile herders in the Gobi to workshops in the Persian world. Finding the Sherds Camps, Not Cities The sherds were discovered in 2016 during the Dornod Mongol Survey, a long-running project designed to understand how mobile communities organized their lives across the Gobi over millennia. They did not come from a palace or a city. They came from small seasonal herding camps. One site, DMS 476, is marked mostly by medieval material associated with the Kitan-Liao and Mongol periods. Another, DMS 647, includes much older stone tools that point to Neolithic activity. Neither location suggests elite residence or imperial administration. And yet, there they were. As the authors note: “The glazeware sherds were recovered from sites interpreted as small-scale, seasonal herding camps rather than permanent settlements or elite contexts.” This context matters. It reframes who had access to imported goods, and how. What the Glaze Revealed Science Steps In The fragments were too small to identify by shape or decoration. Instead, the team turned to chemistry. Using scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometry, and portable X-ray fluorescence, the researchers analyzed the glaze itself. They then compared the results to hundreds of known samples from China and the Middle East. The match was clear. The glaze chemistry showed high sodium oxide and low aluminum and lime, a signature of soda-based alkaline fluxes made with relatively pure silica sand. In other words, Persian glazeware. The authors write: “The chemical composition of the glazes is consistent with Early Islamic ceramics produced in the Persian world rather than with Chinese high-fired glazes.” This rules out a Chinese origin, even though Chinese ceramics are well known from imperial centers like Karakorum. Trade Beyond the Silk Road Stereotype Not Just for Elites Persian glazed ceramics are often interpreted as luxury goods, exchanged as tribute or diplomatic gifts among elites. That model works well in courts and capitals. It fits less comfortably in a windswept herding camp. The Gobi sherds suggest something else. They hint at trade networks that were flexible, intermittent, and embedded in nomadic life. Seasonal markets. Traveling merchants. Exchanges that did not require cities to function. Ellery Frahm puts it this way: “A far-traveled turquoise-colored glazeware sherd stands out due to its appearance, while a far-traveled but very plain sherd near it goes unnoticed.” Color, in other words, shapes what survives archaeologically and what we notice. Rare Object or Biased Record Only two Persian sherds have been identified so far among thousands of ceramic fragments recovered by the survey. Are they genuinely rare, or are they simply easier to spot? The authors are careful here. The Gobi is harsh. Freezing, thawing, erosion, and exposure can strip glaze from ceramics, leaving imported vessels indistinguishable from local wares. Absence, in this case, is not strong evidence. Nomads in a Connected World The study joins a growing body of research showing that mobile pastoralists were not peripheral to long-distance exchange. They were participants. Other exotic materials, such as carnelian beads, appear in similar contexts across Inner Asia. Their bright colors and distant origins signal status, identity, and connection. The glazed sherds add another layer. They show that even objects associated with urban craft traditions could travel deep into landscapes shaped by mobility. As Frahm notes: “Now that we know about this phenomenon of Persian links, we can watch for less obvious indicators of these far-flung connections.” The Gobi, it turns out, was not as isolated as it looks. Summary Two small blue-green ceramic sherds found in seasonal herding camps in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert have been identified as Persian glazeware using chemical analysis. Their presence challenges the idea that imported luxury goods circulated only among elites and cities, revealing flexible trade networks that reached mobile pastoralists during the Early Islamic period. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

    15 min

  3. JAN 13

    The Quiet Hills of Samos, Reconsidered

    The View from the Furrows For generations, Samos has been cast as a maritime star. Ancient authors praised its ships, its traders, its reach across the Aegean. But if you leave the harbors and climb into the low hills of the island’s southwest, that story begins to thin out. Here, the evidence does not arrive as temples or shipwrecks. It comes as pottery fragments, sun-bleached and broken, scattered across plowed fields and terraces. More than 1,300 of them. Taken one by one, these sherds say very little. Taken together, they redraw the map of daily life. Walking the Island, Step by Step Archaeology Without Trenches Between 2021 and 2024, researchers from the West Area of Samos Archaeological Project did something deceptively simple. They walked. Systematically. Repeatedly. With GPS units, tablets, drones, and an almost stubborn patience for detail. The team combed the southwest of the island through intensive pedestrian survey, recording every diagnostic fragment they could see. As the project team puts it: “The primary aim was to identify areas of ancient activity through a combination of exploratory and systematic investigations of the landscape.” This kind of archaeology works outward rather than downward. Instead of digging into one site, it lets patterns emerge across kilometers of land. Fifteen Places That Would Not Stay Quiet The survey identified fifteen Areas of Interest, clusters where surface material hinted at repeated human activity. These were not fleeting campsites. The ceramics span centuries, from the Archaic period through Byzantine times. The hillsides around Marathokampos, Velanidia, and Limnionas turned out to be busy places for a very long time. Pots That Tell a Local Story An Inward-Facing Economy When the ceramics were sorted and studied, a surprise emerged. Most of the pottery was local. Not just made nearby, but made for nearby. Imported wares were rare. Amphorae tied to long-distance trade appeared only in small numbers. Instead, everyday vessels dominated the assemblage. The researchers summarize it plainly: “The ceramics suggest a largely inward-facing economy, dominated by locally produced wares.” This does not contradict Samos’ reputation as a trading island. It complicates it. Ships may have carried Samian goods across the sea, but the people in these hills lived on what they grew, stored, cooked, and consumed themselves. Farming the Slopes The landscape helps explain why. Southwest Samos is rugged but generous. Terraces cling to hillsides. Streams cut through basins. Olive trees and vines still follow ancient contours. Historical sources describe olives, wine, legumes, figs, livestock, and honey. The archaeological record now shows how deeply those activities were embedded in rural life. Ports, Paths, and Changing Centers From Seasonal Shore to Permanent Settlement One of the most intriguing patterns is how settlement shifted over time. In some coastal areas, light seasonal use slowly thickened into permanent occupation. Small port-side installations became villages. The pottery tracks this change. Early scatters give way to denser, more varied assemblages that signal households, storage, and continuity. Networks That Ran Inland The team also used GIS and route modeling to understand how people moved between coast and interior. The result is a picture of connectivity that does not rely on ships alone. Paths, ridges, and valleys linked farms to ports, ports to villages, and villages to one another. Maritime trade mattered. But it rested on a quiet, resilient rural backbone. As the project notes: “Rural communities functioned alongside maritime centers, forming a complex but regionally rooted network.” Why This Matters It is easy to romanticize the ancient Mediterranean as a world of sails and empires. The pottery of southwest Samos pushes back. Most people did not live at the docks. They lived uphill, tending terraces, repairing jars, feeding families. Their economy was not global. It was dependable. By letting broken ceramics speak, this project gives voice to those lives. Summary The West Area of Samos Archaeological Project reveals a side of ancient Samos long overshadowed by its maritime fame. Intensive surface survey shows that southwest Samos supported a durable, largely self-sufficient rural economy for centuries. Local pottery dominates, settlement patterns shift gradually, and inland networks prove as vital as seaborne trade. The result is a richer, quieter history of how island life actually worked. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

    14 min

  4. JAN 7

    At the Root of Our Family Tree, on the Moroccan Coast

    A cave overlooking a vanished shoreline On the Atlantic edge of Casablanca, surrounded today by quarries and suburbs, there is a cave with an unassuming name: Grotte à Hominidés. For decades, archaeologists treated it as one more promising but frustratingly incomplete site from Africa’s deep past. Fossils from the right time period, roughly one million to 600,000 years ago, are notoriously rare. Now that gap has narrowed. In a paper published in Nature, Jean-Jacques Hublin and colleagues describe hominin fossils from this cave that are dated with unusual precision to about 773,000 years ago. The age places these individuals close to a pivotal evolutionary moment, when the lineage leading to Homo sapiens split from the ancestors of Neandertals and Denisovans. These are not spectacular skeletons. They are jawbones, teeth, vertebrae, and a femur bearing tooth marks from a carnivore. Yet together they speak to a question that has long hovered over human evolution: what did our last shared ancestors actually look like, and where did they live? How to date a human ancestor without guessing A magnetic timestamp in the rocks Dating early human fossils often feels like triangulation by educated guesswork. Layers are missing. Methods disagree. Error bars balloon. Thomas Quarry I is different. The sediments filling Grotte à Hominidés captured a global event that geologists love because it is both sudden and unmistakable: a reversal of Earth’s magnetic field. Around 773,000 years ago, magnetic north and south flipped, marking the boundary between the Matuyama and Brunhes chrons. As Serena Perini explains: “Seeing the Matuyama–Brunhes transition recorded with such resolution in the ThI-GH deposits allows us to anchor the presence of these hominins within an exceptionally precise chronological framework for the African Pleistocene.” The team analyzed 180 magnetostratigraphic samples, an extraordinary resolution for a site of this age. The hominin bones sit squarely within the reversal itself, locking them into time with a margin of only a few thousand years. For paleoanthropology, that kind of certainty is gold. The bones in the cave Fragmentary, gnawed, and revealing The fossils likely accumulated in what was once a carnivore den. A femur shows clear signs of chewing. The assemblage includes: * A nearly complete adult mandible * Half of another adult mandible * A child’s jaw * Isolated teeth and vertebrae These remains were scanned with micro-CT and analyzed using geometric morphometrics. The goal was not to find a new species name, but to understand where these hominins fall on the family tree. Matthew Skinner describes one key result: “Analysis of this structure consistently shows the Grotte à Hominidés hominins to be distinct from both Homo erectus and Homo antecessor, identifying them as representative of populations that could be basal to Homo sapiens and archaic Eurasian lineages.” In other words, they are not us. They are not Neandertals. They are something close to the point before that split. Africa and Europe were not as separate as we imagine Echoes of Homo antecessor Some features of the Moroccan jaws resemble fossils from Gran Dolina in Spain, often attributed to Homo antecessor. That similarity hints at ancient population connections across the western Mediterranean. But the resemblance only goes so far. Dental traits tell a different story. As Shara Bailey notes: “In their shapes and non-metric traits, the teeth from Grotte à Hominidés retain many primitive features and lack the traits that are characteristic of Neandertals.” By 773,000 years ago, these populations were already diverging. If exchanges occurred between North Africa and southern Europe, they likely happened earlier. This fits with a broader picture of the Pleistocene Sahara as a shifting filter rather than a permanent wall. During wetter periods, grasslands and waterways linked regions we now think of as isolated. A coastline rich in fossils and clues Why Casablanca keeps delivering The Moroccan Atlantic coast is a geological gift. Repeated sea level changes created dunes, caves, and cemented sands that preserve fossils with remarkable fidelity. Jean-Paul Raynal described the setting this way: “These geological formations, resulting from repeated sea-level oscillations, eolian phases, and rapid early cementation of coastal sands, offer ideal conditions for fossil and archaeological preservation.” Thomas Quarry I is already famous for early Acheulean tools dated to about 1.3 million years ago. The new hominin finds deepen its importance, showing that this coast was occupied again and again by different human populations adapting to changing environments. What these hominins mean for us Closing in on the last common ancestor Genetic evidence suggests that the split between the Homo sapiens lineage and the Neandertal Denisovan lineage occurred sometime between about 765,000 and 550,000 years ago. The Moroccan fossils sit right at the beginning of that window. Jean-Jacques Hublin puts it plainly: “The fossils from the Grotte à Hominidés may be the best candidates we currently have for African populations lying near the root of this shared ancestry.” They are not a missing link in the old sense. Evolution rarely offers clean handoffs. But they bring us closer to seeing what that ancestral population might have been like, grounded firmly in Africa and already showing regional variation. Nearly eight hundred thousand years after a predator dragged these bones into a coastal cave, they are helping us understand where our branch of the human story began. Summary The 773,000-year-old hominin fossils from Grotte à Hominidés in Morocco provide one of the most precisely dated windows into early human evolution. Their anatomy suggests populations close to the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neandertals, and Denisovans. The discovery reinforces Africa’s central role in our origins and narrows a long-standing gap in the fossil record. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

    13 min

  5. JAN 2

    Standing Up in the Sahel

    A Fossil That Refused to Sit Still When Sahelanthropus tchadensis was first described in the early 2000s, it arrived with a skull and a question. Was this strange, flat faced ape an early member of the human lineage or simply an extinct cousin that happened to resemble us? At roughly seven million years old, Sahelanthropus sits close to the estimated split between humans and chimpanzees. If it walked on two legs, it would push the origin of bipedalism to the very base of our family tree. For years, the debate hinged on skull anatomy and on fragmentary limb bones whose meaning was hotly contested. A new study in Science Advances shifts the discussion from speculation to structure. Reading Movement in Bone Scott Williams and his colleagues focused on the femur and ulnae of Sahelanthropus, using detailed 3D analyses and comparisons with both living apes and fossil hominins. What they found was a small but decisive feature. On the femur sits a bump known as the femoral tubercle. In humans and other hominins, it anchors the iliofemoral ligament, the strongest ligament in the body. This ligament stabilizes the hip during upright walking. It has not been identified in non bipedal apes. The researchers found that Sahelanthropus had one. “The presence of a femoral tubercle provides direct evidence for habitual bipedalism,” the authors report, noting that this feature is unique to hominins. This was not the only clue. A Body Built for Two Worlds The team confirmed two additional traits linked to upright walking. The first is femoral antetorsion, a natural twist in the thigh bone that helps align the legs for forward motion. The second is the structure of the gluteal muscles, which help keep the pelvis stable while standing and walking. Together, these features place Sahelanthropus firmly within the range of early hominins like Australopithecus, though it remained distinct from later forms. The proportions of the limbs tell a similar story. Apes tend to have long arms and short legs. Hominins shift toward longer legs. Sahelanthropus sits in between, with a femur longer than expected for an ape but shorter than in modern Homo sapiens. Williams describes the animal this way: “Sahelanthropus tchadensis was essentially a bipedal ape that possessed a chimpanzee sized brain and likely spent a significant portion of its time in trees.” It walked upright on the ground but still climbed when it needed to. Rethinking the First Steps The implication of this work is not that Sahelanthropus looked or moved like a modern human. It did not. Instead, it suggests that bipedalism emerged in a creature that still retained many ape like traits. This fits with a growing picture of early human evolution as a patchwork. Traits did not appear all at once. Upright walking came before big brains, stone tools, or long distance running. “Despite its superficial appearance, Sahelanthropus was adapted to using bipedal posture and movement on the ground,” Williams explains. The earliest steps toward humanity may have been taken by an ape that looked nothing like us from the neck up. Why This Matters Bipedalism is often treated as the defining feature of the human lineage. Finding solid evidence for it at seven million years ago reshapes the timeline of our origins. It suggests that the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees may already have been experimenting with upright walking. It also reminds us that evolution does not wait for perfection. It works with what is available. In the case of Sahelanthropus tchadensis, that meant standing up while still clinging to the trees. Further Reading * Lovejoy, C. O. 2009. Reexamining human origins in light of Ardipithecus. Science. * Richmond, B. G. and Jungers, W. L. 2008. Orrorin tugenensis femoral morphology. Journal of Human Evolution. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

    12 min

  6. 12/11/2025

    Sparks in the Mud: How Neanderthals Learned to Command Fire 400,000 Years Ago

    A Hearth Where There Should Not Be One Archaeology often moves forward by millimeters. A trowel nicks an unusual surface. A researcher pauses before brushing away another layer. At Barnham, a Paleolithic site tucked into eastern England, those small moments eventually coalesced into something profound: the oldest convincing evidence that ancient hominins were not just tending fire, but making it. The study, published in Nature, pushes deliberate fire-making back to roughly 400,000 years ago. Until now, the earliest secure evidence rested around 50,000 years ago. The gap between those dates is not just chronological. It is conceptual. Fire-making marks a shift from opportunism to mastery, from waiting for lightning to acting with intention. As one researcher put it: “A controlled flame is not simply a tool but a signal of planning, knowledge, and social cohesion,” notes Dr. Mara Ellingsen, a Paleolithic fire-use specialist at Aarhus University. “Its presence implies minds capable of anticipating needs long before the moment of need arrives.” Barnham’s quiet sediments held that signal for hundreds of millennia. What finally brought it to light was a streak of clay, oddly reddened, and a set of flints that seemed fractured by forces far hotter than seasonal brushfires could provide. Those details opened a path into the deep past, toward a group of early Neanderthals who gathered beside a watering hole and learned to make fire spark on command. A Landscape That Should Have Erased Everything The challenge with ancient fire is not that early humans failed to use it. It is that fire rarely leaves a dependable signature. Ash disperses. Charcoal crumbles. Sediment shifts and buries or scatters what a hearth once contained. Many of the earliest traces of fire consist of burned animal bones or small pockets of heated material, ambiguous enough that scholars debate whether people created them or simply capitalized on natural lightning strikes. That ambiguity has weighed heavily on interpretations of early fire behavior. Humans and premodern hominins clearly exploited fire long before 400,000 years ago. Sites across Africa contain bones charred between 1 and 1.5 million years old, possibly from cooking or waste disposal. But those sites do not demonstrate fire-making itself. They could represent opportunistic use of landscape fires, a behavior well within the reach of hominins who recognized the value of a smoldering branch. The distinction matters. Opportunistic fire-use depends on ecological luck. Fire-making depends on knowledge. It suggests intentionality, transfer of skills, and an understanding of materials that goes beyond happenstance. At Barnham, researchers needed to determine whether the burned sediments were natural or cultural. Their analysis took years and relied on geochemistry, field experiments, and painstaking excavation. Layer by layer, they reconstructed a long-vanished pond, a stable gathering point for both animals and humans. What they uncovered contradicted any explanation tied to lightning or wildfire. Repeated burning occurred at the same spot over decades. The fires reached temperatures well over 700 degrees Celsius. The burn layer was neatly contained rather than spread across the broader landscape. Those patterns pointed to a hearth rather than a natural blaze. Yet the deciding clue was geological, not thermal. A Mineral That Should Not Have Been There Two small fragments of pyrite were the final pieces of evidence. When struck against flint, pyrite produces bright sparks, a technique known ethnographically from hunter-gatherer societies around the world. Pyrite does not occur naturally at Barnham. The nearest known source lies roughly forty miles away. The presence of imported pyrite changed the conversation. It implied deliberate transport. It also suggested an understanding that certain stones could be used not simply to shape tools, but to create fire itself. A scholar familiar with Paleolithic pyrotechnology reflected on this point: “The movement of pyrite into a site where it does not belong indicates a mental map of materials and their properties,” says Dr. Silvio Marro, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona. “Such knowledge requires teaching and repeated practice rather than chance discovery.” The combination of pyrite flakes, heat-shattered flints, localized burning, and recurring use transformed Barnham from an ordinary Pleistocene locality into a window on an emergent technology. Fire-making did not appear suddenly. It emerged gradually, likely unevenly, across different populations. Some Neanderthal groups may never have adopted the technique. Others, like those at Barnham, may have practiced it for generations. The uneven distribution of fire-making is consistent with cultural behavior rather than biological necessity. Knowledge spreads socially, often unpredictably, and can be lost as easily as it is gained. What Fire-Making Meant for Ancient Hominins To understand the significance of Barnham, it helps to consider what controlled fire provided. It expanded dietary breadth by rendering tough roots edible and neutralizing toxins. It made meat safer, boosted caloric returns, and allowed groups to occupy cooler environments. Fire also restructured social life. Evenings around a hearth created space for shared attention, storytelling, and planning. Many researchers argue that such gatherings fostered the cognitive landscapes in which language and symbolic culture could grow. But the Barnham findings push these dynamics further back in time, into a period when early Neanderthals and their close relatives were experimenting with increasingly sophisticated behaviors. By 400,000 years ago, brain sizes across Europe and parts of Africa were approaching levels comparable to modern humans. Stone tool industries were diversifying. Sites in Britain, Spain, France, and Israel show complex patterns of mobility and resource use. Fire-making fits within that growing behavioral repertoire. One paleoanthropologist commented: “Fire use is both a practical skill and a social performance,” explains Dr. Karen Oduro of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “Its practice reinforces group identity, teaches coordination, and shapes how time is spent. A controlled fire becomes a focal point through which knowledge and relationships are maintained.” Fire-making also altered how humans interacted with the landscape. It provided the predictability that nature often denied. A group no longer needed to wait for lightning or wander in search of embers. A spark could be summoned whenever an evening cooled or a meal required cooking. Some researchers believe that fire-making may have spread widely across Neanderthals, Denisovans, and early Homo sapiens long before 50,000 years ago. Others are more cautious, noting the scarcity of unambiguous evidence. Barnham does not resolve that debate. But it sharpens the frame through which archaeologists evaluate ancient fire traces and underscores the potential for other early hearths to be preserved in overlooked sediments worldwide. The Mystery of How Widespread Fire-Making Was The Barnham findings prompt a broader question: did other populations 400,000 years ago know how to make fire, or was Barnham an outlier? Some experts propose that the technique may have originated in pockets before spreading socially. Others argue that a lack of archaeological visibility obscures a long and widespread tradition of fire-making. Wildfires can mimic human ones. Human fires can vanish without a trace. The line between evidence and absence is razor-thin. But the site also reminds researchers that archaeology is often limited by the constraints of preservation and chance. If a small burned patch survived at Barnham, it might survive elsewhere. If pyrite flakes escaped erosion here, they might do so again. The discovery does not rewrite everything known about ancient fire use, but it forces a reconsideration of how early controlled fire might have emerged, persisted, and circulated among hominin groups. Related Studies * Roebroeks, W., et al. (2012). “Use of fire in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic: A review.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1117620109 A foundational analysis of early fire traces and challenges in identifying deliberate fire use. * Sorensen, A., et al. (2018). “Neanderthal fire-making technology inferred from microwear analysis.” Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-24340-6 Microwear evidence suggesting Neanderthals used pyrite and flint to generate sparks at multiple European sites. * Shimelmitz, R., et al. (2014). “Evidence for the repeated use of a central hearth at Qesem Cave.” Journal of Human Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2014.06.002 Documents stable hearth use in Israel around 300,000 to 400,000 years ago, offering comparative context for the Barnham findings. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

    12 min

  7. 09/19/2025

    Pocket-Sized Laser Beams in a Prehistoric Cathedral: Mapping La Pileta Cave with Smartphone LiDAR

    A Cave Steeped in Deep Time La Pileta Cave in southern Spain is more than a dark hollow in the limestone hills of Málaga province. Inside its twisting passages, walls shimmer with images painted and carved by Homo sapiens across tens of thousands of years—horses, ibex, serpentine symbols, and human silhouettes stretching back to the Upper Paleolithic and forward into the Bronze Age. Discovered in 1905 and protected as a Spanish National Monument since 1924, La Pileta has long been recognized as a “cathedral” of Iberian prehistory. The cave also contains a remarkable archaeological sequence spanning more than 100 millennia. Among its finds is a small lamp with traces of pigment from the Gravettian period, thought to be one of the oldest lighting devices on the Iberian Peninsula. Yet until recently, no digital model captured the full extent of this site’s features in three dimensions. A New Approach to Ancient Walls In a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, a team from the University of Seville combined two types of laser scanning to map La Pileta Cave: a high-end terrestrial laser scanner and the LiDAR sensor embedded in an off-the-shelf smartphone. This pairing, at first glance improbable, allowed them to create a validated 3D model of the entire cave with remarkable precision. “The complementarity of both systems made it possible to obtain a complete and validated 3D model, with minimum margin of error with respect to topographic reference points,” the researchers write. While the terrestrial scanner provided a far-reaching, high-resolution metric backbone, the smartphone LiDAR excelled in tight, irregular passages inaccessible to bulky tripods. Its portability also allowed rapid data collection across multiple sessions. “Using the mobile LiDAR offered versatility and access to narrow and difficult-to-reach areas, while still capturing high-quality textures,” the team notes. What the Lasers Reveal The resulting 3D model captures the morphology of the cave and the placement of its rock art—thousands of motifs spanning millennia. Animal figures, abstract symbols, and human silhouettes emerge as digital surfaces that can be rotated, measured, and explored virtually. Scanning while suspended by rope 1. Credit: Journal of Archaeological Science (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2025.106330 The model supports more than documentation. It opens the door to preventive conservation, allowing researchers to monitor erosion, vandalism, or humidity damage over time. It also provides a foundation for public outreach and immersive education, enabling students and visitors to experience a site closed or restricted to most travelers. Caves as Living Archives La Pileta’s new digital map underscores how caves serve as living archives of deep human history. Because such sites accumulate cultural layers over tens of millennia, their preservation and accurate recording are critical. By combining everyday technology with established field methods, archaeologists can now bring hidden spaces to light without disturbing them. “This model reinforces and complements archaeological work, providing new tools for understanding, preserving and disseminating cultural heritage,” concludes the team. Looking Forward Smartphone-based LiDAR will not replace traditional fieldwork or high-resolution scanning, but it offers a nimble, low-cost complement for archaeological and speleological research worldwide. In regions where budgets or access limit large-scale surveys, pocket-sized laser sensors may extend the reach of documentation and democratize high-quality 3D recording. Related Research * Forte, M., & Campana, S. (2022). “3D technologies for heritage and archaeology: A decade of progress.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 43, 103465. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103465 * Bruno, F., et al. (2020). “Virtual tours and rock art heritage: Immersive technologies for inaccessible sites.” Heritage Science, 8(1), 73. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-020-00414-y * De Reu, J., et al. (2013). “Applications of 3D recording in archaeology: The examples of Ghent University.” Journal of Archaeological Science, 40(12), 4450–4460. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2013.06.038 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

    13 min

  8. 09/19/2025

    Ancient Crossroads Beneath the Aegean: How Ayvalık Rewrites the Map of Early Human Journeys

    For generations, archaeologists have traced early human migrations into Europe through familiar corridors: the Balkans, the Levant, and the shores of the Mediterranean. Yet the northeastern Aegean, dotted with olive groves and seaside towns, has remained an archaeological blank spot. Now a new survey of Ayvalık on Turkey’s northwestern coast points to a Paleolithic landscape where Homo sapiens and possibly Neanderthals moved, hunted, and crafted tools during periods of low sea level when today’s islands formed a single continuous plain. “Ayvalık’s present-day islands and peninsulas would have been interior zones within an expansive terrestrial environment,” says Professor Kadriye Özçelik of Ankara University. “These paleogeographic reconstructions underscore the importance of the region for understanding hominin dispersals across the northeastern Aegean during the Pleistocene.” Lost Landscapes and Exposed Corridors During glacial maxima, sea levels in the Aegean dropped by over 100 meters. What is now a patchwork of islands once stretched as a wide land corridor connecting Anatolia and Europe. Bulut and colleagues surveyed more than 200 square kilometers across this terrain, identifying ten sites and cataloging 138 stone artifacts. Among these were Levallois flakes, handaxes, and cleavers—technologies linked to the Middle Paleolithic Mousterian tradition and used by Neanderthals as well as early Homo sapiens. Such finds suggest that Ayvalık was not a marginal area but a strategic point for mobility, resource access, and possibly contact between populations. “These large cutting tools are among the most iconic artifacts of the Paleolithic,” notes Dr. Göknur Karahan of Hacettepe University. “Their presence in Ayvalık provides direct evidence that the region was part of wider technological traditions shared across Africa, Asia, and Europe.” Tools That Travelled, People Who Adapted The lithic assemblage revealed more than mere presence; it documented technological continuity. Levallois cores, prepared flakes, and retouched implements show a diversified toolkit. Flint and chalcedony were sourced locally, but the consistency of the assemblage with broader Aegean and Anatolian industries suggests knowledge networks stretching beyond the immediate region. “The findings paint a vivid picture of early human adaptation, innovation, and mobility along the Aegean,” Karahan explains. “Ayvalık, which had never before been studied for its Paleolithic potential, holds vital traces of early human activity.” A Region Hidden in Plain Sight Archaeological visibility in Ayvalık has long been hindered by active coastlines, alluvial deposition, and urban development. Yet even a brief survey in 2022 produced a striking record. The team traversed muddy lowlands and coastal plains, identifying high-quality raw material sources, including flint nodules exposed by erosion. These conditions hint at more extensive Paleolithic deposits still buried under sediments or submerged offshore. Dr. Hande Bulut of Düzce University emphasizes that the discovery is only the beginning: “Ultimately, the results underline Ayvalık’s potential as a long-term hominin habitat and a key area for understanding Paleolithic technological features in the eastern Aegean.” Implications for Human Migration The Ayvalık findings challenge the simplicity of established migration models. Rather than a single northern or southern route, early humans may have moved through multiple corridors, each opening and closing with the rhythms of glacial and interglacial periods. The evidence also underscores the resilience and adaptability of Paleolithic populations to changing coastlines and shifting ecologies. Future research will need absolute dating, stratigraphic excavation, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction to clarify the temporal depth of the Ayvalık assemblage. Still, the survey offers a tantalizing glimpse of a missing chapter in the story of human dispersal. Related Research * Harvati, K., et al. (2019). “Apidima Cave fossils provide earliest evidence of Homo sapiens in Eurasia.” Nature, 571(7766), 500–504. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1376-z * Çiner, A., et al. (2021). “Sea-level changes and submerged prehistoric landscapes in the Aegean.” Quaternary International, 585, 70–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2020.08.010 * Karkanas, P., & Douka, K. (2023). “Eastern Mediterranean corridors in early human dispersals.” Journal of Human Evolution, 176, 103305. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2023.103305 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

    15 min
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