Innholdsfortegnelse for EG21 i New Scientist - The Essential Guides

FOR almost all of human existence, our species has been roaming the planet, living in small groups, hunting and gathering, moving to new areas when the climate was favourable, retreating when it turned nasty. Across vast swathes of time, history played out, unrecorded. Then, about 10,000 years ago, everything began to change. In a few places, people started growing crops. They spent more time in the same spot. They built villages and towns. Various unsung geniuses invented writing, money, the wheel and gunpowder. Within just a few thousand years – the blink of an eye in evolutionary time – cities, empires and factories mushroomed all over the world. Today, Earth is surrounded by orbiting satellites and criss-crossed by internet cables. Nothing else like this has ever happened before. Today’s complex…

OUR species, Homo sapiens, has existed for about 300,000 years – give or take a few tens of millennia. For almost all that time, including during the tumult of glaciations, we have been hunters and gatherers. So why abandon a lifestyle that worked well for so long? The obvious reason why people might have started farming is that it produced more food, or at least a more predictable supply. However, there is limited evidence for this. In fact, some people have argued the opposite: that the transition to farming was a cataclysmic turn for the worse. It led, they say, to poor health, limited diets, new diseases and unsustainable practices that have culminated with climate change and a sixth mass extinction. Key evidence of this came from studies of changes…

THE myth that Neanderthals lacked creativity was convincingly exploded in 2018, when a team led by Alistair Pike at the University of Southampton, UK, used the gold-standard uranium-thorium dating technique to analyse artworks in three Spanish caves. They were all more than 40,000 years old, implying that the oldest known cave artists were Neanderthals. Among the artworks was a hand stencil dated to at least 66,000 years ago. But the Neanderthals weren’t content with decorating cave walls. Roughly 175,000 years ago, deep inside Bruniquel cave in France, they used around 400 stalagmites to make enigmatic structures, including a ring measuring 7 metres across. It has been suggested that this might have served as a sort of Stone Age xylophone. That is just speculation, but it raises the point that art…

THE first true writing systems, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform, are complex and didn’t emerge from a vacuum. According to Genevieve von Petzinger, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Victoria in Canada, the circles, triangles and squiggles that humans began leaving on cave walls 40,000 years ago represent the creation of the first human code. If so, the marks aren’t to be sniffed at. Our ability to represent a concept with an abstract sign is something no other animal, not even our closest cousins the chimpanzees, can do. It is arguably also the foundation of our advanced, global culture. The first step to check her hypothesis was to fastidiously document the signs, their location, their age and their style, then see if any patterns emerged. For this, von…

THE first formal writing system that we know of is the 5000-year-old cuneiform script of the ancient city of Uruk in what is now Iraq. The story of cuneiform begins around 6000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the fertile region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that is now Iraq, when there was a shift from living in small agricultural settlements to large urban centres. Here, the Sumerian people built the first city states. Uruk was one of the most important. With temple complexes and a canal system, it was home to up to 50,000 people by 3000 BC and was the administrative hub for the region with a bureaucracy to manage the complex system of labour that had developed. These people spoke Sumerian, a language that is completely different from…

ORLY GOLDWASSER at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem thinks one reason why scribes failed to adopt the alphabet is that they played no part in creating it. In fact, she believes it originated not at Wadi el-Hôl, but at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai peninsula of north-east Egypt, where alphabetic inscriptions found a century ago have now been dated at about 3800 years old. Serabit el-Khadim was once a centre of turquoise mining, employing Semitic-speaking Canaanites from the Middle East to extract the gemstone. Goldwasser’s idea is that these illiterate miners saw Egyptians writing dedications to the gods and wanted in on the action. Given their lowly status, they were never going to persuade Egyptian scribes to teach them hieroglyphics. So they improvised. They assigned new meanings to signs in…

ARCHAEOLOGIST Mykhailo Videiko at Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University, Ukraine, thinks the megasites were simply a response to growing population pressure. The Trypillians’ move may have been facilitated by developments in technology, he says, notably the advent of sledges drawn by bulls or other animals. These made it possible to transport food and other resources over a dozen or more kilometres, from existing villages or outlying fields to the new sites. “There were no roads,” he says. “This was a landscape of forests and river valleys.” Monica Smith at the University of California, Los Angeles, thinks the megasites may have had something in common with Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey, a building complex that is at least 10,000 years old and seems to have been a place where people congregated periodically…

It was long assumed that in hunter-gatherer societies, men hunt and women gather. Then, evidence began to emerge suggesting that women hunted in many cultures in the past. For nstance, of 27 individuals found buried with hunting weapons in the Americas, nearly half were women, a 2020 study found. Yet researchers have been reluctant to conclude that these women were hunters. Research published in 2023 comprehensively overturned the idea that women don’t hunt. Cara Wall-Scheffler at the University of Washington in Seattle and her team looked at a database called D-PLACE that has records on more than 1400 human societies worldwide made over the past 150 years. There was data on hunting for 63 of the foraging societies recorded and, of these, 50 described women hunting. For 41 of these…

NEOLITHIC Europe was in crisis just before the Yamnaya’s arrival. Using the pollen record from archaeological sites as a proxy for levels of agricultural activity, archaeologists have concluded that populations in northern and central Europe began shrinking about 5300 years ago. In at the University of Gothenburg, December 2018, Kristian Kristiansen Sweden, and his geneticist colleagues suggested an explanation. Examining the teeth of Neolithic people who lived in what is now Sweden about 5000 years ago, they found plague-causing bacteria – the earliest known relative of the Black Death. Further analysis suggested the disease began spreading across Europe perhaps as early as 5700 years ago. Kristiansen thinks it is no coincidence that this is also when the settlements of south-east Europe reached their greatest size. Within those settlements, thousands of…

ONE SOURCE of instability in modern societies is agriculture. The crop monocultures we tend to rely on provide a reduced diversity of food sources compared with previous societies. “That’s partly what makes it more vulnerable to all of the things that farmers worry about, like climate change, weather patterns, vagaries in the availability of labour at key times in the agricultural cycle,” says Amy Bogaard at the University of Oxford, UK. In general, we need to make our systems more resilient. But we also need to minimise climate change, because farming and the emergence of complex societies only became possible when the climate stabilised around 10,000 years ago at the dawn of the Holocene, our current geological epoch. “What’s special about the Holocene is stability,” says Bogaard. There have been…

GÖBEKLI TEPE is located on a hilltop in southern Turkey. Beginning in the mid-1990s, excavations there revealed a series of circular enclosures, each containing T-shaped stone pillars several metres high, some with carvings of animals or other symbols. Surrounding these enclosures are rectangular buildings. All this would be unsurprising, except that Göbekli Tepe dates from between 11,500 and 10,000 years ago – before agriculture emerged. “We don’t have domesticated plants or domesticated animals there,” says Laura Dietrich at the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna. Here is evidence that hunter-gatherers sometimes created monumental architecture, something previously thought to be unique to settled agricultural societies. We can’t know why Göbekli Tepe was built. It seems it wasn’t a living space: there is no source of water and no evidence of permanent fireplaces,…

THE first attempts at growing crops wouldn’t have looked much like farming does today. “It’s better to see it as small gardens,” says Dorian Fuller at University College London. “Small, intensively managed plots on riverbanks and alluvial fans – possibly not all that important in terms of the overall calories.” Instead, Fuller thinks these gardens may have provided high-value foods, such as rice, for special occasions. “It’s like growing something for Christmas dinner instead of year-round meals,” he says. As British botanist Lilian Gibbs discovered in Borneo in 1910, and others have seen elsewhere since, this kind of proto-farming is still practised by some modern hunter-gatherer tribes. These people often move every few years as local game populations are depleted, leaving behind fruit trees that their descendants may return to…

NATURE is full of beautiful things. That doesn’t necessarily make their creators artists. An orchid that produces an exquisite flower is simply fulfilling its genetic destiny. The sculptural worm cast you might find on a sandy beach is just a lugworm’s pile of poo. But the artistic abilities of a few animals do seem more like ours. Bowerbirds, in particular, show flair. All 20 species build elaborate structures, which they may decorate with colourful objects or paint with regurgitated berries. This behaviour isn’t entirely hardwired – bowerbirds may choose to decorate with human-made objects that wouldn’t have been available when their bower-building talents evolved. Nevertheless, it is quite stereotyped. Only males build bowers, and they have no choice but to do so. What’s more, bowers serve one purpose: they are…

“THE ability of humans to produce a system of signs is clearly not something that starts 40,000 years ago. This capacity goes back at least 100,000 years,” says Francesco d’Errico at the University of Bordeaux, France. Nonetheless, something quite special seems to have happened in Europe during the last glacial period. When Genevieve von Petzinger at the University of Victoria in Canada documented Stone Age symbols on cave walls, she frequently found certain ones used together. For instance, starting 40,000 years ago, hand stencils are often found alongside dots. Later, between 28,000 and 22,000 years ago, they are joined by thumb stencils and finger fluting – parallel lines created by dragging fingers through soft cave deposits. These kinds of combinations are particularly interesting if you are looking for the deep…

TODAY, the alphabet is so central to education in most countries that children can often recite it long before they have learned to read or write. Beyond the familiar ABC, a variety of alphabets are used to write in many languages, from Russian to Arabic. But all trace back to one common ancestor. The story of that first alphabet has long been a mystery, but over the past 25 years we have made enormous progress towards pinpointing when and where it was invented. The key period seems to be around 3800 years ago, during the reign of Amenemhat III in Egypt. By this time, writing had already been around for more than 1000 years. Two systems had become particularly influential: cuneiform, originating in Mesopotamia in south-west Asia, and Egyptian hieroglyphics.…

COVERING much of the Middle East, the so-called Fertile Crescent east of the Mediterranean Sea has often been called “the cradle of civilisation” thanks to the emergence of city-states such as Uruk in ancient Mesopotamia, which became increasingly urbanised from around 6000 years ago. Estimates of Uruk’s population vary wildly, but, by around 4900 years ago, it is thought to have housed more than 50,000 people, making it one of the oldest cities in the world. Its communal works included temples and canals for irrigation. Uruk’s inhabitants invented the first known form of writing, cuneiform, and their texts include the earliest surviving great work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, about a legendary king of the ancient city. At the western end of the Fertile Crescent, another civilisation was emerging…

Today, centralised states are often responsible for law and justice, but that wasn’t always the case. Hints of how law evolved come from modern human groups that, like Stone Age hunter-gatherers, live in egalitarian, decentralised societies. The Turkana are nomadic pastoralists in east Africa. Despite having no centralised political power, men will cooperate with non-family members in a life-threatening venture – stealing livestock from neighbouring peoples, say. While the activity itself may be ethically dubious, the motivation to cooperate reflects ideas that underpin any modern justice system. If men refuse to join these raiding parties, they are judged harshly and punished by other group members.…

ONE of the earliest known examples of a sustained war is from what is now Sudan. Individuals buried at the prehistoric cemetery Jebel Sahaba seem to have experienced violence and trauma at several points during their lives. At about 13,400 years old, Jebel Sahaba is one of the earliest sites displaying signs of mass conflict. Violence between communities seems to have become more common once people settled in one place to farm, which had begun happening by about 12,000 years ago. But evidence of organised violence among more mobile communities, like those represented by Jebel Sahaba, is unusual. The remains at the cemetery were exhumed in the 1960s, and once it was clear that 20 of the skeletons carried injuries, it was suggested they had belonged to people who had…

SOURCE: DOI/10.1073/PNAS.1323964111 FARMING is seen as a pivotal invention in the history of humanity. Before, our ancestors roamed the landscape gathering edible fruits, seeds and plants and hunting whatever game they could find. They lived in small, mobile groups that usually set up temporary homes according to the movement of the prey they hunted. This changed one fine day in the Fertile Crescent, the region east of the Mediterranean Sea spanning much of what is now the Middle East, around 8000 to 10,000 years ago. There, supposedly, someone noticed sprouts growing out of seeds they had accidentally left on the ground. Over time, people learned how to grow and care for plants in order to get the most out of them. Doing this for generations gradually transformed the wild plants…

IF YOU have ever marvelled at the accomplishment of Stone Age cave artists, you are in good company. In 1940, on visiting Lascaux cave in southern France, Pablo Picasso supposedly said: “Since Lascaux, we have invented nothing.” Perspective, movement, impressionism, abstraction, pointillism – it is all there. And these artworks are some 17,000 years old. Picasso’s remark may be apocryphal. It was certainly premature. In 1994, hundreds of paintings twice the age of those at Lascaux were discovered at Chauvet cave, also in France. The Chauvet paintings are, quite simply, stunning: prowling lions and galloping horses are captured so vividly that the remote Stone Age world becomes almost tangible. Even more astonishingly, this art was created shortly after the dawn of the “cultural explosion”, an event archaeologists have long recognised…

FOR prehistorian Henri Breuil, who studied European cave art in the early 20th century, the paintings and engravings were all about hunting and magic. In the abstract symbols, he saw representations of traps and weapons – meanings that were intrinsically linked to the larger paintings. In the 1960s, archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan declared that lines and hooks were male signs, whereas ovals and triangles were female. Some of this interpretation has stuck. Circles and inverted triangles are still often cited in the literature as representations of the vulva. It is worth noting that many of the earlier scholars studying cave art were men, which may have led to gender biases in their interpretations. “It’s interesting that it was predominantly male archaeologists doing this work early on, and there were a whole…

THE 3800-year-old carvings at Wadi el-Hôl highlighted a real puzzle. As far as we can tell, the alphabet wasn’t embraced for state business until 3200 years ago. One surprising suggestion is that the literati didn’t consider it to be superior to their traditional scripts. Researchers tend to think about writing in terms of efficiency. From this perspective, cuneiform and hieroglyphics are poor systems because they employed hundreds of signs, each potentially having multiple meanings. But scribes valued this complexity, in part because it left room for creativity – enabling them to make visual puns, for instance. At the same time, ancient writing systems were crystal clear in their meaning. The earliest versions of the alphabet were less so. For instance, most didn’t fully represent the vowels of the spoken language.…

AROUND 6200 years ago, farmers living on the eastern fringes of Europe, in what is now Ukraine, did something inexplicable. They left their Neolithic villages and moved into a sparsely inhabited area of forest and steppe. There, in an area roughly the size of Belgium between the modern cities of Kiev and Odessa, they congregated at new settlements up to 20 times the size of their old ones. This enigmatic culture, known as the Cucuteni-Trypillia, predates the earliest known cities in China and in Mesopotamia, a civilisation that spanned part of the Middle East. It persisted for 800 years, but then, as mysteriously as it had begun, this experiment in civilisation failed. The inhabitants left the lightest of footprints in the landscape and no human remains have been found. “Not…

RELIGION has given us algebra and the Spanish Inquisition, Bach’s cantatas and pogroms. You might conclude that it is impossible to make a moral judgement about such a multifaceted cultural phenomenon. Nevertheless, in recent years, there have been attempts to dissect the question using a scientific scalpel. Researchers have tried to work out how humanity has been shaped by things like moralising philosophies, world religions, all-seeing gods and rituals. The studies offer insights, but each presents just a fragment of the full story and sometimes generates competing ideas. What is needed is a way to assess them and to build a more holistic picture of the role religion has played in the evolution of societies. That is what my colleagues and I have been doing. But first, what do we…

THE vast majority of cultures are patriarchies, where men are more likely than women to hold positions of social, economic and political power. So it is tempting to assume that this is the natural state of affairs, perhaps because men are, on average, stronger than women. But a study of humanity’s roots suggests this answer is too simple. Chimpanzees aren’t a proxy for our ancestors – they have been evolving since our two family trees split between 7 million and 10 million years ago – but their social structures can tell us something about the conditions that male dominance thrives in. Common chimpanzee groups are manifestly patriarchal. Males are vicious towards females, take their food, forcibly copulate with females that are ovulating and even kill them merely for spending time…

BEFORE about 5000 years ago, Neolithic Europe was inhabited by people much like those who raised Stonehenge. They were farmers with an urge to work together and build large stone structures. “It looks like these people were quite communal,” says Kristian Kristiansen at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. And that community spirit continued into the afterlife: many of their megalithic monuments served as shared graves, some containing the remains of up to 200 people. They were also innovators. Patterns of wear on ancient cattle bones suggest they had worked out how to use livestock to pull heavy loads. They probably had wheeled vehicles and there may even have been protoroads connecting communities. It looks like they were coming together to live in what Kristiansen calls “mega-settlements” with populations of up…

“SINCE I have been at the Foreign Office, I have not seen such calm waters,” Britain’s permanent under secretary for foreign affairs announced in May 1914. He was wrong, of course. Just three months later, Europe launched into an orgy of killing. By 1945, close to 100 million people had been killed in conflict and a nuclear arms race had begun. The past century seems to have been the worst of times – and yet it has clearly also been the best of times. Difficult as it may be to believe, rates of violent death are lower now than they have ever been. The Stone Age world, we now know, was a rough place. Ten thousand years ago, if someone decided to use force to settle an argument, there were…

AH, THE good old days, when predictions that “the end is nigh” were seen only on sandwich boards and the doom-mongers who carried them were easy enough to ignore. If only things had stayed so simple. The sandwich boards have mostly gone and the world is still here, but the gloomy predictions keep coming, and not all of them are based on creative interpretations of religious texts. Scientists, historians and politicians alike have begun to warn that Western culture is reaching a critical juncture. Cycles of inequality and resource use are heading for a tipping point that, in many past civilisations, precipitated political unrest, war and finally collapse. The idea that Western power and influence is in gradual decline, perhaps as a prelude to a precipitous fall, has been around…

ANCIENT Egypt, the Roman Empire, the Maya, China’s Qing dynasty – these civilisations all shone brightly in their time. Yet, in every case, the glory days were followed by collapse. This seems to be the inevitable trajectory of any culture. What’s more, it looks like Western civilisation is experiencing this fate right now. Signs of crisis are obvious, from rising economic inequality and political polarisation to violent conflict and ecological disasters. Many see this as a global “polycrisis” that poses a severe, possibly existential, threat to contemporary societies. I predicted this would happen. More than two decades ago, I began applying the mathematics of complex systems to history in an attempt to uncover underlying patterns. Using this approach, I discovered that violent political instability follows two cycles, one peaking every…