Reading time: 4 minutes
Ask people how Stonehenge was built and you’ll hear stories of sledges, ropes, boats and sheer human determination to haul stones from across Britain to Salisbury Plain, in south-west England. Others might mention giants, wizards, or alien assistance to explain the transport of Stonehenge’s stones, which come from as far as Wales and Scotland.
Reading time: 6 minutes
How far back does the rich history of Italian olives and oil stretch? My new research, synthesising and reevaluating existing archaeological evidence, suggests olive trees have been exploited for more than 6,000 years. The first Italian olive oil was produced perhaps 4,000 years ago.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Why did we take so long to invent civilisation? Modern Homo sapiens first evolved roughly 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. But initial steps towards civilisation – harvesting, then domestication of crop plants – began only around 10,000 years ago, with the first civilisations appearing 6,400 years ago.
Reading time: 5 minutes
People throughout history have deliberately tried to forget corrupt or criminal leaders who offend the public’s sense of morality or justice. The term damnatio memoriae (“condemnation of memory”) describes this kind of deliberate forgetting in ancient times.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Even though these animals are long extinct, we can draw some conclusions about their likely population because we can estimate their weights from palaeontological information. The dwarf hippo weighed around 130kg, and the dwarf elephant came in at just over 500kg. We also know how to translate weights to estimates of population size, longevity, survival and fertility. We can even use data collected from related species still living today, such as the pygmy hippo and the African elephant, to estimate how fast they would have grown.
Reading time: 5 minutes
Hundreds of years ago it was women who caused cultural traditions to spread – possibly through intermarriage – linking communities along Papua New Guinea’s south coast.
Reading time: 7 minutes
Both bread and wine are products of settled society. They represent the power to control nature and create civilization, converting the wild into the tamed, the raw into the cooked – and their transformation cannot be easily done alone. The very act of transforming the wild into the civilized is a social one, requiring many people to work together.
Reading time: 6 minutes
If you could travel back in time to one of the bustling cities of ancient Mesopotamia (c. 4000–330 B.C.), for example, you would have no trouble finding yourself a bar or a beer. Beer was the beverage of choice in Mesopotamia. In fact, to be a Mesopotamian was to drink beer.
Reading time: 5 minutes
Yet patterns in their descendant languages preserve enough structure to enable us to manage at least a shadowy glimpse of them. The theories and methods pioneered through this work will continue to fuel research into the reconstruction of human ethnolinguistic prehistories worldwide for many years to come.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Charting the archaeology of West Papua is vital because it helps us understand where the ancestors of the wider Pacific came from and how they adapted to living in this new and unfamiliar sea of islands.
Reading time: 9 minutes
Focusing on life in ancient Rome, Pompeii, Herculaneum and Ostia, I’m deeply impressed by the brilliant engineers who designed these underground marvels and the magnificent architecture that masks their functional purpose. Sewer galleries didn’t run under every street, nor service every area. But in some cities, including Rome itself, the length and breadth of the main sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, rivals the extent of the main sewer lines in many of today’s cities. We shouldn’t assume, though, that Roman toilets, sewers and water systems were constructed with our same modern sanitary goals in mind.
Reading time: 8 minutes
We, and the West Turkana Archaeological Project which we co-lead, had discovered the earliest stone artifacts yet found, dating to 3.3 million years ago. The discovery of the site, named Lomekwi 3, instantly pushed back the beginning of the archaeological record by 700,000 years. That’s over a quarter of humanity’s previously known material cultural history. These tools were made as much as a million years before the earliest known fossils attributed to our own genus, Homo.
