Discover Magazine | Human Origins

The Dawn of Civilization: Writing, Urban Life, and Warfare

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:10:00 -0600

Joan Oates’s sharp blue eyes spotted something that was not right. Standing on the windy summit of a vast, human-made mound in northeastern Syria, the wiry 81-year-old archaeologist noticed an ugly scar that had been left by a backhoe on one of the smaller mounds ringing the ancient city of Nagar, where she has excavated for a quarter century. Oates had just arrived to begin her latest season at the site, and this blemish on her cherished landscape annoyed her. Two young men on her team volunteered to investigate the damage. They returned, shaken. Jumping into the trench, one of them had come face-to-face with a skull. “Everywhere we looked, there were human bones,” one recalls. “There were an enormous number of dead people.”

More than 100, it turned out, and their remains had rested there undisturbed for nearly six millennia. What Oates’s team found that hot autumn day in 2006 were the remnants of a ferocious battle or a brutal mass murder on a scale unprecedented for such an early date. And the inadvertent discovery lay within sight of what is currently our best and oldest evidence of early urban life. Digging just a few hundred yards away on the main mound of what today is called Tell Brak, the archaeologists recently uncovered large buildings and extensive workshops from the same period—around 3800 B.C.—as well as imported material and fancy tableware.

The dual finds make Brak a unique window into the time when humans first began to live in cities, trade over long distances, and, apparently, organize warfare on a mass scale. The conventional wisdom holds that urban living began nearly 1,000 years later and nearly 1,000 miles to the southeast in the so-called cradle of civilization once known as Sumer, located in today’s Iraq. When civilization arrived in this northern edge of the Mesopotamian plain, the story goes, it was bestowed by the Sumerians from fabled cities like Ur, Uruk, Eridu. But this hulking mound in a remote corner of Syria (tell means “hill”) offers a radical new view of just how, where, and why our globalized lifestyle may have gotten its start.

3 Faces of Eve

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:25:00 -0600

Our reporter tries out a trio of genetic tests to find out what they can tell her about her identity and her ancestry.

Did We Mate With Neanderthals, or Did We Murder Them?

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:55:00 -0600

Aiming his crossbow, Steven Churchill leaves no more than a two-inch gap between the freshly killed pig and the tip of his spear. His weapon of choice is a bamboo rod attached to a sharpened stone, modeled after the killing tools wielded by early modern humans some 50,000 years ago, when they cohabited in Eurasia with their large-boned relatives, the Neanderthals. Churchill, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, is doing an experiment to see if a spear thrown by an early modern human might have killed Shanidar 3, a roughly 40-year-old Neanderthal male whose remains were uncovered in the 1950s in Shanidar Cave in northeastern Iraq. Anthropologists have long debated about a penetrating wound seen in Shanidar 3’s rib cage: Was he injured by another Neanderthal in a fight—or was it an early modern human who went after him?

“Anyone who works on the ribs of Shanidar 3 wonders about this,” Churchill says.

The possibility that early humans attacked, killed, and drove small bands of Neanderthals to extinction has intrigued anthropologists and fascinated the public ever since Neanderthal bones were first studied in the mid-19th century. At first naturalists were not sure what to make of the funny-looking humanlike bones. But with publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the idea that the bones were from a species closely related to us began to make sense. Eventually scientists recognized that Neanderthals were an extinct species that shared a common ancestor (probably Homo heidel bergensis) with Homo sapiens. For thousands of years, Neanderthals were the only hominids living in Europe and parts of Asia. Then, around 50,000 years ago, early modern humans migrated into Europe from Africa. By 28,000 to 30,000 years ago, the Neanderthals had disappeared.

What Happened to the Hominids Who May Have Been Smarter Than Us?

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:45:00 -0600

Huge-headed humans called Boskops lived in Africa with Homo sapiens until just 10,000 years ago. What happened to them? Shouldn't their superior intellect have given them a survival advantage? We internally activate many thoughts at once, but we can retrieve only one at a time. Could the Boskop brain have achieved the ability to retrieve one memory while effortlessly processing others in the background, a split-screen effect enabling far more power of attention?

Each of us balances the world that is actually out there against our mind’s own internally constructed version of it. Maintaining this balance is one of life’s daily challenges. We occasionally act on our imagined view of the world, sometimes thoroughly startling those around us. (“Why are you yelling at me? I wasn’t angry with you—you only thought I was.”) Our big brains give us such powers of extrapolation that we may extrapolate straight out of reality, into worlds that are possible but that never actually happened. Boskop’s greater brains and extended internal representations may have made it easier for them to accurately predict and interpret the world, to match their internal representations with real external events.

Perhaps, though, it also made the Boskops excessively internal and self-reflective. With their perhaps astonishing insights, they may have become a species of dreamers with an internal mental life literally beyond anything we can imagine.

Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Connect

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:05:00 -0600

We often think if ourselves as Robinson Crusoes sitting on separate islands, we’re all interconnected, both bodily and emotionally. This may be an odd thing to say in the West, with its tradition of individual freedom and liberty, but Homo sapiens is remarkably easily swayed in one emotional direction or another by its fellows. This is precisely where empathy and sympathy start—not in the higher regions of imagination, or the ability to consciously reconstruct how we would feel if we were in someone else’s situation. It began much more simply, with the synchronization of bodies: running when others run, laughing when others laugh, crying when others cry, or yawning when others yawn. Most of us have reached the incredibly advanced stage at which we yawn even at the mere mention of yawning—as you may be doing right now!—but this is only after lots of face-to-face experience. Yawn contagion, too, works across species. Virtually all animals show the peculiar “paroxystic respiratory cycle characterized by a standard cascade of movements over a five- to ten-second period,” which is the way the yawn has been defined. I once attended a lecture on involuntary pandiculation (the medical term for stretching and yawning) with slides of horses, lions, and monkeys—and soon the entire audience was pandiculating. Since it so easily triggers a chain reaction, the yawn reflex opens a window onto mood transmission, an essential part of empathy. This makes it all the more intriguing that chimpanzees yawn when they see others do so. Yawn contagion reflects the power of unconscious synchrony, which is as deeply ingrained in us as in many other animals. Synchrony may be expressed in the copying of small body movements, such as a yawn, but also occurs on a larger scale, involving travel or movement. It is not hard to see its survival value. You’re in a flock of birds and one bird suddenly takes off. You have no time to figure out what’s going on: You take off at the same instant. Other wise, you may be lunch.

The Brain: Humanity's Other Basic Instinct: Math

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:35:00 -0600

New research suggests that math has evolved its way right into our neurons—and monkeys', too.

Darwin's Great Blunder—and Why It Was Good for the World

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:30:00 -0500

Darwin is often hailed as a genius—but in venerating Darwin the man, have we stolen steam from the (correct) idea that Darwinism is obvious to begin with?

The Complicated World of Ancient Humans

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:00:00 -0500

Recent digs show long-distance trade and complex social structures were around for longer than archaeologists thought.

5 Questions: The Mummy Doctor

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:15:00 -0500

Since 2005, Swiss pathologist Frank Rühli has focused on the cause of death for patients who died thousands of years ago.

Unearthing the Mayan Creation Myth

Sat, 16 May 2009 12:40:00 -0500

Researchers find that the tale of the "Hero Twins" goes back more than 2,000 years.

The Brain: The Big Similarities & Quirky Differences Between Our Left and Right Brains

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 08:00:00 -0500

A broken symmetry from our evolutionary heritage is part of what makes us human.

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Money

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:45:00 -0500

11) In a study last year, researchers found more cocaine residue on U.S. bills than on any other currency. Also found on money: staphylococcus bacteria and fecal matter. 17) The world’s first ATM accepted only checks laced with identifying traces of radioactive carbon-14. The inventor claimed users “would have to eat 136,000 checks” for the radioactivity to have any dangerous effects.

Discover Interview: DNA Agrees With All the Other Science: Darwin Was Right

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:15:00 -0600

Molecular biologist Sean Carroll shows how evolution happens, one snippet of DNA at a time

They Don't Make Homo Sapiens Like They Used To

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 08:20:00 -0600

Our species—and individual races—have recently made big evolutionary changes to adjust to new pressures.

DISCOVER Special Evolution Section

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:10:00 -0600

The future of Homo sapiens, genetic proof of evolution, the next Galapagos, and more.

Discover Magazine | Human Origins

The Dawn of Civilization: Writing, Urban Life, and Warfare

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3 Faces of Eve

Top 100 Stories of 2009: #51: Oldest Musical Instrument Found

Did We Mate With Neanderthals, or Did We Murder Them?

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