“The fact that Tebo 1 apparently didn’t face serious infection suggests that whoever performed the amputation understood how to keep the wound, the surgical tools, and their hands clean and understood that they needed to do so (which puts 31,000-year-old hunter-gatherers ahead of European and American surgeons just a century ago).”
“[I]t turned out that the strain of plague that ravaged northern Kyrgyzstan in 1338–1339 was an ancestor of every other 14th-century plague genome that has ever been sequenced. The plague strain from the Lake Issyk-Kul villages also seems to be the most recent common ancestor of four Y. pestis lineages that circulate in modern rodent populations.”
“Nearly every one of the 382 stone tools unearthed at Xiamabei is less than four centimeters long; making and using these smaller blades would have allowed early humans to do more work with less material. Handles helped make the tools easier to grip and more versatile; [Fa-Gang] Wang and his colleagues found one bladelet with part of a bone haft still attached to the stone.”
“[Ludovic] Slimak and his colleagues say that there was probably less than a year between the end of Neanderthal occupation here, in Layer F, and the time our species moved in, in Layer E. That makes it very likely that the two species actually met and interacted at the site, or somewhere very nearby.”
“The Norse may have been at the site slightly earlier, but they were definitely there and cutting down trees by 1021. Based on the development stages of certain cells in the waney layer, Dee, Kuitems, and their colleagues say that one of the trees was cut down in the spring, while another was cut down in the summer or fall.”
“Bennett and his colleagues radiocarbon-dated seeds from the layer just below the oldest footprints and the layer just above the most recent ones. According to the results, the oldest footprints were made sometime after 23,000 years ago; the most recent ones were made sometime before 21,000 years ago.”
“The findings suggest that some of the most important members of our gastrointestinal menagerie—the ‘keystone taxa,’ as Candela and his colleagues put it—have been with us even longer than modern humans have existed.”
“The lone teenager carrying the toddler cut across that route at a right angle. At least three times, mammoths crossed the teenager’s trail, obscuring the small human footprints with their own massive feet. The teenager stepped in some of those fresh mammoth tracks on their way back south-southeast.”
“Flint-knapping in bed is probably an even worse idea than eating crackers in bed, but it’s a delightfully human thing to find traces of. Grains of red and orange ocher also mingled with the bedding layers, and Wadley and her colleagues say the grains had probably rubbed off from someone’s body art.”
“The Okmok II eruption lasted from 43 BCE to 41 BCE, but its effects on the other side of the world lasted more than a decade. Ancient writers describe crop failures and famine in northern Italy and northern Greece from April 43 BCE through 36 BCE.”
“Grotte de Cussac [is] the only site from this period where people buried their dead deep in the interior of a cave (or in a bear nest), mingled the bones of multiple people, or removed skulls from the dead.”
“This single discarded piece of ancient chewing gum tells us that the ancient woman … was probably lactose intolerant, ate duck and hazelnuts, and may recently have had pneumonia. She also had blue eyes, dark brown hair, and dark skin.”
“Dunne and her colleagues found traces of 3,000-year-old fatty acids from ancient milk still clinging to the insides of the vessels. … The amount of material the archaeologists found suggested that the vessels had seen a lot of use—or had been filled with milk before being placed in the children’s graves.”
“The children seem to have scooped up clay-rich mud from the floor and smeared it on a stalagmite against the far wall, then drew curved, sinuous shapes in the wet clay with their fingers. Today, visitors to the cave can see those fluted finger-tracks, which clearly mark the heights of the three young children.”
“Madgwick and his colleagues found strontium isotope ratios representing every major geological area in Britain, and oxygen and carbon isotope ratios were also all over the map, suggesting that the pigs who ended up at the four sites had been reared in diverse landscapes.”