Scientists Intrigued by Conical Skull Found in Ancient Burial Ground
As Live Science reports, the skull, which was found in a prehistoric burial ground known as Chega Sofla without its corresponding skeleton, shows signs not only of intentional modification, but also possibly fatal blunt force trauma.
Dated to roughly 6,200 years old, the strange cone shape of the skull appears to be the product of a practice archaeologists today call artificial cranial modification, a process similar to foot-binding in which the soft skulls of children are bandaged to deliberately deform them.
Found across cultures and millennia, this type of body modification has been undertaken for various reasons, including to denote social status or adhere to beauty standards, as evidenced by it more often being seen in girls than boys. Though it's still occasionally practiced today, the practice sometimes referred to as "skull elongation" was far more common in prehistoric times. The girl with the conical skull in this study, for instance, was believed to have lived in the fifth millennium BCE.
Aside from the cone-shaped cranium of the young woman, who was believed to be younger than the age of 20, archaeologists Mahdi Alirezazadeh and Hamed Vahdati Nasab of the Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran — who also authored a study about their discovery that was recently published in the International Journal of Osteoarcheology — also found a long, unhealed fracture on the back of the skull that likely killed her.
"We know this woman experienced the fracture in the final moments of her life," Alirezazadeh told Live Science, "but we don't have any direct evidence to say that someone intentionally struck her."
Though it's unclear whether the ancient teen in question was intentionally killed or died by accident, the researchers believe that the modified shape of her skull likely made it weaker and more susceptible to trauma than a conventional cranium.
Along with pointing out that an unmodified fractured skull was found alongside the conical skull in the portion of Chega Sofia where they were working, Alirezazadeh also noted that whatever killed the latter "was so severe that it would have fractured a normal, unmodified skull as well."
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What was the first human species?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. All humans today are members of the modern human species Homo sapiens — Latin for "knowing man." But we're far from the only humans who ever existed. Fossils are revealing more and more about early humans in the genus Homo — ancestors like Homo erectus (Latin for "upright man"), who lived in Africa, Asia and parts of Europe between 1.9 million and 110,000 years ago. Scientists now recognize more than a dozen species in the Homo genus. So what, exactly, was the first human species? The answer, it turns out, is not crystal clear. Fossil finds in Morocco have revealed that anatomically modern humans emerged at least 300,000 years ago. But the oldest human species scientists definitively know about is called Homo habilis, or "handy man" — a tool-using primate who walked upright and lived in Africa between 2.4 million and 1.4 million years ago. However, earlier fossils hint that other Homo species may predate H. habilis. The scarcity of early human fossils makes it challenging to know if unusual specimens are a newfound species or simply an atypical member of a known species. On top of that, evolution can be gradual, so it's hard to pinpoint when a new species emerges, especially when fossils have a mix of features from different species. "The process of evolution is continuous, but the labels we place on it for convenience are static," Tim D. White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California Berkeley, told Live Science. Related: Why did Homo sapiens outlast all other human species? Earliest Homo Most evolutionary theories suggest that H. habilis evolved from an earlier genus of primate named Australopithecus — Latin for "southern ape" because its fossils were first discovered in South Africa. Sign up for our newsletter Sign up for our weekly Life's Little Mysteries newsletter to get the latest mysteries before they appear online. Various species of Australopithecus lived from about 4.4 million to 1.4 million years ago. It may be that H. habilis evolved directly from the species Australopithecus afarensis — the best-known example of which is "Lucy," who was unearthed at Hadar in Ethiopia in 1974. The fossils of our genus are usually distinguished from Australopithecus fossils by Homo's distinctively smaller teeth and a relatively large brain, which led to the greater use of stone tools. But White noted that traits like smaller teeth and bigger brains must have emerged at times in the Australopithecus populations that early Homo evolved from. "If you had an Australopithecus female, there wasn't a birth at which point she would have christened the child Homo," he said. As a result, there is no fixed point in time in which Homo originated; instead, the Homo genus emerged roughly between 2 million and 3 million years ago, White said. Evolving in Africa Since the 1970s, researchers in Africa have discovered fossils that they've attributed to another ancient species, Homo rudolfensis, which challenges the idea that H. habilis was the earliest Homo. H. rudolfensis seems to have been physically much bigger, had a larger brain and a flatter facial structure than H. habilis, which may have made it look more like a modern human. Its fossils are roughly the same age as H. habilis — as much as 2.4 million years old. But "there is only one really good fossil of this Homo rudolfensis," according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, so scientists don't know if H. rudolfensis is an unusual H. habilis or even an Austrolopithicus with a larger-than-usual brain. Paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, who heads the Smithsonian Institute's Human Origins program, told Live Science that even older fossils from Africa appear to be from the genus Homo and may predate both of those species. RELATED MYSTERIES —What did the last common ancestor between humans and apes look like? —Are Neanderthals and Homo sapiens the same species? —Why did Homo sapiens emerge in Africa? The oldest of those fossils date from about 2.8 million years ago, but they are only fragments — a few jaw bones and a few teeth — so they are not enough to establish if they came from a different, unnamed species of Homo, he said. A 2025 study found additional teeth dating to 2.59 million and 2.78 million years old that may also belong to this mysterious early Homo species. So it may be that the first human species has not yet been found. "There's a whole lot of excitement, but there is also a lot of uncertainty, about trying to discover more about the origins of the genus Homo," Potts said. Human evolution quiz: What do you know about Homo sapiens? Solve the daily Crossword
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A braided stream, not a family tree: How new evidence upends our understanding of how humans evolved
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Our species is the last living member of the human family tree. But just 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals walked the Earth, and hundreds of thousands of years before then, our ancestors overlapped with many other hominins — two-legged primate species. This raises several questions: Which other populations and species did our ancestors mate with, and when? And how did this ancient mingling shape who we are today? "Everywhere we've got hominins in the same place, we should assume there's the potential that there's a genetic interaction," Adam Van Arsdale, a biological anthropologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, told Live Science. In other words, different hominin species were having sex — and babies — together. This means our evolutionary family tree is tangled, with still-unknown relatives possibly hiding in the branches. Emerging DNA evidence suggests this "genetic interaction" resulted in the diversity and new combinations of traits that helped ancient humans — including our ancestors — thrive in different environments around the globe. "It's all about variation," Rebecca Ackermann, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told Live Science. "More variation in humans allows us to be more flexible as a species and, as a result, be more successful as a species because of all the diversity." Cutting-edge techniques may illuminate the crucial periods deeper in our evolutionary past that led to Homo sapiens evolving in Africa, or even shed light on periods before the Homo genus existed. That knowledge, in turn, could improve our understanding of exactly what makes us human. Related: Lucy's last day: What the iconic fossil reveals about our ancient ancestor's last hours A braided stream In the early 20th century, scientists thought there was a clear evolutionary line between our ancestors and us, with one species sequentially evolving into another and no contribution from "outside" populations, like the branches on a tree. But 21st-century advances in ancient DNA analysis techniques have revealed that our origins are more like a braided stream — an idea borrowed from geology, where shallow channels branch off and rejoin a stream like a network. "It becomes very hard when you think about things in more of a braided stream model to divide [populations] into discrete groups," Ackermann said. "There are not, by definition, any discrete groups; they have contributed to each other's evolution." Ackermann studies variation and hybridization — the exchange of genes between different groups — across the evolutionary history of hominins, to better understand how genetic and cultural exchange made us human. And she thinks hybridization both within and outside Africa played a significant role in our origins. Evidence of such hybridization has come out in a steady stream since the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010. That research program, which earned geneticist Svante Pääbo a Nobel Prize in 2022, revealed that H. sapiens and Neanderthals regularly had sex. It also led to the discovery of the Denisovans, a previously unknown population that ranged across Asia from about 200,000 to 30,000 years ago and that also had offspring with both Neanderthals and H. sapiens. "You have so much complexity that it makes no sense to say there was only one origin of sapiens. There can't be one universal model that explains literally every human on Earth." Sheela Athreya, Texas A&M University When species share genes with one another through hybridization, the process is known as introgression, and when those shared genes are beneficial to a population, it's known as adaptive introgression. Emerging from two decades of gene studies of humans and our extinct relatives is the understanding that we may be who we are thanks to a proclivity to pair off with anyone — including other species. Connecting with other groups — socially and sexually — was an important part of human evolution. "For us to survive and become human probably really depended on that," Van Arsdale said. Benefits of hybridization Since the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, researchers have attempted to identify when and how often our H. sapiens ancestors mated with other species and groups. They've also investigated how Neanderthal and Denisovan genes affect us today. Many of these studies rely on large datasets of genomes from humans living today and tie them back to ancient DNA extracted from the bones of extinct humans and their relatives who lived tens of thousands of years ago. These analyses show that many genes that originated in now-extinct groups may confer advantages to us today. For instance, modern Tibetans have a unique gene variant for high-altitude living that they likely inherited from the Denisovans, while different versions of Neanderthal skin pigment genes may have helped some populations adapt to less-sunny climates while protecting others from UV radiation. There is also evidence that Neanderthal genes helped early members of our species adapt quickly to life in Europe. Given their long history in Europe prior to the arrival of H. sapiens, Neanderthals had built up a suite of genetic variations to deal with diseases unique to the area. H. sapiens encountered these novel diseases when they spread into areas where Neanderthals lived. But, by mating with Neanderthals, they also got genes that protected them from those viruses. Beyond specific traits that may confer advantages in humans today, these episodes of mating diversified the human gene pool, which may have helped our ancestors weather varied environments. The importance of modern genetic diversity can be illustrated with human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes, which are critical to the human immune system's ability to recognize pathogens. Humans today have a dizzying array of these genes, especially in eastern Asia. This area of the world is a "hotspot" for emerging infectious diseases due to a combination of biological, ecological and social factors, so this diversity may provide advantages in an area where new diseases are frequently emerging. When genetic diversity is lost through population isolation and decline, groups may become particularly susceptible to new infections or unable to adapt to new ecological circumstances. For instance, one theory holds that Neanderthal populations declined and eventually went extinct around 40,000 years ago because they lacked genetic diversity due to inbreeding and isolation. Related: Did we kill the Neanderthals? New research may finally answer an age-old question. Discovery of "ghost populations" Some of the newest research goes deeper into evolutionary time, identifying "ghost populations" — human groups that went extinct after contributing genes to our species. Often, archaeologists have no skeletal remains from these populations, but their echoes linger in our genome, and their existence can be gleaned by modeling how genes change over time. For instance, a "mystery population" of up to 50,000 individuals that interbred with our ancestors 300,000 years ago passed along genes that created more connections between brain cells, which may have boosted our brain functioning. The population that hybridized with H. sapiens and helped boost our brains may have been a lineage of Homo erectus. This species was once thought to have disappeared after evolving into H. sapiens in Africa, but anthropologists now think H. erectus survived in parts of Asia until 115,000 years ago. In fact, our evolutionary history may include the mating of populations that had been separated for up to a million years, Van Arsdale said. These "superarchaic" populations are increasingly being discovered as we mine our own genomes and those of our close relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans. For instance, a genetic study published in 2020 identified a superarchaic population that separated from other human ancestors about 2 million years ago but then interbred with the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans around 700,000 years ago. Experts don't know exactly what genes this superarchaic ghost population shared with our ancestors or who it was, but it may have been a lineage of H. erectus. Evolutionary blank space But there's a large, unmapped region of human evolutionary history — and it's crucial for our identity as a species. The period when H. sapiens was first evolving in Africa, and the more distant period of human evolutionary history on the continent that predates the Homo genus, remains a huge knowledge gap. That's in part because DNA preserves well in caves and other stable environments in frigid areas of the world, like those found in areas of Europe and Asia, while Africa's warmer conditions usually degrade DNA. As a result, the most ancient complete human DNA sequence from Africa is just 18,000 years old. By contrast, a skeleton discovered in northern Spain produced a full mitochondrial genome from a human relative, H. heidelbergensis, who lived more than 300,000 years ago. "Maps of human ancient DNA are overwhelmingly Eurasian data," Van Arsdale said. "And the reality is that's a marginal place in our evolutionary past. So to understand what was happening in the core of Africa would be potentially transformative." This is where current DNA technology falls short. Small hominins that walked on two legs, called australopithecines, evolved around 4.4 million years ago in Africa. And between 3 million and 2 million years ago, our genus, Homo, likely evolved from them. H. sapiens evolved around 300,000 years ago in Africa and then traveled around the world. But given the scarcity of ancient DNA from Africa, it is difficult to figure out which groups were mating and hybridizing in that vast time span, or how the fossil skeletons of human relatives from the continent were related. Related: 'It makes no sense to say there was only one origin of Homo sapiens': How the evolutionary record of Asia is complicating what we know about our species A new technique called paleoproteomics could help shed light on our African origin as a species and even reveal clues about the genetic makeup of australopithecines and other related hominins. Because genes are the instructions that code for proteins, identifying ancient proteins trapped in tooth enamel and fossil skeletons can help scientists determine some of the genes that were present in populations that lived millions of years ago. Still, it's a very new technique. To date, paleoproteomic analysis has identified only a handful of incomplete protein sequences in ancient human relatives and has thus far been able to glean only a small amount of genetic information from those. But in a landmark study published this year, researchers used proteins in tooth enamel to figure out the biological sex of a 3.5 million-year-old Australopithecus africanus individual from South Africa. And in another study, also published this year, scientists used tooth enamel from a 2 million-year-old human relative, Paranthropus robustus, to identify genetic variability among four fossil skeletons — a finding that suggests they may have been from different groups, or even different species. Paleoproteomics is still pretty limited, though. In a recent study, scientists analyzed a dozen ancient proteins found in fossils of Neanderthals, Denisovans, H. sapiens and chimpanzees. They found that these proteins could help reconstruct a family tree down to the genus level, but were not useful at the species level. Still, the fact that protein data can be used to reconstruct part of the braided stream of early humans and to identify the chromosomal sex of human relatives is encouraging, and further research along these lines is needed, experts told Live Science. Some are confident new approaches could help us unpack these early interactions. "I think we're going to learn a lot more about Africa's ancient past in the next two decades than we have so far," Van Arsdale said. Ackermann is more cautious. To really understand when, where and with whom our human ancestors mated and how that made us who we are, "we need to have a whole genome" from these ancient human relatives, she said. "With proteins, you just don't get that." Sheela Athreya, a biological anthropologist at Texas A&M University, is optimistic that we can use these new techniques to tease apart our more distant evolutionary past — and that it will yield surprises. For instance, she thinks what we now call Denisovans may actually have been H. erectus. RELATED STORIES —DNA has an expiration date. But proteins are revealing secrets about our ancient ancestors we never thought possible. —28,000-year-old Neanderthal-and-human 'Lapedo child' lived tens of thousands of years after our closest relatives went extinct —Never-before-seen cousin of Lucy might have lived at the same site as the oldest known human species, new study suggests "Absolutely in my lifetime, someone will be able to get a Homo erectus genome," Athreya said, likely from colder areas of Asia. "I'm excited. I think it'll look Denisovan." Either way, it's clear that a whole lot of mixing made us human. The Homo lineage may have first evolved in Africa, Athreya said. 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Scientists use Stephen Hawking theory to propose 'black hole morsels' — strange, compact objects that could reveal new physics
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Tiny black holes created in the aftermath of violent cosmic collisions could offer unprecedented insight into the quantum structure of space and time, a new theoretical study proposes. What's more, signals from these "black hole morsels" could potentially be detected by current instruments, scientists reported in the study, which was published in the journal Nuclear Physics B. "Our work shows that if these objects are formed, their radiation might already be detectable using existing gamma-ray observatories," Francesco Sannino, a theoretical physicist at the University of Southern Denmark and co-author of the study, told Live Science via email. Hawking radiation and the smallest black holes One of the deepest mysteries in modern physics is how gravity behaves at the quantum level. The new study offers a bold proposal to explore this regime by looking for the glow produced by tiny black holes created in the aftermath of giant black hole collisions. The idea that black holes are not entirely black, and therefore could emit faint radiation, was first proposed by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s. His calculations revealed that quantum effects near a black hole's event horizon would cause it to emit radiation and lose mass — a process now known as Hawking radiation. The black hole temperature is predicted to be inversely proportional to its mass. So for massive astrophysical black holes, the effect is minuscule, with temperatures so low that the radiation is effectively undetectable. But for very small black holes, the situation is different. "Black hole morsels are hypothetical micro-black holes that could be formed during the violent merger of two astrophysical black holes," Giacomo Cacciapaglia, a senior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and co-author of the study, said in an email. "Unlike the larger parent black hole, these morsels are much smaller — comparable in mass to asteroids — and thus much hotter due to the inverse relationship between black hole mass and Hawking temperature." Related: Scientists detect most massive black hole merger ever — and it birthed a monster 225 times as massive as the sun Because of this elevated temperature, these morsels would evaporate relatively quickly, releasing bursts of high-energy particles such as gamma-rays and neutrinos. The team's analysis suggests that this radiation could form a distinct signal that may already be within reach of present-day detectors. A new handle on quantum gravity Although no such morsels have been observed yet, the researchers argue that the formation of these tiny black holes is theoretically plausible. "The idea is inspired by analogous processes in neutron star mergers," Stefan Hohenegger, senior researcher at the Institut de Physique des Deux Infinis de Lyon and co-author of the study, explained in an email. "It's supported by estimates from beyond-General Relativity frameworks, including string theory and extra-dimensional models." In such extreme environments, small-scale instabilities might pinch off tiny black holes during the merger process. These objects, in turn, could evaporate through Hawking radiation over timescales ranging from milliseconds to years, depending on their mass. Crucially, if such radiation is detected, it could open a window into new physics. "Hawking radiation encodes information about the underlying quantum structure of spacetime," Sannino said. "Its spectral properties could reveal deviations from the Standard Model at extreme energy scale, potentially leading to discoveries of unknown particles or such phenomena as extra dimensions predicted by various theories." Such energy scales lie far beyond the reach of even the most powerful particle colliders, like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The possibility that black hole morsels might provide a natural "accelerator" for probing these physics is what makes them so compelling. According to the team, the signature of a black hole morsel would be a delayed burst of high-energy gamma-rays radiating in all directions — unlike typical gamma-ray bursts, which are usually beamed. Instruments capable of detecting such high-energy signals include atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, like the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS), in Namibia; the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC), in Mexico; and the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) in China, as well as satellite-based detectors, like the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. "Some of these instruments already have the sensitivity required," Hohenegger noted. The researchers didn't stop at theorizing. They used existing data from HESS and HAWC to place upper bounds on how much mass could be emitted in the form of morsels during known black hole mergers. These limits represent the first observational constraints on such phenomena. "We showed that if black hole morsels form during mergers, they would produce a burst of high-energy gamma rays, with the timing of the burst linked to their masses," Cacciapaglia said. "Our analysis demonstrates that this novel multimessenger signature can offer experimental access to quantum gravitational phenomena.' What comes next While the study provides a compelling case for morsels, many uncertainties remain. The exact conditions for their formation are still poorly understood, and no full simulations have been performed at the scales necessary to model them. But the researchers are optimistic. RELATED STORIES —See the universe's rarest type of black hole slurp up a star in stunning animation —Exotic 'blazar' is part of most extreme double black hole system ever found, crooked jet suggests —Paperclip-sized spacecraft could visit a nearby black hole in the next century, study claims "Future work will involve refining the theoretical models for morsel formation and extending the analysis to include more realistic mass and spin distributions," Sannino said. The team also hopes to collaborate with observational astronomers to perform dedicated searches in both archived and upcoming datasets. "We hope this line of research will open a new window into understanding the quantum nature of gravity and the structure of spacetime," Hohenegger said. If black hole morsels exist, they may not only illuminate the sky with exotic radiation but could also shed light on some of the deepest unsolved questions in physics. Solve the daily Crossword
