2021

Despite its name, the ice age saw its fair share of wildfires, particularly towards the end. Humans were partly to blame, as was likely a catastrophic comet that burned some 10% of the earth’s surface almost 13,000 years ago. But Faith and his colleagues found another surprising culprit: the disappearance of large grazers.

The Neanderthals are probably our most famous cousins: short, stocky humans who went extinct around 40,000 years ago, with some surprising theories as to why. Less-well known but equally relevant are the Denisovans. Remains were discovered in Denisova Cave (also called Aju-Tasch) in Russia in 2008, and genetic analysis revealed them to be very close relatives of Neanderthals. Closer than us, in fact. It turned out we had not one, but two closest relatives.

“What Tribal members have said all along is that you don’t just preserve the archaeological site,” said Lisbeth Louderback, curator of archaeology and director of the archaeobotany lab at the Natural History Museum of Utah and anthropologist at the University of Utah.

The new painting—a series of three to four Sulawesi warty pigs and an outline of human hands—was discovered by Basran Burhan, a doctoral student and co-author of the study, in an isolated valley reachable only by foot. After taking precautions to ensure the collected samples were untouched, the authors calculated that the images must have been made at least 45,500 years ago.

The seeds of an idea were planted as Kristen Hawkes watched older women collecting vegetables. Hawkes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, has extensively studied the Hadza, a group of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania who eat a lot of wild foods such as berries and tubers.