Ancient maritime voyagers carried symbolic art 4,000 years ago

A 4,000-year-old painted stone plaque discovered on a remote Indonesian island is the first known example of portable art belonging to the Austronesian Painting Tradition (APT), providing a rare glimpse into the symbolic world of some of history’s greatest maritime voyagers. 

 

Caption

A 4,000-year-old painted stone plaque discovered on Wetar Island, Indonesia.

Credit

Shimona Kealy/Australian Nattional University.

The discovery was made by an international team led by archaeologists from The Australian National University (ANU) and Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) during excavations at Huknaur rockshelter on Wetar Island, eastern Indonesia. 

The plaque bears a distinctive red concentric-circle and radiating “sun-ray” design characteristic of the APT – a style of rock art found across eastern Indonesia and the Western Pacific in regions where Austronesian languages are spoken. 

Although APT paintings are widespread, most occur on cave and rockshelter walls and are difficult to date, leaving their chronology poorly understood. The Wetar plaque provides the first evidence that these designs were also painted on portable objects, while its securely dated archaeological context provides a rare age for this characteristic motif. 

Lead author Professor Sue O’Connor, from The Australian National University (ANU), said the discovery changes our understanding of how these symbols may have been used. 

"This is the first portable example of Austronesian painted art ever found archaeologically,” Professor O’Connor said. 

“Portable symbols could travel with people and may have helped communicate shared identities, affiliations and beliefs between island communities. Similar sun-like designs were historically painted on boats and other objects, where they could function as symbols of protection and group identity.” 

Co-author Dr Simona Kealy, of the ANU, said radiocarbon dating of the archaeological deposits placed the plaque between approximately 4,090 - 3,900 years ago, when Austronesian-speaking peoples were rapidly dispersing into Island Southeast Asia. 

“This discovery shows that the characteristic sun-ray motif was already part of the APT during the earliest Austronesian expansion into southern Wallacea,” Dr Kealy said. 

 “These people were extraordinary seafarers, rapidly dispersing across thousands of kilometres of ocean. The Wetar plaque shows that art and shared symbolic traditions were part of this great maritime dispersal from its earliest phases.” 

The plaque was found in a preceramic layer, indicating that the APT reached Wetar before pottery – one of the principal material traits traditionally used by archaeologists to trace Austronesian expansion. 

ANU co-author Dr Ceri Shipton said this provides a new perspective on what the earliest Austronesian pioneers brought with them. 

“This discovery shows that Austronesian pioneers arrived with a compelling ideology represented by the APT paintings, prior to more extended contacts bringing pottery,” Dr Shipton said. 

“People didn’t just carry technologies and possessions when they voyaged to new islands. They carried ideas, identities, and new ways of understanding the world.” 

The study, 4,000-year-old painted plaque from Southeast Indonesia reveals Austronesian Painting Tradition preceded Neolithic pottery, will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). 

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2611580123 

Last common ancestor, no matter its feet, could have been a vertical climber

 New research suggests that no matter what we eventually determine the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees to be, we’ll learn it was a primate that climbed trees.

Humans and chimpanzees began their separate evolutionary paths between 6 and 7 million years ago when they split from the last common ancestor (LCA) they shared. Debate about the LCA hinges in part on the tree-dwelling environment from which humans emerged – which involved living among the high-up horizontal branches or being able to get there from the ground, or, more likely, both.

Chimpanzees have ankle flexion that makes them skilled tree trunk climbers, but monkeys have been thought to navigate trees with their arms – which would influence what kind of ancestor we’re looking for, one that climbed up trunks or lived in treetops full time.

Video evidence from West Africa suggests there may be no such distinction, at least based on foot structure: Researchers from The Ohio State University observed and confirmed with measurements that wild sooty mangabey monkeys, known to have feet that lack chimps’ versatile ankles, display foot bone flexibility that facilitates vertical climbing up skinny tree trunks to hide, forage or sleep.

“People are making behavioral inferences from fossils, and some say a monkey can’t vertically climb as well as an ape can,” said first study author Luke Fannin, assistant professor of anthropology at Ohio State. “We’re saying there’s a functional equivalence here. So you can’t rule out vertical climbing just because something doesn’t have a chimpanzee-like foot.”

The research appears this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Identifying the last common ancestor is considered key to helping us understand what led to bipedalism, which is done habitually only by humans. We know we’re apes, but this study makes the point that even if the ancestor had a more monkey-like foot morphology, it could still climb like an ape.

“Part of paleoanthropology is understanding how our evolution happened, and it’s often through the hallmark of how we move because modern humans move quite differently than our cousins, the chimpanzees, do, and they’re the living primate we’re most closely related to,” Fannin said. “And we’re trying to understand why that is.”

Fannin recorded the videos of mangabeys in the wild at the Taï Forest Monkey Project field station in Ivory Coast that is co-directed by W. Scott McGraw, professor and chair of anthropology at Ohio State and senior author of the paper.

“The great thing about having the video is that it allows us to capture exactly what the monkey is doing in a high-resolution manner. So we can actually say how the joint is loaded. Before, we had hunches, but in this way, it’s far more precise,” McGraw said.

The chimpanzee ankle can flex upward at a 45-degree angle during a tree climb, compared to most human ankles’ capacity to flex about 20 degrees. Fannin found that the mangabey foot achieves a 46-degree flex in its midfoot during a vertical climb.

This poses a challenge to differing schools of thought about how the LCA moved and the kind of foot it needed to get around a forest environment – theories differ on whether the foot structure was required to be more like a chimp’s or a monkey’s.

“What’s neat about this paper is it adds clarity, but it also makes the broader picture more fuzzy,” McGraw said. “Because this notion that you have to have a foot like an advanced ape to vertically climb, which is a difficult task, is not true. You’ve got a bunch of monkeys that aren’t extinct – and which can be filmed – that are very competent at performing a biomechanically challenging behavior right now in a forest in West Africa.

“The videos that Luke made in Taï are particularly important because they provide some of the first kinematic documentation of a locomotor behavior in a monkey that has largely been unrecognized or underappreciated.”

There are modern hunter-gatherers and human foragers who are competent vertical climbers as well, a skill believed to be associated with flexibility in their ligaments, tendons and muscles rather than their foot bones.

But Fannin and McGraw note that though modern humans may be defined by walking on two feet, we are focused on ascent, on reaching new heights in a literal sense – a sign that our arboreality, that ancestral connection to trees, is not just anatomical but also a behavioral hallmark.

“Arboreality is fundamental to understanding primates – including ourselves – because it has shaped our body to a large degree: hands and feet, wrists and ankles, nails instead of claws, etc.,” McGraw said.

Added Fannin, “Regardless of where you’re starting from, which we don’t know yet, vertical climbing is universal and the anatomy is going to perform that behavior. So I think that to get at the question of a monkey-like or ape-like last common ancestor, we need more fossils.”

Ancient Egyptian tomb shows how burial trends changed over hundreds of years

 

Placement of mummies in a Theban tomb – from individual placement to stacking of bodies – shows how burial practices and their symbolic implications changed over time

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Frontiers

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image: 

Figure 3 — Mummified individuals from Side Chamber 3 of Theban Tomb 209, showing variation in body orientation and arm position.

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Credit: Proyecto dos cero nueve, Universidad de La Laguna / Jared Carballo-Pérez.

The Theban Necropolis, opposite Luxor, is comprised of more than 400 tombs. In a new Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology study, researchers in Spain examined a part of one of these tombs – chamber three in tomb TT 209 – more closely to reconstruct how this burial space was used and reused between its construction during the Twenty-fifth Dynasty (754-656 BCE) and the Ptolemaic period (305–30 BCE), when it was abandoned.

“We found a total of 16 mummified human individuals, a mummified dog, and a disturbed deposit containing the remains of at least four individuals,” said first author Dr Jared Carballo-Pérez, a researcher at the University of La Laguna. “The detailed study of the bodies indicates neither chaotic accumulation nor a loss of the original ritual over time. Rather, there was a spatial logic in which each new deposition was adapted to the presence of previous bodies – a kind of funerary memory in the processes of reuse.”

Senior author Dr Miguel Ángel Molinero Polo, a professor of Egyptology at the University of La Laguna, added: “We have few details regarding how the people who entered tombs behaved, what their motivations were in each historical period, and how they conceptually reconfigured the pre-existing space.”

Tomb through time

To deepen the understanding of the deposition of bodies and the transformation of funerary space, the team excavated the chamber, photographed the mummies, and produced sketches and descriptions of their position, orientation, and relationship with the tomb’s structures. The chamber contains nine funerary deposits, comprising individual and multiple burials, as well as associated funerary objects.

For the earliest deposits, the team observed relatively separated burials where bodies were placed in coffins.

“The earliest individuals buried here appear to have been of high social standing, as they were interred in coffins, with funerary nets and amulets, and with an assemblage containing costly items, such as the contents held in Phoenician amphorae, a large number of which were found alongside them,” said Molinero Polo.

Later, towards the end of the 25th dynasty and the Persian period (around 680-404 BCE), bodies started being inserted into any space still available. This resulted in denser use of space. In some cases, a change could be seen in the positioning of limbs, for example a folded-in arm whereas in earlier burials arms were typically stretched out. Also in the Persian period, the team observed a shift from individual deposits to a vertical way of arranging bodies. Superposition of bodies was found in two thirds of the burials in the chamber.

Reconstructing funerary practices

In the southeastern section of the chamber, four mummies and one mummified dog are buried on top of one another in the Ptolemaic Period.

“The bodies buried in vertical superposition did not have coffins but were carefully mummified. They also can be associated with upright jars that point to a specific ritual not found in the earlier phases of the tomb’s use,” said Molinero Polo.

“One detail I find quite beautiful is the presence of a mummified dog placed directly on top of the mummies of a man and a woman,” said Carballo-Pérez. “This could indicate a close relationship between these human individuals and the animal, an idea that I think is quite easy to empathize with.”

“It could also reflect a further change in ritual practice, with an animal taking on the role of a psychopomp, a symbolic helper in the journey to the afterlife,” added Molinero Polo.

This, alongside certain changes in the arrangement of bodies – for example, in later deposits individuals were buried with both arms folded over their chests in what Egyptologists call the Osirian position – suggests that the tomb did not become disordered or without structure, or that cultural rites were lost. Instead, the chamber should be considered a repeatedly reactivated space, reconfigured by new burials that transformed the organization and meaning of space itself without erasing the past.

In some funerary deposits, it is difficult to identify the exact sequence of depositions and reconstruct the precise intentionality behind them, the team noted. This is due to century-long use during which the chamber flooded multiple times as well as fires and human re-entry that transported debris within the tomb.

“Nevertheless, what we present means that deposits that were previously considered ‘disordered’ can be reinterpreted,” concluded Carballo-Pérez. “This helps us develop a better understanding of the social behaviors behind funerary practices.”

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Journal

Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology

Pre-Hispanic farmers built giant water system bottom-up, archaeologists reveal

 Communities living in Colombia thousands of years ago achieved an engineering wonder of the world based on cooperation among family groups without top-down government, a new study shows. Archaeologists argue that policymakers in Colombia should now adopt a similar strategy to solve the country’s current water management crisis.

The pre-Hispanic field systems of La Mojana in the Colombian Caribbean are so vast you can see them from a plane at high altitude. Their canals and raised fields – in use from the first centuries BC until the 11th century AD – cover an astonishing 500,000 hectares, roughly the same size as the Grand Canyon National Park, or three times the size of London.

It has traditionally been assumed that powerful rulers must have ordered and managed such an ambitious infrastructure project because of its complexity and the amount of work thought to be involved. In a study published today in Communications Sustainability, however, a University of Cambridge-led archaeological team argues that the work was most likely locally-led, cooperative, and much faster than previously assumed.  

The findings are important historically but also offer hope to Colombians today who are suffering from a water management crisis linked to climate change, intensive farming and policy failure.

“These field systems are so impressive that people have assumed they were achieved by hierarchical chiefdoms. Our data tells a very different story,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Jasmine Vieri, from the University of Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

“Our findings indicate that local communities were capable of building these systems in very short periods of time, and organising themselves rather than relying on a powerful external force.”

The societies responsible for these hydraulic systems in La Mojana were contemporary with the Maya, and with the broader Mesoamerican and Andean state-level societies, which culminated in the huge Aztec and Inca empires a few centuries later. The pre-Hispanic populations occupied an area where, the researchers point out, there is no evidence of state-level societies. It has been assumed – encouraged by evidence of elaborate gold work and ceramics – that they were hierarchical chiefdoms on their way to state formation. By contrast, the new findings support the idea that these people chose to organize themselves far more horizontally and were able to achieve great things.

Their raised field system managed huge quantities of water during heavy rains, gradually redirected it in drier months, buffering against both drought and floods. The network of canals redistributed water from permanent bodies of water around raised areas of housing. The system provided more fertile soils for cultivation in dry seasons and may have helped locals to trap fish.

Using satellite imagery, the researchers mapped a 500-hectare portion (roughly 700 football pitches) of Pre-Hispanic field systems in the municipality of San Macros, Sucre. They studied the infrastructure at an unprecedented level of detail, recording the dimensions and volume of 1,600 ridges and 63 housing platforms. They worked out that when first constructed the formations were around 1.4 metres high from the top of the ridge to the lowest point of the canal.

The international team – including researchers from the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH), and University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain –   then developed a new method to quantify the labour needed to build this system and considered the social and spatial organization most likely to have underpinned this work.

Dr Jasmine Vieri said: “We are confident that one of these canal-ridge systems could have been built in less than two months, around half of a dry season. That’s a far lower labour investment than has been previously assumed, and manageable through cooperation.”

The researchers factored in volumes of moved earth, as well as information about local geology, indigenous working practices, population density and available technology. Starting from an estimated population of 1,600 people in the study area, they based their calculations on a workforce of 800 people which, the researchers emphasise, represents a conservative estimate, given ethnographic evidence that men, women and probably children traditionally engage in subsistence farming.

Soils in the Colombian Caribbean are heavy clay which would have made the work harder and there were no metal shovels in the region in this period. The workers may have used wood tools but this remains unproven.

The study springs from Cambridge’s ERC-funded REVERSEACTION project, which investigates how technologies are sustained in stateless societies, and how collective action can achieve great things without coercion.

Professor Marcos Martinon-Torres, REVERSEACTION’s lead and senior author, said: “Arguments for centralised, top-down planning, unsupported by data, risk obscuring the agency of indigenous pre-Hispanic populations. Pre-Hispanic societies were inventive and cooperative, they worked with nature rather than trying to obstruct it. And we already know that recovering ancestral practices has positive societal impact today through local populations connecting with their heritage through technology.”

Evidence for the use of raised field systems in this region ends before the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century. It isn’t clear why they stopped being used but it has been suggested there was population movement from the lowlands towards mountainous areas.

The researchers argue that the pre-Hispanic sustainable solution to water management can be adopted by local populations without the need for state intervention. Instead of redistributing water flow, the Colombian government has often adopted the opposite strategy of attempting to block water flow to prevent flooding and adapt the land for agricultural and livestock activities based on models designed for non-flooding environments. But dykes have proven incapable of holding water back. Since 2021, the Caregato dyke has suffered multiple breaches, causing losses for local communities and ecosystem damage. At other times, the region suffers from severe droughts.

Study author Dr Fernando Montejo Gaitán, from the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH), said: “Policymakers have shown interest in these ancient systems, but lacked data. Our study is the first to show that these sustainable solutions can be organised locally and collectively. Local people may need resources from the state but not necessarily state intervention.”

The researchers have made their code open source to enable researchers to apply the same methods to data sets relating to other regions.

Reference

J. Vieri, F. Montejo Gaitán, M. Carrero-Pazos, M. Martinón-Torres, ‘Collective labour and sustainability of pre-Hispanic field systems in La Mojana’, Communications Sustainability (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s44458-026-00128-5

Rethinking the earliest stages of cereal domestication

 Around 11,000 years ago, Neolithic communities across southwest Asia began producing their own food by bringing wild cereals, legumes and fruit-bearing plants under cultivation. Over the following millennia, these practices transformed hunter-gatherer lifeways and eventually gave rise to farming societies in which domesticated cereal crops were central to subsistence, storage and the accumulation of surplus.

Wild cereals naturally possess a brittle, or shattering, rachis that allows mature seeds to disperse easily, promoting successful germination in the wild but making seed harvesting by people difficult. In comparison to later domestic cereals, wild cereals also have relatively small grains. Decades of archaeobotanical research have shown that systematic cultivation of cereal crops gradually selected for larger grains and a tough rachis that keeps seeds attached to the ear after ripening, making harvesting more efficient.

"Crop domestication was a highly variable and protracted process that unfolded across multiple regions of southwest Asia," said Dr Jade Whitlam (University of Oxford), who led the study. "Over the past decade, archaeobotanical research has revealed that domestication was preceded by a lengthy period of ‘pre-domestication cultivation’, which is thought to have created the conditions that favoured the evolution of key domestication traits”.

Previous studies have interpreted larger cereal grains and the appearance of plants that would later become weeds of cultivation at Early Neolithic sites as evidence that people were already tilling soils and that selection for domestication traits was already underway. Larger grains recovered from southern Levantine sites have therefore often been viewed as among the earliest indicators of domestication.

"At el-Hemmeh and Sharara, both barley and emmer wheat remained morphologically wild in the initial phases of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, with no evidence of domesticated non-shattering forms", said Dr Whitlam. "Yet grain size varied dramatically, ranging from typically wild-sized grains to grains that were comparable in size to domesticated cereals. At the same time, ecological analysis of weedy plant taxa associated with these cereals indicates they were growing in low disturbance environments, challenging the idea that larger grains were selected for through cultivation practices such as systematic tillage."

To investigate what was driving these differences, the team carried out stable carbon isotope analysis on the charred cereal grains. The stable carbon isotopic composition of cereal grains is strongly influenced by the moisture available to plants as they grow, allowing the team to infer their growing conditions.

“Interestingly, the barley grains that fall within the size range of domestic-sized grains show carbon isotope values indicating they grew under wetter conditions”, said Dr Pascal Flohr (University of Kiel and the University of Oxford), who has carried out extensive field-based experimental work in Jordan establishing the relationship between water stress and the carbon isotopic composition of cereals. “In contrast, the smaller‚ wild-sized grains have isotope values that indicate they grew under much drier conditions, revealing that water availability had a major influence on grain size”.

"Once we integrated the archaeobotanical, weed ecological and isotopic evidence, it became clear that environmental conditions provided a much better explanation for the observed variation in grain size than genetic selection under tillage," said Dr Whitlam. "Our findings show that developmental plasticity rather than genetic change accounts for initial increases in cereal grain size in the Early Holocene southern Levant. This suggests that genetic selection for larger grain size may have occurred later than previously thought, perhaps only after selection for the non-shattering rachis."

"This study demonstrates the value of bringing together long-term archaeological field projects with new analytical approaches. By integrating evidence from archaeobotany, stable isotopes and plant ecology, we can ask entirely new questions about how the transition to agriculture unfolded/. Taken together, these findings suggest that Early Neolithic plant management practices appear to have been part of the long history of hunter-gatherer niche construction rather than a radical new intention to domesticate.” says Professor Cheryl Makarewicz, senior author of the study and director of the excavations at el-Hemmeh and Sharara, the latter with her colleague Dr. Bill Finlayson (Oxford), also a co-author on this research.

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2535274123

1066 as a holy war against ‘followers of Satan’

 

Lost letter from the Pope casts 1066 as a holy war against ‘followers of Satan

A lost letter from the Pope could rewrite the story of 1066 – according to research from the University of East Anglia.

Excerpts from the letter are now held in the Vatican archives and they suggest that a power struggle in Rome helped shape the Norman Conquest.

Analysis shows that King Harold may have forfeited his crown long before the Battle of Hastings by backing the wrong side in a bitter struggle between two rival popes. And that the outcome of 1066 may have been shaped as much by political conflict in Rome as by events on the battlefield at Hastings.

The findings are published today by Yale University Press in a new book titled 'Harold: Warrior King', by UEA historian Prof Tom Licence.

They come as the British Museum prepares to open its blockbuster exhibition featuring the Bayeux Tapestry, one of the most famous surviving artefacts from the Norman Conquest.

A time of not one, but two popes

In the 1060s, Western Christendom was divided by a rift that saw two rival popes claiming authority. According to the new research, England's support for one faction may have helped persuade Pope Alexander II to back William of Normandy's invasion.

It suggests England's backing for one side of the dispute may have had far-reaching consequences.

Prof Tom Licence, Professor of Medieval History and Literature at UEA, said: "1066 was not simply decided on the battlefield at Hastings. The outcome may also have been shaped by decisions taken almost a thousand miles away in Rome."

For centuries, the Norman Conquest has largely been understood as a dynastic struggle sparked by the death of Edward the Confessor and rival claims to the English throne.

Now, Prof Licence argues that a contemporary letter from the Pope points to a muchwider political and religious struggle stretching across medieval Europe.

He said: "Harold's policy on the papacy may ultimately have played into the hands of his enemies, giving William's opportunistic invasion the legitimacy of a just war."

New evidence from the Vatican

The new findings centre on previously overlooked excerpts from a lost letter from the Pope preserved in a medieval canon law collection held in the Vatican.

“The Pope's whole register of letters is lost,” said Prof Licence. “But some survive as copies or excerpts. Two excerpts from this particular letter survive in collections of papal rescripts.”

Written by Pope Alexander II after William's accession, the letter reflects on England's relationship with the papacy before the conquest.

In one passage, Alexander claimed that England had been under the protection of St Peter until people “fired with the pride of their father Satan” led the English away from “the path of truth”.

“While historians have occasionally noted these remarks, they have generally treated them as unexplained references,” said Prof Licence.

“But they can only be fully understood in the context of a fierce dispute that divided Western Christendom during the early 1060s.

“In 1061, rival factions elected two competing popes, Alexander II and Bishop Cadalus of Parma, who became known as Honorius II.

“For several years the two popes and their supporters fought for control of Rome, with Honorius retaining powerful backing from the Holy Roman Empire and attracting support elsewhere in northern Europe.”

According to Prof Licence, the language used in Alexander's letter reflects the political and religious rhetoric employed against Honorius and his followers during the rift.

Rather than simply condemning Harold as an oath-breaker, Alexander appears to have been accusing England of abandoning his cause and siding with his rival.

Prof Licence said: “In the eyes of Pope Alexander's supporters, it was no longer simply a battle for a crown, but a struggle against those they regarded as followers of Satan."

Answering a long-standing historical puzzle

Prof Licence believes this shift likely occurred after Harold came to power in January 1066.

He said: "Historians have traditionally explained papal support for William through Harold's disputed claim to the throne and allegations of oath breaking.

“What this evidence suggests is that Pope Alexander II may have had political reasons of his own for backing the Norman invasion.

"If Harold had aligned England with Alexander's rivals, it would help explain why the pope was willing to support the overthrow of a crowned king. Viewed from Rome, the conquest was not simply a succession dispute but part of a wider struggle over the future of the Church in Europe."

Prof Licence argues that this interpretation helps answer a longstanding historical question - why would a pope support the violent overthrow of an anointed king?

Was the Norman Conquest decided in Rome, not Hastings?

Rather than simply backing William because of Harold's disputed claim to the throne, Pope Alexander II may have been motivated by a wider political struggle taking place across Europe.

According to Prof Licence's research, England's support for a rival papal faction could have influenced the pope's decision to support the Norman invasion.

The findings suggest the Norman Conquest was about more than a battle for the English crown. Instead, 1066 may have formed part of a much larger contest involving the papacy, the Holy Roman Empire and competing power blocs across medieval Europe.

Prof David Fergusson, Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, said: “Tom Licence’s research on the European context of the Norman invasion offers us a fresh perspective on the wider political currents that contributed to the events of 1066.

“His account of the likely role of the papacy in legitimising William’s invasion illustrates the complex dynamics of the relationship between church and monarchy throughout the period. This is a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of the medieval Church in the wider history of Europe.”

Prof Rory Naismith, Professor of Early Medieval English History at the University of Cambridge, said: “This is indeed an important point. The Norman Conquest did not just involve the English and the Normans - it was tied to developments all over Europe.

“Rome in particular had long been central to England's religious identity, and to have brought out the Roman dimension of 1066 in this way is a significant contribution.

“Prof Licence shows what can be achieved when neglected sources are expertly brought out of the shadows,” he added.

Sugars may have helped fuel the evolution of the human brain: new research

Study suggests sugars played a bigger role in brain evolution than previously thought

Fruit, honey and other naturally sweet foods may have helped fuel the evolution of the human brain, according to new research from the University of Sydney and the University of Glasgow.  

Published in Science, the study modelled the glucose needs of humans and their ancestors from four million years ago until recently, finding natural sugars may have supplied energy needed to support growing brains before the advent of cooking made starch-rich foods like tubers and grains easier to digest.  

“Raw starch does not release glucose, meaning early humans likely relied on naturally sweet foods long before grains became a regular part of the diet,” said lead author Professor Jennie Brand-Miller, Professor of Human Nutrition at the University of Sydney Charles Perkins Centre and School of Life and Environmental Sciences. 

The findings offer a different perspective on the longstanding scientific view that meat consumption was a key driver of human evolution. They may also offer insight into why we often crave sweet food.  

“While animal foods were important, the brain’s need for glucose has largely received little attention from anthropologists,” Professor Brand-Miller said.  

Over a period of four million years, human brain size increased from around 300 grams in early hominins to about 1500 grams in modern humans. As brains grew, so did demand for glucose, which is required by other tissues including red blood cells, kidneys and reproductive organs.  

“The human brain is unusually large for our body size and requires substantial amounts of energy,” Professor Brand-Miller said.   

“Glucose is the brain’s primary energy source, and for much of human evolution, would have come from carbohydrates found in foods such as fruit and honey.” 

Modelling the nutritional demands of a growing brain 

The researchers developed a model spanning approximately four million years of human evolution to examine whether dietary carbohydrates could meet the increasing glucose demands of a growing brain. They calculated what they describe as “obligatory glucose demand” – the glucose required by the brain, red blood cells, kidneys and reproductive tissues including the foetus, placenta and mammary glands – and compared this with likely food sources available to our ancestors at different stages of evolution.  

The model included six evolutionary stages and assessed how changing proportions of animal and plant foods affected carbohydrate availability.  

The researchers combined evidence from food composition, metabolism, physiology, fossil isotope studies, dental morphology, archaeology, primate diets and genetics to estimate how humans met their glucose needs as brain size increased.  

This modelling suggests earliest hominins (such as ‘Lucy’, whose brain was the same size as a chimpanzee, Homo habilis and Homo erectus) were likely highly reliant on carbohydrate-rich foods, particularly fruit. Later, as the use of fire and cooking became more widespread, starches from underground food sources such as wild yams, water lily rhizomes and African potato contributed to glucose intake. 

According to Professor Brand-Miller, archaeological evidence suggests grains entered the human diet much later.  

“People often think of carbohydrates as breads and cereals, but for most of human evolution carbohydrates came from fruits, honey and underground plant foods,” she said.  

“The earliest evidence of seed grinding is 65,000 years ago, when we see the first evidence of grinding stones to make flour.” 

The importance of glucose during reproduction 

The study highlights nutritional demands during pregnancy and lactation. The researchers estimate reproductive females required substantially more glucose than other adults because of the needs of the foetus, placenta and milk production.  

“When we think about the foods that supported human evolution, we need to consider not only brain growth but also the nutritional requirements of pregnancy and raising children,” said Professor David Raubenheimer, co-author and Professor of Nutritional Ecology at the Charles Perkins Centre.  

“The foetus and placenta place additional demands on glucose, increasing the need for carbohydrate-rich foods. This helps us understand why pregnant women often crave fruit.” 

The findings may also help explain why sweet foods appeal to children.  

“Our desire for sweetness is instinctive,” said Professor Brand-Miller.  

“Children need more energy in the form of carbohydrate than adults because their brains are claiming as much as two thirds of their basal metabolic rate during development.” 

Incorporating natural sugars into our diet 

Professor Brand-Miller said the research offers insight into our longstanding preference for sweetness.  

“For most of evolution, fruit and honey were valuable sources of energy that helped meet the body’s glucose needs. 

“Sugars in nature are typically packaged within foods that also contain fibre, vitamins, minerals and other beneficial compounds.” 

The findings build on previous University of Sydney research showing honey is nature’s original antibiotic. 

“Honey is not ‘empty calories’ as we are often led to believe. For most of human evolution, honey was a highly valued food source that provided energy and other beneficial properties,” Professor Brand-Miller said.  

“Understanding the role of carbohydrates alongside meat, fat and protein provides a more complete picture of the human evolutionary journey. Our study suggests sugars and starches may have helped shape the development of the human brain and many of the traits that make us human.”  

What can modern humans make of these primordial findings? 

"The evidence suggests that carbohydrate-rich foods helped fuel the energy demands of our growing brains. Rather than fearing carbohydrates, people should focus on high-quality sources, including whole fruits, legumes and nutritious grains, and prioritise a range of carbohydrate foods as part of a healthy diet." 

Research  

Brand-Miller, Jennie, Hardy, Karen, Copeland, Les, et al., SWEET – sugars, diet and human evolution, Science (2026). 

DOI: 10.1126/science.aed8437 

More information, including a copy of the paper, can be found online at the Science press package at https://www.eurekalert.org/press/scipak/