Mike Pitts is a journalist and archaeologist who specialises in the study of British prehistory. His most recent book is Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island (Bloomsbury).
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In The Inheritors, Willliam Golding’s second novel, Neanderthals utter only a few short words and think entirely with images. A family is disturbed by the arrival of people who are not like them, and who talk in sentences. The two groups clash and in the end the only Neanderthal to survive is an infant, stolen
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You don’t need to own a dog or a cat to know the two animals behave differently. One is loyal, protective, excitable and eager to please, the other… a cat. Now, large DNA studies have shed light on the historic origins of our closest pets, creating a fable-like explanation for their contrasting personalities. Modern European
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As I write, hundreds of ancient human remains are secretly being buried in a remote desert 1,000km from Sydney (New South Wales national parks service recommends you take extra supplies, fuel and car parts). No one knows who the people were, how, or when they died. But the reburial has stirred deep emotions, with a
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Ramses and the Pharaohs’ Gold is, let’s not shy away from it, a profit-seeking exhibition mounted by an entertainment business. Neon opened its high-tech space at Battersea Power Station last year with dinosaurs, and has partnerships with the likes of Harry Potter and Marvel. The gold mask fronting Ramses’s publicity has nothing to with Ramses.
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In 2024 a detectorist found some gold coins in Suffolk. The discovery was declared legally treasure. If a museum wanted the coins, the finder would have been rewarded with a sum equivalent to their market value, but none did, so he’s selling them, at an auction estimate of £20,000 to £26,000. Here’s the problem. It
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Climb the Reading Room steps to reach the British Museum’s dazzling Hawaii exhibition, and you perform an obeisance. At the top is a representation of Ku, a larger-than-human god of war and chiefly power, carved in stylish fury from the trunk of a breadfruit tree. He once commanded a flight of stairs at the Museum
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For the archaeologists used to working on major infrastructure jobs, it was a small dig, over in four weeks. Yet Peter Crawley, in charge of excavating the ground ahead of a new local housing project near Thetford in Norfolk, had a hunch it might be important. His team at Pre-Construct Archaeology did a metal-detector survey,
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A human skeleton found in a box in the basement of Eastbourne town hall in 2012, has, not for the first time, caused some controversy. Known as the ‘Beachy Head Lady’, her remains were discovered during a study of 250 skeletons in the council’s collection. She was found to be a Roman woman with recent
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Since the Romans themselves wrote about the subject, we have a clear idea of the good things they did for Britain. Roads, towns, stone and brick buildings, plumbing, writing (IOUs), vineyards and leather bikinis were some of the many gifts of what used to be called Rome’s civilising power. Thanks to archaeology, we know some
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A new report from the field of human origins had sub-editors reaching for their hyperboles. A million-year-old skull, we have learnt, has rewritten humanity’s story. The finality of this is misleading, but there is nonetheless something going on here. If Neanderthals, Denisovans and sapiens evolved away from each other a million years ago, there must have
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It’s hard to exaggerate how isolated Easter Island was before its discovery by Polynesian sailors eight or nine centuries ago. This tiny island, which you can walk round in a day, is thousands of miles in any direction from inhabitable land. Yet a new study claims that long before the first European ship arrived in
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It’s said that were you to meet a suited and well-coiffured male Neanderthal on the train, you’d easily mistake him for a fellow commuter. Face-to-face with Dragon man, however, you’d be forgiven for changing carriages. His head has been described as massive and his teeth enormous, and you could prop a book on his brow
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The announcement that a shipwreck in Newport Harbor, 200 miles up the coast from New York City, has been proven to be James Cook’s HMS Endeavour, will not surprise those who have followed the search for years. In 1768, when Cook set out to record the transit of Venus in Tahiti, the first of his
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In 2002 the remains of Sarah Baartman were buried in her South African homeland. She was among thousands of people around the world from whom body parts were collected in recent centuries and stored or displayed in museums. You might think, as tastes and norms change, returning these remains to their communities a simple thing.
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The first smiths worked with copper and gold. Only when tin came to be added routinely to copper to make bronze did metal replace stone for tools and weapons. The innovation transformed Europe and Asia, creating new classes of makers and traders, and new ways to accumulate wealth and express power. And now a surprising
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When the discovery of a new Iron Age hoard was announced this week, a video was released showing a long table laid out with ancient metalwork. The last time I saw anything similar was when the media were shown the Staffordshire Hoard in 2009. That was a pile of Anglo-Saxon military gold and silver, bought
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In recent years the study of human ancient DNA – extracted from excavated remains rather than living people – has become so popular that scientists are trying to clamp down on the number of samples taken from long-dead individuals. The research keeps coming, however, and it can be hard to keep up. One recent project
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I’ve had a keen interest in Stonehenge since I directed my first excavation there more than 40 years ago. A personal highlight was identifying a skeleton in London’s Natural History Museum, which archaeologists thought had been destroyed in the Blitz, and which turned out to be the remains of an Anglo-Saxon man beheaded beside the stone
