The world’s largest sand sea, the Empty Quarter in the Arabian peninsula, was once dotted with freshwater lakes and lush oases – but prehistoric humans appear to have avoided settling around them.

Today, scientists have found out why: the early inhabitants chose to live near useful deposits of rock instead. After gathering data during a 1500-kilometre expedition across the vast desert and using computer modelling to understand the evidence, researchers have concluded that even plentiful fresh water wasn’t enough to attract early humans if they couldn’t also find exposed formations of suitable tool-making stone like flint and quartz.

“People who live by stone tools never stray far from good stone,” says at the University of Algarve in Portugal, who was involved in the analysis. “You just really don’t see Stone Age sites unless you’re within a few kilometres of an outcrop.”

The Sahara is the world’s largest hot desert, with landscapes ranging from rocky highlands to vast gravel plains. But the Rub’ al-Khali – the Arabic name for the Empty Quarter – is the world’s largest continuous expanse of wind-swept dunes, known as a sand sea. It covers 650,000 square kilometres of the southern Arabian peninsula.

Today, the region is overwhelmingly dry, other than for a few permanent lakes in its interior that are fed by groundwater. But over the past century, scientists have uncovered evidence of numerous ancient lakes that formed during wetter periods, when stronger Indian Ocean monsoons helped .

Researchers have long suspected that these greener periods opened routes for early humans spreading out of Africa and across the Arabian peninsula – an idea supported by the . However, all these sites line the desert’s margins, whereas its vast interior is still largely unexplored by researchers.

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In 2023, Rose’s colleague at the University of Vienna and his team spent 35 days crossing the Empty Quarter’s dunes, examining 125 locations for traces of ancient lakes. They focused on lakes that were present between about 122,000 and 67,000 years ago, when early humans were spreading into Arabia.

The team found evidence of ancient lakes at 55 of the locations. This evidence included freshwater snail and clam shells, ostrich eggshell fragments and traces of animals that once burrowed into the muddy lake beds. But despite these signs of a once-thriving environment, they found no stone tools or other evidence that prehistoric humans had settled by any of the 55 lakes.

“If we could spot a snail shell the size of a fingernail, we would have spotted a stone tool,” says Dellmour. “But there were none.”

To test whether the shortage of suitable stone could explain the lack of human settlements, Rose and Dellmour and their colleagues turned to computer modelling. They mapped ancient water sources and the geology of the Arabian peninsula, then compared the results with the distribution of hundreds of archaeological sites found across the region in earlier research.

The analyses revealed that 57 per cent of the peninsula’s terrain within reach of water lacked suitable stone for making tools – and that prehistoric human settlements were concentrated in places offering both resources.

That could be partly due to ancient tool-making being extremely “wasteful”, requiring abundant access to raw material, says Rose. “They weren’t thinking about efficiency,” he says. “So, you’d have a pile of garbage produced for one spear point.”

Neanderthal Europe was as much a wooden age as a stone age

When Neanderthals dominated Europe, it was likely that wood was at least as important to them as stone for working into tools

Groundwater-fed lakes in the Empty Quarter wouldn’t have brought flint, chert, obsidian or quartz into the sand sea like rivers could have, says Rose. And while people could have carried tools into resource-poor areas, this would probably have supported only small groups for short periods.

The findings show that geology was potentially just as important as climate in shaping prehistoric human migrations, says Rose.

The study sheds important light on a long-standing debate among archaeologists about the importance of raw stone in ancient human sites, especially in harsh environments like the desert, says at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “Probably what’s most surprising to me is the lack of archaeological stone tools in otherwise perfectly fine circumstances, and close access to fresh water,” he says. “It really shows that early humans were picky with where they went and that they did not settle for just any spot.”

We are the only human species left on Earth.

Once, we shared our planet with other human species, including Neanderthals and Denisovans. Today, they’re gone, leaving behind fossils, ancient tools and traces of their DNA within our own. So how did Homo sapiens end up as the last humans standing?

For decades, we believed our ancestors survived because they were smarter, stronger or better adapted. But what if the real secret to our success was something far more unexpected? What if we survived because we were friendlier?

Some researchers believe our ability to cooperate, build relationships and form larger social networks may have given us a crucial evolutionary edge, an advantage of just 2 per cent that, over thousands of years, could have changed the course of human history.

The remains of a Neanderthal recently discovered in a cave in Iraq demonstrate the excruciating brutality of life in the Palaeolithic. The Neanderthal had a severely smashed but healed jaw and a spear hole straight through their shoulder, which is evidence of a likely fatal injury.

However, given that survival after such a massive, earlier dental injury would have been possible only with long-term care, the remarkable find may also provide early evidence of compassion, says at the University of Cambridge.

“We sometime romanticise hunter-gatherer or pre-agriculture lifestyles as peaceful and close to the natural world, or at the other extreme, we think of life in the Palaeolithic as [Thomas] Hobbes described it,” says Pomeroy. In 1651, the political philosopher Hobbes wrote about life in ungoverned societies as “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”. “But it’s not that simple, and both are extreme stereotypes,” she says.

The 75,000-year-old partial skeleton, known as Shanidar A, was recovered in 2019 and 2022 from the Shanidar cave in northern Iraq and consists of a largely complete right hand, two left ribs, a right rib fragment, a left scapula and six teeth. At least five Neanderthal individuals have been found at Shanidar since it was first excavated in the 1950s, and the way they were placed in the ground is often seen as evidence that these ancient humans buried some of their dead.

While the sex of Shanidar A couldn’t be determined, the wear on the teeth suggested that the remains were those of an individual who lived to be about 45 years old – a long life by Neanderthal standards.

They must have been hit very hard in the face at some point in their life, which made one of their bottom front teeth split in half and also probably fractured their jaw, says Pomeroy.

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The broken edge of the tooth became covered in hardened plaque, showing they continued living afterwards without that part of the tooth.

But, says Pomeroy, the person must have been in terrible pain. Although there is evidence from other archaeological sites that Neanderthals used mild, natural painkillers, “I don’t think they would have touched this pain”, she says.

Such a dental injury would have also made it difficult to eat, drink or talk, and would almost certainly have required a period of intensive care from the individual’s group, she says.

“The half tooth that remained in their mouth must have stuck out through the bone and the gums, meaning the hardened plaque, known as calculus, formed all over the top and bottom of the tooth,” says Pomeroy.

She says the force of the blow also made the teeth next to the broken one rotate slightly.

Shanidar A’s scapula, or shoulder blade, had also survived – and the team were stunned to see that it carried a perfectly round hole that was probably made by a wooden spear rather than a stone-tipped weapon.

The location of bone fragments also recovered from Shanidar A’s remains indicate that the spear entered the individual’s body on the left-hand side while they were facing forward.

The team says such an injury would have “penetrated all the way through the chest, including the lungs and potentially major blood vessels, likely leading to a rapid death”.

What is unknown is whether the injury was sustained while hunting or through violence.

, at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain, wasn’t part of the team but recently helped discover the remains of wooden Neanderthal spears at site called Abric Romaní near Barcelona.

She says Neanderthals, like us, were complex beings, capable of very different behaviours depending on the circumstances.

“What I find most striking about Shanidar is how it brings together two seemingly opposite sides of human behaviour,” says Saladié. “We have evidence of lethal violence, but also evidence of care for injured individuals and complex funerary practices.”

Wooden tools, weapons, building materials and domestic items discovered in a Spanish cave challenge the assumption that Neanderthals’ technological life was based primarily on stone.

The finds have given an unprecedented glimpse into everyday Neanderthal life and are a rare opportunity to recover part of their missing world, says at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain.

“Neanderthal technology was not only made of stone; it was also made of wood,” he says.

“The archaeological record gives us a very biased picture of prehistoric technology. We see the stone because it survives, while a huge part of their material culture has simply disappeared.”

Vallverdú and his colleagues have now completed the first systematic review of nearly 600 wooden objects, all between 40,000 and 62,000 years old.

The finds have been collected by generations of archaeologists since the 1980s, excavated at a rock shelter site called Abric Romaní near Barcelona. They include timber imprints in travertine – a rock rich in calcium carbonate that precipitates out of water in certain environments. The rock preserves the patterns of the wood grain even though the timber long ago rotted away. Charred artefacts and actual preserved timber have also been found at the site.

The researchers’ first job was to determine exactly which pieces were used or made by Neanderthals. Only 13 qualified. Most of the remainder consist of trunks, branches, twigs, roots and firewood accumulations.

, also at the Catalan Institute, says the researchers have been surprised at how “complex Neanderthal woodworking could be, and how well they understood the properties of wood”, with the two spears being especially striking to her.

“Producing long, straight shafts and shaping them deliberately into pointed weapons required planning, skill and careful selection of the raw material,” says Chacón.

The technological behaviours preserved at Abric Romaní are comparable to those documented for Homo sapiens, she says.

Other finds included a mysterious wooden tripod, as well as timber trays reminiscent, in terms of likely utility, of the coolamons traditionally used by Indigenous Australians to carry food and water. Some of the wooden objects appear to be structural poles.

But perhaps the item that has most surprised the team is a “club-like” object that has no precedent from any other palaeolithic site.

, also at the Catalan Institute, says the club-like object is “not simply a stick with a thicker end”.

“There is a distinct narrow handle and an enlarged, asymmetrical head, giving the object a much more complex and deliberate form,” she says. “This particular configuration is what we have not been able to find a convincing parallel for in the prehistoric record.”

Vallverdú says the site shows that wood was a normal and important part of Neanderthals’ everyday life.

“We have evidence of woodworking across many archaeological levels and over thousands of years, and the objects are associated with very different activities: hunting, domestic tasks, containers and the organisation of living spaces,” he says.

at the Natural History Museum in London says the archaeological record of wooden artefacts has been “severely constrained” by the generally poor preservation of organic materials.

The finds reveal a much wider technological repertoire of woodworking skills, he says.

The story of the first human tool: the humble container

An analysis of ancient human artefacts finds that the container, a simple but critical tool, may have originated 500,000 years ago. Columnist Michael Marshall explores how slings, ostrich eggs and wooden trays helped our ancestors survive

“This is of course evidence from only one site, in one area, and one time span,” says Stringer, “so it’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of a whole and mostly hidden technology that ran in parallel with the much better-known stone tools of the Palaeolithic.”

“Wood, plant fibres, hides, bone and other organic materials must have been central to daily life, but they normally disappear,” says , also at the Catalan Institute. “So when a site like Abric Romaní preserves wooden imprints and charred wooden objects, it is almost like suddenly seeing the missing half of the toolkit.”

at Kyoto University in Japan describes the wooden objects as “remarkable”.

“Preserved organic materials are truly rare, and they reveal a ‘hidden’ aspect of Neanderthals that we have been missing,” says Morimoto.

How do you prove that 500-year-old bones dug up in a parking lot are the long-lost remains of one of Britain’s most infamous kings?

In our latest video, Professor Turi King, a leading genetic scientist and television expert, gives us the inside track on the remarkable discovery of King Richard III. She reveals how the DNA evidence sparked a royal controversy and how DNA fingerprinting techniques have transformed criminal investigations.

From identifying the Golden State Killer to problems with the Amanda Knox investigation, King discusses a wide range of cases, including what Adolf Hitler’s DNA can and cannot tell us about the notorious dictator.