What might palaeontology unearth in 2024?

What might the field of archaeology be digging up in 2024? Emma Pomeroy is from the University of Cambridge's department of archaeology and is an expert on our Neanderthal relatives, who lived alongside modern humans for more than half a million years before they finally disappeared about 40,000 years ago. She’s been working at a remarkable site in northern Iraqi Kurdistan…

Emma - This year has been busy, as ever. We've been back in the field at Shanidar Cave which is an important site, mainly known for Neanderthal behaviour and also Neanderthal remains that were discovered there. It's a very large cave, actually. Sometimes when we say cave you think it's going to be small and somewhere you have to almost crawl into, but actually it's a very large, open-mouthed cave, South facing, so probably made quite nice living conditions. It's in the foothills of the Bradost mountains, so it is not a high altitude but there's quite an interesting landscape in terms of the steep hills and valleys, a large river nearby. You get quite strong seasonal fluctuations, really very hot in the summer, lovely temperatures for us at least in the 20's in the Spring and in the Autumn, and then sometimes even snow in the Winter. And a mixed habitat, really. Over the Summer you've got temperatures in the 40's so all the grass and things like that become very dried out. But certainly, in the Spring, it's really remarkable and actually the display of flowers in the spring is really, truly amazing.

Chris - It's obvious to see why it would've drawn people, but were there people there all year round given those circumstances?

Emma - The data we have, we're not sure, but it's something that we're trying to delve into more, to understand. Were they there all year round? Are they using this in particular parts of the year and perhaps moving around the landscape to other places when climates are less favourable?

Chris - Would you get a handle on that sort of resolution? Because I presume - I'm not an archaeologist, you are - but I presume that you date the layers that you find the remains in and that tells you roughly when back in history they were there. But can you get a snapshot of the seasons of when things might have been laid down at the same time?

Emma - The dating methods that we can use to tell us how many tens of thousands of years ago Neanderthals were there are not so precise that we can say, 'It's exactly 452,000 years ago and they were there in February.' We have to use different approaches and one of those can be looking at the animal remains from the animals that they've been hunting. If we were to find that the ibex that they were hunting are in a certain phase of the life cycle, say there are lots of young individuals, well that might tell us that they're at a time when there are young, so it's likely to be Spring. If they're seasonal breeders, we might be able to get some indications as well of perhaps looking at some of the plant remains because there's quite a fluctuation throughout the year and obviously there's certain flowering seasons and seeding seasons for different plants. If we find a consistent pattern where the signals we are getting from the plants and animals are telling us things, that can help us to really pin down how they're using the landscape and particularly at Shanidar Cave where we're working.

Chris - Obviously it's really important if there's anywhere that's a rich supply of archaeology because we can learn from it. But what are the key questions that really matter about this place? There's presumably some things in your mind where you're thinking, this is a linchpin to understanding a lot more about this part of the world as it relates to this group of individuals when they were around?

Emma - We have a huge number of individual questions. Some of the big questions we are really trying to get at is how are Neanderthals using the landscape. From my perspective, I'm a biological anthropologist, I lead the study of the skeletal remains, and I think there are very interesting questions there about how they dealt with their dead and whether that can tell us anything about the way they thought about death, if anything, but also how they conceived the landscape. Sometimes, in more recent populations, we have special places in the landscape. One that we might relate to well is a cemetery. So can we say that about Neandertals? Are they structuring the landscape in a way that has meaning to them, perhaps, 'this is a place for the dead.' 'This is a place where we do a particular activity.' And that in turn then helps us to build up a picture of how they thought that, as I said, comes back to this idea of trying to understand their thinking about the landscape around them and the world around them. I think we've also got big questions about what happens to Neanderthals, and obviously this is a classic question, if you like. Neanderthals, as far as we generally understand it, went extinct about 40,000 years ago - although some have argued that maybe their populations were absorbed into the spreading modern human populations. If we accept that they go extinct around that time, what's their interaction like with modern humans? And this is a question we're hoping to address a bit more in the work that we're planning for 2024. So we're hoping to be back in the field and really focus more on this transition period.

Chris - One of the things I love about archaeology, paleoanthropology is that despite studying some of the oldest stuff on Earth, you get to use some of the newest, most cutting edge scientific techniques, inevitably. Word of the year 2023, artificial intelligence or AI, ss anyone applying that to these sorts of questions; looking for the relationships between time points, movements, geographies and so on, to try to get answers to some of the sorts of questions that you've been putting in front of us?

Emma - Absolutely. People have been using AI to try and answer these kinds of questions for a number of years now, actually. But, over the last year, I think the technology and the computing power has got to the point where this is becoming something that we can use much more. This is something that I think's really fascinating: we can take data that we have, such as 3D data taken using obstructed light, we can use aerial photographs, for example, and so have images of large geographic areas and then actually use AI to predict where sites are likely to be, or also to spot structures that might actually be something archaeological. And this technology's really quite astounding. One of the applications that I think is particularly amazing is that they can use this technology in the Amazon. So even where there's huge tree cover over the land, we can strip that away and actually use the technology to spot where sites are, or equally predict where we think they should be based on availability of water, what the landscape is like, the pattern we know of other sites from that time period, where people are tending to build or to occupy the landscape. Then, use that to help guide our further studies. That's just one example of where AI is making a really big contribution in the field.