Every ancient language that has ever been deciphered needed an anchor. Usually that’s a bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone, or a known relative to compare it to. Linear A, the writing system of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization on the Greek island of Crete, has neither.
Linear A is described as a “language isolate” because it has no confirmed link to any known language, living or dead. As such, it has posed a significant challenge for linguists over the past century.
Etruscan, a language of Italy that was used before the rise of the Roman Empire, has fared only slightly better. A partial vocabulary has been collected from short funerary inscriptions, but its grammar and deeper meaning still elude linguists.
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Nine-year-old Eva was watching an episode of the children’s show Horrible Histories about the stone age recently when a question popped into her head. The cave men were speaking a broken form of English, but Eva thought that didn’t sound right and she wondered: how was the first language formed?
She joined our host Eloise to get some answers from anthropologist April Nowell on The Conversation’s Curious Kids podcast.
In each episode of The Conversation’s Curious Kids, a child joins host Eloise to ask a top researcher their burning question.
To listen to season two, follow us wherever you get your podcasts, or listen on the Yoto Player via the Discover section on the Yoto interactive audio platform for kids.
You can also listen back to season one and read lots of answers to questions sent in by children around the world in our Curious Kids series.
Got a question? Pop it in an email, or record it and send us the audio to curiouskids@theconversation.com.
This season of The Conversation’s Curious Kids is supported by the University of Southampton in the UK, a world-leading research-intensive university with a global network of international students and campuses in Malaysia and Delhi.
April Nowell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This episode of The Conversation’s Curious Kids was hosted and mixed by Eloise Stevens. The producer was Katie Flood and the executive producer was Gemma Ware. Credits in this episode to Horrible Histories, Pysched for Nature and Wild Ambience.
Part of the script in this podcast initially suggested Neanderthals had made circles, zigzags, and arrow symbols in a cave around 40,000 years ago. This has been amended to make it clear that markings made by Neanderthals found in caves in France and Spain were of dots, tracings made by fingers and a symbol that looks a bit like a hash tag, and they were from around 50,000 years ago.
The same question drives both the plot of Moana and decades of archaeological research: Why, after centuries of relative stability, did Polynesian voyagers suddenly begin settling islands thousands of kilometers away across the Pacific?
The latest Moana movie is a live-action adaptation of a Disney animated movie of the same name. While the films are fictional, they draw inspiration from the rich seafaring heritage of Polynesian peoples, whose ancestors undertook one of the greatest episodes of maritime exploration in human history.
New climate evidence may help us understand why they embarked on these voyages.
© Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images for Disney
The United States is one of only a handful of countries that allows companies to hold patents on plant varieties. As a result, a small number of corporations can—and do—suppress competition in the seed industry, stifle innovation, and turn taxpayer subsidies intended for farmers into corporate profits.
The US Department of Agriculture has found that two companies control more than 70 percent of US corn and soybean seed sales, and the top four cottonseed companies control nearly 94 percent of that market.
In a May 2026 court filing in a legal dispute between two US seed companies, the Department of Justice said patents on seeds are obstructing competition and research in the agriculture industry.
© wsfurlan via Getty
Researchers later discovered what they could do.
When a whale dies, a very special natural phenomenon can come alive. The carcass might float at the surface for some time, attracting sharks and other predators. As it becomes weathered, it may start to sink, falling through the water until it eventually settles on the seafloor, where deep-sea scavengers feast upon it. The scientific […]
The post A 5.3-million‑year‑old whale graveyard has been found on the floor of the Indian Ocean appeared first on Knowridge Science Report.
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