IELTS CAM Inspired 21 - Reading Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS CAM Inspired 21 - Reading Test 3 được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS CAM Inspired 21 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm answer key và list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.
IELTS CAM Inspired 21 - Reading Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 7
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The saiga
Adaptations
• has a large drooping snout with widened nostrils that:
– trap incoming airborne
1.
– cool its
2.
when temperatures are high
– heat the air on its way to the lungs in the cold months
• acquires a heavy
3.
for the cold season, then moults it in spring
Reasons for population decline
• illegal hunting, driven mainly by demand for the
4.
stripped from adult males
• spread of farmland and settlements, which leads to:
– a contraction of the saiga’s
5.
– herds cut off from the
6.
they follow when migrating
• disease in various forms, producing mass mortality events
• a warming climate, which has dried up the shallow
7.
the herds once depended on
Question 8 - 13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
8
The saiga is no longer found in large numbers anywhere except in one country.
9
During the twentieth century, the saiga’s numbers grew back more quickly in some regions than in others.
10
The saiga came under heavier hunting as a direct consequence of efforts to conserve Africa’s rhinos.
11
The saiga copes well with sudden changes in temperature.
12
The programme was set up mainly at the request of local herding communities.
13
Once the programme had been honoured by the United Nations, more money became available to it.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 18
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage? TRUE if the statement agrees with the information FALSE if the statement contradicts the information NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
14
According to one forecast, Dar es Salaam's population could climb to more than 68 million by 2100.
15
Travelling from the outer districts into the middle of the city and back again generally takes upward of two hours.
16
There are plans to expand the city's suburban railway.
17
The growth on the edges of the city is being carefully managed in line with an official plan.
18
In contrast to numerous other cities on the continent, Dar es Salaam has decided against building an underground railway.
Question 19 - 26
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Dar es Salaam's Njiapanda Bus Rapid Transit system
Features
• the buses travel in their own
19.
, which keeps delays down
• fares are dealt with at the
20.
rather than on board the bus
• a passenger with a young child in a
21.
can still reach every part of the network
Problems
• to avoid draining a bus's
22.
, drivers often keep the cooling turned off
• too few buses are available following a major
23.
at the depot
• passengers can no longer pay by
24.
because the necessary equipment has stopped working
• as travellers enter, staff check tickets manually at the
25.
• large
26.
tend to gather at busy times
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
In the second paragraph, what is the writer doing?
A
giving an account of debates that currently divide archaeologists
B
describing features of prehistory that remain poorly understood
C
identifying a couple of major shifts in how we now understand prehistory
D
reviewing how people have responded to recent archaeological discoveries
28
Why does the writer refer to mobile phones in the sixth paragraph?
A
Innovation may spring from many different sources.
B
Progress tends to unfold step by step.
C
The direction evolution takes is frequently hard to predict.
D
Not every technological advance turns out to be beneficial.
29
In the seventh paragraph, the phrase 'Undoing that legacy' refers to the job of
A
re-examining studies that were shaped by dated assumptions about society.
B
researching the ways in which prehistoric communities were structured.
C
challenging whether the evidence in older studies was authentic.
D
weighing up the significance of some recent research results.
30
In the final paragraph, what does the writer suggest?
A
How societies have changed over history is still far from fully understood.
B
The evidence about prehistoric societies can be read in more than one way.
C
Past societies should not be judged by present-day standards.
D
Learning about earlier societies might help us build a fairer society now.
Question 31 - 34
Complete each of the following statements with the best ending A-F from the box below.
List of Endings
A
some species were able to endure hostile surroundings well before Homo sapiens appeared.
B
Homo sapiens arose earlier than researchers had once believed.
C
beliefs about which members of early communities searched for food may have been mistaken.
D
long-standing ideas about who held power in prehistoric times do not hold up.
E
the gender roles of extinct hominins were unlike those in Homo sapiens groups.
F
Homo sapiens was very likely not the only species able to craft things skilfully.
What was uncovered beside Ondu Falls demonstrated that
31
The discoveries in the northern high plateaus imply that
32
A study made public in early 2024 establishes that
33
Examining the remains of a leader from Anatolia reveals that
34
Question 35 - 40
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
In following statements below, choose
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
35
The writer holds that art was already being made by hominins that predate modern humans.
36
Objects with carved decoration are among the rarest finds at prehistoric sites.
37
Homo sedanus possessed a notably larger brain than earlier hominin species did.
38
The techniques the investigators used to study the Lantern Chamber were somewhat unconventional.
39
The way the results were released made the dispute worse.
40
For the writer, the size of the Homo sedanus brain is the decisive issue in whether it could create art.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Saving the saiga
Across the open grasslands of Central Asia there once moved herds of saiga — a small, migratory antelope — in numbers running into the millions. Those vast gatherings belong firmly to the past. What remains of the species is now concentrated almost wholly within one nation, Kazakhstan, home to more than nine of every ten surviving animals; the thin remainder hang on in Russia, Mongolia and Uzbekistan.
Few creatures have been so exactly moulded by their surroundings. The saiga's most conspicuous feature is a swollen, downward-drooping snout, and this peculiar piece of anatomy earns its keep in several ways. Its enlarged nasal chambers filter windblown sand from each breath the animal takes; through the blistering summer they carry away surplus warmth, sparing the brain from overheating; and once winter arrives they take in freezing air and heat it on its way to the lungs. A further concession to the seasons is a dense fleece, put on as the cold tightens its grip and shed again when milder weather returns.
Superbly equipped though it is for a punishing climate, the saiga has proved helpless before the dangers that people bring. As far back as the nineteenth century, hunters pushed it to the brink of extinction. When the law finally intervened to protect it, the animal rallied, and across much of the twentieth century its numbers rose steadily. That reprieve, however, was short-lived. Within the ten years that followed the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, upward of 95 per cent of the world's saiga were gone — one of the fastest declines ever documented in any mammal.
This headlong crash was the handiwork of poachers working on an almost industrial footing. Adult males bear the brunt of it, hunted above all for their thick hides, which supply a profitable trade in luxury leather. Against expectation, the international drive to protect Africa's beleaguered rhinos did nothing to steer hunters towards the saiga; the slaughter was fed instead by a sudden overseas craze for goods fashioned from saiga leather. With the males so drastically thinned out, the population went into a slide it has still not fully reversed.
A second peril is the steady erosion of the saiga's home. As farmland and fresh settlements push out across the steppe, the animal is left with ever less ground, and its range shrinks in step. Structures thrown up by people — railway lines, pipelines and stretches of fencing among them — slice through the corridors the herds depend on for their seasonal journeys. Where the migrating animals find themselves boxed in, entire herds have on occasion starved.
Disease adds yet another danger. In 2015 an eruption of blood poisoning, triggered by a bacterium that ordinarily does no harm, carried off better than three-quarters of the world's adult saiga in just three weeks. Two years afterwards, a virus that jumped across from farm livestock destroyed roughly 60 per cent of Mongolia's saiga — a subspecies found in no other place on Earth. These abrupt collapses, termed mass mortality events, loom over the animal as a grave and unforeseeable threat.
The climate presents a linked hazard. Built though it is for savage winters and searing summers, the saiga fares badly when temperatures lurch about and the weather strays from its familiar rhythm. A good many experts hold that a freakishly warm spell was what set off the mass die-off of 2015. The steppe itself, meanwhile, has been drying out year on year, and countless shallow pools the herds once drank from have evaporated and disappeared.
Much of the recent push to rescue the saiga has been driven by the Zhasyl Dala Restoration Programme, a venture steered by a coalition of Kazakh wildlife agencies alongside several international conservation organisations. Its object is to mend the steppe, semi-desert and desert habitats of the region, together with the great range of living things they sustain — the gravely threatened saiga foremost among them. In 2022 the United Nations singled the programme out as a World Restoration Flagship, a distinction granted to just ten of the finest large-scale recovery efforts anywhere on Earth. With the accolade came a wave of fresh funding from supporters around the world.
So what is the tally today? By the year 2000 the world's saiga had dwindled to a record low of a mere 21,000. A slight rebound over the ensuing decade was then flattened by the mass mortality events that swept away hundreds of thousands. Yet the arrival of the Zhasyl Dala Restoration Programme has lent the tale a brighter recent chapter. Three years back, the Ustyurt Plateau herd in Kazakhstan brought forth its largest crop of calves in living memory. An aerial count two years ago placed the country's total at roughly 842,000, while a survey conducted earlier this year suggests the Kazakh population has now climbed past 1.9 million. The strangest-looking antelope in the world is still ranked as critically endangered — yet for now, at least, the tide is turning its way.
The problems of getting around the city of Dar es Salaam
Few African cities are growing as fast as Dar es Salaam, the largest city in the coastal nation of Batari. Its population has risen sevenfold since 1985, with roughly 450,000 newcomers each year. United Nations projections have it passing 10 million to become a megacity within eight years, then reaching 12.8 million by 2040. Teodor Vance of the Urban Horizons Institute goes further, suggesting as many as 68 million could live there by the century's end.
At present, around three-quarters of its residents are housed in unplanned, low-rise settlements that spread across the city's outer fringes. For them, a trip into the centre and back commonly runs to more than two hours – and longer still whenever rain reduces the unpaved roads to mud.
Traffic can grind to a halt with no warning at all, even at midday, and drivers of cars and minibuses think nothing of waiting a quarter of an hour or more at a single busy junction. There is one suburban railway, but it reaches only a handful of northern neighbourhoods and counts for little across so vast a city. Beyond the centre, most people get around on moto-taxis – locally called chapa – which alone can thread through the cramped, pothole-ridden lanes of much of the sprawl. The number of accidents involving them is alarming.
The fact that just three major roads feed into the centre is an inheritance from the colonial administration, which at the beginning of the twentieth century designed the city for no more than 50,000 residents. Today's growth is largely young men and women leaving the countryside for work, and as numbers have surged the city has simply spread out along those three highways. Almost all of this new development occurs on the outskirts, and almost none of it follows any agreed plan.
Yet the city is placing its faith in an approach that might give Africa's megacities a different template – one that frees them from a future dominated by the private car. Where many other cities on the continent have set their sights on an underground railway, Dar es Salaam has not. Its choice is humbler, but also cheaper and more realistic to deliver: the bus.
Known as the Njiapanda bus rapid transit (BRT) network, the system operates along dedicated corridors kept apart from ordinary traffic and laid mostly down the centre of the road so that hold-ups are kept to a minimum. Tickets are both bought and inspected at the platforms before anyone gets aboard, and because every bus is step-free, the whole route can be used by wheelchair users and by anyone pushing a pram.
'These new buses are a huge improvement,' says Emanuel Bright, a young data analyst who rides one daily and has seen his commute shrink by about two-thirds. It is far from flawless, he admits: to conserve battery, he notes, the drivers will frequently leave the air conditioning switched off.
Ever since a serious fire swept through the main depot, the network has run short of vehicles, carrying only about 180,000 passengers a day – well under half of what it was built for. The mobile ticketing app is unusable too, since the scanners meant to read it have broken down, so travellers must buy a fresh paper ticket each trip. Every ticket carries a QR code, yet nothing exists to scan it; instead, staff at the barriers simply tear them by hand as passengers file through. Dense crowds inevitably form whenever demand peaks.
The project's first phase ran along Kanju Avenue in the north-west. Phases two and three will carve bus corridors down Selani Road to the south-west and Mbaya Road to the south, with work on both expected to begin very soon; a fourth phase, heading north towards Ndoto, is still at an early design stage. 'Within a few years, much of the city will be served by a transport network of genuinely world-class quality,' says Amara Ndlela, African operations director at the Centre for Sustainable Mobility (CSM). Built throughout to exacting standards, the finished network will place one resident in three within a short walk of a BRT stop.
At the CSM there is real frustration at the continent's fixation on metros. 'When a city builds a metro, a foreign firm tends to drop in a ready-made system from outside,' Ndlela explains. 'A bus network, by contrast, lets people already on the ground take part. That was our aim in Dar es Salaam, and our plan in Kisumba too, where the bus bodies are to be assembled locally and homegrown operators will handle ticketing, fares and the technology behind them. Bus rapid transit has changed everything here. For millions across Africa's cities, it is their one realistic chance of ever being properly connected.'
That our account of human evolution keeps being rewritten is hardly news any longer. Over roughly the past fifteen years, fresh finds have arrived in such quick succession that a string of once-settled facts has had to be revised - among them the age of our own species, now put closer to 315,000 years than to the 200,000 long assumed, and the true character of vanished relatives like the Torvic people. Yet with so many different species and periods in play, spotting the threads that tie them together is no easy matter.
Even so, I believe a few broad lessons can be teased out of this flurry of recent digging. Two in particular strike me. The first is that a growing body of evidence pushes many so-called 'advanced' practices - building and art among them - far deeper into the past than we had supposed, frequently to hominins who came before modern humans. The second is that prehistoric gender roles have been badly misread, with patriarchal assumptions projected onto peoples whose notions of how women ought to live were nothing like our own.
Take building first. Beside Ondu Falls in Malawi, a team recovered timbers that stone tools had notched so as to lock one into another; most likely they came from some larger construction, perhaps a dwelling. None of that would raise an eyebrow were the wood not 491,000 years old - nearly two hundred millennia before our own species, Homo sapiens, appeared. Harsh places were within reach of earlier hominins too. We now know, for example, that a people called the Kessar occupied the icy high plateaus of the far north some 210,000 years ago, overturning the belief that only modern humans, arriving perhaps 4,000 years ago, had ever coped with such surroundings.
Art, too, seems to have been the invention of earlier hominins. That the Torvic people decorated cave walls with paint has been known for many years. It may reach back further still: a yet older species, Homo vallis, appears to have scratched deliberate designs into shells. The fiercest argument, though, surrounds the claim that Homo sedanus produced art. A contemporary of ours, this hominin lived roughly 260,000 years ago, yet its brain was on the small side - the sort typical of far older species and, by the reigning dogma of palaeoanthropology, supposedly ruled out from complex behaviour. And yet, on the walls of the Lantern Chamber cave system in Namibia, where the remains of H. sedanus were found, investigators have identified what look like engravings - crude, art-like markings - though no firm date has yet been fixed for them.
Calling these H. sedanus claims contentious barely captures the mood. A good many specialists regard the evidence offered so far as nowhere near enough to bear them out. Adding fuel to the quarrel was the manner of publication: the findings appeared in an unconventional journal, one that prints its peer reviews openly beside the article itself. My own position on the affair is mixed. More evidence is certainly wanted, above all a secure date for the markings. Yet I also suspect the small size of the brain is something of a red herring. Because skulls are what survive, brain size is what palaeoanthropologists could actually measure, and so it is what they came to fixate on - from bones, after all, one learns a brain's shape and dimensions and little else. Other features, the wiring inside the brain not least, must matter just as much, and might well account for how a creature like H. sedanus could manage sophisticated behaviour even with so modest a brain.
There is, in a way, little cause for surprise that so many of these behaviours began with older, now-vanished hominins. Both evolution and technology tend to advance by small increments. Early birds were poor fliers, and the earliest mobile phones were, frankly, poor at just about everything. It is not that a sudden burst of intelligence and creativity somewhere along our line is an absurd idea in itself - systems do occasionally reach a tipping point and change at runaway speed. The trouble is that the evidence for human evolution ever behaving like that was always thin. What the record suggests instead is that the Torvic people and many besides them walked so that we might run.
However it is eventually resolved, the H. sedanus episode looks set to stand as a case of preconceptions crowding out the evidence. Our thinking about gender in prehistory has gone much the same way. The founders of archaeology held views on gender that now seem decidedly patriarchal, and those views seeped into what they studied. Undoing that legacy is the work of many researchers today, and the past few years have brought some notable advances.
The most striking was probably the dismantling of the 'Man the Hunter' model - the long-popular claim that, in most early societies, hunting fell to the men while the women tended the home. A pooled analysis released in early 2024, however, drew on records from dozens of foraging peoples and found women hunting in roughly three-quarters of them. Fittingly, a spear-throwing device of ancient design, the spear-sling, was shown to let women hurl projectiles as fast as men. Signs that women held real authority have been mounting too. Queen Solveig, it is thought, may have had a hand in uniting the kingdom of Rennland in the 1000s. Earlier by far, a leader who lived in Anatolia some 3,500 years ago proved, once the proteins in her tooth enamel were examined, to have been a woman - not the man many had assumed.
The pattern seems clear: the more we learn about the societies of the past, the more our assumptions about how society 'must' be arranged prove mistaken. Hierarchy, authoritarian rule and patriarchy are not our inevitable fate. They are choices - and what prehistory demonstrates is that other choices are open to us.
Across the open grasslands of Central Asia there once moved herds of saiga — a small, migratory antelope — in numbers running into the millions. Those vast gatherings belong firmly to the past. What remains of the species is now concentrated almost wholly within one nation, Kazakhstan, home to more than nine of every ten surviving animals; the thin remainder hang on in Russia, Mongolia and Uzbekistan.
Few creatures have been so exactly moulded by their surroundings. The saiga's most conspicuous feature is a swollen, downward-drooping snout, and this peculiar piece of anatomy earns its keep in several ways. Its enlarged nasal chambers filter windblown sand from each breath the animal takes; through the blistering summer they carry away surplus warmth, sparing the brain from overheating; and once winter arrives they take in freezing air and heat it on its way to the lungs. A further concession to the seasons is a dense fleece, put on as the cold tightens its grip and shed again when milder weather returns.
Superbly equipped though it is for a punishing climate, the saiga has proved helpless before the dangers that people bring. As far back as the nineteenth century, hunters pushed it to the brink of extinction. When the law finally intervened to protect it, the animal rallied, and across much of the twentieth century its numbers rose steadily. That reprieve, however, was short-lived. Within the ten years that followed the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, upward of 95 per cent of the world's saiga were gone — one of the fastest declines ever documented in any mammal.
This headlong crash was the handiwork of poachers working on an almost industrial footing. Adult males bear the brunt of it, hunted above all for their thick hides, which supply a profitable trade in luxury leather. Against expectation, the international drive to protect Africa's beleaguered rhinos did nothing to steer hunters towards the saiga; the slaughter was fed instead by a sudden overseas craze for goods fashioned from saiga leather. With the males so drastically thinned out, the population went into a slide it has still not fully reversed.
A second peril is the steady erosion of the saiga's home. As farmland and fresh settlements push out across the steppe, the animal is left with ever less ground, and its range shrinks in step. Structures thrown up by people — railway lines, pipelines and stretches of fencing among them — slice through the corridors the herds depend on for their seasonal journeys. Where the migrating animals find themselves boxed in, entire herds have on occasion starved.
Disease adds yet another danger. In 2015 an eruption of blood poisoning, triggered by a bacterium that ordinarily does no harm, carried off better than three-quarters of the world's adult saiga in just three weeks. Two years afterwards, a virus that jumped across from farm livestock destroyed roughly 60 per cent of Mongolia's saiga — a subspecies found in no other place on Earth. These abrupt collapses, termed mass mortality events, loom over the animal as a grave and unforeseeable threat.
The climate presents a linked hazard. Built though it is for savage winters and searing summers, the saiga fares badly when temperatures lurch about and the weather strays from its familiar rhythm. A good many experts hold that a freakishly warm spell was what set off the mass die-off of 2015. The steppe itself, meanwhile, has been drying out year on year, and countless shallow pools the herds once drank from have evaporated and disappeared.
Much of the recent push to rescue the saiga has been driven by the Zhasyl Dala Restoration Programme, a venture steered by a coalition of Kazakh wildlife agencies alongside several international conservation organisations. Its object is to mend the steppe, semi-desert and desert habitats of the region, together with the great range of living things they sustain — the gravely threatened saiga foremost among them. In 2022 the United Nations singled the programme out as a World Restoration Flagship, a distinction granted to just ten of the finest large-scale recovery efforts anywhere on Earth. With the accolade came a wave of fresh funding from supporters around the world.
So what is the tally today? By the year 2000 the world's saiga had dwindled to a record low of a mere 21,000. A slight rebound over the ensuing decade was then flattened by the mass mortality events that swept away hundreds of thousands. Yet the arrival of the Zhasyl Dala Restoration Programme has lent the tale a brighter recent chapter. Three years back, the Ustyurt Plateau herd in Kazakhstan brought forth its largest crop of calves in living memory. An aerial count two years ago placed the country's total at roughly 842,000, while a survey conducted earlier this year suggests the Kazakh population has now climbed past 1.9 million. The strangest-looking antelope in the world is still ranked as critically endangered — yet for now, at least, the tide is turning its way.
Few African cities are growing as fast as Dar es Salaam, the largest city in the coastal nation of Batari. Its population has risen sevenfold since 1985, with roughly 450,000 newcomers each year. United Nations projections have it passing 10 million to become a megacity within eight years, then reaching 12.8 million by 2040. Teodor Vance of the Urban Horizons Institute goes further, suggesting as many as 68 million could live there by the century's end.
At present, around three-quarters of its residents are housed in unplanned, low-rise settlements that spread across the city's outer fringes. For them, a trip into the centre and back commonly runs to more than two hours – and longer still whenever rain reduces the unpaved roads to mud.
Traffic can grind to a halt with no warning at all, even at midday, and drivers of cars and minibuses think nothing of waiting a quarter of an hour or more at a single busy junction. There is one suburban railway, but it reaches only a handful of northern neighbourhoods and counts for little across so vast a city. Beyond the centre, most people get around on moto-taxis – locally called chapa – which alone can thread through the cramped, pothole-ridden lanes of much of the sprawl. The number of accidents involving them is alarming.
The fact that just three major roads feed into the centre is an inheritance from the colonial administration, which at the beginning of the twentieth century designed the city for no more than 50,000 residents. Today's growth is largely young men and women leaving the countryside for work, and as numbers have surged the city has simply spread out along those three highways. Almost all of this new development occurs on the outskirts, and almost none of it follows any agreed plan.
Yet the city is placing its faith in an approach that might give Africa's megacities a different template – one that frees them from a future dominated by the private car. Where many other cities on the continent have set their sights on an underground railway, Dar es Salaam has not. Its choice is humbler, but also cheaper and more realistic to deliver: the bus.
Known as the Njiapanda bus rapid transit (BRT) network, the system operates along dedicated corridors kept apart from ordinary traffic and laid mostly down the centre of the road so that hold-ups are kept to a minimum. Tickets are both bought and inspected at the platforms before anyone gets aboard, and because every bus is step-free, the whole route can be used by wheelchair users and by anyone pushing a pram.
'These new buses are a huge improvement,' says Emanuel Bright, a young data analyst who rides one daily and has seen his commute shrink by about two-thirds. It is far from flawless, he admits: to conserve battery, he notes, the drivers will frequently leave the air conditioning switched off.
Ever since a serious fire swept through the main depot, the network has run short of vehicles, carrying only about 180,000 passengers a day – well under half of what it was built for. The mobile ticketing app is unusable too, since the scanners meant to read it have broken down, so travellers must buy a fresh paper ticket each trip. Every ticket carries a QR code, yet nothing exists to scan it; instead, staff at the barriers simply tear them by hand as passengers file through. Dense crowds inevitably form whenever demand peaks.
The project's first phase ran along Kanju Avenue in the north-west. Phases two and three will carve bus corridors down Selani Road to the south-west and Mbaya Road to the south, with work on both expected to begin very soon; a fourth phase, heading north towards Ndoto, is still at an early design stage. 'Within a few years, much of the city will be served by a transport network of genuinely world-class quality,' says Amara Ndlela, African operations director at the Centre for Sustainable Mobility (CSM). Built throughout to exacting standards, the finished network will place one resident in three within a short walk of a BRT stop.
At the CSM there is real frustration at the continent's fixation on metros. 'When a city builds a metro, a foreign firm tends to drop in a ready-made system from outside,' Ndlela explains. 'A bus network, by contrast, lets people already on the ground take part. That was our aim in Dar es Salaam, and our plan in Kisumba too, where the bus bodies are to be assembled locally and homegrown operators will handle ticketing, fares and the technology behind them. Bus rapid transit has changed everything here. For millions across Africa's cities, it is their one realistic chance of ever being properly connected.'
That our account of human evolution keeps being rewritten is hardly news any longer. Over roughly the past fifteen years, fresh finds have arrived in such quick succession that a string of once-settled facts has had to be revised - among them the age of our own species, now put closer to 315,000 years than to the 200,000 long assumed, and the true character of vanished relatives like the Torvic people. Yet with so many different species and periods in play, spotting the threads that tie them together is no easy matter.
Even so, I believe a few broad lessons can be teased out of this flurry of recent digging. Two in particular strike me. The first is that a growing body of evidence pushes many so-called 'advanced' practices - building and art among them - far deeper into the past than we had supposed, frequently to hominins who came before modern humans. The second is that prehistoric gender roles have been badly misread, with patriarchal assumptions projected onto peoples whose notions of how women ought to live were nothing like our own.
Take building first. Beside Ondu Falls in Malawi, a team recovered timbers that stone tools had notched so as to lock one into another; most likely they came from some larger construction, perhaps a dwelling. None of that would raise an eyebrow were the wood not 491,000 years old - nearly two hundred millennia before our own species, Homo sapiens, appeared. Harsh places were within reach of earlier hominins too. We now know, for example, that a people called the Kessar occupied the icy high plateaus of the far north some 210,000 years ago, overturning the belief that only modern humans, arriving perhaps 4,000 years ago, had ever coped with such surroundings.
Art, too, seems to have been the invention of earlier hominins. That the Torvic people decorated cave walls with paint has been known for many years. It may reach back further still: a yet older species, Homo vallis, appears to have scratched deliberate designs into shells. The fiercest argument, though, surrounds the claim that Homo sedanus produced art. A contemporary of ours, this hominin lived roughly 260,000 years ago, yet its brain was on the small side - the sort typical of far older species and, by the reigning dogma of palaeoanthropology, supposedly ruled out from complex behaviour. And yet, on the walls of the Lantern Chamber cave system in Namibia, where the remains of H. sedanus were found, investigators have identified what look like engravings - crude, art-like markings - though no firm date has yet been fixed for them.
Calling these H. sedanus claims contentious barely captures the mood. A good many specialists regard the evidence offered so far as nowhere near enough to bear them out. Adding fuel to the quarrel was the manner of publication: the findings appeared in an unconventional journal, one that prints its peer reviews openly beside the article itself. My own position on the affair is mixed. More evidence is certainly wanted, above all a secure date for the markings. Yet I also suspect the small size of the brain is something of a red herring. Because skulls are what survive, brain size is what palaeoanthropologists could actually measure, and so it is what they came to fixate on - from bones, after all, one learns a brain's shape and dimensions and little else. Other features, the wiring inside the brain not least, must matter just as much, and might well account for how a creature like H. sedanus could manage sophisticated behaviour even with so modest a brain.
There is, in a way, little cause for surprise that so many of these behaviours began with older, now-vanished hominins. Both evolution and technology tend to advance by small increments. Early birds were poor fliers, and the earliest mobile phones were, frankly, poor at just about everything. It is not that a sudden burst of intelligence and creativity somewhere along our line is an absurd idea in itself - systems do occasionally reach a tipping point and change at runaway speed. The trouble is that the evidence for human evolution ever behaving like that was always thin. What the record suggests instead is that the Torvic people and many besides them walked so that we might run.
However it is eventually resolved, the H. sedanus episode looks set to stand as a case of preconceptions crowding out the evidence. Our thinking about gender in prehistory has gone much the same way. The founders of archaeology held views on gender that now seem decidedly patriarchal, and those views seeped into what they studied. Undoing that legacy is the work of many researchers today, and the past few years have brought some notable advances.
The most striking was probably the dismantling of the 'Man the Hunter' model - the long-popular claim that, in most early societies, hunting fell to the men while the women tended the home. A pooled analysis released in early 2024, however, drew on records from dozens of foraging peoples and found women hunting in roughly three-quarters of them. Fittingly, a spear-throwing device of ancient design, the spear-sling, was shown to let women hurl projectiles as fast as men. Signs that women held real authority have been mounting too. Queen Solveig, it is thought, may have had a hand in uniting the kingdom of Rennland in the 1000s. Earlier by far, a leader who lived in Anatolia some 3,500 years ago proved, once the proteins in her tooth enamel were examined, to have been a woman - not the man many had assumed.
The pattern seems clear: the more we learn about the societies of the past, the more our assumptions about how society 'must' be arranged prove mistaken. Hierarchy, authoritarian rule and patriarchy are not our inevitable fate. They are choices - and what prehistory demonstrates is that other choices are open to us.
