Solar storms, ice cores and nuns’ teeth: the new science of history

Advances in fields such as spectrometry and gene sequencing are unleashing torrents of new data about the ancient world - and could offer answers to questions we never even knew to ask

Scythians did terrible things. Two-thousand five-hundred years ago, these warrior nomads, who lived in the grasslands of what is now southern Ukraine, enjoyed a truly ferocious reputation. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the Scythians drank the blood of their fallen enemies, took their heads back to their king and made trinkets out of their scalps. Sometimes, they draped whole human skins over their horses and used smaller pieces of human leather to make the quivers that held the deadly arrows for which they were famous.

Readers have long doubted the truth of this story, as they did many of Herodotus's more outlandish tales, gathered from all corners of the ancient world. (Not for nothing was the father of history" also known as the father of lies" in antiquity.) Recently, though, evidence has come to light that vindicates his account. In 2023, a team of scientists at the University of Copenhagen, led by Luise Orsted Brandt, tested the composition of leather goods, including several quivers, recovered from Scythian tombs in Ukraine. By using a form of mass spectrometry, which let them read the molecular barcode" of biological samples, the team found that while most of the Scythian leather came from sheep, goats, cows and horses, two of the quivers contained pieces of human skin. Herodotus's texts are sometimes questioned for their historical content, and some of the things he writes seem to be a little mythological, but in this case we could prove that he was right," Brandt told me recently.