Evolutionary Insights by Anthropology.net

Somewhere in the Altai Mountains roughly 59,000 years ago, a Homo neanderthalensis sat still while someone drilled into their tooth with a pointed piece of jasper.We know this because the tooth survived. It came out of Chagyrskaya Cave in southwestern Siberia as specimen Chagyrskaya 64, a lower second molar from an adult individual, and when paleoanthropologist Alisa Zubova of the Russian Academy of Sciences and her colleagues examined it, something was immediately wrong. There was a hole in it. Not a small one — a large, irregular concavity measuring 4.2 mm long, 2.8 mm wide, and 2.6 mm deep, positioned at the center of the occlusal surface and reaching all the way down to the floor of the pulp chamber. Around the edges, visible at magnifications up to 500x, were fine linear striations. The kind left by a rotating tool.“We were intrigued by the unusual shape of the concavity on the tooth’s chewing surface,” said Zubova in a statement accompanying the study. “It differed from the normal morphology of the pulp chamber and did not match the typical pattern of carious lesions seen in Homo sapiens. Moreover, distinctly visible scratches suggested that the concavity was not the result of natural damage but of intentional actions.”Their analysis, published May 13, 2026 in PLOS One, presents a compelling case that Chagyrskaya 64 carries the oldest known evidence of deliberate dental treatment in human evolutionary history — predating the previous record holder by more than 40,000 years.What the Tooth Actually ShowsBefore accepting the drilling interpretation, the team had to work through the alternatives. A deep concavity in an old molar could plausibly result from severe wear, a fracture, or natural carious decay. None of these fit.Dental trauma leaves sharp, fractured edges. The concavity walls in Chagyrskaya 64 are smooth and rounded. Extreme attrition can expose the pulp chamber, but it cannot widen it — and the upper portion of the concavity is broader than the pulp chamber below, which rules out wear as the cause. The comparison sample from the same stratigraphic layer, another Chagyrskaya molar recovered from identical sediment, shows intense occlusal wear but a completely flat chewing surface, no concavity, and uniformly mineralized dentin.Micro-CT imaging told a different story for Chagyrskaya 64. The tooth showed pervasive demineralization of primary dentin, corresponding to Grade 4 or 5 on the Downer diagnostic scale — severe, deep caries extending into both inner and outer dentin. The absence of secondary dentin in a heavily worn tooth is itself anomalous; normally, the pulp responds to attrition by laying down reparative tissue. Here it hadn’t, because the infection had already destroyed it. There was no secondary dentin to form.The morphology of the concavity also doesn’t match anything caries produce naturally. Bacterial decay works by chemical demineralization, creating soft tissue breakdown and irregular cavities. It does not excavate clean, sub-rounded depressions with parallel microstriations on the walls. Those striations, analyzed under scanning electron microscopy, are oriented parallel to the concavity walls and exhibit a corrugated, ridged structure consistent with a rotating tool edge. They appear in at least two discrete locations, at slightly different depths, suggesting the tool was worked from multiple angles.And critically: over the striations, there is polish. Ante-mortem wear, from years of chewing after the procedure was done.Drilling in the DarkTo test whether a jasper perforator could actually produce this kind of concavity, Zubova and colleagues ran a series of experiments on three modern Homo sapiens molars. Two came from undocumented Holocene archaeological collections. The third — an upper left third molar with an untreated cavity and no previous dental work — was contributed by one of the authors. The tools were fabricated from local jasperoid raw material, matching what was available at Chagyrskaya Cave.The experiments were conducted by a single researcher experienced in Paleolithic stone knapping, with a small amount of water added to simulate the oral environment. The technique that worked was manual rotation — holding the pointed perforator between two fingers and drilling with a twisting motion, not scraping. Scraping spread force too broadly and produced only surface striations. The rotational method disrupted the tooth surface within seconds.Penetrating through to the pulp chamber took between 35 and 50 minutes of continuous drilling. The research team notes this is probably a conservative estimate for the original procedure. Working inside a living person’s mouth, with limited visibility, constrained access, and an uncooperative patient, could easily double the time.Neanderthals have thinner enamel than Homo sapiens, distributed over a larger volume of coronal dentin. The infection in Chagyrskaya 64 had already softened the dentin considerably. Both factors likely made the drilling faster. Still: somewhere between one and two hours of someone boring into your tooth with a sharp rock.Raman spectroscopy of the tooth surface detected no residue of plant material, resins, or analgesics. The team notes this doesn’t rule out their use — if the individual lived and chewed on the tooth for years afterward, any herbal packing would long since have worn away. But it leaves open the possibility that no painkiller was used at all.The experimental results matched the archaeological tooth closely. The groove profiles on both share a similar V-shaped morphology, with gently sloping outer walls. The width of the experimentally produced grooves (0.249 mm) closely approximates what’s preserved on Chagyrskaya 64 (0.294 mm). Macrotraces are more pronounced in the experimental specimens — expected, given that they hadn’t then spent 59,000 years in sediment with subsequent wear on top. Microtraces on the original molar are accordingly faint, but present.The concavity itself is not a single depression. Micro-CT shows three partially overlapping depressions that together occupy the entire pulp chamber volume. Whether they were drilled in separate episodes or represent the practitioner widening the cavity as they worked isn’t clear from the preservation. The team’s experimental replication of a three-depression configuration suggests the smallest of the three was probably an early stage, with the two deeper ones expanded after initial penetration. One possibility is that the third depression targeted a separate area of carious tissue. Another is that it was an error — stone tools aren’t precision instruments.The Broader PictureCaries are rare among Neanderthals. Fewer than ten cases have been identified across the entire fossil record, from sites including Palomas, Bau de l’Aubesier, De Nadale, and Kebara. All the previously known cases involve minor lesions confined to enamel or upper dentin, none reaching the pulp chamber. Chagyrskaya 64 is in a class by itself.The Chagyrskaya population appears to have been particularly susceptible. Another tooth from the same cave, Chagyrskaya 18, is a naturally shed deciduous molar from a Neanderthal child of about 9 to 11 years. It carries two carious lesions. The smaller of the two has already breached through the enamel into the upper dentin. The larger is still confined to enamel but actively demineralizing. Two caries cases in a small population is unusual for Neanderthals; the team suggests it may indicate the presence of specific cariogenic bacteria in the local oral microbiome rather than a dietary shift, since isotopic evidence from Chagyrskaya places these individuals squarely within the dietary range of other European Neanderthals.Chagyrskaya 64 also carries a second ante-mortem modification: a pronounced interproximal groove on its distal surface, with microscopic parallel striations characteristic of Stage 4 toothpick use-wear. A nascent groove is also forming on the mesial surface. The same tooth was toothpicked on both sides and then drilled. The toothpick groove sits precisely where demineralization is concentrated in the cervical area — over a second, smaller carious lesion. The drilling concavity sits over the larger lesion on the occlusal surface. Two interventions, two lesions, two tools.Toothpicking behavior predates H. neanderthalensis considerably. Interproximal wear grooves appear on teeth attributed to Homo habilis from Olduvai Gorge, and the same wear pattern has been documented in Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata). The behavior itself isn’t cognitively remarkable. But drilling is something else. The rotational technique requires coordinated fine motor control, sustained application of force in a confined space, and — given the documented grain of the striations — deliberate adjustment of the tool’s angle during the procedure. The team notes that analysis of bone retouchers from Chagyrskaya Cave shows Neanderthals there typically held tools between two fingers during knapping, a technique already requiring significant digital precision.The previous oldest evidence of dental intervention belongs to an individual from Ripari Villabruna in northeastern Italy, dated to around 14,000 years ago. That tooth, a third molar from a late Upper Paleolithic H. sapiens, shows traces of enamel scraping around a carious lesion. Micro-CT of the Villabruna tooth shows substantial retention of demineralized tissue — the scraping was superficial, limited largely to the enamel surface. It would not have relieved the pain of deep infection. Chagyrskaya 64 represents not just an earlier intervention but a more effective one, by a population whose tool-use repertoire apparently included the insight that drilling into the pulp chamber — deliberately and completely — would stop the pain by destroying the nerve.Whether this constitutes knowledge in any formal sense, or something closer to problem-solving arrived at under extreme duress, is a question the tooth cannot answer. What it does answer is whether the capacity existed. The individual who drilled Chagyrskaya 64 identified a source of pain, selected an appropriate tool, executed a controlled invasive procedure, and their patient then went on to chew with the treated tooth for long enough to wear it smooth.“What struck me, and continues to strike me, is what an incredibly strong-willed person this Neanderthal must have been,” said Lydia Zotkina, co-author of the study. “Now, every time I go to the dentist, I think about that guy.”Further Reading* Oxilia G, Peresani M, Romandini M, Matteucci C, Spiteri CD, Henry AG, et al. Earliest evidence of dental caries manipulation in the Late Upper Palaeolithic. Scientific Reports. 2015;5:12150. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep12150* Kolobova KA, Roberts RG, Chabai VP, Jacobs Z, Krajcarz MT, Shalagina AV, et al. Archaeological evidence for two separate dispersals of Neanderthals into southern Siberia. PNAS. 2020;117(6):2879–85. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1918047117* Mafessoni F, Grote S, de Filippo C, Slon V, Kolobova KA, Viola B, et al. A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Chagyrskaya Cave. PNAS. 2020;117(26):15132–6. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004944117* Skov L, Peyrégne S, Popli D, Iasi LNM, Devièse T, Slon V, et al. Genetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals. Nature. 2022;610(7932):519–25. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05283-y* Faux P, Ding L, Ramirez-Aristeguieta LM, et al. Neanderthal introgression in SCN9A impacts mechanical pain sensitivity. Communications Biology. 2023;6(1):958. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-05286-z* Estalrrich A, Alarcón JA, Rosas A. Evidence of toothpick groove formation in Neandertal anterior and posterior teeth. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 2017;162(4):747–56. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23166 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

A tooth recovered from Zhoukoudian cave near Beijing in the early 1950s has been sitting in storage for decades. It belongs to a Homo erectus individual who died roughly 420,000 years ago, during a period when the world held at least four distinct human lineages simultaneously. H. sapiens had not yet emerged. Neanderthals were consolidating in the west. A poorly understood group we now call Denisovans was somewhere in Asia. And H. erectus -- the oldest hominin to have left Africa, a species that had already been roaming across three continents for well over a million years -- was still out there, still occupying the limestone hills north of what is now Beijing.That tooth, and five others like it from two additional sites across China, have just yielded the first informative molecular data ever recovered from Homo erectus. The results, published this month in Nature by a team led by paleogeneticist Qiaomei Fu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, connect these 400,000-year-old individuals to the Denisovans -- and, through them, to people alive today.The breakthrough didn’t come from DNA. It couldn’t. Ancient DNA degrades quickly; even under ideal preservation conditions, retrievable sequences rarely survive beyond a few hundred thousand years, and the specimens from Zhoukoudian, Hexian in Anhui Province, and Sunjiadong in Henan Province are far older than what DNA analysis can reach. Instead, Fu’s team turned to proteins.Proteins survive longer than DNA because they are structurally sturdier, and because tooth enamel -- the hardest tissue in the vertebrate body -- protects them especially well. Enamel is a mineral matrix, and proteins trapped inside it can persist for millions of years in fragmentary form. They are not genetic material themselves, but they are produced by genes and carry the signature of the genetic variants that shaped them. As University of Copenhagen biochemist Enrico Cappellini, who was not involved in the study, put it in comments to Science: proteins are,“a direct expression of genes, so in a sense they carry genetic information. It’s the best proxy for DNA.”Retrieving those proteins from a prized and irreplaceable fossil is a different kind of problem. Most paleoproteomic studies drill or cut into bone or tooth to extract a powdered sample -- destructive work that curators of important specimens understandably resist. Fu’s team used a method called acid etching: the tooth is wrapped in a waterproof film, a patch of enamel just a few millimeters square is exposed, then briefly treated with acid. The technique removes just enough material for analysis while leaving the specimen physically intact except for slight surface discoloration. The teeth from Zhoukoudian, Hexian, and Sunjiadong emerged with their morphology preserved.What came out of that process was a catalog of 11 ancient enamel proteins covering hundreds of amino acid positions. Across all six individuals, from all three sites, the team identified two amino acid variants in a single protein: ameloblastin, which plays a key structural role in enamel formation.Two variants, two storiesThe first variant, designated AMBN(A253G), has never been seen before in any other hominin or primate. It wasn’t in the 1.77-million-year-old H. erectus tooth from Dmanisi, Georgia -- the only previous specimen to yield H. erectusproteins, though those had been too degraded to reveal informative variants. It wasn’t in Homo antecessor from Atapuerca. Not in Neanderthals, not in Denisovans, not in any modern human population. The variant appears to be specific to this population of Middle Pleistocene H. erectus from East Asia.That exclusivity makes it useful. Fossils attributed to H. erectus across Asia are morphologically variable enough that researchers have sometimes disagreed about their relationships. The Hexian specimens, in particular, look morphologically closer to Indonesian H. erectus than to those from Zhoukoudian, and some researchers had proposed they might be more closely related to Denisovans. The AMBN(A253G) variant settles that debate. It appears in both Hexian teeth, just as it does in the Zhoukoudian and Sunjiadong teeth, clustering all six individuals together in a Bayesian phylogenetic tree with 100% posterior probability. Hexian belongs to H. erectus.The second variant is where things get complicated. AMBN(M273V) had already been identified in Denisovans. The known Denisovan specimens include Denisova 3 from the cave in Siberia that gave the group its name, the “Dragon Man” skull from Harbin, the Penghu mandible from Taiwan’s seafloor, and a molar from Laos -- geographically scattered, morphologically distinct from Neanderthals and modern humans, linked almost entirely through ancient DNA and protein analysis rather than anatomy. When the Altai Neanderthal genome was analyzed, researchers found that the Denisovan lineage had received between 0.5% and 8% of its genome from a “super-archaic” hominin whose ancestors had diverged from the common lineage of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans more than a million years ago. They also found that roughly 15% of those super-archaic DNA regions later introgressed from Denisovans into populations in Asia and Oceania.The AMBN(M273V) variant fits this pattern. It is absent from most modern human populations but present at 21% frequency in the Philippines, 1.17% in India, and 0.71% in Papua New Guinea -- exactly the populations expected to carry the highest proportions of Denisovan ancestry. It is homozygous in the more recent Denisovan specimens, Denisova 3 and Penghu 1, but heterozygous in two older Denisovans, the Harbin individual and Denisova 25 (dated to roughly 200,000 years ago). That pattern -- heterozygous earlier, homozygous later -- is consistent with an allele that entered the Denisovan lineage from outside and increased in frequency over time.Fu’s team argues that the “outside” is H. erectus. The variant appears in all six H. erectus individuals across three sites spanning both northern and southern China. Its genomic region shows greater sequence divergence between modern Africans and Denisova 3 than between Africans and the Altai Neanderthal -- a signal that the region is older than the Neanderthal-Denisovan split, consistent with origin in a more diverged group. Denisovans diverged from Neanderthals approximately 380,000 to 470,000 years ago. The H. erectus specimens are dated to roughly 400,000 years ago. The timing, the geography, and the allele frequency pattern all point in the same direction: H. erectus populations in East Asia encountered Denisovans around or before this period, and something passed between them.“Their shared habitats create opportunities for interactions,” Fu and colleagues write in the paper.The scenario they reconstruct goes: H. erectus populations in East Asia, the same individuals whose teeth now sit in Beijing, Hefei, and Luoyang, passed the AMBN(M273V) variant to Denisovans through interbreeding, probably more than 400,000 years ago. Denisovans carried it forward, homozygosity increasing over time as it became more established in the population. Modern humans moving out of Africa and through Asia perhaps 50,000 years ago encountered Denisovans, interbred, and acquired it. A small proportion of people alive today -- primarily in island Southeast Asia and the Pacific -- carry a protein variant in their tooth enamel whose ancestry traces back to Homo erectus on the Chinese mainland almost half a million years ago.What remains genuinely uncertainNot everyone finds the causal chain fully convincing. Yale geneticist Diyendo Massilani, speaking to Science, noted that the study provides no direct evidence of admixture: each group could theoretically have evolved the M273V variant independently, through convergent mutation rather than shared ancestry. He characterized the admixture interpretation as hypothetical.Kirsty Penkman at the University of York, a geochemist who specializes in ancient proteins and was not involved in the research, pushed back on that concern. Enamel proteins are structurally constrained -- they cannot mutate extensively without losing their function. A shared variant in an enamel protein is therefore less likely to represent independent evolution than a shared variant in a less constrained region of the genome might be,“A biomineral protein can’t mutate too much,” she told Science, “because then it stops doing its job.”The honest answer is that proteins cannot resolve this question the way genomic data can. Full H. erectus genome sequences would make the case definitively, but those sequences don’t exist and may never be recoverable. The DNA in these specimens is gone. What Fu’s team has done is work with what survives. John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, also not involved in the study, made a point worth taking seriously,“Scientists used to call this ‘the muddle in the Middle Pleistocene,’” he told LiveScience, “and now we know that muddling is just mixing.” But he also raised a deeper question that the study implicitly surfaces: whether paleoanthropologists have been too loose with the label Homo erectus, grouping together fossils from the Middle Pleistocene in China that may actually represent Denisovan relatives or other populations not yet identified. The protein data confirms that the six specimens from Zhoukoudian, Hexian, and Sunjiadong belong together. It says less about where the boundaries of H. erectus as a category ultimately fall.That is, for now, where the field sits. A small patch of acid-etched enamel, a handful of proteins, and two amino acid variants are the most informative molecular data ever extracted from a species that spent nearly two million years shaping the inhabited world. As Penkman put it: fewer than 20 hominins have ever yielded analyzable protein sequences. Each new specimen adds something. This study adds six at once -- and what they add is the outline of an encounter, written in the crystalline architecture of a tooth.Further Reading* Welker, F., et al. (2020). The dental proteome of Homo antecessor. Nature, 580, 235–238.* Prüfer, K., et al. (2014). The complete genome sequence of a Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains. Nature, 505, 43–49.* Hubisz, M.J., Williams, A.L., & Siepel, A. (2020). Mapping gene flow between ancient hominins through demography-aware inference of the ancestral recombination graph. PLoS Genetics, 16, e1008895.* Tsutaya, T., et al. (2025). A male Denisovan mandible from Pleistocene Taiwan. Science, 388, 176–180.* Fu, Q., et al. (2025). The proteome of the late Middle Pleistocene Harbin individual. Science, 389, eadu9677. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

When T. Whitworth described a set of human cranial fragments from Turkana, Kenya, in 1960, he found himself stuck. The skull was thick-walled. The forehead sloped. The mandible was heavy-built in a way that recalled older, more archaic specimens. But there was also a chin. A proper chin, the bony projection below the lower teeth that counts as one of the diagnostic markers of Homo sapiens.Whitworth was honest about the contradiction. He noted the archaic features, noted the modern one, and didn’t resolve them into a clean interpretation. The fossil got filed away. It was described again in 1966 under the name Kabua 1, mentioned in subsequent surveys, and mostly left alone. Sixty years later, a team led by Abel Marinus Bosman has given it the quantitative analysis it never received, combined with new uranium-series dating. The picture that emerges is strange in an instructive way.Kabua 1 is probably a Homo sapiens. But it is one that carries enough archaic-looking morphology to resist easy classification, and that difficulty, the team argues, is itself meaningful.What the fragments preserveThe Kabua 1 material, held at the Natural History Museum in London, is fragmentary: pieces of the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal bones, along with maxillary and mandibular fragments and several teeth. Working from microCT scans, Bosman and colleagues produced six separate virtual reconstructions, each guided by a different reference cranium ranging from the Middle Pleistocene fossil Kabwe 1 (sometimes called Broken Hill) to recent Maasai individuals. The approach is deliberate. Because Kabua 1 is incomplete and taphonomically distorted, any single reconstruction encodes assumptions about the missing parts. Six different references give a distribution of possible morphologies rather than a single answer, which the team describes as analogous to priors in a Bayesian framework. It is a more epistemically honest way to handle fragmentary material.The reconstructions were compared against a broad sample: Middle Pleistocene Africans and Eurasians, Neanderthals, Late Pleistocene H. sapiens, and 109 recent African H. sapiens crania from eastern and southern Africa. The analysis focused on the neurocranium, because neurocranial globularity, the roundedness and anteroposterior shortness of the braincase, is one of the most diagnostically useful markers distinguishing derived H. sapiens from more archaic hominins.In the principal component analysis, the first axis captures the difference between elongated, low vaults and rounded, globular ones. Neanderthals and Middle Pleistocene hominins cluster toward the elongated end. Derived H. sapienscluster toward the globular end. All six Kabua 1 reconstructions fall within the H. sapiens range on this axis.The second principal component complicates things. The Kabua reconstructions score low on it, overlapping with Middle Pleistocene hominins and Neanderthals as well as some H. sapiens. What this reflects, concretely, is a short nuchal plane, a less vertical frontal bone, and a mediolaterally narrow vault. The reconstruction based on the Ngaloba cranium sits closest to the Middle Pleistocene African group in morphospace, near where the fossil Saldanha overlaps with H. sapiens variation. The reconstruction based on Skhul 5 sits at the opposite extreme, exhibiting a markedly globular neurocranium.The classification analyses add a further layer of nuance. Linear discriminant analysis classifies five of the six reconstructions as Middle Pleistocene African, and only the Skhul 5-based one as H. sapiens. The machine learning methods, which are more robust to the non-normal distribution of the data and less sensitive to sample size imbalances, are more mixed. As the H. sapiens reference sample grows, the reconstructions increasingly classify with that group, with the Ngaloba-based reconstruction the persistent holdout. The authors are appropriately cautious about the LDA result: LDA is designed to maximize between-group variance and can produce artificial separations, and the Middle Pleistocene African grouping lumps specimens with quite different degrees of relatedness to derived H. sapiens.The overall picture is that Kabua 1 has a broadly H. sapiens neurocranium in terms of globularity but retains features that, taken together, pull it toward a more archaic morphological zone. It is not a Neanderthal. It is not Kabwe. But it is not a specimen that would dissolve without trace into a sample of recent Africans.The date and what it meansGetting a reliable age for Kabua 1 has proved difficult, and the new uranium-series results don’t fully resolve that difficulty. They do establish a conservative minimum.Uranium-series dating of fossil bone works because uranium migrates into bone from groundwater after burial. The ratio of uranium isotopes to decay products gives an indication of how long that process has been running. The complication is that uranium can also leach back out, or a second wave of uranium can overprint the first. Each of these events scrambles the signal. Three samples from Kabua 1 were dated: one from the biparietal-occipital fragment, one from a tooth in the mandible, and one from the temporal bone.The tooth has undergone at least three distinct uranium mobilization events, including leaching, making any age derived from it unreliable. The temporal fragment gives an apparent minimum age of around 114,000 years, but there is evidence that a past leaching event may have affected this figure too. The biparietal-occipital sample gives a minimum age of 64.4 ± 5.4 ka. The team judges this the most conservative and defensible figure, because the pattern of uranium isotope ratios in that sample is most consistent with a simple accumulation history unaffected by leaching.This is a minimum age. The actual date of death could be older, potentially considerably older. But at least 64,000 years old places Kabua 1 in the Late Pleistocene, broadly contemporaneous with the populations that would eventually spread beyond Africa.What diversity looks like before the bottleneckThe reason Kabua 1 matters is not just that it is another Late Pleistocene African fossil. It is that it adds to a pattern.Several other Late Pleistocene African fossils show a similar mismatch between what age would predict and what morphology delivers. Iwo Eleru from Nigeria, dated to around 14,000 years ago, has morphology that looks more archaic than it should given its age. Lukenya Hill in Kenya and Ishango in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, both around 20,000 to 25,000 years old, show comparable features. Hofmeyr from South Africa, dated to roughly 36,000 to 38,000 years ago, has a continuous supraorbital torus, a brow ridge, which is vanishingly rare in derived H. sapiens. Nazlet Khater 2 from Egypt, from around the same period, has a face and mandible with proportions that recall Middle Pleistocene hominins far more than they resemble recent Africans.These fossils come from different times and different parts of the continent. They do not cluster into a single variant population. What they share is the preservation of morphological features that most straightforward models of H. sapiens origins would predict should have been largely gone by their respective dates. In each case, the overall assignment to H. sapiens is not seriously contested, but the details resist easy explanation.Two broad frameworks exist for thinking about this. One holds that H. sapiens origins were pan-African: our species emerged as a continent-wide process of population fragmentation and coalescence, with derived traits arising in different regions and spreading through periodic gene flow. Under that model, morphological diversity across Late Pleistocene Africa is expected, because populations were partly isolated and some archaic-looking features represent survivals of deep population structure. The competing view holds that derived H. sapiens originated in a specific region and spread with varying degrees of replacement, and that individuals with more archaic morphology either belong to lineages that eventually went extinct without contributing to living people, or represent the tail ends of variation within a broadly modern species that our comparative frameworks don’t fully capture. Both positions currently have genetic and morphological evidence in their favor.What Kabua 1 does, with its new date and new analysis, is take its place in the growing series of fossils that make the African Late Pleistocene look unexpectedly variable. The team places it alongside Hofmeyr and Nazlet Khater as examples of Late Pleistocene H. sapiens that combine a broadly modern neurocranial shape with features that, in isolation, would look considerably older.There is a structural reason to expect this kind of diversity. Living populations outside Africa descend from a relatively small founding group, and multiple successive founder effects compress morphological variation. Living Africans are already more variable, craniometrically, than non-Africans. The Late Pleistocene fossil record suggests the full historical range was wider still. With a small fraction of that variation preserved in bone and most of it lost, we are probably only beginning to map what H. sapiens actually looked like during the period when the species was exclusively African.How much of that variation is ancestral to anyone living today, and how much belongs to lineages that terminated without genetic descendants, is a question that morphology alone cannot answer. Ancient DNA from Kabua 1 would help, but extraction from a specimen of this age from an equatorial environment is unlikely to succeed. For now, Kabua 1 returns to the record with a more secure identity than it had before, which makes it more useful and, in some ways, more puzzling. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

The mound at Baraleti sits near the center of the Javakheti Plateau, and its name tells you something right away. Natsargora means “hill of ashes.” Not a metaphor. When excavations began in 2023, researchers from the Samtskhe-Javakheti Project found out why: layer after layer of burning events, each folded into the next across roughly three thousand years of occupation. People kept coming back to this place, and they kept burning things down, or finding it burned, and building again.That kind of stratigraphy does not happen by accident. It takes a place that matters.The Javakheti Plateau is a high-altitude grassland tucked into the southern Georgian highlands, between the Greater Caucasus range and the borders of Turkey and Armenia. It sits at elevations that make sustained agriculture difficult. It has been largely off the radar of systematic archaeological survey. Since 2017, a joint Georgian-Italian initiative called the Samtskhe-Javakheti Project has been changing that. Eight years of fieldwork, combining remote sensing, GPS mapping, and GIS-based analysis with targeted excavations, have produced a picture of the plateau as something quite different from the empty frontier it has usually been treated as. The team has documented more than 168 archaeological sites ranging from Bronze Age settlements to medieval monasteries.The sheer number is striking. The more interesting question is what kind of occupation these sites actually represent.Fortresses That May Not Have Been FortressesMuch of the earlier scholarly attention on this region focused on the plateau’s most visible features: the “Cyclopean” fortifications, large-scale stone enclosures with walls built from blocks of almost absurd dimensions. The conventional assumption was that these were defensive citadels, military architecture serving the needs of settled populations under threat.The SJP’s survey data complicates this. Several of the megalithic enclosures, when examined closely, appear to have operated not as permanent military installations but as temporary refuges. A 2022 study of the Abuli and Shaori complexes by Licheli and colleagues proposed that mobile pastoralist groups used such structures seasonally, as secure points during their movements through the highlands or during periods of instability. Cyclopean walls, on this reading, were less about holding territory than about having somewhere reliable to retreat to.The difference matters. A landscape of defensive citadels implies a settled population defending fixed resources. A landscape of seasonal refuges implies something more fluid: herders moving between altitudes, their architecture a response to mobility rather than sedentism, the plateau functioning as an intermediate zone rather than a destination.Sites like Abulis Gora and Saro-1 support a picture of long-term but episodic use. Occupation was not continuous; it was recurrent. People returned to the same ground across centuries, which implies deep familiarity with the landscape, knowledge of where to find water and shelter and stone, transmitted across generations. The necropolises near Bertakana and Lake Tabatskuri make this point in a different register. Funerary traditions do not persist at the same location for that long without a community that keeps returning.What the Ash PreservesAt Baraleti Natsargora, the occupation sequence runs from the Early Bronze Age through the Iron Age, roughly 3500 to 500 BCE. The recurrent burning episodes are both literal and interpretively useful. Each marks a break. Each rebuilding marks a renewal. The defensive wall uncovered in excavation, along with traces of partition walls and clay installations consistent with domestic use, suggests the site functioned as a fortified settlement during its peak phases.A bronze solar disk came from the vicinity of Baraleti during earlier surveys. It is a carefully made object: concentric bands of raised knobs, angular incised motifs, regularly spaced perforations around its rim. Objects like it have been found across southern Georgia, and the pattern of association is consistent. They appear in burials, and they appear disproportionately in female graves. The Baraleti disk now sits in the Akhalkalaki Museum, and while its precise findspot within the site remains uncertain, the weight of regional evidence suggests it accompanied someone into death.What a solar disk meant to the people who made it and buried it is harder to say. The iconography connects to a wider tradition of solar imagery in the protohistoric South Caucasus and across the steppe. Whether it functioned as an identity marker, a symbol of status, a ritual object, or something that resists those categories is a question the object itself cannot answer. The pattern of female association is at least worth sitting with.At Meghreki Fortress, a few kilometers to the east, the team found something more unexpected than bronze metalwork. Inside domestic structures provisionally dated to the Late Iron Age and Achaemenid horizon, roughly the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, were fired clay plaques carrying incised and painted geometric designs. Red, white, and dark blue pigments. The visual effect would have been striking in a room lit by firelight.Painted clay plaques of this kind are not a standard feature of South Caucasian domestic assemblages. Parallels exist at Digasheni and Amiranis Gora, but the density and context at Meghreki stand apart. The interpretation being advanced is that decorated plaques marked ritualised or high-status domestic spaces. Not a temple. Not a public monument. A room in a house. The line between the symbolic and the everyday, at Meghreki, ran through the walls of ordinary buildings.This is worth pausing on. Meghreki’s occupation runs from the Kura-Araxes culture in the Early Bronze Age through to the medieval period, a span of over four thousand years, with the Iron Age as its most intensive phase. Across that time, the architecture shifted, the material culture shifted, the political situation around the plateau shifted. But people kept building at the same spot, and at one particular moment they put painted clay panels on the walls. Whether that moment marked an intensification of ritual practice, a new form of social display, or an outside cultural influence that found local expression is open. The Achaemenid horizon connection is suggestive. Achaemenid influence reached the South Caucasus unevenly and was absorbed in different ways at different scales. A highland settlement in Georgia would not have taken it in straightforwardly.What the SJP is building, across eight years and 168 sites, is a framework for a region that has been treated as peripheral for too long. The Javakheti Plateau turns out to have been a crossroads: a zone where highland and lowland traditions met and overlapped, where mobile groups and settled communities negotiated the same terrain, where symbolic objects traveled with people and sometimes outlasted them. The ash at Baraleti has been accumulating for five thousand years. There is still a lot to read in it.Further Reading* Gambashidze, I. 1999. Samtskhe in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC (according to archaeological materials from the Borjomi Gorge). Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Archaeological Research Center, Tbilisi.* Orjonikidze, A. 1988. “The Early Bronze Age settlement of Digasheni I.” Dziebani 1(1): 15–22. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

Somewhere around 4,000 BC, people living at a promontory above the Sitna river in what is now northeastern Romania built something that didn’t fit. Their settlement had roughly 45 houses, each between 70 and 120 square meters, arranged in orderly rows behind a system of ditches and palisades. The houses were consistent in size, similar in construction, and distributed across a plateau of about 4 hectares. Then there was House 5/6. At approximately 350 square meters — nearly four times the median size of the surrounding structures — it sat between the ditches, positioned squarely near what was probably the settlement’s main entrance. It faces you as you arrive. You cannot miss it.This building, at the site now called Stăuceni-’Holm’, is what Cucuteni-Trypillia researchers call a mega-structure. A team from Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, working alongside the Botoșani County Museum and the National Museum of Bukovina, partially excavated it over four-week campaigns in 2023 and 2024. The results, published in PLOS One in March 2026, add a new site to a very short list and raise questions that the excavation cannot yet resolve.The Cucuteni-Trypillia complex is one of the more genuinely puzzling phenomena in European prehistory. Its settlements, distributed across what is now Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine, range from small villages to enormous concentrations of population. The largest of them, the so-called mega-sites, covered hundreds of hectares and housed thousands of contemporaneous dwellings — Maidanetske, in Ukraine’s Cherkasy Oblast, counts around 2,930 houses across 170 hectares. Some of these sites were occupied continuously for over three centuries. And yet they show, at least on the surface, almost no signs of hierarchy. No palaces. No obviously elite burials. No administrative script. The houses look alike. The material culture is distributed without obvious concentration of wealth.The question that has driven much of the recent research is how communities of this size organized themselves. Some scholars have argued for a fundamentally egalitarian or non-hierarchical social structure. Others have pushed back on this, pointing to subtle differences in building size and position that the older literature sometimes smoothed over. The mega-structures sit at the center of this debate, because they are the most visible departure from the pattern of uniformity — and yet their function remains genuinely unclear.What a Mega-Structure Is, and What It Isn’tA working definition has emerged from prior research, particularly a 2019 synthesis by Hofmann and colleagues that catalogued 140 mega-structures across 19 sites. They are rectangular, substantially larger than the surrounding buildings, positioned in visible or open locations, and often architecturally distinct from domestic dwellings. The relative scale matters more than absolute dimensions: a 350-square-meter building in a settlement where the median house is 91 square meters is an outlier in a way that the same structure wouldn’t be in a different cultural context.Before the excavation at Stăuceni-’Holm’, the primary evidence for mega-structures came from geomagnetic surveys. When clay-rich structures burn and collapse, the fired material leaves strong magnetic anomalies detectable from the surface. Researchers have used the patterning of these anomalies — their density, distribution, and configuration inside a structure’s footprint — to infer internal features: walls, hearths, platforms, room divisions.The excavation at Stăuceni-’Holm’ delivered a sharp correction to this practice. When the team dug into the mega-structure and mapped its geomagnetic signal at successive levels, they found that nearly all of the anomalies they had expected to correspond to interior installations disappeared without trace. No hearths. No raised platforms. No subdividing walls where the magnetogram had suggested them. What they were seeing, it turned out, was simply the varying density of collapsed daub — the fired clay that had once formed the building’s floor and walls. Remove the daub layer, and the anomalies vanish. Only the foundation ditch, cut deeper into the subsoil, remained clearly visible.The authors frame this directly: no information on the interior layout of a Cucuteni-Trypillia mega-structure can be reliably derived from the magnetogram alone. Given how much of the existing comparative analysis rests on geomagnetic data, this is a meaningful caution.What the excavation did find was a foundation ditch tracing the building’s perimeter, roughly U-shaped in section, with postholes cut into it at intervals of 70 to 90 centimeters. The posts had been wedged in place using fragments of fired clay, apparently debris from earlier structures elsewhere on the site. Beneath the clay floor, small tree trunks had been split in half and laid flat-side-down, forming a wooden substructure over which a layer of clay was then applied and smoothed. Two substantial postholes ran along the building’s central axis, deep enough (more than 80 centimeters below the floor level) to have supported a roof. A third central post, if confirmed in the unexcavated northern portion of the structure, would divide the interior lengthwise into two halves.Noticeably absent: ovens, storage features, grinding stones. The amount of burnt clay associated with the structure is far lower than what appears in the domestic buildings at the site, which typically burn thoroughly and leave substantial daub deposits. The mega-structure’s walls may have been largely wooden, burning without leaving much material trace.The Dating ProblemThe team’s working hypothesis, based on the pottery collected from the surface and during excavation, was that Stăuceni-’Holm’ dates to the Cucuteni A3 phase — a period generally assigned to roughly 4350 to 4050 cal. BC. If correct, this would make the mega-structure among the earliest known examples of the type, younger only than the Pre-Cucuteni mega-structure at Baia, dated to around 5000 BC.Then the radiocarbon results came back.Two short-lived samples from the building’s floor — a fragment of Prunus sp. fruit stone and a seed of Polygonum convolvulus, both drawn from protected locations between the floor timbers — returned dates placing the structure in the 40th to 39th centuries BC. That is, around 4000 to 3800 cal. BC. For Cucuteni AB material, not Cucuteni A3.The team considers and rejects several ways out of this contradiction. The samples came from annually growing plants, so an old-wood effect can be excluded. They were recovered from stratigraphically secure positions connected directly to the floor’s construction. A pot found smashed in one of the foundation postholes — a small globular cup in fine-tempered clay, decorated with red ochre and incised designs in what the team identifies as Cucuteni A3 style with Precucuteni technical traditions — links the pottery type to the same depositional event as the radiocarbon dates.The honest conclusion they reach is that something is wrong with the existing chronology, or at least with its application to this region. The absolute dating framework for Cucuteni A3 in the Upper Siret-Prut area rests on very few radiocarbon measurements, several of which carry high standard deviations and uncertain connections to diagnostic material. For that specific region, the published literature relied on four dates before 1995, three of them from charcoal at a single site. The Stăuceni dates, derived from short-lived plant material in an unambiguous context, may be the most methodologically sound anchor the region has.The implication, if the dates hold, is that Cucuteni A3 may persist later in the western distribution area than current models allow. The researchers note that the absolute dates from Stăuceni-’Holm’ would be broadly contemporaneous with the mega-structures at Nebelivka and Dobrovody in Ukraine, and with the radiocarbon-dated mega-structure at nearby Ripiceni-’Holm’, dated to 4041-3975 cal. BC. What looked like a chronological outlier may instead reflect real overlap across the Cucuteni-Trypillia cultural zone that existing phase divisions obscure.What Was Happening InsideThe finds from the building’s interior are sparse in the way that characterizes most excavated mega-structures. Concentrated pottery deposits, mostly as sherds, appear especially toward the building’s eastern interior. Among the more distinctive objects: a clay bowl bearing a zoomorphic protome in the form of a bull’s head with once-massive horns; three ladles, one still bearing traces of painted decoration on both faces; a single clay cone of the type sometimes labeled “conical idols” in the literature; and 87 flint artifacts, about half of them burned. The flint count is notably higher than the handful recovered from the Ukrainian mega-sites, though this likely reflects proximity to local raw material sources rather than functional difference.Archaeobotanical sampling from the floor produced carbonized cereal grains (unidentifiable below the level of Cerealia), associated weed taxa including Polygonum convolvulus, Galium cf. aparine, Chenopodium album, and Echinochloa crus-galli, along with gathered fruits from cornelian cherry (Cornus mas), plum (Prunus sp.), elder (Sambucus sp.), and hawthorn (Crataegus sp.). Carbonized fruit stones are a marker of in-situ food consumption. Feather grass (Stipa sp.) awns appeared in several samples, consistent with insulation, bedding, or floor covering. One sample contained mineralized remains of henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), a psychoactive and medicinal plant.None of this points unambiguously toward any single function. The food remains suggest something was consumed here, but not at the scale of a communal storehouse or dedicated feasting hall. The absence of ovens and grinding stones argues against sustained domestic food processing. The henbane is intriguing but insufficient. The researchers decline to commit to a function: storage building, unlikely; dedicated ritual space, no clear evidence; assembly hall for collective decision-making, possible; residence for a high-status household, not ruled out.The structure occupies, in the settlement layout, a position analogous to what Hofmann and colleagues designate P5 in the larger Ukrainian ring-settlements: outside the main residential zone, well-visible to anyone approaching the site from the south, the only accessible direction given the steep slopes to the west, north, and east. That positioning has meaning. Something was meant to be seen there, or encountered upon entry.Only about 25 percent of the building has been excavated. The northern half, unexcavated, may yet contain the third central posthole that would confirm the building’s internal division, an oven or hearth that would reframe the food residue evidence, or the absence of these things. The archaeology of Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements tends to reward patience. The building waited six thousand years to be partly reopened. Whatever it was, it was built to be noticed.Further Reading* Hofmann R, Müller J, Shatilo L, Videiko M, Ohlrau R, Burdo N (2019). Governing Tripolye: Integrative architecture in Tripolye settlements. PLOS One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0222243* Gaydarska B, Nebbia M, Chapman J (2019). Trypillia Megasites in Context: Independent Urban Development in Chalcolithic Eastern Europe. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 30(1):97–121. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959774319000301* Hofmann R, Müller J, Müller-Scheeßel N (2024). Trypillia mega-sites: a social levelling concept? Antiquity 98(398):1–21. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2024.18* Diachenko A, Harper TK, Chernovol DK, et al. (2024). Testing scale-dependent temporal and spatial biases in relative chronology using AMS 14C dating: A case study of Early–Middle Cucuteni-Tripolye sites in Southeastern Europe. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 55:104495. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2024.104495* Asăndulesei A, Tencariu FA, Nicu IC (2020). Pars pro toto — Remote Sensing Data for the Reconstruction of a Rounded Chalcolithic Site from NE Romania: The Case of Ripiceni–Holm Settlement (Cucuteni Culture). Remote Sensing12(5):887. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12050887* Ohlrau R (2020). Maidanets’ke. Development and decline of a Trypillia mega-site in Central Ukraine. Sidestone Press, Leiden.* Chapman J, Videiko M, Gaydarska B, Burdo N, Hale D (2014). Architectural differentiation on a Trypillia mega-site: preliminary report on the excavation of a mega-structure at Nebelivka, Ukraine. Journal of Neolithic Archaeology16:135–6.* Kirleis W, Corso MD, Pashkevych G, Schlütz F, Hofmann R, Terna A, et al. (2023). A complex subsistence regime revealed for Cucuteni–Trypillia sites in Chalcolithic eastern Europe based on new and old macrobotanical data. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 33(1):75–90. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-023-00936-y This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

The petrous bone is not beautiful. It is a dense, pyramidal wedge buried in the base of the skull, housing the cochlea and semicircular canals, its name taken from the Latin petrosus, meaning rock-like. It weighs almost nothing. You could balance one on your fingertip. Under most circumstances it would register as unremarkable.In paleogenomics, it has become the most fought-over fragment of bone on earth.The cochlea within the petrous is the densest, most highly mineralized structure in the human skeleton. It finishes forming by the eighth week of fetal development and then, essentially, stops changing. Unlike most bone, it doesn’t remodel after birth. It sits there, stable, shielded, preserving its chemistry for centuries or millennia after death. When researchers began testing which skeletal structures yield the highest-quality ancient DNA, the cochlea came out on top, beating out teeth, femora, and everything else. The petrous became the default target for nearly every major paleogenomics lab in the world.According to metadata compiled in the Allen Ancient DNA Resource (AADR v9), a curated database of ancient human genomes, ancient DNA has been retrieved from the petrous bone in 47% of all sequenced individuals. In 96% of those cases, it was the only bone sampled.That is a lot of irreversible drilling.Petrous FeverThe phrase “petrous fever” appears in a 2024 paper in Current Anthropology, describing the gap between what ancient DNA labs claim to prioritize and what they actually do in practice. It describes a pattern of extensive, often redundant sampling from skeletal collections, frequently without clearly defined research questions, driven by the logic of data generation rather than specific inquiry. More than 10,000 ancient human genomes have been generated over the past decade, the majority relying on petrous bones. The momentum is real. So is the problem it creates.The cochlea is not just a DNA vault. The bony labyrinth inside the petrous bone is also a morphological record. Its shape reflects population history and has been used to trace migration and evolutionary divergence across time. The cranial base, of which the petrous is a component, carries a strong phylogenetic signal less susceptible to environmental noise than other cranial regions. And because the petrous forms so early in development and remains so stable, its fine structural details survive taphonomic processes that destroy nearly everything else. Studies of inner ear anatomy, basicranial morphology, stable isotopes, and radiocarbon dates have all increasingly relied on the same small piece of bone.When you drill into the cochlea to extract DNA, you destroy it. The morphological data, the histological information, the stable isotope signal, the inner ear geometry that might have told you something about population dispersal or evolutionary change: all of it is gone. Researchers visiting skeletal collections have encountered cases where both petrous bones from a single individual were removed entirely, one for genetic analysis and one for radiocarbon dating, sometimes both for separate DNA extraction attempts by the same lab, even when a single sample would likely have been sufficient.The question that Lumila Paula Menéndez and colleagues at the University of Bonn, along with a large international team, set out to address is both practical and ethical: can you digitally preserve a petrous bone before destroying it for molecular analysis, and if so, does the imaging process itself damage the DNA you’re trying to extract?The Worry About X-RaysMicro-computed tomography, or µCT, works by passing X-rays through a sample from multiple angles and using algorithms to reconstruct high-resolution three-dimensional cross-sections. For the inner ear, it produces extraordinarily detailed models of the cochlea and semicircular canals, images that can be archived, shared, and analyzed without any physical contact with the original bone. Its advocates have been pushing for it to become a standard step in any research workflow involving the petrous.The hesitation came from a reasonable concern. CT scanning uses ionizing radiation, and ionizing radiation can damage DNA. If scanning compromises the very molecules researchers are trying to recover, the approach defeats its own purpose.Prior work on animal samples and other human bones had suggested that standard µCT parameters fall below radiation doses likely to cause meaningful DNA degradation. But the petrous bone is not a generic skeletal element. Its microstructure and diagenetic history are distinctive. Its density means it interacts with radiation differently. And because it yields such unusually high proportions of endogenous ancient DNA, even minor damage could have disproportionate effects. No previous study had tested µCT effects directly on archaeological human petrous bones.Menéndez and her team found themselves in a position to do exactly that, not by design but by circumstance. In 2021, Menéndez contacted a lead geneticist who was already sampling petrous bones from South American archaeological individuals for a population genomics project. She proposed adding µCT scans before any destructive procedures. Some samples were scanned. Others, already in the pipeline, were not. The mixed dataset created a rare opportunity for comparison.The team analyzed 93 petrous bone samples from Middle and Late Holocene archaeological contexts across the Andes, Central Argentina, and the Cuyo region, spanning roughly 6,000 to 200 years before present. Fifty had been µCT-scanned before molecular analysis; 43 had not. They compared six standard parameters used to evaluate ancient DNA quality and authenticity: endogenous DNA content, read length, cytosine deamination patterns, which are a chemical hallmark that confirms the ancient origin of DNA sequences, and contamination estimates based on both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA. The scanning itself was carried out on a Skyscan 1176 Bruker scanner at the Faculty of Medicine, Paris Diderot University, at 35 µm voxel size, 65 kV, and with a 0.5 mm aluminum filter to reduce unnecessary radiation exposure.No statistically significant differences emerged between the scanned and unscanned groups across any of the six parameters. Endogenous content was similar. Read length was similar. Deamination patterns indicating authentic ancient origin were nearly identical between groups. Nuclear contamination estimates showed no difference at all.One parameter came close to significance. Mitochondrial contamination estimates were marginally higher in the scanned samples, with a p-value of 0.051. But 48 of 49 scanned samples remained below the standard 5% threshold for genomic analysis, and the team’s most parsimonious explanation is selection bias: researchers tend to choose visually well-preserved, more complete bones for scanning, which may incidentally have had more handling and thus slightly more exposure to environmental contaminants. No corresponding effect appeared in nuclear contamination, which would be expected if radiation-induced damage were the mechanism. And it is worth noting that the highest endogenous DNA content in the entire dataset was found in the scanned group, an outcome that makes no sense if scanning is degrading the material.The absence of a detectable effect under these specific conditions is not proof that no effect exists under all conditions. The authors are careful here. Synchrotron scanners, which can deliver far more intense radiation, are a separate matter. The study’s design, because it wasn’t a matched-pair experiment, limits the ability to attribute every observed pattern solely to the scanning variable. Subtle effects at the margins of detectability might still exist. Future controlled experiments using matched samples from the same individuals would strengthen the picture considerably.There is also one caveat that sits slightly outside the scope of this study but matters for field practice: some evidence suggests that µCT scanning can reduce collagen yield, which could affect the reliability of radiocarbon dates from bone. Researchers building multi-method workflows that include 14C analysis should factor this in.What Happens When You Slow DownThe paper’s practical argument follows from its result. If µCT scanning under standard parameters doesn’t compromise ancient DNA, there’s no technical reason to skip it before destructive sampling. Which means the barrier that many labs cited for not scanning first is substantially weaker than it seemed. What remains are the logistical and financial barriers, and the cultural inertia of a field that has organized itself around rapid data production.The workflow Menéndez and her team propose is sequential and deliberately unhurried. Before any bone powder is collected, before any drilling begins, the petrous goes through macroscopic assessment, biological profiling and osteobiographical analysis, digital preservation via CT and surface scanning, and compositional pre-screening using techniques like X-ray fluorescence and near-infrared spectroscopy to evaluate collagen preservation and guide sample selection. Molecular sampling, with a clear research question in hand, comes last.This is not a radical reorganization. It is a sequencing change. It asks researchers to wait a few steps before drilling, to ask what other questions might be answered by this bone before it’s gone.The obstacles are real. CT scanners are not uniformly accessible. The global average cost of a scan is around $100, and many research groups operating with limited budgets have not planned for imaging. Some institutions house their own µCT equipment with trained operators. Others operate in regions where even medical CT scanners are unavailable within thousands of kilometers. The paper addresses this and suggests collaborations with public medical facilities, universities, and private medical centers as partial solutions. Portable surface scanning and photogrammetry present fewer logistical barriers and can often be done in situ.The geopolitical dimension here is not incidental. Most of the ancient human samples driving the aDNA boom originate in the Global South. Most of the large, well-resourced laboratories generating genomes from them are in the Global North. Menéndez and her colleagues are explicit about this: labs in core research countries have both the capacity and a particular responsibility to lead the transition toward more sustainable practices, precisely because they are the primary beneficiaries of destructive sampling from collections held in institutions that often lack the infrastructure to implement better practices on their own.The proposed workflow is also an argument about what counts as evidence. The petrous bone that tells you about genome-wide ancestry might also have told you something about inner ear geometry and population dispersal. About diet and mobility through stable isotopes. About developmental biology. Once it’s powder, none of those conversations are possible. The field has been systematically foreclosing its own future questions.Researchers at collections across multiple continents have encountered individuals from whom both petrous bones were removed entirely, nothing left. It’s difficult to know how many of those samples were digitally preserved before the drilling started, the paper notes. Probably only a small fraction.The proposed five-step workflow won’t be adopted uniformly or quickly. There are labs that will keep sampling as they always have, and there are collections that will continue to be depleted without the kind of careful sequencing this paper advocates. But the technical argument for delay has weakened. The concern about X-ray damage to DNA, under standard µCT conditions, appears to be manageable. What’s left is a choice about what kind of science gets done with what remains.Further Reading* Mallick S, Micco A, Mah M, et al. The Allen Ancient DNA Resource (AADR): a curated compendium of ancient human genomes. Scientific Data 11(1):182 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03031-7* Pinhasi R, Fernandes D, Sirak K, et al. Optimal ancient DNA yields from the inner ear part of the human petrous bone. PLoS One 10(6):e0129102 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0129102* Immel A, Le Cabec A, Bonazzi M, et al. Effect of X-ray irradiation on ancient DNA in sub-fossil bones: guidelines for safe X-ray imaging. Scientific Reports 6:32969 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep32969* Duval M, Martín-Francés L, Wood R. On the impact of micro-CT scanning on radiocarbon dating of fossil material: a cautionary note for the palaeoanthropological community and beyond. Radiocarbon 67(4):709–718 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1017/rdc.2025.23* Sirak K, Fernandes DM, Cheronet O, et al. A minimally-invasive method for sampling human petrous bones from the cranial base for ancient DNA analysis. BioTechniques 62(6):283–289 (2017). https://doi.org/10.2144/000114558 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

Somewhere between 1665 and 1680, a man was buried at the hip with a clay pipe. Traces of soot were still lodged in the bowl. The pipe maker’s stamp on the heel showed a crowned rose and the monogram RW, later traced to Reichard West, a pipe maker recorded in council minutes from Mannheim, Germany, who appears in the historical record between 1673 and 1675 and died around 1675 to 1676. Clay pipes of this period were fragile things, rarely lasting more than three years. The pipe had probably been purchased not long before the burial.That small object, found at the hip of individual 229.2 in a cemetery beneath what is now the Stadtcasino concert hall in Basel, Switzerland, helped anchor an entire group of burials to one of the most significant mortality events in Swiss history: the last recorded plague outbreak in the country, which struck Basel between 1665 and 1670.The site has a layered past. The former Barfüsserkloster, a Franciscan monastery founded in 1250, was abandoned after the Reformation in 1529 and its cloister and outbuildings repurposed as a kind of early institution adjacent to the city’s Bürgerspital, the municipal hospital. The cloister garden became a cemetery. Excavations in 2016 and 2017 uncovered the remains of 279 individuals buried in the post-Reformation period, including a cluster of four graves in the northern section of the site containing 15 individuals interred in coffins and earthen pits, some buried simultaneously.A new study published in Antiquity, led by osteoarchaeologist Laura Rindlisbacher of the University of Basel, brings together ancient DNA analysis, stable isotope data, historical archival research, and detailed osteological observation to reconstruct who these people were before they died. The answer is not flattering to the city that produced them.Fifteen Bodies, One Bad LifeThe 15 individuals in graves 229 through 232 ranged in age from a child of 3 or 4 to an older adult. The average age at death was 17.7 years. Only four individuals survived beyond 20. Because so many were subadults, sex assessment was impossible for eight of them; of those who could be assessed, five were likely male and two likely female.The demographic shape of this burial group is, by itself, unusual. In a cemetery that reflects ordinary background mortality, young children under six typically dominate the subadult count, because childhood disease in pre-modern populations was front-loaded. Here the picture is different: the largest spike falls in the 10-to-19 age range, a period that typically shows low mortality in non-catastrophic samples. The team considered and ruled out warfare as an explanation. There are no perimortem injuries. The mortality profile points to epidemic.Ancient DNA analysis confirmed it. Teeth from ten individuals were sampled, and five returned positive results for Yersinia pestis. The best-preserved sample, from individual 229.2, produced sufficient genomic coverage to place the Basel strain on a maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree. It clusters most closely with Y. pestis strains recovered from plague contexts in London (1560-1635) and Marseille (1720-1722). All three carry a depletion in the pla gene region on the pPCP1 plasmid, a characteristic of post-Black Death strains first identified in Late Second Pandemic contexts after 1353. The depletion may have reduced transmission rates relative to earlier pandemic strains. It did not make the disease survivable for the five individuals who carried it.What is striking is not just that these people died of plague, but what their bodies record of the years before they did.Despite averaging under 18 years of age, the group shows a level of skeletal wear more consistent with a much older and more stressed population. The team applied a modified Index of Skeletal Frailty (ISF), a metric that accounts for accumulated pathological conditions across the skeleton. The average ISF for the Basel group was 3.3. For comparison, 18-to-25-year-olds in medieval London monastic and non-monastic burial contexts yielded an ISF of around 2.09. The Basel subadults were considerably more worn.Every individual for whom teeth survived showed at least one carious lesion. All scored individuals displayed enamel hypoplasia, transverse bands of disrupted enamel development that form during periods of physiological stress in early childhood. Sixty-one percent of available teeth were affected. Degenerative spinal changes consistent with spondyloarthrosis deformans were found in all 15 individuals. Among those under 15, the changes were described as light but present; those aged 15 to 25 showed medium-stage degeneration. Two individuals had worn their front teeth down from habitual use of the mouth as a tool, a pattern associated with trades that require holding or manipulating objects by the teeth.Seven healed traumatic fractures appear across four individuals. Two people had congenital conditions: a cleft palate and an idiopathic scoliosis of the thoracic spine.Who the Hospital Would and Would Not TakeStable isotope analysis of rib collagen from 11 of the 15 individuals shows a diet dominated by C3 plants and animals that consumed them. The isotopic values cluster closely together, with no meaningful differences between subadults and adults, or between likely males and females. The group ate the same food. It was not much of a diet. Compared with other Basel skeletal assemblages, the δ¹⁵N values sit at the lower end of the distribution, suggesting limited animal protein intake relative to populations with access to better nutrition.The consistency of the isotopic data matters because it points toward shared social circumstances. These were not individuals from different rungs of Basel’s hierarchy who happened to die together. The bones suggest they came from the same corner of the city’s social world.That world was structured in ways that made survival during an epidemic a matter of social capital, not just biology. The Bürgerspital, the municipal hospital right next door to the cemetery site, admitted patients with full citizenship status from the city or its surrounding Landschaft, or those with the financial backing of an employer. Domestic servants, even those from the Landschaft, could be expelled from the city if they fell sick. The hospital records confirm that 76 burials took place at the Bürgerspital in 1667 alone, during the last outbreak, compared with a typical annual count of 10 to 60. But those 76 represent only those who qualified for entry.City physician Felix Platter left a detailed report on the 1610/1611 epidemic in the Basel suburbs. The data, analyzed in the early 1980s by historian V. Lötscher, shows that roughly 77 percent of those who fell ill and died in the suburbs were under 20 years old. Young people in the 15-to-20 age range showed a lethality rate of around 72 percent, compared with 54 percent among adults. Women survived infection at higher rates than men.These numbers map closely onto the demographic structure of grave group 229-232.The explanation Rindlisbacher and her colleagues propose is not simply that plague preferred the young. It’s that precarious work conditions prior to and during the epidemic shaped who was already immunologically depleted when Y. pestis arrived. Enamel hypoplasia forming between the ages of three and six reflects physiological stress during precisely the years when, in Early Modern contexts, children from poorer households were being integrated into family labor. The degenerative spinal changes in adolescents point to physically demanding work that left skeletal traces. If you could not stop working, you could not recover from illness, and you could not avoid the crowded conditions that spread the pathogen.The flip side of this is less visible in the bones but present in the archival record: access to social networks during a crisis determined who received care at all. Citizenship status, respectability, and ties to an employer were not just social niceties. They were the mechanism by which a person gained entry to institutions with shelter and medical attention. Those outside that network died in a cloister garden that wasn’t even recorded in the official list of Basel’s plague cemeteries.The team is careful to note that the Stadtcasino site is not a simple lower-class cemetery. The diversity of burial practices across the larger assemblage, including coffin burials, personal items, and coins, suggests a range of social positions among the hundreds interred there over the decades. The 15 individuals in graves 229 to 232 represent one moment in that longer story, likely the epidemic of 1667 to 1668, and probably the most socially marginal of the hospital’s associated dead. A broader comparative analysis of the full assemblage is ongoing.What the study adds, precisely, is the bridge between osteological evidence of hard short lives and the documentary evidence of a city that structured access to survival along lines of citizenship, employment, and social standing. The bones do not lie about the labor. The archives do not lie about the gates.Further Reading* Spyrou, M.A. et al. (2019). Phylogeography of the second plague pandemic revealed through analysis of historical Yersinia pestis genomes. Nature Communications, 10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12154-0* Susat, J. et al. (2020). Yersinia pestis strains from Latvia show depletion of the pla virulence gene at the end of the second plague pandemic. Scientific Reports, 10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71530-9* Castex, D. & Kacki, S. (2016). Demographic patterns distinctive of epidemic cemeteries in archaeological samples. Microbiology Spectrum, 4. https://doi.org/10.1128/microbiolspec.poh-0015-2015* Marklein, K., Leahy, R., & Crews, D. (2016). In sickness and in death: assessing frailty in human skeletal remains. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 161, 208-225. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23019* Lewis, M. (2016). Work and the adolescent in medieval England AD 900-1550: the osteological evidence. Medieval Archaeology, 60, 138-171. https://doi.org/10.1080/00766097.2016.1147787* Lötscher, V. (1987). Felix Platter. Beschreibung der Stadt Basel 1610 und Pestbericht 1610/11. Basel: Schwabe. [VERIFY — cited indirectly through the Rindlisbacher et al. paper; confirm bibliographic details before listing]* Alfani, G. & Murphy, T.E. (2017). Plague and lethal epidemics in the pre-industrial world. Journal of Economic History, 77, 314-343. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050717000092 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

Somewhere around 3600 BC, a man was laid to rest in a stone-walled tomb beside Loch Calder, in what is now the far north of mainland Scotland. Later, his son was placed there too. Then, some years after that, his son’s son. The bones of all three eventually ended up gathered together on stone benches inside the northern chamber of a cairn called Tulloch of Assery A, the remains partly disarticulated by the time of their final arrangement, coated in clay, handled and repositioned as each successive death brought another man to the same threshold.That three-generation male line now shows up in ancient DNA. A new study published in Antiquity, led by Vicki Cummings, Chris Fowler, Iñigo Olalde, Sarah Cuthbert, and David Reich, analyzed 40 new aDNA samples from 22 individuals whose remains had been placed across five chambered cairns in Caithness and Orkney, dating from roughly 3800 to 3200 cal BC. The results map a network of biological relationships that reaches across community boundaries, across decades, and across the Pentland Firth.The five tombs are Tulloch of Assery A and B, Tulach an t-Sionnaich, and Rattar East on the Scottish mainland, and Holm of Papa Westray North on the Orkney island of Papa Westray. Three of the mainland sites cluster within 200 meters of one another around Loch Calder. All three are intervisible. Rattar East sits on the coast, looking out toward the islands. Holm of Papa Westray North is on the other side of that stretch of water.Each tomb belongs to what archaeologists call the stalled cairn tradition: drystone-walled chambers divided by upright slabs into internal compartments, set within a surrounding cairn. They look, from the outside, broadly similar. But they are not identical. Tulach an t-Sionnaich has a single box-like chamber. Tulloch of Assery A has two opposing chambers. Tulloch of Assery B is tripartite. The shared form announces membership in a common architectural tradition; the differences, the team argues, signal something equally deliberate.What the Bones Say, and What They Don’tThe osteological picture at each site is difficult. Excavations recovered a combined minimum number of 37 individuals across the five tombs, but the assemblages are fragmentary, commingled, and in most cases heavily disturbed. At Tulach an t-Sionnaich, the human remains were sandwiched between a stone layer and a layer of animal bone — cattle, deer, bird, fish, mollusc — and intermixed with limpet shells, flint, and pottery. At Tulloch of Assery B, an adult skeleton had a leaf-shaped arrowhead embedded in a thoracic vertebra. At Holm of Papa Westray North, at least 14 individuals are represented, including four children, but much of the assemblage had been disturbed well before scientific excavation began, likely by antiquarian digging in the nineteenth century.aDNA analysis was possible for only 22 of those 37 individuals. From that subset, the team identified nine pairs of close genetic relatives at the third degree or closer. All nine were male-to-male pairings. Beyond those close relationships, shared identity by descent analysis detected around 100 more distant relative pairs, including 11 pairs sharing enough DNA to indicate they were likely fourth- or fifth-degree relatives.The specific relationships matter. At Tulloch of Assery A: the father-son-grandson sequence just described. At Rattar East: two brothers. At Holm of Papa Westray North: a father and son, plus a man who was the father’s maternal uncle or half-brother. And connecting the two areas of Loch Calder: the male buried at Tulach an t-Sionnaich was likely the paternal uncle, half-brother, or grandfather of one of the males at Tulloch of Assery A. The man at Tulach an t-Sionnaich and the senior male at Tulloch of Assery A may have been close enough kin that their communities recognized a shared patriline, even as they built separate monuments.None of that, the authors are careful to note, means patrilineal descent was the only thing going on. Kinship is more complex than any single axis of relatedness. The closest relationship between any two women in the study was fifth degree. No mother-daughter pairing was detected. But the data do show a consistent pattern: in Caithness especially, it was fathers and sons, brothers, uncles and nephews, who ended up sharing the same stone chambers across multiple generations.What makes the Holm of Papa Westray North picture stranger is this: two of the women buried there were more closely related, genetically, to men from the Loch Calder tombs than to any of the men buried alongside them on Orkney. One woman was a fourth-degree relative of the man at Tulach an t-Sionnaich. Another was a fourth-to-fifth-degree relative of the same man. Neither was closely related to the three principal males at Holm of Papa Westray North. Whatever brought them to that island tomb, it was not proximity to their nearest male kin.Stone, Distance, and the Work of MemoryThe team frames the tombs not merely as repositories for the dead but as what they call “technologies of descent and affinity.” Building a tomb in the style of existing tombs was itself an act of social positioning. Each time a new cairn went up near Loch Calder in the 3600s to early 3500s cal BC, those building it were placing themselves in explicit visual and material relationship with what was already there. The proximity was not accidental. The Tullochs of Assery are 30 meters apart.There is something specific and deliberate in the arrangement at Tulloch of Assery A that speaks to how memory worked in these communities. The three generations of males had presumably been placed in the tomb at different times, each man carried in upon death. Yet the bones ended up gathered together on the same stone benches, some coated in clay, suggesting the disarticulated remains had been handled and intentionally repositioned. Relatedness was being actively maintained as a physical fact, remembered and reenacted in the arrangement of bone. The building and use of the tomb was not a single event but an ongoing practice.The chronology, worked out through radiocarbon dating in combination with the genetic relationships, suggests the Loch Calder tombs were built and used in fairly rapid succession during the thirty-seventh and thirty-sixth centuries BC. The main phase of use at Holm of Papa Westray North comes somewhat later, with a father-son pair likely interred somewhere in the mid-3300s. The primary small single-chamber phase at Holm of Papa Westray North probably predates even those individuals. The tomb on the island began as a single box-like chamber within a round cairn, later extended into a four-stalled monument. It was rebuilt to accommodate more dead, or more categories of dead.In Orkney, something different was happening with space. Orcadian stalled cairns were not typically built in tight clusters near one another. Even the concentration of cairns on the island of Rousay are not intervisible. And in Orkney, dry-stone walled houses appear alongside the cairns in the landscape, drawing on the same construction techniques and materials as the tombs themselves. The living and the dead occupied architecturally similar structures, but those structures were distributed differently across the terrain. In Caithness, the logic seems to have been aggregation around the dead. In Orkney, dispersal was the pattern for both.The team interprets this as an emerging difference in how kin groups related to one another. Both regions shared a common architectural tradition and, the DNA confirms, maintained real biological connections across the Pentland Firth. But within a few centuries, communities on either side of that strait were expressing kinship differently through stone. Caithness communities built tombs near existing tombs. Orcadian communities moved away from existing sites, building new monuments and houses in new locations. The shared tradition was real. The divergence was also real.Whether those two women at Holm of Papa Westray North had crossed the water themselves, or whether their ancestry simply reflected older patterns of movement between the regions, the DNA cannot say. Their presence in an Orcadian tomb, more closely tied genetically to men in mainland cairns than to the men beside them, suggests that the relationships between these communities were neither simple nor static. The tombs were built to last. The people in them had lives that ran in multiple directions at once.Further Reading* Fowler, C. et al. (2022). A high-resolution picture of kinship practices in an Early Neolithic tomb. Nature 601: 584–87. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04241-4* Olalde, I. et al. (2018). The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of north-west Europe. Nature 555: 190–96. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature25738* Corcoran, J.X.W.P. (1967). The excavation of three chambered cairns at Loch Calder, Caithness. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 98: 1–75. * Cummings, V. & Fowler, C. (2023). Materialising descent: lineage formation in early Neolithic southern Britain. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 89: 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/ppr.2023.2* Fowler, C. (2022). Social arrangements. Kinship, descent and affinity in the mortuary architecture of Early Neolithic Britain and Ireland. Archaeological Dialogues 29: 67–88. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203821000210* Ritchie, A. (2009). On the fringe of Neolithic Europe: excavation of a chambered cairn on the Holm of Papa Westray, Orkney. Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

There’s a specific kind of power that lives in restricted space. The Classic Maya k’uhul ajaw — the divine king — expressed his authority partly through enclosure. His palace at the center of the city was internally segmented, its rooms accessible only to those with the right rank. Political decisions happened inside. The public stayed outside. The architecture didn’t merely reflect hierarchy; it produced it, embedding the logic of who mattered into stone and sightline.That is what makes a building excavated in 2024 at Ucanal, in the Petén lowlands of Guatemala, genuinely strange. Structure K-1 is a colonnaded open hall — no thick masonry walls, no segmented interior, no enclosed space separating the deliberations of rulers from the people standing in the plaza below. The columns that define its facade leave the interior visible from outside. Whatever happened in that building, anyone in Plaza K could watch.Christina Halperin of the Université de Montréal and her colleagues on the Proyecto Arqueológico Ucanal argue that Structure K-1 was a popol nah, a council house, and their paper in Antiquity places it at a pivotal moment in Maya political history. The building dates to the Terminal Classic period, roughly AD 810–950, a stretch of time that archaeologists have long recognized as a period of profound disruption across the Southern Maya Lowlands. Populations fell. Sites were abandoned. The epigraphic record, so voluble during the Classic period, goes quiet at site after site. What is less well understood is what came after the disruption — not the collapse, but the reinvention.Ucanal offers a case study. The site was an important Late Classic center, capital of the K’anwitznal polity, and it did not simply fade. Instead, the archaeological and epigraphic evidence suggests something more like a rupture and reboot. Sometime in the early ninth century, a fire event destroyed a Late Classic royal tomb. Jade ornaments and human remains were burned, then incorporated into new construction at temple-pyramid K-2 in Plaza K. Halperin and colleagues have interpreted this as a deliberate act of rejection: an attack on or ritual erasure of the previous dynastic order.What emerged in the wake of that event was a new ruler named Papmalil — the name itself is foreign, likely connected to Gulf Coast peoples, possibly the Putun or Chontal Maya. He didn’t claim the site’s traditional emblem glyph as part of his royal title. On a monument at the nearby site of Caracol, Altar 12, he is depicted seated facing another ruler, at the same level, in a horizontal rather than hierarchical arrangement. That visual choice is not incidental. It represents a departure from centuries of iconographic convention in which the k’uhul ajaw was positioned higher, larger, and to the dominant right of everyone else in the scene.A building that did something differentStructure K-1 was constructed during Papmalil’s reign or shortly afterward. It sits on the eastern side of Plaza K, facing the open public space. Excavations in 2024 uncovered the columned bases of the second construction phase, each a low platform of neatly cut stones supporting wooden columns roughly 0.80 meters in diameter. No masonry benches. Walls likely perishable. A broad frontal staircase and raised platform in front of the colonnade would have served as a stage. A small off-center altar was found inside, with Early Postclassic incense burners deposited on top of it before being buried under later construction.The radiocarbon date from the fill of this phase — calibrated to AD 783–880 at 95.4% probability — places it firmly in the Terminal Classic. Ceramic typology corroborates this. The building orientation, at 33–34° east of north, is unusual: it differs from the cardinal alignments of every other public building at Ucanal, and from the Late Classic causeway wall that lies directly beneath it. That departure from the site’s standard cosmological grid is hard to dismiss as accidental.Halperin and colleagues argue that the design of K-1 was doing something specific. Ethnohistoric documents from the sixteenth century describe council houses — popol nah in Yucatec Maya, popol pat in Pokoman — as places where rulers, lineage heads, nobles, and other authority figures assembled to deliberate on political agreements, adjudicate disputes, plan for war, and prepare for ceremonies. The functions were diverse. What made the building form distinctive was its spatial logic: open, visible, accessible in the sense that the proceedings inside could be witnessed by people who had no formal political title.This is the part that matters. The team is careful not to overstate the case. Spectacle and politics were deeply intertwined in Classic Maya governance too — public plazas hosted performances that consolidated the king’s authority by making it visible and legible to crowds. But watching a performance staged by a divine king at the foot of a temple-pyramid, with the palace behind locked walls, is a different kind of political participation than watching leaders deliberate in a building whose entire facade is open to the plaza. In the latter case, the crowd becomes a kind of constituency.The material record from Papmalil’s reign and after reinforces this reading. Non-elite and middle-status residents at Ucanal gained increasing access to imported goods during the Terminal Classic period. Water infrastructure projects specifically benefited lower-topographic-zone residents. Architectural distinctions between elite and non-elite residences narrowed. There is no evidence of a Terminal Classic palace at Ucanal at all. The largest residential groups appear to have been elaborated versions of common patio groups rather than anything resembling Classic period palatial complexes.The broader patternUcanal Structure K-1 is not entirely without precedent. Council houses are attested in the Northern Maya Lowlands during the Late Classic period, and the Puuc region in particular shows a tradition of open-hall architecture. But the political context there was different. Polities in northern Yucatan placed less emphasis on divine kingship throughout the Classic period, with fewer carved stelae celebrating named rulers and fewer elaborate royal tombs. The open hall form may have had an easier path in regions where absolutist kingship was never as entrenched.What the team is documenting at Ucanal is the spread of this architectural logic into the Southern Lowlands — a region where divine kingship had been the dominant organizing principle for centuries — in the context of political crisis. A similar Terminal Classic colonnaded open hall has been identified at Yaxha, and both predate what would become, during the Postclassic period, a widespread template: open halls with low off-center altars, facing public plazas, in political centers from the Petén lowlands to the Guatemalan highlands.The iconographic record aligns with this. Across the Terminal Classic, a new visual trope appears in multiple media: figures seated or standing side by side, facing each other, roughly equal in size. These so-called conference scenes show up on Fine Orange molded-carved ceramics, on incised marine shell pendants, and on stone monuments like Caracol Altar 12. They contrast sharply with the Classic iconographic grammar in which the divine king towered over all others. The shift in how power was depicted and the shift in how political space was organized appear to be tracking each other.None of this means the Terminal Classic transition to more collective governance was smooth, ideologically coherent, or universal. Kingship did not disappear. The institutions changed, not the category. What Halperin and colleagues are describing is something more gradual and contested: a series of architectural, iconographic, and material changes that, taken together, suggest that political legitimacy was being renegotiated, and that ordinary people — as witnesses, as potential sources of consensus, as residents who benefited from new infrastructure — were part of that negotiation in ways they hadn’t been before.Whether that public presence constituted anything like political agency in a formal sense is genuinely hard to determine from the archaeological record. What the buildings can tell us is that the spatial conditions for such influence were being deliberately constructed. Halperin puts it plainly: ancient Maya societies didn’t collapse — they reworked their institutions. One of those reinventions involved the deliberate choice to tear down the walls that had kept governance out of sight.Further Reading* Halperin, C.T. et al. (2024). A pivot point in Maya history: fire-burning event at K’anwitznal (Ucanal) and the making of a new era of political rule. Antiquity 98: 758–76. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2024.38* Inomata, T. (2006). Plazas, performers, and spectators: political theaters of the Classic Maya. Current Anthropology 47: 805–42. https://doi.org/10.1086/506279* Bey III, G.J. & May Ciau, R. (2014). The role and realities of popol nahs in northern Maya archaeology, in G.E. Braswell (ed.) The Maya and their Central American neighbors: 335–55. New York: Routledge. [VERIFY full page range]* Fash, B. et al. (1992). Investigations of a Classic Maya council house at Copán, Honduras. Journal of Field Archaeology 19: 419–42. https://doi.org/10.2307/530426* Martin, S. (2020). Ancient Maya politics: a political anthropology of the Classic Period 150–900 CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

The Sama people of the Philippines spend their lives on or near the ocean, and much of their foraging happens underwater. Over generations, something measurable shifted in their biology: their spleens got bigger. The spleen functions partly as a reservoir for red blood cells; more spleen means more oxygen available during a long breath-hold dive. The gene variants that produce larger spleens became more common in the population. Natural selection, working slowly and without intention, found a useful trait and amplified it.This is what a genuine local adaptation looks like. Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, uses examples like this one throughout his new book, Adaptable: How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us (Penguin Random House, 2025), to illustrate something he treats as central to what our species is. We are, above almost everything else, flexible.“That’s why there’s 9 billion of us and not 9 billion of some other primate,” Pontzer told Live Science. Adaptability is the mechanism. It’s what allowed Homo sapiens to occupy every biome on the planet, adjusting through culture, technology, and accumulated biological change across generations. No other primate comes close.The book is a tour of the human body, system by system, with particular attention to how environments have shaped what those systems do. Pontzer has spent years working with the Hadza of Tanzania, a contemporary hunter-gatherer population, and that research gives him a frame of reference for thinking about baseline human physiology that most biomedical research lacks. Working with diverse populations doesn’t just add data points; it changes the questions you know to ask.What Local Adaptation Actually RequiresThe Sama spleen story is clean, but Pontzer is precise about what makes it possible. Local adaptations are real and documented, but the conditions that produce them are narrow. A trait has to help individuals survive and reproduce in one specific place. Not everywhere, just there. It has to persist across enough generations for selection to accumulate. And the environment driving it has to be stable enough, and geographically bounded enough, that gene flow, the constant mixing of alleles through interbreeding between populations, doesn’t dilute the effect before it takes hold.Most traits don’t survive those criteria.Skin pigmentation does. The gradient of ultraviolet radiation between the equator and the poles is old and consistent, and so is the gradient of melanin production across human populations. Darker skin offers protection against UV damage; lighter skin permits greater vitamin D synthesis where UV is scarce. Both directions of the trade-off have been advantageous in their respective environments for long enough that selection has had time to work. High-altitude adaptations in Himalayan populations follow a similar structure: the mountains have been high throughout the entire span of human prehistory, and so have the selection pressures they impose.Other proposed local adaptations collapse under the same scrutiny. In the 1990s, some researchers argued that Black Americans might carry alleles predisposing them to hypertension and heart disease, the implication being that some evolutionary pressure had shaped cardiac function differently in West African populations. Pontzer is skeptical, for reasons that follow directly from the mechanics of local adaptation. Having a heart that functions well is not a localized advantage. It is useful everywhere. Traits that are universally beneficial spread through gene flow. They don’t concentrate in populations.The same logic applies to claims, still circulating, about population-level differences in cognitive ability having evolutionary roots. Intelligence has been selected for across the entire species, continuously, for as long as Homo sapiens has existed. There is no environment where diminished cognitive ability was adaptive. Any variants that enhance brain function would be expected to spread broadly, not cluster. The framework that makes the Sama spleen story coherent is precisely what makes these other claims incoherent.A Body Built for Somewhere ElsePontzer’s work with the Hadza feeds into a second argument in the book: our bodies were shaped in an environment radically different from the one most people now inhabit, and the gap between those environments is doing measurable damage.Hunter-gatherers are physically active continuously, eating from wild food sources, exposed to a wide range of pathogens. This was the norm for Homo sapiens, and for the hominin lineages that preceded our species, for millions of years. The body we have is a product of that context. Move it into a climate-controlled house with a caloric surplus and minimal required movement, and the same physiology fine-tuned for one environment starts producing maladaptive outcomes in another: heart disease, metabolic disorders, allergies, conditions that appear to have been rare before the agricultural transition and are common now.This is the evolutionary mismatch, and Pontzer is careful not to let it slide into nostalgia or primitivism. It is a mechanistic observation, not a moral one. The body is responding rationally to its conditions; the conditions just happen to be novel in ways that have outpaced any biological adjustment.One of the more interesting extensions of this framework involves genetics and development. Pontzer describes the genome as setting a range of possible outcomes rather than a fixed destination. Your genes constrain what you can become but don’t determine it. The environment usually has the larger visible effect on which possibilities actually materialize. Epigenetics adds another layer: environmental stresses can alter how genes are expressed, switching them on or off in ways that persist for a lifetime. In mice, these changes have been shown to transmit to offspring. The environment a mother experiences can affect her children’s biology. In humans, the evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is suggestive but not yet settled. The studies required take decades to run, and the full picture isn’t in yet.What Pontzer keeps returning to is that diversity is real but layered in ways that resist simple categorization. Knowing something about a person’s pigmentation tells you essentially nothing reliable about their cardiovascular risk, their cognitive profile, or most other things you might want to know. The systems are largely independent. They evolved under different pressures, respond to different environments, and vary along different axes. The assumption that populations sort cleanly into types, and that a trait in one domain clusters reliably with traits in others, is precisely the error that the correct application of local adaptation logic should prevent. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

In 1948, a small team of amateur excavators working a marl quarry near the village of Lehringen in Lower Saxony pulled a wooden spear from sediments laid down during the last interglacial. It was 2.38 meters long, made from yew, still in one rough piece, and it had been lying between the ribs of a straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) for approximately 125,000 years. No photographs of the original find position exist. Neither do reliable drawings. The site was a commercial fertilizer operation, not a planned excavation, and the team did the best they could under the circumstances.The find became world-famous anyway. Lehringen entered the literature as the clearest possible case of Neanderthal elephant hunting: a complete wooden weapon, the first ever found from a Middle Paleolithic context, lying in anatomical association with the largest land mammal known to have lived in Pleistocene Europe. The picture was compelling. Then the skeptics arrived.The problems were real. The spear’s tip showed use-wear traces that left open the possibility it functioned as a multi-purpose tool, perhaps a digging implement or a snow probe rather than a hunting weapon. More troublingly, some researchers argued the spear might have washed into proximity with the carcass at the margins of the paleo-lake, a coincidental association rather than a killing blow. Without proper documentation, there was no way to definitively rule this out. For decades the site existed in an interpretive limbo: famous, referenced constantly, but not quite settled.A study published this year in Scientific Reports by Ivo Verheijen, Gianpiero Di Maida, Gabriele Russo, and Thomas Terberger represents the first systematic zooarchaeological analysis of the Lehringen faunal assemblage. Their findings do not simply shore up the hunting hypothesis. They reframe the site altogether.What the bones sayThe elephant at Lehringen was a male, probably around 30 years old, based on molar wear. Not yet fully grown, but already large. His long bone epiphyses were still unfused, consistent with that age estimate. His death from natural causes is unlikely: the analysis found only minor pathologies to the vertebral column, and an animal in the prime of life at this size would not simply die at a lakeshore and then happen to have a spear fall beside him.The key evidence is on the ribs. Seven ribs or rib fragments carry cut marks. Most of these are on the lateral surface, perpendicular or diagonal to the long axis of the bone, consistent with filleting meat from the rump. That alone would support butchery, not hunting. But one rib fragment carries something more diagnostic: a series of cut marks on its internal face, the surface that faces inward toward the chest cavity. Cut marks on the internal face of a rib have a specific meaning. To make them, someone had to be working from inside the thorax. The carcass had to be fresh. The organs were the target.This matters because access to the internal organs requires primary access to the carcass, before carnivores have opened it, before any substantial decomposition. The cut marks on the inner rib surface indicate the elephant was eviscerated while still in a state that made the organs worth recovering. The researchers note that carnivore gnawing is present on the distal ends of ribs and the dorsal spines of vertebrae, but it is limited. The bone surface shows no significant weathering. The picture is not of a carcass opportunistically encountered and partially scavenged. It is of a fresh animal, butchered by hominins who got there first.The lithic assemblage, 25 Baltic flint flakes recovered near the elephant’s skull, reinforces this. Use-wear analysis on some of these pieces is consistent with defleshing activity. No cores were recovered, which probably means the knapping happened elsewhere. These were working tools, brought to the carcass.No direct evidence of spear impact was found on the elephant’s skeleton. No wound channel, no bone lesion attributable to a thrown or thrust weapon. The absence is not definitive: soft tissue injuries leave no skeletal trace, and an animal struck in the flank or neck might show nothing on the bones that survived. The spear between the ribs remains the most literal association of weapon and prey in the Paleolithic record, and the fresh-carcass evidence, the prime-age male, the lithics with butchery wear, and the lack of any plausible alternative explanation for the elephant’s death all point in the same direction.A wider spectrumThe elephant is not the only story at Lehringen. The site preserves faunal remains from multiple stratigraphic layers spanning different phases of the Eemian interglacial. What the new analysis makes clear is that Neanderthals were not visiting this lakeshore once for a single spectacular kill. They were coming back, exploiting whatever was available.Aurochs (Bos primigenius) remains represent at least three subadult individuals, recovered from the basal peat layer beneath the marl that contains the elephant. The remains of the most complete individual include cut marks on the lateral ramus of a mandible and on a lumbar vertebra, indicating defleshing. Carnivore gnawing, probably from wolf, is also present on the aurochs bones, suggesting that other predators were working these carcasses too, though whether before or after Neanderthal butchery cannot be determined.A single brown bear (Ursus cf. arctos) is represented by two bones: a rib fragment and a distal femur. Both show anthropogenic modification. The rib carries cut marks on its external surface, consistent with filleting. The femur shows cut marks from filleting on both faces, and also impact marks with cone fractures on the shaft. Someone fractured that femur to access the marrow. Brown bear femora contain substantial marrow fat, particularly relevant in late summer and autumn when bears are at maximum fat deposition. The researchers note that bears, beavers, and elephants share a common dietary appeal: high fat content. This may not be coincidental.The beaver (Castor fiber) evidence is the most anatomically detailed. Pelvis fragments, skull elements, and mandibular pieces all carry traces of human activity. Cut marks on the ilium suggest disarticulation at the hip joint. Marks on the maxilla, near the zygomatic arch, are positioned to indicate severance of the masticatory musculature, perhaps to detach the mandible. Marks on the lateral surface of a mandible fragment are consistent with skinning. Beaver fur is dense and waterproof. That the Lehringen Neanderthals were skinning beavers, not just butchering them for meat, fits with documented patterns at other Middle Paleolithic sites including Krapina in Croatia and Taubach in Germany, and goes back even earlier at Bilzingsleben, where both the European beaver and the giant beaver (Trogontherium cuvieri) were being processed with stone tools.The breadth of prey at a single open-air lakeshore site is what stands out. Palaeoloxodon antiquus, a megaherbivore weighing several tons. Bos primigenius, large and dangerous. Ursus cf. arctos, a bear. Castor fiber, a semi-aquatic rodent valued for both its flesh and its pelt. The assemblage also preserves wels catfish (Silurus glanis), pike (Esox lucius), pond turtles, herons, cormorants, deer of multiple species, rhino, wolf. Not all of these were prey. But the lake environment clearly concentrated resources in ways that Neanderthals recognized and returned to.The researchers interpret this as opportunistic procurement rather than specialized hunting. The contrast is with sites like Mauran and La Borde in France or Salzgitter-Lebenstedt in Germany, where large numbers of a single prey species point to targeted, probably organized drives or ambushes. At Lehringen, the diversity of exploited species and the absence of large numbers of any one taxon suggest a different mode: taking what the landscape offered, across multiple visits, from the full range of what the Eemian interglacial around a paleo-lake could provide.The spear itselfThe Lehringen thrusting spear deserves its own moment. Made from yew (Taxus sp.), from the trunk rather than a branch, it required the removal of up to 39 knots and side branches. That is not a weapon thrown together at a kill site. Yew was not a random choice either: the wood is flexible and strong, properties that matter in a thrusting weapon that needs to absorb impact without shattering. The time investment in its production implies forward planning and a clear conception of what the tool was for.The spear shows extensive use-wear, suggesting it had been used repeatedly before ending up at Lehringen. Its current curved shape is a result of post-depositional deformation, probably from the overlying weight of the elephant and sediment. Some researchers suggested that curvature and use-wear indicated it might have served other functions, including digging, and this remains technically possible. But a digging stick is not what you build from a carefully trimmed yew trunk with a hardened point and 39 removed branches.The spear was recovered in seven pieces and is currently broken into eleven, all of which fit together. It is held in Hanover, preserved in beeswax, and remains one of the most extraordinary objects from the Paleolithic record anywhere in the world.What Lehringen offers now, with a proper zooarchaeological foundation under it, is a site that actually supports what the 1948 discovery seemed to show. Neanderthals hunted a straight-tusked elephant. They butchered it fresh, opening the chest cavity to reach the organs. They made the tools to do it, brought them to the lakeshore, and left traces on bones that have lasted 125 millennia in remarkably good condition. They also came back, or never left, hunting aurochs from the peat below the elephant and processing bear and beaver on other occasions. The lake was a resource concentration point, and they knew it.Further Reading* Gaudzinski-Windheuser, S., Kindler, L., MacDonalds, K., & Roebroeks, W. (2023). Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125,000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behaviour. Science Advances, 9, eadd8186. * Gaudzinski-Windheuser, S., Kindler, L., & Roebroeks, W. (2023). Widespread evidence for elephant exploitation by Last Interglacial Neanderthals on the North European plain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(50), e2309427120.* Thieme, H., & Veil, S. (1985). Neue Untersuchungen zum eemzeitlichen Elefanten-Jagdplatz Lehringen, Ldkr. Verden. Die Kunde, N. F., 36, 11–58.* Gaudzinski-Windheuser, S., Kindler, L., & Roebroeks, W. (2023). Beaver exploitation, 400,000 years ago, testifies to prey choice diversity of Middle Pleistocene hominins. Scientific Reports, 13, 19766. * Kindler, L., et al. (2025). Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago. Science Advances, 11, eadv1257.* Schoch, W. H. (2014). Holzanatomische Nachuntersuchungen an der eemzeitlichen Holzlanze von Lehringen, Ldkr. Verden. NNU, 83, 19–29. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

When French Catholic missionaries arrived in the Mangareva Islands in 1834, they came with tools, building expertise, and an agenda. Within a few years, the frères bâtisseurs — lay builder-brothers attached to the mission — had transformed the volcanic archipelago at the southeastern edge of French Polynesia. They raised a massive cathedral in Rikitea, the main village. They put up churches on the neighboring islands of Aukena, Akamaru, and Taravai. Schools, a dormitory, a workshop for the weaver-brothers, communal bread ovens, a royal palace for the converted chief Maputeoa, and a watch tower along the coast. The missionaries were thorough record-keepers and left detailed documentation of everything they built.They wrote almost nothing about the homes their converts lived in.Those homes still exist, or what’s left of them does. Across four islands, 69 ruined stone cottages survive in varying states of collapse, their walls made from blocks of coral cut out of the surrounding reef. Known in Mangarevan as ‘are po’atu, they account for more than half of all the colonial-era structures archaeologists have recorded in the islands. The missionaries taught local people to build this way — Polynesian converts learning European masonry techniques, cutting Acropora branch coral from near-shore reefs and from beach rock formations on the motu, the narrow coral islets that fringe the lagoon. The technique spread. The construction materials were local. The buildings were everywhere. And European sources, predictably, were mostly silent about who built them and when.The problem with recovering that history is partly chronological. Radiocarbon dating, the default method for establishing age in archaeological contexts, becomes unreliable for organic materials less than about 400 years old. The Mangarevan cottages were built mostly in the 1830s to 1860s. Radiocarbon can’t resolve that timeframe with useful precision. Dating by artifact typology is possible — imported ceramics and glassware have known production date ranges — but this requires excavation, adds interpretive noise, and still only narrows things down to multi-decade spans.Coral is a different material. A new study by James Flexner of the University of Sydney, published in Antiquity, demonstrates that uranium-thorium (U-Th) dating can be applied directly to the coral blocks in the walls of these buildings, producing construction dates accurate to within a few years.How the Method Works, and Where It Gets ComplicatedCoral skeletons incorporate uranium from seawater as they grow. Once the coral dies, uranium slowly decays to thorium. Because fresh coral contains essentially no thorium at death, the ratio of uranium to thorium in a sample is a measure of time elapsed since death. For the past 500 years or so, lower concentrations of decay products make this technically demanding, but it works if samples are carefully selected and processed under ultra-clean conditions. Flexner had 10 branch coral samples analyzed at the University of Queensland Radiogenic Isotope Facility.The samples came from unweathered or minimally weathered branch corals embedded in Acropora sp. limestone blocks — either pulled from walls still standing or recovered from blocks that had clearly fallen from adjacent ruins. This is important: heavily weathered coral becomes chemically compromised, and a few of the samples in this study illustrate what that looks like. The watch tower at Mata-Kuiti point returned a date predating European contact with Mangareva by half a century. The sample was notably weathered. The boys’ school at Aukena — the Collège d’Anaotiki, whose construction dates are known from missionary documents as 1853 to 1858 CE — returned 1831 ± 2 CE from a more weathered sample where better material wasn’t accessible.So sample quality matters. But the more interesting complication lies in what the dates actually measure. U-Th dating on coral tells you when the coral died, not when it was placed in a wall. There can be a gap. Coral harvested from the seaward edge of a living reef would have died shortly before it was cut and used. But builders also drew material from the shoreward limestone, where coral might have been dead for years or decades before it was quarried. Some blocks may have been reused from older structures — the archaeological literature on Mangareva has long suggested that pre-contact sacred sites called marae were cannibalized for building material during the missionary construction period.Flexner’s team treats this as analogous to the “old wood” problem in radiocarbon dating of timber buildings: the tree whose ring you’re dating may have died long before it was incorporated into a structure. The U-Th date is best understood as a terminus post quem — a “no earlier than” marker — rather than a direct construction date. The building can’t be older than the coral in its walls; it can only be the same age or younger.With those caveats in place, the dates from the seven undated Polynesian cottages are coherent and informative. Most cluster in the first decade or so of missionary presence: AKH-7 at 1834 ± 3, AKH-10 at 1840 ± 3, AKH-1 at 1841 ± 2, AKH-35 at 1844 ± 2, AKH-20 at 1846 ± 2. One outlier, AKH-11, returned a pre-contact date of 1779 ± 2, which Flexner interprets as probable reuse of coral from a pre-European structure — possibly a marae. The gap between that date and the known period of cottage construction is decades long, but not centuries. No sample showed the kind of age gap that would suggest systematic large-scale looting of ancient reef formations. The reuse, where it occurred, was modest.The Pit Beneath the HouseThe most vivid result in the study involves a house on Akamaru called AKH-20 and a pit feature found beneath its floor.When excavators opened a test unit in the southwest corner of the building, they found a pit — PN-318 — filled with an unusually high concentration of material: bone fragments, shell, glass, and iron artifacts. Food and drink, including what appears to be alcohol-related debris. Compared with the other houses sampled on the island, this pit was exceptional for the density and variety of its contents.The initial hypothesis was that this represented the waste from a single feasting event, perhaps connected to the construction of the house itself. A garbage pit inside a tropical household would be impractical, which made it unlikely that the material accumulated over the course of normal daily life. More plausible was a one-time deposit, sealed beneath the foundation when the building went up.The two U-Th dates support this interpretation. A coral block from the wall of AKH-20 returned 1846 ± 2 CE. A branch coral recovered from inside pit PN-318 returned 1848 ± 4 CE. The dates overlap within their error ranges. Flexner suggests that the coral from the pit probably fell off during the trimming of blocks ahead of construction — builders cutting and shaping coral on site, trimmings falling into the pit, the pit then sealed as the walls went up.If that reading is right, the dates bracket a moment: a feast, a construction event, and a household coming into existence. The feast debris sealed beneath the floor of a Polynesian Catholic home in the 1840s. None of that appears in any missionary document.The objects inside the walls of these buildings add to the picture. Glassware, cooking pots, and ceramics found in excavated contexts indicate how families organized their domestic lives under the mission system — how meals were prepared, how interior space was structured, how religious practice shaped household routines. The architecture and its contents together tell a story about what it meant to be a Polynesian convert in the mid-nineteenth century: a life partly reshaped by European Catholicism and partly continuous with older ways of being that the documentary record treats as invisible.What Flexner’s study opens up is the ability to put those buildings in sequence, to understand which came first and how quickly the construction spread across the islands. The boys’ school on Aukena was a control site with known dates; the Polynesian cottages had none. Now several of them do. Applied more broadly across the 69 surviving structures, U-Th dating could produce a construction timeline detailed enough to ask new questions about how the mission built its community of converts — which households appeared earliest, which came later, whether there are spatial or social patterns embedded in the sequence.The same technique could work well beyond Mangareva. Coral limestone buildings survive across the tropical Pacific, across the Caribbean, along the East African coast. Much of that architecture was built by people who left no written record, documented by Europeans who saw no reason to write about the domestic lives of colonized populations. In those places too, the coral in the walls keeps a chemical record of time. It just needed a method capable of reading it.Further Reading* Kirch, P.V. et al. (2021). Coordinated ¹⁴C and ²³⁰Th dating of Kitchen Cave rockshelter, Gambier (Mangareva) Islands, French Polynesia. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2020.102724* Kirch, P.V. & Sharp, W. (2005). Coral ²³⁰Th dating of the imposition of a ritual control hierarchy in precontact Hawaii. Science 307: 102–104. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1105432* Sharp, W.D. et al. (2010). Rapid evolution of ritual architecture in Central Polynesia indicated by precise ²³⁰Th/U coral dating. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 107: 13234–39. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1005063107* Schiffer, M.B. (1986). Radiocarbon dating and the “old wood” problem: the case of the Hohokam chronology. Journal of Archaeological Science 13: 13–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-4403(86)90024-5* Emory, K.P. (1939). Archaeology of Mangareva and neighbouring atolls. Honolulu: B.P. Bishop Museum.* Laval, H. (1968). Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Mangareva: ère chrétienne, 1834–1871. Paris: Musée de l’Homme. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

In 902 CE, a fleet dispatched by the Umayyad Emirate of Córdoba arrived at Ibiza. The island was barely inhabited. Contemporary Andalusi writers rarely mentioned it at all. Whatever pre-conquest population existed had either fled or dwindled to near nothing. The newcomers — Imazighen clan groups, some Arabs, some Islamized Iberians — settled onto essentially empty land.What happened next, genetically speaking, is what a new study published in Nature Communications sets out to reconstruct.Researchers from the Centre for Palaeogenetics at Stockholm University analyzed ancient DNA recovered from 13 individuals buried in a section of the Maqbara of Madina Yabisa, the main urban Muslim cemetery of medieval Ibiza, discovered during construction work at 33 Bartomeu Vicent Ramon Street in Ibiza town. The burials date to 950–1150 CE. Simple earth pits, bodies placed on the right side facing southeast toward Mecca, no grave goods — with one exception, a burial containing two silver rings. These were people interred according to Islamic law, in a functioning urban cemetery on an island that had gone from empty to organized in a single generation.From 30 sampled individuals, 13 yielded enough DNA for population genomic and metagenomic analyses. That’s a small number. What they show is not.Who Was Buried HereThe genetic picture of these 13 individuals is anything but homogeneous. Principal component analysis places them across a wide swath of the ancestral landscape: two cluster within European population space, one sits close to North African populations, eight occupy positions somewhere between European, Middle Eastern, and North African, and two sit squarely in Sub-Saharan African genetic space.The majority carry mixtures of Iberian and North African ancestry, consistent with the known demographic history of al-Andalus after the Islamic conquest of Iberia in 711 CE, when Imazighen (Amazigh, often called Berbers in older literature) formed the largest group of new arrivals. Y-chromosome haplogroups E1b1b1b1a1 and E1b1b1a1a1c2 — both common in North African Amazigh populations — appear in six of the nine males. One individual, s.107, clusters so closely with pre-European contact Canary Islanders and Moroccan Imazighen that the team interprets him as an Amazigh individual whose small European ancestry component likely reflects the ancient European-related ancestry already present in pre-Islamic North African populations, not recent admixture with local Iberians.Two individuals, s.157 and s.313, are genetic outliers in the other direction: minimal North African ancestry, genomes that look much like pre-Islamic Iberians. Both are buried in a Muslim cemetery. The team reads them as muladíes — muwalladûn in Arabic, recently Islamized local Iberians who retained the genetic signature of their ancestry while adopting a new religious identity. The observation has a larger implication: on Ibiza in the 11th century, cultural and religious transformation was apparently decoupled from genetic admixture. People converted to Islam faster than they mixed.Two People from Opposite Ends of the SahelThe two Sub-Saharan individuals are the most striking members of this group.Individual s.117 is male. His mitochondrial haplogroup is L3e1c, his Y-chromosome haplogroup E1b1a1a1a — both found primarily in Sub-Saharan African populations. When the team compared his genome against a comprehensive panel of modern African populations including groups from across Chad, Sudan, the Sahel, West Africa, and East Africa, he aligned most closely with present-day populations from southern Chad: the Sara and the Laal, speakers of a Nilo-Saharan language and an endangered language isolate, respectively.Individual s.197 also carries Sub-Saharan ancestry — mitochondrial haplogroup L3b2 — but his genome tells a different story. He clusters with Gambian populations and the Senegal Bedik, groups from the Senegambia region of West Africa.These two men, buried in the same small cemetery on a Mediterranean island, came from regions roughly 4,000 kilometers apart, connected by the trans-Saharan networks that Arabic sources describe in some detail. Historical records from Ibn ʿIdhārī, al-Bakrī, and the al-Bayān al-Mughrib tradition document the northward movement of enslaved individuals from the Lake Chad basin via the Kawar and Fezzan oases — through present-day Niger and Libya — toward North Africa and ultimately Iberia. Those same sources describe a military force of around 4,000 cavalry from the kingdom of Takrūr, in the middle-lower Senegal Valley, crossing into Iberia with Yūsuf b. Tāshfīn at the Battle of Zallaqa in 1086 CE. Takrūr had converted to Islam around 1030 CE, and trans-Saharan networks subsequently supplied the Almoravid armies with both captives and voluntary soldiers.The radiocarbon dates of s.117 and s.197, corrected for marine reservoir effects given Ibiza’s island context, place both individuals after 1115 CE — in the second demographic pulse that reached the Balearics following the Almoravid conquest of Mallorca in 1115–1116 CE. The genomic evidence and the historical record align on the same point: these were people moved by the Almoravid military and slave systems, arriving on Ibiza as part of a larger resettlement and garrisoning process.The coexistence of Chadian and Senegambian ancestry in a single small cemetery shows something the historical texts suggest but rarely make vivid: the al-Andalus of the 11th and 12th centuries was not drawing from one part of sub-Saharan Africa. It was drawing from both the western and central Sahel simultaneously, through distinct but overlapping networks.Timing the MixtureBeyond identifying ancestral origins, the team used haplotype-based local ancestry analysis to estimate when North African admixture actually occurred in the ancestors of these individuals.The method works by measuring the length of uninterrupted chromosomal segments of North African ancestry. When two populations mix, the resulting chromosomes carry long stretches of one ancestry type unbroken by recombination. Each subsequent generation, recombination shuffles those stretches shorter. The rate of that decay maps onto generational time.The population-level estimate, combining seven individuals radiocarbon-dated between 1073 and 1094 CE, places the main admixture event approximately 7.84 generations before 1080 CE. Using a generation time of 26.9 years, that translates to roughly 869 CE — predating Ibiza’s conquest in 902 CE by about 33 years, and likely reflecting admixture that began in mainland al-Andalus before or during the initial colonization. Individual-level estimates range from 2.49 to 7.81 generations, pointing to ongoing gene flow rather than a single founding event.One individual, s.157 — one of the two with predominantly European ancestry — shows an admixture date going back approximately 16 generations, to around 519 CE. This is pre-Islamic. The team interprets this as an ancient, low-level North African genetic contribution predating the Muslim conquest, probably connected to the demographic transformations of the late Roman period. S.157 may represent a family line that had a small North African contribution centuries earlier, absorbed into the local Iberian population long before Ibiza became part of al-Andalus.Two individuals, s.131 and s.315, show elevated runs of homozygosity consistent with consanguinity, with s.131’s pattern suggesting first-cousin parental relatedness. This kind of endogamy was documented among Imazighen communities and in other small medieval Iberian populations. S.131’s admixture timing of 3.47 generations suggests that both parents were already part of the admixed local gene pool of Ibiza — a community that had been mixing for generations and was now marrying within itself.The Leprosy CaseIndividual s.313 is one of the two with minimal North African ancestry, almost certainly a muladí. His bones show no diagnostic skeletal signs of leprosy — some facial elements are missing, which makes a definitive osteological assessment impossible, but what survives looks unremarkable.His DNA tells a different story.Metagenomic screening of s.313’s shotgun sequencing data detected Mycobacterium leprae, the bacterium responsible for leprosy. Target enrichment with a custom capture panel increased the read yield from roughly 29,000 reads to 128,800, enabling a mean genome coverage of 3.75x — enough for phylogenetic placement.The M. leprae genome from s.313 belongs to genotype 2F, a clade containing seven ancient genomes from across medieval Europe, dated between approximately 650 and 1250 CE. The clade stretches from Hospital of Sant Llàtzer/Santa Margarida in Barcelona to Sigtuna, Sweden. Maximum parsimony analysis tentatively groups s.313 with an individual from medieval Denmark (Jorgen749, 1223–1279 CE), though this specific relationship was not strongly supported in the maximum likelihood reconstruction.The distribution of genotype 2F across medieval Europe illustrates something that individual burial evidence tends to obscure: disease was moving across the continent along the same networks that moved people, goods, and armies. Ibiza was not isolated from that. A bacterium recovered from a Muslim muladí in the western Mediterranean shares a lineage with individuals buried in Sweden.S.313’s burial was indistinguishable from others in the cemetery. No sign of marginalization, no separation from the community. This is consistent with both Islamic theological and legal frameworks of the period, which placed considerable emphasis on the obligation to care for the sick, and with a broader pattern, also documented in contemporary Christian cemeteries, of including individuals with leprosy in standard community burials rather than excluding them. Whether s.313 had visible disease at the time of death, or died before symptoms appeared, or had a subclinical infection that never progressed, cannot be determined from the available evidence.Pathogens Across the GroupThe metagenomic analysis found traces of multiple pathogens beyond M. leprae. Hepatitis B virus was detected in individual s.167 with high confidence, and lower-coverage signals were validated in three others; genotyping recovered genotypes A and D, both known from medieval European HBV diversity. Human parvovirus B19, the cause of fifth disease, was recovered from four individuals as partial genomes clustering within genotype 2, with trace-level signals in five more. The parvovirus genomes help fill a temporal gap in the European B19V record between roughly 950 CE and the 20th century, and their assignment to genotype 2 extends the known persistence of that lineage.In at least 3 of the 13 individuals analyzed, the team identified molecular evidence of infection by primary pathogens. Including lower-coverage HBV signals brings that number to 5, or approximately 38% — comparable to rates reported from broad-spectrum pathogen screening at other medieval sites. Including Streptococcus pneumoniae (which can be carried asymptomatically) and a periodontal pathobiont, Parvimonas micra, detected in individual s.133, puts the count at 7 individuals, or about 54%.It’s a small community, and more than half of the people whose DNA could be recovered were carrying some detectable pathogen.What the Island WasIbiza before 902 CE barely existed in the written record. By the time these 13 people were buried — between 950 and 1150 CE — the island had become a node in a network that extended south to the Sahel, east to the Levant, and north into a Mediterranean world increasingly structured by the confrontation between Islamic and Christian polities.The genomes reflect this. They show an initial colonization wave from mainland al-Andalus, dominated by Imazighen with some Arab and Islamized Iberian participants, followed by a second pulse after the Almoravid conquest of Mallorca in 1115–1116 CE that brought new arrivals from North Africa, the Iberian peninsula, and — demonstrably — the far side of the Sahara. The timing estimates suggest admixture that had been ongoing for generations by the time these individuals were alive, some of it recent enough that the chromosomal blocks of North African ancestry were still long and largely intact.The two individuals with the deepest European ancestry — genetically local, culturally Muslim — had apparently converted without marrying into the arriving populations. Or at least their ancestors had. And one of them, without any visible sign of disease, was carrying Mycobacterium leprae genotype 2F, a lineage traveling from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia and back again through the bodies of medieval Europeans who left few records other than this.Further Reading* Olalde, I. et al. “The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years.” Science 363, 1237–1241 (2019).* Oteo-Garcia, G. et al. “Medieval genomes from eastern Iberia illuminate the role of Morisco mass deportations in dismantling a long-standing genetic bridge with North Africa.” Genome Biology 26, 108 (2025).* Pfrengle, S. et al. “Mycobacterium leprae diversity and population dynamics in medieval Europe from novel ancient genomes.” BMC Biology 19, 1–18 (2021).* Schuenemann, V.J. et al. “Ancient genomes reveal a high diversity of Mycobacterium leprae in medieval Europe.” PLOS Pathogens 14, 1006997 (2018).* Mühlemann, B. et al. “Ancient human parvovirus B19 in Eurasia reveals its long-term association with humans.” PNAS115, 7557–7562 (2018).* Kocher, A. et al. “Ten millennia of hepatitis B virus evolution.” Science 374, 182–188 (2021).* Fortes-Lima, C.A. et al. “Population history and admixture of the Fulani people from the Sahel.” American Journal of Human Genetics 112, 261–275 (2025).* Dury, G. et al. “The Islamic cemetery at 33 Bartomeu Vicent Ramon, Ibiza: investigating diet and mobility through light stable isotopes in bone collagen and tooth enamel.” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 11, 3913–3930 (2019).* Bennison, A.K. The Almoravid and Almohad Empires. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.* Rodríguez-Varela, R. et al. “Five centuries of consanguinity, isolation, health, and conflict in Las Gobas: A Northern Medieval Iberian necropolis.” Science Advances 10 (2024). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

The bone fragment pulled from Denisova Cave is 2.5 centimeters long. It was dug out of Layer 12 of the East Chamber, a vaulted space in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia where the light changes color in the afternoon and winter can kill you if you’re unprepared. The fragment was identified as hominin through ancient protein analysis, not morphology — it looks like nothing in particular. Then researchers drilled into it and extracted DNA from the powder, and what came out was one of the better-preserved Neandertal genomes ever sequenced: 37-fold average coverage from a single library, better than most ancient genomes require five to twenty libraries to achieve.The individual was male. He was probably about 110,000 years old. He had never been named or catalogued as a skeleton. He was, effectively, nobody — until he became one of the most informative people from the Pleistocene.Two studies published this week in PNAS, both drawing on new Neandertal genomic data, arrive at a picture of Homo neanderthalensis that is striking for how fragile it makes them look. Not just at the end, in the final few thousand years before their disappearance, but throughout their entire existence across Eurasia. They were a species running on fumes.The Fracture LinesThe Denisova Cave individual — referred to in the Massilani et al. paper as Neandertal D17 — belonged to a population of Eastern Neanderthals more closely related to another individual from the same cave, roughly 120,000 years old and female, than to any Neandertal from Western Europe. This isn’t surprising on its face: they came from the same place. What is surprising is the degree of genetic separation between these eastern Altai Neanderthals and the western populations in Europe.The standard measure for comparing population differentiation is FST, which runs from 0 (identical) to 1 (completely separated). Among living humans, the most genetically distant populations on earth — Central African forest-dwelling groups like the Mbuti compared to Papuan Highlanders — reach an FST of around 0.27. These are populations that diverged somewhere between 130,000 and 220,000 years ago and have been largely separate ever since.The gap between Eastern Neanderthals (D5 and D17 from Denisova Cave) and Western Neanderthals (represented by individuals from Vindija Cave in Croatia and a newly sequenced genome from Belgium) comes out at FST = 0.30. That is larger than the most differentiated living human populations. The Eastern and Western Neandertal lineages diverged only about 115,000 years ago, compared to 260,000 to 440,000 years of separate drift between Mbuti and Papuans. Neanderthals were differentiating faster. The Massilani team attributes this to smaller effective population sizes, which amplify genetic drift: when groups are small and isolated, allele frequencies shift quickly just by chance, without any particular selective pressure driving them.How small were these groups? The genome of D17 shows that about 24 percent of his DNA sits in long homozygous runs — stretches where both copies of a chromosome are identical, a signature of recent inbreeding. In D5, the older female from the same cave, the figure is 20 percent. The Denisovan individual from the same site sits at 4 percent. Early modern humans come in between 1 and 6 percent. Population modeling using the length and distribution of these homozygous tracts suggests that the Altai Neanderthals — both the older Eastern ones and a later, Western-derived individual named Chag8 from a different cave in the same region — were living in groups of fewer than 50 individuals under realistic migration scenarios. The later Western Neanderthals in Europe appear to have lived in somewhat larger groups, but not dramatically so.Princeton geneticist Joshua Akey, who was not involved in either study, put it plainly: the global Neandertal population was probably only a few thousand breeding individuals, spread across most of Eurasia.There is something almost incomprehensible about that. Modern humans, for all the times we almost went extinct, have never been that reduced on a global scale while simultaneously occupying that much space.The Bottleneck You Can See ComingThe second study, led by Charoula Fotiadou and Cosimo Posth at the University of Tübingen, approaches Neandertal demography from the other direction: not nuclear genomes from individuals, but mitochondrial DNA from dozens of specimens spanning the last 130,000 years of Neandertal history in Europe. Mitochondrial DNA is maternally inherited and present in large quantities in ancient bone, which makes it tractable even from fragmentary material. The team generated ten new mtDNA sequences from six sites in Belgium, France, Germany, and Serbia, and analyzed them against 49 previously published sequences.The pattern they found is stark. Before about 75,000 years ago, European Neanderthals showed multiple distinct mtDNA lineages. Individuals from different sites across the continent sat on different branches of the phylogenetic tree. There was genetic diversity — not a lot by modern human standards, but genuine regional variation.Then it collapses.The vast majority of Late Neanderthals, those living after about 57,000 years ago, cluster within a single mtDNA lineage. From Iberia to the Caucasus, across the whole surviving range of European Neanderthals, almost everyone is descended in the maternal line from the same ancestral population. The analysis places the origin of that lineage at around 65,000 years ago, with a 95 percent confidence interval running from 56,000 to 76,000 years ago. And it pinpoints the likely geographic source: southwestern France.What happened in between is not hard to guess. Marine Isotope Stage 4 — the glacial period peaking roughly 73,000 to 60,000 years ago — was cold and dry across Europe. The Fotiadou team’s analysis of the archaeological record, drawing on the ROCEEH Out of Africa Database (ROAD), shows Neandertal sites becoming dramatically concentrated in southwestern Europe during this period. The hotspot visible in the data through the 70,000 to 60,000 year window sits in southern France. Structured statistical tests on the spatial data show this cannot be explained by research bias or uneven sampling. Something pulled Neanderthals into that corner of the continent.The genetic and archaeological evidence converge on the same scenario: a population that had been distributed across most of Eurasia contracted into a refugium. Most of the earlier diversity was lost. Whatever lineages existed outside that southwestern European core either died out or were so reduced as to leave no detectable genetic trace in later populations. The only exceptions are two individuals in France — one from Les Cottés, one from Grotte Mandrin — whose mtDNA sits outside the main Late Neandertal lineage, suggesting the refugium itself preserved at least some of the older variation.When the ice retreated, sometime after 65,000 years ago, the survivors spread out again. Neanderthals reappeared at sites across Europe and into the Caucasus. But they were now, in the maternal genetic record, essentially one people. University of Tübingen paleogeneticist Cosimo Posth, a co-author on the Fotiadou study, described it directly: all the genetic diversity visible in the mitochondrial record before 60,000 years ago disappears, and a single lineage survives.This is not extinction followed by replacement from somewhere outside. There is no external source population arriving from Asia or Africa. The Neanderthals who recolonized Europe after the glacial maximum were the descendants of the ones who had sheltered in southwestern France. What the bottleneck destroyed, you cannot get back.42,000 Years AgoThe Bayesian skyline analysis in the Fotiadou study tracks effective population size through time, and the trajectory at the end is what you might expect given everything else in the data. There is no gradual thinning out. The line holds roughly steady until around 44,500 years ago, then drops sharply. It reaches its minimum around 42,000 years ago.That timing overlaps with the arrival of anatomically modern humans in Europe, which most evidence places between 45,000 and 43,000 years ago, and with the sharp climatic instability of Greenland Interstadial transitions around the same period. Qiaomei Fu, a geneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences not involved in either paper, noted that for a population already as constrained as the Neanderthals had become, environmental volatility would have been especially dangerous. When you have no buffer — no large connected populations to draw migrants from, no reservoir of genetic diversity to draw on — each stochastic shock matters more.Within roughly 3,000 years of that decline beginning, the Neandertal genetic signal disappears from the record entirely. Except, of course, for what survived through admixture with modern humans — the 1 to 4 percent of Neandertal ancestry still present in the genomes of everyone alive today outside sub-Saharan Africa.Something else emerges from the Denisova Cave genome. The two oldest individuals from that site — D5 (around 120,000 years old) and D17 (around 110,000 years old) — both carry segments of DNA that trace to Denisovan ancestry. The locations of Denisovan-like segments in the two genomes are significantly correlated, suggesting they shared at least some of the same introgression events. But the later Neandertal from the region — Chag8, from nearby Chagyrskaya Cave, dating to around 80,000 years ago — shows no comparable Denisovan signal. Neither does the Western European Neandertal from Vindija. The Massilani team’s interpretation is tentative but suggestive: the Western-derived population that replaced the Eastern Neanderthals in the Altai sometime between 110,000 and 80,000 years ago may have been recent arrivals with no prior contact with Denisovans, or their ancestors may have arrived after whatever direct interactions the earlier populations had experienced.It is a strange thing to contemplate: two groups of Neanderthals, separated by perhaps 10,000 years, occupying the same cave system at different times, genetically distinct enough from each other to be classified into separate regional populations, each leaving a different archaeological footprint, each with different admixture histories. And none of them aware that in some broader sense they were all running out of time.Max Planck geneticist Hugo Zeberg, a co-author on the Massilani paper, framed the comparative value of these datasets in terms of natural experiments. Modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans: three lineages navigating the same world during overlapping time periods. The question of why one of them is still here is not answered by these papers, but it gets sharper. Neandertal populations, the data suggest, were almost never large enough to absorb disruption the way modern human populations apparently could. The differentiation exceeded anything seen in living humans today — and it happened faster, over shorter timescales, because the groups were smaller and more isolated. Drift overwhelmed everything else.The bone fragment from Denisova Cave is 2.5 centimeters long. From it, researchers reconstructed a genome that shows a man living in a population of fewer than 50 people, already genetically separated from the people his kind would later become, already carrying DNA from another species entirely. He was part of a group at the far eastern edge of its range, in a mountain cave in Siberia, 110,000 years ago.Whether that feels like isolation or just ordinary life is a question the data cannot answer.Further Reading* Hajdinjak, M., et al. (2018). Reconstructing the genetic history of late Neanderthals. Nature 555, 652–656. * Mafessoni, F., et al. (2020). A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Chagyrskaya Cave. PNAS 117, 15132–15136. * Prüfer, K., et al. (2014). The complete genome sequence of a Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains. Nature 505, 43–49. * Prüfer, K., et al. (2017). A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Vindija Cave in Croatia. Science 358, 655–658. * Slimak, L., et al. (2024). Long genetic and social isolation in Neanderthals before their extinction. Cell Genomics 4, 100593. * Skov, L., et al. (2022). Genetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals. Nature 610, 519–525. * Higham, T., et al. (2014). The timing and spatiotemporal patterning of Neanderthal disappearance. Nature 512, 306–309. * Urciuoli, A., et al. (2025). Semicircular canals shed light on bottleneck events in the evolution of the Neanderthal clade. Nature Communications 16, 972. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

The caves of Ice Age Europe were not quiet places. People lived in them, killed animals inside them, made art on their walls, and sometimes processed their dead in them. At Gough’s Cave in Somerset, around 14,300 years ago, a group of humans associated with the Magdalenian technocomplex left behind something strange: human skulls reshaped into cups, human bones engraved, the clear signature of funerary cannibalism. Alongside those remains, among the same depositional layers, were the bones of a dog.That dog’s mandible has a perforation drilled through the masseteric fossa. The same kind of postmortem anthropic modification visible on the human bones.Whatever the precise meaning of that treatment, it says something about the relationship. These people were not keeping a wolf they had recently caught. The dog at Gough’s Cave, as confirmed by nuclear genomic data published this week in Nature, was a fully domesticated member of Canis lupus familiaris, genetically closer to a dog from central Anatolia than to any wolf living in late glacial Europe.The oldest dogs, confirmed by genomeTwo companion papers appeared simultaneously in Nature on March 25, 2026, both addressing the same problem from different directions: when did dogs first appear in Europe, and how do we actually know?The problem with earlier attempts to answer that question is that bones lie, or at least they mislead. Wolf morphology and early dog morphology overlap in ways that make confident separation difficult, especially for remains from 14,000 to 17,000 years ago when dogs were fresh out of the wolf lineage and may not yet have accumulated the skeletal changes we now associate with domestication. Previous claims for Paleolithic dogs in Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Siberia — some dated to 33,000 years ago or older — have repeatedly failed under genetic scrutiny. The animals turned out to be wolves, some of them from extinct lineages.The oldest definitive dog DNA, before these studies, dated to about 10,900 years ago from the Mesolithic site of Veretye in Karelia. That was the floor. The new papers blow through it.One team, led by researchers at the Natural History Museum London, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, and the University of Oxford, generated nuclear and mitochondrial genomes from canid remains at Pınarbaşı in central Anatolia (15,800 years old) and Gough’s Cave (14,300 years old). The other team, led by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, the University of East Anglia, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, analyzed DNA from 216 canid skeletal remains — 181 from pre-Neolithic contexts — across Europe and its margins, using a hybridization capture approach that enriched endogenous canid DNA by 10 to 100-fold from material where less than 1% of the total DNA was even host-derived.Together they confirmed dogs at five sites spanning from Britain to Turkey during the late Upper Paleolithic: Pınarbaşı, Gough’s Cave, Bonn-Oberkassel in Germany, Kesslerloch in Switzerland, and Grotta Paglicci in Italy. The Kesslerloch dog, which had been proposed as a dog on morphological grounds in earlier work and dates to 14,200 years ago, was confirmed genetically by the Crick-led team. It is the oldest dog in their dataset confirmed by genome-wide analysis.The 13,700-year-old canid from Goyet cave in Belgium, by contrast, had long been considered a probable dog. Small size, traces of human modification, red-colored stains. The genetic data says wolf.This is not a minor methodological caveat. It goes to the heart of how the field has been working and how often it has been wrong.A single population, spread across culturesHere is where it gets strange. The five confirmed Paleolithic dogs are associated with three genetically and culturally distinct human populations: the Magdalenian (Gough’s Cave), the Epigravettian (Bonn-Oberkassel, Kesslerloch, Grotta Paglicci), and Anatolian hunter-gatherers (Pınarbaşı). These groups had diverged long before the dogs appear in the record. The Magdalenian and Epigravettian splits probably predate the Last Glacial Maximum, around 24,000 to 21,000 years ago.The dogs don’t reflect this divergence. Dogs from Gough’s Cave and Pınarbaşı are more genetically similar to each other than to any other dog in the dataset. Their most recent common ancestor is estimated at roughly 16,900 years ago — which means their ancestral population was already diverging from other dog populations well before either of these individual animals was born. They cluster together in a distinct mitochondrial clade, C5, a sister group to all other C haplogroup dogs, that also includes Bonn-Oberkassel, Kesslerloch, and Grotta Paglicci.Greger Larson, a paleogeneticist at Oxford and an author on both studies, framed the oddity directly in a press context: the people are very different, but the dogs are very much the same. Across the five sites, the dogs were more genetically similar to each other than the humans at the same sites were to each other.One interpretation, favored by the Marsh et al. team, is that dogs spread westward with the expansion of Epigravettian-associated ancestry and material culture roughly 16,000 years ago, and people carrying Magdalenian ancestry in Britain and perhaps Spain acquired dogs through interactions with Epigravettians — without that interaction leaving any detectable trace of Epigravettian ancestry in the Magdalenian humans. The dog was exchanged; the genes were not.Whether Magdalenian people at Gough’s Cave acquired their dog from Epigravettians or through some other network remains genuinely open. The paucity of Paleolithic dog remains makes the data thin. But the pattern is real: a relatively genetically homogeneous dog population spread across populations of people who were quite distinct from one another. Greger Larson compared it to the spread of a new technology or art form — something people found useful and interesting enough to pass around.Where the dogs came from, and what they were notThe larger question of dog domestication — where, when, by whom — remains unsettled. These papers narrow parts of it without resolving the whole.The Kesslerloch dog, at 14,200 years old, already shows more genetic affinity to later European dogs than to Asian dogs. Population structure in dogs, the data suggest, is at least 14,200 years old. For that differentiation to have already been in place by then, domestication must have occurred considerably earlier. The authors reason, cautiously, that domestication likely predates Kesslerloch by several millennia, to allow enough time for the genetic gap between European and Asian dogs to have opened up.On the question of which wolves were involved, both papers point away from European wolves. The Bergström et al. analysis finds that all the pre-Neolithic European dogs in their dataset are consistent with deriving from an eastern progenitor, the same source population that produced dogs in Siberia, East Asia, and Australasia. European Late Glacial wolves — the wolves that actually lived alongside these dogs — contributed detectably to dog ancestry in none of them. This is not new, but the Kesslerloch confirmation extends the result back several thousand years.One canid from Belgium that illustrates this point neatly: the Goyet cave specimen, genetically a wolf, has fully wolf-like ancestry. Its small size and human modifications were real, but those features, it turns out, don’t tell you what you think they do. A wolf can be small. A wolf can be associated with humans in ways that leave marks on bone. That doesn’t make it a dog.At the same time, the dogs at Gough’s Cave showed similar dietary stable isotope signatures to the humans there, consistent with the dogs eating what the people were eating, or at least food from the same trophic level. At Pınarbaşı, the isotope data for neonatal dogs and their mothers suggests an aquatic dietary component that matches the human diet at the site, where small freshwater fish are common in the occupied layers. The dogs were being provisioned. They were inside the system, not just following it from a distance.What farming did, and didn’t do, to European dogsThe other major finding concerns what happened when agriculture arrived in Europe, roughly 9,000 years ago, carried by people migrating from Southwest Asia.In humans, the Neolithic transition in Europe involved a near-complete replacement of hunter-gatherer ancestry in many regions. Neolithic farmers typically had 70 to 80 percent Southwest Asian ancestry. Ancient DNA from these farmers shows they arrived with their own animals — sheep, goats, cattle, pigs — and largely displaced the wild progenitors of those animals in Europe.Dogs were the only domestic animal already present in Europe before farming arrived. The question was whether they experienced the same kind of replacement.They did not. The Bergström et al. analysis, using formal ancestry modeling, shows that Southwest Asian dog ancestry did enter Europe with Neolithic farmers — but at much lower proportions than in the humans. Neolithic dogs in Scotland showed 21 to 25 percent Southwest Asian ancestry. Dogs in southern Europe showed higher values, up to 66 percent in Greece. But the local Mesolithic dogs persisted in the gene pool, and they persist there still. Modern European dogs fall roughly halfway between Mesolithic European and Neolithic Southwest Asian dogs in ancestry cline analyses, which implies they trace approximately half their ancestry to the pre-agricultural dogs of Europe.The contrast with what happened to dogs when Europeans arrived in the Americas is stark. In the Americas, European dogs rapidly and almost completely replaced the pre-contact native American dog population. The Neolithic transition in Europe was softer. Incoming farmers incorporated local hunter-gatherer dogs to a substantial degree, rather than replacing them.One plausible reading is that hunter-gatherer dogs and farmer dogs were doing overlapping jobs, or at minimum that the social relationships between arriving farmers and existing populations allowed for the mixing of dog populations in ways that colonial-era encounters did not. The genetic data can’t tell you which, but the pattern is clear enough.The Marsh et al. paper adds another layer: eastern Eurasian dog ancestry also entered Europe during the Mesolithic, not just during the later Bronze Age steppe migrations as had been proposed. Balkan Mesolithic dogs from the Iron Gates sites in Serbia (Padina and Vlasac) and from Veretye in northwest Russia carried substantial eastern Eurasian dog ancestry — around 44 percent on average. Human genomes from the same contexts show those people also carried eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry. The dogs followed the people east to west, it seems, just as they had crossed western Eurasia at an earlier moment.This eastern component persisted. Roughly 30 percent eastern Eurasian dog ancestry is present in Neolithic dogs, 33 percent in the Bronze Age, around 20 percent in medieval and modern breed dogs. The fundamental ancestry architecture of European dogs — a mix of western and eastern Eurasian lineages — was in place by at least 10,900 years ago and has not been fully erased since.The question of exactly where dogs first emerged, and from which human group, the data cannot yet answer. The Kesslerloch dog’s genomic profile is divergent enough that it sits off the main cline of global dog diversity in some analyses — more distantly related to later Eurasian dogs than the Mesolithic Scandinavian dogs are. Whether that reflects a basal position in dog phylogeny, or admixture from some earlier dog lineage, or something else, requires more sampling from the gap between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago that currently has almost no coverage. Anders Bergström, the first author of the Crick-led paper, put it plainly: we’re still trying to find out where dogs come from and who were the people who first built this bond.Further Reading* Bergström, A. et al. Grey wolf genomic history reveals a dual ancestry of dogs. Nature 607, 313–320 (2022). * Bergström, A. et al. Origins and genetic legacy of prehistoric dogs. Science 370, 557–564 (2020). * Feuerborn, T.R. et al. Modern Siberian dog ancestry was shaped by several thousand years of Eurasian-wide trade and human dispersal. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, e2100338118 (2021). * Posth, C. et al. Palaeogenomics of Upper Palaeolithic to Neolithic European hunter-gatherers. Nature 615, 117–126 (2023). * Janssens, L. et al. A new look at an old dog: Bonn-Oberkassel reconsidered. Journal of Archaeological Science 92, 126–138 (2018). * Sinding, M.-H.S. et al. Arctic-adapted dogs emerged at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. Science 368, 1495–1499 (2020). Botigué, L.R. et al. Ancient European dog genomes reveal continuity since the Early Neolithic. Nature Communications8, 16082 (2017).* Charlton, S. et al. Dual ancestries and ecologies of the Late Glacial Palaeolithic in Britain. Nature Ecology & Evolution 6, 1658–1668 (2022). * Bello, S.M. et al. Upper Palaeolithic ritualistic cannibalism at Gough’s Cave (Somerset, UK): the human remains from head to toe. Journal of Human Evolution 82, 170–189 (2015). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

Somewhere in what is now the Dordogne, probably sometime around 65,000 years ago, a small group of Homo neanderthalensis survived. The continent around them was largely empty of their kind. The previous 30,000 years had not been kind. The climate had tightened, and the Neanderthals who had ranged from Iberia to the Caucasus and beyond had contracted into a rump population clinging to the warmer southwest of Europe. What happened to the others is not entirely clear. They didn’t disappear overnight. But when the data are assembled and analyzed, the genetic trace of that earlier diversity is almost entirely gone from the Late Neanderthal record.That’s the central finding of a study published this month in PNAS by Charoula Fotiadou, Cosimo Posth, and a large international team. They sequenced ten new Neanderthal mitochondrial genomes from six archaeological sites in Belgium, France, Germany, and Serbia, and analyzed them together with 49 previously published sequences. The result is the most comprehensive picture yet of what happened to European Neanderthals in the millennia before they vanished.The conclusion is stark. Nearly every Late Neanderthal in Europe — individuals spanning from El Sidrón in Spain to Mezmaiskaya in the Caucasus — belongs to a single mitochondrial lineage. The team dates the diversification of that lineage to approximately 65,000 years ago, and the geographic and archaeological evidence converges on a single explanation: a population refugium in southwestern France.The Genetic ContractionTo understand what’s unusual about this, it helps to know what preceded it. Neanderthals from before MIS 3 — the time period associated with the last Neanderthals — show considerably more mitochondrial diversity. The older European individuals in this dataset fall on more deeply branching lineages. Two specimens from Tourtoirac in France (indirectly dated to before 57,000 years ago) fall on different branches entirely, which is itself telling: within a single site, two Neanderthals carry distinct mitochondrial lineages. The same pattern holds for the pre-MIS 3 Neanderthal tooth from Pešturina Cave in Serbia, dated by OSL and ESR methods to around 111,000 years ago. These individuals were part of a more genetically varied world.That world contracted. The researchers used the ROAD database — a large-scale archaeological repository developed by the ROCEEH project at the Heidelberg Academy — to track the geographic distribution of Neanderthal sites from 130,000 years ago onward, in 10,000-year slices. From 130,000 to about 80,000 years ago, Neanderthal sites are spread across western Eurasia, from the Iberian Peninsula to the Black Sea. Then the distribution tightens. By the 70,000–60,000 year window, site density is concentrated in southern France. The spatial statistics confirm this isn’t just a sampling artifact: hotspot analysis and rarefaction testing both support a genuine geographic contraction, not an illusion produced by uneven research coverage.The timing fits what we know about MIS 4. This glacial stage, roughly 73,000 to 60,000 years ago, brought cold and dry conditions across much of Europe. The potential niche space available to Neanderthals, modeled using paleoclimate reconstructions, reached its smallest extent during this period. A refugium in southwestern France would have made environmental sense. The region offered milder conditions, river systems, and game. Something persisted there.What followed that contraction was an expansion. After about 65,000 years ago, the diversity of mtDNA branches among Neanderthals effectively resets. The old lineages are gone, or nearly so. The population that survived in southwestern France radiated outward. By MIS 3, Neanderthals are again spread across the continent, but now they’re all carrying, maternally, the same ancestral signature. The rarefaction analysis shows the longitudinal spread of sites actually increases progressively after 80,000–70,000 years ago — statistically significant broadening that holds up even when controlling for sample size.The molecular dating analysis, run in a Bayesian framework using radiocarbon-dated individuals as calibration points, pins the diversification of the main Late Neanderthal mtDNA branch at around 65,000 years ago (95% HPD interval: 76,000–56,000 years ago). Crucially, this event was preceded by a period of roughly 30,000 years during which no new mtDNA lineages appear to have diversified at all — a long plateau of genetic stasis spanning most of MIS 4. The surviving population was small and isolated enough that its mitochondrial lineages were simply not branching.Goyet and What a Single Site Can Tell YouThe Belgium site of Goyet — the Troisième caverne — is doing a lot of work in this dataset. It’s the most densely sampled Neanderthal site with multiple individuals, and the team added three more mtDNA sequences from it here. What’s remarkable about Goyet is not just the number of specimens but what they span: within a roughly 4,000-year window (45,000–41,000 years ago), the Neanderthal individuals at Goyet encompass almost the entire range of mtDNA diversity seen across Late Neanderthals in Europe. A single cave, a few thousand years, and you’ve essentially sampled the continent’s genetic breadth. The team notes this is statistically indistinguishable from the diversity observed across the whole main Late Neanderthal branch — and the Goyet assemblage is not even a population sample in any conventional sense. Zooarchaeological analysis of the site has previously shown that the Neanderthal remains there reflect selective cannibalism, not ordinary occupation debris.Several of the newly dated Goyet specimens initially produced post-40,000-year radiocarbon dates — which would place them after the generally accepted timing of Neanderthal extinction. The team addresses this directly. Pairwise distance comparisons between some of these specimens and others from the same site show identical mtDNA sequences, suggesting they belong to the same chronological assemblage as Goyet individuals directly dated to 43,000–42,000 years ago. The anomalous radiocarbon results are attributed to collagen contamination from varnish applied to the specimens — a known problem with older museum collections. Molecular dating of these individuals produces ages consistent with the broader Goyet assemblage.Two Late Neanderthals at the French sites of Les Cottés and Grotte Mandrin don’t fit neatly into the main Late Neanderthal lineage. Les Cottés Z4-1514, in particular, falls on a more divergent branch and shows a striking number of accumulated substitutions — more than any other Neanderthal in the dataset. Thorin from Grotte Mandrin, dated to around 50,000 years ago, behaves differently still, with an unusually short branch length that complicates molecular dating. These two individuals may represent lineages that persisted within or near the southwestern French refugium even as the rest of Europe’s Neanderthal diversity was replaced. They’re the exceptions that confirm the pattern — surviving remnants of pre-bottleneck diversity sheltering in the same geographic region that gave rise to the dominant Late Neanderthal lineage.The Final DeclineThe demographic analysis doesn’t stop at the bottleneck. Running a Coalescent Bayesian Skyline analysis on the western Eurasian Neanderthal mtDNA sequences, the team identifies a sharp decline in effective population size beginning around 44,500 years ago and reaching its lowest point around 42,000 years ago. This is shortly before most estimates for final Neanderthal disappearance in Europe, which radiocarbon work by Higham and colleagues had placed around 40,000 years ago.What drove that final decline is not answered by this study. The population had already been severely bottlenecked once. Low genetic diversity in a small, fragmented population has well-documented consequences — reduced adaptive potential, increased vulnerability to inbreeding, susceptibility to stochastic local extinctions. The authors note that a recent morphological study of Neanderthal semicircular canals independently identified a similar bottleneck event. These lines of evidence are converging.The arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe was happening during this same period, though the relationship between that arrival and Neanderthal demographic collapse remains genuinely contested. This study doesn’t adjudicate between climate and competitive displacement as proxies for the final decline — the mtDNA data can show the timing of the crash, not its cause.What it does show is that the genetic story of Late Neanderthals is not one of steady decline from a diverse, continent-wide population. It’s a story of prior collapse, narrow survival, expansion from the remnant, and a second collapse. The Neanderthals who spread across Europe in the last 25,000 years of their existence were not the same populations that had previously inhabited those landscapes. They were the descendants of survivors, carrying a single maternal lineage into territories where older Neanderthal diversity had already been lost.Whether the material culture of this period reflects that demographic history is another question. The authors point out that despite the genetic homogeneity of Late Neanderthals, their archaeological assemblages are far from uniform — the Mousterian and its variants show regional variation that doesn’t map straightforwardly onto the genetic signal. The genes converge; the toolkits don’t, at least not obviously. That gap between genetic and cultural patterning is one of the more interesting problems the study leaves open.Further Reading* Hajdinjak, M., et al. Reconstructing the genetic history of late Neanderthals. Nature 555, 652–656 (2018).* Posth, C., et al. Deeply divergent archaic mitochondrial genome provides lower time boundary for African gene flow into Neanderthals. Nature Communications 8, 16046 (2017).* Peyrégne, S., et al. Nuclear DNA from two early Neandertals reveals 80,000 years of genetic continuity in Europe. Science Advances 5, eaaw5873 (2019).* Slimak, L., et al. Long genetic and social isolation in Neanderthals before their extinction. Cell Genomics 4, 100593 (2024).* Higham, T., et al. The timing and spatiotemporal patterning of Neanderthal disappearance. Nature 512, 306–309 (2014).* Urciuoli, A., et al. Semicircular canals shed light on bottleneck events in the evolution of the Neanderthal clade. Nature Communications 16, 972 (2025).* Kandel, A.W., et al. The ROCEEH Out of Africa Database (ROAD): A large-scale research database serves as an indispensable tool for human evolutionary studies. PLoS ONE 18, e0289513 (2023).* Banks, W.E., et al. An ecological niche shift for Neanderthal populations in Western Europe 70,000 years ago. Scientific Reports 11, 5346 (2021).* Yaworsky, P.M., Nielsen, E.S., Nielsen, T.K. The Neanderthal niche space of Western Eurasia 145 ka to 30 ka ago. Scientific Reports 14, 7788 (2024).* Rougier, H., et al. Neandertal cannibalism and Neandertal bones used as tools in Northern Europe. Scientific Reports 6, 29005 (2016). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

On 3 March 2022, seven days after Russia’s full-scale invasion began, soldiers from the 55th Mountain Motorised Rifle Brigade arrived in Yahidne. The village sits roughly 120 kilometres northeast of Kyiv and 15 kilometres south of Chernihiv, on the eastern bank of the Desna River. The brigade was normally garrisoned in Kyzyl, in the Tuva Republic — more than 4,200 kilometres away. Within days of their arrival, the soldiers had fortified the primary school as a command centre and driven approximately 368 civilians, including 69 children, into the building’s basement. The youngest prisoner was a 1.5-month-old infant. The oldest was 93.They stayed for 27 days.The basement comprised seven chambers and a corridor, totalling around 200 square metres. There were no functioning toilets, no clean water, no adequate food. The space was damp. Ventilation was poor. There was no room to lie flat, so people slept sitting on chairs or on the concrete floor, which had been covered in cardboard for minimal insulation. Elderly detainees began dying from exhaustion and the absence of medical care. At first, Russian soldiers refused to allow the removal of the bodies, so the living remained alongside the dead in that confined space. Eventually some of the deceased were moved to the boiler building or buried hastily outside.Russian forces withdrew on 30 March. Ukrainian troops arrived the following day. During those 27 days, 10 civilians died in the basement. Between 17 and 19 others were killed elsewhere in the village — the exact number remains under investigation.What they left behind is the subject of a study published this month in Antiquity by Grzegorz Kiarszys of Szczecin University and Marek Lemiesz of the National Institute of Cultural Heritage of Poland. Their paper applies the framework of contemporary archaeology to the material traces of the Yahidne crime scene: the objects, the wall markings, the satellite record, the damaged structure. The result is something that sits at a genuinely uncomfortable intersection — between forensics, heritage studies, and the philosophy of memory.What a satellite sees, and what it missesIn March 2022, obtaining commercial satellite imagery of the Yahidne area was not straightforward. Military conflict restricted access to most coverage. Kiarszys and Lemiesz were able to work with two Maxar images available through Google Earth: one from 18 March 2022 (WorldView-3, ground resolution 300mm), one from 22 March (WorldView-2, 500mm resolution).The 18 March image is strange to look at, once you know what you’re looking for. Heavy vehicle tracks are pressed deep into the arable fields at the centre of the settlement, indicating the prolonged presence of armoured machinery. Artillery craters mark the surrounding fields. Smoke rises from multiple points. Near the school, foxholes are aligned along the main road, and military vehicles cluster around the building. In one corner of the image, the elongated shadows of a group of Russian soldiers fall across the ground near the school’s rear entrance.The civilians are completely absent from the image. They are directly below, underground.Four days later, the second image shows fresh damage. The school’s roof and eastern facade have sustained direct rocket strikes. Other buildings previously occupied by soldiers have been destroyed, vehicles burned out and left in place.The authors draw on Roland Barthes’s description of photography as a kind of clock for seeing — a mechanism that connects the present with something that no longer exists. Satellite imagery, they argue, can function in much the same way. It fixes a moment in time with apparent precision while the most significant thing in the frame is invisible: 368 people in a basement beneath those elongated shadows, 368 people who do not appear in any pixel. The image shows the occupation perfectly. It cannot show the prisoners at all.What they drew on the wallsAfter the village was liberated, Ukrainian criminal investigators examined the school. DNA samples collected from the site have since contributed to identifying perpetrators. Personal documents belonging to nine Tuvan soldiers were recovered from the upper floors. In November 2023, selected objects from both the civilian prisoners and the Russian soldiers were catalogued and secured by the Chernihiv Regional Historical Museum. Between late November and early December 2023, the National Institute of Cultural Heritage of Poland coordinated a project to digitally document the school building using LiDAR scanning, photogrammetric modelling of interior features, and CAD plans.By the time Kiarszys and Lemiesz were conducting fieldwork through multiple visits from December 2022 to March 2025, the basement still held much of what had been left behind. School furnishings remained scattered through the chambers: chairs, ping-pong tables, desks, doors that had been repurposed as makeshift beds. Children’s beds brought down from the nursery upstairs were still there. The concrete floor still bore the imprint of cardboard laid down for insulation.Among the objects: clothing, plastic bags, cups, remnants of military rations, jars of pickled cucumbers that soldiers had distributed. Schoolbooks, both Russian and Ukrainian language texts and Ukrainian history books for children. Abandoned toys, plastic and cuddly. Copies of Komsomolskaya Pravda — a special edition distributed by Russian forces, which announced a swift victory that never arrived and claimed that Ukrainian civilians were welcoming the invasion.Upstairs, in the rooms the soldiers had used, more jars of preserved vegetables, many bearing expiration dates from 2012 and 2014. Empty ration boxes, cigarette butts. Walls marked with unit names, nicknames, crude diagrams of observation zones and fields of fire, and hostile inscriptions aimed at Ukrainian opponents. The classrooms had been left heavily damaged and littered.What draws the most sustained attention in the paper is the children’s drawings on the basement walls. Someone had found crayons and paints, and the children drew. The imagery is exactly what you would expect from children who had not yet fully processed where they were or why: characters from the video game Among Us, Minecraft pickaxes, colourful flowers, butterflies, the sun, clouds, trees, Ukrainian flags, fantastical figures. In rooms without paint, charcoal was used instead — scenes of a football match, buildings, a meteor on a collision course with a grocery store. On one corridor wall, someone scratched a scene of two figures hunting a mammoth with a spear, accompanied by a wolf howling at the moon.Above one cluster of drawings, the word “Hello” is written in Ukrainian. Above another, “No Exit.” Elsewhere, a child wrote: “Mommy, when will you buy me a phone?” Words from the Ukrainian national anthem appear, and other inscriptions now partly faded or illegible.What is absent from all these drawings is as significant as what is present. Across the entire visual record left by the children, there is no depiction of the soldiers. No weapons, no violence, no acknowledgment of the foreign men occupying the floors directly above. The absence is total. Whether this reflects deliberate avoidance, protective instinct, or simply the way children’s imaginations work under extreme stress, the study does not speculate. But the authors note it carefully: the omission draws attention to itself.The adult inscriptions followed a different logic. Most were calendars. Drawn on walls in several rooms in varying forms, they tracked the days of imprisonment. The most striking appears on a door in one of the smaller chambers. It starts on 4 March, with certain dates underlined for unknown reasons. On 30 March — the day Russian forces withdrew — the calendar ends. On the following day, someone returned to that door and added a phrase in Ukrainian: “ours have come.” On the wall to the right of the door, someone had listed the dates and surnames of those who died in the basement. On the left, the names of those killed elsewhere in the village. The prisoners could only account for 17 of the 27 to 29 victims — the basement was sealed, and what happened above ground remained largely unknown to them.Hauntology and the question of what to do with the recent pastThe theoretical framework Kiarszys and Lemiesz bring to this material is Derridean hauntology, drawn from Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1993, published in English translation in 2006). The concept, broadly stated, holds that presence is always haunted by absence: by futures that never arrived and pasts that never fully disappeared. A spectre, in this framework, arises from unresolved past events — it returns uninvited, disrupts chronological continuity, and refuses to be definitively located in either the past or the present. Derrida tied this to Freud’s notion of the uncanny: the spectre reveals the strange within the familiar.It’s worth being clear about why this framework does real work here rather than serving as decorative theory. The problem the authors are grappling with is actually quite specific: what makes a mass-produced object — a jar of pickled cucumbers, a cuddly toy, a door with dates written on it — different from an almost identical object that has no association with atrocity? The standard archaeological answer points to context. The object derives meaning from the circumstances of its discovery, from collective memory, from emotional resonance. But that answer, the authors argue, describes the phenomenon without explaining it. It acknowledges that place and memory and meaning co-occur without accounting for the mechanism.Hauntology offers something more: the idea that material objects from sites of unresolved violence become conduits for the spectre. They do not merely represent the past. They carry the past into the present in a way that resists resolution, that insists on being acknowledged. The comb recovered from a concentration camp is not more culturally significant than any other comb because of what it symbolises. It is more significant because the past it participates in has not been resolved, because the loss it points toward has not been adequately mourned, because justice for the harm has not arrived.By this reasoning, the material record of Yahidne — the calendars, the drawings, the propaganda newspapers, the jars, the charcoal hunting scene on the corridor wall — is not evidence in the narrow forensic sense, though it is that too. It is also something that continues to do cultural work, that keeps the events present in a way that cannot be fully archived or put away.The local community in Yahidne decided after the liberation that the school would never again function as a school. That decision had already been made before any archaeological work began. A memorial now stands at the back of the building, near the basement doors that still carry red lettering reading “Warning. Children.” Plans are underway to convert the building into a museum. An architectural proposal has already been developed, though residents have pushed back on the initial concept, insisting on active participation in shaping what the memorial will become.The digital documentation produced by Kiarszys and Lemiesz — the LiDAR scans, the photogrammetric models, the photographic record — was conducted in part precisely because renovation will alter the building, and renovation will erase things. Selected objects from the basement have already been displayed in Ukrainian museum exhibitions and internationally. The door with the calendar and the names of the dead has been shown outside Ukraine. The photographs of the wall drawings have circulated further still.What happens when a crime scene becomes heritage is not a question the discipline of archaeology has a settled answer to. Heritage is usually treated as a given, as something that exists in the world to be recognised and managed. Yahidne raises the prior question of how it comes into being — the process by which objects and places that are barely three years old acquire the kind of cultural gravity that would normally attach to things measured in centuries. The hauntology framework, whatever its limitations, at least takes that question seriously. The spectre is not the past preserved. It is the past that refuses to stay still.Further Reading* Davis, C. 2013. État présent: hauntology, spectres and phantoms, in M. del Pilar Blanco & E. Peeren (ed.) The Spectralities Reader: ghosts and haunting in contemporary cultural theory: 53–60. London: Bloomsbury.* Domashchenko, I. 2023. Yahidne: court hears villagers’ testimony. Institute for War & Peace Reporting, 26 September 2023. https://iwpr.net/global-voices/yahidne-court-hears-villagers-testimony* Oslavska, S. 2023. Inside the basement where an entire Ukrainian village spent a harrowing month in captivity. Time, 15 February 2023. https://time.com/6255183/ukraine-basement-yahidne-held-captive/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

In 2021, a metal detectorist named Peter Heads was working a field at Melsonby in North Yorkshire when he started pulling up pieces of corroded metal that didn’t fit any obvious pattern. Bent iron rings. Ornate copper-alloy fittings. Fragments of harness hardware. He contacted Tom Moore at Durham University. By the time excavation was complete in 2022, the site had yielded two separate deposits comprising nearly 950 individual objects, making it one of the largest Iron Age metalwork finds ever recovered in Britain.The word hoard tends to flatten what was actually there. These weren’t coins or ingots. The assemblage was dominated by the disassembled remains of horse-drawn vehicles: iron tyres, linchpins, yoke fittings, rein rings, kingpins, nave bands, harness straps adorned with Mediterranean coral and glass enamel. There were cauldrons, spears, an iron mirror, fragments of melted silver. Three quarters of the material derived from horse-drawn vehicles and their harness. Whatever was buried here, someone had gone to considerable effort to gather it and dismantle it before putting it in the ground.The first deposit, designated Hoard 1, was placed at the bottom of a ditch. Its core was 28 iron tyres, all of them bent or deformed before deposition, some entirely out of shape, then stacked carefully. Hundreds of other metal items were entangled within and around them. An inverted cauldron sat over part of the pile; a lidded vessel had been placed upside down at the base. While the pit was open, large rocks were thrown in. One of them crushed the cauldron. The base of that cauldron bears a repoussé fish motif in Celtic curvilinear style, possibly trout or salmon set in swirling water. Depictions of fish are rare on Iron Age metalwork across Europe, and worth noting here because the British Iron Age has a documented and debated pattern of apparent fish avoidance, visible in the zooarchaeological record.The second deposit, Hoard 2, was found about 25 metres away. It had fused into a solid mass through iron corrosion, making field excavation impossible. The team lifted it as a block and sent it to the University of Southampton for CT scanning. Inside: more horse harness, iron spears, copper-alloy tubes, and what appears to be an iron pilum shaft threaded through hollow copper fittings. Traces of mineralised textile on the block’s edges and textile impressions in the surrounding fill indicate the bundle had been wrapped before burial. The researchers have decided not to disassemble it. Doing so would destroy one of the few preserved records of how such a deposit was actually constructed.The Case for WagonsThe most significant finding from Melsonby, in terms of what it changes about the Iron Age British record, is the evidence for four-wheeled wagons. Until now, the British evidence for Iron Age wheeled vehicles consisted almost entirely of two-wheeled chariots, mostly from burials on the Yorkshire Wolds dating to the Middle Iron Age, roughly 400 to 150 BC. A single Late Iron Age chariot burial has been identified in Pembrokeshire. That is essentially the extent of the direct evidence.The Melsonby assemblage suggests something different was in use in northern Britain by the first century AD. The U-shaped iron brackets found in Hoard 1 are not known from British two-wheeled chariot contexts anywhere. They have nails protruding from their arms, indicating attachment to thick wooden elements around cylindrical components, and they fit cylindrical iron bands that closely resemble hub collars from four-wheeled wagons on the continent, particularly those dated from around 100 BC to the first century AD. The iron tyres range from 0.77 to 1.08 metres in diameter, larger than those typical of lightweight chariots, and the harness fittings are atypically oversized throughout. Most telling are the kingpins: components specific to wagon steering mechanisms, with no function on a two-wheeled vehicle.The closest material parallel is a pair of four-wheeled wagons recovered from a peat bog at Dejbjerg in Denmark, dated to around 100 BC. Those wagons were buried in pieces but retained their copper-alloy fittings, several of which resemble items from Melsonby: tubes and ferrules, finials, openwork ornamentation. A small repoussé face from Hoard 2 echoes faces decorating the Dejbjerg wagons. Four-wheeled vehicles are well documented across Late Iron Age continental Europe. Their presence in Britain had been anticipated on circumstantial grounds, but never confirmed with physical evidence. The Melsonby deposits represent, in the team’s assessment, the first tangible instance.At minimum, the assemblage accounts for seven vehicles. Possibly more, possibly a mixture of four-wheeled wagons and lighter two-wheeled carts. The harness fittings across Hoards 1 and 2, and a third hoard found at the same site in 1843, show closely related stylistic groupings suggesting multiple matched sets, made in related workshops, treated as sets in deposition. The 1843 find appears to have included a separate cache of large iron wheel rims, described at the time as “iron hoops, conjectured to be tyres of chariot wheels.”What Was Being Destroyed, and WhyThe manner of deposition is as striking as the objects themselves. The vehicles had been dismantled. Many items had been deliberately bent, broken, or exposed to intense heat before burial. Partially melted copper-alloy objects, glass droplets, and melted silver were distributed throughout Hoard 1. The iron tyres had probably been heated to enable bending, a process that left haematite traces on their surfaces. But none of this burning happened in the pit: the surrounding sediment showed no discolouration, no charcoal concentration. The material had been processed elsewhere, then brought here.One possibility is that these objects had been placed on a funeral pyre and then transferred to the ditch. This has been proposed for the 1843 hoard and for similar burning-affected metalwork deposits elsewhere. It fits what the rest of the assemblage contains. The large cauldron, with an estimated capacity of around 35 litres, the second vessel whose form echoes Etruscan wine-mixing bowls and which bears cast human face masks and applied coral studs, the iron mirror, the weapons: these are objects associated with feasting, display, and status. As a category they resemble elite funerary deposits from southern Britain in the same period, including assemblages from Lexden in Colchester and Folly Lane in St Albans.There are no human remains at Melsonby. The small quantities of bone recovered appear to be animal, including probable cremated animal bone in Hoard 2’s trench. The researchers are careful about what this absence means. They point out that hoards, votive deposits, and funerary assemblages represent a continuum of practice rather than clearly bounded categories. The absence of a body does not exclude a funerary event. Cremation was becoming more common in Late Iron Age southern Britain; human remains may have been deposited in ways that are archaeologically invisible, or the event may have involved exposure to a funerary pyre without any conventional burial at all.The site sits about 800 metres from the Late Iron Age oppidum at Stanwick, one of the major power centres of northern Britain and the probable seat of the Brigantes, a tribal confederacy described by classical writers. Stanwick was occupied through the first century BC and first century AD, precisely the period that preliminary radiocarbon dates from the Melsonby deposits indicate. Hoard 1 most probably dates to between 35 cal BC and cal AD 40, with Hoard 2 falling in a similar range. The assemblage includes Roman-influenced objects consistent with Stanwick’s documented engagement with Roman material culture beginning around the turn of the millennium.Tacitus identified Queen Cartimandua as a Brigantian client ruler allied with Rome, active around AD 51 to 69. The team notes that the Melsonby dates, if the deposits are connected to a funerary event, suggest the person being commemorated was more likely Cartimandua’s parent or grandparent than Cartimandua herself. That doesn’t diminish the connection to Stanwick’s political world. The Brigantian reach suggested by the objects is wide: decorative motifs connecting to metalwork from southern Scotland to southern England, Mediterranean coral, Roman-influenced forms. And other aspects of the deposits are worth sitting with. The communal feasting equipment, the relative absence of personal ornaments like brooches, the sheer scale of destruction involved: whatever event this was, it seems to have been as much about collective display as about any individual. The tension between personal and community power is one that the archaeology of the British Iron Age keeps returning to, and Melsonby fits that pattern without resolving it.What happened in that field near Stanwick in the late first century BC or early first century AD remains genuinely open. Something significant occurred, possibly more than once, or in a compressed sequence of related events. Vehicles were destroyed. Enormous quantities of high-value metalwork were bent, melted, bundled, and placed in ditches along a trackway connecting a major political centre to the south. A cauldron decorated with fish was placed upside down over the pile, and then rocks were thrown in on top.Hoard 2 is still in its concreted block.Further Reading* Comeau, R. 2022. Cambrians Christmas Lecture, 2021; Adam Gwilt: The Pembrokeshire Chariot Burial Project. Archaeologia Cambrensis 171: 324–26.* Dobney, K. & Ervynck, A. 2007. To fish or not to fish? Evidence for the possible avoidance of fish consumption during the Iron Age around the North Sea, in C. Haselgrove & T. Moore (ed.) The Later Iron Age in Britain and beyond: 403–18. Oxford: Oxbow.* Foster, J. 1986. The Lexden Tumulus: a reappraisal of an Iron Age burial from Colchester, Essex (British Archaeological Reports British Series 156). Oxford: BAR.* Giles, M. 2012. A forged glamour: landscape, identity and material culture in the Iron Age. Oxford: Windgather.* Haselgrove, C. 2016. Cartimandua’s Capital? The Late Iron Age royal site at Stanwick, North Yorkshire, fieldwork and analysis 1981–2011 (Council for British Archaeology Research Report 175). York: Council for British Archaeology.* Haselgrove, C. & McIntosh, F. 2016. The Melsonby hoard, in C. Haselgrove (ed.) Cartimandua’s Capital?: 343–48.* MacGregor, M. 1962. The Early Iron Age metalwork hoard from Stanwick, N.R. Yorks. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 28: 17–57.* Niblett, R. 1999. The excavation of a ceremonial site at Folly Lane, Verulamium (Britannia Monograph 14). London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies.* Schönfelder, M. 2010. Die Wagen von Dejbjerg. Import, Umwandlung und Anregung, in J. Erzsébet & M. Schönfelder (ed.) Nord-Süd, Ost-West: Kontakte während der Eisenzeit in Europa: 257–68. Budapest: Archaeolingua.* Schovsbo, P.O. 2010. Dejbjergvognene: keltiske impulser i førromersk jernalder. Højbjerg: Jysk Arkæologisk Selskab. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

Sometime around 3700 BCE, a group of Eneolithic steppe-dwellers did something deliberate and labor-intensive at a spot along the Velykyi Kuialnyk River in what is now southern Ukraine. They scraped the topsoil off a platform down to bare yellow loam. They dug a semi-circular ditch, leaving a causeway oriented toward the southwest. They arranged stones in an elongated east-west axis around the mound they raised. At the center, they dug a pit and placed disarticulated human remains inside it — bones that appear to have been deposited in some kind of organic container, a bag or wrapping that left no trace. Then, possibly, they left the pit open for a while before filling it in.The result was not quite a tomb. The mound wasn’t built over the burial — it was already there when the burial happened. Researchers interpret this as a sanctuary first, a burial site second. Evidence of fires in the ditches resembles what we find at causewayed enclosures elsewhere, including Eneolithic enclosures scattered across the Pontic Steppe. Whatever this place was, it mattered to the people who made it.Then several centuries passed. And someone else came.The Yamna Knew What They Were Standing OnThe Early Bronze Age Yamna culture — mobile pastoralists who would eventually contribute significantly to the genetic makeup of Copper and Bronze Age Europe — had a habit of burying their dead in the mounds of the people who came before them. This is well-documented enough to be a pattern rather than a coincidence. At sites across the region, Yamna people interred their dead inside pre-existing structures, modified rock art to fit their own worldview, and routinely destroyed or repurposed Eneolithic anthropomorphic stelae in their ritual practices.Revova Kurgan 3 fits this pattern, but with an unusual level of precision. The Yamna burial at the center of the mound — burial 3, covered by two large stone slabs — was dug directly into the underlying Eneolithic layer. And the person who dug it was careful. The pit cut into the loam of the original mound without disturbing the adjacent Eneolithic burial 19. Two pits, separated by centuries, sitting side by side without touching.That kind of precision is hard to explain as accident. The research team behind the new Antiquity study, led by Svitlana Ivanova and co-authored with Alexey Nikitin, Simon Radchenko, and Dmytro Kiosak, frames this as what they call a “continuity of sacred spaces” — a deliberate ritual reuse of a predecessor’s sacred site. Kiosak acknowledges the interpretive tightrope. A prominent hilltop with good sightlines could attract any number of unrelated groups across centuries. Landscape utility is always a plausible explanation. But the central placement of the new burial, in a mound that could have been built almost anywhere nearby, suggests something more intentional than convenience.After burial 3, the Yamna kept using Revova 3. Three more burials were added at the edges of the same mound layer, dated to roughly 2885–2204 cal BCE. Then a new mound layer was added, containing burial 15. Then another layer with further Bronze Age burials. The site accumulated depth over nearly two millennia — 3711 to 1748 cal BCE, spanning four overlapping mound sequences — each generation adding its dead to the same patch of ground.What the DNA AddsThe palaeogenetic data from burial 19, the earliest individual at Revova 3, introduces a complication to any clean narrative of discontinuity. Whole genome analysis shows that this Eneolithic individual carried Usatove ancestry, linking them to people buried at nearby sites like Mayaky and Usatove. That much is not surprising. What’s interesting is the genetic overlap between the Usatove and the Yamna: approximately half of Usatove genetic ancestry is shared with the Yamna gene pool originating in the Caucasus-Lower Volga area. The individual in burial 19 also carries a Y-chromosome lineage tracing back to the Near East highlands, while their mitochondrial DNA likely came from the local steppe — the same mtDNA lineage found in Yamna individuals in the northwestern Pontic.None of this proves the Yamna people who reused Revova 3 were conscious of any genetic connection to whoever built it. But it does mean the genetic distance between the two groups was not as vast as earlier population models sometimes implied. The people are not neatly separate; the cultures were not hermetically sealed. The Yamna expansion out of the North Pontic Steppe was one of the most consequential demographic events of the prehistoric world — but it appears to have been more entangled with prior populations than the straightforward replacement model suggests.The broader interpretive framework the authors propose connects this particular mound to a wider phenomenon. Yamna and Corded Ware groups, both steppe-derived, seem to have operated with a shared symbolic toolkit — what Ivanova and colleagues describe as a kind of “Steppe-originated religion” spreading across vast territories. For mobile pastoralists covering enormous distances, religion and ritual landscape probably served practical functions: marking territory, cementing communal identity, claiming belonging in places you couldn’t physically occupy at all times. Reusing someone else’s sacred mound is not just an act of appropriation — it’s a statement of continuity, whether that continuity was remembered, invented, or simply felt.The kurgan at Revova 3 stands only 1.1 meters high. From it, a person could see 25 kilometers down the river valley. The Eneolithic people who built it chose that spot for reasons that were probably both practical and meaningful. The Yamna people who came after them chose the same spot. Whether they came because they knew something sacred had happened there, or because the landscape made it obvious, or because their own traditions pointed them toward mounds that already existed — the result was the same. A place that mattered to one group kept mattering, through cultures and centuries and significant genetic change, in ways the archaeology is only now making visible.Future work could extend this picture. Ground-penetrating radar surveys of other kurgan groups in the region might reveal buried stone structures similar to those at Revova 3, suggesting the pattern of reuse was even more widespread. For now, that work is largely suspended. Fieldwork in Ukraine is severely restricted by the ongoing war, and the research project that supported this study has concluded. Kiosak mentions the possibility of continuing related work in Moldova with local colleagues, but funding and access remain open questions.The mound is there. The layers are there. The questions are accumulating.Further Reading* Nikitin, A.G. et al. 2025. A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Nature639: 124–31. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08372-2* Lazaridis, I. et al. 2025. The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans. Nature 639: 132–42. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08531-5* Penske, S. et al. 2023. Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe. Nature 620: 358–65. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06334-8* Ahola, M. 2020. Creating a sense of belonging: religion and migration in the context of the 3rd millennium BC Corded Ware Complex in the eastern and northern Baltic Sea Region. Norwegian Archaeological Review 53: 114–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2020.1852305* Radchenko, S. & Tuboltsev, O. 2019. Causewayed enclosures in Ukraine? A new look at an Early Bronze Age site on the Ukrainian Steppe. Antiquity 93. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.53* Vierzig, A. 2020. Anthropomorphic stelae of the 4th and 3rd millennia between the Caucasus and the Atlantic Ocean. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 86: 111–37. https://doi.org/10.1017/ppr.2020.12* Rassamakin, Y.Y. 2012. Eneolithic burial mounds in the Black Sea Steppe: from the first burial symbols to monumental ritual architecture, in S. Muller-Celka (ed.) Ancestral Landscapes (Travaux de la Maison de l’Orient 58): 293–306. Lyon: Maison de l’Orient et la Méditerranée. * Ivanova, S. et al. 2005. Kurgany drevneishykh skotovodov mezhdurechia Iuzhnogo Buga i Dnestra [Kurgans of the ancient cattle breeders between the Southern Bug and Dniester rivers]. Odesa: Institute of Archaeology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

The oldest known piece of birch tar from Europe comes from the site of Königsaue, Germany, and dates to somewhere between 80,000 and 40,000 years ago. It bears finger impressions. Someone was working it, kneading it, pressing it warm against a stone tool to bind a handle. That same someone almost certainly had birch tar on their hands and skin for the duration of the process, and probably long after.That fact — the unavoidability of skin contact — is at the center of a new study by Tjaark Siemssen and colleagues published this month in PLOS One. The question they asked is one that seems obvious in retrospect: if birch tar is sticky enough to glue stone to wood, and if it coats the hands of anyone who produces it, what happens when it contacts bacteria in an open wound?The answer, it turns out, is that it kills some of them.Siemssen and colleagues produced birch tar experimentally using bark from Betula pendula and Betula pubescens, the two birch species most well-documented in the European Late Pleistocene record. They used three production methods reconstructed from Middle Palaeolithic archaeological evidence: a condensation method, in which bark burns beneath a fireproof surface like stone and the tar is scraped off; a raised clay structure method, which is closer to what the Königsaue piece likely required; and a modern tin can method drawn from Mi’kmaq oral tradition. The samples were then tested against two bacterial strains using a modified Kirby-Bauer disc diffusion assay — the standard method for measuring antibiotic activity in clinical microbiology.The results split cleanly. Against Staphylococcus aureus — a Gram-positive bacterium and the leading cause of skin and wound infections — birch tar produced measurable inhibition zones in five of six samples, ranging from 7.0 to 10.5mm. Against Escherichia coli, a Gram-negative bacterium, it did nothing at all. Zero inhibition across every sample. The tar is selective. It is not a broad-spectrum antibiotic. But S. aureus is exactly the bacterium you would want to suppress if you were applying something to a cut or abrasion, and birch tar suppresses it.The selectivity is not surprising if you know why most plant-derived antimicrobials work the way they do. Birch tar contains phenolic derivatives — catechols, guaiacols, and related compounds — that can disrupt bacterial cell walls. Gram-positive bacteria like S. aureus are more vulnerable because their outer structure is a thick peptidoglycan layer that phenolic compounds can penetrate. Gram-negative bacteria like E. coli have an additional outer membrane that acts as a barrier, blocking entry. The tar’s chemistry is not sophisticated enough to overcome that barrier, but it doesn’t need to be. Wound infections caused by S. aureus are the relevant threat.One of the study’s central findings is what did not matter: the production method. The team observed no clear relationship between how birch tar was made and how effective it was antibacterially. The condensation method, which yields the smallest amounts and has been theorized as the earliest technique Neanderthals might have used, produced tar with similar inhibitory activity to the more labor-intensive raised structure method. The most potent sample — inhibition zone of 10.5mm — came from the raised structure method using B. pendula bark. But other samples from the same method were less active, and a sample from the condensation method still suppressed S. aureus. Individual variation in bark chemistry and pyrolysis conditions matters more than the technique itself.This has a direct implication for when medicinal use could have started. If antiseptic benefit is essentially method-independent, it would have been available to Neanderthals from the earliest phase of birch tar production, at minimum during Marine Isotope Stage 7 — roughly 191,000 to 243,000 years ago — when the earliest tar-hafted tools appear in the European record.The Medicine You Couldn’t AvoidThere is something structurally different about this story compared to claims of deliberate Neanderthal medicine-making. Most of those arguments require inferring intent: a plant residue in dental calculus suggests it was consumed for its effects, but you cannot rule out incidental ingestion. The birch tar case is different. The team notes that during birch tar production, skin contamination is nearly inevitable regardless of technique, because the material is viscous and adhesive at working temperatures. You would have to make a deliberate effort to avoid contact. And the quantities needed for skin application are trivially small: approximately 0.2 grams is enough to cover 100 square centimeters of skin surface.In other words, the wound-dressing dose is essentially the handling residue.That does not mean Neanderthals understood what they were doing in any biochemical sense. But it does mean the beneficial effect was structurally available to anyone producing birch tar. If repeated contact with tar-coated skin consistently preceded faster healing of cuts and abrasions, that pattern could have been recognized and eventually formalized without requiring an explicit theory of infection. This is the kind of knowledge that ethnographic parallels suggest gets transmitted as practice, not explanation.The L’nu (Mi’kmaq) people of Eastern Canada have used birch bark oil — known in Mi’kmaq as maskwio’mi — as a wound dressing and skin ointment for generations. Production knowledge has been passed down through oral tradition from Elders, and the method using tins was recently reconstructed by Bierenstiel and colleagues. Previous laboratory work on maskwio’mi produced from Betula papyrifera has shown broad-spectrum antibacterial properties, with inhibition zones against S. aureus reaching up to 20mm — considerably higher than the experimental Palaeolithic samples in this study, possibly because industrially produced extracts concentrate the active compounds. The Saami of Lapland and the Yakut of Siberia have similarly documented uses of birch-derived materials as wound dressings and antiseptics. The convergence across independent traditions is not decisive evidence of prehistoric use, but it is consistent with it.Neanderthal Care, Materially GroundedThe broader context in which this study sits is a field that has been quietly reassembling the picture of Neanderthal life for the past decade. The case for Neanderthal healthcare is no longer speculative. At Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, the skeletal remains of a Neanderthal individual showed a completely healed injury to the lower leg — a severed tibia that had regenerated over years, implying sustained care from others. A different individual at the same site showed evidence of chronic disability alongside survival well into adulthood. At El Sidrón, Spain, chemical analysis of dental calculus detected signatures of chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla) and yarrow (Achillea millefolium), plants with known medicinal properties, in a Neanderthal individual — though interpretation of intent remains debated. Weyrich and colleagues’ 2017 analysis of ancient DNA from El Sidrón dental calculus documented the presence of Penicillium, a natural antibiotic mold, in one individual’s calculus. Care infrastructure — defined broadly as the social and material means by which injured or ill individuals survive — appears to have been a consistent feature of Neanderthal communities.What birch tar adds to this picture is a material substrate: something that leaves physical traces in the archaeological record and can be experimentally tested for the properties that would have made it useful. Ochre has attracted similar attention. Rifkin and colleagues have tested its UV-protective properties in vivo. Others have explored insect-repellent properties of various resinous materials. The argument in each case is the same as Siemssen et al.’s: a material that was definitely used in a technological context also had secondary properties that would have conferred biological benefit. The question is whether that benefit was incidental or recognized.The Siemssen et al. study cannot answer that. What it can do is close off one type of skepticism. The antibacterial properties of birch tar are not hypothetical or inferred from ethnographic analogy alone. They have now been demonstrated experimentally, using production methods reconstructed from Palaeolithic archaeology, and the effect is present across all three tested methods. You do not need underground pit distillation to get antiseptic birch tar. You can get it from the simplest production method anyone might have stumbled on, by burning bark beneath a flat stone.The authors frame this as a coevolutionary relationship between technological and medicinal use — the idea that the same production process, refined over generations for its hafting yield, simultaneously produced a material with wound-care utility. There is something important in that framing. It resists the temptation to sort Neanderthal activities into clean cognitive categories: here is tool production, here is medicine, here is art. The messier and more interesting possibility is that these were entangled, that a substance could be many things at once, and that the people using it may not have drawn the distinctions we keep trying to impose on them.Further Reading* Schmidt P, Koch TJ, Blessing MA, Karakostis FA, Harvati K, Dresely V, et al. Production method of the Königsaue birch tar documents cumulative culture in Neanderthals. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 15(6):84. 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-023-01789-2* Mazza PPA, Martini F, Sala B, et al. A new Palaeolithic discovery: tar-hafted stone tools in a European Mid-Pleistocene bone-bearing bed. Journal of Archaeological Science 33(9):1310–1318. 2006. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2006.01.006* Hardy K, Buckley S, Collins MJ, Estalrrich A, Brothwell D, Copeland L, et al. Neanderthal medics? Evidence for food, cooking, and medicinal plants entrapped in dental calculus. Naturwissenschaften 99(8):617–626. 2012. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-012-0942-0* Spikins P, Needham A, Wright B, Dytham C, Gatta M, Hitchens G. Living to fight another day: The ecological and evolutionary significance of Neanderthal healthcare. Quaternary Science Reviews 217:98–118. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.08.011* Weyrich LS, Duchene S, Soubrier J, et al. Neanderthal behaviour, diet, and disease inferred from ancient DNA in dental calculus. Nature 544(7650):357–361. 2017. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature21674* Bierenstiel M, Young T, Snow K. Maskwio’min: A birch bark antibiotic. Green Teacher 116:3–7. 2018. * Kaliaperumal R, Oludare A, Zuieva V, Young T, Bierenstiel M. Assessment of the antibacterial activity of Maskwio’mi, an L’nu (Mi’kmaq) skin medicine made from birch bark, against Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae. * Rifkin RF, Dayet L, Queffelec A, Summers B, Lategan M, d’Errico F. Evaluating the Photoprotective Effects of Ochre on Human Skin by In Vivo SPF Assessment. PLOS One 10(9):e0136090. 2015. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0136090* Conde-Valverde M, Quirós-Sánchez A, Diez-Valero J, et al. The child who lived: Down syndrome among Neanderthals? Science Advances 10(26):eadn9310. 2024. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adn9310 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

The fire that destroyed part of Cabezo Redondo around 1450 BC was, archaeologically speaking, a piece of luck. The settlement sits on a hill in the Alto Vinalopó region of southeastern Spain, a few kilometers west of present-day Villena. When flames swept through the circulation area — an outdoor platform and street connecting several houses — they sealed everything beneath carbonized debris. Wheat seeds on the floor. Esparto ropes. Charred timbers. Clay weights still clustered where they had fallen.Together, those remains constitute one of the best-preserved Bronze Age warp-weighted looms found anywhere in the western Mediterranean.A warp-weighted loom is a vertical frame. Threads hang freely from a horizontal beam at the top, held taut by weights tied to their lower ends. A weaver passes the weft thread — the horizontal one — back and forth across the hanging warp to build up the fabric. The design is simple and has proven extraordinarily durable as a concept: versions of it appear in Neolithic Europe, in Greek vase paintings, in ethnographic records from recent centuries. What rarely survives is the physical object. Wood rots. Organic fibers decay. Archaeologists working on prehistoric textile production have long been reduced to reading loom weights in isolation — the clay or stone anchors at the bottom of the threads — and inferring the rest.At Cabezo Redondo, that is no longer entirely the case.The team, led by Dr. Ricardo E. Basso Rial of the University of Granada, documented five charred timbers on a raised stone platform, all from locally sourced Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis). Wood anatomy analysis, conducted with scanning electron microscopy and optical microscopy, confirmed the species and suggested the builders selected mature wood from the outer trunks of large trees — the kind of grain structure that provides stability over time. Esparto grass (Macrochloa tenacissima) ropes, braided and knotted, lay in direct contact with the timbers, likely used to lash structural elements together. Small cords of the same material were found still threaded through the central perforations of several loom weights, the physical remnant of how warp threads were tied on.Two of the timbers, roughly a meter long with rectangular cross-sections, are most plausibly the upright posts of the loom. Three shorter, more slender pieces would have served as crossbeams. One upright preserves a branching fork at one end, possibly adapted to cradle the upper cloth beam. Estimating the loom’s full height is difficult — the timbers are incomplete — but enough survives to partially reconstruct its form.Forty-nine clay weights were found on the platform. Forty-six lay clustered directly beside the timbers. Three others were found nearby, in the same context, their esparto cords still attached.Reading the WeightsWhat makes those weights interesting is not their number but their size. Most Bronze Age loom weights from southeastern Iberia fall in the range of 400 to 900 grams. The main group at Cabezo Redondo averages around 200 grams — small, cylindrical, with a single central perforation. Their thinness is notable too. In a warp-weighted loom, the thickness of a weight determines how much space the attached threads occupy on the loom, and the sum of all weights’ thicknesses determines the total fabric width.Using methodology developed by the Centre for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen — an experimental approach grounded in the physical mechanics of weaving — the team modeled what this assemblage could produce.Two configurations emerge. In the first, 44 weights arranged in two rows of 22 would produce a tabby weave roughly a meter wide. Tabby is the simplest weave structure: each horizontal weft thread passes over and under each vertical warp thread in alternation. The resulting fabric would be open and lightweight, similar to gauze, with a thread count of around 5 to 10 threads per centimeter. Thread diameter was probably under half a millimeter. That kind of textile — thin, made from plant fibers like flax — dominates the preserved Bronze Age record across Iberia.The second configuration is where things get more interesting. The same 44 weights, rearranged into four rows of 11, would produce a twill weave. In a twill, the weft passes over and under pairs of warp threads rather than individual ones, creating a diagonal interlocking structure. The fabric that results is denser, more flexible, more durable — and thread density in this configuration would range from 10 to 19 threads per centimeter. Twill fabrics didn’t become widespread in Europe until the early first millennium BC. The earliest known examples from Central Europe date to roughly 1500 to 1200 BC: precisely when this loom was in use.Four larger, heavier weights were also recovered on the platform, stored nearby rather than mounted on the loom. Their presence suggests the weavers had access to multiple configurations. The platform also yielded spindle whorls — four clay examples including biconical and spherical forms not typical of earlier periods, when heavier discoid whorls associated with flax spinning dominated the record.A Craft in the OpenThe platform itself is worth pausing on. It is not a workshop. It is a raised stone surface, roughly 4.2 by 1.8 meters, partially covered by a roof supported on two timber posts, situated in the street-like space connecting several houses. Ceramic vessels, stone tools, sickle blades, and metal objects were scattered through the surrounding area. The loom sat in shared domestic space, in the middle of ordinary activity.Weaving at Cabezo Redondo was not a specialized or segregated craft the way metalworking was — the evidence for metalworking comes from non-residential contexts. Textile production appears distributed across households, embedded in the rhythms of home and neighborhood. Concentrations of loom weights appear in at least 16 different spaces across the site. House XVIII alone contained 70. Multiple households were weaving, and the variety of weight types implies multiple loom configurations and multiple fabric types in parallel use.Flax, almost certainly, remained the primary fiber. Preserved textile fragments from the region in this period are mostly plant-fiber tabbies. But the lighter weights, the new spindle whorl forms, and the possibility of twill production all suggest something was changing.That shift is what researchers call the “textile revolution”: the gradual adoption of wool as a weaving fiber, and with it a new technical vocabulary. Wool accepts dye more readily than flax. It produces denser, warmer, more patterned fabrics. Twill weaves, which emerged in parallel with wool’s adoption, enable designs using threads of different colors. The trajectory can be traced across Bronze Age Europe — from the Terramare settlements of northern Italy to the funerary textiles of Scandinavia — though it unfolds at different times in different regions. In Iberia, direct evidence for wool is still sparse. The only confirmed find so far is from Tomb 121 at the Argaric site of Castellón Alto in Granada, dated to 1800–1700 BC, and the full analysis of those textile fragments has not yet been published.Cabezo Redondo doesn’t confirm that these particular weavers were making twill fabrics from wool. No textile fragments survived the fire. What it shows is that the equipment for twill production was present, that someone at this settlement understood what four rows of weights could do that two rows could not. In the words of Dr. Basso Rial, the discovery allows us to see the loom itself — frozen at the moment of use — rather than just the partial tools that typically survive.The same fire that ended the weaving preserved the evidence of it. A meter of cloth, or the ghost of one, can still be reconstructed from the distribution of weights on a stone platform, 3,500 years after the last thread was passed.Further Reading* Mårtensson, L., Nosch, M.-L., & Andersson Strand, E. (2009). Shape of things: understanding a loom weight. Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 28, 373–398. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0092.2009.00334.x* Molina González, F. et al. (2003). La sepultura 121 del yacimiento argárico de El Castellón Alto (Galera, Granada). Trabajos de Prehistoria, 60(1), 153–158. https://doi.org/10.3989/tp.2003.v60.i1.127* Gleba, M. (2008). Textile production in pre-Roman Italy (Ancient Textiles Series 4). Oxford: Oxbow.* Grömer, K. (2016). The art of prehistoric textile making: the development of craft traditions and clothing in Central Europe. Vienna: Natural History Museum Vienna. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

There is a gap in the fossil record just before the point where we’d expect to find our earliest ancestors, a window between roughly 10 and 6 million years ago when the lineage leading to humans was presumably doing something interesting locomotively. What we find in that window is mostly silence, punctuated by fragmentary teeth and jaw pieces from Africa and, increasingly, from unexpected places in Europe and western Asia.The Azmaka site in southern Bulgaria, near the town of Chirpan, sits in the Upper Thracian Plain. It has been producing fossils for decades, mostly from the Late Miocene, an extinct world of three-toed horses, early mastodons, and an extraordinarily rich savannah fauna. In 2016, excavators working the AZM-6 sediment horizon pulled out a nearly complete right femur. A thighbone. They didn’t know what it was at first, in the sense that its taxonomic identity required careful argument. But its anatomy was remarkable from the start.That femur, catalogued as FM3549AZM6, is now the subject of a detailed new analysis published in Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments by a team led by Nikolai Spassov of Bulgaria’s National Museum of Natural History, along with Dionisios Youlatos, Madelaine Böhme, and David Begun. Their argument, stated plainly: this bone belongs to a hominine that was walking bipedally, at least part of the time, 7.2 million years ago, in what is now the Balkans.The date alone should give you pause. Orrorin tugenensis, found in Kenya, has long been considered the oldest convincing biped, at about 6 million years. Sahelanthropus tchadensis, from Chad, is older at around 7 million years, but its status as a biped has recently come under serious scrutiny. A 2025 analysis by Cazenave and colleagues argued there are no definitive indicators of bipedalism in the Sahelanthropus femur. If they are right, and if the Azmaka team is right about their Bulgarian bone, then the oldest known biped walked not in Africa but in southeastern Europe.What the bone actually looks likeThe femur is mostly complete. The distal epiphysis is missing, and there’s some diagenetic damage, but enough survives to take reliable measurements across fifteen variables of the proximal end, and enough shaft to characterize its overall shape. The bone was scanned at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. The team ran principal component analyses, canonical variates analyses, discriminant function analyses, and compared the fossil against an extensive reference collection spanning gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, cercopithecoid monkeys, and a range of fossil hominoids from the Miocene.Body mass, estimated from femoral head dimensions using regressions calibrated on chimpanzees, comes in around 23 to 24 kilograms. That’s small. It’s consistent with a female individual. For comparison, the holotype mandible of Graecopithecus freybergi from Pyrgos Vasilissis in Greece is estimated to belong to a male closer to 40 kilograms. The team attributes the Azmaka femur tentatively to cf. Graecopithecus, partly on the basis of its age: the three specimens (the Greek mandible, a premolar from an earlier Azmaka horizon, and this femur) are all confined to roughly the first 70,000 years of the Messinian stage. They’re essentially contemporaries.What actually makes this femur unusual is a cluster of features that, when you look at them individually, each tell a partial story, but together tell a stranger and more compelling one.The femoral shaft is nearly straight. In African great apes the shaft curves anteroposteriorly, an adaptation that the team interprets as related to arboreal locomotion rather than terrestrial quadrupedalism. No actively moving terrestrial quadruped primate has a strongly curved femoral shaft. The Azmaka bone looks more like an australopith’s femur in this respect than like a chimpanzee’s. The greater trochanter sits slightly below the level of the femoral head, a configuration associated with increased hip mobility, also seen in some chimpanzees but more pronounced here in a direction consistent with early hominins.The femoral neck is deep superoinferiorly, unusually so. Neck depth is associated with ground reaction forces at the hip, which is why human necks are deep too: walking upright loads the hip joint in a way that requires a structurally robust neck. The cortical bone distribution within the neck is asymmetrical, thick inferiorly and thin superiorly. This is the pattern you’d expect in an animal subject to consistent unidirectional loads on the hip, as in walking quadrupedally or bipedally. In suspensory apes like chimpanzees and orangutans, the cortical bone is distributed more evenly around the neck because forces come from multiple directions during climbing. The Azmaka specimen looks nothing like a suspensory ape in this respect. It looks like a biped, or at minimum like something doing a lot of stereotypical weight-bearing on its hind limbs.Then there’s the feature the team calls FNOL: the femoral neck oblique length, which measures the ascending, superomedially oriented medial portion of the proximal neck margin. This is a geometric detail that sounds arcane until you understand what it represents. In hominins, the proximal margin of the femoral neck is divided into a short, nearly horizontal lateral part and a long, steeply ascending medial part. This elongated medial portion is what separates the femoral head from the greater trochanter and reflects the elongation of the neck itself, which biomechanically increases the moment arm of the hip abductor muscles. That’s important for stabilizing the pelvis when you’re standing on one leg, which is exactly what you do during every stride of bipedal walking. In non-hominin hominoids, this medial portion is shorter and usually slightly concave. In the Azmaka femur, it is long and straight, grouping statistically with Orrorin, Australopithecus afarensis, Paranthropus, and Homo sapiens, and not with any of the European Miocene apes.Applying a discriminant function developed by Lovejoy and colleagues to distinguish bipedal hominids from knuckle-walking great apes, the Azmaka femur scores on the biped side of the boundary. Just barely, but clearly.A gluteal tuberosity is present on the posterior shaft surface, vertical and posterolaterally placed. In African great apes, the gluteal tuberosity is effectively replaced by a lateral spiral pilaster, a different structure associated with a different configuration of the gluteus maximus, positioned more for hip extension and climbing rather than hip stabilization during upright posture. The Azmaka femur has no lateral spiral pilaster. Its gluteal configuration most closely resembles early hominins like Orrorin and Australopithecus afarensis. A faint intertrochanteric line is also present, associated with a well-developed iliofemoral ligament, which limits hip hyperextension and is characteristic of creatures that habitually extend their hips toward or past neutral.None of these features, alone, is conclusive. Some appear in unexpected places. Gluteal tuberosities of varying development occur across many primates. A straight shaft is not unique to hominins. But the combination is coherent. The pattern points consistently in the same direction.Not a modern walker, but something newThe team is explicit that this is not obligate bipedalism. A number of features associated with fully committed bipedalism in modern humans are absent or underdeveloped: there’s no hypotrochanteric fossa, no clear obturator externus groove, and the shaft is not platymeric (flattened front-to-back) in the way typical of later bipeds. The neck-shaft angle is about 122 degrees, which is in the range of australopiths and modern humans but lower than in the African great apes, lower than in Danuvius guggenmosi (a proposed Miocene biped from Germany with a 134-degree angle), and notably lower than the estimated values for Sahelanthropus, which apparently had an angle somewhere between 138 and 148 degrees, more consistent with orangutans and the suspensory European ape Hispanopithecus than with hominins.The most accurate characterization the team offers is facultative bipedalism alongside terrestrial quadrupedalism, without the specialized arboreal features of extant great apes. This creature could walk upright. It probably also moved quadrupedally on the ground. It was not a habitual tree-swinger. The locomotor repertoire was complex, transitional, and unlike anything living today.That transitional quality is important. The pattern of bipedal features in the Azmaka femur resembles early hominins more than it resembles later ones, a relationship the authors note recalls the distinction between australopiths and Homo. Bipedalism, in other words, appears to have been a multi-phase process. The Azmaka hominine may represent phase one.Professor Spassov has described the bone’s suite of features as combining the characteristics of terrestrial quadrupeds and bipeds, clustering mostly with early bipeds but partially with African apes. Begun characterizes the specimen as a stage between arboreal ancestors like Danuvius and the later East African bipeds.The comparison with Sahelanthropus is worth dwelling on. Sahelanthropus is currently the oldest proposed hominin at about 7 million years, slightly younger than the Azmaka specimen, from Chad. Daver and colleagues argued in 2022 that several features of the Sahelanthropus femur support habitual bipedalism. Cazenave and colleagues argued the opposite in 2025. The Azmaka team has looked carefully at the Sahelanthropus femur and reached a pointed conclusion: the high neck-shaft angle, the strongly curved shaft, the highly sigmoid shape of the lateral linea aspera lip, and extensive rodent gnawing that has obscured potentially diagnostic posterior surface features, all make the bipedal argument for Sahelanthropus substantially weaker than for the Azmaka specimen. The Azmaka hominine, the authors conclude, was probably more committed to bipedal behavior than Sahelanthropus, despite being slightly older.Whether Sahelanthropus was bipedal remains actively contested and will not be settled here.The question of whereAssuming the Azmaka femur is what the team says it is, an early biped older than Orrorinand contemporaneous with or older than Sahelanthropus, the next question is almost unsettling: what does it mean for a potential human ancestor to be in Bulgaria at 7.2 million years ago?The Balkans and Anatolia were busy with hominines in the Late Miocene. Ouranopithecus macedoniensis from Greece, dated to around 9 to 9.6 million years ago. Anadoluvius turkaefrom central Turkey at about 8.7 million years. And now Graecopithecus from Greece and Bulgaria at 7.2 million years. This is not a random scattering. The Balkan-Iranian palaeozoogeographic province sits along the dispersal corridor between Eurasia and Africa, and during the Messinian it was experiencing dramatic environmental upheaval as the Mediterranean periodically restricted and hyperarid conditions developed across western Asia between roughly 7 and 6 million years ago.Böhme and colleagues published an analysis in 2021 showing that mammalian dispersal between Eurasia and Africa in the Messinian moved almost exclusively from Eurasia to Africa, primarily via the Arabian Peninsula. The mammal faunas of Azmaka include a high diversity of savannah-adapted taxa consistent with open and bush savannah environments. The fauna at Pyrgos Vasilissis, the Greek locality for Graecopithecus, tells a similar ecological story. These were not forest apes. They were living in and adapted to open wooded landscapes.The hypothesis the team advances is straightforward, if radical in its implications: the ancestors of Graecopithecus were Balkan-Anatolian hominines already adapted to semi-terrestrial life in open habitats. As those habitats became increasingly arid and patchy, some lineages dispersed southward into Africa, where they encountered and eventually occupied more forested settings as the ancestors of African apes and hominins. What we identify later as the earliest African hominins, including Orrorin and eventually Australopithecus, may represent descendants of this Eurasian population arriving in Africa rather than a purely African radiation.This is a hypothesis, not a settled conclusion. The sample from Azmaka is small. Attribution to cf. Graecopithecus is parsimonious but not proven. One premolar, one mandible, one femur. The team cannot exclude the possibility that multiple hominine taxa coexisted in the earliest Messinian Balkans. A recently published molar from Veles in North Macedonia, dated to approximately the same interval, suggests at minimum that hominine presence in the Balkans during this period was more widespread than a single site would indicate.The savannah environment, the open landscape, the terrestrial locomotion: these are consistent with the scenario in which open country conditions selected for a more diverse positional repertoire that included regular bipedalism, perhaps for foraging on the ground as arboreal resources became scarce, perhaps for carrying offspring or resources across gaps between tree patches, perhaps for the elevated vantage that upright posture provides in open terrain.We do not know exactly what this animal looked like moving through a Late Miocene Bulgarian savannah. We have one femur, dated with good palaeomagnetic and biochronological constraints, from a female who weighed about as much as a large dog. The bone is dark, stained with manganese, encrusted with carbonate, cracked in places. In cross-section through the neck it looks startlingly like a small human femur, not like a chimpanzee’s.That resemblance is what the argument turns on. And it is, in the judgment of a team that has looked at this specimen and the comparative anatomy carefully over several years, not coincidental.Further Reading* Cazenave, M., Pina, M., Hammond, A. S., Böhme, M., Begun, D. R., Spassov, N., et al. (2025). Postcranial evidence does not support habitual bipedalism in Sahelanthropus tchadensis: A reply to Daver et al. (2022). Journal of Human Evolution, 198, 103557. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2024.103557* Daver, G., Guy, F., Mackaye, H. T., Likius, A., Boisserie, J. R., Moussa, A., et al. (2022). Postcranial evidence of late Miocene hominin bipedalism in Chad. Nature, 609, 94–100. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04901-z* Fuss, J., Spassov, N., Begun, D., & Böhme, M. (2017). Potential hominin affinities of Graecopithecus from the Late Miocene of Europe. PLOS ONE, 12, e0177127.* Böhme, M., Spassov, N., Fuss, J., Tröscher, A., Deane, A. S., Prieto, J., et al. (2019). A new Miocene ape and locomotion in the ancestor of great apes and humans. Nature, 575, 489–493. [This is the Danuvius paper]* Böhme, M., Spassov, N., Majidifard, M. R., et al. (2021). Neogene hyperaridity in Arabia drove the directions of mammalian dispersal between Africa and Eurasia. Communications Earth & Environment, 2, 85. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-021-00158-y* Böhme, M., Spassov, N., Ebner, M., Geraads, D., Hristova, L., et al. (2017). Messinian Age and savanna environment of the possible hominin Graecopithecus from SE Europe. PLOS ONE, 12, e0177347.* Richmond, B., & Jungers, W. (2008). Orrorin tugenensis femoral morphology and the evolution of hominin bipedalism. Science, 319, 1662. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1154197* Lovejoy, C. O., Meindl, R., Ohman, J., Heiple, K. D., & White, T. (2002). The Maka Femur and Its Bearing on the Antiquity of Human Walking: Applying Contemporary Concepts of Morphogenesis to the Human Fossil Record. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 119, 97–133.* Macchiarelli, R., Bergeret-Medina, A., Marchi, D., & Wood, B. (2020). Nature and relationships of Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Journal of Human Evolution, 149, 102898. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2020* Sevim-Erol, A., Begun, D. R., Yavuz, A., et al. (2023). A new ape from Türkiye and the radiation of late Miocene hominines. Communications Biology, 6, 842. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-05210-5* Stamos, P., & Alemseged, Z. (2023). Hominin locomotion and evolution in the Late Miocene to Late Pliocene. Journal of Human Evolution, 178, 103332.* Almécija, S., Tallman, M., Alba, D. M., Pina, M., Moyà-Solà, S., & Jungers, W. L. (2013). The femur of Orrorin tugenensis exhibits morphometric affinities with both Miocene apes and later hominins. Nature Communications, 4, 2888. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms3888* Pina, M., Alba, D. M., Moyà-Solà, S., & Almécija, S. (2019). Femoral neck cortical bone distribution of dryopithecin apes and the evolution of hominid locomotion. Journal of Human Evolution, 136, 102651. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

The burnt crust at the bottom of a cooking pot is not glamorous evidence. It is easy to overlook, difficult to analyze, and has spent most of archaeology’s history being scraped off and discarded. But a new study published in PLOS One by Lara González Carretero and colleagues at the University of York and the British Museum has spent considerable effort looking very closely at exactly these crusts, and what they found is harder to explain away than anyone expected.The short version: prehistoric hunter-gatherer-fishers living across Northern and Eastern Europe between roughly 5900 and 3000 BC were not just boiling fish. They were combining specific plants with specific animals into preparations that varied predictably by region. Guelder rose berries with freshwater fish at sites along the Upper Volga and Baltic coasts. Wild grasses and legumes with cyprinids in the Don River basin. Amaranthaceae leaves, stems, and inflorescences alongside fish at Serteya II and Zamostje 2. The patterning is too consistent to be coincidence. These were recipes, or at least something close to them.That claim needs unpacking, because the way we usually study prehistoric diet makes plants almost invisible.The fat problemLipid residue analysis has been the workhorse of pottery-based dietary reconstruction for decades. The technique works by extracting fatty acids absorbed into ceramic walls and identifying them chemically. It is effective, but it has a strong bias: animal fats absorb readily into pottery and persist well. Plant lipids, by contrast, either don’t survive, don’t absorb in the first place, or produce signals so diffuse they’re hard to attribute to anything specific. The result is that the standard chemical toolkit for studying what prehistoric people cooked has been generating a picture of their diet that is almost entirely made up of fish, mammals, and dairy.This is not wrong, exactly. It just isn’t complete. And the new study makes that incompleteness very concrete.González Carretero and colleagues took 85 pottery sherds with substantial preserved food crusts from 13 sites across a broad swath of Northern and Eastern Europe, from the circum-Baltic coast east through Lithuania and Poland into the Upper Volga and down through the Don basin into what is now southern Russia. They ran standard lipid residue analysis. They also looked at the crusts directly, under digital microscopes and scanning electron microscopes, hunting for plant tissue that had been carbonized but not destroyed: cell walls, seed coats, pericarp layers, the waxy epidermis of a berry, the distinctive vascular bundles of a root. In 58 of the 85 vessels, they found something identifiable.The lipids told one story. The microscopy told a different, richer one. Fatty acid isotope values clustered heavily around aquatic sources, as expected. But sitting in the same blackened crust, visible under the electron microscope, were Viburnum opulus berries, seeds from the Amaranthaceae family, fragments of wild grass husks, what appears to be sea beet root tissue, and what may be tubers from sea club-rush (Bolboschoenus maritimus). The two lines of evidence are not contradictory. They’re complementary. Animal fats dominated the lipid signal. But plants were there too, woven into the matrix, preserved as structure rather than chemistry.The team points out that this has methodological implications beyond this particular study. If plant use is this consistent and this widespread, and yet lipid analysis alone misses most of it, then decades of dietary reconstruction based on pottery residues have been systematically underestimating how much plants mattered to these communities.What was actually in the potThe site-by-site results are worth slowing down to examine.At the Lithuanian lake sites of Daktariškė 5 and Kretuonas 1B, as well as the Pomeranian coastal site of Dąbki in Poland, the pattern is consistent: freshwater fish dominate the lipid signal, and microscopy reveals fragments of Poaceae seeds alongside. At Dąbki specifically, Viburnum berries appear frequently in the crusts, co-occurring with high concentrations of freshwater fish biomarkers. What makes this interesting is that Viburnum berries are essentially absent from the broader archaeobotanical record at Dąbki. The site’s flotation samples show starch-rich roots and rhizomes, not berries. The team’s interpretation is that the berries weren’t just being eaten casually; they were being brought specifically to the pot, deliberately combined with fish, for a culinary purpose that required a vessel to accomplish.Viburnum opulus, known as kalyna in Ukraine and Russia, is mildly toxic when raw. The berries taste bitter, smell strongly when heated, and need processing to become palatable. Cooking them with fish would have both reduced the bitterness and, presumably, created a flavor combination that people in this region had decided they wanted. The plant persists in Eastern European food traditions to this day. There’s a dish called Mos’, recorded among the Nivkh people of the Russian Far East, made from pulverized dried fish mixed with fish skin, various berries, and occasionally tubers. The parallel isn’t evidence of continuity across that geographic distance, but it suggests that the general idea of combining fatty fish with acidic, astringent fruit has deep roots in foraging cuisines that developed around cold northern rivers.At Zamostje 2 and Serteya II in the Upper Volga and Dnieper-Dvina regions, a different pattern emerges. Here the crusts are full of Amaranthaceae: seeds, stems, calyces, leaf tissue. The team identified the likely species as small-seeded varieties such as Chenopodium glaucum/rubrum and Atriplex prostrata, not the larger-seeded fat hen (Chenopodium album) that typically dominates macrobotanical assemblages at these sites. The macrobotany and the pottery residues are again telling different stories, but in this case it’s not that plants were absent from the diet. It’s that the plants in the pot were different from the plants being processed or discarded elsewhere at the same site.One detail from this region is particularly striking. The Amaranthaceae remains in the crusts included both green, underdeveloped calyces, which appear in May and June, and ripe calyces with embedded seeds, which ripen from July through August. That range of developmental stages in a single residue type implies that people at these sites were gathering and cooking these plants across several months of the spring and summer growing season, not just harvesting them at peak ripeness. That’s a level of sustained, intentional plant engagement that goes well beyond opportunistic foraging.At Syltholm II in southern Denmark, the analysis produces the most complex picture. Pottery here contained root and rhizome tissue consistent with Amaranthaceae family plants, possibly sea beet (Beta vulgaris ssp. maritima), alongside what appear to be sea club-rush tubers identified by their distinctive solid parenchyma with randomly distributed vascular bundles. There were also Amaranthaceae inflorescences and seeds, freshwater fish, and traces of dairy products that lipid analysis suggests were obtained from neighboring farming communities. A pot that contained fish, foraged tubers, greens from a saltmarsh plant, and perhaps some milk or butter from a nearby Neolithic group is a lot more than forager subsistence. It’s a cuisine that drew on multiple food worlds.The pottery and the practiceThere’s a statistical dimension to this study that goes beyond identifying what was in any given pot. The team ran a Mantel test comparing the similarity of food remains across vessels against the geographic distance between sites and the technological similarity of the pottery itself. Geographic distance produced a weak but real correlation (r = 0.25). More interestingly, pottery technology produced a stronger one (r = 0.48), and that correlation remained significant even after controlling for location. Vessels that were made similarly tended to be used similarly. Vessels that were technically distinct tended to contain distinct food combinations.That finding is cautious, and the team is careful about overinterpreting it. But it points toward something genuinely hard to explain as pure ecology. If culinary practice were solely a function of what happened to grow nearby, you’d expect geography to dominate the signal. The fact that pottery technology tracks food use as well or better than geography suggests that how pots were made and what they were used for were linked by something cultural, not just environmental. Knowledge about pot-making and knowledge about cooking may have traveled together, been taught together, been part of the same set of practices people transmitted across generations and, presumably, across communities.This is not a claim that Mesolithic or Early Neolithic foragers in Eastern Europe had cuisine in any high-culture sense. But it does mean they had something more structured than opportunistic eating. They selected specific plants, ignored others that were equally available. They combined ingredients in ways that were consistent across time and across some geographic areas. They used pottery not merely to extract oil from fish for use as fuel or lubricant, a hypothesis the team is now comfortable rejecting for this assemblage, but to create food preparations that required a vessel: things that needed to be boiled, blended, softened, made edible through heat and mixing.Whether the Viburnum and fish combination tasted good to anyone outside the communities that made it is unknowable. But that someone was making it consistently, across multiple sites, over what appears to be a considerable span of time, suggests that it tasted good enough to them to keep making it. That’s a kind of cultural continuity that archaeology usually can’t access. Here, frozen in burnt crust at the bottom of a Neolithic pot, it almost can.Further Reading* Bondetti, M., Scott, S., Lucquin, A., Meadows, J., Lozovskaya, O., Dolbunova, E., et al. (2020). Fruits, fish and the introduction of pottery in the Eastern European plain: Lipid residue analysis of ceramic vessels from Zamostje 2. Quaternary International, 541, 104–114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2019.05.008* Courel, B., Robson, H.K., Lucquin, A., Dolbunova, E., Oras, E., Adamczak, K., et al. (2020). Organic residue analysis shows sub-regional patterns in the use of pottery by Northern European hunter-gatherers. Royal Society Open Science, 7(4): 192016. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.192016* Dolbunova, E., Lucquin, A., McLaughlin, T.R., Bondetti, M., Courel, B., Oras, E., et al. (2023). The transmission of pottery technology among prehistoric European hunter-gatherers. Nature Human Behaviour, 7(2), 171–183. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01491-8* Lucquin, A., Robson, H.K., Oras, E., Lundy, J., Moretti, G., González Carretero, L., et al. (2023). The impact of farming on prehistoric culinary practices throughout Northern Europe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(43): e2310138120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2310138120* Kubiak-Martens, L. (1999). The plant food component of the diet at the late Mesolithic (Ertebølle) settlement at Tybrind Vig, Denmark. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 8(1–2), 117–127. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02042850 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

There’s a stretch of your genome that’s almost entirely free of Neanderthal DNA. Not just sparse — nearly empty. The X chromosome, in person after person, population after population, looks like something scrubbed it clean of whatever contributions our Neanderthal relatives might have made. Geneticists have known about this for years. They called the gaps “Neanderthal deserts,” and most assumed the explanation was straightforward: natural selection. The Neanderthal variants that ended up on the X chromosome were probably harmful, so they got weeded out over generations. Case closed.It wasn’t closed.A paper published in Science on February 26, 2026, by Alexander Platt, Daniel Harris, and Sarah Tishkoff at the University of Pennsylvania has reopened the question — and the answer they’ve arrived at is stranger and more interesting than genetic incompatibility. The Neanderthal desert on our X chromosome, they argue, wasn’t created by bad genes. It was created by who was sleeping with whom.To understand why this matters, you need to know one thing about sex chromosomes and inheritance. Females carry two X chromosomes; males carry one X and one Y. A father can pass his X chromosome to daughters only — never to sons. A mother always passes an X chromosome, to daughters and sons alike. This asymmetry means that when two populations interbreed, the direction of the mating matters enormously for what ends up in the X chromosome pool. If the males doing the reproducing across groups come from one population and the females from another, the X chromosomes of each group will reflect that imbalance in a predictable, traceable way.The team’s insight was to look at the problem from both ends. The Neanderthal DNA present in modern human genomes had been studied extensively. But Platt and his colleagues realized this was only half the picture. The other half — the modern human DNA that made its way into Neanderthal genomes — had received much less attention. If you could look at both sides of the exchange, you might be able to determine which direction it mostly flowed.What the Neanderthal Chromosomes Actually ShowThree high-quality Neanderthal genomes exist: specimens from the Altai Mountains in Siberia, from Chagyrskaya Cave, and from Vindija Cave in Croatia. These individuals lived at different times, ranging from roughly 122,000 to 52,000 years ago. All of them contain traces of earlier contact with Homo sapiens, the result of an interbreeding event that the researchers estimate occurred around 250,000 years ago — well before the better-known episode roughly 46,000 to 50,000 years ago that left Neanderthal DNA in the genomes of people alive today.When the team examined the autosomes — the 22 pairs of non-sex chromosomes — of these three Neanderthals, they found modern human DNA scattered across them, as expected. Then they looked at the X chromosomes. And what they found inverted every assumption.The Neanderthal X chromosomes didn’t have less modern human DNA. They had significantly more. About 62% more, relative to the autosomes. Where modern humans had a Neanderthal desert on their X chromosomes, Neanderthals had the opposite: a modern human surplus.This is the kind of mirror-image pattern that makes a hypothesis snap into focus. If the explanation for the depletion in modern humans were purely genetic toxicity — Neanderthal variants causing harm and getting selected against — then the same logic should apply in reverse. Harmful modern human variants on the Neanderthal X should also have been purged. But they weren’t. They were overrepresented. Whatever drove the pattern, it wasn’t simply bad genes on the X chromosome making hybrid offspring less fit.The team then ran simulations to test alternative explanations. Could the surplus have resulted from biased migration — say, if the Homo sapiens groups that moved into Neanderthal territory were mostly female? Even in the most extreme version of that scenario, with an entirely female migrant group, the math only produced a 1.3-fold excess of modern human DNA on the Neanderthal X. The observed excess was 1.6-fold. Something more was needed.What fit best was a mating preference. Specifically: Neanderthal males disproportionately mating with modern human females, and their offspring being preferred as partners in subsequent generations as well. The bias wasn’t a one-time event. It appears to have been persistent, operating across multiple generations, possibly across both of the major interbreeding episodes separated by roughly 200,000 years.“You need a strikingly strong phenomenon to get us there,” Platt told the New York Times.The team also checked whether the modern human DNA enriched on Neanderthal X chromosomes might be there because it conferred some advantage — i.e., whether this was positive selection for good modern human variants rather than a signature of mating patterns. The sequences in question turned out to have lower-than-average concentrations of functional elements: protein-coding regions, regulatory sequences, that sort of thing. That doesn’t rule out selection as a partial factor, but it does make a purely adaptive story less convincing.Mate preference, the team concluded, was the most parsimonious explanation.What We Can’t Know From HereThe finding raises a question that the genetics cannot answer: why?The study doesn’t resolve whether the preference was mutual, one-sided, or coerced. Sarah Tishkoff has said the team deliberately didn’t speculate about consent. Steven Churchill, a paleoanthropologist at Duke University who wasn’t involved in the research, was less restrained. If males from one species systematically paired with females from another to this degree, he told Science, it’s hard to square that with anything other than competitive, unfriendly interaction between the groups.April Nowell, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Victoria, pushed back on that framing. There’s no archaeological evidence of violence between human groups at the relevant time periods, she noted. And from the perspective of evolutionary biology, females are typically the more selective sex in mate choice. It’s at least as plausible that Homo sapiens women were choosing Neanderthal partners as that they were being taken by force.Benjamin Peter at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology praised the analysis while flagging a technical concern: the observed pattern on the X chromosome might, in principle, be an artifact of the statistical methods used. He’s also pointed out that the interbreeding event the study modeled directly — 250,000 years ago — predates the episode that actually left Neanderthal DNA in people living today. Whether the same mating bias held during both episodes is an inference, not a direct observation.Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, noted that the fossil and archaeological record from 250,000 years ago is too sparse to offer independent corroboration. “We still do not have a cultural signature for a hybrid social population,” she said. A skeleton in the right place, or ancient DNA from a previously unstudied site, could change the picture significantly.What we’re left with is a pattern in the genome that points clearly toward sex-biased interbreeding and toward mate preference as the likeliest cause. It’s an answer that’s also a door. It opens onto questions about Neanderthal social structure — who stayed, who moved, who chose whom — that the researchers are already beginning to investigate by looking at the ratio of X chromosome diversity to autosomal diversity in Neanderthal populations. That ratio can hint at whether females or males were the ones dispersing between groups, which has its own implications for how Neanderthal societies were organized.The genome, read carefully enough, turns out to hold not just a record of biology but something closer to a social history. What Homo sapiens and Neanderthals did when they met — who approached whom, whose children stayed, whose left — left traces that are still legible today, embedded in the DNA of everyone reading this. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

Three skulls found in the clay banks of the Han River in central China have just gotten a lot older.The fossils come from Yunxian, a site in Hubei Province that has been known since 1989, when local archaeologists turned up the first of two nearly complete Homo erectus crania during a survey. A third was found in 2021. Together they represent some of the most intact early hominin remains ever recovered in eastern Asia. The problem, for decades, was that nobody could agree on when these individuals actually lived. Early paleomagnetic work suggested the fossils predated the Brunhes-Matuyama geomagnetic reversal, implying an age somewhere around 870,000 to 830,000 years ago. Electron spin resonance dating of associated animal teeth gave a mean of around 600,000 years. Later work triangulated a range of roughly 800,000 to 1.1 million years.None of that held up.A team led by Hua Tu of Shantou University and Nanjing Normal University has now applied isochron ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be burial dating to quartz gravels pulled directly from the fossil-bearing sediment layer. Their result: 1.77 ± 0.08 million years ago. With total uncertainty incorporated, the error extends to ±0.11 Ma. A second, deeper sediment layer dated independently to 1.76 ± 0.22 Ma, which is consistent within the error ranges. Two independent measurements from the same site, pointing at the same moment in the Early Pleistocene.That is not a minor revision. It pushes the Yunxian Homo erectus back by at least 670,000 years from previous estimates. It makes these skulls the oldest securely dated H. erectus fossils found in their original context anywhere in eastern Asia.How You Date Sediments That OldThe method behind this result is worth understanding, because it’s what separates this finding from the long line of contested Yunxian ages that came before.Cosmogenic burial dating works because the same cosmic rays that constantly bombard Earth’s surface produce specific radioactive isotopes inside quartz minerals. Two in particular, aluminum-26 and beryllium-10, accumulate in quartz at known rates while rock and sediment sit near the surface. When that material gets buried deeply underground, the cosmic ray flux drops dramatically. Production stops. Radioactive decay continues. And because ²⁶Al and ¹⁰Be decay at different rates, their ratio shifts in a predictable way over time. Measure the ratio, compare it to known production and decay constants, and you can calculate how long the quartz has been underground.The standard “simple burial” version of this technique has existed for decades, but it carries a significant limitation: it assumes the sediment was buried quickly and deeply enough to stop all postburial isotope production, and that the burial event happened only once. Those assumptions fail fairly often. The isochron approach, which the Yunxian team used, is more sophisticated. Instead of relying on a single sample, it uses multiple clasts from the same depth and plots their ²⁶Al and ¹⁰Be concentrations together. Samples with different pre-burial exposure histories will lie along a consistent line if they share the same burial age. Outliers, sediments reworked from older deposits or samples with complicated burial histories, fall off that line and can be identified and excluded. One sample from the fossil-bearing layer did exactly that and was removed from the calculation.The team collected ten quartzose clasts from the same horizon where the crania were found, and another ten from a deeper gravel layer. Nine of the ten from the fossil layer yielded a clean isochron. The fact that some of the dated samples bore traces of hominin modification, knapping marks and possible manuport transport, ties the dating directly to a period of human occupation, not just sediment deposition.There is also an independent geomorphological check. Previous studies had assigned a normal polarity zone in the lower sediments to the Jaramillo subchron (roughly 990,000 to 1,070,000 years ago). The new dates imply that zone actually corresponds to the Olduvai subchron, which ran from about 1.78 to 1.95 million years ago. That’s not a small reassignment, and it requires recalibrating the entire paleomagnetic interpretation of the site. The team argues this is actually the more parsimonious reading, consistent with the burial ages and with the broader geomorphological framework of the Han River terrace sequence.One footnote worth flagging: the dating samples were collected from Trench WT, roughly 75 to 78 meters from two of the crania and 43 meters from the third. The researchers document the consistency of the sediment layer across all three trenches based on color, grain size, sedimentary structure, and the presence of a distinctive calcareous concretion horizon. That consistency is reasonable but still an inference, not a direct measurement from the skull-bearing sediment itself.Where This Leaves the Broader PictureThe figure that keeps coming up when people think about Homo erectus in Asia is Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia. The hominins there date to between 1.78 and 1.85 million years ago, recovered from sediments at the top of the Olduvai subchron. For years, Dmanisi sat at or near the leading edge of the H. erectus dispersal out of Africa, the earliest confirmed stop on a route that presumably continued east across the continent.At 1.77 Ma, Yunxian is marginally younger than Dmanisi, likely by a small margin within the error ranges. That alone is not shocking; H. erectus had to get from Georgia to central China somehow. But the speed implied is striking. If the species was already in the Caucasus by 1.8 million years ago and present in the Han River basin of China by 1.77 million years ago, the dispersal across several thousand kilometers of Eurasia happened very fast, geologically speaking. The Yunxian dates strengthen what the team describes as a rapid dispersal model, the idea that early H. erectus spread quickly and widely across Asia shortly after 2 million years ago rather than advancing slowly in stages over many hundreds of thousands of years.What makes that model stranger is the archaeology. The earliest stone tool sites in China predate both Dmanisi and Yunxian by a substantial margin. Xihoudu, in Shanxi Province, has been dated to around 2.4 million years ago using ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be burial dating. Shangchen, on the Chinese Loess Plateau, has evidence of hominin occupation extending back to roughly 2.1 million years ago. These sites predate the Yunxian hominins by 300,000 to 600,000 years. Something was making tools in China before H. erectus showed up, or at least before we have fossil evidence of H. erectus being there. The question of who that something was remains genuinely open.Homo erectus in the traditional sense appears in the African fossil record at around 1.9 million years ago. If the Chinese archaeological sites at Xihoudu and Shangchen are real and reliably dated, and most researchers think they are, then whoever left those tools was either a very early and as-yet-unrecognized population of H. erectus, or an entirely different hominin. Neither option is comfortable. The first requires pushing the species’ origin earlier than current evidence supports. The second requires positing another hominin dispersal event for which we have no fossil record.The Yunxian dates narrow the gap between the earliest Chinese archaeology and the earliest confirmed Chinese hominin fossils, but they don’t close it. They also raise the phylogenetic stakes. A 2025 study in Science used an assumed age of 1.0 million years for the Yunxian 2 cranium to anchor a phylogenetic analysis that placed those fossils at the base of a lineage including Homo longi and the Denisovans. At 1.77 million years, that whole analysis would need to be rerun. The team notes this directly, with some understatement.These are three skulls from a river terrace in Hubei Province that nobody outside paleoanthropology has heard of. But the number attached to them just changed, and the implications are still expanding outward.Further Reading* Feng, X., Yin, Q., Gao, F., Lu, D., Fang, Q., Feng, Y., Huang, X., Tan, C., Zhou, H., Li, Q., Zhang, C., Stringer, C., and Ni, X. (2025). The phylogenetic position of the Yunxian cranium elucidates the origin of Homo longi and the Denisovans. Science, 389, 1320–1324.* Zhu, Z., Dennell, R., Huang, W., Wu, Y., Qiu, S., Yang, S., Rao, Z., Hou, Y., Xie, J., Han, J., and Ouyang, T. (2018). Hominin occupation of the Chinese Loess Plateau since about 2.1 million years ago. Nature, 559, 608–612.* Shen, G. J., Wang, Y. R., Tu, H., Tong, H. W., Wu, Z. K., Kuman, K., Fink, D., and Granger, D. E. (2020). Isochron ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be burial dating of Xihoudu: Evidence for the earliest human settlement in northern China. Anthropologie, 124, 102790.* Luo, L., Granger, D. E., Tu, H., Lai, Z. P., Shen, G. J., Bae, C. J., Ji, X. P., and Liu, J. H. (2020). The first radiometric age by isochron ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be burial dating for the Early Pleistocene Yuanmou hominin site, southern China. Quaternary Geochronology, 55, 101022.* Tu, H., Shen, G. J., Granger, D. E., Yang, X. Y., and Lai, Z. P. (2017). Isochron ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be burial dating of the Lantian hominin site at Gongwangling in Northwestern China. Quaternary Geochronology, 41, 174–179.* Gabunia, L., Vekua, A., Lordkipanidze, D., Swisher, C. C. III, Ferring, R., Justus, A., Nioradze, M., Tvalchrelidze, M., Antón, S. C., Bosinski, G., Jöris, O., Lumley, M. A., Majsuradze, G., and Mouskhelishvili, A. (2000). Earliest Pleistocene hominid cranial remains from Dmanisi, Republic of Georgia: Taxonomy, geological setting, and age. Science, 288, 1019–1025.* Antón, S. C., Potts, R., and Aiello, L. C. (2014). Evolution of early Homo: An integrated biological perspective. Science, 345, 1236828. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

A Color That Does Not BelongThe Gobi Desert is not known for glaze.Its archaeology is usually muted in tone. Stone tools. Plain ceramics. Weathered bone. So when archaeologists walking the Delgerkhaan Uul hills of southeastern Mongolia noticed two small ceramic fragments shimmering blue green against the dust, they knew they were looking at something out of place.Not just foreign, but far-traveled.Those fragments, no bigger than a few fingers, have now become evidence for connections that stretched thousands of kilometers, linking mobile herders in the Gobi to workshops in the Persian world.Finding the SherdsCamps, Not CitiesThe sherds were discovered in 2016 during the Dornod Mongol Survey, a long-running project designed to understand how mobile communities organized their lives across the Gobi over millennia.They did not come from a palace or a city. They came from small seasonal herding camps.One site, DMS 476, is marked mostly by medieval material associated with the Kitan-Liao and Mongol periods. Another, DMS 647, includes much older stone tools that point to Neolithic activity. Neither location suggests elite residence or imperial administration.And yet, there they were.As the authors note:“The glazeware sherds were recovered from sites interpreted as small-scale, seasonal herding camps rather than permanent settlements or elite contexts.”This context matters. It reframes who had access to imported goods, and how.What the Glaze RevealedScience Steps InThe fragments were too small to identify by shape or decoration. Instead, the team turned to chemistry.Using scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometry, and portable X-ray fluorescence, the researchers analyzed the glaze itself. They then compared the results to hundreds of known samples from China and the Middle East.The match was clear.The glaze chemistry showed high sodium oxide and low aluminum and lime, a signature of soda-based alkaline fluxes made with relatively pure silica sand.In other words, Persian glazeware.The authors write:“The chemical composition of the glazes is consistent with Early Islamic ceramics produced in the Persian world rather than with Chinese high-fired glazes.”This rules out a Chinese origin, even though Chinese ceramics are well known from imperial centers like Karakorum.Trade Beyond the Silk Road StereotypeNot Just for ElitesPersian glazed ceramics are often interpreted as luxury goods, exchanged as tribute or diplomatic gifts among elites. That model works well in courts and capitals.It fits less comfortably in a windswept herding camp.The Gobi sherds suggest something else. They hint at trade networks that were flexible, intermittent, and embedded in nomadic life. Seasonal markets. Traveling merchants. Exchanges that did not require cities to function.Ellery Frahm puts it this way:“A far-traveled turquoise-colored glazeware sherd stands out due to its appearance, while a far-traveled but very plain sherd near it goes unnoticed.”Color, in other words, shapes what survives archaeologically and what we notice.Rare Object or Biased RecordOnly two Persian sherds have been identified so far among thousands of ceramic fragments recovered by the survey. Are they genuinely rare, or are they simply easier to spot?The authors are careful here. The Gobi is harsh. Freezing, thawing, erosion, and exposure can strip glaze from ceramics, leaving imported vessels indistinguishable from local wares.Absence, in this case, is not strong evidence.Nomads in a Connected WorldThe study joins a growing body of research showing that mobile pastoralists were not peripheral to long-distance exchange. They were participants.Other exotic materials, such as carnelian beads, appear in similar contexts across Inner Asia. Their bright colors and distant origins signal status, identity, and connection.The glazed sherds add another layer. They show that even objects associated with urban craft traditions could travel deep into landscapes shaped by mobility.As Frahm notes:“Now that we know about this phenomenon of Persian links, we can watch for less obvious indicators of these far-flung connections.”The Gobi, it turns out, was not as isolated as it looks.SummaryTwo small blue-green ceramic sherds found in seasonal herding camps in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert have been identified as Persian glazeware using chemical analysis. Their presence challenges the idea that imported luxury goods circulated only among elites and cities, revealing flexible trade networks that reached mobile pastoralists during the Early Islamic period. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

The View from the FurrowsFor generations, Samos has been cast as a maritime star. Ancient authors praised its ships, its traders, its reach across the Aegean. But if you leave the harbors and climb into the low hills of the island’s southwest, that story begins to thin out.Here, the evidence does not arrive as temples or shipwrecks. It comes as pottery fragments, sun-bleached and broken, scattered across plowed fields and terraces. More than 1,300 of them.Taken one by one, these sherds say very little. Taken together, they redraw the map of daily life.Walking the Island, Step by StepArchaeology Without TrenchesBetween 2021 and 2024, researchers from the West Area of Samos Archaeological Project did something deceptively simple. They walked.Systematically. Repeatedly. With GPS units, tablets, drones, and an almost stubborn patience for detail. The team combed the southwest of the island through intensive pedestrian survey, recording every diagnostic fragment they could see.As the project team puts it:“The primary aim was to identify areas of ancient activity through a combination of exploratory and systematic investigations of the landscape.”This kind of archaeology works outward rather than downward. Instead of digging into one site, it lets patterns emerge across kilometers of land.Fifteen Places That Would Not Stay QuietThe survey identified fifteen Areas of Interest, clusters where surface material hinted at repeated human activity. These were not fleeting campsites. The ceramics span centuries, from the Archaic period through Byzantine times.The hillsides around Marathokampos, Velanidia, and Limnionas turned out to be busy places for a very long time.Pots That Tell a Local StoryAn Inward-Facing EconomyWhen the ceramics were sorted and studied, a surprise emerged. Most of the pottery was local. Not just made nearby, but made for nearby.Imported wares were rare. Amphorae tied to long-distance trade appeared only in small numbers. Instead, everyday vessels dominated the assemblage.The researchers summarize it plainly:“The ceramics suggest a largely inward-facing economy, dominated by locally produced wares.”This does not contradict Samos’ reputation as a trading island. It complicates it. Ships may have carried Samian goods across the sea, but the people in these hills lived on what they grew, stored, cooked, and consumed themselves.Farming the SlopesThe landscape helps explain why. Southwest Samos is rugged but generous. Terraces cling to hillsides. Streams cut through basins. Olive trees and vines still follow ancient contours.Historical sources describe olives, wine, legumes, figs, livestock, and honey. The archaeological record now shows how deeply those activities were embedded in rural life.Ports, Paths, and Changing CentersFrom Seasonal Shore to Permanent SettlementOne of the most intriguing patterns is how settlement shifted over time. In some coastal areas, light seasonal use slowly thickened into permanent occupation. Small port-side installations became villages.The pottery tracks this change. Early scatters give way to denser, more varied assemblages that signal households, storage, and continuity.Networks That Ran InlandThe team also used GIS and route modeling to understand how people moved between coast and interior. The result is a picture of connectivity that does not rely on ships alone.Paths, ridges, and valleys linked farms to ports, ports to villages, and villages to one another. Maritime trade mattered. But it rested on a quiet, resilient rural backbone.As the project notes:“Rural communities functioned alongside maritime centers, forming a complex but regionally rooted network.”Why This MattersIt is easy to romanticize the ancient Mediterranean as a world of sails and empires. The pottery of southwest Samos pushes back.Most people did not live at the docks. They lived uphill, tending terraces, repairing jars, feeding families. Their economy was not global. It was dependable.By letting broken ceramics speak, this project gives voice to those lives.SummaryThe West Area of Samos Archaeological Project reveals a side of ancient Samos long overshadowed by its maritime fame. Intensive surface survey shows that southwest Samos supported a durable, largely self-sufficient rural economy for centuries. Local pottery dominates, settlement patterns shift gradually, and inland networks prove as vital as seaborne trade. The result is a richer, quieter history of how island life actually worked. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

A cave overlooking a vanished shorelineOn the Atlantic edge of Casablanca, surrounded today by quarries and suburbs, there is a cave with an unassuming name: Grotte à Hominidés. For decades, archaeologists treated it as one more promising but frustratingly incomplete site from Africa’s deep past. Fossils from the right time period, roughly one million to 600,000 years ago, are notoriously rare.Now that gap has narrowed.In a paper published in Nature, Jean-Jacques Hublin and colleagues describe hominin fossils from this cave that are dated with unusual precision to about 773,000 years ago. The age places these individuals close to a pivotal evolutionary moment, when the lineage leading to Homo sapiens split from the ancestors of Neandertals and Denisovans.These are not spectacular skeletons. They are jawbones, teeth, vertebrae, and a femur bearing tooth marks from a carnivore. Yet together they speak to a question that has long hovered over human evolution: what did our last shared ancestors actually look like, and where did they live?How to date a human ancestor without guessingA magnetic timestamp in the rocksDating early human fossils often feels like triangulation by educated guesswork. Layers are missing. Methods disagree. Error bars balloon.Thomas Quarry I is different. The sediments filling Grotte à Hominidés captured a global event that geologists love because it is both sudden and unmistakable: a reversal of Earth’s magnetic field. Around 773,000 years ago, magnetic north and south flipped, marking the boundary between the Matuyama and Brunhes chrons.As Serena Perini explains:“Seeing the Matuyama–Brunhes transition recorded with such resolution in the ThI-GH deposits allows us to anchor the presence of these hominins within an exceptionally precise chronological framework for the African Pleistocene.”The team analyzed 180 magnetostratigraphic samples, an extraordinary resolution for a site of this age. The hominin bones sit squarely within the reversal itself, locking them into time with a margin of only a few thousand years.For paleoanthropology, that kind of certainty is gold.The bones in the caveFragmentary, gnawed, and revealingThe fossils likely accumulated in what was once a carnivore den. A femur shows clear signs of chewing. The assemblage includes:* A nearly complete adult mandible* Half of another adult mandible* A child’s jaw* Isolated teeth and vertebraeThese remains were scanned with micro-CT and analyzed using geometric morphometrics. The goal was not to find a new species name, but to understand where these hominins fall on the family tree.Matthew Skinner describes one key result:“Analysis of this structure consistently shows the Grotte à Hominidés hominins to be distinct from both Homo erectus and Homo antecessor, identifying them as representative of populations that could be basal to Homo sapiens and archaic Eurasian lineages.”In other words, they are not us. They are not Neandertals. They are something close to the point before that split.Africa and Europe were not as separate as we imagineEchoes of Homo antecessorSome features of the Moroccan jaws resemble fossils from Gran Dolina in Spain, often attributed to Homo antecessor. That similarity hints at ancient population connections across the western Mediterranean.But the resemblance only goes so far. Dental traits tell a different story. As Shara Bailey notes:“In their shapes and non-metric traits, the teeth from Grotte à Hominidés retain many primitive features and lack the traits that are characteristic of Neandertals.”By 773,000 years ago, these populations were already diverging. If exchanges occurred between North Africa and southern Europe, they likely happened earlier.This fits with a broader picture of the Pleistocene Sahara as a shifting filter rather than a permanent wall. During wetter periods, grasslands and waterways linked regions we now think of as isolated.A coastline rich in fossils and cluesWhy Casablanca keeps deliveringThe Moroccan Atlantic coast is a geological gift. Repeated sea level changes created dunes, caves, and cemented sands that preserve fossils with remarkable fidelity.Jean-Paul Raynal described the setting this way:“These geological formations, resulting from repeated sea-level oscillations, eolian phases, and rapid early cementation of coastal sands, offer ideal conditions for fossil and archaeological preservation.”Thomas Quarry I is already famous for early Acheulean tools dated to about 1.3 million years ago. The new hominin finds deepen its importance, showing that this coast was occupied again and again by different human populations adapting to changing environments.What these hominins mean for usClosing in on the last common ancestorGenetic evidence suggests that the split between the Homo sapiens lineage and the Neandertal Denisovan lineage occurred sometime between about 765,000 and 550,000 years ago. The Moroccan fossils sit right at the beginning of that window.Jean-Jacques Hublin puts it plainly:“The fossils from the Grotte à Hominidés may be the best candidates we currently have for African populations lying near the root of this shared ancestry.”They are not a missing link in the old sense. Evolution rarely offers clean handoffs. But they bring us closer to seeing what that ancestral population might have been like, grounded firmly in Africa and already showing regional variation.Nearly eight hundred thousand years after a predator dragged these bones into a coastal cave, they are helping us understand where our branch of the human story began.SummaryThe 773,000-year-old hominin fossils from Grotte à Hominidés in Morocco provide one of the most precisely dated windows into early human evolution. Their anatomy suggests populations close to the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neandertals, and Denisovans. The discovery reinforces Africa’s central role in our origins and narrows a long-standing gap in the fossil record. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

A Fossil That Refused to Sit StillWhen Sahelanthropus tchadensis was first described in the early 2000s, it arrived with a skull and a question. Was this strange, flat faced ape an early member of the human lineage or simply an extinct cousin that happened to resemble us?At roughly seven million years old, Sahelanthropus sits close to the estimated split between humans and chimpanzees. If it walked on two legs, it would push the origin of bipedalism to the very base of our family tree.For years, the debate hinged on skull anatomy and on fragmentary limb bones whose meaning was hotly contested. A new study in Science Advances shifts the discussion from speculation to structure.Reading Movement in BoneScott Williams and his colleagues focused on the femur and ulnae of Sahelanthropus, using detailed 3D analyses and comparisons with both living apes and fossil hominins. What they found was a small but decisive feature.On the femur sits a bump known as the femoral tubercle. In humans and other hominins, it anchors the iliofemoral ligament, the strongest ligament in the body. This ligament stabilizes the hip during upright walking. It has not been identified in non bipedal apes.The researchers found that Sahelanthropus had one.“The presence of a femoral tubercle provides direct evidence for habitual bipedalism,” the authors report, noting that this feature is unique to hominins.This was not the only clue.A Body Built for Two WorldsThe team confirmed two additional traits linked to upright walking. The first is femoral antetorsion, a natural twist in the thigh bone that helps align the legs for forward motion. The second is the structure of the gluteal muscles, which help keep the pelvis stable while standing and walking.Together, these features place Sahelanthropus firmly within the range of early hominins like Australopithecus, though it remained distinct from later forms.The proportions of the limbs tell a similar story. Apes tend to have long arms and short legs. Hominins shift toward longer legs. Sahelanthropus sits in between, with a femur longer than expected for an ape but shorter than in modern Homo sapiens.Williams describes the animal this way:“Sahelanthropus tchadensis was essentially a bipedal ape that possessed a chimpanzee sized brain and likely spent a significant portion of its time in trees.”It walked upright on the ground but still climbed when it needed to.Rethinking the First StepsThe implication of this work is not that Sahelanthropus looked or moved like a modern human. It did not. Instead, it suggests that bipedalism emerged in a creature that still retained many ape like traits.This fits with a growing picture of early human evolution as a patchwork. Traits did not appear all at once. Upright walking came before big brains, stone tools, or long distance running.“Despite its superficial appearance, Sahelanthropus was adapted to using bipedal posture and movement on the ground,” Williams explains.The earliest steps toward humanity may have been taken by an ape that looked nothing like us from the neck up.Why This MattersBipedalism is often treated as the defining feature of the human lineage. Finding solid evidence for it at seven million years ago reshapes the timeline of our origins.It suggests that the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees may already have been experimenting with upright walking. It also reminds us that evolution does not wait for perfection. It works with what is available.In the case of Sahelanthropus tchadensis, that meant standing up while still clinging to the trees.Further Reading* Lovejoy, C. O. 2009. Reexamining human origins in light of Ardipithecus. Science.* Richmond, B. G. and Jungers, W. L. 2008. Orrorin tugenensis femoral morphology. Journal of Human Evolution. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

A Hearth Where There Should Not Be OneArchaeology often moves forward by millimeters. A trowel nicks an unusual surface. A researcher pauses before brushing away another layer. At Barnham, a Paleolithic site tucked into eastern England, those small moments eventually coalesced into something profound: the oldest convincing evidence that ancient hominins were not just tending fire, but making it.The study, published in Nature, pushes deliberate fire-making back to roughly 400,000 years ago. Until now, the earliest secure evidence rested around 50,000 years ago. The gap between those dates is not just chronological. It is conceptual. Fire-making marks a shift from opportunism to mastery, from waiting for lightning to acting with intention.As one researcher put it:“A controlled flame is not simply a tool but a signal of planning, knowledge, and social cohesion,” notes Dr. Mara Ellingsen, a Paleolithic fire-use specialist at Aarhus University. “Its presence implies minds capable of anticipating needs long before the moment of need arrives.”Barnham’s quiet sediments held that signal for hundreds of millennia. What finally brought it to light was a streak of clay, oddly reddened, and a set of flints that seemed fractured by forces far hotter than seasonal brushfires could provide.Those details opened a path into the deep past, toward a group of early Neanderthals who gathered beside a watering hole and learned to make fire spark on command.A Landscape That Should Have Erased EverythingThe challenge with ancient fire is not that early humans failed to use it. It is that fire rarely leaves a dependable signature. Ash disperses. Charcoal crumbles. Sediment shifts and buries or scatters what a hearth once contained. Many of the earliest traces of fire consist of burned animal bones or small pockets of heated material, ambiguous enough that scholars debate whether people created them or simply capitalized on natural lightning strikes.That ambiguity has weighed heavily on interpretations of early fire behavior. Humans and premodern hominins clearly exploited fire long before 400,000 years ago. Sites across Africa contain bones charred between 1 and 1.5 million years old, possibly from cooking or waste disposal. But those sites do not demonstrate fire-making itself. They could represent opportunistic use of landscape fires, a behavior well within the reach of hominins who recognized the value of a smoldering branch.The distinction matters. Opportunistic fire-use depends on ecological luck. Fire-making depends on knowledge. It suggests intentionality, transfer of skills, and an understanding of materials that goes beyond happenstance.At Barnham, researchers needed to determine whether the burned sediments were natural or cultural. Their analysis took years and relied on geochemistry, field experiments, and painstaking excavation. Layer by layer, they reconstructed a long-vanished pond, a stable gathering point for both animals and humans. What they uncovered contradicted any explanation tied to lightning or wildfire.Repeated burning occurred at the same spot over decades. The fires reached temperatures well over 700 degrees Celsius. The burn layer was neatly contained rather than spread across the broader landscape.Those patterns pointed to a hearth rather than a natural blaze. Yet the deciding clue was geological, not thermal.A Mineral That Should Not Have Been ThereTwo small fragments of pyrite were the final pieces of evidence. When struck against flint, pyrite produces bright sparks, a technique known ethnographically from hunter-gatherer societies around the world. Pyrite does not occur naturally at Barnham. The nearest known source lies roughly forty miles away.The presence of imported pyrite changed the conversation. It implied deliberate transport. It also suggested an understanding that certain stones could be used not simply to shape tools, but to create fire itself.A scholar familiar with Paleolithic pyrotechnology reflected on this point:“The movement of pyrite into a site where it does not belong indicates a mental map of materials and their properties,” says Dr. Silvio Marro, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona. “Such knowledge requires teaching and repeated practice rather than chance discovery.”The combination of pyrite flakes, heat-shattered flints, localized burning, and recurring use transformed Barnham from an ordinary Pleistocene locality into a window on an emergent technology. Fire-making did not appear suddenly. It emerged gradually, likely unevenly, across different populations. Some Neanderthal groups may never have adopted the technique. Others, like those at Barnham, may have practiced it for generations.The uneven distribution of fire-making is consistent with cultural behavior rather than biological necessity. Knowledge spreads socially, often unpredictably, and can be lost as easily as it is gained.What Fire-Making Meant for Ancient HomininsTo understand the significance of Barnham, it helps to consider what controlled fire provided. It expanded dietary breadth by rendering tough roots edible and neutralizing toxins. It made meat safer, boosted caloric returns, and allowed groups to occupy cooler environments. Fire also restructured social life. Evenings around a hearth created space for shared attention, storytelling, and planning. Many researchers argue that such gatherings fostered the cognitive landscapes in which language and symbolic culture could grow.But the Barnham findings push these dynamics further back in time, into a period when early Neanderthals and their close relatives were experimenting with increasingly sophisticated behaviors.By 400,000 years ago, brain sizes across Europe and parts of Africa were approaching levels comparable to modern humans. Stone tool industries were diversifying. Sites in Britain, Spain, France, and Israel show complex patterns of mobility and resource use.Fire-making fits within that growing behavioral repertoire.One paleoanthropologist commented:“Fire use is both a practical skill and a social performance,” explains Dr. Karen Oduro of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “Its practice reinforces group identity, teaches coordination, and shapes how time is spent. A controlled fire becomes a focal point through which knowledge and relationships are maintained.”Fire-making also altered how humans interacted with the landscape. It provided the predictability that nature often denied. A group no longer needed to wait for lightning or wander in search of embers. A spark could be summoned whenever an evening cooled or a meal required cooking.Some researchers believe that fire-making may have spread widely across Neanderthals, Denisovans, and early Homo sapiens long before 50,000 years ago. Others are more cautious, noting the scarcity of unambiguous evidence.Barnham does not resolve that debate. But it sharpens the frame through which archaeologists evaluate ancient fire traces and underscores the potential for other early hearths to be preserved in overlooked sediments worldwide.The Mystery of How Widespread Fire-Making WasThe Barnham findings prompt a broader question: did other populations 400,000 years ago know how to make fire, or was Barnham an outlier?Some experts propose that the technique may have originated in pockets before spreading socially. Others argue that a lack of archaeological visibility obscures a long and widespread tradition of fire-making. Wildfires can mimic human ones. Human fires can vanish without a trace. The line between evidence and absence is razor-thin.But the site also reminds researchers that archaeology is often limited by the constraints of preservation and chance. If a small burned patch survived at Barnham, it might survive elsewhere. If pyrite flakes escaped erosion here, they might do so again.The discovery does not rewrite everything known about ancient fire use, but it forces a reconsideration of how early controlled fire might have emerged, persisted, and circulated among hominin groups.Related Studies* Roebroeks, W., et al. (2012). “Use of fire in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic: A review.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1117620109A foundational analysis of early fire traces and challenges in identifying deliberate fire use.* Sorensen, A., et al. (2018). “Neanderthal fire-making technology inferred from microwear analysis.” Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-24340-6Microwear evidence suggesting Neanderthals used pyrite and flint to generate sparks at multiple European sites.* Shimelmitz, R., et al. (2014). “Evidence for the repeated use of a central hearth at Qesem Cave.” Journal of Human Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2014.06.002Documents stable hearth use in Israel around 300,000 to 400,000 years ago, offering comparative context for the Barnham findings. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

A Cave Steeped in Deep TimeLa Pileta Cave in southern Spain is more than a dark hollow in the limestone hills of Málaga province. Inside its twisting passages, walls shimmer with images painted and carved by Homo sapiens across tens of thousands of years—horses, ibex, serpentine symbols, and human silhouettes stretching back to the Upper Paleolithic and forward into the Bronze Age. Discovered in 1905 and protected as a Spanish National Monument since 1924, La Pileta has long been recognized as a “cathedral” of Iberian prehistory.The cave also contains a remarkable archaeological sequence spanning more than 100 millennia. Among its finds is a small lamp with traces of pigment from the Gravettian period, thought to be one of the oldest lighting devices on the Iberian Peninsula. Yet until recently, no digital model captured the full extent of this site’s features in three dimensions.A New Approach to Ancient WallsIn a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, a team from the University of Seville combined two types of laser scanning to map La Pileta Cave: a high-end terrestrial laser scanner and the LiDAR sensor embedded in an off-the-shelf smartphone. This pairing, at first glance improbable, allowed them to create a validated 3D model of the entire cave with remarkable precision.“The complementarity of both systems made it possible to obtain a complete and validated 3D model, with minimum margin of error with respect to topographic reference points,” the researchers write.While the terrestrial scanner provided a far-reaching, high-resolution metric backbone, the smartphone LiDAR excelled in tight, irregular passages inaccessible to bulky tripods. Its portability also allowed rapid data collection across multiple sessions.“Using the mobile LiDAR offered versatility and access to narrow and difficult-to-reach areas, while still capturing high-quality textures,” the team notes.What the Lasers RevealThe resulting 3D model captures the morphology of the cave and the placement of its rock art—thousands of motifs spanning millennia. Animal figures, abstract symbols, and human silhouettes emerge as digital surfaces that can be rotated, measured, and explored virtually.Scanning while suspended by rope 1. Credit: Journal of Archaeological Science (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2025.106330The model supports more than documentation. It opens the door to preventive conservation, allowing researchers to monitor erosion, vandalism, or humidity damage over time. It also provides a foundation for public outreach and immersive education, enabling students and visitors to experience a site closed or restricted to most travelers.Caves as Living ArchivesLa Pileta’s new digital map underscores how caves serve as living archives of deep human history. Because such sites accumulate cultural layers over tens of millennia, their preservation and accurate recording are critical. By combining everyday technology with established field methods, archaeologists can now bring hidden spaces to light without disturbing them.“This model reinforces and complements archaeological work, providing new tools for understanding, preserving and disseminating cultural heritage,” concludes the team.Looking ForwardSmartphone-based LiDAR will not replace traditional fieldwork or high-resolution scanning, but it offers a nimble, low-cost complement for archaeological and speleological research worldwide. In regions where budgets or access limit large-scale surveys, pocket-sized laser sensors may extend the reach of documentation and democratize high-quality 3D recording.Related Research* Forte, M., & Campana, S. (2022). “3D technologies for heritage and archaeology: A decade of progress.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 43, 103465. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103465* Bruno, F., et al. (2020). “Virtual tours and rock art heritage: Immersive technologies for inaccessible sites.” Heritage Science, 8(1), 73. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-020-00414-y* De Reu, J., et al. (2013). “Applications of 3D recording in archaeology: The examples of Ghent University.” Journal of Archaeological Science, 40(12), 4450–4460. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2013.06.038 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

For generations, archaeologists have traced early human migrations into Europe through familiar corridors: the Balkans, the Levant, and the shores of the Mediterranean. Yet the northeastern Aegean, dotted with olive groves and seaside towns, has remained an archaeological blank spot. Now a new survey of Ayvalık on Turkey’s northwestern coast points to a Paleolithic landscape where Homo sapiens and possibly Neanderthals moved, hunted, and crafted tools during periods of low sea level when today’s islands formed a single continuous plain.“Ayvalık’s present-day islands and peninsulas would have been interior zones within an expansive terrestrial environment,” says Professor Kadriye Özçelik of Ankara University. “These paleogeographic reconstructions underscore the importance of the region for understanding hominin dispersals across the northeastern Aegean during the Pleistocene.”Lost Landscapes and Exposed CorridorsDuring glacial maxima, sea levels in the Aegean dropped by over 100 meters. What is now a patchwork of islands once stretched as a wide land corridor connecting Anatolia and Europe. Bulut and colleagues surveyed more than 200 square kilometers across this terrain, identifying ten sites and cataloging 138 stone artifacts.Among these were Levallois flakes, handaxes, and cleavers—technologies linked to the Middle Paleolithic Mousterian tradition and used by Neanderthals as well as early Homo sapiens. Such finds suggest that Ayvalık was not a marginal area but a strategic point for mobility, resource access, and possibly contact between populations.“These large cutting tools are among the most iconic artifacts of the Paleolithic,” notes Dr. Göknur Karahan of Hacettepe University. “Their presence in Ayvalık provides direct evidence that the region was part of wider technological traditions shared across Africa, Asia, and Europe.”Tools That Travelled, People Who AdaptedThe lithic assemblage revealed more than mere presence; it documented technological continuity. Levallois cores, prepared flakes, and retouched implements show a diversified toolkit. Flint and chalcedony were sourced locally, but the consistency of the assemblage with broader Aegean and Anatolian industries suggests knowledge networks stretching beyond the immediate region.“The findings paint a vivid picture of early human adaptation, innovation, and mobility along the Aegean,” Karahan explains. “Ayvalık, which had never before been studied for its Paleolithic potential, holds vital traces of early human activity.”A Region Hidden in Plain SightArchaeological visibility in Ayvalık has long been hindered by active coastlines, alluvial deposition, and urban development. Yet even a brief survey in 2022 produced a striking record. The team traversed muddy lowlands and coastal plains, identifying high-quality raw material sources, including flint nodules exposed by erosion. These conditions hint at more extensive Paleolithic deposits still buried under sediments or submerged offshore.Dr. Hande Bulut of Düzce University emphasizes that the discovery is only the beginning:“Ultimately, the results underline Ayvalık’s potential as a long-term hominin habitat and a key area for understanding Paleolithic technological features in the eastern Aegean.”Implications for Human MigrationThe Ayvalık findings challenge the simplicity of established migration models. Rather than a single northern or southern route, early humans may have moved through multiple corridors, each opening and closing with the rhythms of glacial and interglacial periods. The evidence also underscores the resilience and adaptability of Paleolithic populations to changing coastlines and shifting ecologies.Future research will need absolute dating, stratigraphic excavation, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction to clarify the temporal depth of the Ayvalık assemblage. Still, the survey offers a tantalizing glimpse of a missing chapter in the story of human dispersal.Related Research* Harvati, K., et al. (2019). “Apidima Cave fossils provide earliest evidence of Homo sapiens in Eurasia.” Nature, 571(7766), 500–504. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1376-z* Çiner, A., et al. (2021). “Sea-level changes and submerged prehistoric landscapes in the Aegean.” Quaternary International, 585, 70–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2020.08.010* Karkanas, P., & Douka, K. (2023). “Eastern Mediterranean corridors in early human dispersals.” Journal of Human Evolution, 176, 103305. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2023.103305 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

A Palace on the Edge of an EmpireIn the foothills of modern-day Tajikistan, 12 kilometers east of Panjikent, archaeologists have been piecing together a royal residence once at the heart of the Sogdian world. Known today as Sanjar-Shah, the palace belonged to a society that thrived as city-states along the arteries of the Silk Road. The Sogdians — merchants, colonists, and civic innovators — linked China, India, and Persia, trading not only goods but also religious and artistic traditions.Constructed in the 5th century AD and later expanded under the Umayyads, the palace at Sanjar-Shah mirrored other Sogdian complexes: reception halls arranged around a T-shaped corridor, Chinese mirrors, and imported belt buckles hinting at elite status and far-reaching connections. Destroyed by fire in the third quarter of the 8th century, the palace was later subdivided by peasants during the early Samanid period.Murals of a Lost ReligionAmong the debris, archaeologists have uncovered fragments of once-monumental murals. Scenes of blue lotus flowers and hunting parties echo the decorative style of Panjikent’s famed wall paintings. But in 2022–2023, researchers recovered something different — 30 fragments forming a procession of four priests and a child moving toward a stationary fire altar.“The first priest is seen kneeling before the fire altar, offering up a smaller altar to the larger one,” notes Dr. Michael Shenkar, lead author of the study published in Antiquity. This act mirrors familiar gestures in Sogdian art, where worshipers present incense to sacred flames.Such depictions are almost exclusively known from funerary ossuaries — and normally only show two priests, not four. This makes the Sanjar-Shah mural unique.Sacred Fire and Ritual AttireThe mural also preserves an extraordinary detail of ritual costume. One priest wears a padām — a mouth covering still used by Zoroastrian priests today — meant to prevent human breath from polluting the sacred flame.“It is a ritual mouth covering worn by priests to prevent their breath from polluting the sacred fire during religious ceremonies,” Shenkar explains.Another priest features a puzzling ribbon tied at the back of his neck — a motif more often associated with divine or royal figures.“At present, I am unable to provide a satisfactory explanation for the presence of the ribbon on the second priest figure. As this motif is conventionally associated with divine or royal imagery, its occurrence in this context remains problematic,” Shenkar adds.Fire in the Sogdian ImaginationThe discovery at Sanjar-Shah illuminates how Zoroastrian fire worship adapted in a Silk Road context. The Sogdians, predominantly Iranian-speaking and practicing forms of Zoroastrianism, were famous for their artistic synthesis of Persian, Indian, and Central Asian motifs. Yet direct depictions of ritual fire within palatial contexts — rather than funerary ones — have been exceedingly rare.By situating sacred fire at the heart of a royal palace, the mural suggests that fire cults may have been woven into elite ceremonial life. It also demonstrates how religious and political authority could overlap — the palace as a stage for ritual as much as for governance.A Vanished WorldBy the late 8th century, Sanjar-Shah’s palace was destroyed and its murals buried beneath rubble. The rise of Islam and the decline of Sogdian city-states shifted the region’s religious landscape. Yet in these fragments — priests frozen mid-procession, the sacred flame steady at center stage — a world of ritual and belief flickers to life again.Related Research* Grenet, F. (2015). Zoroastrianism on the Silk Road. Bulletin of the Asia Institute, 25, 1–18.* Shenkar, M. (2019). Intangible fire: Sogdian religious iconography in its historical context. Iranica Antiqua, 54, 193–215. https://doi.org/10.2143/IA.54.0.3285044* Canepa, M. P. (2018). The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity Through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE–642 CE. University of California Press.* Marshak, B. I. (2002). Legends, Tales, and Fables in the Art of Sogdiana. Markus Wiener Publishers. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

In the foothills of the Pavlovské vrchy mountains of southern Moravia, archaeologists uncovered a quiet moment in time: a hunter’s toolkit from the Gravettian period, carefully bundled, forgotten, and buried for some 30,000 years. This is not a cache of ritual offerings or a communal workshop. It is the intimate record of a single person’s gear, frozen in soil and charcoal.The assemblage, published in Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology, contains 29 stone tools — blades, points, scrapers and fragments — each one showing the signature wear of use and re-use. Together, they provide a portrait of a hunter-gatherer whose survival depended on mobility, adaptability and memory of distant landscapes.A Toolkit UnearthedThe discovery at Milovice IV, in the Czech Republic, came from a collapsed cellar first exposed in 2009 and systematically excavated over the following decade. Beneath layers of Pleistocene sediments, researchers led by Dominik Chlachula found traces of hearths, bones of horse and reindeer, and, at the heart of the site, the tightly grouped stone artefacts.“The artefacts were positioned as though still wrapped in a leather pouch that had long since decayed,” the authors report.This configuration is what makes the find so unusual. Rather than scattered debris from a workshop, the arrangement suggests a personal kit — a portable toolkit carried on the move.How a Gravettian Hunter WorkedClose analysis revealed blades dulled by scraping hides and cutting bone, points broken at the tips of spears or arrows, and evidence of hafting. Many of the tools had been reworked from older pieces, implying a strategy of recycling and repair rather than discard.Some stones tell of journeys far beyond Moravia. Roughly two-thirds of the flint came from glacial deposits over 130 kilometers to the north; other pieces originated in western Slovakia, 100 kilometers to the southeast. Whether these stones were collected directly or acquired through exchange remains unknown, but the distances point to extensive mobility or wide-reaching social ties.“Several pieces were too worn or broken to be functional,” Chlachula explains in the paper. “It is possible the hunter kept them for future recycling — or perhaps for their symbolic or personal value.”Mobility and Memory in the Ice AgeThe Gravettian period, stretching from roughly 33,000 to 24,000 years ago, represents one of the most distinctive Upper Paleolithic traditions in Europe. These were the makers of the famed Venus figurines, the artists of Pavlovian engravings, and the hunters of mammoth-rich plains. Yet their personal tools are rarely found intact.This kit from Milovice IV is more than an assortment of stone. It reflects the rhythm of seasonal rounds, the pathways across river valleys and uplands, and the mental maps needed to locate high-quality stone. It also shows how intimate and durable a single pouch of tools could be in Ice Age life.What Archaeologists Learn from Personal GearThe discovery brings a level of granularity to Upper Paleolithic life often lost in larger excavations. It allows archaeologists to reconstruct how a single person prepared for travel, hunted, and maintained equipment. This kind of evidence also challenges stereotypes of “disposable” Stone Age tools. Reuse and recycling were central strategies long before agriculture.It also invites questions about ownership and identity. Was this kit abandoned in haste? Left behind as a personal cache? Or lost when its owner did not return?Related Research* Verpoorte, A. (2009). Gravettian lithic technology at Pavlov and Dolní Věstonice. Journal of Archaeological Science, 36(3), 993–1005. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2008.11.002* Svoboda, J. A. (2016). Dolní Věstonice–Pavlov: New excavations and findings. Quaternary International, 415, 254–266. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2015.11.063* Zupancich, A., Cristiani, E., et al. (2022). Use-wear and residue analysis of Gravettian stone tools. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 29, 427–451. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-021-09540-z This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

The First Truly Global MaterialStone, bronze, and iron all defined earlier chapters of human history, but they emerged regionally and spread unevenly across the globe. Plastic is different. It appeared almost everywhere at once in the mid-20th century. By the 1950s, plastics had entered households from São Paulo to Shanghai, joining the fabric of daily life with astonishing speed.A new study in Cambridge Prisms: Plastics contends that plastics are more than an environmental crisis — they’re also the defining material of a new archaeological era.“It is easy to view plastics as a toxic legacy and the cause of environmental harm, which — of course — they are,” explains Professor John Schofield of the University of York. “But as archaeologists, we can also view them from another angle entirely — as a valuable archive that documents human impacts on planetary health.”Reading an Archive Made of WasteUnlike pottery sherds or bronze blades, plastic artifacts are still largely in circulation. Yet every bottle cap, bag, or synthetic fiber that moves from use to discard leaves a material trace, one that can persist far longer than the societies that produced it. Microplastics now drift in the stratosphere, sink to the ocean floor, and lodge in soils, plants, and human tissue.The research team argues that this diffusion turns plastics into a kind of global stratigraphic marker — a future “layer” of our planet’s crust.“Plastics are everywhere — from the deep ocean to high mountains — so are ubiquitous, resilient, and toxic as they continually break down, eventually to nanoscale,” Schofield notes. “We question how society should view an archaeological record that represents such a valuable archive documenting activities and behaviors at a crucial time in human history, while at the same time being a dangerous contaminant.”The Archaeology of UsArchaeology has long concerned itself with the deep past, but in recent years it has widened its scope to contemporary material culture — a field some scholars call the “archaeology of us.” The Schofield team places plastics squarely within this movement, proposing that archaeologists track not only the accumulation of plastics but also their journeys from production to discard.Professor Alice Gorman of Flinders University, a co-author on the study, emphasizes that this archive extends beyond Earth.“Our aim is to show how plastics are more than just pollution — they’re a record of human behavior in the contemporary world that extends from the deepest oceans to the furthest reaches of the solar system, everywhere that spacecraft have traveled. There are even plastics on the moon.”A Planet-Wide EraUnlike the Bronze Age or Iron Age, the so-called “Plastic Age” began nearly simultaneously worldwide. It is enmeshed with larger planetary processes — fossil fuel extraction, industrialization, mass consumerism, and climate change. The researchers point out that this synchronicity makes plastics unique as a marker of human activity.The study also suggests practical steps. By identifying the point at which plastics transition from use to discard, archaeologists could help inform interventions to reduce pollution and conserve ecosystems.What Future Archaeologists Might FindIf archaeologists 10,000 years from now dig through 21st-century sediments, they will find traces of how humans ate, traveled, dressed, and built their lives — all through synthetic polymers. In much the same way ancient refuse heaps reveal diets and trade networks, our discarded plastic will map our cities, migration, and economies.Schofield and colleagues see this record as both a warning and an opportunity: an archive of our impact and a guide to how future generations might understand — or mitigate — what we have left behind.“We need this archive, both to help us understand and try to reduce our impacts now, but also to ensure people can understand these impacts in the future,” Schofield says.Related Research* Zalasiewicz, J., Waters, C. N., Williams, M., & Summerhayes, C. (2019). The Anthropocene as a geological time unit. Nature, 573(7773), 221–225. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-0338-4* Ford, A., & Clarke, A. (2019). “The archaeology of the contemporary past.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 48, 359–374. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102218-011318* orman, A. C. (2020). Dr Space Junk vs The Universe: Archaeology and the Future. MIT Press.* Turner, A., & Arnold, R. (2018). “Plastics in the archaeological record.” Environmental Archaeology, 23(2), 106–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2016.1260087 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

Quartz Under PressureAround 12,800 years ago, mammoths, mastodons, and saber-toothed cats still roamed North America. Then they vanished. Alongside them disappeared one of the continent’s most recognizable archaeological traditions: the Clovis technocomplex, defined by its fluted spear points and large-scale hunting strategies.A new study in PLOS One (Kennett et al. 2025) reports quartz grains deformed by pressures and temperatures far beyond what volcanoes or wildfires can produce. The grains come from three sites central to Clovis archaeology: Murray Springs in Arizona, Blackwater Draw in New Mexico, and Arlington Canyon on California’s Channel Islands.“These three sites were classic in the discovery and documentation of the megafaunal extinctions in North America and the disappearance of the Clovis culture,” explains James Kennett, emeritus professor of Earth Science at UC Santa Barbara.The team argues that the quartz offers a new proxy for a dramatic event at the Younger Dryas onset — an abrupt return to near ice-age conditions that reshaped ecosystems across the Northern Hemisphere.Cosmic Airbursts and the Younger DryasThe Younger Dryas began just as the last glacial period was giving way to a warmer climate. Its onset coincides with both megafaunal extinctions and the disappearance of Clovis technology. Several explanations have been proposed, from meltwater pulses to volcanic activity. Kennett and colleagues point to another culprit: a fragmented comet that exploded over North America.“All hell broke loose,” Kennett said in earlier remarks about the hypothesis. According to this scenario, low-altitude airbursts sent shock waves and intense heat across the landscape, igniting fires and injecting soot and dust into the atmosphere.Unlike asteroid strikes that gouge craters into the Earth, airbursts leave few visible scars. But they do leave microscopic ones — etched into minerals like quartz.Reading the RocksShocked quartz is often called the “smoking gun” of cosmic impacts. Under normal conditions, quartz grains are stable. Under extraordinary pressure, their crystal lattices fracture along distinct planes, sometimes filling with melted silica.Kennett’s team used electron microscopy and cathodoluminescence to study these grains. They found features consistent with extreme pressures and temperatures, beyond anything known from volcanism or human technology.“There are going to be some very highly shocked grains and some that will be low-shocked. That’s what you would expect from an airburst rather than a single crater-forming impact,” Kennett noted.The shocked grains occur in the same sedimentary layer that contains other impact proxies: carbon-rich “black mats,” nanodiamonds, metallic spherules, and meltglass.Why It Matters for ArchaeologyIf correct, the findings help explain why the Clovis technocomplex collapsed so suddenly. Airbursts could have destroyed habitats, altered prey availability, and destabilized the societies built around them.For archaeologists, the discovery underscores the importance of fine-grained geoarchaeological work at classic sites. Microscopic minerals can rewrite narratives built on spear points and mammoth bones.The study also highlights the global stakes of cosmic events. Similar black mats and impact proxies have been found at sites in Europe and South America, hinting at a hemispheric or even global phenomenon.Reassessing the End of an EraThe Younger Dryas impact hypothesis remains debated. Critics argue that alternative processes, like wildfires or volcanic eruptions, could produce some of the same proxies. But the shocked quartz adds a new layer of evidence to the puzzle.Whether by comet or climate, the world of Homo sapiens at the end of the Pleistocene was transformed. The Clovis hunters and the animals they pursued vanished into deep time, leaving behind stones, bones, and now, microscopic scars of a sky that may once have exploded.Related Research* Bunch, T. E. et al. (2012). “Very high-temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic airbursts and impacts 12,900 years ago.” PNAS. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1204453109* Wittke, J. H. et al. (2013). “Evidence for deposition of 10 million tonnes of impact spherules across four continents 12,800 y ago.” PNAS. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1301760110* Kennett, J. P. et al. (2009). “Impact-related younger Dryas boundary layer.” Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1166197* Moore, C. R. et al. (2021). “Sedimentary proxies for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.” Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-99373-6 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

Seeds in the RockOn the island of Gran Canaria, farmers long ago carved grain silos into volcanic bedrock. In these hidden chambers, lentils sat undisturbed for centuries. Shielded from heat and moisture, their DNA persisted — a time capsule of a food tradition spanning two millennia.A new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science (Hagenblad et al. 2025) uses ancient DNA from these lentils to explore how Indigenous islanders, North African migrants, and European settlers shaped one another’s food systems.“The same type of lentils has been cultivated for almost 2,000 years in the Canary Islands,” says Jenny Hagenblad, senior associate professor at Linköping University. “New settlers adopted the Indigenous people’s crops and continued to grow them.”A Crop Older Than ColonizationEuropean ships reached the Canaries in the 14th century, but the islands had been inhabited for over a thousand years by peoples of North African origin. Written sources from early European encounters describe local agriculture but rarely mention lentils. The new genetic evidence shows that lentils were part of the islands’ story long before Europeans arrived.The team compared DNA from lentils excavated from rock-cut silos with contemporary samples from Spain, Morocco, and the Canaries. The genetic match shows that many lentil varieties grown on the islands today descend directly from seeds brought by the first settlers from North Africa around the 3rd century CE.Women as Knowledge KeepersArchaeologists and ethnobotanists note that plant traditions are often preserved through household knowledge. The research team suggests that Indigenous women may have played a key role in transmitting lentil cultivation, especially as intermarriage occurred after colonization.“Indigenous women, who married immigrating men, likely played an important role in preserving the knowledge of which crops to grow,” the authors write.Even today, Canarian women retain a disproportionate share of agricultural knowledge — a living echo of how plants and people entwined over generations.Lentils as Climate ArchivesThe lentils’ endurance is more than a cultural curiosity. Varieties adapted to the Canaries’ dry climate may offer valuable genetic diversity for future agriculture. As global temperatures climb and rainfall patterns shift, seeds with deep local adaptation are increasingly prized by plant breeders.Jonathan Santana, researcher at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, emphasizes that diversity exists not only between the islands and mainland but also among the islands themselves.“We see in our study that different types of lentils are grown on different islands — even islands where it was previously thought that lentils were never cultivated,” Santana explains. “It’s important to preserve lentils from different islands, because genetic diversity can prove valuable for the future of agriculture.”The Curious Case of Lanzarote LentilsOne of the study’s surprises involves the “Lenteja tipo Lanzarote,” a common label in Spanish shops. Despite the name, these lentils are not produced on Lanzarote itself. Genetic analysis shows that lentils from Lanzarote have cross-bred with Spanish mainland varieties, contributing both name and genes to Spain’s lentil stock.Jacob Morales, associate professor at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, points to the broader significance:“With the climate change that is now taking place, Canarian lentils, adapted to growing in dry and warm conditions, may be of great interest for future plant breeding.”Archaeology Meets Food HeritageThis study adds to a growing field where ancient DNA from plants is used to reconstruct past diets, farming systems, and cultural exchanges. The Canary Islands case underscores that colonization did not erase Indigenous foodways entirely. Instead, crops and knowledge flowed across generations, surviving conquest, migration, and globalization.For archaeologists, this work highlights how even small, seemingly mundane finds — a charred seed, a lentil in a silo — can speak to centuries of continuity and change.Related Research* Fuller, D.Q. et al. (2014). “Convergent evolution and parallelism in plant domestication revealed by archaeobotany and genetics.” PNAS. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1308937110* Ramos-Madrigal, J. et al. (2019). “Palaeogenomic insights into the origins of the domesticated horse.” Science Advances. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aav9138* Wales, N. et al. (2014). “Ancient DNA reveals the timing and persistence of barley cultivation on the island of Bornholm.” Holocene. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683613519685* Morales, J., & Santana, J. (2020). “Pre-Hispanic agriculture and food in the Canary Islands.” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-020-00778-0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

The Tropical Puzzle in Our DNALong before Homo sapiens left Africa, another hominin was roaming Eurasia. Denisovans, an extinct branch of our genus, inhabited a mosaic of landscapes stretching from the Siberian taiga to the subtropical forests of Southeast Asia. Their genes persist in modern humans, especially in Melanesia and Southeast Asia, where traces of Denisovan ancestry rise above 5 percent. But why do these archaic alleles persist — and why are they linked to immunity?A new study by Attila Trájer in the Journal of Human Evolution takes a different approach to this question: instead of focusing only on the genes, it reconstructs the environments Denisovans lived in, then compares them to the immune-related DNA we still carry.“The Denisovan genetic legacy is particularly high among present-day Melanesians and some Indigenous Philippine groups. Their ancient habitats may explain why we see certain immune alleles in these populations today,” writes Trájer.Mapping the PaleohabitatsThe study models three confirmed Denisovan sites: Denisova Cave in Siberia, Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau, and Tam Ngu Hao 2 (“Cobra Cave”) in Laos. Each site tells a different ecological story.* Denisova Cave: Subarctic boreal forest, seasonal extremes, and tick-borne disease risk.* Baishiya Karst Cave: High-altitude monsoon-influenced subarctic environment, cold but with pulses of moisture.* Tam Ngu Hao 2 Cave: Humid subtropical setting with monsoon rains, likely rich in mosquitoes, helminths, and other parasites.“The Cobra Cave site stands out as a tropical or subtropical environment with optimal conditions for disease transmission,” Trájer reports.By modeling paleoclimate and known ranges of eight disease vectors (including Plasmodium vivax, Ixodes ticks, and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes), Trájer shows that Denisovan populations were likely exposed to radically different pathogen communities depending on geography. Siberian Denisovans contended with cold-weather zoonoses such as tick-borne encephalitis and Lyme borreliosis, while the Laotian Denisovans faced malaria, helminths, and Nipah-like viruses.Ancient Immunity, Modern ConsequencesThe research highlights specific Denisovan-derived immune alleles such as HLA-H*02:07 and toll-like receptor variants still present in modern populations. These genes shape how the body recognizes viruses, bacteria, and parasites.“Denisovan habitats shaped modern human disease resistance,” Trájer writes, noting that introgressed alleles may have balanced pathogen defense with autoimmune risks.Populations in Melanesia today exhibit high frequencies of these alleles, yet live in regions without the cold-weather pathogens of Siberia. This suggests the inherited alleles may have been selected in tropical or monsoon climates — precisely the conditions reconstructed at the Cobra Cave site.Why This Matters for Anthropologists and ArchaeologistsThis approach bridges two fields often kept apart: paleoecology and immunogenetics. Instead of treating Denisovans as a static genome donor, it reframes them as living organisms responding to disease landscapes — much like hunter-gatherers today. It also deepens debates over the timing and routes of archaic-human dispersals into Southeast Asia.The study further suggests that Denisovan cytochrome P450 gene variants, known for metabolizing plant and animal toxins, may have helped them survive in biodiverse environments teeming with venomous snakes, poisonous plants, and mosquito-borne parasites.Rethinking Human Evolution as an Immunological ProcessFor archaeologists, the implications are clear: sites are not just dots on a map. They’re embedded in ecosystems that left molecular fingerprints in our DNA. Future excavations at Southeast Asian caves may reveal not only stone tools or teeth but also isotopic signatures and microfossils of pathogens, shedding light on the coevolution of hominins and disease.“The Denisovan and shared archaic heritage of these alleles highlights how ancient gene variants continue to shape the modern immune landscape,” Trájer notes.Related Research* Vernot et al. (2016). “Excavating Neandertal and Denisovan DNA from the genomes of Melanesians.” Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad9416* Larena et al. (2021). “Multiple deeply divergent Denisovan ancestries in Papuans.” Nature Ecology & Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1127-1* Dannemann, M., & Kelso, J. (2017). “The contribution of Neanderthals to phenotypic variation in modern humans.” American Journal of Human Genetics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2017.09.001* Hubert et al. (2022). “Denisovan introgression and immune gene adaptation in modern humans.” PNAS. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2102859119 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

The Deep Past of MummificationLong before pharaohs wrapped their dead in linen or the Chinchorro people of coastal Chile painted their desiccated ancestors, small bands of hunter-gatherers in tropical Asia were carefully tending to their dead. They lived in humid monsoon climates where natural desiccation was impossible. Yet between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago they developed a method of preservation that was as much ritual as practical: smoke-drying their dead.The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that the oldest known deliberate mummification in the world occurred in southern China and Southeast Asia, millennia before the celebrated cases of the Nile Valley or the Atacama coast.“These burials show that the preservation of the dead was not only a technical feat but part of a shared set of beliefs spanning thousands of years and thousands of kilometers.”The Evidence: From Caves and Shell MiddensArchaeologists examined more than 50 pre-Neolithic burials from 11 sites across southern China, Vietnam, and Indonesia, including Zengpiyan Cave and Huiyaotian in Guangxi, and Con Co Ngua in northern Vietnam. The dead were buried in strikingly crouched or squatting positions. Some were tightly bound, with limbs pressed against the torso. Many showed traces of blackened bone or cut marks around major joints.Radiocarbon dates push some of these burials back to 12,000 years ago. Laboratory tests—including X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR)—revealed subtle changes in bone chemistry consistent with exposure to low-temperature fires and long periods of smoking rather than high-heat cremation.What Smoke-Drying Looked LikeThe burn patterns suggest bodies were not burned directly but placed over or near smoldering fires. Lower limbs, elbows, and frontal areas of the skull showed the most thermal alteration, implying careful positioning.“Rather than reducing the body to ash, smoke-drying preserved the skin and joints long enough for burial, producing skeletons so tightly flexed that no empty space remained between the limbs and torso.”Ethnographic parallels help make sense of the archaeological record. The Dani and Anga peoples of Papua New Guinea still practiced smoke-drying of ancestors well into the 20th century, seating them above smoldering fires for months at a time. These practices produced bodies in the same tightly bound postures documented in the ancient burials.Rethinking “Dismemberment”Cut marks and dislocated bones once interpreted as mutilation may instead represent steps in the mummification process. In several Guangxi burials, for instance, skulls were placed in unusual positions or limbs bundled like firewood. These arrangements are consistent with post-mummification movement, delayed burial, or ritual rearrangement rather than violence.A First Layer of HumanityThe study also reinforces the idea of an early population layer across Southeast Asia closely related to the ancestors of Indigenous Australians and Papuans. Craniofacial and genetic evidence ties the smoke-mummified individuals to this “first layer,” which arrived in the region long before Neolithic farmers swept in from the north.“This deep biological and cultural continuity suggests smoke-drying was not an isolated custom but part of a much older tradition linking ancient Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and Australia.”A Cultural Technology for the TropicsWhy go to such lengths? In tropical settings, bodies decompose rapidly. Smoking offered a technological solution, but the consistency of the practice across space and time implies it also carried symbolic meaning. Among the Anga, the mummified body still houses the spirit of the deceased; among Aboriginal groups in South Australia, preservation connects the dead to immortality. Such beliefs provide a glimpse of the spiritual landscape of early Homo sapiens in Southeast Asia.Beyond Southeast AsiaFlexed burials with possible signs of smoke-drying appear in Jomon Japan, Gadokto Island off Korea, and even in parts of Australia, hinting at a broader tradition of mortuary practice that may extend back to the first dispersals of modern humans through southern Asia.Why It MattersThis discovery reframes the timeline of one of humanity’s oldest rituals. It shows that complex mortuary behavior did not arise solely with farming societies but was deeply rooted in the hunter-gatherer past. It also underscores how ancient technologies—fire, binding, smoke—were enlisted not just for food or shelter but for shaping memory, identity, and relationships with the dead.Related Research* Arriaza, B. T. (1995). Beyond Death: The Chinchorro Mummies of Ancient Chile. Smithsonian Institution Press.* Aufderheide, A. C., et al. (1993). The Chinchorro mummies of northern Chile. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 91(2), 189–201. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.1330910206* Reid, J., et al. (2021). Mortuary variability and body treatment in the Jomon Period. Quaternary International, 574, 19–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2020.07.006* Lloyd-Smith, L., et al. (2013). New insights from the Niah Cave burials, Sarawak. Antiquity, 87(337), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X0004999X* Matsumura, H., & Oxenham, M. (2014). Demographic transitions and migration in prehistoric Southeast Asia. Proceedings of the Japan Academy Series B, 90(6), 239–249. https://doi.org/10.2183/pjab.90.239 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

High in the mountains and across the scattered islands of Papua New Guinea lives a population whose DNA tells a story about the earliest dispersals of Homo sapiens. For decades, scientists debated whether these communities were descendants of a separate migration out of Africa or part of the same wave that gave rise to other non-African peoples. A new study in Nature Communications points toward an answer, and it is as intricate as the landscape itself.“Perhaps adaptations to tropical climates make Papuans look more like Sub-Saharan African groups, even though their genetics clearly link them to other Asian populations,” said Mayukh Mondal, who led the research. “More studies are needed to uncover how evolution shaped this remarkable population.”A puzzle stretching back 60,000 yearsModern humans left Africa between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago. Archaeological finds in Sahul (the ancient landmass joining Papua New Guinea and Australia) show human presence by at least 50,000 years ago, older than many sites in Europe. For decades, this led to the idea of a “first out of Africa” migration — a separate coastal trek that seeded Oceania before the later expansion into Eurasia.But mitochondrial and Y-chromosome studies failed to confirm a distinct ancestry. While traces of earlier dispersals cannot be ruled out entirely, genomic studies increasingly point to a single main migration for all non-African populations.Papua New Guineans complicate this picture. They carry the highest levels of Denisovan DNA in the world — remnants of encounters with a now-extinct hominin whose remains are known mainly from a Siberian cave. This inheritance hints at stopovers in Southeast Asia where Homo sapiens and Denisovans may have met.Using AI to model ancient population historyThe new study combined high-quality genome data with neural-network models to test demographic scenarios explaining the origins of Papua New Guineans. The results point to a sister relationship with other Asian populations rather than a separate, older migration.The authors also identified a severe population bottleneck in the ancestors of Papua New Guineans. Numbers may have plunged soon after arrival and remained low for millennia. Unlike other non-African populations, they never experienced the farming-driven demographic booms that transformed Eurasia.“This unique demographic history left genetic signatures that, if misunderstood, could look like evidence of a contribution from an unknown population,” Mondal explained.Why it matters for anthropology and human evolutionThese findings deepen the story of how Homo sapiens expanded and adapted. Papua New Guinea represents a living repository of the earliest human movement into Oceania and the persistence of small-scale societies over tens of millennia. Isolation and survival bottlenecks have preserved signatures of one of humanity’s oldest population histories.This work also underscores how demographic change — not just gene flow or selection — can shape the patterns we see in human DNA. It challenges scientists to disentangle the effects of ancient migrations from the echoes of small, isolated populations.Related research* Malaspinas, A.-S., et al. (2016). “A genomic history of Aboriginal Australia.” Nature, 538(7624), 207–214. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18299* Bergström, A., et al. (2021). “Origins of modern human ancestry.” Nature, 590(7845), 229–237. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03244-5* Jacobs, G. S., et al. (2019). “Multiple deeply divergent Denisovan ancestries in Papuans.” Cell, 177(4), 1010–1021.e32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.02.035These studies show Papuan and Aboriginal Australian genomes as key evidence for the earliest dispersals of modern humans and the mosaic of archaic admixture events that followed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

A century ago, British doctors in colonial Africa were puzzled by goiter, a swelling of the neck linked to iodine deficiency, appearing in people living far from the sea. Yet this phenomenon had much deeper roots. Across thousands of years, shortages and surpluses of essential minerals such as iodine, iron, zinc, and calcium quietly sculpted the human genome. A new study in The American Journal of Human Genetics argues that the genetic fingerprints of these pressures are still visible today.“Different human populations lived in different environments, so they had to adapt to different kinds of environmental pressures, such as disease and diet, that over time can drive trait differences,” said Jasmin Rees, first author of the study.The Evolutionary Weight of Trace ElementsMicronutrients are the molecular background of life. Iron builds blood; zinc shapes immunity; calcium hardens bones; iodine fuels the thyroid. Yet their availability depends on geography. Soils vary, rivers leach or concentrate minerals, and whole ecosystems express these differences in the food they produce. Before vitamins and fortification, human populations had no buffer.The new study took a broad look at this hidden map, asking whether the evolutionary signatures of micronutrient availability were still encoded in our DNA. Researchers examined 276 genes linked to how humans absorb, transport, or use 13 essential minerals, scanning the genomes of more than 900 people from 40 populations worldwide.“Different human populations lived in different environments, so they had to adapt to different kinds of environmental pressures… This paper is a first step in understanding which populations might be most at risk.” — Jasmin ReesGenes as Geological RecordsFor every mineral studied, at least one population carried signs of adaptation in the genes regulating its use. This was not a localized effect—it was global. Each essential mineral left its mark on at least one group of humans at some point in history.In the Maya, whose ancestors lived in iodine-poor soils, the researchers found strong evidence of genetic changes in iodine metabolism. In parts of South Asia with unusually high magnesium levels, they identified two genes suggesting adaptation to prevent magnesium toxicity. The findings suggest that across continents and millennia, genes responded to the quiet but persistent tug of local geology.A Mosaic of Human DietsBefore agriculture, people already depended on their environment for trace elements. But farming and settlement likely intensified the problem. Soil depletion, monoculture, and new diets amplified shortages and sometimes created surpluses. Over thousands of years, these pressures influenced which gene variants thrived.“This paper is a first step in understanding which populations might be most at risk,” Rees said. “We hope with more studies, the findings can eventually help inform public health going forward.”Why It Matters for the PresentModern human populations are not starting from scratch. Each carries a legacy of past adaptations. As climate change and industrial farming continue to strip soils of nutrients, understanding these inherited vulnerabilities could help predict who is most at risk for deficiency-related disease.Anthropologists and geneticists are now asking how deep this pattern runs. Did micronutrient pressure shape not just physical health but also cognition or reproductive patterns? Could mineral deficiencies explain aspects of migration, settlement, or even myths about sacred springs and salt? These are open questions, but the Rees team’s data lay a foundation.Related ResearchOther studies echo this focus on diet and evolution, each shows how diet-related pressures have repeatedly shaped the human genome.:* Andrés, A. M. et al. (2020). Balancing selection maintains a form of the APOL1 gene that protects against sleeping sickness but increases kidney disease risk. Nature Genetics, 52, 835–845. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-020-0633-8* Mathieson, I., & Mathieson, S. (2018). FADS gene adaptation to plant-based diets in Europe. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2, 1887–1892. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0697-8* Tishkoff, S. A., et al. (2007). Convergent adaptation of lactase persistence in Africa and Europe. Nature Genetics, 39, 31–40. https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1946 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

Beneath the soil of northern Latvia lies one of Europe’s largest Stone Age cemeteries. For decades, Zvejnieki has fascinated archaeologists for its hundreds of burials, red ochre stains, and pendants made from animal teeth. But the flaked stone tools—often seen as ordinary or utilitarian—sat largely ignored in museum drawers. A new multiproxy study published in PLOS ONE changes that, revealing a surprising portrait of gender, age, and ritual in prehistoric Europe (Petrović et al. 2025).“Our findings overturn the old stereotype of ‘Man the Hunter,’” said Aimée Little of the University of York. “Lithic grave goods were not just for men. Women and children were equally likely to be buried with them.”A Cemetery with Deep TimeZvejnieki sits on a former island in Lake Burtnieks, its cemetery active from roughly 7500 to 2500 BC. Over 330 graves have been excavated, spanning Mesolithic and Neolithic lifeways. Many burials are lined with red ochre; some children were interred with amber discs over their eyes or small figurines tucked near their heads. The new study zeroed in on 158 stone tools from 33 graves, analyzing their raw materials, manufacture, and microscopic wear traces.“A missing part of the story was understanding why seemingly utilitarian items were given to the dead,” noted Anđa Petrović of the University of Belgrade.Stone Tools Beyond UtilityThe team found that flakes, scrapers, bifacial points, and blades were buried with adults, children, and especially older adults—without strong ties to biological sex. Children were in fact the most common recipients of lithic grave goods. About half of the artifacts showed no signs of use, suggesting they may have been made specifically for burial.This deliberate inclusion echoes patterns seen across the eastern Baltic. Some tools appear to have been intentionally broken before deposition, hinting at a shared ritual tradition. Others bear microscopic traces of hide-working, meat-cutting, or mineral processing, suggesting these tools once played a role in daily life before being offered to the dead.Why This Matters for ArchaeologyFor decades, archaeologists often assumed that stone tools signified male hunters, while ornaments and pendants marked female or child burials. The Zvejnieki data undermine that binary. Instead, stone tools in death seem to reflect community-wide practices of mourning, memory, and identity.“We cannot make gendered assumptions about Stone Age grave goods,” Petrović emphasized. “Lithics played an important role in the mourning rituals of children and women as well as men.”Ritual as a Community ActOne of the richest burials belonged to a genetically female older child (Burial 207) interred with seven bifacial points, six scrapers, and sixteen flakes. Another, a young adult female (Burial 211), was accompanied by an ochre-rich deposit containing dozens of flakes and blades. These assemblages dwarf those of many adult male graves.Lithic grave goods were not just for men. Women and children were equally likely to be buried with them.” — Aimée Little“We cannot make gendered assumptions about Stone Age grave goods.” — Anđa PetrovićThese findings point to a complex ritual life where children and women could be at the center of symbolic acts, not on the margins. Even simple flakes—usually the most humble of stone artifacts—were sometimes singled out as meaningful offerings.A Wider Baltic TraditionComparable funerary practices have been documented at other sites in Finland and Russia, suggesting a broader cultural sphere. The Stone Dead Project database now provides open access to Zvejnieki’s lithic inventory, allowing researchers worldwide to compare burial customs across northern Europe.Related ResearchOther studies support a rethinking of gender and burial practices in prehistoric Europe:* Nilsson Stutz, L. (2003). Embodied Rituals and Ritualized Bodies: Tracing Ritual Practices in Late Mesolithic Burials (Lund University). * Jordan, P. (2003). Material Culture and Sacred Landscape: The Anthropology of the Siberian Khanty (AltaMira).* Schulting, R. J., & Richards, M. P. (2002). “The wet, the wild and the domesticated: The Mesolithic–Neolithic transition in the western British Isles.” Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 68, 101–123. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0079497X00001487 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

On a windswept plateau in Sardinia, the remains of nuraghi rise like weathered chess pieces. These stone towers belong to the island’s Nuragic culture, which flourished in the late Bronze and early Iron Age. Scattered across the island are hundreds of miniature bronze figures—bronzetti—depicting warriors with horned helmets, archers, ships, animals, and deities. For more than a century, scholars debated where the metal for these figurines came from. A new study in PLOS One offers the clearest answer yet.“The bronzetti were primarily made from copper sourced in Sardinia itself, sometimes blended with copper from the Iberian Peninsula,” explains Daniel Berger of the Curt-Engelhorn Center for Archaeometry, who led the geochemical analysis. “We found no evidence of copper from the Levant, which only became clear once we examined osmium isotopes.”A Multi-Proxy Look at MetalThe team combined multiple isotope signatures—copper, tin, lead, and osmium—to build a geochemical fingerprint of each figurine. This “multi-proxy” approach revealed a kind of ancient recipe book: local copper mixed strategically with imported Iberian copper and imported tin. Although Sardinia had its own tin and lead deposits, these were not used for the bronzetti, suggesting deliberate sourcing choices.“Archaeological methods give us the context,” says Helle Vandkilde of Aarhus University. “But it is the isotope data that allow us to pinpoint the origin of the metals and even detect strategic mixing, perhaps to influence the color or hardness of the final objects.”The study covered bronzetti from three of the island’s largest Nuragic shrines, showing remarkably similar chemical signatures across sites. This consistency implies shared production standards and widespread coordination, not isolated local workshops.Horned Helmets and Northern EchoesThe bronzetti also reframe a bigger question: how far did these Mediterranean networks reach? For Vandkilde’s team, the answer extends all the way to northern Europe.“We only have to think of the Viksø helmets or the warriors on Scandinavian petroglyphs wearing horned helmets,” says Heide Wrobel Nørgaard of Moesgaard Museum. “With new knowledge about where the metal for these figures came from, we are one step closer to mapping the connections between Sardinia and Scandinavia.”Iconography links Sardinia and the Nordic Bronze Age between 1000 and 800 BCE. Horned helmets appear in both regions, from Sardinia’s bronze miniatures to giant stone carvings in Sweden. The new isotopic data make it harder to dismiss these similarities as coincidence. Instead, they hint at overlapping ritual spheres or exchange networks stretching from the central Mediterranean to the Baltic.Bronze Age Connectivity ReconsideredThis research adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that the late Bronze Age was a time of unprecedented connectivity. The Sardinian data echo findings from British middens, where isotopes show animals transported hundreds of kilometers for communal feasting, and from tin-trade studies tracing Cornish metal to the eastern Mediterranean.By pulling chemical signatures from artifacts as small as a figurine, archaeologists can reconstruct the movements of goods, ideas, and people. These patterns challenge the idea of insular cultures and instead reveal webs of interaction spanning seas and millennia.“Having the opportunity to analyze the famous bronze figures from Sardinia is an important step toward understanding how the island was a central piece of the metal trade during the Bronze Age,” says Berger.Related Research* Ling, J., Hjärthner-Holdar, E., Grandin, L., Stos-Gale, Z., Kristiansen, K., Melheim, L., … & Mårtensson, A. (2014). Moving metals or indigenous mining? Provenancing Scandinavian Bronze Age artefacts by lead isotopes and trace elements. Journal of Archaeological Science, 41, 106–132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2013.07.018* Sabatini, S., & Bergerbrant, S. (Eds.). (2020). The World of the Nordic Bronze Age. Oxbow Books.* Wood, B. J., & Williams, J. (2022). Tin isotopes and the Bronze Age trade networks. Antiquity, 96(389), 1023–1040. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2022.73 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

In the late second millennium BCE, the landscape of what is now northern Germany was dotted with monumental burial mounds. Among the largest and most elaborate are those at Seddin, in the Prignitz region of Brandenburg. Archaeologists have long noted that the artifacts buried here—razor-thin gold ornaments, fine bronze vessels, and exotic glass beads—hint at a community plugged into far-reaching networks of exchange. New isotope analysis of cremated human remains adds an even more striking layer: many of the dead themselves were born far from the sandy soils in which they were buried.“Most buried individuals show a non-local, foreign strontium signature,” said Professor Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Gothenburg. “This aligns with archaeological evidence of intensified trade between these regions.”An Elite Hub of the Late Bronze AgeBetween 900 and 700 BCE, Seddin’s monumental mounds marked more than just local power. They were nodes in an interconnected world stretching from southern Scandinavia to northern Italy. The recent study, led by Dr. Anja Frank, is the first bioarchaeological investigation of Seddin’s elite burials. It shows that mobility was not limited to goods; it included people of high status.“We were able to identify that their chemical composition was foreign to the region,” Dr. Frank explained. “However, the investigated individuals generally came from outstanding burial mounds, meaning our results represent only the elites.”The findings emerge from the analysis of cremated remains—bones reduced to fragments but still chemically resilient. In particular, the researchers targeted the petrous portion of the temporal bone, or inner ear, which forms in early childhood and resists alteration even during cremation.Reading Mobility in Bone ChemistryStrontium isotopes, derived from the local geology, enter the food chain through plants, animals, and drinking water. When children grow, their bones and teeth lock in a regional chemical “signature.” Comparing this signature in human remains to the local baseline allows archaeologists to tell whether an individual grew up in the same area where they were buried.The Seddin study compared the isotope ratios of 30 cremated individuals to a reference baseline built from local soils and waters. The results show that most of the sampled individuals had isotope values incompatible with the Seddin region but consistent with regions such as southern Scandinavia, central Europe, and possibly northern Italy.“Identifying the area of origin is less straightforward, as multiple areas can have the same strontium composition,” Dr. Frank noted. “We narrowed it down further using the archaeological record.”Elite Networks and the Movement of IdeasThe isotope results dovetail with decades of artifact studies. For example, horned helmets appear in both Sardinia and Scandinavia at the same time, while Scandinavian-style razors and Italian bronze vessels occur in northern Europe. The new data suggest that such items were not only traded but also accompanied by people who may have brokered or controlled exchange networks.Dr. Serena Sabatini, co-author of the study, highlights that Seddin’s elite dead fit within a broader European pattern of mobility during the Late Bronze Age. “This was a time when the value of bronze shifted, trade routes realigned, and elite groups across Europe began forging new identities,” she said.Reconsidering “Local” Bronze Age CommunitiesThe Seddin study prompts a reassessment of what archaeologists call “local culture.” Monumental mounds, elite goods, and isotope data together suggest that the elites of Seddin were at least partly foreign-born, their status tied to their ability to mobilize distant connections.This pattern mirrors findings from other parts of Europe, such as the Lech Valley in southern Germany, where isotope studies have shown that high-status women were often migrants. Taken together, these studies depict a Bronze Age world far more fluid, mobile, and interconnected than once assumed.Related Research* Knipper, C., Mittnik, A., Massy, K., et al. (2017). Female exogamy and gene pool diversification at the transition from the Final Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in central Europe. PNAS, 114(38), 10083–10088. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1706355114* Frei, K. M., Mannering, U., Kristiansen, K., et al. (2015). Tracing the life story of a Bronze Age woman from Egtved, Denmark. Scientific Reports, 5, 10431. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep10431* Price, T. D., Frei, K. M., & Frei, R. (2015). Strontium isotopes and human mobility: A geochemical approach to archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 44, 217–231. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-013854 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

A New Look at the Evolution of the Human BrainOne of the enduring questions in human evolution is why certain cognitive conditions—autism spectrum disorder (ASD) among them—appear far more common in Homo sapiens than in other primates. A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution tackles this puzzle from a fresh angle, linking cell-type evolution in the neocortex to the genetics of autism.“The most abundant type of neocortical neurons—layer 2/3 intratelencephalic excitatory neurons—has evolved exceptionally quickly in the human lineage compared to other apes,” Starr and Fraser report.This finding suggests a remarkable trade-off: the same changes that may have helped build the uniquely human brain could also have increased our vulnerability to autism.Why Layer 2/3 Neurons MatterThe human neocortex contains an extraordinary diversity of neurons. Starr and Fraser analyzed single-nucleus RNA sequencing data from multiple primate species to track how different cell types changed over time. They discovered a consistent pattern: more common neuronal cell types evolved more slowly, likely because mutations in them carry a higher cost.But one group stood out. Layer 2/3 intratelencephalic (L2/3 IT) neurons, which connect different regions of the cortex and underpin higher-order cognition, evolved much faster in the human lineage than expected.“This accelerated evolution was accompanied by dramatic down-regulation of autism-associated genes, which was likely driven by polygenic positive selection specific to the human lineage,” the authors write.Evolution’s Double-Edged SwordWhy would natural selection favor changes that increase autism risk? Starr and Fraser point to several possibilities. Many autism-linked genes also influence brain development speed. Humans have an unusually slow postnatal brain development compared to other primates, which may have allowed more complex learning—including language—to take root.They also note that changes in L2/3 IT neurons overlap with genes tied to schizophrenia, hinting at a broader evolutionary reshaping of the human brain’s wiring and plasticity.“Our analysis suggests that natural selection on gene expression may have increased the prevalence of ASD, and perhaps also schizophrenia, in humans,” the paper states.Testing the Hypothesis in the LabTo rule out non-genetic explanations, the team used human–chimpanzee hybrid cortical organoids to measure allele-specific expression in identical environments. This experiment showed a consistent bias: human alleles of autism-linked genes were expressed at lower levels than chimpanzee alleles.This pattern strongly supports lineage-specific natural selection rather than random drift.Rethinking Human-Specific DisordersFrom an anthropological perspective, these findings suggest that conditions often framed purely as “disorders” may instead be byproducts of the same evolutionary pressures that gave rise to our species’ extraordinary cognition. Rather than being uniquely pathological, autism’s prevalence might reflect a legacy of how our brains evolved to learn slowly, integrate information across cortical regions, and develop complex social and linguistic capacities.Where This Leaves Anthropology and ArchaeologyFor anthropologists and archaeologists, the study highlights the importance of integrating genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory to understand human uniqueness. Just as stone tools and symbolic artifacts offer windows into our ancestors’ behavior, neuronal cell types and their gene expression profiles may hold keys to our cognitive past.Summary for Social Media (235 characters):New research links autism’s high prevalence to rapid evolution of a key human neuron type. The same changes that built our unique cognition may have increased neurodiversity. #Anthropology #HumanEvolution #NeuroscienceRelated Research:* Human-accelerated regions and autism: Doan, R. N. et al. (2016). Molecular Psychiatry, 21(1), 80–88. https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2015.142* Human-specific gene expression shifts in the brain: Liu, X. et al. (2016). Nature, 530(7590), 171–174. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16505* Neocortical neuron diversity across species: Bakken, T. E. et al. (2021). Nature, 598(7879), 111–119. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03465-8* Human–chimp hybrid organoids for evolutionary studies: Gokhman, D. et al. (2021). Nature, 592(7853), 277–283. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03498-z This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

When archaeologists discuss the skills that allowed Homo sapiens to eclipse other hominins, they often cite symbolic behavior, complex tools, or language. But beneath these visible traits lies something less tangible: the capacity to focus. Paying attention — selectively, deeply, and flexibly — shapes how humans plan, hunt, and cooperate. A recent paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science explores how this trait may have emerged from subtle differences in neurogenetics among modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans.Genes as Clues to Ancient MindsMarlize Lombard, a cognitive archaeologist at the University of Johannesburg, set out to examine which genes linked to attention in Homo sapiens show differences in the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes. Ancient DNA now provides full genome sequences of both extinct relatives, allowing researchers to ask new questions about their cognition.“Paying attention in complex ways is one of the things that humans do differently from all animals today,” Lombard notes. “The question is how far back this ability goes — and whether our cousins shared it.”By sifting through published datasets, Lombard identified 180 genes associated with attention in Homo sapiens that differ from those in Neanderthals and Denisovans. Eighteen were highly expressed in specific brain regions, including the brainstem, cerebellum, amygdala, basal ganglia, white matter, and thalamus. Many of these regions are typically considered “ancient” brain structures, not the obvious centers of higher cognition.“These subcortical regions, along with the thalamus, are implicated in the evolution of human attention and deserve more focused study,” Lombard argues.The Surprising Role of the “Reptile Brain”In modern neuroscience, the brainstem and cerebellum are often cast as housekeeping centers of movement, balance, and automatic processing. Yet recent research shows they also regulate sensory integration and attention. Clinical neuroscientist Samantha Abram, who studies psychosis at the University of California San Francisco, finds the overlap striking.“I was struck by the fact that this paper found the cerebellum and brainstem were huge contributors to the evolution of attention,” Abram says. “It’s another line of evidence that these areas play a role in human thinking, not just basic processing.”The implication is that Homo sapiens may have developed faster, more efficient “relay hubs” for attention compared to Neanderthals and Denisovans — a neurological advantage that could ripple out into planning, tool use, and social learning.Limits and CautionOther scholars urge caution. Cedric Boeckx, an evolutionary neuroscientist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, emphasizes that genetic differences do not automatically translate to behavioral differences.“Having ancient genomes is a valuable source of information, but it has to be used very wisely,” Boeckx says. “There isn’t a direct link between genotype and phenotype.”Without experimental evidence, such as gene-function studies in model organisms, the cognitive effects of these mutations remain speculative. But Boeckx agrees that highlighting subcortical areas broadens the conversation about hominin cognition beyond the cerebral cortex.From Genes to TechnologiesEven with caveats, Lombard’s approach underscores how internal brain circuitry may have supported the outward behaviors archaeologists study. If attention networks in Homo sapiens became more robust, they could have enabled longer periods of focus, finer motor control, or more elaborate social coordination. Lombard’s previous work has already identified 48 attention-related genes expressed differently in the precuneus, a region associated with self-awareness and spatial reasoning.As Lombard notes, these hidden aspects of the brain may hold the keys to understanding why Homo sapiens produced complex symbolic traditions, long-range trade, and intricate toolkits, while other hominins faded.“The goal,” Lombard explains, “is to assess these brain areas’ potential for telling us something new about how the human mind evolved its capacity for paying attention.”Related Research* Gunz, P., et al. (2019). Neandertal introgression sheds light on modern human brain evolution. Nature, 571(7763), 512–516. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1366-5* Kochiyama, T., et al. (2018). Reconstructing the Neanderthal brain using computational anatomy. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 6296. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-24331-0* Neubauer, S., et al. (2018). The evolution of modern human brain shape. Science Advances, 4(1), eaao5961. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aao5961 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

Across the rolling lowlands of southern Britain lie strange hills of bone and soil. They are not barrows or burial mounds but middens—prehistoric rubbish heaps built from the remnants of enormous communal feasts. New isotope research suggests these mounds were more than places to discard leftovers. They were hubs of mobility, identity, and social power at the end of the Bronze Age.Middens as social landscapesMiddens are not subtle. Potterne in Wiltshire covers an area the size of five football pitches, its layers dense with charred bone and broken pottery. East Chisenbury rises like a long, low mound only ten miles from Stonehenge, holding the remains of hundreds of thousands of animals. At Runnymede, cattle bones dominate the soil near the Thames.For decades, archaeologists suspected these accumulations reflected large-scale gatherings. Yet it was unclear just how far the people—or their livestock—had come to take part.“Each midden had a distinct makeup of animal remains, with some full of locally raised sheep and others with pigs or cattle from far and wide,” explains Dr. Carmen Esposito, lead author of the new study, conducted at Cardiff University and now at the University of Bologna.The research, published in iScience, examined six middens in Wiltshire and the Thames Valley. Using multi-isotope analysis, the team traced the geographic origins of the animals slaughtered at each site. The findings sketch a portrait of Bronze Age Britain in motion.A feast of regionsPotterne stands out as a place of pork. Its pigs came from an unusually broad catchment, extending into northern England. This is not the signature of a single farm supplying meat, but of multiple groups converging on a shared ritual center.Runnymede tells a different story. Here cattle, not pigs, dominate, and their isotopic signatures show origins far beyond the immediate region. East Chisenbury, in contrast, looks more local. Sheep form the overwhelming majority of bones, and the isotope values indicate animals raised in the surrounding landscape rather than imported from afar.“We believe this demonstrates that each midden was a lynchpin in the landscape, key to sustaining specific regional economies, expressing identities and sustaining relations between communities during this turbulent period,” says Esposito.The period in question—roughly 3,000 years ago—marked a time of upheaval. The value of bronze declined, trade networks shifted, and communities turned increasingly to farming. Yet the middens show that large gatherings persisted, perhaps becoming more important precisely because they helped knit fractured societies together.Bones as traveloguesMulti-isotope analysis allows archaeologists to track animals across time and space. Because local geology leaves distinct chemical signatures in water, plants, and soil, those markers end up in the teeth and bones of animals and humans. Centuries later, researchers can use this geochemical map to identify where individuals were raised.“At a time of climatic and economic instability, people in southern Britain turned to feasting—there was perhaps a feasting age between the Bronze and Iron Age,” says Professor Richard Madgwick, a co-author of the study at Cardiff University.These events were not merely about consumption. They created obligations and alliances, forged identities, and reaffirmed social structures. The middens themselves became monuments—physical testaments to gatherings that may have rivaled anything seen again in Britain until medieval fairs.“The scale of these accumulations of debris and their wide catchment is astonishing and points to communal consumption and social mobilization on a scale that is arguably unparalleled in British prehistory,” Madgwick adds.Beyond the Bronze AgeThe study complicates earlier ideas of an isolated and fragmented Late Bronze Age. Instead, it shows a patchwork of interconnected communities, each using feasting to anchor social and economic networks. Potterne, Runnymede, and East Chisenbury were not interchangeable—they played complementary roles in a wider system of movement, trade, and ritual.These findings also underscore how material discarded thousands of years ago can retain vital information. In the bones of pigs and sheep lie stories of human travel, social cohesion, and the shifting meaning of meat at a pivotal moment in Britain’s past.Related Research* Madgwick, R., Lamb, A. L., Sloane, H., Nederbragt, A. J., Albarella, U., & Parker Pearson, M. (2019). Multi-isotope analysis reveals that feasts in the Stonehenge environs involved livestock from across Britain. Science Advances, 5(3), eaau6078. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau6078* Parker Pearson, M. (2012). Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Mystery. Simon & Schuster.* Sharples, N., & Parker Pearson, M. (1997). Between Land and Sea: Excavations at Dun Vulan, South Uist. Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

A Forgotten LandscapeFor decades, archaeologists pictured the heart of the Iberian Peninsula—the vast central plateau known as the Meseta—as a barren expanse bypassed by the first Homo sapiens. After Neanderthals disappeared, it was assumed that this cold and arid interior remained nearly empty until modern humans returned near the end of the Last Glacial Maximum.A new study from the rock shelter of Abrigo de la Malia in Guadalajara upends that assumption. Dating to between 36,200 and 26,260 years ago, the site preserves faunal remains that capture the lives of hunters who not only ventured into the Meseta but returned often enough to leave a record stretching over 10,000 years.“The zooarchaeological and taphonomic evidence documents short but recurrent occupations over at least 10,000 years,” the authors write. “This pattern demonstrates that climatic deterioration during the Early Upper Paleolithic did not significantly alter the settlement patterns or subsistence strategies of Homo sapiens.”What the Bones RevealThe Malia assemblage is dominated by medium and large ungulates—red deer, wild horses, bison, and chamois. Cut marks and bone fractures show that humans, not carnivores, were the primary agents of processing. The hunters skinned, butchered, and cracked bones for marrow.“Taphonomic data suggests primary and almost exclusive anthropic processing of medium and large-sized ungulates, from skinning to marrow extraction”These patterns suggest the site was not a permanent home but a recurrent hunting camp. Groups likely stopped at Malia to process carcasses after nearby kills, leaving behind bones, lithics, and traces of hearths before moving on.Climate Windows and Human ResilienceMalia’s sediments preserve ecological shifts. Around 35,000 years ago, climatic amelioration in the Submediterranean zone boosted herbivore biomass, creating what researchers describe as “ecological windows of opportunity” that drew human groups inland.As conditions worsened, with forests giving way to colder open landscapes, humans adapted by continuing to target reliable game. The resilience of these groups contradicts older models that portrayed the plateau as uninhabitable during the harsh climate of Marine Isotope Stage 3.Challenging Old NarrativesPrevious research focused on coastal refuges, where rich archaeological layers painted a picture of Upper Paleolithic life concentrated along the Cantabrian, Atlantic, and Mediterranean margins. By contrast, sites in the Meseta seemed scarce, reinforcing the idea of a depopulated heartland.Malia forces a reassessment. Its evidence shows that early Homo sapiens were capable of exploiting upland, forested, and grassland environments—even under deteriorating climates.“Malia allows us to characterize human behavior in the early Upper Paleolithic and provides insight into the resilience of the first Homo sapiens to successfully colonize challenging and resource-scarce territories”A Plateau Not Empty, but AliveMalia joins a growing list of sites suggesting the Meseta was never a true void. Short-term occupations like those at Los Enebrales and Peña Capón hint at repeated visits by hunting groups. Seen together, they suggest a mosaic of mobility strategies: sometimes seasonal camps, sometimes task-specific stopovers, always tied to the rhythms of climate and prey.Why It MattersThe discovery repositions central Iberia within broader debates about how early modern humans spread across Europe. It suggests that their colonization strategies were not limited to resource-rich coasts but extended into demanding interior environments.This resilience adds nuance to the story of human dispersal: Homo sapiens were not simply opportunistic invaders of easy landscapes but skilled hunters able to extract sustenance from difficult ecologies.Related Research* Alcaraz-Castaño, M., et al. (2017). “The human settlement of Central Iberia during MIS 2: new technological, chronological and environmental data from the Solutrean workshop of Las Delicias.” Quaternary International, 431, 104–124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2015.11.001* Vidal-Cordasco, M., et al. (2022). “Ecological opportunities and the persistence of Upper Paleolithic populations in Iberia.” Quaternary Science Reviews, 286, 107523. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2022.107523* Lombera-Hermida, A., et al. (2021). “Subsistence and settlement strategies at Cova Eirós during the Upper Paleolithic.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 38, 103061. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2021.103061* Sanchis, A., et al. (2023). “Short-term occupations in the Upper Paleolithic: faunal insights from Cova de les Malladetes.” Quaternary International, 685–686, 69–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2023.03.005 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

Paleoanthropology is a field of constant surprises, where the oldest certainties can be upended by a single discovery. For decades, the story of human evolution was a tidy progression: Bigger brains meant greater intelligence, which in turn led to complex behaviors like creating art, using fire, and, most powerfully, engaging in mortuary rituals. This story placed us—Homo sapiens—at the pinnacle, with our ancient cousins like Neanderthals following close behind. But a small-brained hominin from a South African cave system has complicated this narrative in the most profound way.For several years, the species known as Homo naledi has been at the center of one of the most intense debates in the study of human origins. The initial theory, popularized in a 2017 Netflix documentary, suggested that this species, with a brain no larger than a chimpanzee’s, had deliberately buried its dead. The claim was initially met with widespread skepticism among many independent experts. A significant criticism was that the remains could have simply been transported to their final resting place by natural forces, such as water flow. In science, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.Now, a new study in the journal eLife revisits the case, providing a detailed reanalysis of the evidence. The research, led by Lee Berger and an international team, offers a more robust argument for a complex suite of behaviors that include the deliberate burial of the dead. The findings, which have convinced at least one of the original skeptical peer reviewers, are forcing the field to reconsider the fundamental relationship between brain size and the origins of ritual and symbolic thought.The Meticulous Taphonomy of a BurialTo understand the controversy, one must look closely at the geological and taphonomic evidence from the Rising Star Cave system. The skeletal remains of Homo naledi were found deep within the Dinaledi Subsystem, a network of chambers and passages so narrow and challenging to navigate that it requires specialized cavers to reach. This location alone suggests that bodies did not simply wash in or fall from a surface entrance.The researchers focused on three distinct areas within the cave where concentrations of Homo naledi fossils were found: the Hill Antechamber Feature, the Dinaledi Chamber Feature 1, and the original "Puzzle Box" area. At each of these locations, the team meticulously studied the spatial arrangement of the bones and the composition of the surrounding sediment. Their analysis provided several lines of evidence that, when taken together, challenge the idea of natural accumulation.Perhaps the most compelling evidence comes from the state of the bones themselves. The fossils were found in articulated or semi-articulated positions, a phenomenon the researchers call "matrix-supported skeletal regions." This means that the bones of an individual were still held together by soft tissue when they were rapidly covered by sediment. This finding directly contradicts the hypothesis that the bodies decomposed on an open cave floor before being slowly covered by sediment, as decomposition would have caused the joints to disarticulate and the bones to scatter.The team's work also provides evidence that the remains were placed in pits that were intentionally dug. In the Hill Antechamber, the stratigraphic layers in the cave floor, which slope at a steep angle, are abruptly truncated at the edges of the fossil concentration. This pattern suggests that a hole was dug through the pre-existing layers before the body and new sediment were placed inside. Similarly, in the Dinaledi Chamber, a distinct layer of laminated orange silty-mudstone is interrupted by the feature containing the Homo naledi bones. This disruption is inconsistent with a natural depression and instead points to the deliberate excavation of a pit.The newly published work presents a minimal definition of "cultural burial" consisting of three components:* A hole or pit is dug by hominins into the sediment.* A body or body parts are placed into this feature by hominins.* The remains are covered (backfilled) by hominins.The evidence from the cave fits this definition. The new findings are so convincing that one of the anonymous peer reviewers, who had initially found the evidence for intentional burial "inadequate and unconvincing," reversed their position. n their revised manuscript, the authors have implemented substantial improvements in methodology, analytical depth, and overall presentation, which have effectively resolved the critical issues previously highlighted. Key gaps in the earlier version, such as the absence of detailed reconstructions of taphonomic processes, bone articulations, and displacement patterns, have been addressed with thorough analyses and clearer illustrations.The reviewer also noted that the new data now includes evidence that the bones were placed in human-made pits, directly addressing a prior concern.Rethinking the Hominin MindThe implications of this study reach far beyond a single cave system. If Homo naledi buried its dead approximately 241,000 to 335,000 years ago, it means a species with an average brain size of just 550 cubic centimeters was capable of a behavior previously attributed only to larger-brained hominins like Neanderthals and modern humans. This challenges a long-standing paradigm in anthropology, which has often treated brain size as the primary driver of complex cognitive and cultural behaviors.The question of why Homo naledi might have engaged in this behavior remains open. Did they possess a complex understanding of death or an emotional response akin to grief? The researchers are cautious about attributing modern human motivations to these ancient relatives, but they suggest that the behavior is a clear sign of an intentional and meaningful response to death.The paper also highlights other intriguing findings. In the Hill Antechamber, the researchers found a stone object positioned near an articulated hand, embedded in the sediment at an angle that could not have occurred naturally. While the study does not definitively conclude that this was a "grave good" intentionally placed with the body, its distinctive placement is intriguing and suggests a degree of forethought. The team also documented a number of engravings on a nearby cave wall that have been attributed to Homo naledi, adding to the picture of a species with complex social and cognitive capabilities. These findings suggest that the emergence of complex social behaviors was not a single, linear event tied to one hominin lineage, but rather a more complex story of convergent evolution in different species with very different cognitive architectures.As the study's authors note, the evidence forces us to confront an uncomfortable but necessary truth: the story of human evolution is not a simple, single path to our modern selves. It is a story of multiple hominin lineages, each with its own unique toolkit for making sense of their world and confronting the profound mystery of death.Additional Research* Martinón-Torres, M., d'Errico, F., Santos, E., Álvaro Gallo, A., Amano, N., Archer, W., Armitage, S. J., Arsuaga, J. L., Bermúdez de Castro, J. M., Blinkhorn, J., Crowther, A., Douka, K., Dubernet, S., Faulkner, P., Fernández-Colón, P., Kourampas, N., González García, J., Larreina, D., Le Bourdonnec, F.-X., MacLeod, G.,... & Lari, M. (2021). Earliest known human burial in Africa. Nature, 593(7857), 95-100. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03457-8. This study documents the oldest known Homo sapiens burial in Africa, a child found in a deliberately excavated pit in a cave in Kenya, dating to approximately 78,000 years ago.* Pomeroy, E., Bennett, P., Hunt, C. O., Reynolds, T., Farr, L., Frouin, M., Holman, J., Lane, R., French, C., & Barker, G. (2020). New Neanderthal remains associated with the 'flower burial' at Shanidar Cave. Antiquity, 94(373), 11-26. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2019.207. This research describes a new adult Neanderthal skeleton found at the famous Shanidar Cave in Iraq, showing articulated remains within a stratigraphic context that suggests intentional burial.* Sala, N., Pantoja-Pérez, A., Gracia, A., & Arsuaga, J. L. (2024). Taphonomic-forensic analysis of the hominin skulls from the Sima de los Huesos. The Anatomical Record, 307(9), 2259-2277. DOI: 10.1002/ar.24883. This paper explores the taphonomy of the thousands of hominin fossils from the Sima de los Huesos site in Spain, concluding that the accumulation of bodies was not due to a natural accident, but rather intentional disposal of corpses, predating the Homo naledi burials by hundreds of thousands of years. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

Linguists have long mapped the world's languages as grand family trees. They draw neat branches to show how Latin gave rise to French, Spanish, and Italian, or how a single Proto-Germanic root sprouted the distinct forms of English, German, and Swedish. This view, of languages passed vertically from one generation to the next, is a powerful way to visualize history. It is a story of inheritance, of ancestral words and grammars persisting through time, modified only slightly by each passing century. It is a clean and satisfying picture. But it is also incomplete.The reality of language is far messier. It is a story not just of descent but of borrowing. Throughout human history, populations have met, interacted, and mingled, and with them, their languages have done the same. Words leap from one language to another; new sounds are adopted; grammatical structures shift. This process is known as horizontal transfer, and it is a fundamental force in how languages evolve. Yet, for all its importance, it has remained a puzzle, a vast historical landscape shrouded in mist. How can we possibly measure the effect of contact when so much of human history remains unrecorded?A recent study published in Science Advances offers a new way to pierce through that mist. By turning to a different kind of historical record—the human genome—researchers have found a way to quantify the effects of population contact on language at a global scale. The analysis of this data suggests that the story of linguistic evolution is not just one of persistence and change, but of surprising and consistent patterns that transcend time, place, and the immense social complexities of human interaction.The Ghost of Encounters PastFor centuries, the only way to study linguistic borrowing was through the circumstantial clues left behind in the historical record. A linguist might notice a pattern in the grammars of two unrelated languages in a certain region and infer that they must have once been in contact. The evidence for such contact, however, was often pieced together from fragmented historical accounts or geographical proximity, leaving large gaps in our understanding. This made it nearly impossible to draw global conclusions about how contact shapes language. The historical evidence was largely circumstantial, and a systematic, cross-cultural study of borrowing rates seemed out of reach.The team behind the new study, led by Anna Graff and Chiara Barbieri, sought a solution in the field of population genetics. Their premise was straightforward: if a population's genes can tell us about past mixing events, why couldn't they also tell us about the cultural exchange that likely took place at the same time? They proposed that genetic admixture—the presence of genetic material from two previously distinct ancestral populations in a single modern population—could serve as a reliable, independent proxy for population contact.To put this hypothesis to the test, the researchers analyzed the genomes of 4,768 individuals from 558 populations around the world. Using genetic analysis tools, they identified over 125 instances where modern populations showed significant genetic admixture from two different ancestral groups. This allowed them to create a list of "contact pairs," such as the descendants of Spanish and Quechua speakers in South America, whose genomes clearly showed the legacy of an ancient interaction. Crucially, by focusing on languages from different families, they could be certain that any shared linguistic traits were the result of borrowing, not shared ancestry.For each of these genetically-defined contact pairs, the researchers then drew on two extensive databases of linguistic features, covering grammar, phonology, and lexicon. By comparing the languages of the admixed populations with those of their ancestral sources, the team could precisely measure how much linguistic sharing had occurred. This approach bypassed the problem of missing historical records entirely, creating a systematic, global map of language contact and its outcomes.A Quiet, Global ConsistencyThe most striking finding to emerge from this work was a quiet yet profound consistency. The researchers found that regardless of where in the world these populations came into contact, their languages became more similar to a "remarkably consistent extent". The probability of two languages sharing a feature state increased by approximately 4% to 9% in situations of genetic contact.This consistency held true across a wide range of demographic and geographic conditions. It was observed whether the contact took place between populations within a single continent, such as the contact between Bantu and Khoisan languages in Zambia, or between continents, as was the case with European colonialism in the Americas. The findings indicate a consistent link between the history of human populations and the history of their languages.The consistency of this effect suggests something fundamental about the process of linguistic change. It implies that the fact of contact itself is a more powerful and predictable force than the myriad specific details of that contact. The study's authors noted that the social dynamics, power imbalances, and geographical scale of a given encounter do not seem to alter the overall rate of borrowing in a significant way. It is as if there is a general, self-limiting rate of cultural diffusion that persists across all scenarios, constrained enough not to completely erase the vertical history of a language but powerful enough to reshape its structure.The Curious Case of the Unborrowable TraitFor decades, the field of linguistics has held to certain assumptions about which features of a language are more likely to be borrowed. The conventional wisdom suggested that "matter borrowing," the transfer of concrete words, was common and easy, while "pattern borrowing" of sounds or grammatical structures was rare and difficult. The logic was tied to the human brain: while new vocabulary can be learned at any age, the core structures of grammar and phonology are thought to be acquired during a "critical period" in early childhood, making them less accessible to adults who initiate most borrowing.The meta-analysis of the Graff et al. study directly challenged this long-standing assumption. When the researchers broke down their findings by linguistic feature class, the results were not what was expected. The table below illustrates some of the surprising results.The most compelling contradiction appeared in the data on "Grammatical Categories" and "Lexical Classes". These features are notoriously difficult to acquire after early childhood, yet the study found that their borrowing rates were in a range similar to or even higher than "Lexical Semantics".This finding suggests that the social forces at play during contact may easily override what were once considered cognitive or developmental constraints. In situations with strong demographic imbalances, such as those associated with European colonialism, there is high pressure to assimilate to a high-prestige language. The adoption of a dominant group's grammatical categories may not be a simple cognitive act but a social one, a powerful signal of assimilation and a means of gaining social standing. The study posits that a language is not just a cognitive tool but a badge of group identity, and its features can be borrowed or rejected based on social necessity, regardless of their intrinsic difficulty.When Languages Push BackWhile the study found a consistent trend toward borrowing, it also revealed a compelling counter-narrative: sometimes, languages in contact actively reject convergence. This phenomenon, known in anthropology as schismogenesis, is a process of signaling divergence, where groups in contact use linguistic differences to assert a distinct identity. The study found a noticeable number of feature states that, instead of being shared, actually became less alike under contact, a sign of this deliberate diversification.A particularly interesting example of this dynamic appeared in the data on prosody, the rhythmic and tonal properties of speech. Prosody is a powerful marker of social belonging. The researchers found that in imbalanced, colonial-era contact, prosodic features were more likely to be borrowed, a sign of assimilation. However, in more socially balanced encounters, these same features showed a tendency for divergence, becoming a tool for distinguishing one group from another.This dual nature of prosody illustrates a deeper truth about language and identity. The same linguistic feature can be a signal of convergence in one context and a symbol of divergence in another, depending entirely on the social power dynamics between the groups. It shows that language change is not a passive process of absorption; it is an active negotiation of identity, played out through the subtle shifts in sounds, words, and grammar.A Legacy of Connection, and a Warning for the FutureThe findings of this study are not confined to the past; they resonate deeply with the present. The history of human migration is a testament to the power of contact, from ancient displacements of farmers to recent intercontinental movements. Our world is more interconnected than ever, and these same processes of borrowing, convergence, and divergence are at work.Consider the United States, which has historically been a polyglot nation driven by waves of immigration. Yet, it is also a place where immigrant languages frequently face extinction, often fading within a few generations as they are replaced by English. This dynamic is a modern echo of the processes the study documented. Contact can certainly lead to language loss, but as this research shows, it also reshapes the surviving languages, sometimes eroding their deeper structural diversity by making them more similar. As our world becomes increasingly globalized, the study serves as a poignant reminder that the forces of human interaction will continue to transform the map of linguistic diversity, not just by driving some languages to extinction but by changing the very character of those that survive.Other Pathways to the Human VoiceThe Graff et al. study is a story about the cultural evolution of language—how it changes once it exists. But what about the biological evolution of the capacity for language itself? This is a separate but equally fascinating thread in the fabric of human history.Another line of research recently explored a single genetic change that may have been a key contributor to our species’ capacity for complex vocal communication. Researchers from Rockefeller University studied a single amino acid change in the NOVA1 gene that is unique to modern humans and absent in our ancient cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. To understand its function, they introduced the human version of the gene into mice. The result was a surprising change in the animals' vocalizations. Baby mice called to their mothers differently, and adult males altered their mating calls. While this gene is not exclusively responsible for language, its singular change in Homo sapiens and its effect on vocal communication in another species points to a possible biological foundation for our most complex cultural trait.The NOVA1 research and the Graff et al. study illuminate two distinct but interconnected aspects of human evolution. One is about the deep biological changes that enabled us to speak in the first place, and the other is about the constant, dynamic social forces that shape how we speak. Together, they paint a fuller picture of the human story—one in which our biological potential and our social history have always been intertwined.Additional Research* Barbieri, C., Blasi, D., Arango-Isaza, E., Sotiropoulos, A. G., Hammarström, H., Wichmann, S.,... & Bickel, B. (2022). A global analysis of matches and mismatches between human genetic and linguistic histories. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119(12), e2122084119. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2122084119* Patin, E., Lopez, M., Grollemund, R., Verdu, P., Harmant, C., Quach, H.,... & Quintana-Murci, L. (2017). Dispersals and genetic adaptation of Bantu-speaking populations in Africa and North America. Science, 356(6337), 543-546. DOI: 10.1126/science.aal1988* Ma, D., Abrahms, B., Allgeier, J., Newbold, T., Weeks, B. C., & Carter, N. H. (2024). Global expansion of human-wildlife overlap in the 21st century. Science Advances, 10(25), eadp7706. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adp7706* Graff, A., Graff, A., Blasi, D. E., Ringen, E. J., Bajić, V., Bavelier, D.,... & Bickel, B. (2025). Patterns of genetic admixture reveal similar rates of borrowing across diverse scenarios of language contact. Science Advances, 11(35), eadv7521. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adv7521* Xu, C., Kohler, T. A., Lenton, T. M., Svenning, J. C., & Scheffer, M. (2020). Future of the human climate niche. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117(23), 11350-11355. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1910114117 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe