Archaeologists have uncovered rare evidence of ritualized animal sacrifice at the Casas del Turuñuelo archaeological site in southwestern Spain. The site dates back to the 5th century BCE and offers a glimpse into the Tartessian culture of the Iberian Peninsula. The discovery is described in a study published November 22 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

[Related: Early humans carved old skeletal remains from burial caves into tools.]

The Tartessos were a historical civilization settled in the southern Iberian Peninsula from the 9th to 5th centuries BCE during the Iron Age. Archaeologists believed that their culture had a mixture of traits from local Iberian populations and Phoenicians arriving from countries in the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. It had a writing system called Tartessian, that had roughly 97 inscriptions in a Tartessian language. 

In the western Mediterranean region where the Tartessos lived, archaeological evidence of animal sacrifice is difficult to come by. However, written sources including Homer’s The Odyssey chronicle animal sacrifice in the Mediterranean at this time. The gap between the written record and archaeological evidence has made it difficult for archaeologists to establish a clear understanding of what protocols and patterns were behind the practice here. 

Mª Pilar Iborra Eres, a study co-author and archaeologist Spain’s Instituto Valenciano de Conservación, Restauración e Investigación, tells PopSci that the Casas del Turuñuelo site is special due to the “excellent conservation of the building and its contents. In this case, the accumulation of bone remains that testify to ritual activities.”

In this new study, Eres and her team studied an example of animal sacrifice from an Iron Age building that dates back towards the end of the 5th Century BCE. The excavation began in 2015 and they examined and dated 6,770 bones that belonged to 52 animals. The animals were predominantly adult horses, but also included cattle, pigs, and one dog. The remains show signs of intentional burial, which is one clue that they were sacrificed. 

They found that the animals had been buried in three sequential phases. In the first two phases, the skeletons were found to be mostly complete and unaltered. In the third phase, all of the skeletons except the horses show signs of having been processed for food. This suggests that a meal likely accompanied this ritual. 

A case study like this one allowed the team to establish some key details about ritual protocols at Casas del Turuñuelo in order to determine what was behind them. The bones indicate that adult animals were selected for sacrifice rather than young. The presence of burned plant and animal remains also shows that fires played a role in these rituals. 

[Related: Pompeii’s archaeological puzzles can be solved with a little help from chemistry.]

Casas del Turuñuelo also shows some unique features compared to other Mediterranean sites, including the large number of sacrificed horses. 

“The equine remains were discovered as a result of a methodical excavation of one of the areas of this building, the courtyard,” says Eres. “This is where animal sacrifices were made during the use of the building by Iron Age societies. 

The space was also likely used repeatedly over several years for a variety of sacrificial rituals.

The team was surprised that they were able to verify that the deposit here was so perfectly preserved and portrayed what they believe to be an accurate picture of the rituals that took place there. They hope to complete this study by applying new methods to study the samples. 

“Archaeology allows us to learn about many aspects of the life of past societies,” says Eres. “By applying innovative methodologies such as computed tomography, paleoparasitology, isotope analysis for the study of diet and mobility or ancient DNA, the aim is to carry out a complete study of this group of equids.”

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Reviled the world over for making our scalps itch and rapidly spreading in schools, lice have hitched their destiny to our hair follicles. They are the oldest known parasites that feed on the blood of humans, so learning more about lice can tell us quite a bit about our own species and migratory patterns. 

[Related: Ancient ivory comb shows that self-care is as old as time.]

A study published November 8 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE found that lice likely came into North America in two waves of migration. First when some humans potentially crossed a land bridge that connected Asia with present day Alaska roughly 16,000 years ago during the end of the last ice age and then again during European colonization. 

“In some ways, lice are like living fossils we carry around on our own heads,” study co-author Marina Ascunce, an evolutionary biologist with the United States Department of Agriculture, tells PopSci.  

Lice are wingless parasites that live their entire lives on their host and there are three known species that infest humans. Humans and lice have coevolved for thousands of years. The oldest louse specimen known to scientists is 10,000 years old and was found in Brazil in 2000. Since lice and humans have a very intertwined relationship, studying lice can offer clues into human migratory patterns.

“They went on this ride across the world with us. Yet, they are their own organism with some ability to move around on their own (e.g., from one head to another). It provides insight into what happened during our time together,” study co-author and mammal geneticist from the University of Florida David L. Reed tells PopSci. 

In this new study, a team of scientists from the United States, Mexico, and Argentina analyzed the genetic variation in 274 human lice uncovered from 25 geographic sites around the world. The analysis showed distinct clusters of lice that rarely interbreed and were found in different locations. Cluster I was found all over the world, while Cluster II was found in Europe and the Americas. The only lice that had ancestry from both clusters are found in the Americas. This distinct group of lice appears to be the result of a mixture between lice that were descended from populations that arrived with the people who crossed the Bering Land Bridge into North America and those descended from European lice. 

Researchers found genetic evidence that head lice mirrored both the movement of people into the Americas from Asia and European colonization after Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the late 1400’s.

“Central American head lice harbored the Asian background associated with the foundation of the Americas, while South American lice had marks of the European arrival,” Ariel Toloza, a study co-author and insect toxicologist at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnica (CONICET) in Argentina, tells PopSci. “We also detected a recent human migration from Europe to the Americas after WWII.” 

[Related: Rare parasites found in 200 million-year-old reptile poop.]

The evidence in this study supports the theory that the first people living in the Americas came from Asia between 14,000 and 16,000 years ago and moved south into Central and South America. However, other archaeological evidence like the 23,000 to 21,000 year-old White Sands footprints and Native American tradition suggests that humans were already living in the Americas before and during the last ice age. Some potentially 30,000-year-old stone tools were discovered in a cave in Central Mexico in 2020, which also questions the land bridge theory. 

The study also fills in some of lice’s evolutionary gaps and the team sequenced the louse full genome for future research. 

“The same louse DNA used for this first study was used to analyze their whole genomes and also more lice were collected, so in the next year or so, there will be new studies trying to answer our ongoing questions,” says Ascunce. 

Technological improvements can also now help scientists study include ancient DNA from lice that has been found in mummies or even from louse DNA recovered from ancient combs. The study also offers some lessons in studying animals that we may generally experience as a nuisance.

“The world is full of a lot of plants and animals that are reviled or despised,” says Reed. “You never fully [know] what role they play in the environment or what their true value might be. So, be curious and see what stories the lowliest of animals might have to tell.”

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A tiny glimmer spotted amid seagrass by a diver off the Italian coast has yielded one of the largest historical treasure troves in over a decade. According to a November 4 announcement by Italy’s culture ministry, an archeological recovery team has recovered somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 near-pristine ancient coins from the Mediterranean Sea dating back to the fourth century Roman empire. 

[Related: These ‘fake’ ancient Roman coins might actually be real.]

Authorities described the large, bronze coins (known as follis) found near the town of Arzachena “in an exceptional and rare state of conservation,” with only four appearing slightly damaged. Upon further inspection, experts determined the currency originated across the Roman empire between 324 and 340 CE—roughly during Constantine the Great’s reign—with nearly every active mint known from the time, apart from Antioch, Alexandria, and Carthage.

Roman follis coinage entered circulation circa 294 CE during monetary reforms instituted by the emperor Diocletian. Even without a final official coin count, the Arzachena find is already confirmed to be larger than the last major follis discovery made a decade ago in the UK. In 2013, a local metal detector enthusiast uncovered 22,888 follis near Seaton Down a few hundred feet away from the site of a Roman military fort and villa circa the second-to-third centuries.

“The treasure found in the waters of Arzachena represents one of the most important discoveries of numismatic finds in recent years and highlights once again the richness and importance of the archaeological heritage that the depths of our seas… still guards and conserves,” Luigi La Rocca, regional director general of archaeology, fine arts and landscape, said via the Italian government’s recent announcement. La Rocca went on to describe such artifacts as “an extraordinary but also very fragile heritage” that is now constantly threatened by climate change and other human ecological impacts.

[Related: AI revealed the colorful first word of an ancient scroll torched by Mount Vesuvius.]

The tens of thousands of coins may not be the end of discoveries off the Sardianian coast, either. While recovering the follis, divers also found fragments of tall, two-handled, narrow neck jugs known as amphorae. Combined with the coins’ location across “two macro-areas of dispersion” in a large, sandy area between the beach and seabed, experts believe the region could hide the remains of a yet-to-be-uncovered shipwreck. Conservationists are now moving forward with follis restoration efforts.

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In parts of Brazil, water levels are so low due to severe drought that previously submerged ancient rock carvings are visible for the first time since 2010. The petroglyphs including depictions of animals and other natural objects are located on the shores of Rio Negro, at an archeological site known as the Ponto das Lajes–Place of Slabs– near where the Rio Negro and the Solimões river flow into the Amazon River.

These carvings were previously seen during a drought 13 years ago, when the Rio Negro’s water levels dropped to what was then an all-time known low of 44.7 feet. As of October 23, the water levels in the Rio Negro are at 42.2 feet. Some experts predict that the drought could last until early 2024. 

[Related: The Amazon is on the brink of a climate change tipping point.]

According to the BBC, archaeologist Jaime Oliveira told local media that the markings were carved by people who lived in the area in pre-Columbian times. “This region is a pre-colonial site which has evidence of occupation dating back some 1,000 to 2,000 years. What we’re seeing here are representations of anthropomorphic figures.”

In addition to the faces and animals, grooves in one of the rocks were potentially used by Indigenous people in the area as a whetstone to sharpen their arrows. Carlos Augusto da Silva of the Federal University of Amazonas identified 25 groups of these carvings on a single rock.

Pieces of ceramics that archaeologists believe are thousands of years old have also been found at the site. The area was home to large Indigenous villages before European colonists arrived in the Seventeenth Century. 

[Related: Historic drought brings eerie objects and seawater to the surface of the Mississippi River.]

The carvings re-emerged earlier in October amid this unusually dry season. A similar situation arose in Europe in the summer of 2022, when one of the worst droughts in 500 years revealed “hunger stones,” in rivers across the continent. These stones covered in engraved markings show the water levels from previous dry times and some come with grim warnings. Near the town of Děčín in the northern Czech Republic, one haunting stone read “If you see me, then weep,” or “Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine.”

Scientists attribute this drought in South America to an El Niño weather pattern and warming in the North Atlantic linked to human-made climate change. 

Due to the low water levels, endangered pink river dolphins in Lake Tefé, Brazil are at risk of suffocation and a major hydropower plant near Porto Velho has also been shut down. Tens of thousands living in remote communities who can only travel by boat are also being isolated from the rest of the world.

These dry conditions are also accelerating the destruction of the most biodiverse rainforest on Earth. Parts of the Amazon rainforest have already begun to change from humid ecosystems that store large amounts of heat-trapping gasses into more dry forests that release these gasses into the atmosphere. Climate change, deforestation and fires have made it harder for the Amazon region as a whole to recover from severe droughts.

“This is a catastrophe of lasting consequences,” Luciana Vanni Gatti, a scientist at Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research, told The New York Times. “The more forest loss we have, the less resilience it has.”

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Is human society becoming more violent? It’s hard to imagine a point in time containing an event as destructive as an atomic bombing. Even the most brutal acts committed by our ancient ancestors pale in comparison to the organized assaults countries have executed in the last century alone. Ongoing wars and human right violations suggest that we are living in one of the most vicious times in history. But the evidence, according to archaeologists who study historical violence, says there is no black-and-white answer.

To conclude that humans are more violent than ever, you’d need a timeline of all the aggressive actions in human history. Archaeologists have found some artifacts that weave a story of humanity’s violent past from a skeleton that could have been the first murder victim about 430,000 years ago to the ancient Mesopotamian death pits that likely held war casualties or human sacrifices. These pieces of history, though, are still not enough to paint a complete picture. 

The further we go back in time, the harder it is to assess violence and killings, explains Linda Fibiger, an archaeologist at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, who researches conflict in early human history. 

Remains alone don’t tell complete stories. Finding enough evidence to know whether humans at a certain time period were violent, or if someone’s violent death was an isolated event, is tricky. Even if an autopsy of an ancient human implies a brutal death, it can’t reveal a killer’s motive. Some ceremonial acts, for example, were interlaced with violence as people were sacrificed as tributes to the gods.

[Related: Grisly medieval murders detailed in new interactive maps]

“I don’t think prehistory was in an eternal state of warfare and conflict. But with the skeletal evidence and the percentage of individuals with violent trauma, I’m sure most people would have been aware of violence or known somebody who encountered it,” says Fibiger. She also notes whether people in the past considered an act a crime could change the perception of whether they were living in a violent time.

If perception is a factor, it’s possible we could be living in the most peaceful era to date. In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker theorized that small hunter-gatherer groups were the most violent, back in the day, with the highest percentage of people dying from warfare. As communities settled into more organized states, they were better able to become more “civilized” and develop skills of empathy, reasoning, and self-control.

“We would like to believe that we’re so much more smart, reasonable, and more civilized”, says Dean Falk, an evolutionary anthropologist from Florida State University. “But I don’t think everything’s peachy now.” Falk, in her previous analysis of the evidence Pinker presented, found that he failed to consider the population sizes of the different communities in his calculations. This could have inflated the rate of war deaths in hunter-gatherer communities when comparing them to state-based societies. And although a larger percentage of a small society may have died in a conflict, Falk argues that says more about the attacks they suffered than their own violent behavior.

When Falk included the absolute number of deaths (the number of deaths for a given population scaled to their size) into the calculations, she found it was the population size, not the type of civilization structure, that determined whether a society lost their residents to warfare. And while the percentage of annual war deaths was lower among state societies, Falk says the number of annual war deaths has gone up in bigger populations. “This might have to do with big brains and having technology to invent more effective weapons to kill each other.”

There’s also no rule that states we’re on a linear path toward a more or less violent society. New research published this month in the journal Nature Human Behaviour suggests human violence has waxed and waned throughout history. Giacomo Benati, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona in Spain and coauthor of the new study says analyzing violent trends across history often falls victim to bias, focusing on historical battle records or polarized narratives of the ancient world. 

[Related: A group of humpback whales is choosing violence]

His new work, one of the largest archaeological studies on early human violence, tries to avoid that prejudice, by examining  a large set of bones. Benati and his team analyzed any sign of cranial trauma or weapon-related wounds in 3,539 skeletons belonging to people who lived in seven Middle Eastern countries between 12,000 to 400 BCE. 

This study was particularly interesting because it tries to contextualize what’s happening, says Fibiger, who was not involved in the research. The large dataset of human skeletal remains allowed them to link traumatic deaths to ongoing conflicts, economics, and the unequal distribution of resources and wealth caused by climate. “Bringing these things together gives a better concept of people’s lives,” Fibiger says, “and what might have escalated conflict and broken down relationships.”

Interpersonal violence—murder, torture, slavery, and other cruel punishments—peaked around 4,500 to 3,300 BCE during the Chalocolithic period, Benati and his co-authors concluded. The high rates of violence could have to do with the formation of political units vying for control, which may have escalated local quarrels to larger and more organized conflicts.

Benati says the most surprising finding was the steady drop in violence across the Early and Middle Bronze period, which he suspects has to do with better living standards. “After going through thousands of photos of excavated skeletons, life before modern medicine [did] not look pretty,” he says. “It was short, and they had to live with constant ailments and pains.”

Violence rates appeared to pick up again through the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. People may have become more violent due to a drier climate. The Iron Age ushered in a 300-year drought which contributed to crop shortages and widespread famine. This lack of water would have stressed out communities, leading to competition over resources. This possessiveness for limited resources—whether land or food—are universal motivators for violence that is still seen today, Fibiger points out. Additionally, given the worsening climate situation right now, Benati says how people reacted to extreme climate events in the past could tell us how people will react to instability in the future. Climate change, for example, may once again herald a longer period of violence. 

Given our bloody record for handling conflict, archaeologists remain divided on whether humans will ever live in a violent-free society. Fibiger believes people are not inherently violent, but may be pushed into situations where they are required to defend themselves or their livelihood. By learning from violence in the past, she believes humans can do better. Falk is less optimistic. She says it’s possible we will wipe out our species, seeing that we are just as capable of violence as our ancient ancestors. The only difference now is our access to more lethal weapons and more organized warfare. “For proof of that, just turn on your TV to the evening news.”

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The ocean’s diverse seaweeds are full of nutrients and can be very tasty. While seaweed is common in many Asian dishes, it is not as popular in many traditionally European cuisines. However, this was not always the case. New archaeological evidence also shows that early Europeans ate seaweeds and freshwater plants 8,000 years ago. The findings are described in a study published October 17 in the journal Nature Communications and anchor the plants in the past.

[Related: Why seaweed is a natural fit for replacing certain plastics.]

In the study, researchers examined biomarkers that were taken from the calcified dental plaque of 74 individuals found at 28 archaeological sites from northern Scotland to southern Spain. The plaques revealed “direct evidence for widespread consumption of seaweed and submerged aquatic and freshwater plants.”

The samples where biomolecular evidence survived showed signs that red, green, or brown seaweed and freshwater aquatic plants were eaten. One sample from Scotland’s Orkney archipelago also had evidence of a type of sea kale. The researchers also found that seaweeds and freshwater plants were continually eaten in Europe into the Early Middle Ages. 

“Not only does this new evidence show that seaweed was being consumed in Europe during the Mesolithic Period around 8,000 years ago when marine resources were known to have been exploited, but that it continued into the Neolithic when it is usually assumed that the introduction of farming led to the abandonment of marine dietary resources,” study co-author and University of York bioarchaeologist Stephen Buckley said in a statement.

The nutritional benefits from eating seaweed were likely very well understood by ancient European populations. Some historical accounts report laws related to collection of seaweed in Iceland, France, and Ireland dating back to the 10th Century. Sea kale is also mentioned by Roman naturalist and writer Pliny as an anti-scurvy remedy for sailors on long sea voyages. Through the 18th century, seaweed was considered a famine food and is featured in a popular Irish-language folk song. 

[Related: Why seaweed farming could be the next big thing in sustainability.]

Currently, there are roughly 10,000 different species of seaweeds around the world, but only 145 species are regularly consumed. Depending on the type of seaweed, the plants are a great source of fiber, iron, and potassium among other vitamins and minerals. Cultivating seaweed can also be very environmentally friendly, as the seaweed produces oxygen while absorbing excess nitrogen in the water.

“Our study also highlights the potential for rediscovery of alternative, local, sustainable food resources that may contribute to addressing the negative health and environmental effects of over-dependence on a small number of mass-produced agricultural products that is a dominant feature of much of today’s western diet, and indeed the global long-distance food supply more generally,”  study co-author and University of Glasgow archaeologist Karen Hardy said in a statement. “It is very exciting to be able to show definitively that seaweeds and other local freshwater plants were eaten across a long period in our European past.”

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The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE is one of the most dramatic natural disasters in recorded history, yet so many of the actual records from that moment in time are inaccessible. Papyrus scrolls located in nearby Pompeii and Herculaneum, for example, were almost instantly scorched by the volcanic blast, then promptly buried under pumice and ash. In 1752, excavators uncovered around 800 such carbonized scrolls, but researchers have since largely been unable to read any of them due to their fragile conditions.

On October 12, however, organizers behind the Vesuvius Challenge—an ongoing machine learning project to decode the physically inaccessible library—offered a major announcement: an AI program uncovered the first word in one of the relics after analyzing and identifying its incredibly tiny residual ink elements. That word? Πορφύραc, or porphyras… or “purple,” for those who can’t speak Greek.

[Related: A fresco discovered in Pompeii looks like ancient pizza—but it’s likely focaccia.]

Identifying the word for an everyday color may not sound groundbreaking, but the uncovery of “purple” already has experts intrigued. Speaking to The Guardian on Thursday, University of Kentucky computer scientist and Vesuvius Challenge co-founder Brent Seales explained that the particular word isn’t terribly common to find in such documents.

“This word is our first dive into an unopened ancient book, evocative of royalty, wealth, and even mockery,” said Seales. “Pliny the Elder explores ‘purple’ in his ‘natural history’ as a production process for Tyrian purple from shellfish. The Gospel of Mark describes how Jesus was mocked as he was clothed in purple robes before crucifixion. What this particular scroll is discussing is still unknown, but I believe it will soon be revealed. An old, new story that starts for us with ‘purple’ is an incredible place to be.”

The visualization of porphyras is thanks in large part to a 21-year-old computer student named Luke Farritor, who subsequently won $40,000 as part of the Vesuvius Challenge after identifying an additional 10 letters on the same scroll. Meanwhile, Seales believes that the entire scroll should be recoverable, even though scans indicate certain areas may be missing words due to its nearly 2,000 year interment.

As The New York Times notes, the AI-assisted analysis could also soon be applied to the hundreds of remaining carbonized scrolls. Given that these scrolls appear to have been part of a larger library amassed by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher, it stands to reason that a wealth of new information may emerge alongside long-lost titles, such as the poems of Sappho.

“Recovering such a library would transform our knowledge of the ancient world in ways we can hardly imagine,” one papyrus expert told The New York Times. “The impact could be as great as the rediscovery of manuscripts during the Renaissance.”

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Neanderthals cooked crab and created art, but they also could have haunted cave lions and used their skins. Some 48,000 year-old puncture wounds on a cave lion’s ribcage suggest that the big cat was killed by a Neanderthal’s wooden spear. The findings are described in a study published October 12 in the journal Scientific Reports and may be the earliest known example of lion hunting and butchering by these extinct humans.

[Related: Sensitive to pain? It could be your Neanderthal gene variants.]

For about 20,000 years, cave lions were the most dangerous animals in Eurasia, with a shoulder height of about 4.2 feet high. They lived in multiple environments and hunted large herbivores including mammoth, bison, hose, and cave bear. They get the name cave lions due to the fact that most of their bones have been found in Ice Age caves. The fearsome creatures went extinct at the end of the last Ice Age, but live on through their bones and the 34,000 rock art panels at Grotte Chauvet in France. 

In 1985, an almost complete cave lion skeleton was uncovered in Siegsdorf, Germany. The bones are believed to be from an old, medium-sized cave lion. There are cut marks across bones including two ribs, some vertebrae, and the left femur, which lead scientists to believe that ancient humans butchered the big cat after it died.  

However, the authors in this new study took another look at the remains. They describe a partial puncture wound located on the inside of the lion’s third rib. The wound appears to match the impact mark left by a wooden-tipped spear. The puncture is angled, which suggests that the spear entered the left of the lion’s abdomen and penetrated its vital organs before impacting the third rib on its right side. 

“The rib lesion clearly differs from bite marks of carnivores and shows the typical breakage pattern of a lesion caused by a hunting weapon,” Gabriele Russo, a study co-author and zooarchaeology PhD student at Universität Tübingen in Germany, said in a statement. 

The characteristics of the puncture wound also resemble the wounds found on deer vertebrae which are known to have been made by Neanderthal spears. The new findings could represent the earliest evidence of Neanderthals purposely hunting cave lions.

“The lion was probably killed by a spear that was thrust into the lion’s abdomen when it was already lying on the ground.” study co-author and University of Reading paleolithic archaeologist Annemieke Milks said in a statement. 

[Related: How many ancient humans does it take to fight off a giant hyena?]

The team also analyzed the findings from a 2019 excavation at the Unicorn Cave–or Einhornhöhle–in the Harz Mountains in Germany. The remains of several animals dating back to the last Ice Age or about 55,000 to 45,000 years ago were found, including some cave lion bones. They looked at bones from the toes and lower limbs of three cave lion specimens. These bones also had cut marks that are consistent with the markings generated when an animal is skinned.

The cut marks suggest that great care was taken while skinning the lion to ensure that the claws remained preserved within the fur. This finding could be the earliest evidence of Neanderthals using a lion pelt, potentially for cultural purposes.

“The interest of humans to gain respect and power from a lion trophy is rooted in Neanderthal behavior and until modern times the lion is a powerful symbol of rulers!” Thomas Terberger, a study co-author and archaeologist at the Universität Göttingen in Germany said in a statement. 

Future studies of cave lion bones could reveal more details of more complex Neanderthal behaviors and how the animal may have laid the basis for cultural development by our own species—Homo sapiens. 

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The world of mummified poop, or coprolites, offers a fascinating look into the parasites and snacks that pass through people and animals’s digestive systems. Seeing what foods were around can give archeologists an idea of the landscape hundreds of years ago. A new DNA analysis of mummified poop from two pre-Columbian Caribbean cultures reveals that they ate a wide variety of plants, tobacco, and even cotton. The findings are described in a study published October 11 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

[Related: Ancient poop proves that humans have always loved beer and cheese.]

The study looked at the coprolites from two pre-Columbian cultures called the Huecoid and Saladoid. An earlier study of centuries old fecal matter supports a hypothesis that the Huecoid likely originated in the Andes Mountains in present-day Bolivia and Peru before migrating among different islands in the Caribbean around the third century CE. The Saladoid people likely originated in modern day Venezuela and traveled to the Puerto Rican island of Vieques by the sixth century CE.

“Archeologists at the University of Puerto Rico dedicated over 30 years to digs on the Island of Vieques, finding the coprolites along with many other priceless artifacts,” Gary A. Toranzos, study co-author and environmental microbiologist/paleo microbiologist at the University of Puerto Rico, tells PopSci. “One would consider finding coprolites easy [since] they are deposited every day. However, most people will not recognize them and the conditions for coprolite formation need to be very specific.”

Coprolites need dryness to preserve the DNA and it was believed that this preservation was impossible due to the Carribbean’s humid climate.  

“Narganes and Chanlate proved them wrong,” Toranzos says. 

In the study, Toranzos and microbiologist Jelissa Reynoso-García carefully extracted and analyzed plant DNA from ten coprolite samples from the La Hueca archaeological site in Puerto Rico. They then compared the extracted plant DNA against a database of diverse coprolite samples and contemporary plant DNA sequences.

They found that the Huecoid and Saladoid peoples enjoyed a diverse and sophisticated food system, including sweet potato, wild and domesticated peanut, chili peppers, a domesticated strain of tomatoes, papaya, and maize. Their analysis also detected tobacco, potentially due to chewing tobacco, pulverized tobacco inhalation, or tobacco as a food additive for medicinal and/or hallucinogenic purposes. 

[Related: What prehistoric poop reveals about extinct giant animals.]

Surprisingly, cotton was also detected in the samples. This could have been from ground cotton seeds used in oil or because women wet the cotton strands with their saliva leaving strands in the mouth while weaving. 

Additionally, they did not not find evidence of cassava consumption. Cassava is a root vegetable also called yucca and manioc. The authors were surprised that there weren’t any traces of it in these samples, as this plant was often reported as a staple food in the pre-Columbian Caribbean in sources from the time. 

“Cassava DNA was not found, likely because of the extensive preparation of the cassava powder to get rid of toxins in the plant,” says Toranzos.

Different food preparation techniques means that each coprolite sample is only a snapshot of what one specific person had been recently eating. The authors were only able to identify plants that are in current DNA sequence databases and plants that are now-extinct, rare, and in non-commercial crops were not detected. While it’s likely that the Huecoid and Saladoid people ate other plants or fungi than the study notes. The authors hope this analysis gives further insight into the lives of pre-Columbian people of the Americas.

“Even poop is a great resource for agriculture, and many other things,” Toranzos says. “Now we see they are a great way of obtaining information from those who lived thousands of years before us.”

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In the years since the Neanderthal genome was first sequenced, geneticists have been peering into the past to look for traces of this extinct group of humans within our genes. The presence of these ancient genes could make carriers more at risk for severe COVID-19, influence nose shape, and even make some people more sensitive to pain. 

[Related: Neanderthal genomes reveal family bonds from 54,000 years ago.]

A new study published October 10 in the journal Communications Biology found that those carrying three Neanderthal gene variants are actually more sensitive to pain from skin pricking after prior exposure to mustard oil. In this case, mustard oil acts as an agonist, or a substance that initiates a physiological response. Adding it to the skin causes a quick response by neurons called nociceptors that create a sense of pain. 

SCN9A is a key gene in the perception of pain that is located on chromosome 2. It is highly expressed nociceptors that are activated when a sharp point or something hot is applied to the body. The neurons encode proteins within the body’s sodium channel and alert the brain which leads to the perception of pain. Earlier research found three variations in the SCN9A gene–M932L, V991L, and D1908G–in sequenced Neanderthal genomes and reports of greater sensitivity to pain among the living humans who have all three of these variants. 

“It has been shown in previous studies that some rare mutations in this gene that stop the channel from working can cause insensitivity to pain,” study co-author and University of Oxford neuroscientist David Bennett tells PopSci. “We were, however, interested in these other mutations, which were shown to have an opposite effect of enhancing the activity of this channel, thus leading their carriers to be somewhat more sensitive than non-carriers.”

According to Andrés Ruiz-Linares, study co-author and University College London human geneticist, earlier studies show that the mutations are quite rare in the British populations, but they are very frequent in Latin American populations. 

“We thus realized that we had, in our hands, the perfect dataset to not only replicate their study but also go further and identify the pain modality that was at work here,” Ruiz-Linares tells PopSci. 

In the study, the team measured the pain thresholds of 1,963 individuals from Colombia in response to a range of stimuli. The D1908G variant was present in roughly 20 percent of chromosomes within this population. About 30 percent of chromosomes carrying this variant also carried the M932L and V991L variants. All three variants were associated with a lower pain threshold in response to skin pricking after the skin was exposed to mustard oil, but not in response to pressure or heat. Additionally, carrying all three of these variants was associated with greater pain sensitivity than carrying only one of them. 

[Related: Neanderthals were likely creating art 57,000 years ago.]

The team then analyzed the genomic region that houses SCN9A using genetic data from 5,971 individuals from Peru, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. They found that the three Neanderthal variants were more common in regions where the population had a higher proportion of Native American ancestry, such as the Peruvian population.

“They [the mutations] have a rather wide range in these countries, from 2 to 42 percent,” study co-author and University College London statistical geneticist Kaustubh Adhikari tells PopSci. “Up to 18 percent of their populations could carry two copies of the mutation. These are, however, gross estimations. We also know, from the previous study, that these mutations are pretty rare in European populations.”

The team believes that the Neanderthal variants may sensitize the sensory neurons by changing the threshold at which a nerve impulse is generated. The variants could also be more common in populations with higher proportions of Native American ancestry due to random chance as well as population bottlenecks that occurred during when the Americas were first colonized by Europeans. 

“Although Neanderthal intermixing with Europeans is now well-known in popular culture, their genetic contribution to other human groups, such as Native Americans in this case, is less talked about,” study co-author and population geneticist at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment in France Pierre Faux tells PopSci. “In this study, we saw how important and relevant it is to study genetic backgrounds that are under-represented in medical cohorts.”

Since acute pain can play a role in moderating behavior and preventing further injury, the team is planning additional research to determine if carrying these variants and having greater sensitivity to pain was advantageous during human evolution. Understanding how these variants work could also help physicians understand and treat chronic pain.

“Genes are just one of many factors, including environment, past experience, and psychological factors, which influence pain,” says Bennet. 

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In 2006, a cluster of mysterious dark spots on a lakebed of White Sands National Park in New Mexico caught the attention of archaeologists. The shapes stroked their curiosity until they eventually excavated the site three years later. Waiting for them was one of the rarest and soon-to-be controversial discoveries in history—a set of fossilized human footprints. 

The preserved markings were found on the shore of a lake that existed during the most recent ice age, and could be one of the earliest signs of biped migration to North America. Some experts claim they are the steps of the Clovis people, the continent’s first human inhabitants and the ancestors for most Native Americans. The Clovis are thought to have made the journey to North America 13,000 to 13,500 years ago using a land bridge that connected Asia to Alaska. From there, they continued to move as far down south as Central and South America. 

“This was groundbreaking to the archaeologic community, and it was also a tough pill to swallow,” says Kathleen Springer, a research geologist for the United States Geological Survey (USGS) who helped analyze the fossilized steps. “Having 23- to 21,000-year-old footprints is much earlier than the prevailing paradigm of Clovis or pre-Clovis that are known in this part of North America.”

The finding initially received some pushback. When the results were first revealed in 2021, concerned archaeologists wrote comments and papers challenging the results, citing the need for better evidence. More specifically, they criticized the study method and the decision to use radiocarbon dating on the seeds of an aquatic plant that was excavated from the same site. 

Part of the debate came down to an isotope that’s often used in archaeological work. Carbon-14 forms in the air and is introduced to photosynthetic plants and the animals that eat them. When flora and fauna are alive, they have the same amount of carbon-14 as the Earth’s atmosphere; when they die, it decays in their remains. Scientists can then measure how much of the isotope is left and use that metric to calculate an organism’s approximate age. But as some experts have pointed out, aquatic plants like the ones sampled at White Sands can get carbon from the water they live in, which can skew the measurements and make a specimen seem older than it really is.

“It’s called the hard water effect, and it’s a really well-known problem with radiocarbon dating,” explains Jeffrey Pigati, a USGS research geologist who co-authored both studies with Springer. He says the general argument with the first paper is that there were large hard-water effects that made them overestimate the age of the footsteps when they should have been around 15,000 or 17,000 years old.

The COVID pandemic delayed many of the follow-up experiments Pigati and Springer wanted to complete when investigating the site in 2020. Three years later, they finally did with two new methods that corroborate their original estimate of the footprints’ age: radiocarbon dating of pollen and luminescence dating.

To avoid heavy-water effects, the team extracted pollen grains from the same sediment as the White Sands footprints. According to Pigati, this is a time-consuming and laborious process because it involves breaking down rock into one cubic centimeter of material and separating pollen from other organic material before measuring carbon-14 levels. Additionally, pollen is extremely light—experts need to sample thousands of grains to meet the minimum mass requirement for a single radiocarbon measurement. In total, they successfully isolated 75,000 pollen grains. When the they compared the measurements to ones from the seeds of the aquatic plant, the ages matched.

The second technique was optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating. Unlike radiocarbon dating, OSL dating is based on the buildup of luminescence properties in quartz crystals over time; in some rare cases, it can date sediments as far back as 400,000 years ago. The USGS team dated three different mineral samples from the same area where the footprint was discovered and calculated ages that were similar to the ones measured in the seeds.

Still, this does not mean we have a complete picture of our species’ migration to North America. Paulette Steeves, an archaeologist and author of The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, who was not involved in the White Sands research, says there are archaeological sites in both North and South America that date to as early as 11,000 to 200,000 years ago. While she argues it’s not the oldest sign of human habitation in the Americas and may not be proof of the first Indigenous group, “the White Sands footprints site is a great addition to the record of early people in the Western Hemisphere.”

The footprints are just one piece of the puzzle. Archaeologists still don’t know exactly how people lived in the middle of an ice age and weathered harsh climate. Future projects at White Sands could include tracking the footprints to a campsite or further scouring the area for stone tools that could give some insight into their survival. “Every day we’re working out there is amazing because you never know what is going to be discovered,” Pigati says. “This is all a part of science in action.”

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Fictional murderous barbers and real life serial killers are woven into London’s spooky history with legendary tales of their dastardly deeds. However, Sweeney Todd or Jack the Ripper may have paled in comparison to students from Oxford in the 14th century. A project mapping medieval England’s known murder cases found that Oxford’s student population was the most lethal of all social or professional groups, committing about 75 percent of all homicides.

[Related: How DNA evidence could help put the Long Island serial killer behind bars.]

First launched in 2018, Cambridge’s Medieval Murder Maps plots crime scenes based on translated investigations from 700-year-old coroners’ reports. These documents were recorded in Latinand are catalogs of sudden or suspicious deaths that were deduced by a jury of local residents. They also included names, events, locations, and even the value of murder weapons. The project recently added the cities of York and Oxford to its street plan of slayings during the 14th century. 

The team used these rolls and maps to construct the street atlas of 354 homicides across the three cities. It has also been updated to include accidents, sudden deaths, deaths in prison, and sanctuary church cases. 

They estimate that  the per capita homicide rate in Oxford was potentially 4 to 5 times higher than late medieval London or York. It also put the homicide rate at about 60 to 75 per 100,000—about 50 times higher than the murder rates in today’s English cities. The maps, however, don’t factor in the major advances in medicine, policing, and emergency response in the centuries since.

York’s murderous mayhem was likely driven by inter- knife fights among tannery workers (Tanners) to fatal violence between glove makers (Glovers) during the rare 14th century period of prosperity driven by trade and textile manufacturing as the Black Death subsided. But Oxford’s rambunctious youth made for a dangerous scene.

By the early 14th century, Oxford had a population of roughly 7,000 inhabitants, with about 1,500 students. Among perpetrators from Oxford, coroners referred to 75 percent of them as “clericus.” The term most likely refers to a student or a member of the early university. Additionally, 72 percent of all Oxford’s homicide victims also have the designation clericus in the coroner inquests.

“A medieval university city such as Oxford had a deadly mix of conditions,” lead murder map investigator and University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner said in a statement. “Oxford students were all male and typically aged between fourteen and twenty-one, the peak for violence and risk-taking. These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild, and thrust into an environment full of weapons, with ample access to alehouses and sex workers.”

Many of the students also belonged to regional fraternities known as “nations,” which could have added more tension within the student body.

One Thursday night in 1298, an argument among students in an Oxford High Street tavern resulted in a mass street fight complete with battle-axes and swords. According to the coroner’s report, a student named John Burel had, “a mortal wound on the crown of his head, six inches long and in depth reaching to the brain.”

Interactions with sex workers also could end tragically. One unknown scholar got away with murdering Margery de Hereford in the parish of St. Aldate in 1299. He fled the scene after stabbing her to death instead of paying what he owed. 

[Related: A lost ‘bawdy bard’ act reveals roots of naughty British comedy.]

Many of the cases in all three cities also involved intervention of bystanders, who were obligated to announce if a crime was being committed, or raise a “hue and cry.” Some of the bystanders summoned by hue ended up as victims or perpetrators.

“Before modern policing, victims or witnesses had a legal responsibility to alert the community to a crime by shouting and making noise. This was known as raising a hue and cry,” co-researchers and Cambridge crime historian Stephanie Brown said in a statement. “It was mostly women who raised hue and cry, usually reporting conflicts between men in order to keep the peace.”

Medieval street justice was also coupled with plentiful weapons in everyday life, which could  make even minor infractions lethal. London’s cases include altercations that started over littering and urination that led to homicide. 

“Knives were omnipresent in medieval society,” said Brown. “A thwytel was a small knife, often valued at one penny, and used as cutlery or for everyday tasks. Axes were commonplace in homes for cutting wood, and many men carried a staff.”

The team told The Guardian that they hope this project encourages people to reflect on the possible notices behind historic homicide and explore the parallels between these incidents and the altercations in the present. 

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Glaciers are melting faster than ever, and while that might spell disaster for the planet, it has opened up a new field of research called glacial archaeology. Artifacts, bodies, and viruses frozen deep in ice for millions of years are now thawing out and washing to the surface; the warmer climate is also allowing archaeologists to navigate areas that were once too dangerous to excavate.

The 1991 discovery of Ötzi—a prehistoric human who is estimated to have lived in the 4th millennium BCE—in a melting glacier in the Italian Alps currently remains the greatest discovery for glacial archaeology. But it’s not the only noteworthy find we’ve seen in the last two decades.

Treasure trove of arrows

Earlier in September, Pilø and his team were searching through the Jotunheimen mountains in eastern Norway and uncovered a wooden arrow with a quartzite arrowhead and three feathers. Ancient people used feathers to stabilize the arrow and guide it to its target. These accents usually decay over time, but the ice kept them intact. The arrow is estimated to be 3,000 years old and may have belonged to a reindeer hunter from the early Bronze Age. It’s one of several arrows that have been surfaced from Norway’s melting ice in recent years.

In 2014, Pilø and his colleagues uncovered a prehistoric ski in a melting ice patch in Norway. The ski is thought to be 1,300 years old, and had the bindings still intact. In 2021, they came across the second ski, making it one of the most well-preserved prehistoric skis to date. Because the skis were very well-preserved, Pilø says they were able to make replicas and race down slopes with iron-age skis. “That was a lot of fun.”

Prehistoric animals

In August 2010, a partially preserved carcass of a baby wooly mammoth was found in Siberia’s permafrost. Nicknamed Yuka, the frozen animal is estimated to be around 30,000 years old, which puts it back in the last ice age. Based on where the specimen was discovered, it’s likely that the mammoth wandered away from its herd in the grasslands and got stuck in mud. Given that the lower body was well-preserved in ice, it gave researchers an opportunity to analyze the extinct species in-depth and extract its frozen blood.

The melting snow in Antarctica has also led to some interesting evolutionary findings. During a 2016 research expedition, Steven Emslie uncovered the preserved remains of 800-year-old Adelie penguins, along with some less well-preserved remains of the aquatic birds estimated to be around 5,000 years old. According to a study he published in 2020, the penguins were likely moving because of changing sea-ice conditions and were covered up by increasing snowfall, which prevented their remains from decaying.

Organic artifacts

A muddy future

While the warming climate is paving the way to more discoveries of the ancient past, there are some hiccups. Ross MacPhee, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, says that though it’s easier to access places that were once inhospitable, melting snow can be a poor substrate for research. “Everything is a mudhole,” which makes it much more complicated to look for fossils, he explains.  

There is also the issue of ancient artifacts washing away: Pilø estimates 60 to 80 percent of mountain ice in Norway is in danger of melting by the end of this century. He describes it as a race against time. “If we are not ready to search for these finds, they will get lost, and so will the stories they could have told us.” 

A combination of resources from aerial photography of mountains, digital models of terrain, and satellite imagery has helped glacial archaeologists melting glaciers and any areas where  artifacts may have thawed out. However, their efforts can only go so far as ice around the poles continues to melt at unprecedented speeds. If temperatures continue to rise—July 2023, for example, was the hottest month ever recorded in human history—Pilø warns that 90 percent of mountain ice in Norway might disappear by 2100.

Still, archaeologists like Pilø are taking advantage of this fleeting opportunity to dig through the soft ice while they can. While the chances are tiny, he still holds out hope that the melting glaciers will help him find the next ice mummy.

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One of the most enduring mysteries about our earliest ancestors and extinct human relatives is how they ate and procured enough food to sustain themselves millions of years ago. We believe that archery first arrived in Europe about 54,000 years ago and Neanderthals were cooking and eating crab about 90,000 years ago, but scavenging was likely necessary to get a truly hearty meal. A modeling study published September 28 in the journal Scientific Reports found that groups of hominins roughly 1.2 to 0.8 million years ago in southern Europe may have been able to compete with giant hyenas for carcasses of animals abandoned by larger predators like saber-toothed cats.

[Related: An ‘ancestral bottleneck’ took out nearly 99 percent of the human population 800,000 years ago.]

Earlier research has theorized that the number of carcasses abandoned by saber-toothed cats may have been enough to sustain some of southern Europe’s early hominin populations. However, it’s been unclear if competition from giant hyenas (Pachycrocuta brevirostris) would have limited hominin access to this food source. These extinct mongoose relatives were about 240 pounds–roughly the size of a lioness–and went extinct about 500,000 years ago. 

“There is a hot scientific debate about the role of scavenging as a relevant food procurement strategy for early humans,” paleontologist and study co-author Jesús Rodríguez from the National Research Center On Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Burgos, Spain tells PopSci. “Most of the debate is based on the interpretation of the scarce and fragmentary evidence provided by the archaeological record. Without denying that the archaeological evidence should be considered the strongest argument to solve the question, our intention was to provide elements to the debate from a different perspective.”

For this study, Rodríguez and co-author Ana Mateos looked at the Iberian Peninsula in the late-early Pleistocene era. They ran computer simulations to model competition for carrion–the flesh of dead animals–between hominins and giant hyenas in what is now Spain and Portugal. They simulated whether saber-toothed cats and the European jaguar could have left enough carrion behind to support both hyena and hominin populations—and how this may have been affected by the size of scavenging groups of hominins. 

They found that when hominins scavenged in groups of five or more, these groups could have been large enough to chase away giant hyenas. The hominin populations also exceeded giant hyena populations by the end of these simulations. However, when the hominins scavenged in very small groups, they could only survive to the end of the simulation when the predator density was high, which resulted in more carcasses to scavenge.  

[Related: Mysterious skull points to a possible new branch on human family tree.]

According to their simulations, the potential optimum group size for scavenging hominins was just over 10 individuals. This size was large enough to chase away saber-toothed cats and jaguars. However, groups of more than 13 individuals would have likely required more carcasses to sustain their energy expenditure. The authors caution that their simulations couldn’t specify this exact “just right” group size, since the numbers of hominins needed to chase away hyenas, saber-toothed cats, and jaguars were pre-determined and arbitrarily assigned.

“The simulations may not determine the exact value of the optimum, but show that it exists and depends on the number of hominins necessary to chase away the hyenas and of the size of the carcasses,” says Rodríguez.

Scavenged remains may have been an important source of meat and fat for hominins, especially in winter when plant resources were scarce. This team is working on simulating the opportunities hominins had for scavenging in different ecological scenarios in an effort to change a view that scavenging is marginal and that hunting is a more “advanced” and more “human” behavior than scavenging. 

“The word for scavenger in Spanish is ‘carroñero.’ It has a negative connotation, and is frequently used as an insult. We do not share that view,” says Rodríguez. “Scavengers play a very important role in ecosystems, as evidenced by the ecological literature in the last decades. We view scavenging as a product of the behavioral flexibility and cooperative abilities of the early hominins.”

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There’s a recurring mystery surrounding early human migration: Exactly when did Homo sapiens make their way from Africa into Europe and Asia? It’s possible that a period of warmer temperatures could have contributed to this flow of people into Eurasia, according to a study published September 22 in the journal Science Advances. Warmer temperatures and more humidity may have helped the forests in the region grow and expand north into present-day Siberia. The theory hinges on the presence of pollen in the region’s sediment record. The scourge of modern day spring allergy sufferers could have laid the groundwork for our very distant ancestors’ migration into Eurasia.  

[Related: Humans and Neanderthals could have lived together even earlier than we thought.]

This movement could have begun in three waves into Eurasia about 54,000 years ago. It is also likely that both warm and cold climates would have played a role in this travel. The Pleistocene Epoch is known for huge climatic shifts, including the formation of the massive ice sheets and glaciers that would eventually forge and shape many of the landforms we see on Earth today. 

To piece together what the climate could have looked like during a possible warm period about 45,000 to 50,000 years ago, researchers working on the study created a record of the vegetation and pollen from the Pleistocene found around Lake Baikal in present-day Siberian region of Russia with the oldest archeological traces of Homo sapiens in the area. 

Sediment cores were used to extract data for a pollen timeline, and the study suggests that the dispersal of humans occurred during some of the highest temperatures and highest humidity of the late Pleistocene. The presence of more ancient pollen, and thus plant life, in the record shows evidence that coniferous forests and grasslands may have spread further throughout the region and could support foraging for food and hunting by humans. According to study author and University of Kansas anthropologist Ted Goebel, the environmental data combined with archeological evidence tell a new story of the area. 

“This contradicts some recent archaeological perspectives in Europe. The key factor here is accurate dating, not just of human fossils and animal bones associated with the archaeology of these people, but also of environmental records, including from pollen,” Goebel said in a statement. “What we have presented is a robust chronology of environmental changes in Lake Baikal during this time period, complemented by a well-dated archaeological record of Homo sapiens’ presence in the region.”

Goebel worked with teams from three institutions in Japan, including Masami Izuho of Tokyo Metropolitan University. During the pollen analysis, the team found some potential connections between the pollen data and the archeological record of early human migration into the region. The early modern humans of this period were making stone tools on slender blands and using bones, antlers, and even ivory to craft the tools. 

“There is one human fossil from Siberia, although not from Lake Baikal but farther west, at a place called Ust’-Ishim,” Goebel said. “Morphologically, it is human, but more importantly, it’s exceptionally well-preserved. It has been directly radiocarbon-dated and has yielded ancient DNA, confirming it as a representative of modern Homo sapiens, distinct from Neanderthals or Denisovans, or other pre-modern archaic humans.”

[Related: World’s oldest known wooden structure pre-dates our species.]

It’s possible that the earliest humans in the area likely would have lived in extended nuclear families, but it is difficult to say with certainty since so much archeological evidence has degraded over time. Ust’-Ishim in Siberia provides the earliest known evidence of fully modern humans coexisting with other extinct human species in the area, but the find was an “isolated discovery,” according to the team.

“We lack information about its archaeological context, whether it was part of a settlement or simply a solitary bone washed downstream,” said Goebel. “Consequently, linking that single individual to the archaeological sites in the Baikal region is tenuous—do they represent the same population? We think so, but definitely need more evidence.”

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The values and lifestyles of past societies are often revealed to anthropologists and archaeologists through their relationship with death and the burial of their dead. It’s an essential hallmark of human cultural systems and part of this relationship involves manipulations, retrieval, and reburial of human remains after an individual had died. Now, some new evidence from a cave in Spain shows that early humans may have returned to the burial site to craft tools from the bones and possibly extract marrow, potentially as food. The findings are detailed in a study published September 20 in the open-access journal PLOS One.

[Related: Cremated remains still hold clues to life and death in the Bronze Age.]

Caves along the Iberian Peninsula were not only Neanderthal crab cooking hotspots, but also as places to bury the dead and modify human remains for thousands of years. Using caves for burials was a common practice in multiple present-day countries, and it began to become more common in Portugal and Spain around the 4,000 BCE. The archaeological sites in this region show evidence that human remains were later manipulated for other uses, but the cultural meaning behind these changes is still largely unclear. 

University of Bern bioarchaeologist Zita Laffranchi, anthropologist Marco Milella, and  Universidad de Córdoba archaeologist Rafael M. Martínez Sánchez co-wrote the study, and  believe that the underground and dark features of the caves likely provided ancient humans with a well-suited place to house remains. 

“Such traits are shared by ancient Neolithic farming societies in Iberia, Europe, and other parts of the world, as part of a system of transcultural responses towards death. As if it were a ‘device of making ancestors,’ the community remains grouped together after death, in a subterranean space interpreted as a perpetual projection of an eternal nocturnal environment,” the study authors wrote in an interview accompanying the paper.

In the new study, the team examined human remains from the Cueva de los Marmoles cave in southern Spain. They looked at the bones of at least 12 people. Radiocarbon dating pegged the burials between the fifth and second millennium BCE, roughly from this area’s Neolithic period to its Bronze Age. Most of the items from this study were excavated between 1998 and 2018. These include a diligently carved human skull cup, a tibia that appears to have been modified for use as a tool, and dozens of other bone fragments found in the almost 27,000 square-foot cave. 

New evidence suggests that some remains may have been intentionally broken and scraped for marrow for up to a year after the Marmoles individuals had died. The team noted the intentional post-mortem modifications made to the remains, which include some fractures and scrapes to the bones. These cuts could have resulted from efforts to get marrow and other tissues from the bones for dietary or practical uses. 

They were initially surprised by the extended time frame that the cave was used for funerary practices.

“This suggests that Marmoles was a symbolic landmark for human communities living in the area, and was likely to be the presence of specific funerary traditions,” wrote the authors. “Secondly, the most interesting aspect of our findings was the complex treatment of the remains, often difficult to interpret, but which unequivocally points to rather homogenous actions, and well-defined traditions and beliefs systems.”

[Related: Extinct human cousins may have beaten us to inventing burial rituals.]

These results match other cave sites in the region, and show that burying human remains in caves and later modifying and using them as food and tools was daily widespread. While there could also be further symbolic purposes for these body modifications, those are still unclear and need further study. 

The authors say that the next steps will include continued archaeological study of the save and apply more radiocarbon, anthropological, and zooarchaeological analyses to the skeletal remains that may emerge in future digs at Marmoles and other burial caves in the area. 

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Archaeologists in Zambia have uncovered a wooden structure dating back about 476,000 years to the Early Stone Age or Pleistocene Epoch. It represents the earliest known use of wood in construction by human ancestors. The discovery at Kalambo Falls expands scientists’ understanding of the technical abilities early hominins must have had in order to shape tree trunks into large combined structures. The findings are detailed in a study published September 20 in the journal Nature. The structure itself predates the evolution of our own species (Homo sapiens) by potentially over 120,000 years. 

[Related: Mysterious skull points to a possible new branch on human family tree.]

Kalambo Falls is a 772-foot-tall waterfall that sits on the border of Zambia and Tanzania and is the second highest uninterrupted waterfall on the African continent. The wooden structure found there in 2019 includes two preserved interlocking logs joined side-to-side by an intentionally cut notch. The upper log appears to have been purposefully shaped and tool marks were found on both logs and a collection of wooden tools was also found.

The find is the earliest known evidence of humans deliberately shaping two logs to fit together. The authors believe that the logs may have been used to build a raised platform, walkway, or the foundation for dwellings constructed in the region’s periodically wet floodplain. Previous research has shown evidence that wood use at this time was limited to its use for digging, as spears, and in making fire. The other earliest example of a clearly modified wood object was collected in South Africa in 1952 and dates back to the Middle Stone Age. 

“This find has changed how I think about our early ancestors. Forget the label ‘Stone Age,’ look at what these people were doing: they made something new, and large, from wood,” study co-author and University of Liverpool archaeologist Larry Barham said in a statement. “They used their intelligence, imagination, and skills to create something they’d never seen before, something that had never previously existed.”

Additionally, the authors say that this discovery challenges the view that Stone Age humans were nomadic. Kalambo Falls would have provided them with a constant source of water, and the forest around them would have supplied enough wood to help them make more permanent or semi-permanent structures. 

“They transformed their surroundings to make life easier, even if it was only by making a platform to sit on by the river to do their daily chores. These folks were more like us than we thought,” said Barham.

The team used new luminescence dating techniques to reveal an object’s age. It can estimate the last time that minerals in the sand surrounding the wood were exposed to sunlight. The analysis estimates that the artifact is close to half a million years old. 

“At this great age, putting a date on finds is very challenging and we used luminescence dating to do this,” study co-author and Aberystwyth University geographer and luminescence dating scientist Geoff Duller said in a statement. “These new dating methods have far reaching implications – allowing us to date much further back in time, to piece together sites that give us a glimpse into human evolution.”

[Related: Humans and Neanderthals could have lived together even earlier than we thought.]

The archaeological site Kalambo Falls was first excavated in the 1950s and 1960s, long before dating techniques could allow archaeologists to understand the significance of the findings. The area is currently on a tentative list to become a UNESCO World Heritage site due to its archaeological significance.   

This research is part of the Deep Roots of Humanity project, an interdisciplinary international team of researchers investigating how human technology developed in the Stone Age. 

“Kalambo Falls is an extraordinary site and a major heritage asset for Zambia. The Deep Roots team is looking forward to more exciting discoveries emerging from its waterlogged sands,” said Barham.

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Cave paintings and rock art date back at least more than 57,000 years. They detail everything from an early form of writing to more recent dark stories of conflict. They also appear to have been an important animal tracking tool. In present-day Namibia, prehistoric peoples from the Late Stone Age put so much detail into their engravings of human and animal prints, that modern day Indigenous trackers were able to identify exactly which animal prints they were depicting, but also the animals general age and sex. The findings are detailed in a study published September 13 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

[Related: Cave drawings from 20,000 years ago may feature an early form of writing.]

While engravings of human footprints and animal tracks appear in various traditions of prehistoric rock art around the world, Namibia is especially rich in well-executed rock art made by hunter-gatherers in the Late Stone Age. 

In the new study, a team of researchers from Germany and Namibia worked with Indigenous tracking experts from the Kalahari desert to analyze animal and human footprints found in rock art in the Doro! Nawas Mountains in central Western Namibia. The tracking experts were able to define the species, sex, age group, and even the exact leg of the animal or human print in more than 90 percent of the 513 engravings they examined. The rock art had significantly more diversity in the animals represented by the tracks than the ones of animals themselves. The prehistoric engravers also showed a clear preference for certain species of animals, were more likely to depict adult animals than juveniles, and male footprints outnumbered female footprints.

According to the team, the new findings reveal some patterns that likely arise from culturally determined preferences, but the meaning of these cultural preference patterns is still unknown. The team believes that consulting with present-day Indigenous experts may help determine more of the meaning behind the drawings. However, they point out that while Indigenous knowledge is critical for advancing archaeological research, the precise meaning and context of this rock art will likely remain elusive.

[Related: A discovery found in Germany’s ‘Unicorn Cave’ hints at Neanderthal art.]

“Namibia’s rock faces contain numerous Stone Age depictions of animals and humans, as well as human footprints and animal tracks. Until now, the latter have received little attention because researchers lacked the knowledge to interpret them,” the authors added.

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A team of archaeologists have unearthed a roughly 1,000 year-old mummy with well-preserved brown hair in Peru’s capital city of Lima. The mummified remains were found alongside preserved textiles, ceramic vessels, and other objects at the Huaca Pucllana monument, a 82-foot tall clay pyramid with  an archaeological site hidden inside of a ceremonial grave. 

[Related: Machu Picchu was home to ancient people from all over South America.]

“This is an adult individual in a sitting position with bent legs,” head archaeologist Mirella Ganoza told Reuters. Ganoza noted that the mummy’s long hair and jaw were both nearly completely intact, but the sex of the individual is still unknown. 

Archaeologists have found other mummies and ancient offerings at the Huaca Pucllana site before. But there is still more to be uncovered, according to the team. Lima itself is home to about 400 sacred sites, with numerous archaeological ruins and mummies. Years of finds have been used to analyze the cultural, health, and social conditions of Indigenous Peruvians. In April, another 1,000 year old mummy was found about 15 miles from Lima at the Cajamarquilla archaeological site. Those remains were believed to be from an adolescent and some of the corpse’s skin was still distinguishable. It was found burried with at least 20 other individuals who are thought to be victims of human sacrifice.

Long before the Incas built their mountaintop royal retreat Machu Picchu or Spanish colonizers first arrived around 1527, Peru was home to multiple thriving pre-Hispanic cultures, including the Ychsma people. Huaca Pucllana was built by the Ychsma around 500 CE and is the heart of present-day Lima’s Miraflores district. It’s believed that the Ychsma used it as a cemetery. The Ychsma people are credited with building at least 16 pyramids, some of which are older than Egypt’s pyramids by about 4,000 years. The irrigation experts dominated the central coast of Peru until it was absorbed by the Inca empire around roughly 1468. The mummified remains themselves can be traced back about 1000 CE. 

[Related: Scientists use AI to help uncover elusive Nazca lines.]

“I find it quite interesting that right in the heart of Miraflores, in the middle of the city, surrounded by modern buildings and constructions, an important site is still preserved, the Huaca Pucllana ceremonial center,” Ganoza told Reuters.

Earlier this year, researchers discovered a similar mummy believed to be close to 3,000 years old in Lima. This mummy’s skull also had intact hair that was found inside of a cotton bundle before the rest of the remains were uncovered.  That mummy is believed to be from the Manchay culture, which developed between 1500 and 1000 BC in Lima’s valleys. The Manchay are associated with the construction of temples built in a U-shape that pointed toward the sunrise, according to Reuters. 

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A team of scientists from the United States, Italy, and China may have finally explained a large gap in the African and Eurasian fossil record. According to a model in a study published August 31 in the journal Science, the population of human ancestors crashed between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago. They estimate that there were only 1,280 breeding individuals alive during this transition between the early and middle Pleistocene. About 98.7 percent of the ancestral population was lost at the beginning of this ancestral bottleneck that lasted for roughly 117,000 years, according to the study.

[Related: Want more eye-opening science stories? Sign up for a PopSci newsletter.]

During the Late Pleistocene, modern humans spread outside of the African continents and other human species like Neanderthals began to go extinct. The Australian continent and the Americas also saw humans for the first time and the climate was generally cold. This era is best known for its massive ice sheets and glaciers that shifted around the planet and shaped many of the landforms we see on Earth today.. 

In this study, the team used a new method called fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal), as a way to determine ancient demographic inferences with modern-day human genomic sequences from 3,154 people. 

“The fact that FitCoal can detect the ancient severe bottleneck with even a few sequences represents a breakthrough,” study co-author and University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston theoretical population geneticist Yun-Xin FU said in a statement.   

FitCoal helped the team calculate what this ancient loss of life and genetic diversity looked like utilizing present-day genome sequences from 10 African and 40 non-African populations.

“The gap in the African and Eurasian fossil records can be explained by this bottleneck in the Early Stone Age chronologically,” study co-author and Sapienza University anthropologist Giorgio Manzi said in a statement.  “It coincides with this proposed time period of significant loss of fossil evidence.”

Some of the potential reasons behind this population drop are mostly related to extremes in climate. Temperatures changed, severe droughts persisted, and food sources may have dwindled as animals like mammoths, mastodons, and giant sloths went extinct. According to the study, an estimated 65.85 percent of current genetic diversity may have been lost due to this bottleneck. The loss in genetic diversity prolonged a period of minimal numbers of humans who could successfully breed and was a major threat to the species. 

However, this bottleneck also may have contributed to a speciation event, which happens when two or more species are created from a single lineage. During this speciation event, two ancestral chromosomes may have converged to form what is now chromosome 2 in modern humans. Chromosome 2 is the second largest human chromosome, and spans about 243 million building blocks of DNA base pairs. Understanding this split helped the team pinpoint what could be the last common ancestor for the Denisovans, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens (modern humans). 

[Related: Why you should sleep naked tonight, according to science]

“The novel finding opens a new field in human evolution because it evokes many questions, such as the places where these individuals lived, how they overcame the catastrophic climate changes, and whether natural selection during the bottleneck has accelerated the evolution of human brain,” co-author and East China Normal University evolutionary and functional genomics expert Yi-Hsuan PAN said in a statement.

In future studies, researchers could continue to find answers to how such a small population persisted in the face of climate adversity. It’s possible that learning to control fire and a climate that began to shift to be more hospitable to human life may have contributed to the rapid human population increase about 813,000 years ago.      

“These findings are just the start,” study co-author and Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health theoretical population geneticist and computational biologist LI Haipeng said in a statement. “Future goals with this knowledge aim to paint a more complete picture of human evolution during this Early to Middle Pleistocene transition period, which will in turn continue to unravel the mystery that is early human ancestry and evolution.”

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While Ancient Egyptians believed in life after death for everyone, mummification was a process typically reserved for royalty—and their friends. Egyptian pharaohs wanted to make sure their close companions joined them in the next world, so they extended the courtesy of mummification to their inner circle. This discovery came to light more than a century ago, when archaeologists inspected the items used to preserve the body of a noblewoman called Senetnay.

And though her life may have ended, her story lives on. Senetnay’s remains continue to spill secrets of ancient Egyptian funeral practices: Two now-empty jars that once held her lungs and liver had been sitting untouched, until recently, in the Museum August Kestner in Germany. An international team of archaeologists analyzed the residue of balm remaining in the containers. From this ointment, the authors of a study published today in Scientific Reports extracted new details on Senetnay’s past life and Egyptian trading relations.

Senetnay lived in Egypt around 1,450 BCE and was the wet nurse for the son of Pharaoh Thutmose III, the future Pharaoh Amenhotep II. Yet her mummifications reflect an almost pharaonic-like status, describes Barbara Huber, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany and lead study author. 

[Related: This is the best look yet into ancient Egyptians’ mummy-making chemicals]

In 1900, famed Egyptologist Howard Carter—who also found King Tut’s tomb two decades later—uncovered Senetnay’s remains in the Valley of the Kings. While there was not a complete body, he noticed four jars used to preserve her organs. In mummification, the body is dried out and organs placed in jars filled with antibacterial balms to slow down decomposition. Huber and her colleagues scraped six samples from the leftover balm found in the inner wall and base of the two containers. 

Using several chemical techniques to separate and study the chemical composition of each sample, the authors found remnants of beeswax, plant oils, animal fats, bitumen (a petroleum-based substance), and resins. “The study uses sophisticated scientific methods to analyze the material of the balm in the jars,” says Sahar Saleem, a mummy expert and radiology professor at Cairo University who was not involved in the study. She adds that the archeological methods  used in the research helps go beyond generalizations and Egyptian myths to provide unique knowledge of the royal mummification process.

Both jars also showed hints of the compounds coumarin and benzoic acid. Sweet, vanilla-scented coumarin is found in cinnamon. Benzoic acid, a derivative from tree bark, has a faint but fragrant smell.

“Because there were so many aromatic materials used in embalming, we assumed the smell was used to mask the stench of decomposing bodies. It must have been a very interesting olfactory experience,” Huber says.

[Related: Egypt is reclaiming its mummies and its past]

Senetnay likely held a high social standing. Some of the substances were not commonly used for embalming in Egypt at the time. Their presence suggests her mummification was handled with extra-special care; these ingredients must have been imported from all over the world. One of the resins used to store her lungs, for example, could have been dammar, obtained from trees that grow exclusively in the tropical rainforests of southeast Asia. “This means in the mid-second millennium there would have already been far-away trade connections from ancient Egypt to other parts of the world,” Huber says.

It’s also possible this resin could have belonged to the Pistacia trees that are normally found in the Mediterranean coastal region. Additionally, there was evidence of larch resin, based on the presence of the medicinal ingredient larixol in the embalming jar. This substance, used in  ancient Rome, comes from a plant species native to an area north of Egypt, across the Mediterranean. Archeologists haven’t fully explored this region for trade connections, Huber notes, which could give more evidence into the relationship between ancient Egypt and Central Europe.

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Burial rites and other forms of grieving the dead possibly date back to the Neanderthals or even an extinct hominid species named Homo naledi. The ancient origins of these important social and emotional rituals for those left behind are still quite a mystery, and anthropologists are still piecing together how these practices have evolved over the course of humanity. With the help of some cutting edge technology, a team from Slovakia, Czech Republic, Belgium, and Austria was able to reconstruct the funerary process of two individuals whose burned remains were uncovered in urns dating back to late in the Bronze Age. The findings were published August 30 in the journal PLoS ONE.

[Related: Composting a human body, explained.]

Scientists studying these processes typically look at two different types of burials—traditional inhumation burials where the deceased is buried and urn burials in which the deceased’s remains are burned and stored in an urn. In many European countries, urn burials from prehistoric times are excavated by archaeologists before heading into the lab for further study. 

“For inhumation burials, if you have a complete human skeleton, it is possible to reconstruct a so-called osteobiography—a biography of the deceased individuals based on information obtained from the bones—pretty well,” study co-author and forensic anthropologist Lukas Waltenberger tells PopSci. Waltenberger is currently working at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

According to Waltenberger, scientists can use the pelvis and features from the skull to determine the sex of the deceased, determine the age of death from bone and teeth development, and even theorize a cause of death from evidence of trauma. While the characteristic bone features needed for these kinds of analyses are often destroyed by the fire or during an excavation, scientists are not always completely out of luck.

“It is a modern myth that if a body is cremated, it will turn into ash,” says Waltenberger. “Bone fragments of up to 20 cm [7 inches] in length remain, which contain various information about the life of a person. By reading this information it is possible to tell an individual’s life history even after millenia.”

[Related: This 7th-century teen was buried with serious bling—and we now know what she may have looked like.]

For this study, Waltenberger received complete urn burials from Late Bronze Age Austria (roughly 1400-1300 BCE) that were first uncovered in 2021 and recorded and analyzed all of the material left behind in these urn burial. The interdisciplinary team combined traditional archaeological techniques with anthropology, computed tomography, archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, geochemistry, and isotopic approaches.

The team first used CT scans to virtually excavate the urns without tampering with them. Eventually, some of the large bone fragments were still recognizable and then started to crumble smaller pieces during the micro-excavation. They then performed osteological (bone) and strontium isotope analysis which revealed details about the individuals whose remains were inside of the urns.

“One urn contained the remains of a young adult female, who died in her twenties, the other one the remains of a 9 to 15 year-old child,” says Waltenberger. “The child showed signs for vitamin deficiencies (Vitamin C and D). So, it was not healthy.”

The isotope analysis revealed that both individuals were born in the present-day St. Pölten area of northeastern Austria area and likely lived there when they died. They also found evidence that both people had been cremated on a pyre with food offerings (meat from sheep or goat and red deer) and bronze jewelry. The female individual was also buried with the tooth fragments of a wild boar, which Waltenberger suspects probably would have been worn as a wristband or necklace. The urn also had traces of eight wild and five crop plant species from the region that were offered up as funeral offerings and used as fire accelerants. According to the team, this is the first known evidence for plant residues in a prehistoric cremation burial.

[Related: Details of life in Bronze Age Mycenae could lie at the bottom of a well.]

In future studies, similar interdisciplinary techniques could be to other urn burials to learn more about their prehistoric inhabitants. The team from this study has started to apply these techniques to a large sample of 1,000 cremation burials. 

“First results are very promising and already point towards local variation of funerary rites,” says Waltenberger. “It is possible to receive a comprehensive impression of the Late Bronze Age, if only researchers consider state-of-the-art techniques and look for this tiny traces of information like a detective.”

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For the first time in almost a century, a team of archaeologists have discovered stone walls dating back to the Roman Empire in Zug, Switzerland. The Alpine state in the central portion of the country is known for hockey, beautiful scenery, and some exciting archaeological finds. In a translated press release, the Office for the Preservation of Monuments and Archeology called the finding an “archaeological sensation” for the region that could offer more insight into Roman activity in central Switzerland.

[Related: Bronze Age cauldrons show we’ve always loved meat, dairy, and fancy cookware.]

While excavating a gravel pit in the city of Äbnetwald, a team uncovered the 2,000-year-old Roman walls that possibly once protected a building complex. They have also found some iron nails, pieces of plaster wall, gold fragments possibly from jewelry, millstones, glassware, crockery, bowls, and ceramic jugs called amphorae.

Archaeologists also found evidence that some elite people lived at the site, including imported Roman tableware called terra sigillata and some detailed glass vessels. During this time, amphorae jars typically held fish sauce, wine, or olive oil and provide some evidence that the Romans in the region traded with Mediterranean countries. 

According to the team, it is not surprising that this elevated position near the city of Äbnetwald was selected as the location for their buildings. It offered an excellent overview of the surrounding landscape. A gravel hill nearby was already inhabited several thousand years before the Romans came, indicating that it was already prime real estate.  

The walls extended to at least 5,300 square feet and it is still unclear how the site was used. According to Christa Ebnöther, a professor of archeology of the Roman provinces at the University of Bern, it could have been a villa that had a view of a temple building.

[Related: Pompeii’s archaeological puzzles can be solved with a little help from chemistry.]

“We were also amazed that the top bricks were even visible above ground. Only a few structural relics of this kind from the Roman period are known in the pre-Alpine region—in contrast to other regions. What is also astounding is the relatively good preservation of the remains,” said Ebnöther.

The team also found multiple bronze and copper coins. A silver denarius minted by Julius Caesar from around the First Century BCE with an elephant trampling on either a snake or a dragon etched into it was found amongst them. 

Previously, archaeologists have uncovered other valuable finds in this area, such as a number of coins from the ancient Celts, the remains of a settlement dating to the middle of the Bronze age, and evidence of burials from the late Bronze age. 

On Saturday, September 2nd, the general public is invited to tour the excavation and learn more about the Romans who lived in pre-Alpine Central Switzerland.  

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The Gua Sireh Cave on the island of Borneo in the Malaysian state of Sarawak is known for hundreds of charcoal drawings lining the walls of its main chambers. Now, a team of researchers from Australia’s Griffith University, the Sarawak Museum Department, and the Bidayuh people have officially dated some of the drawings in the cave which tell a sad and true story.  The findings are detailed in a study published August 23 in the journal PLOS One.

[Related: Neanderthals were likely creating art 57,000 years ago.]

The team dates the drawings to between 1670 to 1830 CE, which corresponds with a time of increasing conflict in the region. By the early 19th century, Sarawak was a loosely governed territory under the Brunei Sultanate. The Bruneian Empire only had authority along the coastal regions of Sarawak. These regions were held by semi-independent Malay leaders. The ruling Malay people controlling the area exacted heavy tolls on the area’s indigenous hill tribes, including the Bidayuh. 

“The Bidayuh recall Gua Sireh’s use as a refuge during territorial violence in the early 1800s when a very harsh Malay Chief had demanded they hand over their children,” Mohammad Sherman Sauffi William, a Bidayuh descendent, Sarawak Museum curator, and co-author of the study said in a statement. “They refused and retreated to Gua Sireh, where they initially held off a force of 300 armed men trying to enter the cave from the valley about 60 meters [196 feet] below.

After two Bidayuh were shot and seven were taken as prisoners and/or enslaved, most of the tribe escaped through a passageway at the back of the largest entrance chamber to the cave, which leads through the Gunung Nambi limestone hill, according to Sauffi William. 

“The figures were drawn holding distinctive weapons such as a Pandat which was used exclusively for fighting or protection, as well two short-bladed Parang Ilang, the main weapons used during warfare that marked the first decades of white rule in Borneo,” Sauffi Wiliam said.

The art in Gua Sireh is just one part of a wider distribution of drawings found from the Philippines through Southeast Asia, across Borneo and Sulawesi to Peninsular Malaysia. They are believed to be associated with the diaspora of Austronesian speaking peoples. Previous dating work established that similar drawings in the Philippines were made as early as 3500 and 1500 BCE in southern Sulawesi.

[Related: Cave drawings from 20,000 years ago may feature an early form of writing.]

To the best of their knowledge, the latest radiocarbon dates are the first chronometric age determinations for Malaysian rock art. Their first step in this process was establishing what substance was used to create the cave drawings. 

“Black drawings in the region have been made for thousands of years,” study co-author and Griffith University archaeological scientist Jillian Huntley said in a statement.  “We wanted to confirm the images were drawn with charcoal, as there are a limited number of substances you can actually radiocarbon date.”

To do this, the team looked at the decay of carbon isotopes, which meant that the material had to be organic or contain carbon. The analysis determined that charcoal made from different species of bamboo had been used to make them and they are well preserved partially due to the cave’s limestone walls. 

The dating has also been informed by Bidayuh oral histories and was used to record the experience of territorial violence and colonization in the region. The team knew from earlier studies that the rock art in northwestern Borneo is dominated by drawings of animals, people, ships, and abstract geometric/linear design.

“At Gua Sireh, people are drawn wearing headdresses—some armed with shields, knives and spears, in scenes showing activities such as hunting, butchering, fishing, fighting and dancing,” study co-author and Griffith University anthropologist and archaeologist Paul Taçon said in a statement. “We had clues about their age based on subjects such as introduced animals, but we really didn’t know how old they were, so it was difficult to interpret what they might mean.”

Future studies could apply similar techniques to other drawings and reveal more insight into the Austronesian and Maylay diasporas and the region’s complex human history. 

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The ruins of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii are full of morbid mystery. In 79 CE, a volcanic eruption wiped out the city of between 10,000 and 20,000 inhabitants. Massive plumes of volcanic ash and pumice shot out of Mount Vesuvius, covering and suffocating Pompeii’s doomed residents. Archaeologists have found the remains of over 1,300 victims in the site southeast of the city of Naples over the last 250 years.

[Related: ‘Violent’ earthquakes accompanied the infamous volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii.]

Some of the bodies of Pompeii were also preserved in plaster, but not from Mount Vesuvius and not in 79 CE. In the 1860s and 1870s, archaeologists led by Giuseppe Fiorelli poured plaster into the voids left behind by the bodies that had decomposed. These casts typically have the skeletal remains embedded in the plaster that retain the body shape and give a realistic image of victims of the eruption. 

“Pompeii is one of the most important places from an archaeological point of view,” Gianni Gallello, an archeological scientist at the University of Valencia in Spain tells PopSci.  “All of Roman society is imprinted at the moment after the eruption, all stuck in time.”

However, the plaster may have contaminated the chemical composition of the bones, according to a study published August 23 in the journal PLOS One. While the plaster may have altered the chemical makeup of the bones, bioarchaeological analysis still supports the theory that these specific victims died from asphyxiation and not from blunt force trauma from rocks or burning.

Gallello is one of the co-authors of the study who specializes in applying analytical chemistry to archeological finds. He brought a technique called portable X-ray fluorescence as a way to noninvasively examine the elemental composition of the bones and plaster for the first time. 

“It’s a portable device that takes the material profile invisibly,” Gallello explains. “Everything was in contact with the plaster, so you can get contamination. Plaster also has high levels of compounds similar to the bones.”

In this study, Gallello and his colleagues looked at six plaster casts from the Porta Nola (gate) area of Pompeii and one cast from the city’s Terme Surbane (or frescoed bath house) for anthropological and multielemental analysis. They also compared these bones to cremated bones from a Roman necropolis and ones found in a Spanish Islamic necropolis.

[Related: Mount Vesuvius murdered its victims in more brutal ways than we thought.]

“Cross referencing is important for volcanologists and anthropologists. It provides complimentary data [for the] reconstruction of the evidence. Anthropological work can say that the position of the bones of the people who died while they were escaping is telling that they probably died from asphyxiation, while archaeological data can say if it was during the second part of the eruption,” says Gallello.

Using portable X-ray fluorescence, they found that the plaster from Pompeii was completely different from the burned and unburned bones from the collection. Testing out this method for the first time on the Pompeii casts also helped add to the prevailing theories of what killed these specific residents of Pompeii during the eruption. While the plaster contamination makes it more difficult to study, the chemical analysis supports the theory that the victims suffocated from the volcanic ash. 

“We don’t pretend to say how they died. What we do is provide more evidence and data to complement and allow the volcanologists who are very active in Pompeii to study,” says Gallello. 

The team hopes that using noninvasive techniques like this on other archeological finds and cast skeletons will help find better evidence to draw stronger conclusions on the causes of death. 

“It’s an honor to work in Pompeii,” says Gallello. “We do work that we love, and for us, it’s not work.”

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Ancient bones can give scientists crucial information about what human bodies of the past looked like, but finding evidence of what nourished those prehistoric bodies is a bit more challenging. Archeologists typically need to use context clues to draw conclusions on what people used to eat—or get lucky and find some poop. 

[Related: Neanderthals caught and cooked crabs 90,000 years ago.]

However, sometimes protein and fat residues can stand the test of time on ancient pottery or in teeth. A study published on August 18 in the journal iScience found that residents of the Caucuses ate sheep, deer, goats, and members of the cow family during the Maykop period (about 3700–2900 BCE) of the Bronze Age. Some millennia old cauldrons from archaeological sites in Eurasia were crucial in deciphering this ancient menu.

“It’s really exciting to get an idea of what people were making in these cauldrons so long ago,” study co-author and University of Zurich biological anthropologist Shevan Wilkin said in a statement. “This is the first evidence we have of preserved proteins of a feast—it’s a big cauldron. They were obviously making large meals, not just for individual families.”

The study combines protein analysis and archaeology to explore the details of what was cooked in ancient cauldrons recovered from burial sites in Eurasia’s Caucasus region. This region lies between the Caspian and Black Seas, and spans Southwestern Russia to Turkey. 

“We have already established that people at the time most likely drank a soupy beer, but we did not know what was included on the main menu,” study co-author and Institute for the History of Material Culture archaeologist Viktor Trifonov said in a statement.

Many metal alloys have antimicrobial properties that help preserve proteins on cauldrons. Microbes in the dirt that would normally degrade the proteins left behind on surfaces made of stone or ceramic are stopped on metal alloys.

The team collected eight residue samples from seven metal cauldrons and successfully retrieved proteins from milk, muscle tissue, and blood. The presence of a protein called heat shock protein beta-1 (HSPB-1), indicates that the metal cauldrons were used to cook tissues of deer or bovine animals (cows, yaks, or water buffalo). They also recovered milk proteins from either goats or sheep, so these people likely also prepared dairy. 

Using radiocarbon dating, the team believes that the cauldrons could have been used between 3520–3350 BCE. 

[Related: Details of life in Bronze Age Mycenae could lie at the bottom of a well.]

The cauldrons show signs of wear and tear from use, but also signs of extensive repair. Taking the time to repair the kitchen tools suggests that they were a valuable object that required skill to make. Such a cooking vessel could be an important symbol of social position or wealth. 

“It was a tiny sample of soot from the surface of the cauldron,” said Trifonov. “Maykop bronze cauldrons of the fourth millennium BC[E] are a rare and expensive item, a hereditary symbol belonging to the social elite.”

In future studies, the team would like to explore the differences and similarities between a wider range of vessel types. This could help them get a better idea of what people in the region were doing and how food preparation differed regionally at this time. Cuisine is an important part of culture, so studies like these can help archaeologists better understand the cultural connections between different regions.

“If proteins are preserved on these vessels, there is a good chance they are preserved on a wide range of other prehistoric metal artifacts,” said Wilkin. “We still have a lot to learn, but this opens up the field in a really dramatic way.”

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Modifying our bodies, from external expressions like piercings and tattoos to more internal changes like drilling holes into skulls or foot binding, is quintessentially human. Now, a team of biological anthropologists and archaeologists from Kyushu University in Japan and the University of Montana are learning more about how Japan’s Hirota people partook in a millennia old practice of intentional cranial modification. Their findings,published August 16 in the journal PLOS ONE, also found that there were no significant differences in cranial modification between males and females, indicating that both sexes partook in the process.

[Related: Mysterious skull points to a possible new branch on human family tree.]

Humans are born with fairly soft and pliable skulls to help push our large braincases through the birth canal. During cranial modification, a person’s head is pressed or bound to permanently deform the skull. This is primarily done at an early age, and the practice even predates written history. 

There is evidence that Neanderthals living 45,000 years ago were shaping their infants’ skulls, possibly because it was believed to be better for survival. In Mexico, the Maya may have intended it as a way to protect the souls of its young people. A form of artificial cranial deformation in which a baby’s head was tightly bound and padded to protect the skull from impact was still common among peasantry in Western France as recently as the early 1900s. Scientists theorize the practice was generally performed to signify group affiliation or demonstrate social status.

Now, scientists are gaining a better understanding on how the process occurred in in Japan’s Hirota people, who lived on the island of Tanegashima in southern Japan during the end of the Yayoi Period (roughly the 3rd century CE) to the Kofun Period (between the 5th and 7th century CE). 

“This site was excavated from 1957 to 1959 and again from 2005 to 2006. From the initial excavation, we found remains with cranial deformations characterized by a short head and a flattened back of the skull, specifically the occipital bone and posterior parts of the parietal bones,” study co-author and  Kyushu University biological anthropologist Noriko Seguchi said in a statement. 

While this particular dig gave the team an ideal spot to study cranial modification, it was not clear if these changes to the skull had been truly intentional or not. In the study, the team used a hybrid of 2D images to analyze the shape of the skulls’ outlines and 3D scans of their surface. They also compared data from skulls from other archeological sites in Japan, including the Doigahama Yayoi people in Western Yamaguchi and the Kyushu Island Jomon people, who were the hunter-gatherer predecessors to the Yayoi people. 

[Related: Skull research sheds light on human-Neanderthal interbreeding.]

“Our results revealed distinct cranial morphology and significant statistical variability between the Hirota individuals with the Kyushu Island Jomon and Doigahama Yayoi samples,” said Seguchi. “The presence of a flattened back of the skull characterized by changes in the occipital bone, along with depressions in parts of the skull that connects the bones together, specifically the sagittal and lambdoidal sutures, strongly suggested intentional cranial modification.”

While the team is still not sure what motivated the Hirota people to do this, they hypothesize that it was to preserve group identity and possibly facilitate a long-distance trade of shellfish, as supported by archaeological evidence found at the site.

“Our findings significantly contribute to our understanding of the practice of intentional cranial modification in ancient societies,” said Seguchi. “We hope that further investigations in the region will offer additional insights into the social and cultural significance of this practice in East Asia and the world.”

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Hammocks normally invoke an image of sipping tropical drinks or relaxing in a backyard, not necessarily archaeological discoveries. However, while installing a hammock this summer at Michigan State University, workers found a hard, impenetrable, surface just under the ground. Campus archaeologists looked at old maps and determined that the object was not a rock, but the 140-plus year-old foundation of the first observatory on MSU’s campus.

[Related: Ceramic pipes kept this town from flooding during monsoons 4,000 years ago.]

The observatory was built in 1881, but was demolished in the 1920s and was buried under ground over the course of the last century, according to The Washington Post. Another observatory was built in 1969 and is still up and running on campus.

“It gives us a sense of what early campus looked like in the late 19th century,” MSU campus archaeologist and anthropology doctoral student Ben Akey said in a statement. “The original campus observatory was built and used at a time when Michigan Agricultural College—what would become MSU—was a radically different institution with only a handful of professors and a relatively small student body.”

Akey will continue to collaborate with the university’s Infrastructure Planning and Facilities (IPF) department to keep up with campus construction projects and research any discoveries that are found. Students will also work to preserve any artifacts that the site might hold and coordinate with IPF to ensure anything detected during construction is properly researched and preserved.

Using the MSU archives, Akey conducted most of the research that confirmed the discovery of the building’s former foundation. The book “Stars Over the Red Cedar’, written” by  professor emeritus in the MSU Department of Physics and Astronomy Horace A. Smith, also helped confirm this unique find. 

The old observatory is located just behind what is now Wills House and was built by Professor Rolla Carpenter. An 1873 graduate of Michigan State Agricultural College, Carpenter returned as a professor and taught courses in mathematics, astronomy, French, and civil engineering.

[Related: Newly discovered ‘Stonehenge of the Netherlands’ is 4,000 years old.]

“In the early days of MSU’s astronomy program, Carpenter would take students to the roof of College Hall and have them observe from there, but he didn’t find it a sufficient solution for getting students experience in astronomical observation,” Akey said. “When MSU acquired a telescope, Carpenter successfully argued for funding for a place to mount it: the first campus observatory.”

MSU’s present day observatory is located just south of campus and boasts a 24-inch telescope. The space is used for both education, research, and free public observation nights.

“It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come from a little 16-foot circular building to a large building with a high-quality telescope and an electric dome,” MSU astrophysics and anthropology major Levi Webb said in a statement. “Seeing the difference between how observing used to be versus how it is now is very interesting to me and makes me appreciative of the observatory we have now.”

Correction (August 23, 2023, 3:37pm): An early version of this story spelled “Wills House” as “Willis House.” PopSci regrets the error.

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China’s Longshan period which lasted from about 2600 to 2000 BCE is best known for its sophisticated pottery shapes, but their sophisticated plumbing is getting some well-deserved attention. A team of archaeologists found the oldest known ceramic water pipes in China, demonstrating that locals were capable of major feats of engineering without a centralized state government. The findings are described in a study published August 14 in the journal Nature Water. 

[Related from PopSci+: Inside the project to bring ‘self-healing’ Roman concrete to American shorelines.]

The newly unearthed network of ceramic water pipes and drainage ditches were found at the ancient walled city of Pingliangtai, located in what is now the Huaiyang District of Zhoukou City in central China. The town was home to roughly 500 people during neolithic times and had protective walls and a surrounding moat. It sits on the Upper Huai River Plain on the vast Huanghuaihai Plain, and the climate 4,000 years ago saw large seasonal climate shifts. Summer monsoons could dump a foot and a half of rain on the region every month. 

With all this rain, it was critical for the region to manage floodwaters. The people of Pingliangtai appear to have built and operated a two-tier drainage system to help mitigate the rainy season’s excessive rainfall. Simple but coordinated lines of drainage ditches ran parallel to the rows of houses to divert water from the residential area to a series of ceramic water pipes that carried the water into the surrounding moat, and away from the village.

The team says that this network of pipes shows that the community cooperated with one another to build and maintain this drainage system. 

“The discovery of this ceramic water pipe network is remarkable because the people of Pingliangtai were able to build and maintain this advanced water management system with stone age tools and without the organization of a central power structure,” study co-author and University College London archaeologist Yijie Zhuang said in a statement. “This system would have required a significant level of community-wide planning and coordination, and it was all done communally.”

The network is made of interconnecting individual segments which run along roads and walls that divert rainwater. According to the team, it shows an advanced level of central planning and is the oldest complete system discovered in China to date. 

The team was also surprised by this find because the Pingliangtai settlement shows little evidence of a social hierarchy. The homes within it were uniformly small and there aren’t any signs of social stratification or significant inequality amongst the population. Digs at the town’s cemetery also didn’t reveal any evidence of a social hierarchy in burials the way excavations at other nearby towns have. 

[Related: Mysterious skull points to a possible new branch on human family tree.]

The level of complexity that these pipes demonstrate also undermines some earlier understanding of archaeological finds that believe only a centralized state power could organize and provide the resources for such a complex water management system. Other ancient societies that used advanced water systems tended to have a stronger, more centralized government, but Pingliangtai shows that that centralized power was possibly not always needed.

“Pingliangtai is an extraordinary site. The network of water pipes shows an advanced understanding of engineering and hydrology that was previously only thought possible in more hierarchical societies,” study co-author and Peking University archaeologist Hai Zhang said in a statement. 

The ceramic water pipes also show an advanced level of technology for this period in time. Like with Longshan pottery, there was some variety of decoration and styles, but each pipe segment was about 7.8 and 11.8 inches in diameter and about 11.8 to 15.7 inches long. Multiple segments were slotted into one another to transport the water over long distances. 

According to the study, the team can’t say specifically how the labor to build this infrastructure was organized and divided. A similar level of communal coordination would also have been necessary to build the earthen walls and moat that surround Pingliangtai.

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A 300,000 year-old fossilized skull discovered in China is proving to be an evolutionary puzzle. The specimen dating back to the late middle Pleistocene doesn’t look like other skulls that have been found from this time period, and could possibly point to a previously unknown human species. The findings were published late last month in the Journal of Human Evolution.

[Related: Leftovers of a 2,000-year-old curry discovered on stone cooking tools.]

A team of scientists from institutions in Spain, the United Kingdom, and China found the lower jaw–or mandible–and 15 other separate specimens in eastern China’s Hualongdong region in 2015. The mandible in question is named HLD 6 and dates back to an important period in hominin evolution, just before some of the traits that are still seen in modern humans began to evolve in East Asia. 

The study noted that HLD 6 was “unexpected” since it doesn’t currently fit into any known taxonomic groups. The skull has similar facial features to those of early modern humans. The skull could potentially belong to a direct human ancestor called Homo erectus sometime between 550,000 and 750,000 years ago. 

However, it also shares some of the characteristics of the Denisovans, who belong on a different branch on the human family tree than Homo Erectus. HLD 6 does not appear to have a chin, just like previously discovered Denisovan specimens. Denisovans are now extinct and split from Neanderthals about 400,000 years ago.

Given that the specimen has a mixture of Homo erectus and Denisovan characteristics, they believe this was potentially a hybrid of modern human and ancient hominid. The team notes that this combination of facial features hasn’t been observed in East Asia hominids, which suggests that some of the traits found in modern humans began to appear as far back as 300,000 years ago.

[Related: A javelin-like stick shows early humans may have been keen woodworkers.]

They believe that the fossils belonged to a 12- to 13-year-old child. The team did not have an adult skull belonging to this same species to compare it with, but they used Middle and Late Pleistocene hominin skulls of similar and adult age. They noticed that the shape patterns remained the same regardless of age, which they say supports the theory that this could be a different human species. 

The history of the human family tree is constantly changing, as scientists develop better techniques for finding and analyzing specimens. A study published in June proposed that humans entered the forests of Asia about 400,000 years earlier than they previously believed. Humans and Neanderthals also could have been interbreeding earlier and in three separate waves that eventually led to the extinction of Neanderthals. 
If this new theory proves to be correct, a new “pre-sapiens specimen” branch could be added to this complex family tree and bring more insight into human evolution.

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In the Late Bronze Age, humans learned to smelt iron, and things haven’t been the same since. Between 1200 and 1000 BCE, the movement of information stemming possibly from ancient Anatolia on how to utilize the metal and turn it into tools both led to more permanent settlements and put sturdy weapons in the hands of lots of people for the first time in history. 

But even before the Iron Age, which ended around 600 BCE, iron could still be turned into tools since the material can be found naturally—mostly off of the planet, however. One example of such extraterrestrial iron, which was typically found in meteorites in conjunction with nickel or silicate minerals, in tools was recently rediscovered in the depths of Switzerland’s Bern History Museum. There, a team of archaeologists spotted an arrowhead made with what they believe to be iron from a meteor. They published their findings recently in the Journal of Archeological Sciences.

[Related: A meteorite-hunting AI will scout for space rocks buried in polar ice.]

The 1.5-inch long, 2.9 gram arrowhead was originally discovered in the 19th century in a late Bronze Age lake dwelling community called Mörigen on Lake Biel about an hour drive from Bern. Archeological finds made from meteoritic iron are quite rare, the Bern History Museum wrote in a release—there are only 55 objects in all of Europe, Asia, and Africa, including King Tut’s ‘space dagger’, and these all come from 22 sites. 

The settlement of Mörigen is located a mere five miles from the location where the Twannberg meteorite struck earth around 150,000 years ago. Strangely enough, the meteorite, which was discovered only in 1984, couldn’t have been the original source for this particular tool. After some analysis, the authors found that the arrowhead itself was made up of 8.3 percent nickel, twice as much as the Twannberg meteorite holds. The tiny tool also is made up of a high content of geranium and a low concentration of aluminum-26. This hints that the meteorite was likely a IAB type and originally had a mass of at least two tons. 

Three such meteorites have hit Europe—one in the Czech Republic, one in Spain, and one in Estonia. The authors estimate that the meteorite that could’ve sourced this rare find is the Kaalijarv meteorite, which formed a giant crater on the Estonian island of Saaremaa around 1,500 BCE. This impact site, a 864-mile-journey through modern day Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, also suggests a complex trade and transport system could have been in place during this era. Now, it’s just a matter of finding the rest of the ancient gadgets and tools that could’ve been made from space rocks long before anyone knew what they were. 

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Humans have had a love for shiny accessories and adornments for thousands of years. Now, a newly discovered ornate necklace discovered in a child’s grave in ancient Jordan is giving archaeologists insights into the complex social structure of Neolithic cultures. The necklace is described in a study published August 2 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

[Related: Scientists build intricate Neolithic family tree from 7,000-year-old DNA.]

The Neolithic Age began in roughly 10,000 BCE and is considered the later part of the Stone Age. This period was known for polished stone tools, more permanent settlements and villages instead of hunter-gathering societies, domesticated plants and animals, and some pretty strong women. Body adornments were (and still are) powerful symbols that visually communicate cultural values and personal identities. Scientists studying ancient cultures can learn a lot from the valuable objects people were buried with, from the amulets left with a teenage mummy in ancient Egypt to the ivory tusks buried with a very important Copper Age woman.

In this study, a team analyzed the materials that were found adorning the body of an eight-year-old child who was buried in a grave at the 9,000 year-old Neolithic village of Ba’ja in Jordan. Estimates say he likely died somewhere between 7400 and 6800 BCE. They found more than 2,500 colorful stones and shells, two large amber beads that are currently the oldest known in the Levant, a large stone pendant, and a delicately engraved mother-of-pearl ring buried with the unidentified child. 

After analyzing the craftsmanship, composition, and the spatial layout of these items, the team believes that they likely belonged to a single composite multi-row necklace that has fallen apart over time. They created a physical reconstruction of the necklace as part of the study and it is currently on display in the Petra Museum in Wadi Musa, Jordan.

According to the team, this multi-row necklace is one of the oldest and most impressive Neolithic ornaments found to date. It appears to have taken meticulous work and required the importation of materials from other regions outside of Jordan. It offers new insights into funerary practices at the time, since burial techniques are often an indicator of relationships in a community and shared values of a culture. 

[Related: This teen mummy was buried with dozens of gold amulets.]

This necklace also shows a complex social dynamics between the Ba’ja community members at the time who would have had to come together to make this necklace, including artisans, traders, and the high-status authorities who would commission such pieces. Future studies could look into this aspect of Neolithic culture and recent advances in spectroscopy techniques could potentially reveal where the various beads and gemstones came from. 

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For thousands of years, gemstones have been valued and traded around the world. Along with their beauty, these strong and rare minerals carry with them a unique elemental composition and atomic orientation. These traits act as fingerprints that can show researchers a gem’s past—including where they originated and traveled.

[Related: A rare diamond is offering a glimpse into a possibly watery world inside the Earth.]

In a study published August 1 in the journal AIP Advances, a team of scientists used spectroscopic techniques to compare sets of gems and pinpoint where they originated and how they passed through trade routes. They looked at gems found in the Arabian-Nubian Shield—an exposure of mineral deposits near the Red Sea in present day Egypt and Saudi Arabia. 

Spectroscopy helped the team identify specific elements inside the gems, including their chemical makeup and structure. These traits influence the gems’ color, differentiated the stones found outside of the Arabian-Nubian Shield, and show which gems are natural versus synthetic. 

“We showed the main spectroscopic characteristics of gemstones from these Middle East localities to distinguish them from their counterparts in other world localities,” Adel Surour, co-author and meteorologist and geologist at Galala University in Egypt, said in a statement. “This includes a variety of silicate gems such as emerald from the ancient Cleopatra’s mines in Egypt, in addition to amethyst, peridot, and amazonite from other historical sites, which mostly date to the Roman times.”

A technique called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) can quickly characterize the gem’s chemical composition, while another called fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) determines the functional groups connected to the gem’s structure and detects the presence of water and other hydrocarbons. Raman spectroscopy shows the unique crystalline structure of the gems’ atoms, even for chemically identical materials.

[Related: Space diamonds sparkle from the wreckage of a crushed dwarf planet.]

The team found that iron content likely correlates to the signature purple hue in amethysts and elements including chromium, vanadium, and copper also impact a gem’s color. Synthetic gems that are less expensive and used in lab experiments are exposed by a signature water peak. 

The unique crystalline structure of the gems differentiated amazonite beads from Mexico, Jordan, and Egypt, making it possible to follow where they traveled.

“Gemstones such as emerald and peridot have been mined since antiquity,” Surour said. “Sometimes, some gemstones were brought by sailors and traders to their homelands. For example, royal crowns in Europe are decorated with peculiar gemstones that originate from either Africa or Asia. We need to have precise methods to distinguish the source of a gemstone and trace ancient trade routes in order to have correct information about the original place from which it was mined.”

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Terms like “cultural heritage” and “archaeology” might conjure Indiana Jones-lie scenes of old and ancient things buried under the sands of time. But even now, each one of us is producing material that could interest future humans trying to record and study our own era.

For those who believe that space exploration and astronauts’ first departures from Earth are culturally significant, then there is a wealth of objects that spacefarers—crewed and uncrewed, past and present—have left in the realms beyond our atmosphere.

“This stuff is an extension of our species’ migration, beginning in Africa and extending to the solar system,” says Justin Holcomb, an archaeologist with the Kansas Geological Survey. “I argue that a piece of a lander is the exact same thing as a piece of a stone tool in Africa.”

This idea is the heart of what Holcomb and his colleagues call “planetary geoarchaeology.” In a paper published in the journal Geoarchaeology on July 21, these “space archaeologists” detail how they want to study the interactions between the items we’ve left around the solar system and the  hostile environments they now occupy. This research, the authors believe, will only become more important as human activity on the moon is set to blossom in the decades to come.

The idea of documenting and preserving what we leave behind in space isn’t a completely new concept. In the early 2000s, New Mexico State University anthropologist Beth O’Leary (who co-authored the paper with Holcomb) cataloged objects scattered around Tranquility Base, Apollo 11’s landing site on the moon. O’Leary later helped get some of those artifacts registered in California and New Mexico as culturally significant properties.

“I would argue that Tranquility Base could easily be considered the most important archaeological site that exists,” says Justin St. P. Walsh, an archaeologist at Chapman University in California who was not involved with the new paper. The base’s lunar soil can’t be declared a cultural heritage site because that would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prevents any country from claiming the soil of the moon or another world. But scholars can still list objects found there as heritage.

Naturally, O’Leary’s catalog includes the remnants of Apollo 11’s lunar module and its famed US flag, along with empty food bags, utensils, hygiene equipment, and wires. What is space junk to some is precious culture to space archaeologists. Even long-festering astronaut poop has its value—“that’s human DNA,” Holcomb says.

Archaeological sites on Earth are deeply impacted by the processes of the world around them, both natural and artificial. Likewise, Tranquility Base doesn’t just sit in tranquility. The moon’s surface is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays and micrometeoroids; even faraway human landings can kick up regolith showers.

[Related: Want to learn something about space? Crash into it.]

Holcomb and his colleagues want to study the various states objects are left in to learn how sites on the moon and other worlds change over time—and how to preserve them for our distant descendants. “We think in deep time scales,” says Holcomb. “We’re not thinking in just the next five years. We’re thinking in a thousand years.”

That sort of research, the authors say, is still quite new. Holcomb, for instance, wants to study what happens to NASA’s Spirit rover on Mars as a sand dune washes over it. Other planetary geoarchaeology projects might focus on what the moon’s environment has wrought upon artificial materials we’ve left on the lunar surface.

“We can find out more about what happened to [castoffs] in the length of time they’ve been there,” says Alice Gorman, an archaeologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, who also wasn’t a co-author. 

On Earth, Gorman and colleagues plan to replicate Apollo astronauts’ boot prints in simulated lunar soil and subject them to forces like rocket exhaust. Gorman believes even engineers with no interest in archaeology may want to take interest in work like this. “These same processes will be happening to any new habitats built on the surface,” she says. “With the archaeological sites, we get a bit of a longer-term perspective.”

The moon is the immediate focus for both this paper’s authors and other space archaeologists, and it’s easy to see why. After several decades of occasional uncrewed missions and flybys, NASA’s Artemis program promises to spearhead a mass return to the satellite’s surface. The Artemis program is slated to land on the moon’s south pole, far away from existing Apollo landing sites. But a flurry of private companies have emerged with the goal of not just touching the moon as Apollo did, but extracting its resources.

Space archaeologists fear that all this future activity will place past sites at risk. “We barely know how to operate on the moon,” says Walsh.

There are some indications that the broader space community is thinking about the problem. The Artemis Accords (a US-initiated document that aims to outline the ethical guidelines for the Artemis era) and the Vancouver Recommendations on Space Mining (a 2020 white paper by primarily Canadian academics that proposes a framework for sustainable space mining) express a desire to protect space heritage sites.

Of course, these are only words on nonbinding paper, and space archaeologists do not think they go far enough. Holcomb and colleagues want experts in their field to be involved in planning—for instance, steering scientific and commercial space missions away from spots where they might interfere with existing cultural heritage. There is earthbound precedent for such a role: In many countries, archaeologists already assist infrastructure projects.

“We know we’re going to go there someday, so let’s make sure that we have the protections in place before we go and ruin things,” says Walsh.

[Related: What an extraterrestrial archaeological dig could tell us about space culture]

Moves like this can’t protect lunar heritage from every possible harm: A future satellite could very well crash-land on Tranquility Base and wreck the last remnants of Apollo 11 there. But space archaeologists say that it is valuable to take any steps we can.

“I think the paper is a really fantastic demonstration of how any mission to the moon has to be about more than just engineering, and it has to be interdisciplinary,” Gorman notes. “It’s very timely that it’s been published now, while there’s still time to incorporate its recommendations into actual lunar missions.”

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Despite being a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most well-known archaeological locations in the world, Machu Picchu’s history is still being uncovered. This former royal estate from the vast Inca Empire located in present day Cusco, Peru was once home to a mixture of royalty and the workers who served them. DNA is offering up new clues as to who once lived and worked there.

[Related: The king behind Machu Picchu built his legacy in stone.]

In a study published July 26 in the journal Science Advances, scientists analyzed DNA from 34 people and uncovered a diverse genetic ancestry. This supports a theory that the people believed to have been servants were brought from distant and varied populations across the Inca Empire and further into South America.

“There were no slaves in the Andean world. Nonetheless, individuals were removed from their ethnic homelands and assigned to serve the Inca royal families for life in different capacities, including that of retainers at country palaces such as Machu Picchu,” study co-author and Yale University archaeologist Lucy Salazar tells PopSci. “Ancient DNA provides the most powerful tool in determining the genetic background of these individuals.”

In the study, the team compared the DNA of 34 individuals buried at Machu Picchu over 500 years ago with DNA of other people from around the Inca Empire, as well as some modern genomes from South America. They found that the individuals had come from as far away as Amazonia (which includes parts of present-day Brazil, Bolivia, and Colombia), but only a few shared DNA with each other. This indicates that they had been brought to Peru as individuals rather than as part of a family unit or community group.

Salazar says it was surprising that only a few came from the heartlands of the Inca Empire. The majority came from the Pacific coast, the Amazonian lowlands, Ecuador and Chile. However,  over a third of the sample had some Amazonian genetic background. 

“Another surprise was the number of individuals with genetic admixtures from geographically unrelated sources (45 percent of our sample),” Salazar says. “The sheer genetic diversity at Machu Picchu was remarkable and unprecedented, and it suggests that the cultural diversity at Machu Picchu was more similar to a cosmopolitan center than a modern agricultural village.

The study also found that the genetic composition of the Inca capital of Cusco was also diverse, but very different from the samples excavated at Machu Picchu. The team plans to study genetic samples from Inca Cusco to better understand the differences in the genetic composition of these two sites. Salazar is currently excavating an Inca cemetery to learn more. 

[Related: Ancient Maya masons had a smart way to make plaster stronger.]

Work like this study is part of a trend in archaeology that combines traditional archaeological techniques with new technologies and scientific analyses. It can lead to a more complete understanding of ancient civilizations not possible without these advances. Breakthroughs in the analysis of ancient DNA led to the collaboration of Salazar and fellow Yale archaeologist Richard Burger, geneticist Lars Fehren-Schmitz from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and archaeologists from Cusco.

“The role of the Amazon in the Inca empire has been more important than previously recognized and the complexity of the Inca society is only beginning to be understood,” she says. “Applying new scientific techniques such as ancient DNA analysis allows archaeologists to explore questions that were previously out of reach.”

The study was also part of an agreement to return artifacts native to Machu Picchu, currently being stored at Yale University to the University San Antonio de Abad of Cusco, back to the historic site.

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Around 12,000 years ago, humans shifted away from a hunter gatherer lifestyle and into a neolithic society based around farming. This change still has a massive impact on our lives, but it is difficult to assess how these communities migrated and what their social networks may have looked like. 

[Related: Neolithic surgeons might have practiced their skull-drilling techniques on cows.]

In a study published July 26 in the journal Nature, a team of scientists used roughly 7,000 year-old DNA to reconstruct two massive family trees. Their findings suggest that some females left their home community to join another. It also provides evidence of stable health conditions and a supportive social network within one prehistoric community in Europe. 

One way scientists determine relationships are through burials, inferring who may have been related through inferences of funeral practices of the time. But actual genetic analysis is tricky. The Paris Basin region in northern France has several monumental funerary sites that archaeologists believe were built for the more “elite” members of prehistoric society. 

However, the nearby site of Gurgy ‘Les Noisats’ is one of the largest Neolithic funerary sites that does not have a monument. This sparked questions about the different burial practices of the time. 

In this new study, the team used ancient genome-wide data excavated from Les Noisats between 2004 and 2007. The remains of 94 individuals buried in Gurgy are dated to approximately 4,850 to 4,500 BCE. The team combined this ancient genome data with strontium isotope analysis, mitochondrial DNA to show maternal lineages, and Y-chromosome data for patrilineal lineages, age-at-death, and genetic sex to build two family trees. 

The first tree connects 64 individuals over seven generations, and is the largest pedigree reconstructed from ancient DNA to date. The second family tree connects 12 individuals over five generations.

“Since the beginning of the excavation, we found evidence of a complete control of the funerary space and only very few overlapping burials, which felt like the site was managed by a group of closely related individuals, or at least by people who knew who was buried where,” study co-author and University of Bordeaux archaeo-anthropologist Stéphane Rottier said in a statement. 

The team also found a positive correlation between spatial and genetic distances of the remains, which indicates that the deceased were likely to be buried close to a relative. When examining the pedigrees further, they also saw a strong pattern along paternal lines. Each generation, it seems, is almost exclusively linked to the generation before through the biological father. The entire Gurgy group can be connected through the paternal line.  

[Related: Neanderthal genomes reveal family bonds from 54,000 years ago.]

On the other side of the family trees, evidence from mitochondrial lineages and the strontium stable isotopes show a non-local origin of most of the women. This suggests Gurgy had a practice called patrilocality, where sons stayed where they were born and then had children with women from outside of the community. By contrast, most of the lineage of adult daughters are missing, suggesting there might have been a reciprocal exchange system with other communities. The newer female individuals were only very distantly related to each other, which shows that they likely came from a network of communities nearby instead of just one group. There could have been a relatively large exchange network of many groups in the region. 

“We observe a large number of full siblings who have reached reproductive age. Combined with the expected equal number of females and significant number of deceased infants, this indicates large family sizes, a high fertility rate and generally stable conditions of health and nutrition, which is quite striking for such ancient times,” study co-author and Ghent University paleogeneticist Maïté Rivollat said in a statement. 

Additionally, the team could point to one male individual from which everyone in the largest family tree was descended. This “founding father” of the cemetery has a unique burial, with skeletal remains buried as a secondary deposit inside the grave pit of a woman. This indicates that his bones must have been brought from where he originally died to be reburied at Gurgy. 

“He must have represented a person of great significance for the founders of the Gurgy site to be brought there after a primary burial somewhere else,” co-author and University of Bordeaux paleogeneticist Marie-France Deguilloux said in a statement. 

While the main pedigree spans seven generations, the demographic profile suggests that a Gurgy itself was probably only used for three to four generations, or approximately one century. Nevertheless, these lengthy pedigrees represent a step forward in our understanding of the social organization of past societies. 

“Only with the major advances in our field in very recent years and the full integration of context data it was possible to carry out such an extraordinary study,” study co-author and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology molecular anthropologist Wolfgang Haak said in a statement. “It is a dream come true for every anthropologist and archaeologist and opens up a new avenue for the study of the ancient human past.”

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The global spice trade has been linking global economies and shaping the world for at least 4,000 years. Seasonings and herbs we completely take for granted today were once so valuable that a long held theory believes that Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt, even giving rise to the word “salary.”

[Related: For decades, turmeric’s ultra-golden glow had a deadly secret.]

Now, scientists have uncovered the remnants of Southeast Asia’s earliest evidence of curry–a dish of meat or vegetables seasoned with a mixture of spices– in Vietnam dating back almost 2,000 years. The findings are detailed in a study published July 21 in the journal Science Advances. 

The team from Australian National University analyzed the micro-remains from the surface of stone grinding tools recovered at the Oc Eo archaeological site in southern Vietnam. South Asia has played a vital role in the spice trade since the Bronze Age. Southeast Asia especially played a vital role due to its tropical climate and geographical location between the Indian subcontinent and China—perfect for growing and transporting the seeds, fruits, and other crops used to make spices.

Most of the tools studied for this paper were excavated between 2017 and 2019, while others had been stored at a local museum. The team initially set out to understand and learn more about the function of a set of stone grinding tools called “pesani,” that people of the ancient Funan kingdom possibly used to powder their spices. What they found, however, was delicious clues about ancient curry. 

The tools bore the remains of a wide range of spices still stored in cabinets today, including sand ginger, galangal, clove, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, fingerroot, and tumeric. 

“Our study suggests that curries were most likely introduced to Southeast Asia by migrants during the period of early trade contact via the Indian Ocean,” study co-author and Australian National University PhD candidate Weiwei Wang said in a statement. “Given these spices originated from various different locations, it’s clear people were undertaking long-distance journeys for trade purposes. 

The study also shows that the port city of Oc Eo played an important role in a trade that linked the economies and cultures of Asia, Africa, and Europe and sheds more light on how significant and coveted spices were as commodities in ancient civilizations. 

In addition to the microscopic remains on the stone tools at the site, the team also excavated some well-preserved seeds. 

“The preservation of plant remains in Oc Eo is exceptional – the seeds were so fresh it was hard to believe they were 2,000 years old,” co-author and Australian National University archeologist Hsiao-chun Hung said in a statement. “We believe further analysis could identify more spices and possibly even uncover unique plant species, adding to our understanding of the history of the region.”  

[Related: What would possess someone to eat a Carolina Reaper pepper? This writer tried to find out.]

Despite today’s curry powder being readily available stored in plastic containers at a local grocery store, the key ingredients haven’t really changed since ancient times. 

“The spices used today have not deviated significantly from the Oc Eo period,” co-author and archaeologist at Vietnam’s Southern Institute for Social Sciences Khanh Trung Kien Nguyen, said in a statement. “The key components are all still there, such as turmeric, cloves and cinnamon.” 

The team hopes to analyze the seeds found at the site in future studies and could identify more spices or even some unique plant species that will add to the understanding of this region’s history. Completing more dating at the site could also fill in some gaps on when and how each type or plant or spice was traded around the world. 

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Our early human ancestors were a pretty busy bunch, cooking up brown crabs in caves in Portugal, mastering archery, and even taking on weaving. They may have been master woodworkers. According to a study published July 19 in the journal PLOS ONE, a 300,000-year-old wooden hunting weapon was scraped, seasoned, and sanded before it was used to kill animals. This new finding indicates that early human woodworking techniques were more sophisticated and developed than scientists once believed. Creating lightweight weapons may have enabled group hunts of smaller and medium sized animals. 

[Related: Women have been skillful, purposeful hunters in most foraging societies.]

The two-and-a-half foot long stick was first discovered in Schöningen, Germany in 1994 alongside other tools including throwing spears, thrusting spears, and a second throwing stick that was similarly sized. This new study used some of the advances in imaging techniques that have emerged in the almost three decades since the stick’s discovery—micro-CT scanning, 3D models, and 3D microscopy—to take a closer look.

“Our study confirms that this tool is the earliest known ‘throwing stick’, which is a weapon that was thrown rotationally, similar to a boomerang,” co-author and University of Reading palaeolithic archaeologist Annemieke Milks tells PopSci. “The slight curve of the tool, as well as how it was shaped to have more mass towards one half, rather than in the middle, would have helped it to rotate. We think that it might have been thrown at distances as far as 30 meters [98 feet].”

The stick was most likely used to hunt medium sized game such as red and roe deer, and potentially quicker and smaller prey including birds and hare. It likely would have been thrown like a modern day javelin. While it is lightweight, the high velocities at which these weapons can be launched could have resulted in some deadly high-energy impacts.

The carefully shaped points, fine surface, and polish from handling also suggested that it was part of a personal kit that was repeatedly used, instead of a quickly made tool that was thrown away. The 3D microscopy and micro-CT scanning helped the team identify all of the building steps, including how the bark was removed, how the two points were shaped, and how the wood was worked away to force a more aerodynamic weapon.

“We were really excited to see just how many steps and how detailed the woodworking is on this tool. We could also see that they sanded the surface to make it finely finished, and that some polish shows they used this tool for a really long time. This was a tool that was beautifully crafted and used for some time,” says Milks.

[Related: Archery may have helped humans gain leverage over Neanderthals.]

These early hunting weapons can also be thought of as tools that whole communities would use. Footprints belonging to both adults and children have been discovered at Schöningen, indicating that children were present at this site. At this time, hunting was key to survival, some children as young as three or four would learn to throw and use weapons and girls and women likely weren’t excluded from learning these crucial skills.

“In some societies, they start hunting in groups of kids, without any adults at all, and then in their teenage years they start hunting larger animals,” says Milks. “Although we don’t know for sure who threw this weapon, smaller tools like this throwing stick may have been particularly well-suited for kids to learn with.”

The stick is currently on display at the Forschungsmuseum Schöningen.

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Decoding the gender inequalities and misconceptions of the past is having a moment. In the past few weeks, studies have debunked the men as hunters women as gatherers myth, and we’re continuing to learn about the powerful people (and teens) that lived centuries ago. 

The Copper Age, between 3,200 and 2,200 years ago, was known for the widespread use of copper, but also gendered burials. According to a new study published July 6 in the journal Scientific Reports, the highest status individual of a Copper Age society on the Iberian peninsula was actually a woman, and not a man as originally believed. 

“This study was undertaken as part of a broader research looking at the interplay between early social complexity and gender inequalities,” study co-author and University of Seville prehistorian Leonardo García Sanjuán tells PopSci. “As part of this research, it became obvious that there is a serious problem in the identification of biological sex in prehistoric skeletons, which are often found in a poor state of preservation.”

Now redubbed the “Ivory Lady,” this woman’s tomb was first discovered in 2008 in Valencia on Spain’s southeastern coast. The find dates back to the Copper Age, when the metal was used for construction, agriculture, and even creating engravings of owls that may have been toys. The grave is also a rare example of single occupancy burial at the time and the tomb was filled with the largest collection of valuable and rare items in the region. These treasures include high-quality flint, ostrich eggshell amber, a rock crystal dagger, and ivory tusks.

All of these trinkets and single tomb initially indicated that the remains must belong to a prominent male, but peptides and DNA don’t lie. 

In the study, the team used peptide analysis to test for the presence of a protein called amelogenin in the teeth of the specimen. This protein is on the AMELX gene in the X chromosome and on the AMELY gene on the Y chromosome, which males have. Analysis of a molar and an incisor detected the presence of the AMELX gene, indicating that the remains belonged to a female rather than a male. 

“When we compare the Ivory Lady with other Iberian Copper Age burials (and we did a systematic comparison based on a compilation of data for more than 2,000 burials) she stands out as the most prominent person ever to have lived in that period,” says García Sanjuán.

Additionally, due to the lack of grave goods in infant burials, it’s likely that individuals at this time were not granted high status by their birth rite. The team believes that the Ivory Lady made it to the top through her merit and achievements in life.

[Related: Lucy, our ancient human ancestor, was super buff.]

According to García Sanjuán, the remains of a similarly high status male have not been found. The only similarly lavish Copper Age tomb in the region contained at least 15 women and was found next to the Ivory Lady’s grave. This tomb is presumed to have been built by those who claimed to be her descendants, which suggests that women held positions of leadership in Iberian society during this time. 

“In the ethnographic literature, the leaders of the pre-state societies are, in most cases, male individuals and concepts such as ‘big man’, ‘chiefdoms’ or ‘aggrandizers’ are used to describe these societies. Our study shows that this was not necessarily the case in prehistory,” says García Sanjuán. “In our view, this implies that we need not only to rethink what has been said for Copper Age Iberia, but for the processes that led to social complexity worldwide.”

This study was part of the broader project WOMAM: Women, Men and Mobility, Understanding Gender Inequality Through Prehistory which is funded by the European Commission.

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It can be tough to find archaeological evidence of woven baskets, ropes, and other goods made from plants, particularly in the world’s tropical regions, where warm and humid air breaks down green matter easier than stone or bone fragments. But some microscopic plant bits can stand up to the ravages of time, as shown by rare scraps stuck to three stone tools recently studied in the Philippines. These tiny traces of archaic plant technology are described in a study published June 30 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, offering indirect evidence of the earliest known tools made for working with the region’s tough vegetation.

[Related: People in China have been harvesting rice for more than 10,000 years.]

A team of researchers found these tools in Tabon Cave, located in the Palawan Province in the western Philippines. The scientists’ radiocarbon dating found these tools were as old as 39,000 years, pushing back the timeline of Southeast Asia’s fiber technology. Previously, the oldest evidence of plant goods in the area were roughly 8,000 year old fragments of mats found in southern China. 

Compared to the toolkits found from prehistoric groups in Africa or Europe, stone tools in Southeast Asia were not very standardized, using  diverse sizes and shapes. According to study co-author Hermine Xhauflair, a prehistorian and ethnoarchaeologist at the University of the Philippines Diliman, some scientists believe that this difference was due to adaptations to the environment that spurred an “Age of Bamboo.” Similar to the Stone Age or Bronze Age, which heavily relied on their namesake materials, tools at this time were likely mostly made of plentiful bamboo. This organic material doesn’t preserve well, so scientists must look for micro-traces for evidence of this critical chapter in human history.

“Mastering fiber technology was a very important step in human development,” Xhauflair tells PopSci. “It means that people had the potential and the capacity to make objects from multiple parts, bound by fiber; they could build complex houses and structures, make baskets and traps, string bows to hunt, rig sails to boats, and even build the boats.”

The stone tools that Xhauflair and her team found in Tabon Cave show  microscopic evidence of the wear and tear associated with fiber technology. They looked at the plant processing techniques still used by the region’s Indigenous communities, including the Tagbanua, Palaw’an, Tao’t Bato, Molbog, Batak, Agutaynen, and Cuyonon. Rough and rugged plants such as palm and bamboo are stripped and their stems are turned into supple fibers for weaving or tying. 

[Related: ‘Fingerprints’ confirm the seafaring stories of adventurous Polynesian navigators.]

Building from these contemporary practices, the team conducted multiple surveys and fieldwork in the rainforest near the cave to find the signature of the different plants and fiber technologies. From that, they could build a database. They then used optical, digital, and scanning electron microscopes on the stone tools from Tabon Cave and found consistent patterns of damage to the stone tools and the ones used today. 

Further study will shed light on how the ancient residents of Tabon Cave made baskets, traps, ropes for houses, bows for hunting, and more. This discovery also raises the question of whether plant-based techniques have persisted, uninterrupted, for hundreds of generations. “The technique used nowadays to process plant fibers in the region was already known 39,000 years ago. Are we in [the] presence of a very long-lasting tradition?” Xhauflair asks. “Or was this technique discovered at several points in time and abandoned?” 

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The doomed city of Pompeii is more known for the massive volcanic eruption and earthquakes that destroyed the city in 79 CE than its culinary offerings. However, people in the ancient city near present-day Naples, Italy still ate—and their art offers us a window into what they enjoyed. To the untrained eye, a still-life fresco that was recently uncovered looks like present-day pizza, but the experts at the Pompeii archaeological site say it’s not your usual slice.  

[Related: The best way to reheat pizza (and some things you should never do).]

Tomatoes and mozzarella are two of the key ingredients that make up the beloved dish, but sadly they were not available in Italy 2,000 years ago when the fresco was painted. Tomatoes were only introduced to Europe from North and South America in the 1500s.  Some historians believe that the discovery of gooey, stretchy mozzarella cheese led directly to the invention of pizza in the 1700s in Naples. 

The archeologists believe that the tasty-looking fresco is focaccia covered in fruits, such as pomegranate and possibly dates, and is finished with spices or a type of pesto. The focaccia is served on a silver plate and is paired with wine in a chalice. 

The fresco also shows a contrast between what we may see as a frugal meal served dished up on a luxurious on a silvery tray. Pizza has experienced quite a transformation over the years.  “[Pizza was] born as a poor-man’s dish in southern Italy, which has won over the world and is served even in starred restaurants,” director of the Pompeii archaeological site Gabriel Zuchtriegel said in a statement. 

UNESCO listed the art of making Neapolitan pizza, or Pizzaiuolo, on its cultural heritage list in 2017, recognizing its four phases of dough preparation and for being baked exclusively in a wood oven at 905 degrees Fahrenheit. These days, pizza represents about one-third of the food budget of foreign visitors to Italy and generates roughly $16.4 billion in revenue for the country. 

The fresco was uncovered during new excavations in a central location of Pompeii called Regio IX. The painting was on the remains of a wall of an ancient Pompeian house. This house was connected to a bakery that was partially explored between 1888 and 1891 and researchers reopened investigations into the house last January.

[Related: ‘Violent’ earthquakes accompanied the infamous volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii.]

The tasty visual belongs to a genre of images, known as Xenia in antiquity. The pictures took inspiration from the “gifts of hospitality” that were offered to guests based on a Greek tradition from the Hellenistic period (Third to First Centuries BCE). About 300 of these representations have been found in Vesuvian cities. 

“Pompeii never ceases to amaze; it is a chest that always reveals new treasures,” Italian Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano said in a statement. “The conservation and development of the heritage as stated by Article 9 of the Constitution, are an absolute priority.”

Pompeii was destroyed in a cataclysmic volcanic eruption from nearby Mount Vesuvius around 79 CE. The explosion’s sudden and deadly nature preserved most of the ancient Roman city intact and embalmed in volcanic ash. Archaeologists have found the remains of over 1,300 victims in the site over the last 250 years.

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From the doomed real-life crewmembers of the Nineteenth Century whaleship Essex to the fictional yet grisly soccer-player on soccer-player crime in season 2 of the hit-series Yellowjackets, cannibalism grips our minds in both fiction and the real world.

[Related: Dinosaur cannibalism was real, and Colorado paleontologists have the bones to prove it.]

In a study published June 26 in the journal Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from the Smithsonian describe what could be the oldest decisive evidence of our close evolutionary relatives butchering—and likely eating—one another.

The team examined a 1.45-million-year-old left shin bone from an unknown Homo sapien relative that was found in northern Kenya. The bone has nine cut marks, and analysis of 3D models of the fossil showed that they are very close to the damage that is inflicted by stone tools. According to the team, this is the oldest instance of this behavior known with a high degree of confidence and specificity.

“The information we have tells us that hominins were likely eating other hominins at least 1.45 million years ago,” study co-author and National Museum of Natural History paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner said in a statement.  “There are numerous other examples of species from the human evolutionary tree consuming each other for nutrition, but this fossil suggests that our species’ relatives were eating each other to survive further into the past than we recognized.”

The fossilized tibia was housed in the National Museums of Kenya’s Nairobi National Museum collections. Pobiner encountered them while searching for clues on which prehistoric predators could have hunted and eaten our ancient relatives and she noticed the evidence of butchery while checking the bone for bite marks.

Pobiner sent molds of these cuts to co-author Michael Pante of Colorado State University to try to figure out if these were actually cut marks. Pante created 3D scans of the molds and then compared the shape of the marks with a database of 898 individual tooth, butchery, and trample marks that were created through controlled experiments.

According to the analysis, nine of the 11 total marks were positively identified as clear matches for the type of damage inflicted by stone tools. The remaining two marks were likely a big cat’s bite marks, with a lion being the closest match. The bite marks also could have come from one of the three different types of saber-tooth cats that prowled the landscape at this time. 

The cut marks alone do nor prove that whomever butchered the owner of this leg made a meal out of them, but Pobiner believes that this seems to be the most likely scenario. The markings are located where the calf muscle would have attached to the bone, which is a good place to cut if the assailant’s goal was to remove a chunk of flesh. Additionally, the cut marks are all oriented the same way, suggesting that a hand wielding a stone tool may have made the marks in succession without changing their grip or adjusting the angle. 

[Related: Lucy, our ancient human ancestor, was super buff.]

“These cut marks look very similar to what I’ve seen on animal fossils that were being processed for consumption,” Pobiner said. “It seems most likely that the meat from this leg was eaten and that it was eaten for nutrition as opposed to for a ritual.”

On the surface, it looks like this could be an example of prehistoric cannibalism, but cannibalism requires the eater and the eaten to be of the same species. Initially, the shin bone was identified as Australopithecus boisei and then as Homo erectus in 1990. Today, experts agree that there is not enough conclusive information to know what species of hominin the bone belongs to. The use of stone tools also doesn’t narrow down which species might have been the butcher. 

This fossil could be a trace of prehistoric cannibalism, but also may have been a case of one species making a meal out of its evolutionary cousin.

Since none of the stone-tool cut markings overlap with two bite marks, it makes it even harder for scientists to infer anything about the order of events that took place when this hominin lost its leg. It’s possible that a big cat may have scavenged the remains after other hominins removed most of the meat from the leg bone, or that a big cat killed this unlucky prehistoric human and was chased off by other hominins that wanted to take over the kill. 

[Related: 2.9 million-year-old tools found in Kenya stir up a ‘fascinating whodunnit.’]

A fossilized skull first discovered in South Africa in 1976 previously sparked debate about the earliest known case of human relatives butchering each other. This skull was roughly 1.5 to 2.6 million years old. Studies on the skull from 2000 and 2018 disagreed about the origin of the marks left on the skull’s right cheek bone. One proposes that the marks were the result from stone tools used by hominid relatives, while the other study asserts that the marks were formed through contact with sharp-edged stone blocks that were found lying against the skull. If ancient hominins actually did use tools to put marks on the skill, it still isn’t clear if they were butchering each other for food, due to a lack of large muscle groups on the skull.

In future tests to determine once and for all that the fossilized tibia in this new study is actually the oldest cut-marked hominin fossil, Pobiner said she would love to reexamine the skull from South Africa, since it potentially has cut marks that were made using similar techniques observed in her new study. 

The findings are also another example of the treasures that could be lurking in museum drawers and cupboards around the world just waiting to be uncovered. 

“You can make some pretty amazing discoveries by going back into museum collections and taking a second look at fossils,” Pobiner said. “Not everyone sees everything the first time around. It takes a community of scientists coming in with different questions and techniques to keep expanding our knowledge of the world.”

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Just in time for this year’s summer solstice and six months ahead of the winter solstice, a team of archeologists announced the discovery of a 4,000-year-old sanctuary composed of burial mounds and ditches in the central Netherlands. The sanctuary is about 45 miles east of Rotterdam, in the town of Tiel. 

[Related: Extinct human cousins may have beaten us to inventing burial rituals.] 

The team believes it may have been built to align with the sun on the solstices, similar to southern England’s most famous stone circle, Stonehenge. The main burial mound is roughly 65 feet in diameter, and its passages are lined up to serve as a solar calendar. The calendar was to determine events such as religious festivals and harvest days, according to the discovery team.

Human skulls, valuables such as a bronze spearhead, and offerings—including animal skeletons—have been found at various locations where the sun shone through the openings during the longest and shortest days of the year, according to the municipality. The burial mound contained the remains of roughly 60 men, women, and children. The burial sites were likely used for 800 years, according to the team. 

“What a spectacular archaeological discovery! Archaeologists have found a 4,000-year-old religious sanctuary on an industrial site,” officials from the town of Tiel wrote on their Facebook page. “This is the first time a site like this has been discovered in the Netherlands.”

[Related: The Aztecs’ solar calendar helped grow food for millions of people.]

Digging and excavations began in this “open-air sanctuary” in 2017, and the team found items dating to the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Roman Empire, and the Middle Ages over the past six years. 

By examining the differences in the color and composition of the clay around it, scientists located three burial mounds a few miles from the Waal River. Within one of the graves, the team found a woman buried with a glass bead from present-day Iraq (Mesopotamia). This bead is the oldest ever found in the Netherlands, and the team says it proves people from this time were in contact with people who lived over 3,000 miles away. 

“Glass was not made here, so the bead must have been a spectacular item as for people then it was an unknown material,” University of Groningen archaeology professor Stijn Arnoldussen said in a statement to the AFP. “Things were already being exchanged in those times. The bead may have been above ground for hundreds of years before it reached Tiel, but of course, it didn’t have to be.”

Some of these discoveries will be featured in a local museum in Tiel and in the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities at a later date.

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Cave paintings and markings uncovered by anthropologists and archaeologists can be categorized as art—some may even count as early forms of writing. Despite finding drawings in caves across Europe and as far as Indonesia from thousands of years ago, relatively little is still known about the artistic expressions made by both primitive Homo sapiens and extinct Neanderthals.

[Related: How Neanderthal genetic material could influence nose shapes to this day.]

According to a study published June 21 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, some markings on a cave wall in France date back more than 57,000 years ago, making them the oldest known engravings made by Neanderthals to date. 

“Fifteen years after the resumption of excavations at the La Roche-Cotard site, the engravings have been dated to over 57,000 years ago and, thanks to stratigraphy, probably to around 75,000 years ago, making this the oldest decorated cave in France, if not Europe!” the authors wrote in a statement. 

Neanderthals are slowly shaking their reputation as our more “primitive” cousins. A 2021 find from a “Unicorn Cave” in Germany found early hints of Neanderthal art dating back 51,000 years. Neanderthals also could have lived in tight family bonds and possibly even cooked crab 90,000 years ago. 

Only a few artistic productions like the ones from Germany are attributed to Neanderthals, and their meaning is still subject to debate. The newly-found drawings, spotted in a cave called La Roche-Cotard in central France’s Loire Valley, could give scientists more insight. 

The team interprets this series of non-figurative markings on the wall as finger-flutings– or marks made by human hands. They made a plotting analysis and used photogrammetry to build 3D models of the markings and compared them with known and experimental human markings. Based on the arrangement, spacing, and shape of the engravings, the team believes that they are deliberate, intentional, and organized shapes that human hands created. 

The sediments within the cave were dated using a process called optically-stimulated luminescence dating. According to the researchers, this particular cave was closed up by sediment about 57,000 years ago—roughly 3,000 years before Homo sapiens became established in Europe. 

The age of the sediments, combined with the fact that stone tools in the cave are associated with a Neanderthal-specific technology called Mousterian, is strong evidence that these engravings are the work of Neanderthals, according to the team.

[Related: Sex, not violence, could’ve sealed the fate of the Neanderthals.]

These nonfigurative, and still indecipherable, creations are a similar age with cave engravings that Homo sapiens made in other parts of the world, adding more evidence to the idea that Neanderthals were as complex and diverse as our own human ancestors. 

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Skull analysis is helping archaeologists in the United Kingdom reconstruct the face of a 7th century CE 16 year-old-woman. The woman was buried near Cambridge, England with the Trumpington Cross, an extremely rare gold and garnet cross.  

[Related: The Roman Britons cared a lot about hair removal, and it shows in artifacts.]

The artifacts were first discovered in 2012 by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit at Trumpington Meadows. A forensic artist created this teenager’s likeness using measurements of her skull, as well as data on the tissue depth of Caucasian females. Precise hair and eye color couldn’t be determined without DNA analysis.

“It was interesting to see her face developing. Her left eye was slightly lower, about half a centimeter, than her right eye. This would have been quite noticeable in life,” Hew Morrison, a forensic artist from Inverness, Scotland, said in a statement.

Bioarcheologists conducted isotopic analysis of her bones and teeth, which revealed that she moved to England from somewhere in Central Europe after she turned seven. They deciphered that the proportion of protein in her diet decreased by a small amount, but it was enough to make a difference towards the end of her short life. 

“She was quite a young girl when she moved, likely from part of southern Germany, close to the Alps, to a very flat part of England. She was probably quite unwell and she traveled a long way to somewhere completely unfamiliar – even the food was different. It must have been scary,” bioarchaeologist Sam Leggett from the University of Edinburgh said in a statement. 

Earlier analysis of her remains indicate that she suffered from illness, but could not reveal the exact cause of her death. According to the team, her burial itself is remarkable. She was laid to rest on a carved wooden bed, wearing the ornate Trumpington Cross, fine clothing, and gold pins. 

Only 18 bed burials have been uncovered in the UK, and this ornate cross made with gold and garnets is one of only five of its kind that have ever been uncovered in Britain. The best known example of this kind of cross was found in the coffin of St. Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral. It likely identified the teen as an aristocrat or royal and one of England’s earliest converts to Christianity. 

In 597 CE, Pope Gregory sent St. Augustine of Canterbury to England on a mission to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxon kings. This process continued for many decades and even included a mass baptism on Christmas Day 597. 

[Related: A lost ‘bawdy bard’ act reveals roots of naughty British comedy.]

“She must have known that she was important and she had to carry that on her shoulders. Her isotopic results match those of two other women who were similarly buried on beds in this period in Cambridgeshire,” said Legget. “So it seems that she was part of an elite group of women who probably traveled from mainland Europe, most likely Germany, in the 7th century, but they remain a bit of a mystery. Were they political brides or perhaps brides of Christ? The fact that her diet changed once she arrived in England suggests that her lifestyle may have changed quite significantly.”

The Trumpington Cross will be displayed with the delicate gold and garnet pins connected by a gold chain at a new exhibition in  Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology starting this week, alongside the forensic image of what this young lady may have looked like.

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The history of religion in ancient Egypt is full of fascinating details and mysteries. While some of the Egyptian gods, take Osiri or Isis, are relatively well known, there are certainly some that are far from common knowledge. For example, Bes, the deity of music, merriment, and childbirth. This god was depicted as a long armed, imperfect, “dwarf-like” being, according to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. Worship of the god was brought by Phoenicians as far as Spain’s Balearic islands, notably to Ibiza or the “Island of Bes.”

[Related: Ancient Egyptians had a unique way of mummifying crocodiles.]

Many cups and vessels were fashioned in the shape of Bes’s head, with the hope that the liquid inside would contain healing properties.According to a preprint study published to Research Square, traces of hallucinogenic plants were found in sampled residues of a Bes vessel dated back to second century BCE, also known as the Ptolemaic dynasty (if that sounds familiar, it’s likely because Cleopatra was the last queen of the iconic empire). 

Researchers from Florida and Italy started their journey by analyzing the DNA inside of a vase housed in the Tampa Museum of Art. This vase had come into the museum’s possession in 1984 from a private collection. Records show it was purchased in Cairo in 1960 and found in the Fayum district, a region appropriately known for its fertile land for farming. 

In the vase, the researchers found traces of two intriguing plants—first the Syrian rue, which causes stimulating and hallucinogenic effects in humans at low doses. The second, the blue water lily, which has psychoactive properties and has been used throughout history in traditional medicine to help with woes like sleep deprivation and anxiety. 

[Related: Tomb of a forgotten queen is one of several new stunning Egyptian discoveries.]

Beyond just mind-bending plants, the Bes-shaped jug had traces of fermentation yeast, sesame seeds, wheat, fruit, honey and “human proteins.” Sometimes, these human proteins come from skin, and are classified as contaminants, according to the paper. But these were a “deliberate addition”, the authors write, considering the proteins likely came from breast milk, oral or vaginal fluids, and blood. 

The odd mix led the authors to believe this was likely a ceremonial drink linked to the “Myth of the Solar Eye” where Bes fielded off the wrath of bloodthirsty Hathor with an alcoholic drink disguised as blood.

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In late November 1974, the world of archeology changed when scientists discovered Lucy (a nod to a famous Beatles track played over and over at the dig site), a 40-percent complete fossil of a young female Australopithecus afarensis in Ethiopia. This species of ancient hominid was living and walking around on two feet in East Africa 3.7 to 3 million years ago, long before the earliest stone tools were made. While Lucy and her relatives were shorter, more ape-like, and had smaller brains than Homo sapiens, they showed just how long human-like creatures were evolving and strolling about on Earth.

Just recently, scientists uncovered that Lucy, whose remains are housed in a specially constructed safe in the National Museum of Ethiopia, may have been even more like us than we thought—and considerably more muscular in the legs department. According to a new paper published on June 13 in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Lucy could walk around upright just as well as a person.

[Related: The ‘granddaddy’ of all early hominins walked on Earth a lot longer than we thought.]

Previously, paleoanthropologists disagreed on Lucy’s bipedal stance. Some thought she likely waddled around with her back hunched over, not unlike today’s chimpanzees. However, Ashleigh Wiseman, a paleoanthropology research associate at the University of Cambridge, created 3D models of the leg and pelvis muscles of the 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis. After recreating 36 muscles in each of the ancient hominids’ legs, she found that Lucy’s stance was quite similar to humans. 

Not only could she walk like a Homo sapien, but she was considerably more muscular than us—her calves and thighs were more than twice the size of those of modern humans. Her thighs in particular were made up of 74 percent muscle, compared to the average 50 percent split between fat and muscle in our species today. 

This shouldn’t be too surprising, however, given the world ancient hominids lived in. To manage life in East Africa 3 million years ago, Lucy and her cousins would’ve had to roam wooded grasslands, while swiftly switching to climbing forest canopies, Wiseman said in a statement. 

“We are now the only animal that can stand upright with straight knees. Lucy’s muscles suggest that she was as proficient at bipedalism as we are, while possibly also being at home in the trees,” Wiseman added. “Lucy likely walked and moved in a way that we do not see in any living species today.”

[Related: 2.9 million-year-old tools found in Kenya stir up a ‘fascinating whodunnit’.]

3D models have previously been used to reconstruct the muscles of other lost species. In fact, Wiseman mentions that the method has helped paleontologists figure out the shockingly slow running speeds of T. rexes. But recreating the builds of our ancestors lets us see how far we’ve come—and how much muscle we’ve lost as our lifestyles have shifted. 

“Of course, in the fossil record we are left looking at the bare bones,” Wiseman told CNN. “But muscles animate the body—they allow you to walk, run, jump and even dance. So, if we want to understand how our ancestors moved, we first need to reconstruct their soft tissues.”

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Humans can be found pretty much everywhere on the planet, but this wasn’t always the case. After Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago, it was the beginning of a long journey as our species spread to distant corners of the world. 

Previously, evidence largely supported that the early voyage from Africa to Southeast Asia and eventually Australia was by the seaside: Our ancestors stuck to coastal and island locations, moving through today’s Sumatra, Philippines, and Borneo. But new findings show that island-hopping may have been just one method of travel for the humans who  became Australia’s First People. A paper published June 13 in Nature Communications outlines how modern humans passed by a cave in Northern Laos on their way through Asia, around 40,000 years earlier than anthropologists had thought. 

[Related: Neanderthals caught and cooked crabs 90,000 years ago.]

The findings from the Tam Pà Ling cave demonstrate two crucial discoveries—that modern humans moved through Arabia and Asia much earlier than previously known, and that these humans weren’t afraid to travel through woods and forests to get there. 

“Tam Pà Ling plays a key role in the story of modern human migration through Asia but its significance and value is only just being recognised,” Fabrice Demeter, a University of Copenhagen palaeoanthropologist and one of the paper’s lead authors, said in a news release. 

The story begins back in 2009 with the discovery of a skull and mandible in the cave located 186 miles from the shore. But, Laotion law doesn’t permit direct dating of fossils found at its World Heritage sites, which includes Tam Pà Ling. At the time, using a form of luminescence dating on nearby sediments, scientists placed the fossils at a minimum age of 46,000 years, which is in line with prior research investigating when humans showed up in the region.

[Related: Ancient Mesopotamian texts show when and why humans first kissed.]

But, in the following years, more fossils have been found—including pieces of human skeletons beneath around 15 feet of sediment. To figure out the age of these skeletal remains, the researchers used uranium-series dating on a stalactite tip buried in sentiment, as well as uranium-series and electron-spin-resonance on two pairs of animal teeth found about 6 feet deeper. This chronology reveals a human presence in the region for at least 56,000 years, according to the new research: A fragment of human bone buried below around 23 feet of sediment suggests humans arrived between 68,000 and 86,000 years ago.

Strangely enough, this cave is not too far from Laos’ Cobra Cave, where an ancient Denisovan tooth discovery placed the mysterious human cousin in the region as far as 164,000 years ago. There may be more buried secrets of early humans waiting to be uncovered, as author and Macquarie University geochronologist Kira Westaway said in a statement: “We have much to learn from the caves and forests of Southeast Asia.”

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If you were able to view the southern coast of Peru from a bird’s-eye view, you’d be able to make out dozens of strange drawings of creatures: a giant spider, whale, hummingbird, and condor. These are the Nazca lines, Peru’s own archaeological enigma. First discovered in the early 20th century, these lines were supposedly made from around 400 BCE to 650 CE, but how people created the desert pictures, tens to hundreds of feet long, is still somewhat shrouded in mystery.

While hundreds of these strange drawings have already been found, there are still more that elude even the most careful observer. Which is why new searches rely on nonhuman helpers. An artificial intelligence method was able to recently scope out four new lines, according to a report in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Researchers, including lead author Masato Sakai, a professor of anthropology and archaeology at Yamagata University in Japan, have been looking for hidden Nazca lines for years—and as of December 2022, his team had found 168 new geoglyphs across the Nazca Pampa using satellite imagery, aerial photography, LIDAR scanning, and other methods. In 2016, after capturing a few especially high-resolution photos of the lines, Sakai and his team took things a step further, according to Live Science. 

[Related: What the longest-lasting Mesoamerican cities all had in common.]

Teaming up with IBM Japan and IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in the United States, the researchers used 21 known Nazca geoglyphs to train the deep learning system on what to look for, or elements commonly found in the drawings. Then they set their program to work combing through aerial photos. The first AI-captured Nazca line, an odd-looking humanoid, was found back in 2019, and just recently the software has uncovered three more, which include a 250-foot-long pair of legs and a 62-foot-long fish. 

The deep learning system, according to the report, is about 21 times faster than a human when it comes to analyzing aerial photographs. Poring over the entire Nazca Pampa to identify figurative drawings (not including the many geometric or linear ones) would take around 68 days straight for a human archeologist, according to the paper. With the help of the AI, that could take only 78 hours. 

Much like other culturally or ecologically important sites, the Nazca lines face threats from climate change, human activity, and more. Time is of the essence to find and preserve these eccentric pieces of human history—and Sakai and team write that the pairing of field research and AI could lead to “more efficient and effective investigations.”

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Since its initial discovery was announced in 2015, an extinct hominid species named Homo naledi (H. naledi) has been making anthropological waves. Now, three new preprint studies published June 5 in the journal eLife and presented at the Richard Leakey Memorial Conference suggest that these human cousins may have buried their dead and carved symbols into cave walls, showing that they were capable of complex behavior despite their smaller brains. 

[Related: New Species On Human Family Tree Discovered In Ancient Mass Grave.]

While the research hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, some outside scientists believe that more evidence is needed to challenge what is already known about how complex thinking evolved in humans. If these new findings are true, it would overthrow the current belief that humans are the only species to bury their dead.

H. naledi’s brain is roughly one-third the size of the human brain. Previously, most scientists believed that the mental capacity behind burial, making marks, and other more complex cultural behaviors required a bigger brain, like those of the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. 

“It’s not how big your brain is, it’s how you use it and what it’s structured for,” study co-author and University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks said in a statement. Hawks has helped lead the H. naledi  team since its beginning.

The fossil remains of the species were first uncovered about 10 years ago in the Rising Star cave system northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. Since then, team members have descended into the tight underground caves that they say show this species in a new light. 

One study describes the potential intentional burial sites that held fossilized remains of children and adults in the fetal position and buried in shallow holes in the ground. One of the other studies describes a series of marks carved into the cave’s limestone walls that include cross-hatched lines, squares, and triangles. 

Additionally,  H. naledi  had a smaller frame based on the skeletons that have been excavated. Archaeologists estimate that the average  individual weighed less than 90 pounds and was under five feet tall. This small stature would have helped them navigate the extremely narrow and cramped passageways in this cave system. Some of the cave system’s labyrinth of passages are as narrow as seven inches and are located 300 feet underground. 

The bones found in the cave are between 236,000 and 335,000 years old, which is older than the graves at Qafzeh cave in Israel. These 92,000-year-old graves are commonly cited as the earliest known examples of human burial.

[Related: Humans and Neanderthals could have lived together even earlier than we thought.]

“This is a great moment in human history,” Lee Berger, the South African paleontologist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence who co-wrote all three papers, told The Washington Post. Berger said people have wondered, “‘What will we do when we meet another culture as complex as us?’ Well, you just did.”

Berger has drawn criticism in his three-decades-long career for announcing or publishing research before gathering sufficient supporting evidence. He, in turn, has criticized the practice of waiting years to share discoveries with the public, calling it “elitist,” according to The Washington Post. 

These new findings show that the caves still have more to offer scientists working to understand human evolution, according to Hawks. The team hopes to have more trained eyes and experts into the caves to search for more evidence. 

“We have to approach it like an escape room. We have to study every hidden detail now,” Hawks says. “This whole cave system might be part of some kind of cultural space.”

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Ancient Romans were apparently staunch believers that “pain is beauty,” especially when body hair removal is involved. A collection of tweezers once used to remove armpit hair are amidst over 400 new artifacts on display at a Wroxeter Roman City in Shropshire, England. 

[Related: This ancient Roman villa was equipped with wine fountains.]

Some of the objects related to both cleanliness and beauty in Roman times include a skin scraper called a strigil, bottles of perfume, jewelry made from jet and bone, amulets to ward off evil, and make-up applicators. 

“At Wroxeter alone we have discovered over 50 pairs of tweezers, one of the largest collections of this item in Britain, indicating that it was a popular accessory! The advantage of the tweezer was that it was safe, simple and cheap, but unfortunately not pain free,” site curator Cameron Moffett said in a statement. 

Wroxeter Roman City was once known as Viroconium Cornoviorum, which was a thriving urban spot that was once about the size of the ill-fated Pompeii, Italy during the Flavian dynasty. It was once the fourth largest town in Roman Britain and was founded as a legionary fortress in the mid-first century. It was officially established as a town in the 90s CE and was inhabited until the fifth century.

Various excavations of the site have uncovered a forum where laws were made, market, a multipurpose office, community center, and shopping center, and a bath house. In the bath house, Roman Britons would have bathed and socialized, as Romans generally cared a great deal about cleanliness and public image. 

Roman cities throughout their empire had toilets in addition to these communal baths, and many Romans owned personal cleaning kits. These kits included an ear scoop for wax removal, a nail cleaner, and tweezers. Roman tweezers were used for way more than crafting the perfect eyebrow arch. They were used on all unwanted body hair, which sounds a bit like its own form of torture, and was usually performed by slaves, according to English Heritage, a charitable organization that oversees over 400 historic sites in England.

“It may come as a surprise to some that in Roman Britain the removal of body hair was as common with men as it was with women. Particularly for sports like wrestling, there was a social expectation that men engaging in exercise that required minimal clothing would have prepared themselves by removing all their visible body hair,” said Moffett. “It’s interesting to see this vogue for the removal of body hair around again after millennia, for everyone, although luckily modern methods are slightly less excruciating!”

[Related: Scientists think they found a 2,000-year-old dildo in ancient Roman ruins.]

To help set them apart from “barbarians,” Roman Britons preferred a cleanly shaved face on men. Hair plucking was so painful that Roman author and politician Seneca once wrote a letter complaining about the noise coming from from the public baths, noting “the skinny armpit hair-plucker whose cries are shrill, so as to draw people’s attention, and never stop, except when he is doing his job and making someone else shriek for him.”

For women, removing hair was often the perception of beauty. “There are many, many written sources including Pliny and Ovid,” Moffett told The Guardian. “They are all writing about how you will need to keep on top of the body hair and you know, gosh, no man is going to be interested in you if you’ve got armpit hair.”

A reconstructed Roman town house stands among the city’s surviving ruins, and many of the objects discovered at Wroxeter depict the daily lives of those who once lived there. 

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It’s been a little over four years since a major fire ravaged France’s iconic Notre Dame de Paris cathedral, causing an estimated $865 million of damage to the majority of its roof and recognizable spire. Since then, the French government, engineers, and a cadre of other dedicated restoration experts have been hard at work rebuilding the architectural wonder, which is currently slated to reopen to the public by the end of 2024.

It’s a tight turnaround, and one that would be much easier to meet if carpenters used modern technology and techniques to repair the iconic building. But as AP News explained earlier this week, it’s far more important to use the same approaches that helped first construct Notre Dame—well over 800 years ago. According to the recent dispatch, rebuilders are consciously employing medieval era tools such as hand axes, mallets, and chisels to reforge the cathedral’s hundreds of tons’ worth of oak wood roofing beams.

Although it would progress faster with the use of modern equipment and materials, that’s not the point. Instead, it’s ethically and artistically far more imperative to stay true to “this cathedral as it was built in the Middle Ages,” explained Jean-Louis Georgelin, a retired general for the French overseeing the project.

[Related: The Notre Dame fire revealed a long-lost architectural marvel.]

Thankfully, everything appears to be on track for the December 2024 reopening. Last month, overseers successfully conducted a “dry run” to assemble and erect large sections of the timber frame at a workshop in western France’s Loire Valley. The next time the pieces are put together will be atop the actual Notre Dame cathedral.

As rudimentary as some of these construction techniques may seem now, at the time they were considered extremely advanced. Earlier this year, in fact, researchers discovered Notre Dame was likely the first Gothic-style cathedral to utilize iron for binding sections of stonework together.

It’s not all old-school handiwork, however. The team behind Notre Dame’s rebuilt roofing plans to transport the massive components to Paris via trucks, and then lifted into place with help from a large mechanical crane. Over this entire process, detailed computer analysis was utilized to make absolutely sure carpenters’ measurements and handhewn work were on the right track. Still, the melding of bygone and modern technology appears to perfectly complement one another, ensuring that when Notre Dame finally literally and figuratively rises from the ashes, it will be as stunning as ever.

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Libraries are full of unique and missing oddities from long lost letters to famous forgeries. A newly discovered record of live comedy performance in medieval England is yet another example of how deep the roots of British theater run. In a study published May 30 in The Review of English Studies, researchers describe a 15th century manuscript with slapstick, lively text mocking everyone from kings and priests down to lower classes. If that’s not enough, the naughty narrative encourages drunkenness and features a killer rabbit.

[Related: Codebreakers have finally deciphered the lost letters of Mary, Queen of Scots.]

These new texts also contain the earliest recorded use of a ‘red herring’ in the English language, which is a misleading statement, question, or argument that is meant to redirect the conversation or text conversation away from its original subject. Additionally, it fills in some knowledge gaps regarding comic culture in England between Geoffrey Chaucer and the Renaissance’s William Shakespeare.

In the Middle Ages, minstrels often traveled from taverns and fairs to entertain people. Fictional minstrels such as Robin Hood’s Allan-a-Dale, are common in literature, but historical references to actual performers are more rare. When the minstrel was performing these newly found works, the Wars of the Roses were still raging. Life was very difficult for the majority of English people. However, study author James Wade, an early English literature specialist from Cambridge University, says this text shows that fun entertainment was still flourishing as social mobility increased.

Wade found the text when researching in the National Library of Scotland. Wade saw that a scribe had written: “By me, Richard Heege, because I was at that feast and did not have a drink.”

“It was an intriguing display of humor and it’s rare for medieval scribes to share that much of their character,” Wade said. This little joke encouraged him to look into why, how, and where Heege had copied these texts.

This new study focuses on the first of nine booklets that make up the larger Heege Manuscript. The booklet contains three texts that Wade concludes were copied down in 1480 from a memory-aid written by an unknown minstrel that likely performed them near the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border in central England. The three texts are a mock sermon written in prose, a tail-rhyme burlesque romance titled “The Hunting of the Hare,” and an alliterative nonsense verse called “The Battle of Brackonwet.” 

“Most medieval poetry, song and storytelling has been lost,” Wade said in a statement. “Manuscripts often preserve relics of high art. This is something else. It’s mad and offensive, but just as valuable. Stand-up comedy has always involved taking risks and these texts are risky! They poke fun at everyone, high and low.”

[Related: Medieval knights rode tiny horses into battle.]

All three texts are comedic and designed for live performance, since the narrator tells the audience to pay attention and even to pass him a drink. The texts also feature regional humor and inside jokes for a local audience.

Wade believes that this minstrel wrote part of his act down since the many nonsensical sequences would have been very difficult to recall solely by memory. 

“He didn’t give himself the kind of repetition or story trajectory which would have made things simpler to remember,” he said “Here we have a self-made entertainer with very little education creating really original, ironic material. To get an insight into someone like that from this period is incredibly rare and exciting.”

Like many present day comedians and actors, medieval minstrels are believed to have had day jobs as peddlers and plowmen, but performed their theatrical gigs at night. Some also may have even gone on tour by traveling the county, while others stuck to local venues. Wade believes the minstrel in these new texts was more of a local performer. 

“You can find echoes of this minstrel’s humor in shows like Mock the Week, situational comedies and slapstick,” said Wade.“The self-irony and making audiences the butt of the joke are still very characteristic of British stand-up comedy.

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The persistent pathogen known as the plague was circulating around Europe and Asia centuries before it wiped out about 25 million people. A team of scientists have just recently found 4,000 year-old DNA belonging to Yersinia pestis, or the bacteria that causes the plague. That’s about 3,000 years before the plague before the Black Death began. The findings were detailed in a study published May 30 in the journal Nature Communications and represent the oldest evidence of the plague in Britain found to date. 

[Related: Scientists tracked the plague’s journey through Denmark using really old teeth.]

The team identified two cases of Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis) from human remains found uncovered in a mass burial site in southwest England near Somerset and another in a ring cairn monument in Cumbria in northwest England. After taking small skeletal samples from 34 individuals at both sites, they screened for plague bacteria in the teeth. Dental pulp can trap the DNA remnants of infectious diseases and has helped scientists find evidence of the plague before. 

After extracting dental pulp, they analyzed the DNA inside and identified three cases of Y. pestis in two children that are estimated to be about 10 to 12 years-old when they died, as well as one case in a woman who was between 35 and 45 years-old. It is likely that these people lived at roughly the same time, according to radiocarbon dating.  

“The ability to detect ancient pathogens from degraded samples, from thousands of years ago, is incredible. These genomes can inform us of the spread and evolutionary changes of pathogens in the past, and hopefully help us understand which genes may be important in the spread of infectious diseases,” study co-author and PhD student from the Francis Crick Institute Pooja Swali said in a statement. “We see that this Yersinia pestis lineage, including genomes from this study, loses genes over time, a pattern that has emerged with later epidemics caused by the same pathogen.”

Plague has been identified in multiple individuals who lived in Eurasia between 5,000 and 2,500 years ago during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age (LNBA). Evidence of the plague, however, hadn’t been seen in Britain at this point in time. This LNBA strain was likely brought into Central and Western Europe about 4,800 years ago as humans expanded into Eurasia, and this study suggests it extended even further west into Britain. The LNBA strain’s wide geographic range suggests that it could have been easily transmitted.

Genome sequencing found that the strain of Y. pestis found in these sites looks very similar to the strain identified further east into Eurasia at the same time and not later strains of the disease. It lacked the yapC and ymt genes, which are both seen in later strains of plague. The ymt gene is also known to play an important role in plague transmission via fleas. It is likely that the LNBA strain was not transmitted on fleas, unlike later strains of the plague, such as the one that caused the Black Death in the Fourteenth Century. 

[Related: You could get the plague (but probably won’t).]

The team is not fully certain that the individuals at these old burial sites were infected with the exact same strain of plague, since pathogenic DNA that causes disease degrades very quickly in samples that could be incomplete or eroded. 

The Somerset site is also rare since it doesn’t match other funeral sites dating back to this time period. The individuals buried there appear to have died from trauma. The team believes that the mass burial here was not due to an outbreak of plague, but the individuals studied may have been infected when they died.  

“We understand the huge impact of many historical plague outbreaks, such as the Black Death, on human societies and health, but ancient DNA can document infectious disease much further into the past,” co-author and geneticist at the Francis Crick Institute Pontus Skoglund said in a statement. “Future research will do more to understand how our genomes responded to such diseases in the past, and the evolutionary arms race with the pathogens themselves, which can help us to understand the impact of diseases in the present or in the future.”

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Humans are born with instincts for crying and smiling, but not for kissing. Sometime in the past, our ancestors had the idea to smack their mouths together and call it romantic. And though we may not know who gave the first smooch, ancient records of these steamy sessions are helping us piece together when people started locking lips. 

The generally accepted earliest evidence we have of making out is religious text written in India in 1500 BCE. And while there was no official word for kissing back then, sentences like “young lord of the house repeatedly licks the young woman” and lovers “setting mouth to mouth” implied more than platonic relationships. But whether this was when kissing all began is still up for debate. In fact, an overlooked collection of written texts from ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq and Syria) suggests people were kissing further in the past. 

Citing those texts, authors of a new perspective article published today in the journal Science argue romantic kissing occurred 1,000 years earlier than historians first predicted. And as kissing became more of the norm, old medical records reveal the widespread transmission of viruses that spread through lip-to-lip contact.

“Given what we know about the history of kissing in humans and the myriad of similar kissing-like behaviors observed around the animal kingdom, I’m not surprised by these findings,” says Sheril Kirshenbaum, the author of The Science of Kissing, who was not involved in the study. “Whether romantic or not, kissing influences our bodies and brains in so many meaningful ways by guiding our emotions and decisions.”

[Related: Scientists think they found a 2,000-year-old dildo in ancient Roman ruins]

Clay tablets left behind by ancient Mesopotamians in 2500 BCE describe two types of kissing. The first was the friendly-parental kiss. People kissed the feet of their elders or the ground as a sign of respect or submission. 

The second was the lip kiss with a more erotic and intimate overtone. However, there were a few cultural expectations when it came to this type of kissing. Romantic kissing was an action reserved for married couples, as people frowned upon any PDA in Mesopotamia. Kissing among unmarried folks was taboo, considered to be giving in to sexual temptation. People not meant to be sexually active, such as priestesses, were thought to lose their ability to speak if they kissed someone. “The need for such norms indicates that romantic kissing must have been practiced in society at large,” explains lead author Troels Pank Arbøll, an assyriologist (a person studying the language and civilization of ancient Mesopotamia) at the University of Copenhagen.

As more people adopted the practice of kissing on the lips, ancient medical texts described illnesses whose symptoms resemble viral infections spread through mouth-to-mouth contact. The authors note this aligns with DNA analysis from ancient human remains detecting viruses such as herpes simplex virus 1, Epstein-Barr virus, and human parvovirus. All three viruses transmit through saliva.

One example is a disease that the ancient Mesopotamians labeled bu’šānu. The infection involved boils in or around the mouth area. Its name also implies that the infected person might have stunk. While Arbøll says bu’šānu shares several symptoms with herpes, he warns people not to make any assumptions. “As with all ancient disease concepts, they do not match any modern diseases 1:1, and one should be very careful when applying these modern identifications. A disease concept like bu’šānu likely incorporated several modern diseases.”

Mesopotamians likely did not think infectious diseases were spread through kissing, since it is not listed anywhere in the medical texts. However, they had some religiously influenced ideas of contamination, which spurred some measures to avoid spreading the disease. For example, a letter from around 1775 BCE describes a woman in a palace harem with lesions all over her body. Assuming it was contagious, people avoided drinking from any cups she drank, sleeping in her bed, or sitting on her chair.

[Related: When you give octopus MDMA they hug it out]

The findings show that this form of kissing did not originate in a single place. Mesopotamia, India, and other societies separately learned to associate pecks on the lips as romantic. Arbøll says it’s possible other areas also learned about kissing but didn’t have the writing tools to record this behavior. This opens the question of how widely sexual kissing was practiced in the ancient world. 

Some experts are less convinced that kissing was a universal behavior. William Jankowiak, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved in the study, points out that written records of kissing often occurred in complex societies and less so in people living in smaller foraging groups. It’s also difficult to know if romantic kissing was practiced in more than one class or reserved for elite groups in ancient civilizations. Additionally, other factors, such as living in tropical versus colder regions, could influence whether people wanted to lock lips. 

There’s still a long way to go in understanding the ancient history of kissing. But the study does clear up one thing—all the smooching our ancestors did is probably why oral herpes and other kiss-transmitted diseases are a global problem today.

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An international team of archaeologists digging in Saudi Arabia and Jordan reportedly found the world’s oldest architectural plans. The findings were published in a study May 17 in the journal PLOS ONE and includes precise engravings that date back between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago.

[Related: Details of life in Bronze Age Mycenae could lie at the bottom of a well.]

These ancient blueprints depict large structures used to trap and funnel animals for slaughter into enclosures called kites. First spotted by aviators in the 1920s, the contraptions are called “kites” because of the shape they form. The converging walls range from hundreds of feet up to 3.1 miles long and drive the animals towards a corral surrounded by pits up to 13.1 feet deep. 

According to the authors, plans like these for kites represent a milestone in human development because intelligent behavior is needed to transpose the plans for such a large space onto a small two dimensional surface. A kite would have also helped people hunt a larger group of animals in a shorter period of time. 

“Although human constructions have modified natural spaces for millennia, few plans or maps predate the period of the literate civilizations of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt,” the authors wrote in a statement. “The ability to transpose large space onto a small, two dimensional surface represents a milestone in intelligent behavior. Such structures are visible as a whole only from the air, yet this calls for the representation of space in a way not seen at this time.”

In this new study, the team reports two new engravings first unearthed in 2015 that represent the ruins of kites in present-day Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The Jibal al-Khasabiyeh area in Jordan has eight kite areas. The stone found with a representation of how to build them that was carved with stone tools measures two feet long and one foot wide and is about 7,000 years old. 

In Saudi Arabia, Zebel az-Zilliyat has two pairs of visible kites that are about two miles apart.  A massive to-scale engraving of the plans was excavated nearby. The 10 feet long by seven feet wide blueprint dated to about 8,000 years ago. In this engraving, it was reportedly pecked instead of carved into the stone, possibly with hand picks. It was created at a scale of roughly 1:175, so actual kites were 175 times larger than the engraving itself.

The study also found that the proportions, layout, and shape of the engravings were consistent with the actual remains of the ancient kites. They are also in keeping with the four cardinal directions (north, south, east, and west).

[Related: Cave drawings from 20,000 years ago may feature an early form of writing.]

Over 6,000 kite structures have been found across central Asia and the Middle East, with the majority in present-day Saudi Arabia, eastern Jordan, and southern Syria. There are other  ancient engravings in Europe that are believed to portray maps, but scientists have yet to discover depictions of hunting kites on the continent.

Little is known about the people who made the kites thousands of years ago and a project like this likely would have been a large group undertaking, according to the authors. 

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The preserved ancient Roman city of Pompeii is best known for the catastrophic volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed the city in 79 CE. But the discovery of two skeletons at Italy’s Pompeii Archaeological Park adds to growing evidence that earthquakes  accompanied the fateful eruption. The details of the excavation were published by the Pompeii Archaeological Park on May 16 in the E-Journal of Pompeii Excavations.

[Related: This ancient Roman villa was equipped with wine fountains.]

As the ground shook, massive plumes of volcanic ash and pumice and boiling hot gasses shot out of the volcano which covered and suffocated its residents. The bodies of those caught in the eruption were well preserved by the ash, offering scientists a unique window into the event. Archaeologists have found the remains of over 1,300 victims in the site southeast of Naples over the last 250 years

According to Pompeii Archaeological Park, the skeletons were discovered during a recent excavation of the Casti Amanti, or the House of the Chaste Lovers. 

“In recent years, we have realized there were violent, powerful seismic events that were happening at the time of the eruption,″ Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park told the Associated Press. 

Zuchtriegel added that advances in archaeological techniques and methodology, “allow us to understand better the inferno that in two days completely destroyed the city of Pompeii, killing many inhabitants.” These technological advances are making it possible to figure out the dynamic of the deaths right down to the final seconds. 

The remains were found in a utility room where the pair had possibly sought shelter beneath a collapsed wall. The skeletons are believed to belong to two men that were at least 55 years old at the time of the eruption. 

The team also believes that the house was likely undergoing reconstruction when the eruption and earthquake struck due to a stone kitchen counter covered in powdered lime.

[Related: As Rome digs its first new metro route in decades, an archaeologist safeguards the city’s buried treasures.]

Part of the southern facing wall collapsed and crushed one of the men and the skeleton’s raised arm, “offers a tragic image of his vain attempt to protect himself from the falling masonry.” At the western wall, the entire upper section detached and fell into the room and crushed and buried the other man. 

The team also found some organic matter that they believe is a bundle of fabric, vessels, bowls, jugs, six coins, and a glass paste that possibly used to be the beads of a necklace.

“The discovery of the remains of these two Pompeians in the context of the construction site in the Insula of the Chaste Lovers shows how much there is still to discover about the terrible eruption of AD 79 and confirms the necessity of continuing scientific investigation and excavations. Pompeii is an immense archaeological laboratory that has regained vigor in recent years, astonishing the world with the continuous discoveries brought to light and demonstrating Italian excellence in this sector,” Italy’s Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano said in a statement.

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A broken molar and some sophisticated stone pointed tools suggest that Europe’s first known humans may have been living on the continent 54,000 years ago. The findings are detailed in a study published May 3 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE and suggests that the first modern humans spread across the European continent during three waves in the Paleolithic Era. 

[Related: Sex, not violence, could’ve sealed the fate of the Neanderthals.]

Homo sapiens arose in Africa over 300,000 years ago and anatomically modern humans are thought to have emerged about 195,000 years ago. Previously, it was believed that modern humans moved into Europe from Africa roughly 42,000 years ago, leaving the archaeological record of Paleolithic Europe withs many open questions about how modern humans arrived in the region and how they interacted with the resident Neanderthal populations. The 2022 discovery of a tooth in France’s Grotte Mandrin cave in the Rhône Valley suggested that modern humans were there about 54,000 years ago, about 10,000 years earlier than scientists previously believed. 

“Until 2022, it was believed that Homo sapiens had reached Europe between the 42nd and 45th millennium. The study shows that this first Sapiens migration would actually be the last of three major migratory waves to the continent, profoundly rewriting what was thought to be known about the origin of Sapiens in Europe,” study co-author Ludovic Slimak, an archeologist at and University of Toulouse in France, said in a statement. 

The newly analyzed stone tools from this study have further upended that timeline. They suggest that the three waves of migration occurred between 54,000 and 42,000 years ago. The team of researchers compared records of stone tool technology across western Eurasia to document the order of early human activity across the continents. It focused on tens of thousands of stone tools from Ksar Akil in Lebanon and France’s Grotte Mandrin (where the tooth was found) and analyzed their precise technical connections with the earliest modern technologies in the continent. 

The technology of the tools went through three similar phases in each region, Slimak said, so they may have spread from the Near East to Europe during these three distinct waves of migration. The study suggests Neanderthals only began to fade into extinction in the third wave–about 45,000 to 42,000 years ago. 

[Related: Archery may have helped humans gain leverage over Neanderthals.]

The team also looked at a group of stone artifacts that were previously found in the eastern Mediterranean region called the Levant, or what includes today’s Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Slimak compared the tools from Grotte Mandrin to the ones from Ksar Akil in Lebanon, noting similarities between them. The artifacts from a group of stone tools known as the Châtelperronian resemble the modern human artifacts seen in the Early Upper Paleolithic of the Levant. The Châtelperronian items date to about 45,000 years ago and scientists had often thought Châtelperronians were Neanderthals.

“Châtelperronian culture, one of the first modern traditions in western Europe and since then attributed to Neanderthals, should in fact signal the second wave of Homo sapiens migration in Europe, impacting deeply our understanding of the cultural organization of the last Neanderthals,” said Slimak.

The moving of these technologies allow for a provocative new reinterpretation of human arrival into Europe and how it is related to the Levant region. Future studies of these phases of human migration will help paint a clearer picture of the sequence of events when Homo sapiens spread,   and gradually replaced Neanderthals.

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Archaeologists in Rome have unearthed a treasure trove of Renaissance-era medical supplies inside the Forum of Caesar. Among the “golden” finds are 500 year-old medicine bottles and urine flasks. In a study published April 11 in the journal Antiquity, the authors believe that the containers were used to collect pee for medical analysis and diagnosis. 

According to the researchers, the pathogens that could have been present in these bottles helps uncover how urban waste was managed.

[Related: Pee makes for great fertilizer. But is it safe?]

The current excavation initially began in 2021 and is part of an international collaboration called the Caesar’s Forum Excavation Project. The 16th century medical dump was found inside Caesar’s Forum, which was built centuries prior in 46 BCE. About 1,500 years later, a guild of bakers used this space to build the Ospedale dei Fornari or Bakers’ Hospital. According to the authors, the waste dump was then created by the hospital’s workers. 

The archaeologists also found rosary beads, broken glass jars, coins, a ceramic camel, and a Renaissance-era cistern full of ceramic vessels. The team of researchers from institutions in Italy and Denmark believes that the objects were likely related to patient care in the hospital. Each patient at the hospital may have been given a basket with a bowl, drinking glass, jug, and a plate for hygiene purposes. 

The glass urine flasks are called “matula” in medieval Latin medical texts and were likely used for the practice of uroscopy. This was a diagnostic tool for physicians during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Urine was also once believed to be a cure for motion sickness. 

The authors believe that doctors would use the flasks to observe urine’s sedimentation, smell, color, and even taste. This would help the physicians diagnose ailments like kidney disease, jaundice, and diabetes. The excess glucose in diabetic urine gives it a saccharine quality. English physician Thomas Willis was credited with discovering this during the 17th Century and described the pee as “wonderfully sweet as if it were imbued with honey or sugar.”

[Related from PopSci+: What’s in a packrat’s petrified pee? Just a few thousand years of secrets.]

Also included in the cistern were lead clamps that were associated with wood treated with fire. According to the study, this may be evidence of burning objects brought into the hospital from houses with known plague cases. Italian physician Quinto Tiberio Angelerio wrote this in a series of rules for preventing the spread of the contagious disease in 1588, which included burning objects touched by plague patients. Plague killed roughly 25 million people throughout the 14th century alone as it spread across Eurasia, North Africa, and eventually the Americas for 500 years.

Once the cistern was full, it was likely capped with clay While landfills existed at this time outside the city walls of Rome, “the deposition of waste in cellars, courtyards, and cisterns, although prohibited, was a common practice,” study lead author Cristina Boschetti told Live Science. 

The unique find sheds more light on how hygiene practices and controls in European medical settings progressed during the early modern era. 

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BUMS. HEINIES. FANNIES. DERRIERES. Few muscles in the human body carry as much cultural clout as the gluteus maximus. “Butts are a bellwether,” writes journalist Heather Radke in her 2022 book Butts: A Backstory. Radke goes on to explain that our feelings about our hindquarters often have more to do with race, gender, and sex than with the actual meat of them. Unlike with a knee or an elbow, Radke argues, when it comes to the tuchus, we’re far more likely to think about form than function—even though it features the largest muscle in the human body. 

For all the scrutiny we spare them (outside of when we’re trying on new jeans) our butts aren’t mere aesthetic flourishes. A booty is, in fact, a unique feat of evolution: Out of any species, humans have the most junk in their trunks. Many other creatures have muscle and fat padding their backsides, and some even have butt cheeks. But none pack anything close to the same proportions as us.

So why did our ancestors develop such a unique cushion? Evolutionary biologists’ best guess is that our shapely rears help us walk upright. The curved pelvic bone that gives the butt its prominence likely developed as our weight moved upward and our muscular needs shifted. Research increasingly suggests that more massive muscles in the vicinity of the buttocks make for faster sprinting and better running endurance too. “The butt is an essential adaptation for the human ability to run steadily, for long distances, and without injury,” Radke writes. 

That said, the gluteus maximus does more than just keep us on our feet. The fat that sits atop it affects how we feel whenever we sit or lie down. The organs nestled behind those cheeks also have a massive influence on our health and wellbeing. Here are a few of the ways our bums factor into scientific understanding, lifesaving medicine, and the future of engineering. 

Digging deep for ancient backsides 

For as long as humans have been making art, they’ve been thinking about bodacious butts. The 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf is a famous pocket-size figurine carved by a Western European civilization during the Upper Paleolithic. The statuette, which some archaeologists suspect served as a fertility charm, immortalizes a body too thick to quit.

Scientists also love peeping at the actual posteriors of our early ancestors, which hold a broader archaeological significance in telling the stories of ancient people and their lifestyles. Differences in the pelvis and other sat-upon bones have long been used to determine the sex of unearthed skeletal remains, though we know now there isn’t as clear-cut a binary as researchers long assumed. In 1972, anthropologist Kenneth Weiss flagged that experts were 12 percent more likely to classify skeletons found at dig sites as men versus women, which he blamed on a bias for marking indeterminate skeletons as male. Recent research bears that out, with anthropologists now designating many more remains as having a mix of pelvic characteristics (or simply being inconclusive) than they did historically. Still, while the distinction isn’t completely black and white, the signs of a body primed for or changed by childbirth are useful in figuring out the age and sex of ancient remains. Butt bones can also tell us about how people lived: This March, archaeologists published the oldest known evidence for human horseback riding in the journal Science Advances. They identified their 5,000-year-old equestrians—members of the Yamnaya culture, which spread from Eurasia throughout much of Europe around that same time—with the help of signs of wear and tear to hip sockets, thigh bones, and pelvises. 

Supporting heinies of all shapes and sizes

As Sharon Sonenblum, a principal research scientist at the School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, puts it, “What could be better than studying butts?” The Rehabilitation Engineering and Applied Research Lab that she’s part of is perhaps more aptly referred to by its acronym: REAR. 

Stephen Sprigle, a Georgia Tech professor in industrial design, bioengineering, and physiology, started REARLab with better solutions for wheelchair users in mind. A decade ago, he and Sonenblum saw the potential for an engineering-minded solution to the serious clinical problem of injuries from sitting or lying down for extended periods. Pressure sores and ulcers are a risk whenever soft tissue presses against a surface for a prolonged time, and they become more dangerous in hospital settings—where antibiotic-resistant bacteria often lurk—and in people with conditions that hinder wound healing, like diabetes. 

Sonenblum recalls that they set out to answer a deceptively simple question: What makes one backside different from another? To answer it, they had to put a whole lot of booties into an MRI scanner. Those imaging studies and others (including some done on supine patients) have provided an unprecedented amount of data about butt cheeks and the stuff inside them. 

The big headline, Sprigle says, is that “we’re big bags of water. What the skeleton does in that big bag of goo is totally fascinating.” 

The work proved particularly humbling for Sonenblum, who’d intended to spend her career studying how the gluteus maximus affects seating. Instead, she and her colleagues figured out that humans don’t rest on muscle at all—the fat is what really counts. Sonenblum and the rest of the REARLab team are investigating how the natural padding in our rears changes over time, particularly in people who spend a lot of time sitting or supine.

Today, REARLab creates more precise computer models and “phantoms” to help cushion testing—mainly for wheelchair seats, but also for ergonomic chairs of all stripes—better account for real-world bums. Phantoms aren’t quite faux butts; they’re simple and scalable geometric shapes, almost like the convex version of a seat cushion designed for your tuchus to nestle into. They don’t account for bodies’ individual differences either. 

“Phantoms are always a tricky balance between time and representation,” Sonenblum says. “You want to represent the population well, but you can’t have too many or you’ll spend your entire life running tests.”

REARLab’s current approach is to use two shapes—elliptical and trigonometric—to represent a fuller backside and one more likely to pose biomechanical problems when seated, respectively. It would be reasonable to assume the trigonometric butt is the bonier of the two, Sonenblum says, but the reality isn’t so simple. Large individuals with lots of adipose tissue can still lose the round cushioning when they sit. 

“I’ve seen scans of butts that look like this, and when I do, I think, Wow, that’s a high-risk butt,” Sonenblum explains. It comes down to the quality of the tissue, she adds. “If you touch a lot of butts, you’ll find that the tissue changes for people who are at risk [of pressure injuries]. It feels different.”

Sonenblum and Sprigle hope that continued work on backside modeling, cushion-testing standards, and adipose analysis will help wheelchair users and patients confined to their beds for long stretches stay safer and more comfortable. But their work has implications for absolutely anyone who sits down. When asked what folks should take away from their studies, they’re both quick to answer: Move. People with limited mobility may not be able to avoid the loss of structural integrity in their butt tissue, but anyone with the ability to get up often and flex their muscles can keep that natural padding in prime health. 

Finding better bellwethers for bowel cancer

When it comes to protecting your posterior, it’s not just the bodacious bits of the outside that count. One of the biggest backside-related issues scientists are tackling today is the sharp rise in colorectal cancer, which starts with abnormal cell growth in the colon or rectum. It’s already the third most common cancer and second leading cause of cancer death, but it represents a mounting threat, especially for millennials. New cases of young-onset colorectal cancer (yoCRC)—defined as a diagnosis before age 50—have gone up by around 50 percent since the mid-1990s. 

Blake Buchalter, a postdoctoral fellow at Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute focused on cancer epidemiology, says that the most troubling thing about this recent uptick in cases is how little we know about what’s causing it. He and his colleagues suspect that 35- to 49-year-olds who die from colorectal cancer may share many of the same demographics and risk factors—higher body weight, lower activity levels, smoking, alcohol use, and diets high in processed and red meats—seen in patients aged 50 and older. But those under the age of 35 don’t follow those patterns as closely as expected. 

“This indicated to us that mortality among the youngest colorectal cancer patients may have different drivers than among older populations,” Buchalter says. “Our future work in this space aims to identify underlying factors that might be driving higher incidence and mortality among certain age groups in particular geographic regions.” 

Buchalter hopes that more granular data will encourage more granular screening guidelines too. While he was heartened to see the US Preventative Services Task Force shift the recommended colon cancer screening age down from 50 to 45 in 2021, it’s clear that some populations are at risk for the disease earlier, he says. Buchalter and his colleagues hope to zero in on who should be getting screened in their 20s and 30s. 

But colonoscopies, the most commonly recommended form of detection, present a major hurdle in themselves. A 2019 study found that only 60 percent of age-eligible US adults were up to date on their colorectal cancer screenings, with others citing fear, embarrassment, and logistical challenges such as transportation to explain their delayed colonoscopies. At-home fecal tests offer a less invasive alternative, but research shows that fear of a bad diagnosis and disgust with the idea of collecting and mailing samples still keep many folks from using them. Blood tests and colon capsule endoscopy (CCE), in which patients swallow a pill-size camera to allow doctors to examine the gastrointestinal tract, both show promise in supplementing, and perhaps someday replacing, the oft-dreaded colonoscopy.

For now, it’s worth going in for the physical screening if you can manage it. While blood and stool tests can accurately detect signs of the cancer, colonoscopies can actually help prevent it. During a standard colonoscopy, gastro­enterologists are able to identify and remove potentially precancerous polyps known as adenomas on the spot. No DIY kit can manage that.  

Tracking microbiomes with futuristic commodes

Meanwhile, other researchers are uncovering health secrets from long-ago water closets. In 2022, archaeologists uncovered what they believe to be the oldest flush toilet ever found, in Xi’an, China. The 2,400-year-old lavatory features a pipe leading to an outdoor pit. Researchers believe the commode, which was located inside a palace, allowed servants to wash waste out of sight with buckets of water. Flush toilets wouldn’t appear in Europe until the 1500s, and wouldn’t become commonplace until the late 19th century. Up until that point, major US cities employed fleets of “night soil men” to dig up and dispose of the contents of household privies and public loos.

As far as we’ve come from the days of night soil, the future of the humble toilet looks even brighter. Sonia Grego, an associate research professor in the Duke University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, says she’s “super-excited” to see commodes enter the 21st century. 

“Smart” toilets boast everything from app-controlled heated seats to detailed water-usage trackers, and could grow into a $13.5 billion industry by the end of the decade. But Grego’s team—the Duke Smart Toilet Lab at the Pratt School of Engineering—is focused on turning waste flushed down porcelain bowls into a noninvasive health tool. She envisions a future in which your toilet can warn you of impending flare-ups of gut conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, flag dietary deficiencies, and even screen for signs of cancer. 

“When we first started to work on the smart toilet for stool analysis, laboratory scientists were skeptical that accurate analytical results could be obtained from specimens that had been dropped in a toilet instead of a sterile collection container,” Grego recalls. “The perspective is very different now.”

Drawing inspiration from wild butts 

Humans may be unusually blessed in the butt-cheek department, but that doesn’t mean other animals’ rears hold less scientific appeal. From modeling the evolution of the anus to cracking the code on climate-friendly gut microbes, scientists are keeping close tabs on all sorts of animal bottoms. Some researchers are even hoping to harness the power of butt breathing—yes, actually breathing through your butt—for future applications in human medicine. 

We’ll circle back to backside breathing in a moment. First, let’s consider the wombat. While it’s true enough that everybody poops, these marsupials are the only animals known to drop cubes. For years, no one was quite sure how they managed to get a square peg out of a round hole. Some even assumed the wombat must have an anus designed for squeezing out blocks instead of cylinders. In 2020, mechanical engineers and wildlife ecologists at Georgia Tech teamed up to publish a surprising new explanation for the shape in the aptly named journal Soft Matter. They’d borrowed roadkill from Australia to do the first-ever close examination of a wombat’s intestines. By inflating the digestive tract and comparing it to more familiar pig intestines, they were able to show that the marsupial’s innards have more variation in elasticity: Instead of being fairly uniform throughout, the organs have some inflexible zones. The team’s findings suggest that a few nooks within the digestive system—some stretchy, others stiff—provide a means to shape the refuse into a square. 

Wombat butts themselves, by the by, are veritable buns of steel. Their rumps contain four fused bony plates surrounded by cartilage and fat and can be used to effectively plug up the entrance to a burrow when potential predators come sniffing around. While this has yet to be caught happening live, some scientists think wombats can even use their powerful bums to crush the skulls of intruders like foxes and dingoes who manage to make it inside. 

So now we have more clarity on how wombats poop cubes, but the question of why remains unanswered. Experts have posited that wombats communicate with one another by sniffing out the location of poop cubes, making it advantageous to produce turds less likely to roll out of place. Others argue that the unusual shape is a happy accident: Wombats can spend as long as a week digesting a single meal, with their intestines painstakingly squeezing out every possible drop of moisture to help them survive the arid conditions Down Under. Their entrails, when unwound, stretch some 33 feet—10 feet more than typical human guts—to help facilitate the frugal squeezing. When the species is raised in captivity with loads of food and water, their poops come out moister and rounder. 

Elsewhere in the world of scat science, folks are working to understand the secrets of nonhuman gut microbiomes. Earlier this year, biotechnologists at Washington State University showed that baby kangaroo feces could help make beef more eco-friendly. Joey guts contain microbes that produce acetic acid instead of methane, which cows burp out in such abundance that it significantly worsens climate change. By reseeding a simulated cow stomach with poop from a newborn kangaroo, researchers say they successfully converted the gut to a factory of acetic acid, which doesn’t trap heat in the atmosphere. They hope to try the transfer out in a real bovine sometime soon. 

Going back to the butt breathing, scientists are hoping to suss out how to give humans a superpower already exhibited by catfish and sea cucumbers. In 2021, Japanese researchers reported in the journal Med that they’d been able to keep rodents alive in oxygen-poor conditions by ventilating them through their anuses. Inspired by loaches—freshwater fish that can take in oxygen through their intestines—the scientists are trying to find new ways to help patients who can’t get enough air on their own. They’ve moved on to study pigs, which they say do wonderfully with a shot of perfluorodecalin (a liquid chemical that can carry large amounts of oxygen) up the bum. 

From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s not all that surprising that our outbox can handle the same duties as our inbox. Though it’s still not clear which came first, it’s well established that the anus and the mouth develop out of the same rudimentary cell structures wherever they appear. Some of the most basic animals still use a single opening for all their digestive needs. And one creature—just one, as far as we know—has a “transient anus.”

In 2019, Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, demonstrated that the warty comb jelly creates new anuses as needed. Whenever sufficient waste builds up—which happens as often as every 10 minutes in young jellies—the gut bulges out enough to fuse with the creature’s epidermis, creating an opening for defecation. Then it closes right back up. It’s possible that the world’s first anuses followed the same on-demand model, proving yet again that the butt and its contents are worthy of our awe, curiosity, and respect.  

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Archaeologists in western Scotland have found the foundations of a Roman fortlet dating back to the Second Century CE. According to the government-run historic preservation commission Historic Environment Scotland, this fort was one of 41 defensive structures that was built near the Antonine Wall, one of Scotland’s six UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

[Related from PopSci+: How Scotland forged a rare alliance between amateur treasure hunters and archaeologists.]

This fortified wall made of mostly wood ran for roughly 40 miles across Scotland as part of the Roman Empire’s unsuccessful attempt to extend its control throughout Britain from roughly 410 to 43 CE. The Antonine Wall was defended as the northernmost frontier of the Roman Empire. Emperor Antoninus Pius ordered the building of the wall in 142 CE as a one-up to his predecessor Hadrian. The famed Hadrian’s Wall was built in the 120s CE about 100 miles south of the Antonine Wall.

The Romans called the people living in Scotland “Caledonians”, and later named them  the Picts after a Latin word meaning “painted people,” in reference to their body paintings or tattoos. The Romans retreated to the Hadrian Wall in 162 CE after 20 years of trying to hold a new northern line at the Antonine Wall.

In 1707, antiquarian Robbert Sibbald said he saw the fortlet in the area around Carleith Farm in West Dunbartonshire. During the 1970s and 1980s, excavation teams looked for it but were unsuccessful.

New technology allowed Historic Environment Scotland’s archaeological survey team to find the buried remains. The team used a geophysical surveying technique called gradiometry to peer under the soil without excavating. Gradiometry measures small changes in Earth’s magnetic field to detect buried archaeological features that can’t be seen from the surface. It identified the base of the fortlet, which remains buried under the ground. Turf would have been laid on top of this base. The team found the fortlet in a field near Carleith Primary School.

The fortlet would have been occupied by 10 to 12 Roman soldiers who were likely stationed at Duntocher, a larger fort nearby. The fortlet would have been made up of two small wooden buildings.

[Related: Slàinte mhath! The oldest piece of Scottish tartan fabric has been identified.]

“It is great to see how our knowledge of history is growing as new methods give us fresh insights in the past,” Riona McMorrow, deputy head of world heritage at Historic Environment Scotland, said in a statement. “Archaeology is often partly detective work, and the discovery at Carleith is a nice example of how an observation made 300 years ago and new technology can come together to add to our understanding.”

While up to 41 fortlets may have once lined the Wall, only nine have been found thus far. This new discovery marks the 10th known forlet, and Historic Environment Scotland is currently reviewing the site’s designation to ensure that it is protected and recognized as part of the Antonine Wall. 

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The 2016 animated family film Moana brought the long-told story of Polynesian seafarers (along with some incredibly catchy tunes) to a much wider worldwide audience. Now, geochemical analysis is confirming the oral history of ancient Polynesia’s incredible sailors in a new study published April 21 in the journal Science Advances. 

[Related from PopSci+: Voyagers made it to Hawaiʻi thousands of years ago with no compasses. Here’s how.]

Long before Europeans arrived, Polynesian wayfinders sailed to islands across the central Pacific in canoes, and the stories of their adventures have survived largely through oral history. There has been limited material evidence supporting these accounts of Polynesian societies from distant islands interacting with one another. 

“Pacific islanders were able to travel over very long distances and did so in every region of the Pacific. Polynesian peoples settled hundreds of islands from Papua New Guinea to Easter Island (Rapa Nui),” study co-author and French National Centre for Scientific Research archaeologist Aymeric Hermann tells PopSci. “The extent of long distance voyages in an Ocean as vast as the Pacific, and several centuries before any other society could really master seafaring, is pretty amazing.”

Details of the westward expansions to a group of islands west of Polynesia called the Polynesian Outliers have been even more unclear. Indigenous cultures vary across the Pacific’s islands, but oral traditions and shared cultural items indicate that there could have been contact and exchanging of goods across long distances. 

In this new study, an international team of scientists analyzed stone artifacts from the Polynesian Outliers where communities are considered more culturally isolated. In seeking to discover how these communities are connected with their Oceanic neighbors, the team’s analysis suggests that the items were carried there from over 1,000 miles away from their source regions in Samoa.

These findings support prevailing theories that societies in western Polynesian societies were incredibly mobile over the last millennium, possibly colonizing the Outliers as a result of their voyages. 

To do so, Hermann and colleagues grabbed geochemical fingerprints from stone tools found on the Polynesian Outliers. According to Hermann, most geochemical sourcing studies in the Pacific have been conducted on the Oceanic islands which have different geochemical signatures from the Outliers. This presented the team with a huge challenge of many possible sources from southeast Asia to the eastern Pacific that have many overlapping geochemical characteristics.

[Related: On board the canoe that proved ancient Polynesians could cross the Pacific.]

To look closer and try to pick apart these characteristics, they took isotopic and geochemical analyses of 14 artifacts on three Outlier Islands (Emae, Taumako, and Kapingamarangi) that were dated to as early as 1258 CE. The team combined these analyses with earlier studies and used a large database of geological signatures from sites across Oceania. They were able to source the artifacts to distant islands and volcanic arcs over 1,000 miles further east of the Outliers. 

“Among all possible sources in the Pacific, all the artifacts that can be distinctively associated with West Polynesian traditions were sourced to the exact same quarry in Samoa, which is also the source of other artifacts found in the eastern Pacific,” said Hermann.

The evidence from the materials supports earlier studies and oral histories of this travel across vast distances in the Pacific. 

According to Hermann, it’s important to remember that remembered that “global history is always local history first.” The team sought permission from the communities of Makatea, Tongamea, Finongi, and Sangava on Emae Island, as well as from  chiefs Ti Makata mata, Ma Ti Tonga, D. Maribu, Sasamake, Ti Nambua mata, Ti Nambua roto, and Ti Makura mata before undertaking the field research needed for this study. 

“It is necessary to use new lenses to look at human history: people always moved around, and societies always changed in contact with neighbors and sometimes through very long distances, long before Christopher Columbus reached the Americas,” said Hermann. 

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What’s inside a miniature, 2,500-year-old coffin? Well, now researchers at the British Museum know. A team of scientists used a noninvasive technique called neutron tomography to peer inside six Egyptian animal coffins that have been sealed for over two millennia. The contents are described in a study published on April 20 in the journal Scientific Reports.

[Related: A gold-laced mummy could be the ‘oldest and most complete’ specimen found in Egypt.]

Neutron tomography allows researchers to peer inside without disturbing the coffins. It creates images based on the way that the neurons emitted by a source pass through it. Neutron tomography is more effective than x-rays at seeing through metal.  The team developed this technique after other noninvasive methods of looking into the coffins, such as traditional X-rays, didn’t work on the coffins.

The coffins in the study range from approximately two to 12 inches long and date back to sometime between 664 BCE and 250 BCE, during Egypt’s late period . The decorative coffins were built with copper compounds and are covered with images of eels, cobras, and lizards. Three were found in the ancient city of Naukratis and two were in Tell el-Yehudiya in 1885, but the other two have mysterious, currently unknown origins. 

Within three of the coffins, the authors identified bones including an intact skull that has similar dimensions to a group of lizards endemic to northern Africa. Two of the coffins have evidence of more broken down bones. 

“In the first millennium BC, lizards were commonly mummified in ancient Egypt, as were other

reptiles, cats, dogs, falcons, ibises, shrews, fishes… Lizards, like snakes and eels, were particularly associated with ancient Egyptian solar and creator gods such as Atum and perhaps, in the case of Naukratis, with Amun-Ra Shena,” co-author and project curator at the British Museum Aurélia Masson-Berghoff said in a statement. “With the help of neutron imaging, we have the potential to learn more about the ritual and votive practices surrounding these once impenetrable animal coffins, the ways they were made, used and displayed.”

They also found textile fragments that may be made of linen, which was a common fabric used in Ancient Egypt for mummification. The team believes that the linen in these coffins may have been wrapped around the animals before they were laid to rest in the coffins. 

The lead found in three of the coffins also may have been a way to aid in the weight distribution of two coffins, as well as fix up a hole in the other. Lead may have been the metal of choice due to its status as a “magical material.” Earlier studies found that lead was used in both love charms and curses.  They did not identify any additional lead in three of the coffins secured by two suspension loops. 

[Related: This teen mummy was buried with dozens of gold amulets.]

The loops may have been there to suspend these lighter coffins from the walls of a shrine or temple. Additionally, the miniature coffins could hang from boats, or even from statues used in religious processions. 

The study offers more insight into how animal coffins were built and used in ancient Egypt. Animal mummification was widespread, and some mummified animals were believed to be physical incarnations of gods. Others may have represented offerings to these deities or were used in ritual performances.  

“Neutron imaging has many important applications in 21st-century science,” co-author and research fellow at the Science and Technology Facilities Council Anna Fedrigo said in a statement. “This study shows that it can also shed light on the inner structure of complex archaeological objects, including their manufacturing techniques and contents.”

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An ancient Maya city might seem an unlikely place for people to be experimenting with proprietary chemicals. But scientists think that’s exactly what happened at Copán, an archaeological complex nestled in a valley in the mountainous rainforests of what is now western Honduras.

By historians’ reckoning, Copán’s golden age began in 427 CE, when a king named Yax Kʼukʼ Moʼ came to the valley from the northwest. His dynasty built one of the jewels of the Maya world, but abandoned it by the 10th century, leaving its courts and plazas to the mercy of the jungle. More than 1,000 years later, Copán’s buildings have kept remarkably well, despite baking in the tropical sun and humidity for so long. 

The secret may lie in the plaster the Maya used to coat Copán’s walls and ceilings. New research suggests that sap from the bark of local trees, which Maya craftspeople mixed into their plaster, helped reinforce its structures. Whether by accident or by purpose, those Maya builders created a material not unlike mother-of-pearl, a natural element of mollusc shells.

“We finally unveiled the secret of ancient Maya masons,” says Carlos Rodríguez Navarro, a mineralogist at the University of Granada in Spain and the paper’s first author. Rodríguez Navarro and his colleagues published their work in the journal Science Advances today.

[Related: Scientists may have solved an old Puebloan mystery by strapping giant logs to their foreheads]

Plaster makers followed a fairly straightforward recipe. Start with carbonate rock, such as limestone; bake it at over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit; mix in water with the resulting quicklime; then, set the concoction out to react with carbon dioxide from the air. The final product is what builders call lime plaster or lime mortar. 

Civilizations across the world discovered this process, often independently. For example, Mesoamericans in Mexico and Central America learned how to do it by around 1,100 BCE. While ancient people found it useful for covering surfaces or holding together bricks, this basic lime plaster isn’t especially durable by modern standards.

But, just as a dish might differ from town to town, lime plaster recipes varied from place to place. “Some of them perform better than others,” says Admir Masic, a materials scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who wasn’t part of the study. Maya lime plaster, experts agree, is one of the best.

Rodríguez Navarro and his colleagues wanted to learn why. They found their first clue when they examined brick-sized plaster chunks from Copán’s walls and floors with X-rays and electron microscopes. Inside some pieces, they found traces of organic materials like carbohydrates. 

That made them curious, Rodríguez Navarro says, because it seemed to confirm past archaeological and written records suggesting that ancient Maya masons mixed plant matter into their plaster. The other standard ingredients (lime and water) wouldn’t account for complex carbon chains.

To follow this lead, the authors decided to make the historic plaster themselves. They consulted living masons and Maya descendants near Copán. The locals referred them to the chukum and jiote trees that grow in the surrounding forests—specifically, the sap that came from the trees’ bark.

The authors tested the sap’s reaction when mixed into the plaster. Not only did it toughen the material, it also made the plaster insoluble in water, which partly explains how Copán survived the local climate so well.

The microscopic structure of the plant-enhanced plaster is similar to nacre or mother-of-pearl: the iridescent substance that some molluscs create to coat their shells. We don’t fully understand how molluscs make nacre, but we know that it consists of crystal plates sandwiching elastic proteins. The combination toughens the sea creatures’ exteriors and reinforces them against weathering from waves.

A close study of the ancient plaster samples and the modern analog revealed that they also had layers of rocky calcite plates and organic sappy material, giving the materials the same kind of resilience as nacre. “They were able to reproduce what living organisms do,” says Rodríguez Navarro. 

“This is really exciting,” says Masic. “It looks like it is improving properties [of regular plaster].”

Now, Rodríguez Navarro and his colleagues are trying to answer another question: Could other civilizations that depended on masonry—from Iberia to Persia to China—have stumbled upon the same secret? We know, for instance, that Chinese lime-plaster-makers mixed in a sticky rice soup for added strength.

Plaster isn’t the only age-old material that scientists have reconstructed. Masic and his colleagues found that ancient Roman concrete has the ability to “self-heal.” More than two millennia ago, builders in the empire may have added quicklime to a rocky aggregate, creating microscopic structures within the material that help fill in pores and cracks when it’s hit by seawater.

[Related: Ancient architecture might be key to creating climate-resilient buildings]

If that property sounds useful, modern engineers think so too. There exists a blossoming field devoted to studying—and recreating—materials of the past. Standing structures from archaeological sites already prove they can withstand the test of time. As a bonus, ancient people tended to work with more sustainable methods and use less fuel than their industrial counterparts.

“The Maya paper…is another great example of this [scientific] approach,” Masic says.

Not that Maya plaster will replace the concrete that’s ubiquitous in the modern world—but scientists say it could have its uses in preserving and upgrading the masonry found in pre-industrial buildings. A touch of plant sap could add centuries to a structure’s lifespan.

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A team of archaeologists have uncovered a unique ancient Roman winery within the luxurious Villa of the Quintilii. The remains of this opulent villa are just to the south of Rome, Italy. The findings, published on April 17 in the journal Antiquity, detail the winery in the mid-third-century CE building that lies along the ancient Appian Way–a critical supply line for the Roman military. 

The large villa was owned by the wealthy Quintilii brothers who served as consuls, one of the most powerful elected positions in the Roman Republic  in 151 CE. Around 182 or 183 CE, Roman emperor Commodus had them killed and took possession of their properties, including this particular villa.

[Related: As Rome digs its first new metro route in decades, an archaeologist safeguards the city’s buried treasures.]

Archaeologists had previously documented the villa’s luxuries, including a giant bathing complex, statues, and colored marble tiling. One of the lesser known parts of the villa was a circus for chariot racing that was added during Commodus’ reign. During a 2017 and 2018 expedition to find the circus’ starting gates, the first hints of the hidden winery were discovered. 

According to the study, the name Gordian is stamped into a wine-collection vat, which means that emperor Gordian III may have either built the winery or renovated it roughly around CE 238 to 244. The winery is located just beyond Rome’s city limits during antiquity, amidst orchards, farms, monumental tombs, and the villas of the super rich like the Quintilii brothers. It has standard winery features for this time, including two wine presses, a grape trading area, two presses, and a cellar sunk into the ground to store and ferment the wine in large clay jars. 

“However, the decoration and arrangement of these features is almost completely unparalleled in the ancient world,” Emlyn Dodd, study co-author and archaeologist and assistant director at the British School at Rome, wrote in The Conversation. “Nearly all the production areas are clad in marble veneer tiling. Even the treading area, normally coated in waterproof cocciopesto plaster, is covered in red breccia marble. This luxurious material, combined with its impracticalities (it is very slippery when wet, unlike plaster), conveys the extreme sense of luxury.”

The facility also included multiple luxurious dining rooms with a view of wine-filled fountains. Within the marble-lined trading areas, enslaved workers would stamp down the harvested grapes. The crushed grapes were then taken to the two mechanical presses, and the resulting grape must was then sent into the three wine fountains. The wine must have gushed out of semicircular niches built into a courtyard wall.

[Related: Ancient poop proves that humans have always loved beer and cheese.]

It is likely that this and other villas were built with both wine making and spectacle in mind. Letters from earlier emperor Marcus Aurelius describe him having eaten rich meals while watching wine being made, likely at a luxury winemaking facility at the Villa Magna. This villa, about 30 miles from Villa of the Quintilii, is currently the only known parallel.

With only one dining room currently excavated, Dodd and the team are looking for funding to uncover all of the villa’s lavish rooms. 

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New research suggests that a piece of fabric tartan found in a peat bog in the Scottish Highlands may be the oldest traditional tartan ever found. The roughly 22 by 17 inch piece of Scottish history could be up to 500 years old and is on display at the V&A Dundee design museum in Dundee, Scotland. 

The cloth was found in the early 1980s in Scotland’s Glen Affric valley, about 15 miles west of Loch Ness.

[Related: Codebreakers have finally deciphered the lost letters of Mary, Queen of Scots.]

The Scottish Tartans Authority (STA) commissioned dye analysis and radiocarbon testing of the textile to prove its age. Four initial colors–green, brown, and possibly red and yellow–were identified. The dye analysis confirmed that indigo or woad in the green fabric were both used. The analysis of the other colors was inconclusive. Since there wasn’t any evidence of artificial or semi-synthetic dyestuffs, the STA believes that it predates the 1750s and is believed to have been made between 1513 and 1625, during the reigns of King James V, Mary Queen of Scots, or King James VI/I.

Tartan experts believe that this tartan was likely an “outdoor working garment” and wouldn’t have been worn by nobility. Tartan itself is a specific type of textile made using colored wool and yarn that is woven into crisscrossing vertical and horizontal bands. The diagonal bands and color blocks repeat to form a pattern of squares and lines and different tartan patterns have been associated with specific Scottish clans for centuries. 

“The tartan has several colors with multiple stripes of different sizes, and so it corresponds to what people would think of as a true tartan. The potential presence of red, a color that Gaels considered a status symbol, is interesting because of the more rustic nature of the cloth,” said STA head of research and collections Peter MacDonald, in reference to a Gaelic-speaking ethnic group from Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man.

MacDonald added that the resting process took almost six months and that the team is thrilled with the results. “In Scotland, surviving examples of old textiles are rare as the soil is not conducive to their survival. The piece was buried in peat, meaning it had no exposure to air and it was therefore preserved,” MacDonald said in a statement.

[Related: A ship from the 16th century was just dredged up in England.]

Scientists believe it survived centuries of weather and war due to the lack of air. The cool and waterlogged conditions in the bog create a highly acidic and low-oxygen environment that helps preserve objects for millennia. In 2009, archaeologists found 3,000-year-old butter in a bog in Ireland and another team found the remains of a 4,000-year-old man with intact skin in 2013.

Some earlier possible examples of tartans have been found in England, including the Falkirk tartan which dates back to the third century. However, since the pattern is a simple checkered design and there is no evidence that the yarn was dyed, it is not considered a “true tartan.”

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In the 10th century, or so the story goes, seven Persian princes fled their homeland and traveled on seven ships, eventually landing on the shores of East Africa. Each prince founded a town across this stretch of land known as the Swahili Coast. Today, people who identify as Swahili view this legend as an origin story that explains their diverse heritage. 

But there’s also debate over how real this legend is. Now, a team of scientists argue that this challenged history has caused us to overlook a critical cultural connection between two continents. 

A new analysis of ancient DNA reveals this connection between Africa and Asia is very real. In a study published today in the journal Nature, scientists show that people living more than 800 years ago on the Swahili coast had an intertwined African and Asian ancestry. This suggests a multiracial identity shaped early Swahili culture and brings a new understanding of the past to the people who are Swahili today.

In regards to understanding exactly how Swahili culture was formed, “they are a people without a history,” says Chapurukha Kusimba, a professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida and senior author of the study. “We have partially resolved the issue of who were the ancestors of the Swahili people and who built this great African civilization.”

One reason why this Africa-Asia connection was originally doubted is that the tale of the seven Persian princes was not recorded until the early 1500s. There are various versions of the story, and research suggests it’s possible that these contain the storytellers’ biases. Additionally, some Eurocentric archaeologists doubted Africans transformed the Swahili coast into vibrant port cities, and their prejudice caused them to venture that the cities were built by Europeans. Lastly, other African natives have accused wealthier Africans of exaggerating or lying about their connections to Asia to elevate their social status, says Kusimba.

[Related: Crystals and eggshells tell a 105,000-year-old story of humans in the Kalahari Desert]

To come to this conclusion, the study team received permission from local Swahili people to excavate cemeteries along the coast of East Africa where the first Swahilis lived. The team took DNA samples from the skeletal remains of 80 individuals estimated to have lived between 1250 and 1800 CE. They then compared the DNA sequences to the DNA of present-day coastal Swahili speakers and to a database containing the genetics of other Eurasian and Eastern African  groups. The bodies were then reburied in their respective burial sites.

The genetic analysis of the ancient DNA revealed a mixture of both African and Asian populations. About 80 to 90 percent of Asian DNA could be linked to Persia. The remaining 10 percent came from Indian ancestors. This suggests that intermarrying was happening by at least 1,000 CE, long after Africans first built the port towns where merchant trades took place. 

At this point in history, intermingling with other cultures was not an isolated event—it was happening in multiple locations across Eastern Africa. The study team also analyzed the DNA of modern people living in Kenya and Tanzania, and found that they also showed evidence of both African and Asian ancestry. This discovery made sense to the researchers, who expected that people of mixed Indian and Persian ancestry traveled beyond the coast and formed relationships with other local African groups. 

“We could see that there was this mixture between Africans and Asians happening at least two locations along the coast and possibly even more,” says lead author Esther Brielle, a postdoctoral fellow in the genetics and genomics department at Harvard University. 

Brielle says they had ample DNA samples to compare the genetics of people living in present-day Kenya and Tanzania. The genetic findings showed similar results of Asians having relations with local African groups. 

Overall, most of the DNA coming from Asian ancestry was inherited from men, while the African ancestry stemmed primarily from women. Brielle says the findings make sense because Swahili society was heavily involved in the Indian Ocean trading network, causing them to have a constant foreign presence on the coastline. Back in those days, traveling merchants were predominately male.

The study authors note that while in other parts of the world, similar genetic signatures suggest that men forcibly married local women, they don’t think this is what happened here. A hallmark of Swahili culture is following a matriarchal society and Persian men likely married into local trading families and adopted their customs. Kusimba thinks women had some choice over who they married, and it was appealing to marry these wealthy men from abroad. 

“While archaeologists, historians, and linguists have long suspected such intermarriages took place, this is the first time well-dated data, in the form of ancient DNA signatures, have been assembled the necessary empirical support for these suppositions,” says Paul Lane, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge who was not affiliated with the study.

[Related: Eastern Africa’s oldest human fossils are more ancient than we realized]

However, interactions with foreigners may have differed depending on an ancient person’s social status. Matthew Pawlowicz, an archaeologist at Virginia Commonwealth University who was not a part of the study, points out that most of the samples of ancient DNA came from elite Muslim cemeteries. A broader socioeconomic sample would have helped with understanding the diversity of medieval Swahili people who may have lived outside of stone houses or who did not directly engage with merchants in the Indian Ocean trade network. 

Kusimba tells PopSci he plans to excavate other burial sites to provide a more diverse genetic picture of ancient Swahili people and understand why most of these cities collapsed around the 16th century. Ultimately, this work shows us the value of immigration and how refugees can contribute to the cultural diversity of a country.

“You have African communities welcoming people who are in need, giving them a place to live, and intermarrying with no problems,” says Kusimba. “These people are African people, but can trace their ancestry to many parts of the world.”

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On April 15, 2019, eyes around the world were glued to the news as a massive fire ripped through The Notre-Dame de Paris. The disaster damaged most of the metal and wood in the cathedral’s roof and famous spire, spurring an estimated $865 million restoration. The French landmark is set to open back up to visitors in December 2024. 

Investigations into the cathedral’s construction during its renovation found that the 860-year-old building is the first known cathedral of Gothic-style architecture that used iron to bind the stones together when it was initially constructed. The use of iron in this manner was a huge technological advancement for the time and the discovery is detailed in a study published March 15 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

[Related: Get a high-tech tour of the long-lost Ironton shipwreck discovered in the Great Lakes.]

When it was built in the middle of the 12th century, Notre Dame was one of the tallest buildings ever built, towering about 104 feet over Paris. Earlier studies suggested that it was able to soar to these heights by combining a number of architectural innovations such as ribbed crossing and thin vaults, but the role that iron played in the cathedral’s initial construction was unclear. 

The restoration of the cathedral after the 2019 fire allowed a team to study previously hidden parts of Notre Dame, where they obtained samples of material from 12 iron staples that were used to bind stone together. The staples were in different parts of the building, including the nave aisles, upper walls, and tribunes. 

The team studied the samples using radiocarbon dating to estimate how old they were. Microscopic, chemical, and architectural analyses suggest that the iron staples were used during the earliest phases of the cathedral’s construction in the 1160s. This makes it the first building of its type to rely on these iron staples throughout its structure. 

Reinforcement of the building’s stones with iron was key to creating the cathedral’s Gothic style, the authors add. Compared with stone architecture used in Roman times, such as the Roman Colosseum, Gothic architecture, which dates back to around the 12th to 16th centuries in Europe, used innovations in ironwork to build structures with more detail and that appear lighter. 

“Radiocarbon dating reveals that Notre-Dame de Paris is indisputably the first Gothic cathedral where iron was thought of as a real building material to create a new form of architecture. The medieval builders used several thousand of iron staples throughout its construction,” the authors wrote in a statement.

[Related: Severe droughts are bringing archaeological wonders and historic horrors to the surface.]

These new findings, when paired with other historical and archaeological knowledge from the same time period, could also help deepen the understanding of how iron was traded, circulated, and forged in Paris during the 12th and 13th centuries. Many of the staples in this study appear to have been made by welding pieces of iron from different supply sources.

Further study of these samples could help researchers create a comprehensive database of historical iron producers in the region to confirm these new findings about the iron market in medieval Paris. 

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A 191-foot-long sunken ship missing beneath the waves of Lake Huron for almost 130 years has been discovered nearly intact with the help of self-driving boats and high powered sonar imaging. 

At around 12:30 AM on September 24, 1894, a three-masted schooner barge called the Ironton collided head-on with the wooden freighter, Ohio, after being cut loose from a tow line in the face of inclement weather. Both vessels quickly sank beneath the waves, and although all of the Ohio’s crew escaped aboard a lifeboat, only two of Ironton’s crew survived the ordeal. For decades, both pieces of history rested somewhere along the bottom of Lake Huron, although their exact locations remained unknown.

[Related: Watch never-before-seen footage of the Titanic shipwreck from the 1980s.]

In 2017, however, researchers at Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary collaborated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Office of Ocean Exploration and Research to begin search efforts for the roughly 100 ships known to have sunk within the 100-square-miles of unmapped lakebed. Using state-of-the-art equipment including multibeam sonar systems aboard the Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab’s 50-foot-long research vessel, RV Storm, the team scoured the sanctuary’s waters for evidence of long-lost barges, schooners, and other boats.

In May 2017, the teams finally located Ohio’s remnants, although Ironton eluded rediscovery. Two years later, Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary set out on another expedition, this time partnered with Ocean Exploration Trust, the organization founded by Robert Ballard, famous for his discoveries of the Titanic, Bismarck, and USS Yorktown. For their new trip, researchers also brought along BEN (Bathymetric Explorer and Navigator), a 12-foot-long, diesel-fueled, self-driving boat built and run by University of New Hampshire’s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping. 

By triangulating the Ohio’s now-known location, alongside wind and weather condition records for the day of the ship’s demise, RV Storm got to work with BEN’s high-resolution multibeam sonar sensor to map Lake Huron’s floors for evidence of the Ironton. With only a few days’ left to their trip, researchers finally were rewarded with 3D sonar scans of a clear, inarguable shipwreck featuring three masts.

[Related: For this deep-sea archaeologist, finding the Titanic at the bottom of the sea was just the start.]

Video footage provided by an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV) the following month confirmed their suspicions—there lay the Ironton, almost perfectly preserved thanks to Lake Huron’s extremely cold, clear waters. “Ironton is yet another piece of the puzzle of [the region’s] fascinating place in America’s history of trade,” Ballard said in a statement, adding that they “look forward to continuing to explore sanctuaries and with our partners reveal the history found in the underwater world to inspire future generations.”

Future research expeditions and divers searching for the Ironton’s exact resting place will have no trouble going forward—Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary plans to deploy one of its deep-water mooring buoys meant to mark the spot, as well as warn nearby travelers to avoid dropping anchors atop the fragile remains. The Ironton’s made it this far in nearly pristine condition, after all.

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The idea of a “lost city” may feel like an ancient legend or the plot of a movie, but some of the world’s abandoned cities were bustling not too long ago. In France, the town of Oradour-Sur-Glane has been mostly untouched since 1944, when a military branch of the Nazi Party’s SS organization killed most of its population. Italian city Craco’s population dwindled after landslides in the 1960s and was completely deserted after an earthquake in 1980. The landscape of the western United States is full of the boom and bust towns that cropped up during the 19th Century.

It’s obvious that cities rise and fall, but there often aren’t clear records of why—especially when studying urban areas from thousands of years ago. Archaeologists face the challenge of putting together a puzzle from the remains of cities long gone to form theories of why some places retained their importance longer than others. 

[Related: The Aztecs’ solar calendar helped grow food for millions of people.]

A study published on March 3 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution analyzed the remains of 24 ancient cities in present-day Mexico and found that collective governance, investments in infrastructure, and cooperation between households were consistent in the cities that lasted the longest. 

“For years, my colleagues and I have investigated why and how certain cities maintain their importance or collapse,” said study co-author Gary Feinman, the MacArthur Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago, in a statement. 

Previously, the team surveyed a wide range of Mesoamerican cities over thousands of years. They  found a broad pattern of societies with government structures that promoted the well-being of its people that lasted longer than the ones with large wealth gaps and autocratic leaders. 

Their new study focuses more on cities from a smaller time and geographical scale. The 24 cities in the western half of Mesoamerica and were founded between 1000 and 300 BCE, centuries before Spanish colonization dramatically changed the region in the 16th century. 

Clues were found in the remains of the buildings, ground plans, monuments, and plazas. “We looked at public architecture, we looked at the nature of the economy and what sustained the cities. We looked at the signs of rulership, whether they seem to be heavily personalized or not,” said Feinman. 

If remnants contain art and architecture that celebrates larger-than-life rulers, it’s a sign that the society was more autocratic or despotic. By contrast, depictions of leaders in groups, often wearing masks, is more indicative of shared governance. 

Among the 24 ancient cities in the study, the cities that had more collective forms of governance tended to remain in power longer, sometimes by thousands of years more than the more autocratic ones. 

[Related: The ancient Mexican city of Monte Albán thrived with public works, not kings.]

However, even among the cities that were likely governed well, some cities were still outliers.  To understand why, they looked at infrastructure and household interdependence.

“We looked for evidence of path dependence, which basically means the actions or investments that people make that later end up constraining or fostering how they respond to subsequent hazards or challenges,” Feinman said.

They found that efforts to build dense and interconnected homes and large, central open plazas were two factors that contributed to sustainability and regional importance of these cities. 

As a way to measure sustainability in the past, most research looks for correlations between environmental or climatic events like hurricanes and earthquakes and the human response to them. However, it’s difficult to know whether the timing is reliable, and these studies typically emphasize a correlation between environmental crisis and collapse without considering how some cities successfully navigated those major challenges.  

In this study, the team took a different approach. The residents of these cities faced everything from drought and earthquakes to periodic hurricanes and heavy rains, in addition to challenges from competing cities and groups. They used this lens to examine the durational history of the 24 centers and the factors that promoted their sustainability. The team found that it was governance that had an important role in sustainability. According to study co-author Linda Nicholas, this shows that, “responses to crises and disasters are to a degree political”. Nicholas is an adjunct curator at the Field Museum.

While these cities and their inhabitants have been gone for thousands of years old, the lessons learned from their peaks and downfalls are incredibly relevant today. 

“You cannot evaluate responses to catastrophes like earthquakes, or threats like climatic change, without considering governance,” said Feinman. “The past is an incredible resource to understand how to address contemporary issues.”

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Who was the first human to ride a horse? That first rider’s distant descendents might have crossed continents and built empires on horseback. But when and where horsemanship began is not a straightforward question to answer. Horse-riding began in a time from which few equine remains survive.

As it happens, we don’t need to find the horse to find signs of people riding it. We could uncover clues from the remains of the human rider instead. A life on horseback warps human bones, and thanks to such skeletal signs, archaeologists might have found the earliest evidence of human horse-riding yet—dating from as early as 3000 BCE, as they report in a study published in the journal Science Advances today.

“You have not only the horse as a mount, but you have also the rider,” says Volker Heyd, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland and one of the study authors. “And we were looking into the human beings.”

The skeletons in question were once people of the Yamnaya culture, living in what is now southeastern Europe, some 5,000 years ago. But because they died long before written history, there aren’t many signs of “culture” as most of us would imagine it—they might have been one ethnic group, or many. Instead, archaeologists have found evidence that the Yamnaya built similar objects and practiced similar ways of life: These people roamed the steppes, herded cattle, and drove wheeled wagons. Some scholars believe they spoke a distant antecedent of today’s Indo-European languages. Perhaps most impressively, they buried the dead beneath towering mounds that we call kurgans.

[Related: Scientists are trying to figure out where the heck horses came from]

We know that the Yamnaya had horses, but we don’t know if they merely herded them for milk and meat, or if they actually rode them. Any riding equipment—bridles and saddles—would have been fashioned from organic materials that probably long decomposed.

But horses are only one half of horse-riding. Archaeologists, perhaps, could find the other half within Yamnaya kurgans—in human bones that can tell their own stories. 

That’s because “primates like us humans are not made for sitting on horseback,” says Birgit Bühler, an archaeologist at the University of Vienna in Austria. “The horse is not made to carry us.” Without a saddle or stirrups—which the earliest riders probably didn’t have—staying balanced requires repeatedly moving the lower body and thighs. With all that biological material in motion, horse-riding, just like any other mechanical movement, would leave a mark on human bones.

Over decades of repeated stress on horseback, the human skeleton changes in response. Bone tissue in the pelvis and femurs might thicken and densify. Hip bones might chafe against each other and build up calcium. Vertebrae in the spine might warp and deform. And horses might bite, kick, step on, or throw off their riders—all of which can break bones.

[Related: Ancient climate change may have dragged the wild horses away]

Researchers have dubbed these as symptoms of “horsemanship syndrome” or “horse-riding syndrome.” Other activities might cause individual changes, but the combination of these markers may be a telltale sign of a horseback life. Bühler, for instance, has used this method to study the Avars: horse-riding nomads from the Asian steppes who rode west to rule swathes of central and eastern Europe in the early Middle Ages. 

Studying bones from 1,500 years ago is already difficult; studying bones that are three times older is even more so. But this study’s authors came across multiple markers of horseback riding in one 4,500-year-old skeleton from Strejnicu, Romania.

“It was kind of surprising to all of us to find that,” says Martin Trautmann, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, and another of the study authors.

To further confirm whether the Yamnaya rode horses, the authors examined every bone from this group that they could get their hands on, dug up from sites across Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, and Romania. Some remains had been excavated decades ago. 

Just because they had bones doesn’t mean they had every bone. “On average, about half of the skeleton is preserved, and the half we have is sometimes heavily eroded,” says Trautmann. The authors evaluated skeletons from 24 ancient people against a list of six criteria that matched the first Strejnicu skeleton. They diagnosed four additional sets of bones—dating between 3021 and 2501 BCE—that fit at least four of horsemanship syndrome’s criteria.

We know that humans first domesticated the horse around 4000 BCE; we also know that the first chariots arose around 2000 BCE. If these skeletons are evidence of horse-riders, then they could provide a key “missing link” between the two.

“It doesn’t come that unexpected if you see the wider context of Yamnaya,” says Heyd. Archaeologists believe that the Yamnaya culture spread rapidly across the European steppe within just a few decades—in archaeologists’ time, virtually an instant. “You wonder how this is possible without horseback riding,” he says.

It isn’t definitive proof. Time’s ravages, by erasing bones, have made this certain. Bühler, who wasn’t involved with the work but called it a “fantastic paper,” points out that the authors missed one of the key criteria of other horsemanship syndrome research—the hip socket stretching, vertically, into an oval—because they just didn’t have the hip sockets to properly measure.

“It’s not their fault, because the material is not there,” says Bühler. Future finds may give archaeologists the full skeletons they need, she says. Until then, she says she is “cautious” about interpretations that these people rode horses.

The authors may just yet find those bones—their research into the Yamnaya is far from over. 

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From the 15th to the 12th Century BCE, Greece’s Mycenaean civilization played a major role in developing classical Greek culture. The two major cities, Mycenae and Tiryns, are even featured in Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. These stories have influenced literature and art in Europe for more than 3,000 years, but scientists are still finding new clues to how these people lived. 

A large debris deposit in the remains of Mycenae that dates back to the Late Bronze Age (about 1200 to 1150 BCE) is helping a team of researchers from the University of North Florida, the University of California, Berkeley, an archaeology research firm SEARCH, Inc better understand the history of animal resources in the ancient city. Their most recent findings, published March 1 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, describe animal remains inside a well within Petsas House–a household in Mycenae that also had a ceramics workshop that local artisans used.

[Related: Horned helmets came from Bronze Age artists, not Vikings.]

From well preserved agricultural records and architecture like the entrance to the Mycenae citadel called the Lion Gate, researchers believe that animals provided an important source of both sustenance and also symbolism. However, more research is needed to fully understand the role that animals played.

In the study, excavations into Petsas’ well recovered multiple animal remains among stone, metal, and ceramic material. The most common remains were from sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, and dogs. The team believes that most of this material was likely thrown into the well from other parts of the house after a destructive earthquake, and additional evidence showed that the animals were used as food. 

The team found that the dog remains were more intact than the farm animals and were deposited into the well at a different time. They believe that this is tentative evidence that the canines may have been treated differently in death than the other animals like pigs or sheep. 

[Related: Ancient poop proves that humans have always loved beer and cheese.]

“This study presents new insights about ancient animals recovered from the renowned archaeological site of Mycenae in Greece—a major political center in the Late Bronze Age, famous for references in Homer’s Iliad,” the authors wrote in a statement. “Research at Petsas House, a domestic building in Mycenae’s settlement used in large part as a ceramics workshop, revealed how the remains of meaty meals and pet dogs were cleaned and disposed of in a house well following a major destructive earthquake. Study of the archaeologically recovered bones, teeth, and shells from the well yielded a more nuanced picture of the diverse and resilient dietary strategies of residents than previously available at Mycenae.”

More deep dives into this well and the rest of the archeological site will potentially reveal patterns of how this civilization stored food, traded food and other goods, and how they responded to natural disasters. 

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Centuries before COVID-19 brought the world to a screeching halt in March 2020, a tiny bacteria called Yersinia pestis–AKA the plague–killed roughly 25 million people throughout the Fourteenth Century alone as it spread across Eurasia, North Africa, and eventually the Americas for 500 years. Plague still exists today, particularly in the American west, and parts of Africa and Asia, but it can be treated with antibiotics. 

Now, a team of scientists studying the origins and evolution of the plague are using human teeth from Denmark to help them answer burning questions on how it arrived, persisted, and spread in Scandinavia.

[Related: What a 5,000-year-old plague victim reveals about the Black Death’s origins.]

Their study, published February 24 in the journal Current Biology, focused on a timeline of 800 years (1000 to 1800 AD) and used almost 300 samples collected at 13 archeological sites around Denmark. They used the samples from the teeth to reconstruct Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis) genomes that were present at the time. Teeth can preserve traces of blood-borne infection for centuries and proved to be a valuable resource for this kind of genetic detective work. 

What they found is that the plague was reintroduced to the Danes in multiple ways over that time period via human movement. 

“We know that plague outbreaks across Europe continued in waves for approximately 500 years, but very little about its spread throughout Denmark is documented in historical archives,” said study co-author Ravneet Sidhu, a graduate student at McMaster University’s Ancient DNA Centre, in a statement.  

The analysis was conducted at McMaster and the team worked with historians and bioarchaeologists in Denmark and Manitoba, Canada to examine how the different strains of the plague that were present in Denmark during this period of time were related.

After reconstructing the genomes, the team then compared these older specimens with each other and their modern-day Y. pestis relatives. They found samples positive for plague in samples from 13 individuals who lived over a period of 300 years. From this pool, nine samples had enough genetic information to make evolutionary conclusions about how the plague persisted in Denmark, showing how urban and rural populations alike faced constant waves of the disease.

“The high frequency of Y. pestis reintroduction to Danish communities is consistent with the assumption that most deaths in the period were due to newly introduced pathogens. This association between pathogen introduction and mortality illuminates essential aspects of the demographic evolution, not only in Denmark but across the whole European continent,” said Jesper L. Boldsen, the skeletal collection curator and paleodemographer at the University of Southern Denmark, in a statement.

[Related: These skeletons might be evidence of the oldest known mercury poisonings.]

The analysis also showed that Y. pestis sequences from Denmark were interspersed with medieval and early modern strains that originated in other European countries, including the Baltics and Russia, instead of coming from a single Denmark specific cluster that reemerged from natural virus reservoirs over time.  

“The evidence for plague in Denmark, both historical and archaeological, has been far more sparse than in some other regions, such as England and Italy. This study identified plague for the first time from medieval Denmark, therefore enabling us to connect the experience in Denmark to disease patterns elsewhere,” said co-author and University of Manitoba anthropologist Julia Gamble, in a statement.

The study proposes that the earliest known appearance of Y. pestis in Denmark dates back to 1333 in the southwestern town of Ribe around the time of the Black Death. It appeared in rural areas like Tirup and disappeared by 1649. Most of the places hit in Denmark were port cities, but one of the final outbreaks hit smaller rural sites in the central portion of the country that did not have access to water for transportation. The team believes that this suggests that humans were moving the pathogens around via rodents or lice.

“The results reveal new connections between past and present experiences of plague, and add to our understanding of the distribution, patterns and virulence of re-emerging diseases,” said Hendrik Poinar, a study co-author and director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre and an investigator with the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, in a statement. “We can use this study and the methods we employed for the study of future pandemics.”

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A team of scientists have found what could be the earliest evidence of modern human archery in Europe, dating back 54,000 years–about 10,000 years earlier than previously believed. The findings, published February 22 in the journal Science Advances, suggest that projectile weaponry like the bow and arrow could have been mastered during the modern humans incursion into Neanderthal territory and not after it. This weapon mastery gave humans an advantage over Neanderthals. 

These tools were found in Grotte Mandrin, a rock shelter in southern France near the Rhône River valley known for revealing 12 archaeological layers with animal remains and pointed objects since the 1990s. 

[Related: 2.9 million-year-old tools found in Kenya stir up a ‘fascinating whodunnit’.]

Projectile weapons like throwable spears and bows and arrows were believed to have appeared very suddenly among modern humans living in Eurasia 45,000 years ago–during the Upper Paleolithic period. However, a 2022 study co-authored by some of this same team uncovered 54,000-year-old dental remains from modern humans at this same site, suggesting that they were in the area about 10,000 years earlier than scientists previously believed.

Now, it appears that bows and arrows were with them. 

In this study, the team recovered 852 artifacts with well-defined points, blades, and flakes. Of these samples 383 had wear patterns that indicated they were either thrusted, thrown, or used to saw or cut. 196 items showed signs of being thrown.

The team used microscopic and macroscopic wear analysis to assess them and then used replicas of the artifacts with the same flints and technologies used by early humans to test how well they’d work on a hunt. The points could pierce animal hides and the team studied how they fractured.

The team believes that these findings show that Neanderthals did not develop weapons that could be mechanically propelled. Instead, they continued to use traditional weapons–huge stone-tipped spears that were thrusted or thrown by hand and required close contact with their game. 

“Bows are used in all environments, open or closed, and are effective for all prey sizes,” study author Laure Metz, an archaeologist and anthropologist from Aix-Marseille Universite in France and the University of Connecticut, tells PopSci. “Arrows can be shot quickly, with more precision, and many arrows can be carried in a quiver during a hunting foray. These technologies then allowed an uncomparable efficiency in all hunting activities when Neanderthals had to hunt in close or direct contact with their prey, a process that may have been much more complex, more hazardous and even much more dangerous when hunting large game like bison.”

[Related: Neanderthals caught and cooked crabs 90,000 years ago.]

According to Metz, the weapon transitions show that tradition is a deeply human characteristic “Even more than 50,000 years ago, traditions were anchored and important. They [early humans] preferred to keep their weapons than to adopt more effective weapons [that were] totally new to them.”

A team of over 40 scientists will continue to explore Grotte Mandrin, since scientists are still constantly learning more about our early ancestors within its rock layers. 

“It is important to understand where we come from and sometimes, something that seems obvious or natural to us, was not so for our ancestors or Neanderthal cousins,” says Metz.

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Sex toys can provide pleasure, deeper intimacy, and can even help those with pelvic floor pain, erectile dysfunction, and the effects of menopause. People have also probably used them for much longer in history than we think.

A study published February 20 in the journal Antiquity believes that a nearly 2,000 year-old penis-shaped wooden object might have been a sex toy used by ancient Romans in Britain. It could be the “first known example of a non-miniaturized disembodied phallus made of wood in the Roman world,” according to the study. 

Archaeologists found the almost seven-inch-long artifact over 20 years ago in a ditch near Vindolanda, the remains of a Roman Fort near Hadrian’s Wall. The 73-mile-long wall in northern England once once marked the northwest frontier of the Roman Empire. 

[Related from PopSci+: These sex toys are designed to heal, one orgasm at a time.]

According to the study, the tool was initially believed to be a darning tool, likely because it was found alongside dozens of shoes, dress accessories, and small tools and craft waste products. It was also suspected that the object may have been used as a pestle or as a charm to “ward off evil,” as phalli were used across the Roman Empire as a way to protect against bad luck. They were usually depicted in paintings and mosaics, and small phalli made from metal or bone were commonly worn as pendants around the neck.

A new analysis from Newcastle University and University College Dublin found that this is the first known example of a disembodied wooden phallus recovered in the Roman world. 

“Wooden objects would have been commonplace in the ancient world, but only survive in very particular conditions – in northern Europe normally in dark, damp, and oxygen free deposits,” said Rob Sands, a study co-author and archaeologist from University College Dublin, in a statement. “So, the Vindolanda phallus is an extremely rare survival. It survived for nearly 2000 years to be recovered by the Vindolanda Trust because preservation conditions have so far remained stable. However, climate change and altering water tables mean that the survival of objects like this are under ever increasing threat.”

The team believes that it was more likely used to stimulate the clitoris and not necessarily used for penetration. It could have been used as a pestle to grind cooking ingredients or medicine. The phallus could have been slotted into a statue for passers-by to touch for good luck or to absorb its protection from back luck. This practice was common throughout the Empire and the statue it belonged to may have been located near the entrance to an important government or military building.

“The size of the phallus and the fact that it was carved from wood raises a number of questions to its use in antiquity. We cannot be certain of its intended use, in contrast to most other phallic objects that make symbolic use of that shape for a clear function, like a good luck charm,” said Rob Collins, a study co-author and archaeologist from Newcastle University, in a statement. “We know that the ancient Romans and Greeks used sexual implements – this object from Vindolanda could be an example of one.”

[Related: Ancient athletes did something truly shocking with their genitals.]

The phallus is currently on display at the Vindolanda museum and the team hopes that the findings encourage more analysis of previously found objects to better understand their purposes.

“This rediscovery shows the real legacy value of having such an incredible collection of material from one site and being able to reassess that material,” said Barbara Birley, Curator at the Vindolanda Trust, in a statement. “The wooden phallus may well be currently unique in its survival from this time, but it is unlikely to have been the only one of its kind used at the site, along the frontier, or indeed in Roman Britain.”

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An international team of archaeologists recently uncovered some of the oldest stone tools ever found. The ancient tools, discovered along the banks of Lake Victoria in Kenya, are likely the oldest evidence of both an important Stone Age innovation called the Oldowan toolkit and of hominins consuming very large animals. The findings were published on February 9 in the journal Science. 

The Oldowan toolkit includes three types of stone tools: hammerstones for hitting other rocks or creating tools that pound, cores that are angular or oval shaped and split off pieces of material, and flakes used as a cutting or scraping edge.

[Related: People in China have been harvesting rice for more than 10,000 years.]

The team says that while there is solid evidence that the artifacts are likely about 2.9 million years old, a more conservative estimate is between 2.6 and three million years old. 

In the excavations at the site named Nyayanga on western Kenya’s Homa Peninsula, the team also found a massive pair of molars that belong to Paranthropus– a genus of close evolutionary relatives of modern humans. These teeth are the oldest fossilized Paranthropus remains found by scientists. Their presence at a site with so many stone tools has sparked a mystery about which human ancestor made the tools.

“The assumption among researchers has long been that only the genus Homo, to which humans belong, was capable of making stone tools,” said Rick Potts, a co-author of the study from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, in a statement. “But finding Paranthropus alongside these stone tools opens up a fascinating whodunnit.”

Whichever human ancestor was responsible for building these tools was more than 800 miles away from the previously known oldest examples of Oldowan stone tools. These 2.6 million year old tools were uncovered in Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia in 2019 and this new finding expands the region associated with Oldowan technology’s earliest origins. 

“With these tools you can crush better than an elephant’s molar can and cut better than a lion’s canine can,” said Potts. “Oldowan technology was like suddenly evolving a brand-new set of teeth outside your body, and it opened up a new variety of foods on the African savannah to our ancestors.”

The team analyzed the wear patterns on the stone tools and animal bones found near them, which led them to  believe that the tools were used to process various materials and foods, including plants, meat, and possibly bone marrow.

[Related: Ancient humans used mastodon bones to hunt the giant beasts.]

Among the 1,776 fossilized animal bones the team found 330 artifacts which showed signs of butchery. At least three individual hippos were found at the site and two of the incomplete skeletons had bones that showed signs of butchery–a deep cut mark on one hippo’s rib fragment and four short, parallel cuts on the shin bone of another hippo.

“Stone tools are allowing them, even at this really early date, to extract a lot of resources from the environment,” study co-author Thomas Plummer from City University of New York’s Queen’s College told the Associated Press. “If you can butcher a hippo, you can butcher pretty much anything.”

While the team says it will be difficult to solve the mystery of which ancestor species made the tools, the excavations in this study offer an important window to the past world of humans’ ancestors. The findings also show how stone technology allowed early hominins to adapt to different environments,eventually giving rise to today’s humans.

“East Africa wasn’t a stable cradle for our species’ ancestors,” Potts said. “It was more of a boiling cauldron of environmental change, with downpours and droughts and a diverse, ever-changing menu of foods. Oldowan stone tools could have cut and pounded through it all and helped early toolmakers adapt to new places and new opportunities, whether it’s a dead hippo or a starchy root.”

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On the 436th anniversary of her execution, a team of international codebreakers has uncovered some of the secret, coded letters written by Mary Stuart (aka Mary, Queen of Scots) while she was imprisoned in England. 

These letters had been considered lost to time and were only discovered after George Lasry (a computer scientist and cryptographer), Norbert Biermann (a pianist and music professor), and Satoshi Tomokiyo (a physicist and patents expert) were able to decipher the sophisticated coded writing system that Mary used in her letters. Their code cracking work was published on February 8 in the journal Cryptologia.

[Related: This ancient language puzzle was impossible to solve—until a PhD student cracked the code.]

In the middle to late 16th century, Mary was the first in line of succession to the English throne after her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. Catholics considered Mary to be the legitimate sovereign instead of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth, and the queen imprisoned her for 19 years since she was seen as a threat. Mary was beheaded on February 8, 1587 when she was 44 years-old due her involvement in the Babington Plot, an alleged plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth and install Mary as queen.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and a team found the cryptic documents in the online archives for encrypted documents at France’s national library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). The letters date from 1578 to 1574 and offer insights into her captivity. She communicated with her allies and most of the letters are addressed to a supporter named Michel de Castelnau de Mauvissière, France’s ambassador to England.

“Upon deciphering the letters, I was very, very puzzled and it kind of felt surreal,” says co-author George Lasry, in a statement. “We have broken secret codes from kings and queens previously, and they’re very interesting but with Mary, Queen of Scots it was remarkable as we had so many unpublished letters deciphered and because she is so famous.”

Lasry is part of the multi-disciplinary DECRYPT Project which maps, digitizes, transcribes, and deciphers historical ciphers. 

The team used computerized and manual techniques to decode the letters. Some of the documents were in a set of unmarked documents written in cipher and had the same set of graphical symbols. The letters were also originally cataloged as documents pertaining to Italian matters and dating to the first half of the 16th century.

As the team began to crack the code, they noticed that they were written in French and didn’t discuss Italy at all. Eventually, verbs and adverbs using the feminine form, mentions of captivity and the name Walsingham—referring to Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth I’s secretary and spymaster—arose the suspicion that they might be from Mary Stuart.

[Related: Fake Galileo manuscript suspected to be a 20th-century forgery.]

The team took a graphical user interface (GUI) tool which uses symbols to allow a person to communicate with a computer and developed a code breaking algorithm called hill climbing, which determined that some letters–like E or T–have two alternative symbols to encipher them. This is called a homophonic cipher, which was very common in the 16th century, according to Lasry.

After they recovered the homophones, the team identified symbols that represent single letters in the alphabet, common prefixes and suffixes, and eventually the symbols representing names, places, and the twelve months of the year to work out the structure of the cipher to read what was written in the letters.

They compared the letters with some of Walsingham’s papers that were not written in cipher to help confirm that these belonged to her. 

In order to find other encrypted letters from Mary, online searches and physical inspection of documents is needed, but these letters add 57 letters and about 50,000 words of additional primary source material on the complex historical figure.

“In our paper, we only provide an initial interpretation and summaries of the letters. A deeper analysis by historians could result in a better understanding of Mary’s years in captivity,” added Lasry. “It would also be great, potentially, to work with historians to produce an edited book of her letters deciphered, annotated, and translated.”

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What types of food would be served at a Paleolithic Period buffet for Neanderthals? Fruits, plants, and nuts for sure, but the former inhabitants of Gruta de Figueira Brava in Portugal would have also expected lots of seafood, especially brown crab (Cancer pagurus).

“Neanderthals in Gruta da Figueira Brava were eating a lot of other marine resources, like limpets, mussels, clams, fish, as well as other terrestrial animals, such as deer, goats, aurochs and tortoises,” archaeologist Mariana Nabais from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution tells PopSci.  

[Related: Skull research sheds light on human-Neanderthal interbreeding.]

Nabais specializes in zooarchaeology, or the study of animal remains that are found at archaeological sites. She is the lead author on a study published February 7 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology that presents evidence that Nednderthals were cooking and eating crabs 90,000 years ago. 

She and her team studied the deposits of stone tools, shells, and bones uncovered at Figueira Brava, south of the capital city of Lisbon. While they found a wide variety of shellfish in the deposits, remnants of brown crab were the most common in the deposits. Neanderthals possibly used low tide pools during the summer to harvest the crustaceans, according to the team. 

Most of the crabs were adults which would yield roughly seven ounces of meat. “I was very surprised about the unexpected large amount of crab remains, and their large size, similar to those we eat today,” says Nabais.

The team looked at the patterns of damage on the crab’s shells and claws and did not find any marks from rodents or evidence that birds had broken into the shells. When looking for signs of butchery and percussion marks from tools, they found fracture patterns in the shells that indicate that the shells were intentionally broken up to access the meat.

[Related: Why everything eventually becomes a crab.]

Burns were found on about eight percent of the crab shells, indicating that Neanderthals were roasting the crabs in addition to harvesting them. Comparing the black burns on the shells with studies of other mollusks showed that the crabs were heated to 572 to 932 degrees Fahrenheit, a typical temperature for cooking. 

“Our results add an extra nail to the coffin of the obsolete notion that Neanderthals were primitive cave dwellers who could barely scrape a living off scavenged big-game carcasses,” Nabais said in a statement. 

According to Nabais, it is impossible to know why Neanderthals chose to harvest brown crabs or if they attached any significance to eating them, but consuming them would have given added nutritional benefits. This study was limited to observational and not experimental data, but another study Nabais’ co-authored has been submitted for publication and validated the inferences made in this paper. 

“The origin and destiny of the Neanderthal lineage remains one of the key research questions addressed by paleoanthropology and paleolithic archaeology,” Nabais says. “Our research advances our knowledge of the Neanderthals, especially with regards to those who lived in southern Europe.”

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As early as 23 million years ago, giant mastodons roamed the Earth. These elephant ancestors were typically shorter than their modern day descendants, but were more dense and also bore signature tusks. These gigantic mammals were also hunted by the earliest humans before going extinct about 13,000 to 12,700 years ago.

A team of researchers have now found what’s believed to be the oldest direct evidence of mastodon hunting in the Americas. They studied bone fragments embedded in a mastodon rib unearthed in the 1970s at Washington States’ Manis site and found the tip of a weapon inside. The weapon is a projectile that was actually made from the bone of another mastodon. 

[Related: From the archives: 100 years of mastodon fossil fascination.]

The findings were described in a study published on February 2 in the journal Science Advances.

“We isolated the bone fragments, printed them out and assembled them,” said co-author Michael Waters, an anthropologist and director of Texas A&M’s Center for the Study of First Americans, in a statement. “This clearly showed this was the tip of a bone projectile point. This is the oldest bone projectile point in the Americas and represents the oldest direct evidence of mastodon hunting in the Americas.”

The Manis projectile is about 13,900 years old and predates other projectiles found at the site by about 900 years. These tools are associated with the Clovis people, whose spear points have been found in several fossil sites across the country.

“What is important about Manis is that it’s the first and only bone tool that dates older than Clovis. At the other pre-Clovis site, only stone tools are found,” Waters said. “This shows that the First Americans made and used bone weapons and likely other types of bone tools.”

According to the study, the projectile got stuck within the mastodon’s rib. However, the bone used to make the point on the projectile came from another mastodon’s leg bone. It was also shaped into a point on purpose.

“The spear with the bone point was thrown at the mastodon. It penetrated the hide and tissue and eventually came into contact with the rib. The objective of the hunter was to get between the ribs and impair lung function, but the hunter missed and hit the rib,” said Waters.

A study published in 2011 on this same rib bone used radiocarbon dating to determine the age of the sample,  and a later genetic study confirmed that it belonged to a mastodon. This new study used CT images and 3D software to create 3D images of each bone fragment. The team was able to fit the pieces back together like a puzzle to show what the projectile looked like before it entered the mastodon’s rib and splintered. 

[Related: These footprints could push back human history in the Americas.]

The Manis site gives scientists more insight into the lives of the first people to live in the Americas, but the debate about when people arrived is still ongoing. Waters believes that the first people likely came to the Americas by boat along the North Pacific before moving south.

“There appears to be a cluster of early sites in the Northwestern part of the United States that date from 16,000 to 14,000 years ago that predate Clovis. These sites likely represent the first people and their descendants that entered the Americas at the end of the last Ice Age,” said Waters.

Some of the estimates of when humans first inhabited North America typically ignore indigenous knowledge that life and culture in North America exists far beyond even the 23,000 year estimate.

“There are many sites that have really good dating and really good reports that are much older,” Paulette Steeves, a Cree-Metis archaeologist at Algoma University who studies Indigenous history, and author of The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, told PopSci in 2021. Steeves has compiled hundreds of finds that she says presents credible evidence that humans in the Americas date back before 16,000 years.

A set of fossilized footprints found in New Mexico’s White Sand National Park are one of the most discussed examples that contradict the 14,000 to 16,000 year settlement hypothesis, but they are not the only evidence. Researchers have also found possibly 30,000-year-old stone tools in a cave in central Mexico and non-native animal bones that may bare evidence of being cooked by humans were found in another spot in Mexico are between 28,000 and 30,000 years old.

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One of humanity’s greatest traditions is honoring the dead. Vikings burned the deceased in boats to grant safe passage into the afterlife. Ancient Tibetans practiced sky burials where corpses were devoured by vultures to cleanse the sins of the departed and allow for a peaceful ascension into heaven. But one of the most well-known burial practices in living history is mummification. Ancient Egyptians began mummifying the dead as early as 3,500 B.C.E to keep the body intact as the soul transformed from an earthly entity to a celestial being. 

Mummies serve as a glimpse into humankind’s past, including what society looked like. But despite autopsies or X-ray scans, archaeologists are stumped on how ancient Egyptians actually mummified humans. A new study published today in the journal Nature provides an answer for how they mastered this complex process. By studying the residues left on a set of embalming pots, a team of archaeologists identified chemical mixtures used to preserve the dead.

Artificial preservation is a complex process. Ancient embalmers were challenged to remove organs like the brain (they used hooked instruments to remove chunks of brain tissue through the nose) without causing physical damage or alterations to the body. Defying natural decomposition meant that they also had to be masters of chemistry. They created concoctions that would stop the body from decaying. Archaeologists studying mummies have tried to identify the unique chemical recipes, but some labels inscribed on embalming containers have been lost in translation. 

In the current study, the authors studied the contents of ceramic vessels from an embalming workshop in Saqqara, Egypt. “This archaeological site in Saqqara is the only mummification workshop ever discovered in Egypt,” says Sahar Saleem, a mummy expert and radiology professor at Cairo University who was not involved in the study. She says this discovery was a rare opportunity to investigate embalming materials and methods the Egyptians likely meant to keep secret.

Found a few meters south of the pyramid of King Unas, the underground workshop is dated around 664-525 B.C.E. The team found 121 beakers and bowls marked with embalming instructions, such as for preparing linen bandages or for specific body parts. “The findings give us a unique understanding on the actual technical steps the embalmer took based on the instructions written on the pots: how to treat the head, the order of using different mixtures,” says Saleem.

[Related: A dried-up arm of the Nile provides another clue to how Egyptians built the pyramids]

The authors studied the chemical makeup from residues left on nine beakers and 22 red bowls. They identified a large diversity of natural substances from plant oils and bitumens (natural petroleum) to resins and animal fats. Sixty percent of the vessels contained remnants of juniper or cypress. The second most commonly found product was cedar oil or tar, which were found in over half of the pots. 

Some ceramics contained blends of different chemicals. For example, one container had ricinoleic acid (a type of fatty acid used in soap) mixed with oleic acid (fatty acid found in animal and vegetable fats and oils) and possibly castor oil. The authors suggest that this combination of ingredients was used as an antiseptic and antifungal agent to preserve human tissue and reduce unpleasant smells. Bitumens, tars, resins, and beeswax have hydrophobic and adhesive properties that when made into balms could be applied onto bandages to seal skin pores and remove moisture.

“I was fascinated with this chemical knowledge of ancient Egyptians,” says Phillip Stockhammer, a professor of prehistoric archaeology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and senior study author. He says if the ancient Egyptians ever moved the body, it could become contaminated with microbes that would try to eat up the skin. “They knew immediately they needed antibacterial, antifungal substances to keep the skin preserved, and this is without having any microbiology background.” 

[Related on PopSci+: Inside the project to bring ‘self-healing’ Roman concrete to American shorelines]

The bowls were engraved with instructions for specific steps in the embalming process. Eight were designated for head treatment and, to the authors’ knowledge, this was the first time elemi oil or tar of juniper-cypress was found as ingredients for embalming the head. Some bowls contained markers of oil or tar of conifer to ‘to wash’ the body while another bowl labeled ‘to make his odor pleasant’ showed signs of animal fat and degraded resin. To preserve the skin, ancient Egyptians used a bowl of animal fat mixed with heated beeswax as a kind of moisturizing ointment.

The researchers also found that most of the embalming ingredients were imported from other lands, suggesting Egyptians were heavily involved in the international economy. They likely traded for bitumen in communities surrounding the Dead Sea. Others seemed to have made the long trek to the Mediterranean, tropical Africa, and southeast Asian woods to find resin and elemi. “The industry of embalming was driving forward early globalization because they were transporting these materials over large distances from across Southeast Asia to Egypt,” says Stockhammer. The expansive network of trade and exquisitely refined process gives a new glimpse at how embalmers were master specialists of their craft.

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ANCIENT ROMANS were masters of concrete, fashioning concoctions of sand, water, and rock into long-lasting marvels. Bridges, stadiums, and other structures they built with the stuff still stand tall—even harbors and breakwaters that have been soaked by tides and storms for nearly 2,000 years. This substance, robust to the microscopic level, far outlives the modern material, which generally requires steel supports in salt water and is still likely to corrode within decades.

When the Roman Empire ended, so did its method of making marine concrete. But by following chemical clues within ancient architecture, today’s scientists have revived this technique. In recent years, researchers have only gotten better at understanding it, applying lessons from fields as diverse as archaeology, civil engineering, and volcanology. They have pulled tubes of the ancient substance from under the ocean. They have zapped it with X-rays to observe its microscopic minerals. Now they’ve mixed up their own industrial version.

In 2023, for the first time in nearly two millennia, Roman-style marine concrete will be tested on a coastline. Silica-X, a US-based company that specializes in experimental glass, plans to place four or five slabs into Long Island Sound beginning this summer. Unlike virtually all other concrete products made today, which are designed to resist their environments, these 2,600-pound samples will embrace their aquatic surroundings—and are expected to become stronger over time.

As water moves through the porous solid, the material’s minerals will dissolve, and new, strengthening compounds will form. “That is actually the secret of Roman concrete,” says University of Utah geology and geophysics research associate professor Marie D. Jackson, who is working on a reboot of the stuff with a $1.4 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, a federal program that supports early-stage technology research. 

Jackson has spent more than a decade investigating what happens when Roman concrete meets seawater. She is part of a team working alongside Silica-X; the prototypes destined to be dunked in the New York estuary are based on her recipe.

“One hundred percent, Marie is the most significant person” trying to understand and develop the substance, says her frequent collaborator, Google hardware developer Philip Brune. More than a decade ago, when Brune was a Ph.D. student, he and Jackson created the first of what they call Roman concrete analogues. After making a terrestrial type—similar to the basis of the Pantheon and Trajan’s Market—they switched to a marine variant.

Jackson has an application in mind for these historical replicants: guarding against the effects of climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects that by 2050, sea levels will rise by an average of 10 to 12 inches along American coasts. Modern concrete seawalls, which need to be replaced roughly every 30 years, already cover a substantial percentage of the US shoreline. If waves keep mounting, it will be necessary to find a more durable and sustainable option to reinforce our seaboards. 

The duality of concrete

Concrete’s ingredients are about as simple as a sugar cookie’s. Besides water and air, it requires a grainy material called aggregate, which may be sand, gravel, or crushed rock. The other necessity is cement, a mineral glue that holds the constituents together. Portland cement, invented in the mid-1800s in England, remains the basis for the majority of modern concrete formulas. This mix results in a consistently potent product. “You can make it on Mars with the same ingredients, and you know it will work,” says Admir Masic, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Concrete Sustainability Hub.

Portland cement production is the noxious part: Not only is it thirsty for fresh water and energy, it also releases loads of carbon dioxide. The manufacturing process is responsible for 7 to 8 percent of worldwide CO₂ emissions, according to Sabbie Miller, a civil and environmental engineering assistant professor at the University of California, Davis. If the global concrete industry were a nation, its greenhouse gas footprint would be the third biggest on the planet, after those of China and the US. 

The concrete sector is aware of its product’s environmental legacy and is willing to work toward change, Miller says. Global construction conglomerate HeidelbergCement, for one, announced in 2021 that it would construct the first carbon-neutral cement plant by 2030, a facility that would capture greenhouse gases and lock them up in bedrock below the sea. Other types of concrete in development are designed to lock up pollution within the material itself. Miller, who is working on techniques to turn carbon into a solid, storable mineral, says these are “very much early-days, we’ll-see-if-it-works technologies.”

Making concrete as the Romans did should reduce troublesome emissions, researchers say, in large part because this substance won’t need to be replaced frequently. Yet the ancient process doesn’t yield quite as much compressive strength—this resource won’t hold up super-tall buildings or heavily traveled bridges. In the concrete heart of Manhattan, “We will not use Roman-inspired material,” says Masic, who co-authored a paper with Jackson and two others on reactions within the building materials in the Roman tomb of Caecilia Metella and is an inventor of what he calls a “self-healing” substance. Rather, he says, the timeless concoction could be fashioned into roads that resist wear, walls that withstand waves, and vaults that confine nuclear waste.

What Roman-style concrete does best is survive, aided by its ability to repair itself within days. “This material has phenomenal durability,” Brune says. “Nothing else that you find in the built environment lasts with as much integrity and fidelity.” A key ingredient that gives it this ability lies in the sand-like pozzolan of Pozzuoli, Italy.

From fire to the sea

Jackson did not set out to unlock the secrets of Roman concrete. Drawn to volcanology and rock mechanics, she studied Hawaii’s Mauna Loa in the late ’80s and early ’90s. In 1995, she spent a year in Rome with her family, living near the ruins of the Circus Maximus, once a huge chariot-racing stadium. While there, she became fascinated with the volcanic rock incorporated into the city’s celebrated classical architecture.

Roman concrete has been the subject of intense scholarship—structures that persist for thousands of years tend to attract attention. But Jackson, with her geologist’s eye, saw something powerful below the surface. “It is very difficult to understand this material unless one understands volcanic rocks,” she says. In her analysis, Jackson focused on tephra, particles spit out in a volcanic eruption, and tuff, the rock that forms when tephra firms up. 

Her first paper about Roman building materials, a collaboration with four other scientists, was published in the journal Archaeometry in 2005. The group described seven deposits where ancient builders had collected tuff and stones. These were products of explosive eruptions from two volcanoes north and south of Rome. By the first century BCE, Roman architects had recognized the resilience of these rocks and had begun to place them in what Jackson notes were “strategic positions” around the city.

While she examined materials in the Eternal City, others were separately scouring the sea. A trio of scholars and scuba divers—classical archaeologists Robert L. Hohlfelder and John Oleson, and London-based architect Christopher Brandon—launched the Roman Maritime Concrete Study in 2001. Over the next several years, they collected dozens of core samples from Egypt, Greece, Italy, Israel, and Turkey, taken from 10 Roman harbor sites and one piscina, a seaside tank for corralling edible fish.

Some of the locations they inspected were immense structures: At Caesarea Palaestinae, a port city built between 22 and 10 BCE during the reign of King Herod, Romans created a harbor from an estimated 20,000 metric tons of volcanic ash. 

To look inside the ruins, the archaeologists needed heavy machinery. “You used to whack some pieces off the outside of a big, maybe 400-cubic-meter lump of concrete on the ocean floor,” says Oleson, a University of Victoria professor emeritus. But that approach has flaws. The surface is already decayed from sea growth, so whatever breaks off might not represent what’s deeper inside. “You’ve also been whacking on it with a hammer,” he says, which can foul the opportunity to measure its material strength.

The project required a more precise, piercing touch. A cement company in Italy, Italcementi, provided funding and helped get the three men a specialized hydraulic coring rig. Diving beneath the Mediterranean, they spent hours drilling, extracting cylindrical cores up to 20 feet long. “It was difficult,” Oleson says. “In places like Alexandria, the visibility—because of all the things you don’t want to think about—was less than your arm length.”

That effort paid off. No one had been able to look at the layers within the submerged structures before. The opinion at the time was that the concrete must have been extra strong to last for thousands of years in seawater. But that wasn’t the case, Oleson and his colleagues found: “In modern engineering terms, it’s quite weak,” he says. What it was, though, was remarkably consistent in its volcanic elements. Oleson theorizes that grain ships used Neapolitan pozzolan as ballast, ferrying it to work sites hundreds of miles from its source.

In 2007, the trio’s presentation on seawater concrete won an award at the Archaeological Institute of America’s annual meeting. “I was standing there, bathing in the glory, and this short, excitable woman came up and started talking to me,” Oleson recalls. The stranger was Jackson, who Oleson says launched into a detailed explanation of the rare crystal minerals she had observed within Roman architectural concrete. Oleson, for his part, had never taken a college chemistry course, but he recognized a kindred spirit—and that this geologist had expertise his group needed. 

They gave Jackson access to the maritime samples. And when she peered inside, she found chemical laboratories on a nanometer scale.

Reactions in the rock

In his first-century work Natural History, Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote of a dust that “as soon as it comes into contact with the waves of the sea and is submerged, becomes a single stone mass, impregnable to the waves and every day stronger.” How precisely these wet grains—the pozzolan—became ever stronger would not be revealed for almost 2,000 years.

When Jackson investigated the core samples Oleson and his colleagues had obtained, she spotted some of the same features she’d seen in the architectural concrete in metropolitan Rome. But in the sunken stuff, she also saw what she labeled mineral cycling: a looping reaction in which compounds formed, dissolved, and formed new ones.

To make concrete, Romans mixed tephra with hydrated lime. That accelerates the production of a mineral glue called calcium aluminum silicate hydrate, or C-A-S-H. (The backbone of unadulterated modern concrete, C-S-H, is a similar binder.) This happens within the first months of installation, Jackson says. Within five to 10 years, the material composition changes again, consuming all the hydrated lime through a kind of microscopic interior remodeling. By then, percolating fluid “begins to really make a difference” as it produces long-lasting, cementlike minerals within.

Jackson and a team of scientists used sophisticated microscope and X-ray techniques, including work done at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Advanced Light Source, to look at these powerful but teeny crystals. “We were able to show systematically that Roman seawater concrete had continued to change over time,” she says. Within each pore of the concrete, seawater had reacted with glass or crystal compounds. In particular, she found stiff, riblike plates of a rare mineral known as aluminous tobermorite, which probably help prevent fractures, as she and her colleagues wrote in a 2017 paper in the journal American Mineralogist.

The ocean itself plays a vital role. Roman fabricators made their marine concrete mixtures with seawater, and its salts became part of the mineral structure—sodium, chlorine, and other ions helped activate the tephra-lime reaction. Once the concrete was in the tides, as fluid slowly percolated through the hulking edifices, life flourished on the facades. Worms made tubes and other invertebrates sprouted shells.

Modern reinforced concrete, meanwhile, needs a high pH to preserve the steel rebar within, which means its surface is less friendly to living things. Once it is cast, after about 28 days of hardening and curing, it is near its maximum sturdiness, Brune notes. (Attempts are underway to give newer kinds of concrete the ability to restore themselves, such as infusing the material with bacterial spores that create limestone.)

Specifically, concrete using Portland cement is as brittle as it is strong. Under too much strain, it cracks, sometimes with a sharp snap that propagates and causes wide-scale failure. “The ability of the material to carry further loads, it’s gone. It’s fractured,” Jackson says. 

Roman concrete breaks differently. Brune and Jackson have tested their analogues under strain, creating semicircles out of the blend and pressing them to the cracking point. They observed that unlike extremely inflexible substances that will fail and essentially split into halves, Roman concrete displaces the strain over many small fractures, without necessarily losing its overall integrity. “Roman concrete-style materials respond really well to that kind of cracking,” Brune says, adding that this feature could explain why the age-old recipe has endured so long despite earthquakes and the churn of aquatic environments.

White clumps of lime found in Roman concrete can also keep it robust, as Masic and fellow MIT scientists reported in a Science Advances paper in January. In lab experiments, the team drained water through cracked concrete cylinders for 30 days. Water continuously flowed through broken samples of typical concrete. But in concrete with added lime gobs, calcite crystallized to fill the gaps. 

Jackson and Brune have observed similar self-restoring abilities in their marine concrete replicas. In to-be-published experiments funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy grant, they again cracked semicircles of the concoction. When they placed the damaged arcs in containers of seawater, chemical reactions resumed—new glue accumulated in the fractures. This, Jackson says, is concrete that self-repairs.

New trials, new island

As 2023 surges on, Roman-style concrete will venture further than ever before. US Army Corps of Engineers research geologist Charles Weiss, who studies concrete and other structural materials, has submitted a proposal to try out Jackson’s formula. If the Vicksburg, Mississippi, military lab receives the funds—“Working for the government, nothing is for sure,” he says—Corps researchers will cast the material and place it in a body of water.

Elsewhere, another federal project’s failure may have helped Jackson’s creation along. In 2018 in South Carolina, at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River National Laboratory, scientists were trying to make a product that could safely store radioactive garbage.

The national lab wanted to create foam glass, a type of bubble-filled substance meant to be inactive, and contracted the Silica-X team to help. They weren’t successful. The mixture kept reacting with its surroundings—a problem because if radioactive waste receptacles dissolve, they can release unstable particles. But what’s bad for nuclear trash is good for seawalls designed to respond to their environs. Glass designers at the lab recognized this potential and connected Jackson with the company.

Despite the growing interest in Roman-style concrete, it is neither feasible nor sustainable to mine industrial amounts of pozzolan from Naples. Instead, Philip Galland, Silica-X’s chief executive, says its production process digs into nonnuclear US waste streams to obtain silica, which is then transformed into synthetic tephra. That will be the basis for the upcoming Long Island Sound field test, Galland says, in an “area where it can offer shoreline resilience.”

Silica-X plans to assess the 3.5-foot cubes’ durability over two years. Along with its partners—the New York Department of Environmental Conservation and Alfred University, home to an influential ceramics college—the company will analyze the material’s potential as a storm-surge barrier and how it performs as a habitat for microbes and other local marine life.

At the same time, Jackson has returned to her original subject matter: volcanoes. She is the principal investigator of a project to study Surtsey, a tiny volcanic island off of Iceland that’s just 60 years old. A UNESCO World Heritage site, it emerged from the Atlantic in sprays of smoke and lava from 1963 to 1967. “I remember when it first erupted,” Jackson says, “because my dad came home from work and told us that there was a baby volcano erupting.”

At Surtsey, scientists have found microbial life in basalt rocks previously untouched by humans. (Aside from research teams who arrive by boat or helicopter, visitors are banned from the volcano.) They have drilled to the seafloor, through stone that is still hot years after the last eruption, and examined the tephra there. As it slumbers, Jackson believes this place can reveal what happened in the early years of submerged Roman concrete. 

What she knows about the material has been gleaned from stuff that’s aged for thousands of years underwater. Although the young terrain is an imperfect replica of the coveted ancient ingredient—the fluids there aren’t quite the same as what percolated through the Roman structures—Jackson says she has already spied some similar geochemical processes. The ash and seawater around the volcano offer a parallel to the early reactions that gave a great civilization its building blocks. This is a living laboratory that could teach us Roman concrete’s art of change, witnessed on a scale as massive as a new island or as tiny as minerals morphing across millennia. If all goes well, the modern version of this powerful invention will outlast its makers just the same.

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Egyptologists announced that they have uncovered multiple 4,300 year old tombs and a gold laced mummy in the Saqqara necropolis, about 19 miles south of the capital city of Cairo. 

The tombs date back to 2686-2181 BCE, during the the Fifth and Sixth dynasties of the Old Kingdom, according to officials at a press conference on January 26. The vast burial site is located at the ancient Egyptian capital city of Memphis and is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It’s home to multiple pyramids, animal graves, and old Coptic Christian monasteries.

[Related: Egypt is reclaiming its mummies and its past.]

Egypt’s somewhat controversial former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass led the team and said 12 “beautifully carved” statues were found, in addition to two deep burial shafts. 

“The most important tomb belongs to Khnumdjedef, an inspector of the officials, a supervisor of the nobles, and a priest in the pyramid complex of Unas, the last king of the fifth dynasty. The tomb is decorated with scenes of daily life,” Hawass told reporters. 

One of the other tombs belonged to a person named Meri. According to Hawass, Meri was the pharaoh’s appointed “secret keeper.” This title was held by a senior palace official who had the authority and power to perform certain religious rituals. 

Another tomb belonged to a priest in Pharaoh Pepi I’s pyramid complex, and one other tomb belonged to a judge and writer named Fetek (according to inscriptions on the coffin). Fetek’s tomb included a collection of “the largest statues” ever found in the area, according to the team.

A large, completely sealed rectangular limestone sarcophagus holding a mummy covered in gold leaf inside was also uncovered. The mummy is of a man named Hekashepes and  “may be the oldest and most complete mummy found in Egypt to date,” Hawass added.

[Related: This teen mummy was buried with dozens of gold amulets.]

In 2018, an expedition in Saqqara found a 4,400-year-old tomb of a royal priest named Wahtye, and a following visit in 2019 led to the discovery of hundreds of mummified animals.

Since tourism accounts for up to 15 percent of Egypt’s gross domestic product (GDP) and about two million jobs, leaders hope that a recent string of discoveries will help entice visitors. Political unrest, economic crises, and the COVID-19 pandemic have hurt the vital industry in recent years. 

However, some critics, like the former head of Supreme Council of Antiquities, say that excavations like these have prioritized finds that grab attention over hard academic research. Regardless of the debate, the government still plans to hold the long-delayed inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum located at the foot of the famed pyramids in Giza this year. It hopes to draw in 30 million tourists per year by 2028.

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Ancient Egyptians believed that when a person died, the spiritual body sought out an afterlife. But, entry was not a guarantee. A perilous journey through the underworld was required before an an individual could reach Osiris (the god of the deceased) and the Hall of Final Judgement. Relatives of the dead and embalmers did all that they could to help ensure that their loved one may reach a happy destination in the afterlife, and many of these practices and beliefs were written and edited in the Book of the Dead, likely around the 16th century BCE.

[Related: It may be time for museums to return Egyptian mummies to their coffins.]

Thousands of years later, scientists are still unwrapping the details of these burial practices. A study published January 24 in the journal Frontiers in Medicine describes how a team Egypt used computerized tomography (CT) to “digitally unwrap” the intact, never-opened mummy of a 2,300-year-old teenage boy from a high socioeconomic class that was buried with at least 49 amulets. The discovery is shedding light into mummification procedures and the importance of grave ornaments during Egypt’s Ptolemaic period (from 305 to 30 BCE).

The “Golden boy,” mummy was found in 1916 at a cemetery in Nag el-Hassay in southern Egypt that was used between approximately 332 and 30 BCE. The mummy features many examples of ancient Egyptian beliefs about life after death. He was armed with no fewer than 49 amulets of 21 types to promote the resurrection of his body, wore sandals as a symbol of purity, and had meaningful ferns wrapped around his body.

“Here we show that this mummy’s body was extensively decorated with 49 amulets, beautifully stylized in a unique arrangement of three columns between the folds of the wrappings and inside the mummy’s body cavity. These include the Eye of Horus, the scarab, the akhet amulet of the horizon, the placenta, the Knot of Isis, and others. Many were made of gold, while some were made of semiprecious stones, fired clay, or faience. Their purpose was to protect the body and give it vitality in the afterlife,” said Sahar Saleem, a co-author and a professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Cairo University, Egypt, in a statement.

The amulets represent a wide range of Egyptian beliefs about death and the afterlife. Someone placed a golden tongue leaf inside the mouth to ensure that he could speak in the afterlife, while the two-finger amulet placed beside his penis was added to protect the embalming incision. An Isis Knot called on Isis, the power of the goddess of healing and magic, to protect the body. Additionally, a right-angle amulet was included to bring balance and leveling and double falcon and ostrich plumes represented the duality of a person’s spiritual and material life.

The mummy was laid inside two coffins. The outer coffin had a Greek inscription and the inner was wooden sarcophagus. He also wore a a gilded head mask, a chest covering on the front of the torso, and a pair of sandals. “The sandals were probably meant to enable the boy to walk out of the coffin. According to the ancient Egyptians’ ritual Book of The Dead, the deceased had to wear white sandals to be pious and clean before reciting its verses,” said Saleem.

CT scans revealed that the the boy was uncircumcised, about four feet tall, but didn’t reveal any known cause of death other than something natural. The team estimates that he was between 14 and 15 years-old from the amount of bone fusion and the lack of wisdom teeth. His mouth also didn’t have any evidence of tooth loss, dental caries, or periodontal disease.

[Related: Egypt is reclaiming its mummies and its past.]

The mummy’s outer surface also had symbolic ferns woven around it. “Ancient Egyptians were fascinated by plants and flowers and believed they possessed sacred and symbolic effects. Bouquets of plants and flowers were placed beside the deceased at the time of burial: this was done for example with the mummies of the New Kingdom kings Ahmose, Amenhotep I, and Ramesses the Great. The deceased was also offered plants in each visit to the dead during feasts,” said Saleem.

His heart, which was believed to be a person’s center of intelligence and being, remained in tact, but the rest of the organs had been removed through an incision and the brain was removed through the nose and replaced with resin.

Inside the mummy’s thoracic cavity (which contains the heart and lungs), the researches found an amulet of a golden scarab beetle. The team 3D printed a replica version of the amulet for display and study.

“The heart scarab is mentioned in chapter 30 of the Book of the Dead: it was important in the afterlife during judging the deceased and weighing of the heart against the feather of the goddess Maat. The heart scarab silenced the heart on Judgement Day, so as not to bear witness against the deceased. It was placed inside the torso cavity during mummification to substitute for the heart if the body was ever deprived of this organ,” said Saleem.

The management team at The Egyptian Museum has sinced moved the mummy to their main exhibition hall under the nickname “Golden boy.”

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Mummification isn’t just for human bodies. Scientists have uncovered everything from cats to hawks to cobras mummified in tombs across Egypt. Some big and fearsome predators were also mummified, including some crocodiles species that can weigh up to 500 pounds and are found in the Nile River were also mummified. A new study published on January 18 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE is taking a closer look at these preserved reptiles.

[Related: It may be time for museums to return Egyptian mummies to their coffins.]

The team of researchers from institutions in Belgium and Spain finds that crocodiles were mummified in a unique way at the burial site of Qubbat al-Hawā in Aswan, Egypt during the 5th Century BCE. While there are several hundred mummified crocodiles available in museum collections around the world, they are not often examined thoroughly. The team looked at both the formation (morphology) and preservation of 10 crocodile mummies ranging from about five to 11 feet long. The specimens were found during excavations in 2018 in rock tombs at Qubbat al-Hawā, along the western bank of the Nile River.

The mummies included five partial skeletons and isolated skulls.

“The crocodiles are an extraordinary find,” study co-author Bea De Cupere from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, tells PopSci. “Although I am an archeozoologist and used to work with animal bones, the crocodile skulls were very impressive, and I am very happy to have got the opportunity to study these crocodile remains.”

The team believes that the mummies come from two crocodile species, West African and Nile crocodiles, based on their morphology. They also found that the preservation style was different than the ones used on mummies found at other sites. There was no evidence that resin was used to plug up holes in the bodies or that carcass evisceration (the removal of the internal organs) was part of the mummification process.

“It is assumed that the animals were first, elsewhere, laid on the surface or buried in a sandy environment that allowed the bodies to dry out naturally. Most likely the intestines were thus not removed,” De Cupere says.

This preservation style suggests it occurred during the pre-Ptolemaic age, or before the reign of Egypt’s Ptolemy Dynasty, the dynasty that included Cleopatra VII. This style is consistent with the final phase of funeral practices used during the 5th Century BCE, according to the team.

Comparing mummies and the mummification techniques behind them is helpful when studying patterns and practices in both animal use and corpse preservation over time.

[Related: Scientists try to unwrap the secrets of Egyptian mummy DNA.]

Some of the limitations of this particular study included a lack of available ancient DNA from the crocodiles and radiocarbon dating.

“The presence of two species of crocodiles (the Nile crocodile and the West-African crocodile) in the tomb has been hypothesized. It would be ideal to test the species identification with DNA-analysis,” says De Cupere. “Based on the archaeological context and the lack of evidence of resin or bitumen use, the crocodile deposit is assumed to be pre-Ptolemaic. Radiocarbon dating of the animals would be worthwhile”

Additional studies incorporating both DNA analysis and radiocarbon dating will help present day scientists better understand ancient Egyptian cultural practices.

Correction (January 19, 2023): An earlier version of this story said crocodiles could weigh up to 16,500 pounds. It is roughly 500 pounds. We regret the error.

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When it comes to placing temples for notoriously moody gods, being literal can come in handy. If you’re a fan of Greek mythology, perhaps it will come as no surprise that a temple to the god of the seas was recently discovered in a location noted for its repeated run-ins with tsunamis. 

The temple of Poseidon may have finally been uncovered by a team of scientists at the Kleidi site near Samikon, an ancient village on the Peleponnesian peninsula of Greece. This area was once known to be the location of the sanctuary of Poseidon, alongside some wild weather events. Now, researchers suspect this newly found temple-like structure within the sanctuary could be the very one dedicated to Poseidon, as described 2,000 years ago by Greek historian Strabo.

[Related: These intricate ‘living’ paintings are teeming with microscopic organisms.]

According to earlier reports, the building dates back to the sixth century B.C.E , and was around 30 feet wide, at least 90 feet long, and had two-foot-thick walls. Additionally, the building featured a vestibule typical for temples of the time, a back chamber, and a special room dedicated to the deity. The kicker, according to a post from the Austrian Archaeological Institute Athens, is the presence of a marble perirrhanterion, or a water basin used for ritual washing in sanctuaries in the Archaic period.

“This discovery allows new perspectives on the political and economic importance of the [religious cooperation] of the Triphylian cities in the 6th century B.C.E, for whom the sanctuary of Poseidon at Samikon formed the centre of their religious and ethnic identity,” they write.

[Related: Tomb of a forgotten queen is one of several new stunning Egyptian discoveries.]

The region where this discovery was found is also known for its group of three large hills surrounded by lagoons and coastal swamps. “The results of our investigations to date indicate that the waves of the open Ionian Sea actually washed up directly against the group of hills until the 5th millennium B.C.E. Thereafter, on the side facing the sea, an extensive beach barrier system developed in which several lagoons were isolated from the sea,” Andreas Vött of Mainz University says in a release. 

These hills came in handy because the region was also plagued by tsunamis in the prehistoric and historic eras, some records showing events as recently as 551 and 1303 C.E. But, the builders of this temple might have seen that as an advantage for the particular location of Poseidon’s holy house. Afterall, he was known for his temper coming out in the forms of floods, earthquakes, and general destruction.

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A cryptic group of markings found in caves throughout Europe possibly served as a pre-historic animal encyclopedia. Archaeologists have known about these markings for at least 150 years, but now scientists predict that the pairing of these sequences of dots, lines, and other shapes combined with drawings of animals could have expressed information about the deer, cattle, wild horses, and mammoths that once roamed the continent. The marking themselves date back to at least 20,000 years, roughly when the last Ice Age peaked.

[Related: Humans may have arrived in the Americas 15,000 years earlier than we thought.]

In a new study published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, a team of researchers found that rather than recording speech or sentences, these markings recorded information numerically and reference a calendar. This means that the markings aren’t writing in the same sense of Sumerian writing systems (pictographs and cuneiform) from about 34,000 BCE onward. Instead, the researchers call this a “proto-writing” system that pre-dates other similar systems by at least 10,000 years.

“The meaning of the markings within these drawings has always intrigued me so I set about trying to decode them, using a similar approach that others took to understanding an early form of Greek text,” said co-author Ben Bacon, an amateur archaeologist and independent researcher, in a statement. “Using information and imagery of cave art available via the British Library and on the internet, I amassed as much data as possible and began looking for repeating patterns. As the study progressed, I reached out to friends and senior university academics, whose expertise were critical to proving my theory.”

Birth cycles in similar present day animals were used as a reference point to figure out that the number of markings associated with Ice Age animals was actually a record, by lunar month, of when the animals were mating.

For example, they believe that a “Y” sign meant “giving birth” and found a correlation between the number of marks, the Y’s position, and the months when modern animals mate and then birth their young.

“Lunar calendars are difficult because there are just under twelve and a half lunar months in a year, so they do not fit neatly into a year. As a result, our own modern calendar has all but lost any link to actual lunar months,” said co-author Tony Freeth, a professor of mechanical engineering at University College London, in a statement.

[Related: A discovery found in Germany’s ‘Unicorn Cave’ hints at Neanderthal art.]

Freeth has extensive work in deciphering the ancient Greek space clock called the Antikythera Mechanism. This clock uses a 19-year mathematical calendar to calculate astronomical events. This calendar is more simple, using a meteorological calendar tied to temperature changes instead of celestial events like solstices and equinoxes.

Freeth and Bacon then slowly devised a calendar that helped explain why it was so universal across caves in Europe. According to the team, it shows that hunter-gatherers in the Ice Age were the first to use marks and a systemic calendar to document major ecological events within a calendar.

“The implications are that Ice Age hunter-gatherers didn’t simply live in their present, but recorded memories of the time when past events had occurred and used these to anticipate when similar events would occur in the future, an ability that memory researchers call mental time-travel,” said co-author Professor Robert Kentridge from Durham University, in a statement.

The team hopes that decoding this proto-writing system further will offer insight into the types of of information that early humans valued.

“As we probe deeper into their world, what we are discovering is that these ancient ancestors are a lot more like us than we had previously thought. These people, separated from us by many millennia, are suddenly a lot closer,” concluded Bacon.

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While dredging in the flooded Dungeness quarry in southeastern England, workers from concrete supplier CEMEX UK came across more than just a bevy of rocks. Within the ground were the timbers of a ship that date back to the reign of Elizabeth I. The monarch was Queen of England and Ireland from 1558 until 1603, and is regarded by some historians as one of the nation’s greatest rulers.

During the late 16th Century, England and many other nations in the region were in a trade boom, with routes expanding and the English Channel serving as a major trading route. Today, very few English-built ships that date back to this busy time remain.

[Related: Storm erosion brings 200-year-old shipwreck to the surface of a Florida beach.]

“To find a late 16th-century ship preserved in the sediment of a quarry was an unexpected but very welcome find indeed,” said Andrea Hamel, a Marine Archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology, in a statement. “The ship has the potential to tell us so much about a period where we have little surviving evidence of shipbuilding but yet was such a great period of change in ship construction and seafaring.” 

Archaeologists recovered more than 100 timbers from the hull of the ship and dendrochronological analysis was funded by Historic England. The ship was built somewhere between 1558 and 1580 according to the analysis, which also confirmed that it was made from English oak. According to Wessex Archaeology, this timing and material places the ship at a transitional period in ship construction in Northern Europe. Historians believe that this is when ships moved from the traditional clinker construction seen in Viking vessels to frame-first-built ships. This technique is where a ship’s internal framing is built and the planking is added to frames later to create a smooth outer hull. It’s a similar technique to what was used to construct the Mary Rose, a warship that was built between 1509 and 1511, and some of the ships that would later explore and colonize North America.

[Related: Has Captain Cook’s lost ship been found? Maybe.]

The ship was uncovered close to 1,000 feet away from the sea, but experts believe that the quarry used to be closer to the coast. The ship possibly wrecked on the headland or was discarded there at the end of its prime. The discovery presents an opportunity to better understand the development of the shipping, ports, and coast line in this part of the Kent coast. 

“The remains of this ship are really significant, helping us to understand not only the vessel itself but the wider landscape of shipbuilding and trade in this dynamic period,” said Antony Firth, Head of Marine Heritage Strategy at Historic England, in a statement.

Air and water can quickly rot wood, so old ships like these need a layer of sediment to protect it. To preserve the ship’s wooden timbers, the team used laser scanning and digital photography to take measurements and photos and once archaeologists complete this work, the timbers will be reburied in the quarry lake so that the remains can continue to be preserved by the silt in the dirt.

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Thousands of years before life hacks, cat videos, some dubious health advice, and conspiracy theories took over social media, techniques for pottery making were spread in hunter-gatherer social networks.

A team from the University of York and the British Museum analyzed the remnants of 1,226 pieces of pottery from 156 sites in Northern and Eastern Europe and found a correlation between the pottery’s age, physical features, and how the ceramics were used. According to the study, this is evidence that communities shared the techniques and families passed down to other generations.

[Related: How to make pottery from scratch.]

Their findings, published December 22 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, show that techniques for making pottery spread rapidly westwards from about 5,900 BCE onward through social traditions. It took only 300-400 years to advance more than 1,846 miles, or about 155 miles in a single generation—pretty fast for a time before quick transportation and TikTok. 

The oldest pottery containers to date are close to 20,000 years old and come from eastern parts of Asia. They have been found with the remnants of multiple food including fish, boar, and tortoise inside. The techniques for making similar ceramic containers possibly spread over time through Siberia, before reaching hunter-gatherer societies in Northern Europe. Farming and agriculture reached countries in northern Europe about 6,000 years ago.

“Our analysis of the ways pots were designed and decorated as well as new radiocarbon dates suggests that knowledge of pottery spread through a process of cultural transmission,” study co-author Oliver Craig, an archeologist from University of York, said in a statement. “By this we mean that the activity spread by the exchange of ideas between groups of hunter-gatherers living nearby, rather than through migration of people or an expanding population as we see for other key changes in human history such as the introduction of agriculture.”  

[Related: People in China have been harvesting rice for more than 10,000 years.]

The authors combined radiocarbon dating with data on how ceramic vessels at the time were produced and decorated, and an analysis of the food remnants found inside the pots. Studying the traces of organic material left behind in the pots helped the team demonstrate that the vessels were used for cooking, and shared culinary traditions may have helped share ideas and techniques for pottery-making.

“We found evidence that the vessels were used for cooking a wide range of animals, fish and plants, and this variety suggests that the drivers for making the pottery were not in response to a particular need, such as detoxifying plants or processing fish, as has previously been suggested,” added co-author Carl Heron, from the British Museum, in a statement. “We also found patterns suggesting that pottery use was transmitted along with knowledge of their manufacture and decoration. These can be seen as culinary traditions that were rapidly transmitted with the artifacts themselves.”

The team believes that specific knowledge may have been shared through marriages or at gathering places where hunter-gatherers may have gathered together, possibly at certain times of year.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

On the eastern end of the Greek island of Crete, archaeologist Dimitra Mylona steps out onto the dun-colored remains of the 3,500-year-old Minoan settlement of Palaikastro and considers the past. Not just the big-P past that is the fundament of her career but also the small-p past of her own route to truth through a discipline burdened by myth and speculation. For the past 30 years, Mylona has been testing and refining her methodology, sifting through sites to ever-finer degrees. And if there’s anything the past few decades have taught her, it’s that the closer you look at ancient Mediterranean civilizations, the more the fish rise to the surface.

Mylona is a zooarchaeologist—a specialist in the study of animal remains of ancient societies. Through the close observation of bones, shells, and other finds, zooarchaeologists try to re-create a picture of the way humans hunted, husbanded, ate, and more generally interacted with the animals around them. Traditionally, zooarchaeologists in the Mediterranean have focused on goat and sheep and other forms of terrestrial protein as the go-to meat sources for Greece and other Mediterranean countries. Back in 1991, as a new graduate student, Mylona thought no differently, imagining herself picking through the remains of livestock. But during one of her first digs, in the same Palaikastro she now surveys, the presence of an entirely different find captivated her—fish bones.

Working by the sea, Mylona and other students were excavating the dirt floors of Minoan houses more than 3,000 years old. To retrieve minuscule finds—carbonized seeds of plants, bits of wood charcoal, bones of birds, lizards, and fish—they sifted the soil by using water to float the smallest of objects to visibility. “One of the senior archaeologists called me over to look into the microscope,” she says. “I imagine she was hoping to find someone that would take an interest in something others had ignored.” In the scope was one of the many tiny fish bones that were found that day, probably belonging to a small comber or a wrasse. The senior archaeologist was right. Mylona gazed at the folds and crenulations of those fish vertebrae and mused: a story lurked. She learned during those early digs that archaeologists in Greece were just beginning to employ the much more fine-scale water flotation method to the soils of ancient sites, and as a result more and more fish remains were coming to light. The search for a fishier ancient world, Mylona thought, might be the way forward for her academic career.

Setting out to the University of Sheffield in England in the early 1990s for graduate work, Mylona immediately felt resistance to her newfound focus. Her graduate supervisor advised her against committing to a fish bone master’s degree, instead urging her to specialize in the analysis of mammal bones. Fish bones were a dead end, he maintained. To prove his point, he gave her a book published in 1985 by the historian Thomas Gallant, A Fisherman’s Tale: An Analysis of the Potential Productivity of Fishing in the Ancient World. The book claimed ancient Greek seas were too poor to support fisheries of significance. For decades, that perceived poorness became the accepted defining characteristic of the Mediterranean in academic circles. Because few rivers flow into the Mediterranean, the sea is considered nutrient-starved and described as containing little phytoplanktonic life—oligotrophic in scientific parlance. Without sufficient terrestrial nitrogen and phosphorous, phytoplankton—the very base of the marine food web—are sparse. Indeed, one of the reasons the Med, as researchers affectionately call the sea, shows its clear sapphire face to modern humanity is this paucity of plankton. This “containing little life” framework may be a case of what historical ecologists often refer to as presentism—the tendency to view the past through a present-day lens. Presentism or not, the acceptance of the narrative left Mylona perplexed: an entire theory was based on a narrow selection of evidence.

Back in the 1980s, Gallant and others were focused on ancient economies and building models to predict people’s dietary behaviors in the past. To Gallant, for example, the evidence suggested that given the relatively high population of the Greek coastlines, there was not enough fish to go around. Goat and sheep obviously filled the caloric deficit. “So any calculation based on the few fish bones that were handpicked in Greek excavations at the time made [fish] a very insufficient source of nutrition,” Mylona says.

Having come from a region in northern Greece where fish is an integral part of modern diets, Mylona felt something was askew with this methodology. Over the course of the next 10 years—while earning a master’s and a PhD at the universities of Sheffield, York, and Southampton, and shuttling back to a growing family on Crete—Mylona started assembling the tools she would need to prove the hypothesis of a fishier Mediterranean.

While field excavation is often the most iconic part of archaeology, the real decoding of the evidence usually comes to light in laboratories and offices far away from the site. And so, after we look over Palaikastro, Mylona takes me up along winding roads into the hills of the Lasithi region and eventually brings us to the headquarters of the organization that has supported Mylona’s fish investigations—the Institute for Aegean Prehistory. The institute’s Study Center for East Crete (SCEC), funded by the American philanthropist and archaeologist Malcolm Wiener, is perched atop a site with a sweeping view of the Dikti Mountains and has an architecture designed to recall the airy halls of the Minoan palaces. Once inside, Mylona leads me first past archaeologists and conservators patiently piecing together vast jigsaw puzzles of pottery, then past an illustrator pen-and-inking renderings of sculpture, and finally to her office.

“In order to know what you are looking at, you need first to establish a reference collection,” she says as she pulls out box after box of bones lining her office shelves. A reference collection is a kind of archive of skeletons that allows zooarchaeologists to compare excavated remains with the bones of present-day creatures. “In Greece in 1993, there was not a single reference collection for fish bones—none whatsoever,” Mylona says. “Zooarchaeology is not taught in Greek universities, so there are no university collections of fish skeletons.”

During what was the busiest decade of her life, she made regular trips to the central fish market in Crete’s second-largest city, Chania on the northwest coast, and to moored fishing boats wherever she found them. She bought all the species of fish she could locate. Then she buried them around her home in the north-central Cretan coastal town of Rethymno. After digging them up months later once bugs and microorganisms had eaten away skin and flesh, Mylona scoured, cleaned, and filed away the fish bones like books in a library. When she deemed her collection big enough, she returned to the bones gathered during her first digs and got down to the serious business of seeing what was what.

Counting ancient fish to establish a baseline for classical fisheries may seem like a rather arcane, academic thing to do during a time of climate crisis and profound environmental disruption. But baselines are important. You cannot restore what you cannot remember. That said, the historical baseline that Mylona is heroically unearthing is elusive. Even gathering data on the modern baseline—what is in the sea today—is a neglected science. Ringed by 22 nations that have fished with ever-increasing relentlessness, the contemporary picture the scientific literature paints of the Med is grim indeed. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in 2019, only 36.7 percent of the assessed stocks in the Mediterranean and Black Seas were fished within biologically sustainable levels. After the Aswan High Dam near the mouth of the Nile in Egypt was completed in 1970, nutrient flow into the Mediterranean Sea from the Nile Delta has been curtailed, shifting the nature of plankton blooms and perhaps the entirety of the marine food web. Many other dams throughout the region have done similar damage.

Invasive species have further plundered the sea. Since the Mediterranean and the Red Seas were connected by the Suez Canal in 1869 to eliminate an expensive shipping detour around the Horn of Africa, hundreds of alien species have flooded the Med, and the sea is now considered the most invaded on the planet. On top of alien species eating their way through the Med’s forage fish, some species, such as Lagocephalus sceleratus, are dangerously toxic, too.

All of these degradations to a once-productive marine food system are happening in part because, with the exception of small coastal communities, the rest of modern Europe no longer relies on the Med for its survival. If you were to believe the earlier work of other archaeologists, you could be persuaded that this was always the case. The sea may have birthed multiple civilizations, but that’s not how early archaeologists and historians, like Gallant, imagined the past; imagined being the operative word.

As we continue on our odyssey of eastern Crete, Mylona and I eventually find our way down to Mochlos, a one-time fishing village now turned tourist resort an hour’s drive west of Palaikastro—a place that inevitably leads one to compare past and present. We are looking down a steep escarpment out on the bluer-than-blue Aegean, an embayment of the Mediterranean running between Europe and Asia. Before us is a pair of massive stone fish tanks that have been lying at the seafront for more than 2,000 years. Romans created the pens during their occupation of Greece to support a fishing industry that brought in catches live and stored the most precious fish until they could be sold fresh to highly discerning, and rich, customers. Yet even with the investment in infrastructure made for the sake of seafood, Mylona told me, the fish were important to ancient societies even beyond their role on the plate.

“Fish are different,” she says. “Cattle, sheep, goats—these were all animals used for sacrifice in religious rituals. There was a methodology in how you approached their slaughter and treatment. In classical Greece of the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, and probably also earlier, they were ceremonially slaughtered and eaten. You find their remains on altars, on places of sacrifice, and everywhere within settlements.” But fish, she says, occupied a place in society more closely linked to the day-to-day, something that is only realized when archaeological evidence is put in context of “softer” remains like ancient literature.

“Fish were more secular,” Mylona explains. “Because fish participated in the vignettes of daily life, we find them a lot in the classical theatrical comedies. The fishmonger who is a cheater. Or the ignorant customer. Or the glutton who wants to buy all the fish in the market—a symbol of someone who is totally undemocratic. In comedy, fish are used to convey what is proper social behavior. Fish are the vehicle that transmits this idea.” Yet, as much as fish were relegated to the comedies, Mylona and her reference collection show fish were a very serious part of society.

To prove her point, Mylona takes me back to her laboratory at SCEC to show me how something as simple as using water to wash and sift through archaeological deposits reveals a different world. Once the large pieces are extracted and cataloged in a first pass, the “fines” are put into the water flotation separator. A series of meshes allows researchers to extract the tiniest of bones from dirt and rock. Finally, Mylona lays out these bits of bones and tweezes them apart, comparing them flake by flake to the bones in her reference collection.

“The thing is that most fish bones are small, especially in this part of the world. Small fish predominate,” she says. But even the larger fish, a grouper of seven kilograms, for instance, leave bones that may be no larger than two centimeters. “You can’t easily see them in the course of an excavation. If you do it out in the open, if the light is not right, and if you are really hot and tired, you may not see it.”

Despite the difficulty, Mylona has been persistent. And the result of all this tedious work was revelatory. At Palaikastro, where fish bones first entered her vision, the four large fish bones that were handpicked in one of SCEC’s buildings were complemented by 4,000 more when water flotation took place. When Greek archaeologists applied the same methodology to coastal sites in the Aegean and even in many inland locations, fish bones were uncovered by the hundreds or thousands in nearly every location. Fish were clearly an important part of the ancient Greek diet: a vast underestimation of the importance of the sea as a source of food had taken place.

Does this persistent and pernicious misapprehension of the importance of fish in the Mediterranean’s past have ramifications for the modern inheritors of the Mediterranean Sea thousands of years later? To probe this question, Mylona turns to her friend Manos Koutrakis who also went down a fishy career path. But where Mylona’s fish are in the past, Koutrakis’s are rooted in the present.

Koutrakis makes his home in Kavala, in northern Greece, near the villages where both he and Mylona grew up. Kavala sits on the Thracian Sea, a region nourished by three large rivers and the outflow of the Black Sea. All this makes it the most productive body of water in the eastern Mediterranean. Koutrakis is the child of a fisherman who worked those waters for 60 years. He feels the pulse of fishing he did as a child, though today Koutrakis does so as a researcher, collecting Kavala data with his team in the Fisheries Research Institute for all the fisheries of northern Greece. Koutrakis routinely interacts with commercial fishermen, parsing through fish auctions and diving the Med regularly in his quest to keep tabs on the national fishery.

Koutrakis is the first to acknowledge there has been a decline in fish populations in the past 50 years. Whereas pre–Second World War small-scale local fishermen, similar to their ancient counterparts, mainly worked the Mediterranean, the post-war era has seen a superstructure of much larger vessels on top of the preexisting locals. This pressure has squeezed the artisanal sector to an ever-greater degree. The problem is that scientists—much like archaeologists pre-Mylona—lack baseline data on modern fisheries in Greece.

“The Hellenic Statistical Authority was not considering the catches of vessels under 20 horsepower until 2015,” Koutrakis says. “But most of the Greek artisanal vessels were probably exactly in this category.” Yes, larger vessels have also impinged on the artisanal sector, but that sector is still there and in business. Furthermore, it was only in 2016 when Greece created an online database to collect data with self-reporting of landings from vessels more than 12 meters in length.

The discounting of data from small-scale fishers means that managers in charge of placing limits in areas and during specific seasons for the most sensitive stocks are in part blinded. In fact, this is all part of what is often called the Mediterranean Exception. Whereas fisheries around the world are increasingly moving toward quota management systems that try to allocate the exact tonnage each fisher may take, management in the Med still relies on much less precise methods. Seasonal openings and closures and mesh sizes of nets are the main tools that managers have to work with. Koutrakis needs the equivalent of Mylona’s water flotation method for sifting the small bones of modern Greek fisheries, and he works toward that.

“The solution is to have good scientific data,” Koutrakis concludes. And slowly that data is being amassed. “Since 2017, EU regulations require more effort on the quality of data collected. Scientific working groups are putting in more effort in assessing more stocks in order to know where the problem is,” Koutrakis tells me. But is this enough? Will the gaps be filled too late? Will Mediterraneans lose what remains of their biological heritage before we have anything that resembles what they’re now only starting to understand is the historical baseline?

Any talk of baselines in fisheries inevitably leads to the work of the fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia. Pauly famously coined the term shifting baselines back in 1995. The essential premise of the shifting baselines hypothesis is that each successive generation has a diminished view of what constitutes abundance. The memories of the Greek fisherman who might have caught 100 sea bream in an hour are lost to his great-grandson who thinks a 10-fish day is a great success. To understand the actual condition of the sea with respect to the historical baseline, I contact Pauly.

“I don’t accept this idea that the Mediterranean is a poor sea,” Pauly tells me. “This is what people always say—few rivers going into the sea to deliver the nutrients. But we know from Roman records that there was probably a significant population of gray whales in the sea. That these whales brought in nutrients from the wider Atlantic, and through their feces fertilized the sea,” Pauly says. What happened to these whales? “The Romans likely killed them all. Everywhere you look, we have evidence of a more abundant sea.” Sharks are not abundant in the Med, but that’s today. “We just did an analysis of film taken by the Austrian cinematographer Hans Hass in 1942. There are sharks everywhere.”

And what will happen if we never refine our understanding of the historical baseline and use it to set recovery goals for fish abundance and diversity?

“The thing is, you don’t need to have the fish to satisfy most people who visit the Mediterranean. You will have the clear, blue empty water. You will have the seaside developments, this ugly mess of concrete from which people will emerge to swim. You’ll have postcards and souvenirs,” Pauly says. “But you will have no fish. And no one will remember that they were ever there.”

This is, of course, the last thing Mylona wants to see in her home waters. And so, she will keep on cataloging and counting, making a bone-by-bone argument for the legacy of a more abundant Mediterranean. “The interest coming from the European Union is more and more focused on environmental issues,” she tells me. “This is our main problem and that’s where our funding will go. More and more we have to ask questions that are relevant for today. The biggest challenge for archaeologists today is to build bridges with marine biology and conservation, to find ways to use the archaeological and historical fisheries data in meaningful and useful ways.”

The hope and dream is a better memory of the past that will influence our behavior in the future—a baseline shifted back to something closer to the abundance we’ve lost.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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