Archaeologists have discovered an iron cannonball fired by Texans at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. This is the second intact cannonball they have discovered from the famous conflict. The first one, a bronze cannonball, was found earlier this year and was likely fired by the Mexican army.

"It's a huge deal," Tiffany Lindley, director of archaeology at the Alamo, said in a video statement from Alamo Trust. "We all thought, 'There's no way we can top it,'" she said, referring to the bronze cannonball discovered March 5, just a day before the 190th anniversary of the conflict that killed Davy Crockett, "and then we found another one."

Both cannonballs were recovered from the northeast corner of the church at the Alamo, which was originally built in 1718 as a Spanish mission and fortress in what is now San Antonio. But the Alamo is better known as the location of an 1836 battle during the Texas Revolution, in which Anglo-American settlers and Hispanic Texans known as Tejanos seceded from the Republic of Mexico.

In a 13-day siege culminating in a deadly assault on March 6, 1836, Mexican troops, commanded by Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna, surrounded the Alamo and killed the 180 Texan rebels defending the structure, including Davy Crockett. The cry "Remember the Alamo!" was used in later skirmishes in the Texas Revolution as soldiers fought Mexican troops for independence.

The newly excavated iron cannonball was found June 2, according to a statement from Alamo Trust.

Of the two cannonballs, "the newest one is slightly larger" and was likely fired from a cannon that shot 6-pound [2.7 kilogram] cannonballs, Kolby Lanham, a senior researcher and historian at the Alamo, said in the statement. "The likelihood is that the bronze one belonged to the Mexican Army and the iron one belonged to the Texans."

Over the years, archaeologists have found numerous pieces of ammunition and shrapnel at the Alamo, Lindley said, but these cannonballs are the first examples of solid shots — spherical projectiles fired from a gun or cannon — they have ever found.

"It's just a huge kind of once-in-a-lifetime deal," Lanham said. "But obviously, it's happened twice."

The Mexican and Texan cannonballs were found near each other, so they are likely the historic remains of the two sides shooting at each other in the fateful siege nearly two centuries ago.

"Whenever they were dropped the very first time — possibly in 1836, probably — they haven't been touched since, and that's what makes them extra special," Lindley said. "I don't think you can undersell it."

The Alamo remains an active archaeological site, where experts have discovered artifacts that span its centuries of history, from Indigenous stone tools that predate the Spanish mission through the late 19th century, when the structure was converted into a general store and warehouse.

Can you identify these historical objects of war? Test your smarts with our weapons of the world quiz!

This rare example of an Aztec ritual mask was carved from wood over five centuries ago to represent Mictlantecuhtli, the god of death and lord of the underworld, who was always depicted with a skull face. Mictlantecuhtli was responsible for the souls of people who died "heroic deaths" in battle, sacrifice or childbirth, helping them navigate the nine levels of the underworld and find eternal rest.

According to The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which has the mask in its collection, the carved wooden artifact measures 6.75 by 5.5 inches (17.2 by 14 centimeters). The sunken eyes with black pupils and the triangular nose give the mask a skull-like quality. On the cheeks, experts discovered traces of small, reddish dots that likely represent splotches of decay associated with Mictlantecuhtli. His teeth have been painted with vertical black lines, and both ears appear to have been pierced, as Mictlantecuhtli was often depicted with ear spools made of human bones.

Masks were an important part of ancient Aztec religion. In some rituals, people would wear masks of key deities, including carved skulls representing death, to transform themselves into supernatural beings. But because this particular mask of Mictlantecuhtli has no eye holes, it was probably affixed to a post or statue rather than worn, according to The Walters Art Museum, making it a rare example of a sculptural Aztec mask.

Mictlantecuhtli was a formidable part of the Aztec pantheon. He was said to be at least 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall and wore a necklace made of human eyeballs. When his full body was depicted, Mictlantecuhtli was shown with his arms raised, ready to tear apart the dead who entered his domain of Mictlan, the Aztec underworld. People who worshipped Mictlantecuhtli even practiced ritual cannibalism at his temple on occasion, according to Michael E. Smith, an emeritus archaeologist at Arizona State University.

One key myth featuring Mictlantecuhtli, according to University of California, Riverside archaeologist emeritus Karl Taube, involves the creation of the generation of people living in the world today. In this origin myth, the feathered serpent deity Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god of earth, water and wind, among other things, must go to the underworld to retrieve the bones of all the deceased ancestors who had been turned into fish by a massive flood. Mictlantecuhtli agrees to give up the bones if Quetzalcoatl can blow a conch shell trumpet while journeying around the underworld.

Mictlantecuhtli secretly gives Quetzalcoatl a shell without holes, but Quetzalcoatl quickly fashions it into a trumpet, completing the task. Mictlantecuhtli is enraged and doesn't want to hand over the bones, but Quetzalcoatl takes them anyway. He brings them to Cihuacoatl, the fertility goddess, who grinds down the bones and places them into a sacred container. All of the Aztec gods gather around the vessel and shed their blood into the bone meal, creating humans.

This myth demonstrates that, although Mictlantecuhtli was associated with the dead in Aztec mythology, he was also connected to the concepts of regeneration and resurrection.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

The "Llullaillaco Maiden" — a teenage girl whose mummified body was found atop a frigid volcano in Argentina — was sacrificed centuries ago by the Inca. Now, a new analysis of plant remains in her burial is helping archaeologists pinpoint the historical events that led to her death over half a millennium ago.

In 1999, archaeologists discovered the remains of three mummified Inca children — one teenage girl, and a boy and girl each around 7 years old — just below the summit of the Llullaillaco volcano in Argentina near its border with Chile. Analysis of the mummies over the past two decades has shown that the children were fattened up with gourmet food and plied with alcohol and coca (a plant from which cocaine is derived) before they were led to a subterranean shrine on the freezing, windy summit and left for dead in a ritual called capacocha.

Even though these mummies, dubbed the "Children of Llullaillaco," are incredibly well preserved, the exact date they were sacrificed has remained unclear. A radiocarbon analysis conducted in 2007 on hair samples from the mummies placed their deaths sometime between 1430 and 1520. To narrow down this date and link it to known political and climatic events, an international team of researchers radiocarbon-dated the botanical remains found in the burial. They published their results June 5 in the journal Archaeometry.

"We aimed to determine the precise date of the event within the broader timeline of the Inca Empire's development and expansion," study lead author Dominika Sieczkowska-Jacyna, an archaeologist at the Silesian University of Technology in Poland, told Live Science in an email. "Answering this question allows us to better understand Inca political strategies and the role that capacocha ceremonies played in imperial governance."

The Llullaillaco Maiden, also known as La Doncella, is the name given to the mummy of the teenage girl. Due to the many funeral offerings she had been given, archaeologists think she may have been the main sacrifice and was accompanied in death by the two younger children as attendants. Included in the Llullaillaco Maiden's offerings were corn (Zea mays), cassava (Manihot esculenta) and coca leaves (Erythroxylum coca), whose seeds were carbon-dated to reveal a more precise chronology than the mummies themselves.

The archaeologists found that the botanical remains narrowed down the children's possible date of death to between 1462 and 1507, with the most likely date falling around 1499, during the reign of Huayna Capac, one of the last Inca emperors.

"Our results suggest that political motivations were likely behind this particular capacocha, and the dating evidence helped us narrow the chronological framework of the offering," Sieczkowska-Jacyna said.

The Inca Empire reached its greatest extent under Huayna Capac, who ruled from 1493 to about 1525, when he died of smallpox introduced by the Spanish. From the empire's capital at Cuzco in southern Peru, the emperor's father, Tupac Inca, had expanded Inca territory south into Chile, while Huayna Capac extended the empire north into present-day Ecuador and Colombia. In 1499, the area around Llullaillaco would have been incorporated into the Inca Empire fairly recently.

"Considering this context, it is plausible that the sacrifice at Llullaillaco may have been enacted as part of such a state-sanctioned campaign [of sacrifices], serving to ritually anchor the Inca presence in the region or to commemorate a significant political event," the researchers wrote in the study. That is, the sacrifice of the three Children of Llullaillaco was likely part of Huayna Capac's effort to maintain cultural cohesion in the vast, diverse Inca Empire.

Colonial-era chronicles do mention that Huayna Capac journeyed to the southern part of his empire, including the northwest region of what is now Argentina, and that he made rich offerings to the gods in the form of child sacrifices, the researchers wrote.

"Although we cannot yet confidently attribute the event to a specific emperor with 100% confidence, our working hypothesis is that this capacocha was connected to an imperial journey into the southern regions of the empire and may have been associated with the establishment of alliances with local groups in the Titicaca Basin," Sieczkowska-Jacyna said.

The Inca practice of child sacrifice in the early 16th century may have reaffirmed imperial authority or sought to maintain cosmic balance during a period of perceived instability just before the arrival of Europeans, according to the researchers.

Similar analyses should be conducted on other child sacrifices, the researchers noted in the study, to learn more about the broader patterns of ritual sacrifice and political power across the Inca Empire.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:25 p.m. EDT on June 15 to include comments from the study's first author.

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Indigenous Andeans in Peru may be able to digest potatoes and other starches more easily than anyone in the world, a new study finds.

Scientists discovered that Indigenous Andeans have more copies of the gene for saliva-based starch digestion enzymes — called amylase — than any other population worldwide. Natural selection drove the surge in amylase genes following the local domestication of potatoes around 10,000 years ago, according to the study published May 5 in the journal Nature Communications.

Amylase in humans' saliva breaks complex starch down into simple sugars, making the starch easier to digest. Populations worldwide differ in the number of gene copies that encode for amylase, but more copies means more amylase production and presumably, improved starch digestion.

On average, people around the world have seven copies of the amylase gene, but Indigenous Andeans in Peru possess an average of 10 copies. People with a higher number of amylase genes had a 1.24% higher chance of surviving and reproducing than those with fewer copies, the researchers wrote in the study.

While that number seems small, this is an "insanely high" adaptive advantage that would have compounded over each successive generation, study co-author Omer Gokcumen, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Buffalo, told Live Science.

Being able to digest amylase effectively was more than just passing gas when eating potatoes, Gokcumen said. The strong survival and reproductive advantage suggests either a substantial number of babies did not survive because the pregnancies were not successful, or people with more gene copies have more babies, he said. "It's actually a life or death kind of situation."

Variation in starch digestion

Beginning around 12,000 years ago, the ancient people living in the Andes had developed a slew of new adaptations, including the ability to live at high altitudes and digest new foods.

Previous analysis of the genomes of Peruvians of Indigenous South American ancestry revealed signs of selection for an intestinal starch digestion enzyme. That adaptation was likely the result of Indigenous Andean populations having domesticated potatoes as early as 10,000 years ago.

In 2024, Gokcumen and his team identified variation in the structure of salivary amylase genes across global populations. But the cause of that variation was unclear.

To figure out what caused the difference, in the new study, Gokcumen and his team created a map of salivary amylase gene copy numbers using genome data from 3,723 individuals from 85 global populations. They found that Peruvian Andeans and Akimel O'odham people in southern Arizona and northern Mexico had the highest average number of salivary amylase genes out of the populations they studied.

The researchers found that, beginning around 10,000 years ago, Indigenous Andean individuals with 10 or more copies of the salivary amylase gene had a 1.24% higher chance of surviving and reproducing than those with fewer copies — evidence that natural selection caused the elevated copy number in the Indigenous Andeans in their sample.

The Akimel O'odham samples also showed high copy numbers, but the researchers could not perform tests looking for signs of natural selection in this population as too few Akimel O'odham individuals were included in their sample.

The functional advantage of having more salivary amylase copies is unknown. Gokcumen said it could have something to do with the microbiome, metabolism and immune system. For instance, people with more copies of the gene may get more calories from cooked potatoes. He and his team are now running experiments to clarify these potential relationships, he said.

This is an "exciting and important study," Charles Lee, a human genomics expert at The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Connecticut who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science in an email.

The high copy numbers in the Akimel O'odham samples suggests that "different Indigenous American groups may have developed high amylase copy numbers in different ways, depending on their diets," Lee said.

Salivary amylase gene copy number variation is unlikely to be the only example of adaptive variation in gene structure, Lee added. "It is simply one of the best examples we currently have of how complex copy number variation can intersect with diet, culture and human evolution," he said.

Do you know where pumpkins and blueberries come from? Find out with our fruits and vegetables quiz!

Two indentured servants and an 8-year-old boy who was possibly enslaved were buried alongside distinguished local families in Maryland's first Colonial settlement, a new study finds.

The boy, who died sometime between 1667 and 1704, had largely African-derived ancestry, with around 25% to 30% European ancestry. He was wrapped in a shroud and buried in a gable-lidded coffin, according to the researchers. Based on the chemical signature of isotopes in his skeleton, he was born in America.

The discovery of a young boy with majority African ancestry who was buried alongside European-ancestry individuals is a "significant finding that warrants additional consideration," the researchers wrote in a study published Thursday (May 14) in the journal Current Biology.

The investigation, which looked at the DNA of a few dozen 17th-century skeletons, also detailed that the Maryland colony was established by people with genetic ancestry from western England and Wales.

St. Mary's City was founded in 1634 as the capital of the British colony of Maryland. Around 300 people of mostly English ancestry settled the area after fleeing religious persecution and, by 1667, had erected a small church known as the Brick Chapel. Archaeological excavations over the past three decades have revealed dozens of Colonial-era burials, including three rare lead coffins, inside and surrounding the Brick Chapel.

Although historians have found numerous records on the founding families of St. Mary's City, it was unclear who exactly was buried at the Brick Chapel and where they came from.

In the new study, researchers detailed their analysis of the genomes of 49 people who were buried at the Brick Chapel between 1634 and 1730. They discovered that two eminent men — Thomas Greene, the second colonial governor of Maryland, and Philip Calvert, the fifth colonial governor of Maryland — were buried there along with their families. Calvert was interred in a lead coffin, as was his first wife, Anne Wolseley Calvert, and Philip Calvert's infant son with his second wife.

Although researchers had already known about Calvert and his family's burials, Greene had been unidentified until now. He was identified by comparing his DNA to the 23andMe genetic database and by analyzing genealogical records.

"This is the first time that ancient DNA has been used to help identify unknown individuals, without any prior knowledge of who they might have been," study first author Éadaoin Harney, a senior scientist at the 23andMe Research Institute, said in a statement. "And it just so happens that one of those individuals [Greene] turned out to be one of colonial Maryland's most prominent figures."

The majority of the skeletons from the Brick Chapel revealed ancestral ties to Wales and western England, and by cross-referencing those genomes with data contributed by 23andMe research participants, the researchers discovered that there are over 1.3 million living genetic relatives of this founding Colonial population. The largest number of close relatives of this founding group — over 200 people — have ancestral ties to Kentucky, likely due to the migration of Maryland Catholics to Kentucky after the Revolutionary War.

"Detecting such a clear genetic signal of this documented historical migration to Kentucky highlights the power of our approach," Harney said.

Enslaved people and indentured servants

Three of the 49 skeletons were a bit unusual, though. This included the 8-year-old boy with African ancestry and two young men. The men were in their 20s when they died sometime between 1634 and 1667 and had chemical signatures suggesting they were recent immigrants from Ireland. Neither was buried in a coffin, and both of their skeletons showed signs of heavy physical labor and poor health. "Although their status of bondage is unknown, these features are consistent with the profile of indentured servants," the researchers wrote.

Indentured servitude was a common practice in Colonial America, making up about 80% of white immigrants, according to Anna Suranyi, a historian at Endicott College in Massachusetts who was not involved in the study.

"Servants were quite different from slaves in that the period of servitude was limited, usually four or seven years, and afterwards, they were expected to join colonial society," Suranyi told Live Science in an email.

Both indentured servants and enslaved people often lived in the same household as their masters and mistresses, she said. But in terms of cemeteries, "white people, including indentured servants, were generally buried in segregated cemeteries, with enslaved people sometimes being buried in isolated and unmarked locations."

The fact that the boy with African ancestry was buried in the Brick Chapel cemetery in line with English customs may indicate he was not enslaved. The distinction between indentured servant and enslaved person was more fluid in the 17th century, Suranyi said, "with some people of African ancestry being treated more like indentured servants, though with longer periods of servitude — 20 years, for instance."

The results of this project have been years in the making, study co-author Douglas Owsley, curator of biological anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, said in the statement. The lead coffins containing Philip Calvert and his family were first discovered in the 1990s, but their genomes have been formally published for the first time in the new study.

"This work highlights the power of ancient DNA analyses to fill in gaps in the historical record," study co-author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University, said in the statement. "While written records are extraordinarily rich, genetic data can still address gaps in that record and yield surprises."

How much do you know about the first people to reach the Americas? Find out with our First Americans quiz.

A controversial study published in the journal Science in March claimed that Monte Verde, a 14,500-year-old Paleo-Indian archaeological site in Chile that is one of the oldest human occupations in the Americas, was actually only 8,200 years old. But in a collection of three scientific letters published last week, 30 experts have critiqued the study's "substantive errors and misrepresentations" and asserted that the study's claims are "categorically false and found to be unsupported."

Monte Verde, located in the mountains of southern Chile, was discovered in 1976. Tom Dillehay, an archaeologist at Vanderbilt University who has led the excavations at the site for nearly 50 years, recovered stone tools, preserved wood, bones and skin of extinct animals, a human footprint, edible-plant remains, hearths and natural rope. The occupation of the site, sometimes called Monte Verde II or MV-II, was carbon-dated to 14,500 years ago, making it the only securely dated Late Pleistocene archaeological site in South America.

But as Live Science reported in March, Science published a study by a group of researchers led by Todd Surovell, an archaeologist at the University of Wyoming, that attempted to reevaluate the age and formation of MV-II. Based on newly collected soil samples and the identification of a well-dated layer of volcanic ash at the site, the researchers concluded that Monte Verde was most likely occupied in the Middle Holocene, around 4,200 to 8,200 years ago.

"The so-called 14,500-year-old archaeological component that was supposed to forever change our understanding of the colonization of the Americas actually comes from a landform that's at best 8,000 years old," Surovell told Live Science in March.

The reactions from outside experts were swift and critical. Michael Waters, a geoarchaeologist at Texas A&M University, told Live Science in March that the study included "egregiously poor geological work," while David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, told Live Science in March that the researchers' work "was not actually at the [MV-II] site" and therefore "may have little bearing on what was at the site itself." And Dillehay promised a detailed scientific response to Surovell and colleagues' claims would be forthcoming.

30 scientists slam stratigraphic study

Dillehay, Waters and Meltzer are each the first author on a series of three scientific commentaries, or eLetters, published in Science May 4 and 5. The letters — which, along with their supplementary information, total more than 100 pages — systematically dismantle the claims made in the March study by Surovell and colleagues and refute their conclusion that Monte Verde was younger than claimed.

One of the main findings in the Surovell study was the presence of a unique layer of ash known as the Lepué Tephra, which blanketed the area after a volcanic eruption 11,000 years ago. The researchers discovered this tephra ‪—‬ ejected volcanic material ‪—‬ in several geological sections along the creek at Monte Verde and concluded that, at some point, erosion cut a channel through the site. So, while MV-II is lower in the ground than the surrounding terraces, it was actually settled on top of the tephra layer, making it younger than 11,000 years.

Dillehay and colleagues challenge this claim, writing that "based on integrated archaeological, geochemical, chronostratigraphic, and pollen data, there is no [around 11,000-year-old] Lepué Tephra below the MV-II archaeological site." In fact, the samples that Surovell and colleagues took were from a geological layer not from Monte Verde II but characterized by a layer of fungus and an iron-oxide-rich pyroclastic bead layer.

Another reason Surovell and colleagues believe MV-II is younger than claimed is due to the complex geology of the site, which is on the banks of a creek. While their radiocarbon dating of new samples of charcoal and wood from the Monte Verde area produced dates ranging from 13,400 years to 16,500 years ago, in line with previous studies, the researchers suspected that those materials may have been washed into the site and redeposited, making the site seem older than it is.

In their eLetter, Waters and his co-authors noted that the Surovell study provided no evidence that any of the dated wood or bones had ever been moved, calling it "speculation" and writing that the "most egregious failure" of the study is that the stratigraphy they describe does not match the stratigraphy of MV-II.

"Years of previous research on and around the MV-II component has yielded numerous radiocarbon ages on artifacts and features directly from the MV-II component in support of a late Pleistocene age for the MV-II component," Waters and his co-authors wrote.

In a third eLetter, Meltzer and his co-authors pointed out that genetic studies fully support an age of 14,500 years for Monte Verde and noted that the Surovell study makes "several questionable claims about the peopling of the Americas and how we understand that process."

In the late 1990s, Monte Verde entered archaeology textbooks as a clear example of a pre-Clovis site, fundamentally changing the way archaeologists thought the first Americans arrived on the continent. But since then, archaeologists have discovered many other sites that predate the circa-13,000-years-ago Clovis migration, demonstrating much earlier waves of migration into the Americas.

Genetic information is an independent dataset that acts as a check on archaeological data and has shown that all ancient and present-day Native Americans trace their ancestry to three lineages: ancient Beringians (who split off circa 20,900 years ago), and northern and southern Native Americans (who split circa 15,700 years ago). The genetics therefore attest to the pre-Clovis (more than 13,000 years ago) presence of humans south of the continental ice sheets.

Back and forth in Science

One unresolved question is whether Surovell and colleagues' quick survey of geological layers outside the original archaeological site will upend decades of slow, methodical scientific research.

"After a few hours of fieldwork with no excavation," Dillehay and co-authors wrote, "Surovell's team proposed that the MV-II site dates to the mid-Holocene and was contaminated by wood and other materials redeposited from older contexts upstream. We uphold the original interpretation of MV-II as a late Pleistocene human occupation."

Surovell told Live Science in an email that "when more than 30 authors take the time to write three separate letters in response to our paper, it underscores both the significance of our Monte Verde research and the broader implications it carries beyond the site itself." The researchers plan to address the scientific eLetters in a formal response soon, but Surovell said, "We see little that raises serious concern."

The most serious issue that outside experts see, however, is an agenda to bring back the "Clovis First theory," which states that the first Americans arrived through an ice-free corridor around 13,000 years ago, and discount the growing number of archaeological sites in the Americas that predate this.

The conclusions in the Surovell study "disregard not only the Monte Verde II evidence, but also decades of research in diverse disciplines," Meltzer and his co-authors wrote. "Their lack of engagement with the full range of site data, selective use of the broader literature and over-stated conclusions do not advance scientific discussion nor the field of first Americans studies."

How much do you know about the first people to reach the Americas? Find out with our First Americans quiz!

This figurine of a small male camelid was made by the Inca as a "huaca" — a sacred being, site or object revered by their society. The quadruped was probably intended to be a llama (Lama glama), but it may represent the other camelid species domesticated by Andean people: the alpaca (Lama pacos or Vicugna pacos).

According to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has the statue in its collection, the llama stands about 2 inches (5.1 centimeters) tall and was crafted from an alloy of silver, gold and copper. After casting, an Inca artist added the creature's features, including eyes, nostrils, toes and a wry smile.

The Inca raised llamas and alpacas for a wide variety of purposes. They were used to carry goods long distances, and people ate the animals' meat, wove clothes from their wool, turned their bones into musical instruments, sewed hides to make shoes, collected their droppings for fuel and fertilizer, and consumed their fat for medicinal purposes. Llamas were also key to some ancient rituals.

This figurine may have been created for the Inca ritual called "capac hucha," a Quechua term meaning "royal obligation," according to The Met. This annual celebration in Cuzco, which was founded around the 12th century as the capital of the Inca Empire, involved sacrifices of llamas, maize and children to mark important events such as a drought, the death of a ruler, or the expansion of the empire.

Among the artifacts that archaeologists have discovered at capac hucha sites are metal and shell figurines, some of which had been "dressed" with textiles and feathers and were thought to have been imbued with sacred power. And one of the three "Children of Llullaillaco" — Inca child mummies discovered in 1999 — was buried with 11 camelid figurines made from silver, gold and shell, revealing the importance of llama effigies in death.

The close association between llamas and the Inca can even be seen in contemporary cinema. In Disney's "The Emperor's New Groove" (2000), a ruler named Kuzco is transformed into a llama that looks more than a bit like the 600-year-old miniature camelid effigy.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

Humans migrated to South America in three distinct waves over the course of thousands of years, a new large-scale analysis of Indigenous Americans' DNA reveals. The investigation also found that genes related to fertility, metabolism and the immune response helped people adapt to their unique environment in the "final frontier" of human migration, the researchers said.

In a study published Wednesday (April 22) in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists detailed findings from the Indigenous American Genomic Diversity Project, which analyzed 128 genomes from people living in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay and Peru — an investigation that included 45 populations and 28 language families. The researchers' goal was to better understand how and when people arrived on the continent and the factors that shaped these populations' genetics.

"Until now, only two Amazonian Indigenous populations had been genetically characterized, and due to the particularity of their environment and their isolation, they were not very representative," study first author Marcos Araújo Castro e Silva, a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council's Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) and Pompeu Fabra University in Spain, said in a translated statement. The research team worked in collaboration with Indigenous communities to develop the study and integrate the findings into Indigenous history, study co-author Tábita Hünemeier, head of the Human Population Genomics Lab at IBE, said in the statement.

An analysis of the 128 new genomes plus 71 previously published Indigenous genomes revealed two new findings and contributed additional data that confirmed two previous discoveries.

The researchers found that South America was populated in at least three waves, one of which was previously unknown. Their genetic data suggested that the earliest wave of people flowed into South America more than 9,000 years ago, followed by a distinct genetic lineage — shared today by the Quechua in Peru — that spread through Central America and into South America around 9,000 years ago.

But the genomes also revealed "a previously unrecognized third dispersal into South America," the researchers wrote in the study, that "probably occurred at least 1,300 years ago" from Mesoamerican-related groups. Although that timeframe roughly matches up with the collapse of Mesoamerican cities like Teotihuacan, which declined between A.D. 650 and 750, the genetic data does not point to a single event, Hünemeier told Live Science in an email.

"What we see is a more gradual and complex process, probably involving increasing connectivity and gene flow between Mesoamerica, the Caribbean and South America over time," Hünemeier said.

The genetic analysis also revealed traces of an ancient Asian "ghost lineage" that contributed genes to both Indigenous Americans and early Australasians, who lived in the subregion of Oceania including present-day Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. This genetic signal, which the researchers call Ypykuéra (meaning "ancestor" in the Indigenous Tupi language of Brazil), has been present at low-but-consistent levels in Indigenous people for more than 10,000 years, they noted in the study. Although the genetic signal of Ypykuéra has been found in modern people, no fossil evidence of the group has been discovered yet.

"Overall, both findings reinforce the idea that the peopling of the Americas was more dynamic and complex than previously thought," Hünemeier said, including "contributions from ancestral populations that are not yet represented in the archaeological or fossil record."

The Indigenous American Genomic Diversity Project, which nearly tripled the number of Indigenous genomes that scientists have sequenced, also revealed that the Americas' Indigenous population was less genetically diverse than other continental human groups but that it also had more genetic diversity than previously thought, including genes important for surviving in the novel environments of the Americas, such as the Amazon rainforest and the Andes.

"Current genetic diversity is only a fraction of the original, as [European] colonization decimated Indigenous populations by 90%," Hünemeier said in the statement. The combination of population collapse, fragmentation and isolation ‪—‬ along with epidemics, enslavement and warfare ‪—‬ caused major evolutionary bottlenecks, which reduced Indigenous peoples' genetic diversity. "Even so, we observe genetic continuity of more than 9,000 years in some regions," Hünemeier said.

Some of the genes that persisted in Indigenous populations were those associated with immune function, energy metabolism, fertility, fetal growth and malaria protection, the researchers wrote, revealing that diverse biological processes were shaped by natural selection in Indigenous American populations. Some of these genes were found to be shared with modern Australasian populations, suggesting several ancient Ypykuéra traits were positively selected to help Indigenous Americans thrive in a new environment.

"Genetic information from Indigenous American populations is essential because these groups have been historically underrepresented in genomic research, leaving major gaps in our understanding of human diversity, evolution and health," study co-author Carlos Eduardo Amorim, an anthropologist at Arizona State University, said in a statement. "Our findings provide the most comprehensive view of Indigenous American genomic diversity and evolutionary history to date."

How much do you know about the first people to reach the Americas? Find out with our First Americans quiz!

Using ancient-DNA analysis, researchers have identified the presence of Streptococcus pyogenes, or group A strep, in a 700-year-old mummy from Bolivia, confirming that strep infections were present in the Americas prior to European exploration. The strain of strep discovered in the mummy is similar to modern ones that can cause strep throat and scarlet fever.

This is the first time group A strep has been identified in archaeological remains, the researchers said.

"We weren't looking for this pathogen specifically," Frank Maixner, director of the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies in Italy and co-author of a study published April 13 in the journal Nature Communications, said in a statement. "When conducting genetic analysis of mummies, we approach the work with an open mind, analyzing not only human genetic material but also the DNA of the numerous microorganisms present in human remains."

Maixner and colleagues had been studying naturally mummified remains found in "chullpas," a type of ancient funeral tower, across the Andean Plateau in Bolivia. These people were buried in the Late Intermediate Period (1000 to 1450), after the collapse of a pre-Inca civilization known as Tiwanaku but before the rise of the Inca Empire.

When analyzing one particular mummy ‪—‬ a young adult male with a modified skull who lived sometime between 1283 and 1383 ‪—‬ the researchers found DNA from several different bacteria, including S. pyogenes and Clostridium botulinum, which can cause botulism.

"The detection of Streptococcus pyogenes was particularly significant," the researchers wrote in the study. "Despite its presence in modern outbreaks, this pathogen has not yet been detected in ancient times."

Group A strep is found globally today and is responsible for a spectrum of diseases, from mild conditions like strep throat to life-threatening infections like necrotizing fasciitis. The bacterium also causes scarlet fever, an illness that was historically one of the leading causes of childhood mortality prior to the development of antibiotics in the 1940s.

Despite the worldwide ubiquity of strep for centuries, information about the evolution of the bacterium has come only from modern strains, leaving unanswered questions about whether it was present in the Americas prior to European colonization.

In the new study, however, the researchers were able to isolate a near-complete genome of S. pyogenes from one tooth of the Bolivian mummy. At 700 years old, the genome is the earliest confirmed occurrence of this bacterium in the Americas, the researchers wrote.

DNA analysis also revealed that the ancient Bolivian strep strain diverged from all other S. pyogenes lineages around 10,000 years ago. This time frame may have coincided with humans' first foray into the Andes, as they encountered previously unknown animals that may have carried the pathogen, the researchers noted in the study.

It's not yet clear, though, which diseases caused by group A strep were present in pre-Hispanic Bolivia. The genome that the researchers identified is most similar to modern strains that are "throat specialists," or the strains that cause strep throat and scarlet fever rather than skin conditions like impetigo and "flesh-eating disease." These strains of strep also increase in prevalence in cooler months, which align with the climate of the Bolivian highlands, which were cold and dry.

The young adult whose skeleton was positive for strep DNA lived in a society with increasing population density and high rates of migration, and the researchers found from his bones that his nutritional status was likely below average. All of this evidence "could impact immune function and susceptibility to such ancient infections or potential outbreaks in the past," they wrote, but they can't confirm exactly how the man died.

Evidence from the new Bolivian strain of strep is consistent with an American origin for the pathogen, the researchers wrote. But because this is the first time group A strep has been identified in ancient remains, the researchers noted that additional work is sorely needed, including a broader dataset of ancient and modern S. pyogenes genomes from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Amassing that information could help experts unravel the evolutionary history of strep and the impact it had on the lives and deaths of ancient people.

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Archaeologists have discovered a Spanish coin placed beside the Strait of Magellan in southern Chile as part of a ceremony carried out by colonists more than 400 years ago.

The coin is a vital clue for archaeologists investigating a colonial settlement there, as it matches a surviving 1584 account of the Christian ceremony involving the coin, a standard practice when Spanish colonial settlements were founded. The find also helps to validate an old map of the long-lost settlement.

"This discovery provides a rare and powerful point of convergence between written sources and archaeological evidence," Soledad González Díaz, the lead researcher on the project and a historian at Bernardo O'Higgins University in Santiago, told Live Science.

"It not only helps to confirm the location and layout of key structures within the settlement but also opens new possibilities for reconstructing [its] spatial organization," she said.

The "8-real" coin ("real de a ocho" in Spanish and the original pirate "piece of eight") was minted out of silver in the 16th century. It was discovered in March during archaeological excavations at the site of Ciudad del Rey Don Felipe, a doomed Spanish colony that was founded on the north side of the Strait of Magellan in 1584.

The coin was found atop a stone within the underground foundations of the settlement's first church. (Historic reports suggest there may have been more than one church.) González Díaz said all Spanish colonies in the New World were founded with similar ceremonies and that an account of the exact location was given in the writings of the Spanish navigator Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, who had placed the coin on the stone.

Many of the same researchers had used Sarmiento de Gamboa's writings to locate two bronze cannons at the site in 2019, and the latest find is further evidence of his accuracy, she said.

Doomed colony

The Spanish crown founded the Rey Don Felipe colony in 1584 in response to reports that the English privateer Francis Drake had used the Strait of Magellan to sail between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in 1578. (The English were Spain's enemies at that time.)

The strait had been navigated in 1520 by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who was then sailing for Spain, and for many years, it was the only known passage to the Pacific. Spain claimed the land on both sides of the strait and hoped to fortify it so that enemies could not pass.

But the colony founded to support the fortifications — dubbed Ciudad del Rey Don Felipe, after the Spanish king Philip II — was a disaster. Most of its roughly 350 settlers died of disease, starvation and extreme cold within a few years of the colony's founding. Spain had tried to resupply the Rey Don Felipe colony. But the ships were wrecked by storms, and the whole idea was abandoned after Sarmiento de Gamboa was captured by the English in 1586. The crew of an English ship in 1587 reported that the colony was in ruins, with only a few survivors.

Historic find

In their investigations of the doomed settlement, archaeologists mapped it with metal detectors and geolocation instruments, which enabled the researchers to pinpoint the location of the underground stone and the coin, Francisco Garrido, an archaeologist at Chile's National Museum of Natural History in Santiago, told Live Science.

The location gave the team a better understanding of the 16th-century settlement's layout. "Now we can know for sure that this is the place where the church was located, and from there, it is easy to know where all the other structures were built," Garrido said.

Another member of the research team, Southern University of Chile archaeologist Simón Urbina, told Live Science that the coin helped validate the map of the colony made by Sarmiento de Gamboa but that the other structures still need to be verified.

"The evidence for huts, churches, and defensive palisades is not yet entirely clear or archaeologically confirmed," he said in an email, adding that further excavations are needed to confirm the existence of those structures.

The team's work showed that the site had been populated by Indigenous people both before and after the time of the colony, which suggested it was chosen by the Spanish in the hope they'd have a chance of surviving there.

But the Spanish quickly ran out of food. "The first winter must have taken a severe toll on the adult population that had arrived from Spain and was expected to hunt in an unfamiliar territory," Urbina said.

Archaeologists in Vietnam have made a discovery that could rewrite scientists' understanding of where syphilis originated.

The team found the Stone Age skeletons of three people who had a debilitating bacterial disease that left marks on their bones and teeth. This disease is in the same family as syphilis, and the discovery of it in prehistoric Vietnam could challenge the idea that syphilis-like diseases originated in the Americas.

In a study published March 13 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, the researchers documented three cases of congenital treponematosis at two Neolithic sites in Vietnam dating to around 4,100 to 3,300 years ago. Treponemal diseases are a group of infections caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum. These diseases, caused by different subspecies of the bacterium, include syphilis, bejel and yaws.

For decades, researchers believed that of these diseases, only syphilis could be spread through congenital transmission, meaning from parent to child during pregnancy, study first author Melandrie Vlok, a lecturer in anatomy and physiology at the Charles Sturt University, told Live Science in an email. The assumption has been used to back the claim that syphilis originated in the Americas, after previous research found that 5,500-year-old remains of children carried bacteria related to syphilis alongside signs of congenital infection, Vlok said.

But importantly, "none of this DNA is actually syphilis," she noted. This distinction matters as evidence of congenital infection by the bacteria has long been seen as evidence of syphilis itself.

"Our new research flips the script," Nicola Czaplinski, a doctoral candidate in health sciences at the University of Notre Dame Australia, said in an email to Live Science. According to their findings, "congenital transmission isn't unique to syphilis."

Three children from neolithic Vietnam

While scientists have long debated where treponemal diseases originated, only one other study had investigated the question in Vietnam.

That study included cases that dated to the early agricultural transition, around 4,000 to 3,500 years ago. It focused on Man Bac, a site dating to around 4,100 to 3,300 years ago in northern Vietnam, and found that over 10% of the buried people examined had markings on their bones and teeth consistent with treponematosis. Most of those affected were young children and adolescents.

The new study looked at 16 sites across Vietnam, including Man Bac, and examined a total of 304 individuals dating from 10,000 to 1,000 years ago. It found evidence of congenital treponematosis in three children. Two individuals, aged 18 months and 5 years old, were identified at Man Bac, and a third individual from An Son, dating between 3,900 and 3300 years ago, in southern Vietnam and was around 2.5 years old.

The children's teeth bore the most telling signs of congenital treponematosis, with some appearing stunted, malformed, or as though they were "worm-eaten."

The researchers noted that because most of the individuals with treponematosis across both studies were children and adolescents, the disease was likely not transmitted sexually. But the existence of congenital cases complicates the assumption that mother-to-child transmission was exclusive to syphilis, a cornerstone to the "Columbus hypothesis" that leans on the idea that syphilis originated in the Americas.

"This discovery challenges one of the key pillars of the 'Columbus brought syphilis [to Europe from the New World]' theory and shows that … we're still a long way from solving the mystery of where syphilis really began," Czaplinski said.

But despite this breakthrough, many challenges remain in determining exactly where syphilis originated. Vlok explained that in tropical regions like Southeast Asia, DNA doesn't preserve well.

"Recovering it often requires taking large amounts of bone, and that raises serious ethical concerns," she said. "Human remains are not just scientific samples; they are the ancestors of living communities and must be treated with care and respect." Similarly, Africa is understudied in regards to the origins of treponemal disease, she added.

Charlotte Roberts, professor emeritus of bioarchaeology at Durham University in the U.K. who wasn't involved with the new study, noted that the research adds to scientists' knowledge of this disease group.

"Treponemal disease has been studied for decades by palaeopathologists, often with controversial outcomes," Roberts told Live Science in an email. "This is, therefore, a welcome study of an area of the world which has not seen much evidence to date."

Additionally, the study suggests that early migrations of people from China may have been responsible for the spread of the disease in Vietnam. Both sites featured in the study were established as the result of early migrations of farmers into mainland Southeast Asia and their subsequent interactions with local foragers.

"Of particular interest," Roberts said, "is the suggestion that migration of people in the region may be directly linked to the occurrence of this infection."

Indigenous people in the western United States invented dice more than 12,000 years ago, offering archaeologists the world's oldest evidence of gambling and possibly the oldest use of probability, a new study reveals. But the purpose of these games of chance was very different from modern-day gambling, as the games helped people — mostly women, evidence hints — interact with new acquaintances and redistribute goods and wealth.

"There is a deep history of dice, games of chance and gambling in Native America," Robert Madden, an archaeologist at Colorado State University, told Live Science. "This precedes any evidence we have of dice in the Old World by 6,000 years."

In a study published Thursday (April 2) in the journal American Antiquity, Madden looked at more than 600 sets of Native American dice from 45 prehistoric archaeological sites in the western U.S. from 13,000 to 450 years ago. He discovered that dice were present at Indigenous sites on both sides of the Rocky Mountains throughout this lengthy period.

"This is the first evidence we have of structured human engagement with the concepts of chance and randomness," Madden said. "We're seeing really complex practices and an intellectual accomplishment here."

To identify the prehistoric dice, Madden first turned to a century-old book called "Games of the North American Indians" by Stewart Culin, an anthropologist who gathered historic accounts of Native American games. Culin described the dice as "binary lots" where one side of the flat or curved object was marked with a specific pattern or color and the other side was blank. Tossing a binary lot and allowing it to fall at random is similar to flipping a coin, and Indigenous people would often toss multiple lots to produce mathematically complicated outcomes.

Using Culin's descriptions, Madden searched archaeological archives for artifacts that could be dice. He found 565 "diagnostic" examples of dice and 94 "probable" examples across 58 archaeological sites in the Great Plains and the Rockies. But there were no dice in the eastern half of the U.S. until after the arrival of Europeans.

"The dice tend to show up in liminal spaces where you have a lot of high mobility," Madden explained. "It might have something to do with how separated these people are and the need to relate to people you don't see very often." That is, dice games may have been invented as a "social technology of integration," he said, or an icebreaker for strangers who wanted to exchange goods, information or mates.

The three earliest dice that Madden discovered came from Folsom culture sites in Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico dating to nearly 12,900 years ago. These people were hunter-gatherers known for a distinctive stone tool called the Folsom point. "Folsom people liked exotic, beautiful materials," Madden said, and they traveled great distances to source stones like flint and chalcedony (a variety of quartz). Games of chance may have allowed the Folsom people to trade for their preferred stones.

Whereas modern gambling is often undertaken by one person against the "house" — such as using a slot machine at a casino or placing a bet on a horse race — Indigenous gambling was more of a one-to-one, personal interaction, Madden said, where the odds tended toward 50/50 over time and where the stakes were trade items like a set of hides or semiprecious stones.

"It's a kind of leveling device that you see in a lot of cultures with egalitarian social structures," he said.

Based on historical accounts of Indigenous gambling, in more than 80% of dice games the participants were exclusively women, Madden said. It is unclear if that figure can be extended into the deep past, but Indigenous "women may have been on the front end of trying to use this social technology to create connections between people," he said.

One of the most significant findings of the study is that the earliest Native American dice predate those found in Eurasia by several thousand years, Madden said. Somewhere around 5,500 to 7,000 years ago, dice showed up in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the western Caucasus. Historians of mathematics often point to the invention of dice as a crucial step in humans' discovery of the random and probabilistic nature of the universe.

"But we see this happening in hunter-gatherer Native American societies in the Late Pleistocene" (126,000 to 11,700 years ago), Madden said. "It shows significant intellectual accomplishment as a social technology" and reveals that the understanding and use of probability may have originated in the New World, he said.

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Archaeologists in Mexico have unearthed a square stone altar used for human sacrifices during the Toltec Empire more than 1,000 years ago.

The altar, human bones, obsidian knives and ceramic vessels were discovered during excavation for a transportation project near the archaeological site of Tula, about 55 miles (88 kilometers) north of Mexico City.

In a translated statement posted Tuesday (March 24) by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), archaeologists described the altar — also called a momoztli in Nahuatl — as a three-layer construction of stones that measures about 10 square feet (1 square meter). Four human skulls and several human leg bones were recovered from three sides of the altar, likely from people who were sacrificed.

"We know that they are offerings because they are located specifically in certain sections of the feature, but we don't know if they have any other remains underground that cannot be physically seen," Víctor Francisco Heredia Guillén, the archaeologist who's coordinating the project, said in a translated video.

Archaeologists discovered the remains of walls around the altar, suggesting it was located in a courtyard. Additional rooms flanked the courtyard and may have been part of a palace or other residential structure housing ancient Tula's elite, Heredia said.

Between the fall of Teotihuacán around A.D. 550 and the rise of Tenochtitlán in 1325, Tula was an important Mesoamerican urban center and the capital of the Toltec Empire, which lasted from 950 to 1150. Located in Mexico's Hidalgo state, Tula was contemporary with the Maya site of Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán Peninsula. Tula boasts a large pyramid dedicated to the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl that is topped with four massive statues of Toltec warriors.

The newly discovered altar likely dates to the imperial period of Tula's occupation, according to the archaeologists. By that time, the Toltec had gained a reputation as fierce warriors, and the human sacrifices may have been enemies offered after the Toltec defeated them.

One of the skulls appears to still be attached to part of the spine, suggesting decapitation was part of the sacrificial ritual.

"In this case, although metal was already being worked in the postclassic period, we know that decapitations were still done here with obsidian or flint knives, and they left cut marks on the bones," Heredia said.

But additional research will be required to learn more about the sacrificial victims. Anthropological analysis should reveal whether the bones came from men or women, and chemical analysis may show whether the victims were local or came to Tula from afar, Heredia said.

"Each discovery like this expands our knowledge of one of the great civilizations of Mesoamerica," Claudia Curiel de Icaza, the Mexican secretary of culture, said in the statement.

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Archaeologists have unearthed an intact bronze cannonball used at the Battle of the Alamo. They made the discovery one day before the 190th anniversary of the historic conflict between Mexican troops and white settlers in Texas.

The Alamo's director of archaeology, Tiffany Lindley, announced the find in an episode of the Alamo's podcast, "Stories Bigger than Texas," on Thursday (March 19).

"We found a complete cannonball," Lindley said in the podcast. "I don't think words can express the feelings that we all felt."

The Alamo is a historic Spanish mission and fortress that was built in 1718 in what is today San Antonio, Texas. It was the location of a key 1836 battle in the Texas Revolution, when Anglo-American settlers in Texas seceded from the Republic of Mexico.

During a 12-day siege, thousands of Mexican troops commanded by General Antonio López de Santa Anna surrounded the Alamo, which was defended by a small group of about 180 Texan rebels led by William Travis, James Bowie and Davy Crockett. The Mexican army launched an assault on March 6, 1836, killing all the Alamo's defenders. During later skirmishes in the Texas Revolution, soldiers cried out "Remember the Alamo!" as they fought Mexican troops for independence.

In early March, the archaeology team was working near the northeast corner of the church, which had been a part of the Spanish mission, when they discovered the cannonball buried approximately 3 feet (0.9 meters) below the surface.

"I basically sprinted over to the unit," Kolby Lanham, Alamo's senior researcher and historian, said in the podcast. "That's a literal artifact from the Battle of the Alamo and you're holding it for the first time since the battle happened."

Lanham noted the artifact is a 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) bronze ball, which is the kind of ammunition that the Mexican army used. The Texans, on the other hand, preferred iron cannonballs.

"I would say with a fair amount of certainty that this is a Mexican army cannonball and it was likely fired at the Battle of the Alamo or could have been during the 12-day siege," Lanham said. "That artifact waited 190 years to be pulled out of the ground."

In addition to the intact ball, the archaeologists recovered four cannonball fragments outside the church. At least one of those fragments is likely from the Battle of the Alamo, Lindley said. But the fragments are from hollow balls that were probably fired by the Mexican army from a short-barreled cannon called a howitzer, said Lanham, whose team is now working to piece the fragments back together.

Archaeological and historical work is ongoing at the Alamo, and researchers are regularly recovering new information and artifacts like the cannonballs. "Things like that change the Alamo's story," Lanham said.

The Alamo recently marked the 190th anniversary of the battle on March 6.

"We found this cannonball on March 5," Lindley said, "the day before the commemoration. I have chills now just thinking about it."

A team of archaeologists is questioning the 14,500-year-old date of Monte Verde in Chile, one of the oldest human occupations in the Americas, and proposing a much younger age for the key Paleo-Indian site. The researchers suggest their new date challenges the current narrative of how early the Americas were settled, but other experts are not convinced and call it "egregiously poor geological work."

The Monte Verde archaeological site is located in the mountains of southern Chile. Discovered in 1976, the site yielded stone tools, preserved wood, bones and skin of extinct animals, a human footprint, edible plant remains, hearths and natural rope. Radiocarbon dates placed the site's occupation level, called Monte Verde II or MV-II, at about 14,500 years ago.

The early date fundamentally changed the way archaeologists thought the first Americans arrived on the continent, suggesting that some people may have taken a coastal route to South America before the Clovis people moved through an ice-free corridor into North America around 13,000 years ago.

Since the discovery of Monte Verde, archaeologists have identified many other sites that predate the Clovis migration by more than a thousand years, including Paisley Caves in Oregon, White Sands in New Mexico, the Friedkin and Gault sites in Texas, and Page-Ladson in Florida. But MV-II is still unusual because it is the only securely dated Late Pleistocene archaeological site in South America.

In a study published Thursday (March 19) in the journal Science, an international group of researchers led by Todd Surovell, an archaeologist at the University of Wyoming, reevaluated the age and formation of MV-II. They concluded that Monte Verde was most likely occupied in the Middle Holocene, around 4,200 to 8,200 years ago.

"The so-called 14,500-year-old archaeological component that was supposed to forever change our understanding of the colonization of the Americas actually comes from a landform that's at best 8,000 years old," Surovell told Live Science. "In other words, it's not an ice age site."

Surovell and study co-author Claudio Latorre, a paleoecologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, visited Monte Verde in 2023 and collected samples of soil and organic matter from areas near the MV-II occupational site, which was destroyed more than three decades ago by logging activities and flooding. The researchers' radiocarbon dating of new samples of charcoal and wood from the Monte Verde area produced dates ranging from 13,400 years to 16,500 years ago, in line with previous studies. But because the site is located on the banks of a creek with complex geology, Surovell and colleagues suggested that these older dated materials were actually redeposited onto a much younger site, making MV-II seem older than it is.

The key to the redating, Surovell said, is a layer of ash known as the Lepué Tephra, which blanketed the area after a volcanic eruption 11,000 years ago. The researchers discovered this tephra ‪—‬ ejected volcanic material ‪—‬ in several geological sections along the creek and concluded that, at some point, erosion cut a channel through the site. So while MV-II is lower in the ground than the surrounding terraces, it was actually settled on top of the tephra layer, making it younger than 11,000 years.

Archaeologists question the geological analysis

But Tom Dillehay, an archaeologist at Vanderbilt University who has spent 50 years studying Monte Verde, disagrees with the researchers' conclusions.

"There is no 11,000-year-old ash layer underneath the Monte Verde II site," Dillehay told Live Science in an email. "They are studying a different context in the area and are projecting that into the site from elsewhere."

The volcanic tephra layer is interesting new information, Michael Waters, a geoarchaeologist at Texas A&M University who was not part of the study, told Live Science. But the study includes "egregiously poor geological work," he said. For example, the authors say one of the site terraces formed partly from erosion and partly from deposition, but Waters said this is geologically impossible.

"There's so many things that should be done if you're evaluating an archaeological site," including micromorphology, wood identification, chemical analysis of bones, and examination of paleosols (ancient soil layers) and cryptotephras (invisible layers of volcanic ash), Waters said. "They didn't bother to do that. This study falls really short in demonstrating that Monte Verde II is Middle Holocene."

Monte Verde entered archaeology textbooks as a clear example of a pre-Clovis site in the late 1990s, after archaeologists who were previously skeptical of the early date visited the site and concluded there was no reason to question the integrity of the dating.

David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who led that expedition in 1997, said that, while he appreciates alternative perspectives on archaeological sites, there are several problems with the new study.

"Their work was not actually at the site, but instead in small sections that are tens to hundreds of meters distant," Meltzer told Live Science in an email. If the creek is active and complicated, as the researchers suggest, "then the other sections they sampled may have little bearing on what was at the site itself."

Don't rewrite textbooks just yet

In addition to the methodological errors in the study, archaeologists have taken issue with Surovell's statement that "with colonization of the Americas no longer anchored by Monte Verde, our revised chronology supports a more recent date of human arrival to the Americas."

"It's a sign of a good, healthy discipline when something that's settled science is questioned," Kenneth Feder, an archaeologist and author of "Native America: The Story of the First Peoples" (Princeton University Press, 2025), told Live Science. But regardless of the date of Monte Verde, "that really doesn't in any way negate the probable scenario that people had to come in along the coast first in order to get them into North America before the ice-free corridor ever opened up."

Meltzer agreed and pointed out that archaeological sites elsewhere support the interpretation of Monte Verde as a very early human occupation site.

"Monte Verde is hardly the sole site in the Americas that pre-dates Clovis," Meltzer said. "Even if the authors are correct — and I am extremely skeptical — that won't change the overall narrative of the peopling of the Americas."

Surovell is not so sure. In a 2022 study published in the journal PLOS One, he and his co-authors argued that pre-Clovis sites like Friedkin, Gault and Coopers Ferry (in Idaho) are marked by "downdrift" of artifacts and organic material from upper layers, potentially making those sites appear older than they actually are.

"It speaks to the need for more of this kind of replication [of dating] to be done," Surovell told Live Science, "particularly at these sites that appear to be outliers, like White Sands 22,000 years ago. It's a very strange thing. Where did these people come from? One possible explanation is that that site has been misinterpreted."

But Dillehay said Surovell and co-authors have a clear agenda: to bring back the "Clovis First theory," which states that the first Americans arrived through an ice-free corridor around 13,000 years ago.

"The scientific team behind the Monte Verde Project is currently preparing a detailed scientific response that will systematically address the methodological, empirical and contextual errors present in the study," Dillehay said.

"We came up with a different conclusion," Surovell said. "Not to say ours was right. I absolutely welcome somebody to try to replicate what we've done."

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The Americas have been home to humans for tens of thousands of years, with the first people arriving during the last ice age, when woolly mammoths, giant sloths and saber-toothed cats roamed the land.

These Indigenous Americans left behind clues about their lives, including prehistoric footprints of a caregiver and a squirmy toddler in what is now New Mexico and a heartbreaking cremation burial of a 3-year-old child in what is now Alaska.

But how much do you know about the first people to reach the Americas? Take our quiz to find out.

Remember to log in to put your name on the leaderboard; hints are available if you click the yellow button.

Around 1,000 years ago, a pre-Inca culture acquired wild parrots from hundreds of miles away in the Amazon rainforest and then kept them captive in what is now coastal Peru, all so people could access the birds' vibrant feathers, which were "prestigious symbols of status," a new study finds.

Researchers found some of these feathers in a 1,000-year-old tomb about 20 years ago. Now, a new analysis reveals the "complete journey of these feathers," including where the birds originated, what they ate, and which routes the live birds were likely carried on before being traded to the Yschma, a pre-Inca society that flourished from about A.D. 1000 to 1470.

While it's long been known that the Inca and other pre-Hispanic cultures traded and valued parrot feathers, the new study is one of the first to reveal that the "Ychsma culture, long before the Inca Empire, participated in a sophisticated trade network that spanned the Andes," the authors wrote in the study.

Researchers first discovered the burial in 2005 after a survey with ground-penetrating radar and a later excavation revealed two large, stone-lined tombs near the Temple of Pachacamac, 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Lima. In one of the two Yschma tombs, the archaeologists found parrot feather ornaments with vivid colors that had been preserved for centuries.

Now, an international team of researchers has analyzed the feathers' DNA and chemical composition, and concluded that the feathers came from live Amazonian parrots that had been transported, and likely traded, across the mountains, before being kept in captivity on the Peruvian coast. Their new study was published Tuesday (March 10) in the journal Nature Communications.

"Our study proves that centuries before the Inca, societies like the Ychsma, the Chimú, and others were already managing sophisticated, organised, long-distance trade networks," study co-author Izumi Shimada, co-director of the Pachacamac Archaeological Project that originally found the tombs and a professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University, told Live Science in an email. "They possessed profound ecological knowledge and negotiated trade agreements that connected the Amazon with the coastal deserts, revealing that these states [were] more interconnected."

The discovery shows how much effort these societies invested in what they deemed prestigious objects. At Pachacamac, these feathers were found adorning false heads — cloths filled with reeds and other plants — attached to 34 funerary bundles of deceased individuals who were also decorated with small cinnabar masks, suggesting that the feathers were used in ceremonial activities such as burial rites.

However, it appears that the captive birds weren't living at the temple.

"Our research actually suggests that the large-scale rearing of these captive birds may not have happened at Pachacamac itself (no parrot skeletons, eggshells, or signs of breeding houses were found), but further north maybe in the Chimú Empire, who then traded the harvested feathers south to the Ychsma," study first author George Olah, a research fellow at The Australian National University, told Live Science in an email. The proposed Chimú breeding site is based on the new paper's computer models, he added.

A sacred site

The Pachacamac temple and its oracle served as the heart of the Yschma society, which controlled the valleys around Lima before the Inca conquest around 1470. "Because of the widespread and longstanding reputation of Pachacamac, elites of diverse cultures in ancient Peru sought the privilege of being buried close to the temple," Shimada said. "It is believed that the site contained tens of thousands of burials of elites of different cultures and regions."

After the Spanish conquest in 1533, looters ransacked graves at Pachacamac for centuries, stealing and destroying countless Yschma artifacts. By the time the Pachacamac Archaeological Project began its work in the early 2000s, many researchers believed no intact elite tombs were left by the temple — so the discovery of the two tombs was an "exceptional event," the researchers wrote in the study.

Feather quest

In their investigation, the team looked at the mitochondrial DNA of 25 feathers found in the tombs and determined that the ornaments attached to the funeral bundles came from at least four tropical parrot species: scarlet macaws (Ara macao), red-and-green macaws (Ara chloropterus), blue-and-yellow macaws (Ara ararauna) and mealy Amazons (Amazona farinosa). All of these birds are native to lowland tropical forests east of the Andes, not to the Peruvian coast.

These birds lived hundreds of miles from the Ychsma, which suggests the society traded with others to acquire the birds.

"The fact that they ended up more than 500 kilometres [310 miles] away, on the other side of South America's highest mountain range, proves human intervention," Olah said in a statement. "They do not naturally fly over the Andes."

An analysis of the feathers' isotopes (variations of elements with varying numbers of neutrons in their nuclei) shed light on the birds' diets.

Unlike modern wild parrots' diets, which are rich in fruits and seeds, the ancient feathers from Pachacamac showed diets rich in plants like maize and possibly food linked to coastal agriculture enriched by seabird feces.

"Because they showed a coastal diet, it proves the birds were brought to somewhere along the coast alive and kept in captivity long enough to moult and grow new feathers with the isotopic signature we detected," Olah told Live Science in an email.

The macaw feathers also showed a higher genetic diversity in their DNA, unlike the low diversity expected from a small captive breeding colony. This suggested that local breeding was happening near Pachacamac and birds were being repeatedly sourced from Amazonian populations and moved through trade routes in the mountains.

"While it is tempting to think of them as pets, the archaeological evidence suggests they were maintained primarily for their feathers, which were valuable prestige items used in elite tunics, headdresses, and funerary bundles," Olah said.

Finding the routes across the Andes

To determine how these birds moved across the Andes, the team turned to computational models. They plugged in ancient topography, river systems and ocean conditions, and then ran a "least cost" path analysis to determine which routes would have demanded the least energy from human caravans.

The more efficient routes pointed to two likely corridors: one through northern networks tied to coastal regions where the Chimú Empire was located and another through central Andean passages connecting the coast to eastern lowlands.

"The recommended best paths actually made good sense and also aligned well with historical and archaeological evidence," Olah said.

Bird quiz: How much do you know about our feathered friends?

Ancient tools found in Alaska may shed light on how humans first arrived in the Americas, a new study finds.

The artifacts, which include items linked with crafting stone tools and ocher, a red mineral often used in ceremonies, are about 600 years older than similar artifacts from the Clovis people who lived farther south, in New Mexico and elsewhere.

The similarities suggest that the people who used the Alaskan artifacts are the ancestors of the Clovis, which in turn hints that the ancestors of the Clovis may have marched across the land bridge that once connected Asia with the Americas, and not along a coastal route as recently argued.

Based on stone artifacts up to 13,400 years old, for most of the 20th century archaeologists suggested that ancestors of the prehistoric culture dubbed the Clovis were among the first to migrate from Asia to the Americas. Researchers have discovered Clovis artifacts — such as distinctive, pointy stone tools — across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. (But research over the past few decades has revealed that the Clovis were far from the first people to reach the Americas.)

It remains uncertain how the predecessors of the Clovis made their way to the New World. It was long thought that they reached North America via the Bering Land Bridge, which emerged as sea levels dropped during the last ice age (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). These migrants could have wended their way across this expanse of land and then south through an ice-free corridor to give rise to the Clovis.

However, other work raises the question of whether the corridor through what is now Canada was actually ice-free when the ancestors of the Clovis might have been able to cross it. Therefore, a competing idea proposes that they migrated to the New World through other routes, such as in watercraft along the coast of Asia, the Bering Land Bridge and the Americas.

Alaska archaeology

To investigate this mystery, scientists analyzed findings from the Tanana Valley in central Alaska. For more than four decades, excavations there have uncovered artifacts from early Alaskan hunters of woolly mammoths and other "megafauna," or giant beasts.

The researchers focused on recent discoveries from the Holzman site in the middle Tanana Valley, where they found evidence of stone and mammoth ivory tool manufacturing dating to about 14,000 years ago, such as a nearly complete mammoth tusk, which could have been raw material for ivory production, and a hammerstone for crafting stone tools. This makes this pre-Clovis area one of the earliest known human sites in the Americas.

"What's exceptional [about this site] is its remarkable preservation," study co-author Kathryn Krasinski, an archaeologist at Adelphi University in New York, told Live Science. "The lower components tend to be frozen much of the year, so we have also recovered ancient plant DNA and even a strand of 13,600-year-old bison hair. This type of organic material preservation is quite rare."

The Tanana Valley was located between the Bering Land Bridge and the ice-free corridor, the scientists noted, and the ivory tools and the process of manufacturing them at the Holzman site are similar to those used for Clovis artifacts found farther south.

"People lived and thrived in interior Alaska around 1,000 years before the appearance of Clovis technology further south," study co-author Brian Wygal, an archaeologist at Adelphi University, told Live Science. "We argue that the growing evidence from interior Alaska confirms an inland route through an ice-free corridor as the most likely scenario for the initial arrival of people in midcontinental North America."

In other words, the ancestors of the Clovis may have first wandered across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia to Alaska, and then migrated further south down an ice-free corridor to give rise to the Clovis.

The evidence from Holzman and other sites in that area of Alaska is consistent with "migration to the continental United States by an interior route," Todd Surovell, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming who did not participate in the study, told Live Science. "The evidence for ivory working provides a nice cultural tie to the Clovis tradition further south."

Difficult to know

However, Jack Ives, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Alberta who did not take part in this research, cautioned that the people of ancient northeast Asia where migrants to the Americas likely came from shared many features, such as symbolic use of ocher in burials, and similar stone artifacts. This raises the question of whether the ivory artifacts seen at Holzman and elsewhere are directly tied to the Clovis or whether "they were part of a broader suite of ideas for various populations entering the Western Hemisphere," Ives told Live Science.

Ives also noted that scientists often pose the inland and coastal scenarios of migration into the Americas as competing ideas "with either one or the other telling the entire story." However, a better way to go about it, he said, "is to realize that if we would like to have a comprehensive picture of this early time frame, we need to understand what is going on in both the early period coastal and [ice-free] corridor worlds." Geneticists often suggest the peopling of the New World involved successive episodes of small founding lineages, so both the inland and coastal scenarios might have played a part, Ives added.

Wygal and his colleagues aim to continue excavations in the Tanana Valley to learn more about how the first Alaskans interacted with woolly mammoths and other aspects of their environment, he said. Future research should also investigate "the ice-free corridor itself," Surovell said. "There has been considerable research on coastal areas, but the ice-free corridor by contrast has been largely neglected."

The scientists detailed their findings in the Feb. 15 issue of the journal Quaternary International.

Last ice age quiz: How much do you know about Earth's frosty past?

Around two millennia ago, Tumaco-Tolita potters living in what is now Colombia and Ecuador began crafting hyperrealistic sculptures of their revered elders. This figurine of an older man, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, may have been a religious specialist, shaman or other leader in his community.

The artifact, which is 25 inches (63.5 centimeters) tall, depicts an elderly person with deep facial creases, baggy skin beneath the eyes, a handful of teeth, and chin stubble. The man's head appears flattened, likely indicating that his skull had been shaped or modified when he was an infant in a cultural practice that signaled his ethnic identity or rank, according to archaeologist Hugo Ikehara-Tsukayama, who wrote about the sculpture in 2022.

The statue has small holes in the nose, ears and nipples, suggesting that gold adornments once decorated the figurine. (Marked nipples were more commonly used to depict women in Tumaco-Tolita art, Ikehara-Tsukayama noted, but the statue is not wearing a long skirt typical of depictions of women, so the gender is unclear.)

The figurine was crafted from gray clay paste that was commonly used by the Tumaco-Tolita people (also spelled Tumaco-La Tolita and Tolita-Tumaco), and it would have taken several days to complete due to the complexity of the design. It was likely polished and painted in antiquity, but the colors have worn away over time.

This elderly man was depicted sitting on a stool, which was a symbol of authority in the ancient Americas. He also may have been a shaman who helped connect people with supernatural beings. The old man's prominent spine and dry, wrinkled skin evoke those of an iguana, according to Ikehara-Tsukayama, and this animal connection could have been one key to the shaman's power.

This sculpture is one of the earliest known depictions of a seated leader from this area of Ecuador and Colombia, according to the Met. Male leaders who held religious and secular power in ancient American societies were sometimes called caciques.

The statue of the cacique was likely displayed or carried in important ritual ceremonies, Florencio Delgado Espinoza, an archaeologist at San Francisco University in Quito, Ecuador, explained in an audio interview posted on the Met's website, but the figurine's exact function is unknown.

"People love these caciques, but also they really were scared of them because they have the power — so it's love and fear," he said.

The Tumaco-Tolita were also well known for their metalworking. They lived in an area rich in natural gold and crafted impressive figurines out of the precious metal. But the group disappeared from their coastal homeland by A.D. 500, likely dispersing to other parts of South America.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

The oldest known sewn clothing in the world may be pieces of animal hide that Indigenous people stitched together with plant and animal cords and then left in an Oregon cave around 12,000 years ago, during the last ice age, a new study finds.

Although its exact use is unknown, the sewn hide is "quite possibly a fragment of clothing or footwear," which would represent the only known item of clothing recovered from the Pleistocene to date, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Feb. 4 in the journal Science Advances.

An amateur archaeologist discovered the sewn hides in 1958, but the new study is the first to date the artifacts. In their paper, the team determined that 55 pieces of crafted animal and plant materials previously unearthed in two Oregon caves — including sewn hide, cords and twine — stemmed from the Younger Dryas, a period of sudden cooling that occurred from about 12,900 to 11,700 years ago.

The discovery provides clear evidence that Indigenous people in North America shielded themselves from the worst of the cold by using complex technology made from perishable materials. Sewing pieces of hide together allowed for tight-fitting clothing, which would have provided more warmth than simple, loose-fitting draped hide clothes.

"We already knew they did, we just had to assume and guess what they were like," study lead author Richard Rosencrance, a doctoral researcher in anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno, told Live Science in an email. "They were accomplished and serious sewists during the Ice Age."

Clothes, along with other technologies required to keep people warm, were essential for permanent residence in northern latitudes, including areas of North America. But exactly when humans began to wear clothes is unknown, and the perishable nature of the materials means they are rarely found.

To date, there are only four sites — all in Oregon and Nevada — where non-bone animal and plant technology from the Late Pleistocene has been discovered in the Western Hemisphere. (The Late Pleistocene spanned 126,000 to 11,700 years ago and includes the last ice age.)

Archaeologists previously discovered two of the largest collections of Late Pleistocene perishable tools in the world in Cougar Mountain Cave and the Paisley Caves in Oregon, according to the new study. These artifacts included 37 fiber cords, baskets and knots; 15 wooden implements; and three sewn hides.

Rosencrance and his team used radiocarbon dating to determine the ages of these artifacts and confirmed that all of them date to the Younger Dryas. The cords were braided using three strands and were made using sagebrush, dogbane, juniper and bitterbrush fibers. Because the cords varied from 0.13 to 1 inch (0.33 to 2.5 centimeters) wide, they were probably used for a range of purposes, the researchers wrote in the study.

The three pieces of animal hide had been processed and dehaired, with cord made from a combination of plant fiber and animal hair sewn into the sides. The sewn hide dates to between 12,676 and 11,956 years ago, and an analysis of the chemical makeup of the animal hides revealed they came from North American elk (Cervus canadensis). (The oldest known shoes in the world are also from a cave in Oregon, and they date to about 10,400 years ago.)

The authors of the new study also examined 14 eyed and three eyeless bone needles that had previously been discovered at Cougar Mountain Cave and the Paisley Caves, as well as the nearby Connley Caves and Tule Lake Rockshelter. In addition, they looked at four potential ornamental items uncovered in the Connley Caves, including a porcupine tooth with a hole drilled into the top and lines scratched onto the surface.

"The abundance of bone needles and the presence of adornment items and very fine-eyed needles suggest that clothing was more than a utilitarian survival strategy but also an avenue of expression and identity," the authors wrote. "This evidence pushes beyond conventional assumptions to confirm that Pleistocene peoples in the Americas used clothing as both survival technology and social practice."

Eyed bone needles disappeared from the archaeological record in Oregon after around 11,700 years ago, Rosencrance said, which suggests that tight-fitting clothing became less important as the climate warmed.

Editor's Note: This story was updated on March 5 at 9:29 a.m. ET to correct the date range of the sewn hide. The radiocarbon dates were 12,600 to 11,880 before present (BP), calibrated to 1950, meaning the hide is 12,676 to 11,956 years old.

The famous Inca "ice mummies" have been holding secrets since their discovery decades ago, and CT scans are now revealing what these children's last moments were like, a new study finds.

The researchers examined the remains of four Inca children who were killed about 500 years ago and left on remote peaks in the Andes as "messengers to the gods," the researchers wrote in the study. However, the new CT scans revealed that at least one of these children had been killed elsewhere and then relocated to a mountain peak, according to the study, which was published in the April issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

The research also showed that some of the children selected for this ritual "capacocha" sacrifice had injuries and diseases when they were killed, contrary to some early Spanish accounts that the victims were always in perfect health.

"Our findings show that chroniclers' accounts should be treated with caution," Dagmara Socha, an archaeologist at the University of Warsaw in Poland and the lead author of the study, told Live Science. "Although historical sources describe the children as physically perfect and without flaws, modern scientific analyses reveal a very different reality."

The four mummies are those of an 8-year-old girl, a 10-year-old girl, a 14-year-old girl, and the famed "Lady of Ampato" — also known as the "Ice Maiden" and "Momia Juanita" — who was also sacrificed when she was about 14 years old. Her mummified body was found in a shrine near the summit of Peru's volcanic Mount Ampato in 1995.

The researchers determined that the 10-year-old girl found near the same summit had been sacrificed elsewhere. The scans revealed that the organs in her abdomen and chest cavities had been removed and replaced with stones and textiles before the body was wrapped and placed in a sitting position, with the knees drawn up to the chin, on a plateau near the top of the mountain.

Although the ice mummies were preserved by the extremely dry air at the altitudes where they were found — about 19,000 feet (5,800 meters) above sea level — the 10-year-old girl's missing organs are the first evidence that any of the bodies had been deliberately prepared for mummification, possibly to remedy what were seen as the victims' physical deficiencies, the researchers wrote.

Ice mummies

The medical scans of the four mummies — three from Mount Ampato and another from a shrine near the summit of the Sara Sara volcano, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) roughly west — showed some of the young sacrificial victims had suffered from several ailments.

Scans of the 8-year-old girl's mummy found on Mount Ampato revealed an enlarged esophagus that may have been a symptom of Chagas disease (a parasitic infection common in the region) and scars in her lungs that may have been caused by tuberculosis.

These health conditions were likely common in the Inca population at the time, so it's no surprise that the mummies weren't "perfect" as the European accounts had claimed. "This may reflect the general living conditions within the Inca Empire, but it may also indicate that European chroniclers did not fully understand what the Incas themselves considered ideal," Socha said.

Divine messengers

According to some early Spanish writers in Peru, the capacocha sacrifices were among the most important rituals in the Inca world. In these sacrifices, children or young teens — both boys and girls — would be ritually killed, and their bodies would be naturally mummified near the tops of high mountains so they would act as "messengers to the gods."

The methods of killing differed; some victims were strangled, while others were smothered. Socha said it seemed that each of the four sacrificial victims in the study had been killed by a severe blow to the head, possibly from a wooden club.

Early Spanish accounts indicated that the young victims of the capacocha rituals acted as "messengers" for a long time after they had been ritually killed. For example, a report by the conquistador Pedro Pizarro (a young cousin of Francisco Pizarro) stated that living people visited ice mummies to seek approvals for marriages.

"The evidence suggests that these children … continued to function as mediators between the living community and the divine Apus [Andean deities] long after their deaths," Socha said.

Paleo-Inuit people reached remote islands in the High Arctic off the northwest coast of Greenland nearly 4,500 years ago, according to a new study that documents evidence of prehistoric dwellings there.

These early Arctic people, who had fine-tuned advanced watercraft technology and seafaring skills, repeatedly made the treacherous open-water journey to the islands to access vital maritime resources.

The island cluster of Kitsissut (also known as the Carey Islands) is the westernmost point of Greenland. Consisting of six small islands, Kitsissut is located at the heart of a rich marine environment called a polynya, which is a semipermanent area of open water in the middle of sea ice. Contemporary Inuit identified Kitsissut as an important place for hunting seabirds and accessing eggs, which prompted a team of archaeologists to investigate the islands for traces of prehistoric activity.

In a study published Monday (Feb. 9) in the journal Antiquity, researchers detailed the results of their archaeological survey of three of the islands. They found nearly 300 archaeological features in their survey, with the largest concentration being 15 Paleo-Inuit dwellings at the tip of Isbjørne Island. The dwellings suggested that people made the difficult journey from Greenland's mainland to Kitsissut numerous times.

The dwellings were identified by a ring of stones indicating the past presence of a tent with a hearth at the center. Based on an animal bone discovered in one of the tent rings, the archaeologists dated the occupation to around 4,000 to 4,475 years ago.

"In a regional perspective, it is a lot of tent rings in one place, indeed one of the largest concentrations," study lead author Matthew Walls, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, told Live Science in an email. This suggests that Kitsissut and the polynya was "a place of return," Walls said. "It wasn't just a one-off visit by a family blown off course, for example."

It is unclear exactly how the Paleo-Inuit people arrived at Kitsissut, but the minimum journey from the mainland to the dwellings on Isbjørne Island is 33 miles (53 kilometers), the researchers wrote in the study. The route through the open sea is marked by erratic crosswinds, dense fog and powerful mixing currents — an extraordinarily risky journey that would have taken around 12 hours to complete in a wood-framed, skin-covered watercraft typical of Paleo-Inuit peoples.

"They are almost certainly visiting during the warm season, which doesn't last very long," Walls said. "The travel conditions also make it most likely that they are doing this in the brief summer."

Paleo-Inuit people probably headed to Kitsissut to hunt and gather eggs from the thick-billed murre (Uria lomvia), a polar seabird that nests in the thousands in the summer. The dwelling sites the archaeologists found are located directly below their nesting cliffs, Walls said, and there are numerous murre bones around the tent rings.

"The number of rings does give the sense that it is a whole community making the crossing, rather than a small hunting party," Walls said, but "that is something that we could perhaps prove with further excavation, giving us a better snapshot of community life."

The Paleo-Inuit people's ability to navigate frigid expanses of open water in kayak-like vessels to reach Kitsissut shows their strong commitment to a maritime lifestyle, the researchers wrote, but it also demonstrates their advanced skills in navigation and watercraft technology.

"Archaeologists have tended to think about the area as a crossroads, or primarily a route of movement between Canada and Greenland," Walls said. But Kitsissut and the polynya are "better framed as a place of innovation."

Archaeology Fragments Quiz: Can you work out what these mysterious artifacts are?

Archaeologists in Mexico have discovered a 1,400-year-old tomb from the Zapotec culture that features well-preserved details, including a sculpture of a wide-eyed owl with a man in its beak, multicolored murals and calendrical carvings.

Officials found the tomb after following up on an anonymous report of looting at the site. Their investigation revealed the "most significant archaeological discovery in a decade in Mexico," Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, announced at a Jan. 23 news conference in Spanish.

The tomb was discovered in San Pablo Huitzo, a municipality in Oaxaca in southern Mexico, in 2025. It dates to about A.D. 600, when the Indigenous Zapotecs — also known as the "Cloud People" — flourished in the area. The Zapotec civilization was established around 700 B.C. and collapsed due to the Spanish conquest in 1521. However, hundreds of thousands of Zapotec-speaking people still live in Mexico today.

At the entrance to the newly announced tomb, archaeologists found a large carved owl whose beak opens to reveal the painted face of a Zapotec lord. In ancient Zapotec culture, the owl represented death and power, suggesting it held in its mouth a portrait of the ancestor the tomb honors, according to a translated statement from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

Inside the tomb, a threshold between two chambers boasts an elaborately carved doorway. The top has a horizontal beam made of stone slabs engraved with "calendrical names" — a naming system in which deities and important people were given a specific symbol associated with their birth date. Flanking the doorway were engraved figures of a man and a woman, perhaps representing ancestors buried in the tomb or guardians of the palace, according to the INAH statement.

The walls of the burial chamber preserved multicolored murals in white, green, red and blue. They depict a funeral procession of people carrying bags of "copal," a tree resin that was burned as incense during ceremonies in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.

The highly decorated tomb is an "exceptional discovery due to its level of preservation and what it reveals about Zapotec culture: its social organization, its funerary rituals, and its worldview, preserved in its architecture and mural paintings," Claudia Curiel de Icaza, Mexico's secretary of culture, said in the statement.

An interdisciplinary team from the INAH is currently working to conserve and protect the tomb, and further research will address the ceramic evidence, the iconography, and the handful of human bones recovered from the tomb.

The Huitzo tomb joins a dozen other ancient Zapotec tombs discovered in Oaxaca in the past decade, many of which had been looted before archaeologists could study them. But even though some information about the ancient Zapotec civilization has been lost to looting, the Huitzo tomb is "a source of pride for Mexicans; a testament to the greatness of Mexico," Sheinbaum said.

Archaeology Fragments Quiz: Can you work out what these mysterious artifacts are?

Harpoons crafted from the bones of humpback and southern right whales show Indigenous groups in what is now Brazil were hunting whales 5,000 years ago.

The discovery, which included 118 whale bones and crafted artifacts, reveal that prehistoric whaling was not confined to people in temperate and polar climates in the Northern Hemisphere, according to a study published Jan. 9 in the journal Nature Communications.

"Whaling has always been enigmatic," because it's difficult to distinguish bone tools made from actively hunted and stranded animals in the archaeological record, study co-author André Carlo Colonese, a research director at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, told Live Science.

So the new tools are significant because their discovery alongside multiple bone remains from members of the same species represents some of the oldest evidence of active whale hunting in the world, the authors wrote in the study.

Prehistoric whaling

For prehistoric people, whales provided huge feasts, oil for warmth, and bones for tools and cultural ornaments and accessories. Although coastal communities have opportunistically salvaged these resources from beached whales for at least 20,000 years, the evidence of active hunting is much younger. For example, people hunted large whales with deer bone harpoons 6,000 years ago in what is now South Korea, and harpoons from around 3,500 to 2,500 years ago have been uncovered in the Arctic and sub-Arctic.

Colonese and his team did not originally set out to investigate early whaling. Instead, they were trying to document the marine species that were used by Indigenous Sambaqui populations in southern Brazil. To do so, they analyzed the molecular signature of precolonial cetacean (whale, dolphin and porpoise) bones at the Joinville Sambaqui Archaeological Museum in Brazil. Of the 118 bone remains with an identifiable cetacean species, most were from southern right whales, but many bones were from humpback whales. Only 37 had been crafted into items such as pendants.

It was "completely random" that one of the museum's curators brought out a box of what were believed to be sticks, Colonese said. But based on their design, such as hollow centers for a wooden shaft and carved tips, he immediately recognized them as harpoons. The team identified 15 harpoon elements, including heads and shaft components, made from either southern right whale or humpback whale rib bones.

The researchers took tiny samples from two harpoon foreshafts to determine their age, which revealed that the tools were between 4,710 and 4,970 years old. Colonese said he jumped for joy when he saw the results because these are some of the oldest harpoons found anywhere in the world — over 1,000 years older than the Arctic and sub-Arctic examples.

The discovery also showed that these Indigenous populations in Brazil were not simply gathering mollusks and catching fish. "The conventional idea was that the Sambaquis didn't have the technology" for whaling, Colonese said. "This is telling us that they were actually hunting."

"It's a very spectacular, informative discovery," Jean-Marc Pétillon, an archaeologist at the University of Toulouse in France who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.

Although it's not clear that these particular harpoons were used to hunt whales — as opposed to other marine animals, such as seals — this new evidence helps to contradict the assumption that whaling was practiced only in the Northern Hemisphere, according to Pétillon.

"Having these people living in southern Brazil in tropical conditions that also did whaling is also a way to change our perspective on these maritime exploitation systems," he said.

The world's oldest evidence of Treponema pallidum, the bacterium that causes syphilis and several chronic skin infections, has been found in a 5,500-year-old skeleton buried in a rock shelter in Colombia. But the genetic evidence suggests that the person was infected with a previously unknown strain of T. pallidum, adding to an already-complicated picture of the evolution of syphilis.

Researchers have debated the geographical origin and spread of the treponemal diseases — syphilis, bejel, yaws and pinta, all of which are caused by bacteria in the genus Treponema — for centuries. Because the best-documented epidemics of syphilis occurred in Europe in the 15th century, early theories suggested that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis to the Americas or, conversely, that Indigenous people in the Americas transmitted syphilis to Columbus and his crew.

More recent DNA studies, however, have identified T. pallidum in a person buried around A.D. 1000 in Chile and in several people buried between 350 B.C. and A.D. 570 in Brazil, placing the bacterium in the Americas long before the Columbian expedition.

In a study published Thursday (Jan. 22) in the journal Science, researchers isolated the oldest T. pallidum genome yet, from the skeleton of a middle-aged hunter-gatherer who was buried in Colombia 5,500 years ago.

"Our results push back the association of T. pallidum with humans by thousands of years," study lead author Davide Bozzi, a computational biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, said in a statement.

Ancient genomes of Treponema are exceptionally difficult to recover and are usually found in skeletons with bony evidence of treponemal disease lesions, such as holes that make the bone appear moth-eaten, which are often associated with the later stages of infection. Surprisingly, the 5,500-year-old skeleton containing evidence of T. pallidum did not have any obvious skeletal lesions, although other skeletons in the area did.

While investigating the new T. pallidum genome, which they named TE1-3, the researchers found that it was a different lineage than all other subspecies of T. pallidum identified to date. Based on a statistical analysis of the differences among the genomes, the researchers estimated that TE1-3 diverged from today's lineages around 13,700 years ago. This suggests that Treponema began circulating in the Americas thousands of years earlier than experts previously thought.

But the new genome does not clarify whether early Treponema lineages like TE1-3 were capable of sexual transmission like venereal syphilis.

"Current genomic evidence, along with our genome presented here, does not resolve the long-standing debate about where the disease syndromes themselves originated, but it does show there's this long evolutionary history of treponemal pathogens that was already diversifying in the Americas thousands of years earlier than previously known," study co-author Elizabeth Nelson, a molecular anthropologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said in the statement.

In a related perspective published in Science, Molly Zuckerman and Lydia Bailey, anthropologists at Mississippi State University who were not involved in the study, wrote that the new finding "points to an origin for syphilis in the Americas rather than Europe." Comparing progressively ancient genomes of Treponema with modern genetic data could help inform infection control strategies for syphilis, which has rebounded globally over the past decade, they wrote, as well as help researchers understand the history of infectious disease.

"It is possible that 15th century syphilis was the first globalized emerging infectious disease and a harbinger of all subsequent ones, from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19," Zuckerman and Bailey wrote.

The new discovery shows "the unique potential of paleogenomics to contribute to our understanding of the evolution of species, and potential health risks for past and present communities," study co-author Lars Fehren-Schmitz, a geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in the statement.

Human skeleton quiz: What do you know about the bones in your body?

The 1,100-year-old mummified remains of a man reveal he likely died in an ancient turquoise mining accident in Chile. Extensive evidence of blunt-force trauma discovered on the man's skeleton suggests he died because of a rockfall or mine collapse, according to a new study.

The naturally mummified body, along with grave goods that included a bow and arrow and a snuff kit for hallucinogenic drugs, was originally excavated in the 1970s from an area just outside a pre-Hispanic turquoise mine in the northern Chilean city of El Salvador in the middle of the Atacama Desert. A visible fracture in the mummy's left lower leg bone suggested the man might have been involved in an accident, but a full analysis of the body was not completed until 2023.

In a study published Dec. 15 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, Catalina Morales and Francisco Garrido, archaeologists at the National Museum of Natural History in Santiago, Chile, used CT scans and X-ray imaging to reveal intricate details of the extensive trauma that probably resulted in the man's death.

"It is likely that a miner would have entered the mine and used stone hammers to extract turquoise from the surrounding rock," Morales and Garrido told Live Science in an email. "In the event of a rockfall, there was no form of protection."

In the researchers' analysis of the mummy, they discovered that the man was between 25 and 40 years old when he died. They carbon-dated the mummy to between A.D. 894 and 1016, placing him at the beginning of the Late Intermediate Period in the central Andes, between the Wari Empire (and its eventual collapse) and the rise of the Inca Empire.

Multiple unhealed fractures were evident on the man's upper spine. He also had rib, shoulder blade and collarbone fractures, which suggest "a blunt force impact over a wide area" of his upper back, revealing his "upper left thorax bore the brunt of the impact," Morales and Garrido wrote in the study. The impact displaced several of his vertebrae and collapsed his rib cage.

Additionally, the researchers identified a fracture in a vertebra near the base of his spine, likely the result of the initial upper-back injury. The upper- and lower-spine injuries are both "typically associated with severe spinal cord damage and high mortality," the researchers wrote.

But there were no injuries found to the man's skull, neck or arms, which indicates that the impact occurred when the man was in a head-down body position. He may have been actively mining or perhaps attempting to protect his head with his arms when he was struck by a heavy object falling from above. This type of injury is seen in the bodies of people involved in earthquakes and in occupational accidents in forestry, construction and mining, the researchers wrote.

Turquoise mining was practiced for two millennia in the Atacama Desert, according to the researchers. Miners used specific equipment — including stone hammers, wooden and stone shovels, and baskets — to extract the semiprecious stone and bring it back to the mining camp, where the turquoise was turned into beads. Many of these beads were then traded or exchanged along the extensive pre-Hispanic Inca road system.

Most ancient turquoise mines were open-air and shallow, so miners did not wear protective equipment. But the mine at El Salvador, the researchers said, was one of the few that included subterranean galleries.

"Considering the archaeological context, this individual likely died while extracting turquoise, when a rock fell on his back from the ceiling of the mine," the researchers wrote in the study, but "further research is needed to better understand the living conditions of ancient miners."

Gold and gems quiz: What do you know about sparkly treasures made by nature?

Centuries ago in Peru, a decapitated individual's head was turned into a "trophy." Now, a careful look at this trophy head reveals that despite a potentially problematic birth defect, the individual survived into early adulthood.

Based on several photos of the head, a researcher spotted that the individual was born with a cleft lip, Beth Scaffidi, an assistant professor of anthropology and heritage studies at the University of California, Merced, wrote in a new study.

Cleft lip and cleft palate are related conditions in which babies are born with a gap in the lip and/or the roof of their mouth. They are among the most common birth defects, occurring in approximately 1 in 700 live births globally in modern times, research suggests. But diagnosing orofacial clefts (the umbrella term for cleft lip and palate) in archaeological remains is rare, with only around 50 cases identified to date around the world, according to one study.

The latest study, published Nov. 3 in the journal Ñawpa Pacha, is the first time an orofacial cleft has been documented in an Andean trophy head, offering a "unique opportunity" to explore how ancient peoples of the region viewed such conditions, Scaffidi wrote in the paper.

"This finding is important because it shows that people survived, and even thrived, with this condition in the ancient Andes," Scaffidi told Live Science in an email. "It helps show that what we define as a disability and how we respond to it is culturally, rather than biologically, determined."

Trophy heads

For millenia, ancient peoples in parts of the Andes mountains in South America, as well as the surrounding regions, collected severed heads as trophies, processing them for preservation and display purposes, Scaffidi said. Most known examples date to between roughly 300 B.C. and A.D. 800, often originating from around modern-day Nazca in coastal Peru's Ica department (Peru has 24 departments, or regions). Trophy heads were likely passed down as heirlooms through generations, Scaffidi said.

"Most trophies were mummified naturally in the arid desert environment, and many preserve hair and flesh," Scaffidi said. "We still debate whether these heads were lovingly curated remains of beloved ancestors or souvenirs of violent conquest of enemies, but many do also display violent injuries received before and around the time of death."

During a research project, Scaffidi came across an intriguing example in the catalog of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Saint-Etienne, France, purportedly originating from the Ica department.

Scaffidi examined photographs of the mummified head and determined that the individual was probably male and a young adult at the time of death. Based on the visible facial structures, she diagnosed the individual with a cleft lip.

Perhaps the most serious complication of orofacial clefts is difficulty latching during breastfeeding, but these conditions can also cause respiratory, hearing and speech issues, she wrote in the study. Today, these birth defects are typically treated with surgery in the first few months of life, but in the ancient Andean world they would have presented a significant challenge to mothers and caregivers during the baby's infancy. The individual Scaffidi studied, for example, would likely have required specialized care to receive nourishment as an infant.

A special status

But not only did this individual survive into early adulthood, it is possible that their condition even granted them special status, Scaffidi said. Cultural responses to orofacial clefts in the ancient Americas varied widely, from shame to veneration. But taking into account what is known about the worldviews of ancient Andean peoples specifically, it is likely this individual was perceived as sacred and afforded a high-status role throughout life and beyond, Scaffidi said.

In the absence of documentary or textual sources, ancient ceramic vessels from the region — particularly those produced by the Moche culture (A.D. 200 to 850) of northern Peru — provide clues as to how congenital conditions might have been understood at the time.

In the study, Scaffidi found 30 ceramic representations of orofacial clefts that had already been documented from the wider Andean region, 20 of which were from Moche areas. These examples mostly depict males adorned in elite jewelry, head wrappings, or performing shamanic or medical activities, suggesting that they were people of importance. Other research suggests that the Moche believed facial markings protected them from supernatural harm, thus, birth defect markings were revered.

Previous research has indicated that Andean trophy heads were often collected from individuals perceived as having supernatural powers, with the belief that the people taking the heads could use this power to benefit their own communities.

The collection of this particular subject as a trophy head, even through potentially violent means, is consistent with the idea that orofacial clefts were celebrated by the takers, Scaffidi said. What may be seen today as a disability was likely considered a "blessing," according to the study.

More than 400 years ago, the English colonist and explorer John Smith wrote in his journal that there were Indigenous villages along a major river in what is now Virginia. But the reported sites of the villages were later forgotten, and their existence was disputed.

Now, archaeologists excavating along the Rappahannock River have discovered thousands of artifacts — including beads, pieces of pottery, stone tools and pipes for tobacco — that they think come from the villages described by Smith centuries ago.

"The presence of these artifacts confirms both oral histories and documents that suggested settlements were located here in 1608, when Captain John Smith spent several weeks mapping the Rappahannock River," said Julia King, a professor of anthropology at St. Mary's College of Maryland who led the excavations.

The key part of the river is lined with high cliffs that would have allowed only limited access to the village above, King said. But the height of the village there would have given it views up and down the entire river valley, while the soil at the site would have been good for growing corn, King told Live Science in an email.

The river is named after the Rappahannock tribe, one of 11 Indigenous American groups recognized in Virginia. Many members of the tribe still live nearby and hope to reclaim and protect ancestral lands along the river, King said.

Rappahannock histories

Smith had been a mercenary soldier and adventurer in Europe before he was elected president of the council at the Jamestown colony in Virginia in 1608. (Jamestown was founded a year earlier and is recognized as the first permanent English settlement in North America.)

Smith was a self-aggrandizing figure and left a "larger-than-life" legend, including his purported love story with Pocahontas. His letters and witness accounts indicate that Smith enforced military-style discipline at Jamestown, where he famously declared "he that will not work shall not eat" — a policy credited with saving the colony from starvation in its earliest years, although over 400 Jamestown colonists starved to death after John Smith returned to England in 1609.

King said Smith was a keen explorer who had spent several weeks mapping the Rappahannock River and wrote about Indigenous villages in what became the Fones Cliffs area.

The new finds also correspond with the oral histories of the Rappahannock tribe, King said.

"Oral history gets a bad rap in some quarters because memories are not perfect, but documents aren't either," she said. "The strategy is to read both with and against the grain of both sources and to question everything."

King and her colleagues have researched the early history of the Rappahannock River region for several years. They located the sites of the Fones Cliffs settlements by cross-referencing historical documents with oral histories and by "walking the land," she said.

The researchers have now excavated roughly 11,000 Indigenous artifacts from two sites at Fones Cliffs, and some of the items may date back to the 1500s.

Land claims

In the 17th century, the Rappahannock tribe agreed to sell about 25,000 acres (10,100 hectares) of land to the Jamestown colony for the price of 30 blankets, beads and some tools, according to Smith's writings. However, land deals between Europeans and Indigenous Americans like this one are often debated by historians. For instance, it's unclear whether Indigenous Americans understood "selling land" the same as Europeans did at the time; they may have perceived these types of land deals as "sharing" or "leasing" an area, researchers previously told Live Science.

The newfound artifacts may have implications for the development of the area, King said.

"Rappahannock people understand the greater river valley as their homeland, regardless of who may own the land today," she said. And so the tribe is working with private partners and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to purchase or otherwise protect key sites.

New York University historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman, an expert on Smith and early Jamestown who was not involved in the discoveries, told Live Science in an email that Smith had verified his map with the Chesapeake Algonquian people who had accompanied him on his expedition.

"Important finds such as this come from the collaborations archaeologists have established with modern Native people, such as the Rappahannocks," she said.

David Price, an independent historian and author of "Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation" (Vintage, 2005) who was not involved in the research, called the newly discovered artifacts "wonderful finds."

"They deepen our knowledge of the Rappahannock and their interactions with the English," he told Live Science, "especially during the fragile early years of English exploration — when Native communities and settlers were shaping each other's histories through trade, diplomacy and conflict."

Archaeologists digging at a Mesoamerican site in Mexico have discovered an unusual, cube-shaped human skull. It is the first evidence that people in this area practiced a unique form of head-shaping, scientifically known as cranial modification, around 1,400 years ago.

The skull was unearthed near the archaeological site of Balcón de Montezuma (Balcony of Montezuma) in the east-central Mexican state of Tamaulipas. Various Mesoamerican ethnic groups lived in the area between 650 B.C. and A.D. 1200. Around A.D. 400, a village sprang up, eventually encompassing around 90 circular houses in two plazas, according to the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

In a recent review of artifacts and bones discovered at Balcón de Montezuma, researchers noticed that the skull of a middle-aged man was a shape they'd never seen before.

In a Nov. 25 translated INAH statement, biological anthropologist Jesús Ernesto Velasco González explained that, while artificially modified skulls have been discovered in the area before, the shape of this man's skull is unique.

Many people are familiar with cultures that practiced cone-shaped cranial modification, as these skulls have an almost "alien" appearance. Those skull shapes were typically created by using lengths of fabric or soft padding to "bind" the heads of infants and encourage the skull to grow in an "oblique" direction, and they appear elongated.

Most of the modified skulls from Balcón de Montezuma, meanwhile, are shaped in an "erect" direction by placing soft padding on the back and/or front of the skull, causing the person to have a more upright or pointy head.

But the man from Balcón de Montezuma has a different form of "erect" modification in which the top of his head was flattened, giving his skull a cube-shaped appearance that some experts refer to as parallelepiped (shaped like a three-dimensional parallelogram or rhombus).

Since examples of this flat-topped skull shape had only been seen outside the area, including in Veracruz and in the Maya area, the researchers wanted to test whether the man was local or foreign. Analyzing the chemistry of the man's bones and teeth, however, revealed that he was born in the area, likely lived there his entire life, and died there.

The researchers' speculate that man's uncommon head shape may have some sort of culturally-specific meaning that is still unknown. In many parts of Mesoamerica, slightly different head shapes are known to correlate with different cultural groups. Although this man himself was not from another geographic location, it is possible that the people who shaped his head were members of a different cultural group.

Research into the material recovered from past archaeological investigations at Balcón de Montezuma is ongoing, according to INAH Tamaulipas director Tonantzin Silva Cárdenas, and will help expand experts' understanding of the site and its cultural and historical relationships with other pre-Hispanic groups in the area.

Human skeleton quiz: What do you know about the bones in your body?

Ancient DNA has revealed a mysterious Indigenous group that lived in central Argentina for nearly 8,500 years, a new genetic study reports.

Although the people of this newfound "deep lineage" lived at the same time as two other Indigenous lineages in central Argentina, they barely mixed with others in the area, the researchers found.

In the study, published Nov. 5 in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers analyzed 238 genomes from ancient skeletons of people who lived as long as 10,000 years ago in what is now Argentina. While previous studies had shown that there were distinct populations in the central Andes, the Amazon and Patagonia, little research had been done on the people who lived in the geographical area in between those groups: central Argentina.

"Our big question was: Given its location in the middle of these three populations, were people here a mix of these ancestries, or not?" study co-author Rodrigo Nores, a geneticist at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina, told Science magazine.

Considering the well-documented and rapid spread of ancient people throughout South America — which can be seen in archaeological evidence such as "fishtail" stone projectile points distributed throughout the Southern Cone (the region encompassing Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) — the long-standing assumption was that ancient genomes would provide another line of evidence for how people migrated throughout South America.

But the research team's genomic study of archaeological skeletons revealed a "deep genetic lineage" that persisted for more than 8,000 years in central Argentina — until at least A.D. 1800 — without any significant interaction with the groups surrounding it. While the archaeo-genetic trail ends about 200 years ago, the researchers picked up some clues in the DNA of modern Argentinians. The mystery lineage appears to be the main Indigenous American lineage in the region up to the present day, the researchers wrote in the study.

Given that there are no geographical borders in central Argentina that would have kept people from migrating and interacting with others outside the area, it's unclear why the people in this genetic group kept to themselves. And it's especially surprising considering that, over millennia, central Argentina faced lengthy droughts, a switch from hunting and gathering to agricultural production, and the spread of Amazonian people into their area — all events that typically lead to population turnover.

Although there were myriad languages in central Argentina in the historic era, the similar genetic background of the mystery lineage persisted, meaning linguistic differences did not align with biological differences, the researchers noted in the study. Put another way, the people of this newfound lineage likely spoke many languages.

While the new study is not the final word on the genetic history of Argentina, the researchers wrote that "the genetic structure revealed here provides a basis for correlation to archaeology and enriches our understanding of an important world region."

Canada has officially lost its measles elimination status, meaning the highly contagious disease is once again spreading consistently there.

The declaration was made by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), an international health agency, according to a Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) statement released Monday (Nov. 10). After reviewing recent epidemiological and lab data from Canada, the PAHO concluded that the same measles strain has circulated within the country for over a year.

For an infectious disease to be considered "eliminated" from a region, there must be no endemic transmission for at least a year. "Endemic transmission" refers to the consistent, sustained spread of a disease in a particular population; it does not refer to sporadic cases that might occur after an infected traveler imports a disease from elsewhere, for instance.

In July, the PAHO noted that the Americas have seen a 29-fold increase in measles cases in 2025 compared with 2024. At that time, Canada had reported the largest number of cases of the countries assessed, with 3,170 reported between January and July.

As of late October, Canada had reported more than 5,100 measles cases this year, including 4,777 confirmed cases and 361 probable ones. These cases have been seen in 10 areas: Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories.

This year's cases mark the continuation of a large, multijurisdictional outbreak that first hit the country in October 2024, according to the PHAC statement. "While transmission has slowed recently, the outbreak has persisted for over 12 months, primarily within under-vaccinated communities," PHAC officials said.

Now, PHAC is collaborating with the PAHO and working with federal, provincial, territorial and community partners to improve vaccination coverage, strengthen surveillance efforts and provide evidence-based guidance to communities, according to the statement. Canada could earn back its elimination status if "transmission of the measles strain associated with the current outbreak is interrupted for at least 12 months."

Meanwhile, the United States eliminated measles in 2000 but has seen a similar recent increase in the number of cases. Texas has been hardest hit among the states affected by outbreaks this year, followed by Arizona, New Mexico and Kansas. Per the latest data, nearly 1,700 cases have been reported across the entire U.S. so far in 2025, up from 285 in all of 2024.

"Measles vaccination is the best way to prevent measles and stop outbreaks. We see this clearly by looking at the vaccination status of measles cases in the United States," the Johns Hopkins U.S. Measles Tracker says. "Unvaccinated individuals or those with unknown vaccination status represent almost all reported measles cases" in the country this year.

Although the childhood vaccination schedule has been under renewed scrutiny under Health and Human Services Secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for now the recommendations for measles vaccination have remained much the same.

Nonetheless, measles vaccination rates have been falling to concerningly low levels in the U.S. in recent years. Models suggest that, if current vaccination rates stay steady, the disease may become endemic to the country within 20 years. That scenario would lead to an estimated 851,300 cases, 170,200 hospitalizations and 2,550 deaths from measles over the next 25 years from now. And given that measles can cause a range of long-term health complications in survivors of the illness, the U.S. would also see those knock-on issues surge.

If vaccination rates fall, rather than remain steady as in the above scenario, the projected outcomes are worse, the models show.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

This gilt-copper nose ornament, discovered at the archaeological site of Loma Negra in northern Peru, depicts the important Moche deity Ai Apaec, also known as the Decapitator. The ornament is inlaid with accents of turquoise and black stones for his pupils.

In Moche mythology, Ai Apaec was the supreme creator, a deity who had the power to subdue and restore order. In art from the time, he is commonly depicted with a human face, jaguar fangs, and a spider-like body, along with a ceremonial knife called a tumi in one hand and a decapitated human head in the other to represent his power to subdue.

The Moche, also known as the Mochicas, lived on the coast of northern Peru from A.D. 200 to 900, prior to the rise of the Inca Empire. This piece of jewelry was found at Loma Negra, a rich Moche site near the Ecuadorian border. Hundreds of gold, silver and copper artifacts were looted from tombs at Loma Negra in the late 1960s, but many of them, including this ornament, were eventually donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The Decapitator ornament measures 2.8 by 3.9 inches (7 by 10 centimeters) and was made out of a sheet of gilded copper. Semiprecious stones accentuate the Decapitator's eyes, earrings and belt. Ai Apaec also wears a large, silver nose ornament. The tiny figurine was likely attached to a piece of silver so that someone could wear it as a nose ornament. But because most of the Loma Negra artifacts were looted from graves, it is unclear whether this ornament was associated with a specific person.

Archaeologists have found that the Moche practiced human sacrifice to honor their gods. This ritual was performed for political reasons, such as the killing of captured enemies, but recent research has shown that family members were also sometimes sacrificed to their high-status relatives.

The Decapitator is closely associated with spiders in Moche iconography, but experts are unsure exactly why. According to The Met, "perhaps the manner in which spiders trap their prey in a web and liquefy their internal organs was considered analogous to the Moche practice of prisoner capture and sacrifice by bloodletting."

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

By deciphering hieroglyphic inscriptions on centuries-old rocks, researchers have identified the name of a previously unknown Maya queen. Known as Ix Ch'ak Ch'een, she ruled Cobá, or the "city of choppy water," in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula in the sixth century, according to a translated statement from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

Cobá was a major urban center in the Maya world and was occupied from around 350 B.C. to the 14th century. It had a core of elite houses built around four lakes, along with thousands of residential structures, numerous white stone roads and several pyramids.

In 2024, archaeologists with INAH discovered an extensive hieroglyphic text carved into a stone staircase at Cobá, which they named the Foundation Rock, according to The Yucatan Times. Erosion had badly damaged the Foundation Rock, making it difficult to translate the 123 hieroglyph panels. But additional discoveries, including 23 stelae — freestanding inscribed stone pillars — have provided clues to help experts interpret the texts.

Ancient Mayan text experts David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin and Octavio Esparza Olguín of the National Autonomous University of Mexico recently matched one panel from the Cobá Foundation Rock with two stelae from the site and realized they referred to the same person: Ix Ch'ak Ch'een.

Although the Foundation Rock mentions the coronation of Ix Ch'ak Ch'een, the specific dates for her reign are unclear. However, the Maya queen's name is mentioned in association with building projects that included a ball court, the construction of which is noted to have happened around the date 9.7.0.0.0 in the Maya calendar, or Dec. 8, 573.

Ix Ch'ak Ch'een may have been a particularly powerful queen, as the researchers have linked her to Testigo Cielo, a ruler of the politically and militarily influential Kaan kingdom that was part of the Maya civilization and known for its snake kings.

Female rulers among the Maya were rare — with only a couple dozen known compared to hundreds of kings — but during the Late Classic period (550 to 830), prominent women such as the "Red Queen" came to power. The Red Queen ruled the Maya city of Palenque in the mid-seventh century.

According to Esparza, research on the Foundation Rock has already provided essential information on dynastic rulers and historical events that happened at Cobá, but their investigation is ongoing.

Ancient Maya quiz: What do you know about the civilization that built pyramids across Mesoamerica?

Scientists analyzing 1,300-year-old human feces from the Cave of the Dead Children in Mexico have discovered that people often dealt with nasty intestinal infections more than a millennium ago.

"Working with these ancient samples was like opening a biological time capsule, with each one revealing insight into human health and daily life," study lead author Drew Capone, an assistant professor of environmental health at Indiana University, said in a statement.

Capone and colleagues used molecular analysis techniques to study 10 ancient desiccated feces samples — also called paleofeces — found in a cave in Mexico's Rio Zape Valley just north of the city of Durango in northwestern Mexico, that dated from A.D. 725 to 920. The researchers published their findings Wednesday (Oct. 22) in the journal PLOS One.

In the late 1950s, archaeologists excavated the Cave of the Dead Children and recovered human and non-human paleofeces, plant remains and animal and human bones from a large trash heap. The cave was used by people from the prehistoric Loma San Gabriel culture, who practiced small-scale agriculture, produced unique ceramics, lived in small villages and occasionally practiced child sacrifice. Archaeologists named the cave after the skeletons of children found there.

Previous studies of paleofeces from the cave revealed the presence of hookworm, whipworm and pinworm eggs, suggesting the people who deposited their feces in the cave were infected by a variety of parasites.

In the new study, the scientists used cutting-edge molecular techniques to detect additional microbes in paleofeces from 10 "distinct defecation events" with the aim of expanding their understanding of the burden of disease among the Loma people. "There is a lot of potential in the application of modern molecular methods to inform studies of the past," study co-author Joe Brown, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in the statement.

The researchers extracted DNA from the 10 paleofeces samples and then used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify the DNA of the microbes in the feces. Every sample had at least one pathogen or gut microbe in it, and the two most common were the intestinal parasite Blastocystis, which can cause gastrointestinal issues, and multiple strains of the bacterium E. coli, which were found in 70% of the samples. Also identified were pinworms as well as Shigella and Giardia, which cause intestinal illnesses.

The high number of microbes discovered in the paleofeces "suggests poor sanitation among the Loma San Gabriel culture from 600-800 CE resulted in exposures to fecal wastes in the environment," the researchers wrote in the study. People likely ingested the microbes via feces-contaminated drinking water, soil or food, the team added.

While these pathogen-associated genes persisted in the paleofeces for up to 1,300 years, there may have been even more pathogens in the samples that have since decayed and are no longer detectable, the researchers noted in the study.

Still, the new analysis revealed the DNA of pathogens that were not previously found in paleofeces, including Blastocystis and Shigella.

"The application of these methods to other ancient samples offers the potential to expand our understanding of how ancient peoples lived and the pathogens that may have impacted their health," the researchers wrote.

The growth of a pre-Inca civilization known as the Wari may have been aided by psychedelic-laced beer, researchers propose in a new study.

The Wari flourished from roughly A.D. 600 to 1000 and are known for their mummified burials, human sacrifices, and elaborate objects created out of gold, silver and bronze. They also built cities such as Huari and Pikillaqta, which contained temples and dwellings for elite inhabitants, and controlled much of Peru as well as parts of Argentina and Chile.

In the new study, published Monday (Oct. 6) in the journal La Revista de Arqueología Americana (The Journal of American Archaeology), the researchers suggest that Wari rulers used psychedelics mixed in beer to help grow their empire. They explain that the "afterglow" — the long-term effect of drinking the mix — would have lasted weeks and that communal feasts where it was drunk would have brought people together. While the body may excrete psychedelics quickly, the aftereffects can last for days or weeks.

The study authors noted that the remains of seeds from a plant named Anadenanthera colubrina (also known as vilca) have been found at Wari sites, including near the remains of beer made from a plant called Schinus molle. Mixing the vilca, which is known to produce a psychedelic effect, with the beer would have "lessened but extended the high," Justin Jennings, a curator of South American Archaeology at the Royal Ontario Museum and co-author of the paper, told Live Science in an email.

In the paper, the authors noted that scientific studies of similarly acting psychedelics found that people who took them tended to display "greater openness and empathy."

These traits "would have been highly desirable for a Wari political system that depended on friendly, routine face-to-face interactions between people who had once been strangers or even enemies," the researchers wrote in their paper.

People would have drunk the psychedelic beer together at communal feasts held within enclosed areas at the residences of Wari officials. This shared experience would have enhanced the event, the researchers said.

"When guests came to the Wari compounds, they gathered in patios that could only comfortably fit a couple dozen people," the team wrote. "Except for a patch of sky, they were cut off from the rest of the world in a high-walled interior space — this was the place where they would spend hours together drinking, eating, talking, and praying," the researchers wrote in their paper.

"The hours that participants spent together must have been an unforgettable collective experience that forged strong bonds between participants," they added.

Building an empire

The regular, widespread use of the psychedelic beer and its afterglow played a key role in the Wari Empire's consolidation of political power, said Jacob Keer, an independent scholar and co-author of the paper.

The "long-term psychological effects of drinking vilca beer a few times a year could constitute a new cognitive normal, instilling increased openness and empathy in feast participants," the researchers wrote in their paper. "Within the context of an expanding empire where violence and animosity was commonplace, the lingering effects [of consuming it] may have been integral to Wari legitimization and consolidation."

Scholars who were not involved with the research had mixed reactions to the conclusions in the paper, however. Patrick Ryan Williams, director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, said the team put forward an "interesting hypothesis" but cautioned that we can't be certain that vilca was actually mixed into beer.

"I am not convinced, however, that the discovery of vilca seeds in an area where molle beer was consumed constitutes evidence of vilca being included as an ingredient in beer," Williams said, as it would be like finding cocaine on the floor of a nightclub and assuming the drug was put into drinks.

"When a chemical trace for vilca is found in the ceramic pores of drinking cups, I will be more open to the premise presented here," Williams said.

Mary Glowacki, an archaeologist and president of the Pre-Columbian Archaeological Research Group, called the paper "thought-provoking" but noted that "most early Andean societies used intoxicating substances — including vilca — for political negotiation." She questioned whether the Wari's use of psychedelics was greatly different from that of other groups in the region.

Divers have recovered over 1,000 coins from a shipwreck off the east coast of Florida. The coins were discovered this summer within the historical "Treasure Fleet" of Spanish ships that sank in July 1715, when hundreds of sailors and over $400 million worth of gold and silver disappeared into the ocean.

In a statement, representatives for 1715 Fleet - Queens Jewels, a shipwreck salvage company authorized to dive to the wrecks, wrote that they had recovered more than 1,000 silver reales (also called "pieces of eight") and five gold escudos, along with other rare gold artifacts. Both types of coin were common currency in the Spanish colonies in the Americas.

"Each coin is a piece of history, a tangible link to the people who lived, worked, and sailed during the Golden Age of the Spanish Empire," Sal Guttuso, director of operations for 1715 Fleet - Queens Jewels, said in the statement. "Finding 1,000 of them in a single recovery is both rare and extraordinary."

The coins were most likely minted in the Spanish colonies of Mexico, Peru and Bolivia, according to the statement. Some have mint marks and visible dates, and their excellent condition suggests that they were part of a single collection that spilled and were quickly buried when one of the ships broke apart.

The 1715 fleet, also known as the "Plate Fleet," had been loaded with coins and other products from Spanish colonies, and the 12 ships set sail from Cuba on their annual trip back to Spain on July 24. After a few days of sailing, the fleet encountered an intense hurricane off the east coast of Florida. Eleven ships sank, and their remains were scattered over a span of 50 miles (80 kilometers). Some of the treasure was recovered soon after the disaster, but much of it remained under the ocean for centuries.

"Every find helps piece together the human story of the 1715 fleet," Guttuso said. The coins will be conserved and displayed to the public at local museums, according to the statement.

Exploration of the 1715 shipwrecks has produced other impressive finds over the past decade. In 2015, divers found an extremely rare Spanish coin called a "tricentennial royal" that had been minted for King Philip V of Spain, along with nearly $1 million worth of gold coins and gold chains. But that team, headed by Eric Schmitt of Booty Salvage, failed to report 50 coins they found in the shipwreck. Local authorities working with the FBI managed to recover most of the stolen coins in 2024.

Various treasures from the wrecked fleet are likely still hidden under the ocean. The fleet was said to be carrying jewels belonging to Philip V's second wife as part of her dowry, including a 74-carat emerald ring and 14-carat pearl earrings.

Under Florida law, removal of artifacts from shipwrecks is illegal unless a permit is secured. 1715 Fleet - Queens Jewels has exclusive rights to dive at the wrecks.

Archaeologists have uncovered a massive 3D mural on the northwest coast of Peru. Blue, yellow, red and black paints still adorn the 3,000-year-old mural, which is decorated with fish, stars and mythological beings.

"The imagery, decorative techniques and exceptional state of preservation make this a truly unprecedented discovery in the region," Cecilia Mauricio, an archaeologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru who found the mural, told Live Science in an email.

Mauricio and her team began digging at the archaeological site of Huaca Yolanda in early July. During the first week of excavation, they uncovered the mural, which dates to the Formative Period (2000 to 1000 B.C.), so called because the first complex societies arose in what is now Peru at this time. The mural is nearly 20 feet (6 meters) long and 9.5 feet (2.9 m) tall.

The south face of the mural depicts a large bird with outstretched wings and a diamond motif on its head, Mauricio said, possibly representing an eagle or a falcon. On the north face, there are plants, stars and human-like figures that "seem to represent shamans," who were powerful people in that time period, Mauricio said.

"Current evidence suggests that the mural decorated interior spaces within the main atrium of a Formative Period temple," Mauricio said.

Related: Massive circular tomb filled with battle-scarred people unearthed in Peru

Huaca Yolanda was probably occupied at the same time as Chavín de Huántar, which was a major ritual site in the Andes before the birth of the Inca Empire. The Chavín civilization was located in the highlands and developed sophisticated agricultural techniques, metallurgy and textile production. People at this site left behind murals that depict jaguars and reptiles that are predators in the jungle lowlands.

But the mural at Huaca Yolanda is different from those found at Chavín because it reflects a distinctive coastal artistic tradition, including imagery of fish and fishing nets.

Unlike Chavín, Huaca Yolanda is not an officially protected archaeological site. In a statement from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Mauricio is asking the Peruvian Ministry of Culture, regional authorities and heritage organizations to safeguard the site to preserve this rare window into a formative and sophisticated past.

The first people to step foot in the Americas were harboring a sliver of DNA from two extinct Eurasian human groups: the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, a new study finds. This genetic relic could have helped the earliest Americans fight diseases they encountered in their new environment, the researchers proposed.

Everyone alive today is "a result of like three different species coming together," study co-author Fernando Villanea, a population geneticist at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Live Science.

"What we think has happened is that humans had this archaic variation," study co-author Emilia Huerta-Sanchez, a population geneticist at Brown University, told Live Science. As people expanded into the Americas, they did not have to wait to develop new mutations to fight off new pathogens and could instead draw from the arsenal of genetic variants they gained from other human groups, she said.

In the new study, published Thursday (Aug. 21) in the journal Science, the researchers detailed their analysis of MUC19, a protein-coding gene with various functions, including coding for the consistency of mucus. They found that 1 in 3 Mexicans alive today has an MUC19 gene similar to that of Denisovans, a mysterious group of ancient humans who lived throughout Asia from about 200,000 to 30,000 years ago.

Research into MUC19 in Indigenous Americans has focused on two different aspects. One set of researchers previously showed that people with Indigenous American ancestry carry a high number of ancient human variants of MUC19, whereas the other set found that the MUC19 gene as a whole became more common over time in North American Indigenous populations because it was evolutionary advantageous.

But in the new study, the researchers discovered that the length of the Denisovan MUC19 DNA segment in Indigenous Americans has increased over time and that the variant hitched a ride from Neanderthals in an Oreo-like gene sandwich, Villanea said in a statement. This is the first time scientists have found a Denisovan gene that came to humans via Neanderthals.

"It's wild," Villanea said. "Is this the only instance of this happening, or are there more? We are still trying to figure [it] out."

Related: 'More Neanderthal than human': How your health may depend on DNA from our long-lost ancestors

A DNA sandwich

To test whether the Denisovan-specific variants of MUC19 were beneficial for Indigenous Americans, the team compared the genetic data available on modern Mexican, Peruvian, Colombian and Puerto Rican individuals from the 1000 Genomes Project with the genetic sequences of 23 Indigenous people, most of whom lived in the Americas prior to the 13th century, as well as three Neanderthals and one Denisovan.

The team found that modern-day Mexicans had the highest frequency of the Denisovan-specific MUC19 variants, with about 33% of the population carrying this version of the gene. About 20% of Peruvians carried the variant, whereas only around 1% of Colombians and Puerto Ricans did. The researchers think this is because, on average, Mexicans have more Indigenous American DNA in their genomes than the other populations do.

When the team investigated which archaic human group had passed on these gene variants, they were surprised to see that the Denisovan section of the gene was sandwiched between Neanderthal-specific DNA. The most likely explanation for this is that Neanderthals first acquired these variants from mating with Denisovans, and when Neanderthals later mated with modern humans, they passed on this surprise genetic parcel, the researchers said.

"The researchers took this complex pattern, and they were able to parse it out in the context of past human demographic events," Ripan Malhi, a molecular anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science in an email. The work is impressive, he said, and now we need to learn more about the function of the Denisovan MUC19 gene.

This is the next step for Villanea and his team, who are planning to look at new research collections of biological samples that have both genomic and trait data from Latino or Indigenous American people to see how the Denisovan-specific variants affect protein function.

Depending on exactly what the Denisovan MUC19 variant does, it may help the immune system fight some specific pathogens or regulate particular immune responses, Huerta-Sanchez said. "We suspect that it's going to be doing something drastically different" from what the modern human variant does, Villanea said.

Human evolution quiz: What do you know about Homo sapiens?

Archaeologists have discovered four 18th-century shipwrecks off the coast of North Carolina, including what may be the wreck of La Fortuna, a Spanish privateer from Cuba that exploded during an attack in 1748.

The wrecks were found near Brunswick Town, a major Colonial port on the southern coast of North Carolina. The town was the first successful European settlement of the Cape Fear region (named due to 16th-century sailors' fears of getting shipwrecked), and the port was used to export pine products like tar and turpentine used by the Royal Navy. But archaeologists surveying the area had not expected to find such a large number of wrecks and colonial artifacts.

"Visibility [underwater] is consistently pretty low in the Cape Fear River," Cory van Hees, a graduate student at East Carolina University (ECU), said in a statement. Van Hees got disoriented while diving and came across beams of wood sticking out of the mud. "I didn't understand what I was looking at in that moment," van Hees said, "but I knew I should relay the wooden structure to faculty."

The project co-leaders, ECU maritime archaeologists Jason Raupp and Jeremy Borrelli, think one of the wrecks, which comprises 47 timbers, is La Fortuna. Historical records note that two Spanish ships anchored off Brunswick Town on Sept. 4, 1748. The Spanish began to raid the then-English town, but they were surprised by a counterattack from the colonists a couple of days later. During the attack, La Fortuna exploded and sank.

The project team found two major clues that the wreck is indeed La Fortuna: the timbers and the artifacts nearby, including Spanish pottery.

Some of the wood used in the ship's construction was from a cypress species native to Central America. This suggests that shipbuilders used raw materials from a Spanish Caribbean colony to construct the ship, according to the statement, and La Fortuna is the only Spanish ship known to have sunk in this area.

Related: Coins worth over $1 million recovered from 1715 Spanish treasure shipwrecks in Florida

While recording the shipwrecks this summer, the team "found hundreds of artifacts," Borrelli told Live Science in an email, including "ceramic sherds, glass container bottles, clay tobacco pipes, a cooper's adze [cutting tool], barrel heads and staves, sailcloth, leather shoes, possible clothing fragments, and butchered animal bone." In addition, two fragments of 18th-century Spanish-American ceramics are "another clue supporting the preliminary identification of La Fortuna," Borrelli said.

The other three wrecks are still something of a mystery. All of them have construction details and artifacts that suggest they were used in the 1700s, Borrelli said, which means the wrecks are likely associated with the 50-year lifespan of the Colonial port at Brunswick Town. But coastal erosion has dramatically impacted the archaeological site, scattering the shipwrecks' remains over a wide area, he said.

Raupp and Borrelli plan to continue their investigation into the wrecks.

"As we dig deeper and uncover more evidence, it may lead us in another direction," Borrelli said. "It is highly improbable that any of the other shipwrecks found at Brunswick Town are Spanish vessels, but we can't rule anything out at the moment."

The Nazca people lived in a tropical desert on the southwestern coast of Peru between 100 B.C. and A.D. 800. So how did they know what a penguin looked like, and why did they honor one with its own ceramic pot?

This painted penguin pot is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was made about 1,600 years ago and was collected in Peru in the late 19th century. The multicolored ceramic vessel is 8.2 inches (20.8 centimeters) tall and has tiny, sculpted wings and a prominent bill.

The Nazca (also spelled Nasca) people are best known for their enormous geoglyphs — designs that are carved into the ground but are most easily seen from above. Hundreds of Nazca Lines have been discovered. They often depict images from the natural world, such as a cat, a monkey, a pelican and a killer whale. Experts don't know why the Nazca created these geoglyphs, as the culture left no written records.

Related: Monomachos Crown: The 1,000-year-old crown honoring 'the one who fights alone' found by a farmer in a field

But Nazca pottery also featured animals, people, mythical creatures and gods in unique, multicolored styles reminiscent of the geoglyphs, pointing to the importance of these creatures to their society.

According to the Art Institute of Chicago, this vessel is a rare depiction of the Humboldt penguin (Spheniscus humboldti), a species that lives along the Pacific Coast and is known for projectile pooping. The penguins can live along the Peruvian coast thanks to the Humboldt Current, which brings frigid water from Antarctica northward, chilling the tropical water. Humboldt penguins have thrived in Peru for centuries, but they are now vulnerable to extinction due to climate change and human encroachment.

The penguin vessel dates to a period when the Nazca were experimenting with realistic depictions of animals, including a lobster-shaped vessel and numerous examples of the "mythical killer whale." Although the orca — which features in ceramics, geoglyphs and petroglyphs — was clearly an important symbol to the Nazca, experts are unsure whether the penguin vessel held any special meaning or whether it reflects the Nazca's keen observation of the natural world around them.

While installing a water pipeline in Argentina last month, workers stumbled upon the skull of a child who was buried at least 700 years ago. The archaeological discovery quickly garnered media attention because of the asymmetry of the skull, drawing comparisons to aliens.

But the flattening on the back of the skull, which belonged to a 3- to 4-year-old child, is simply the result of the cultural practice of head shaping, Cristian Sebastián Melián, director of the Provincial Directorate of Anthropology in Catamarca, Argentina, told Live Science in a translated email.

The skull was found on May 27 in the town of San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca in northwestern Argentina. When archaeologists investigated the pits made in the infrastructure project, they found broken and burned llama remains, along with a ceramic vessel typical of pottery from the Inca occupation there between 1430 and 1530, Melián said.

But the child's skull was found several feet away along with the rest of the skeleton, which was placed in the grave in the fetal position. Although the child had no grave goods, pottery fragments in the dirt suggested a date of death around 1100 to 1300.

The archaeologists did not see any trauma on the child's skeleton, but they noted the "pronounced cultural cranial alteration of the oblique tabular type," Melián said.

The practice of head shaping, or cranial modification, dates back thousands of years and has been found in all parts of the world. While some cultures used long stretches of cloth wrapped around a baby's head to create an elongated shape, others applied padding to the front or back of the baby's head to create a flatter shape. Nowadays, often for medical purposes, parents may employ a special helmet to ensure their baby has a round, symmetrical head.

Related: 'Cone-headed' skull from Iran was bashed in 6,200 years ago, but no one knows why

The child's skull found in San Fernando was likely shaped using padding to encourage the "oblique tabular" shape, which is flat or sloping at the front and back of the skull. This practice can cause the sides of the skull to widen and appear bulged.

Most scholars of ancient head shaping agree that the practice had few, if any, negative health consequences. Instead, experts say the practice was linked to social identity or to child-rearing preferences.

Currently, the Provincial Directorate of Anthropology has more than 100 skulls from ancient people in its skeletal collection, Melián said, and evidence of head shaping is extremely common.

"Approximately 90% of them have an erect or oblique tabular shape" to their skulls, Melián said.

Archaeologists have uncovered two large piles of iron flakes on North Carolina's Hatteras Island that they say are evidence of a 16th-century "Lost Colony" of English settlers who disappeared in 1587. But some experts are unconvinced and say more evidence is needed.

"We've been digging there for 10 years off and on," Mark Horton, an archaeology professor at the Royal Agricultural University in the U.K., told Live Science, "and I think the real breakthrough was the hammer scale mixed in with 16th-century artifacts."

Hammer scale is a flaky byproduct of traditional blacksmithing. When iron is heated, a thin layer of iron oxide can form, which is then crushed into small pieces as the blacksmith hammers the iron.

"The colonists must have been desperate for a type of material that they otherwise didn't have," Horton said. "They're forging new iron artifacts from the material that they've got with them," he said, to make "new nails for building houses or ships."

Horton studies the Lost Colony, a group of about 120 English settlers who arrived on Roanoke Island in North Carolina's Outer Banks in 1587. The colonists struggled to survive and sent their leader, John White, back to England for supplies. When White returned in 1590, he couldn't find his compatriots — but he discovered the word "CROATOAN" carved into wood.

For centuries, historians and archaeologists have been puzzled by the disappearance of the colony. They've wondered whether the Croatoan tribe killed the settlers or whether the English moved elsewhere, perhaps to live with members of the Croatoan tribe on what is now called Hatteras Island.

Related: Jamestown colonists killed and ate the dogs of Indigenous Americans

"But then last summer, we did an excavation on Hatteras Island, and we found hammer scale in a pit underneath a thick shell midden that contains virtually no European material in it at all," Horton said, adding that he thinks the English basically assimilated into the Indigenous tribe.

Radiocarbon dating of the layer of dirt in which the hammer scale was found suggests its age aligns with the Lost Colony. Since hammer scale is waste and not something that is traded, and because the Indigenous people are not known to have used iron forging technology, this iron trash strongly suggests that the English settlers made it to Hatteras Island in the late 16th century, Horton said. His group's finding has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The new discovery fits in well with historical and archaeological information, Kathleen DuVal, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Live Science. "It absolutely makes sense that the Lost Colony would have moved to Hatteras Island," DuVal said. "They wrote exactly where they were going: to Croatoan."

But not everyone is convinced by the piles of hammer scale. "I would like to see a hearth if we're talking about forging activity," Charles Ewen, a professor emeritus of archaeology at East Carolina University, told Live Science.

And even then, the hammer scale may be from Indigenous people's repurposing of the colonists' items for their own use, Ewen said, or it could even be trash from 16th-century explorers and settlers who stopped over while sailing the Gulf Stream up the East Coast. "The hammer scale is just not doing it for me without good context — and without a report, I'm not seeing good context," he said.

Horton said that, with archaeological excavations largely complete at the site — which is on private land, with cooperation from the landowner — he and his team plan to move forward with a publication.

"The hammer scale is another piece of really compelling evidence that we've got," Horton said, "but there are still several loose ends." For example, it is still a mystery whether some of the colonists moved elsewhere and whether some of them died at the Roanoke Island or Hatteras Island settlements.

Ewen, who co-authored the 2024 book "Becoming the Lost Colony: The History, Lore and Popular Culture of the Roanoke Mystery" (McFarland, 2024), said the archaeological and historical evidence does not clarify what happened to the Lost Colony. But he thinks that someday, the mystery might be solved, particularly "if we could find European burials that we could tie to the 16th century with European materials and not trade items," Ewen said.

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of three Maya cities in the Petén jungle of Guatemala.

The cities are about 3 miles (5 kilometers) apart and are arranged like a triangle, Guatemala's Ministry of Culture and Sports reported in a translated statement. The cities were settled sometime during a period that archaeologists call the "middle preclassic," which occurred between roughly 1000 and 400 B.C. They were inhabited until around 1,100 years ago, when many Maya cities in the region collapsed.

The most important of the three cities is a site archaeologists are calling "Los Abuelos," which means "the grandparents." This name comes from two stone sculptures found at the site: one of a man and another of a woman. They are believed to depict ancestors of those who lived at the site, the statement said, noting that this city may have been a ceremonial center for those who lived in the area.

Los Abuelos thrived during the Middle Preclassic (1000 B.C. to 400 B.C.) and Late Preclassic periods (400 B.C. to A.D. 300) before being abandoned and then reinhabited during the Late Classic period (A.D. 600 to 900). It has an astronomical complex with buildings positioned in such a way that solstices and equinoxes can be recorded precisely, the statement said. The remains of a human burial were found at the site, along with the remains of two felines, pottery vessels, shells and arrowheads.

Archaeologists also discovered an altar in the shape of a frog and an engraved stone slab known as a stela. Once the Mayan writing on the stela is translated, it may provide more information about the site and the people who lived there.

Another newly found city, which archaeologists named "Petnal," has a 108-foot-tall (33 meters) pyramid, the statement said. The top of the pyramid is flat and has a room that houses the remains of murals on its walls. Red, white and black from the murals can still be seen, but more research is needed to determine what the murals depict.

Petnal was likely a political center, according to the statement. A frog-shaped altar was also found there. The frog is perceived as a symbol of fertility and rebirth in Maya mythology, wrote researchers Robert Sharer and Loa Traxler in their book "The Ancient Maya: Sixth Edition" (Stanford University Press, 2006). Frog altars have been found at other Maya sites and presumably would have been used in rituals.

The third newly found city, which the archaeologists dubbed "Cambrayal," has a network of canals that originates in a water reservoir at the top of a palace, the statement reported. The main purpose of the canals may have been for removing waste.

"It's especially exciting to learn about the Los Abuelos site," Megan O'Neil, an associate professor of art history at Emory University who was not part of the excavation team, told Live Science in an email. The stone sculptures found at the site "are especially poignant and are similar to many other examples of Maya people making offerings to vital sculptures and connecting with their ancestors by interacting with sculptures from the past."

O'Neil noted that it was important that archaeologists found the remains of intact ceramic vessels during their excavation. In the past, this region was heavily looted and the pottery made by the ancient Maya was taken and sold on the international market. The new finds may "help reconnect items in private and museum collections with their places of origin and deposition, helping return memory to those ceramics, to these sites, and to Maya people living in this region and across the world," O'Neil said.

The discoveries of the three cities, along with other newly found sites in the region, were made by a team of archaeologists from Slovakia and Guatemala who were part of the Uaxactún Archaeological Project (PARU), which searches for Maya ruins near the Maya city of Uaxactún. Since 2009, PARU has discovered 176 sites, although only 20 have been excavated. Live Science reached out to archaeologists involved with the research, but they did not answer questions by the time of publication.

Skeletons buried near the ancient Maya city of Copán have revealed new clues about the collapse, but not total decimation, of the Maya civilization.

A study of the genomes of seven people from the Classic Maya period (A.D. 250 to 900) of Copán in what is now western Honduras showed that the population dramatically shrank around 1,200 years ago.

"Our findings indicate a decline in population size" among the Maya, study co-author Shigeki Nakagome, an assistant professor of genomic medicine at Trinity College Dublin, told Live Science in an email, which "aligns with a scenario proposed by archaeologists in which the population decreased but did not become entirely extinct."

Nakagome and colleagues published their findings Wednesday (May 28) in the journal Current Biology. In their study, the researchers investigated the hypothesis that outsiders assumed power at Copán in the late 420s and explored how interactions between locals and non-locals created social and cultural change at this important Maya center.

Copán was a major capital located at the extreme southeast of the Classic Maya civilization, functioning as a kind of crossroads between Central and South America. The royal dynasty that ruled for four centuries was established at Copán in A.D. 426 by a man known as K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo', who was an outsider according to inscriptions. Previous genomic and isotopic analyses of skeletons from other Maya sites have suggested that migration and gene flow were common, but the nature of that gene mixing at Copán had never before been investigated.

Based on their sequencing of genomes of seven people buried at Copán, the researchers discovered that the people all had different maternal lineages. Two males, however, belonged to the same Y-chromosome lineage and were buried together: one male in a wealthy burial was a possible dynastic ruler and the other male was a potential sacrifice.

But the men were not closely related. "Even though the dynastic ruler and the sacrificed individual share the same Y-chromosome haplogroup," Nakagome said, "we did not find any kinship." The lineage the men share is common among present-day Indigenous American populations, he said.

Related: Secret of ancient Maya blue pigment revealed from cracks and clues on a dozen bowls from Chichén Itzá

By comparing the seven ancient genomes to previously sequenced genomes across Siberia and the Americas, the researchers found strong evidence of genetic continuity in the Maya region from the Late Archaic period, roughly 3700 B.C. to 1000 B.C., to the present day. These genetic data suggest "the enduring persistence of local ancestry in the Maya region," the researchers wrote in the study.

They also found that during the Classic Maya period, there was an influx of people with highland Mexican ancestry, possibly from other Maya sites such as Chichén Itzá. These "outsiders" — perhaps part of the ruling dynasty of Copán — mixed with the locals, creating a population with two main ancestries.

Delving further into the genomic data of the seven individuals, the researchers were able to estimate the size of the Maya population at specific points in time. According to their model, "the population in the Maya region appears to have experienced significant growth in effective size, reaching approximately 19,000 [people]" around A.D. 730, they wrote. The increase may be related to the advent of maize agriculture, which could have supported a larger population. Then, the population size began to decline around A.D. 750, "coinciding with the onset of the collapse of Classic Maya civilization," they wrote.

Although the population dramatically dwindled with the collapse of the Maya political system, the researchers ultimately found support in their analysis for population persistence through time.

"The genetic continuity observed in our study supports the idea that the population was not replaced by another group after the collapse." The genomes of the more than 7 million present-day Maya are closely related to the genomes of ancient Maya.

Ancient Maya quiz: What do you know about the civilization that built pyramids across Mesoamerica?

While investigating a cave high in the mountains of Mexico, a spelunker thought she had found a pile of trash from a modern-day litterbug. But upon closer inspection, she discovered that the "trash" was actually a cache of artifacts that may have been used in fertility rituals more than 500 years ago.

"I looked in, and it seemed like the cave continued. You had to hold your breath and dive a little to get through," speleologist Katiya Pavlova said in a translated statement. "That's when we discovered the two rings around the stalagmites."

The cave, called Tlayócoc, is in the Mexican state of Guerrero and about 7,800 feet (2,380 meters) above sea level. Meaning "Cave of Badgers" in the Indigenous Nahuatl language, Tlayócoc is known locally as a source of water and bat guano. In September 2023, Pavlova and local guide Adrián Beltrán Dimas ventured into the cave — possibly the first time anyone has entered it in about five centuries.

Roughly 500 feet (150 m) into the cave, the ceiling dipped down. The pair of explorers had to navigate the flooded cave with a gap of just 6 inches (15 centimeters) between the water and the cave ceiling. "Adrián was scared, but the water was deep enough, and I went through first to show him it wasn't that difficult," Pavlova said.

While taking a break to look around, Pavlova and Beltrán were shocked to discover 14 artifacts.

"It was very exciting and incredible!" Pavlova said. "We were lucky here."

Related: 2,500-year-old burials of 3 people discovered in a cave in Mexico

Among the artifacts were four shell bracelets, a giant decorated snail shell (genus Strombus), two complete stone disks and six disk fragments, and a piece of carbonized wood. Pavlova and Beltrán immediately contacted Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), which sent archaeologists to recover the artifacts in March.

Given the arrangement of the bracelets — which had been looped over small, rounded stalagmites with "phallic connotations" — the archaeologists speculated that fertility rituals were likely performed in Tlayócoc cave, they said in the statement.

"For pre-Hispanic cultures, caves were sacred places associated with the underworld and considered the womb of the Earth," INAH archaeologist Miguel Pérez Negrete said in the statement.

Three of the bracelets have incised decorations. An S-shaped symbol known as "xonecuilli" is associated with the planet Venus and the measurement of time, while the profile of a human-like figure may represent the creator god Quetzalcoatl.

Pérez dated the artifacts to the Postclassic period of Mesoamerican history, between A.D. 950 and 1521, and suggested that they were made by members of the little-known Tlacotepehua culture that inhabited the region.

"It's very likely that, because they were found in a close environment where humidity is fairly stable, the objects were able to survive for so many centuries," Pérez said.

Ancient Maya quiz: What do you know about the civilization that built pyramids across Mesoamerica?

The ancient Maya civilization stretched throughout Central America and lasted for nearly three millennia. Although never unified into one massive empire, the Maya controlled dozens of city-states, also known as "polities," which arose when people settled in permanent villages and began to cultivate maize. The ancient Maya are well known for their pyramids and for their series of calendars — one of which convinced many people that the world would end in an apocalypse on Dec. 21, 2012. While the ancient political system collapsed between A.D. 800 and 1000, the society did not. Today, more than 7 million Maya live in their original homelands and beyond.

Are you up to date on recent research on the ancient Maya? Take our quiz to find out.

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An 800-year-old mummy donated to a museum in Italy a century ago has revealed new clues about ancient face tattoos. But the mummy's origin remains shrouded in mystery.

Some time prior to 1930, the mummy of an adult female was donated to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (MAET) at the University of Turin, with no records of its archaeological context. The mummy recently caught the attention of a team of researchers due to the surprising presence of tattoos on her face.

In a study published in the May-June issue of the Journal of Cultural Heritage, the international team of researchers detailed their analysis of the mummy and her tattoos, noting that they were extremely unusual both in their location and in the composition of the ink used to make them.

The mummy has straight black hair cropped short and is tightly flexed into a seated position, typical of mummy burials in the Andes. Researchers carbon-dated textile fragments stuck to the body and determined the woman died between A.D. 1215 and 1382.

"On the basis of current evidence — particularly preservation, body placement, associated materials and documents — a South American origin is strongly supported," study lead author Gianluigi Mangiapane, an anthropologist at the University of Turin, told Live Science in an email.

Related: Lasers reveal hidden patterns in tattoos of 1,200-year-old Peru mummies

But while looking closely at the mummy using infrared reflectography, a technique often used to "see through" paint layers of artwork to find older brush strokes, the research team noted a series of unusual tattoos: three lines on the mummy's right cheek, one line on the left cheek and an S-shape on the right wrist.

"Skin marks on the face are rare among the groups of the ancient Andean region and even rarer on the cheeks," the researchers wrote in the study, and the S-shaped tattoo "is so far unique for the Andean region."

To identify the ink used to make the tattoos, the researchers used a suite of non-destructive techniques. Although they expected to find evidence of charcoal in the ink, they instead discovered that the unusual ink was made with magnetite, an iron oxide mineral, with traces of the mineral augite. In South America, augite and magnetite can be found together in southern Peru, suggesting a potential homeland for the mummified woman.

"There are a small number of ethnographic accounts from the Americas that describe the use of mineral or earth pigments such as hematite or magnetite for tattooing, and the new study fits quite nicely with those," Aaron Deter-Wolf, an archaeologist at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology who was not involved in the study, told Live Science by email.

But Deter-Wolf, who is an expert in ancient tattooing, is not convinced that the mystery mummy hails from the Andes.

"Stylistically, these particular face markings have far more in common with historic Arctic or Amazonian traditions than with Andean practices," Deter-Wolf said. "It would be fascinating to see what oxygen isotopes or other studies might be able to tell us about the origins of this individual."

At this stage, though, isotope analyses have not been carried out. "Since these types of analyses are invasive, we have currently decided to limit such procedures in order to preserve the integrity of the remains," Mangiapane said.

But the MAET that houses the mummy is interested in further investigation, Mangiapane said, and this may include future cultural comparisons to better understand the nature of the mysterious mummy's facial tattoos.

Mummy quiz: Can you unwrap these ancient Egyptian mysteries?

During the last ice age, humans crossing from Asia along the Bering Land Bridge underwent three major population splits as they traveled through the Americas, a new genetic analysis reveals. This journey, which the team identified as the "longest human migration out of Africa," led to a group that settled in Patagonia 14,500 years ago.

In a study published Thursday (May 15) in the journal Science, an international team of scientists detailed their analysis of 1,537 genomes of people from 139 different ethnic groups to identify genetic characteristics of the earliest Americans.

"Many Indigenous populations are small and genetically unique," study co-author Hie Lim Kim, a population genomics professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, told Live Science by email. "One of the main findings of our study is their extremely low genetic diversity."

By analyzing genetic material collected by the GenomeAsia 100K consortium, which includes data from Asian populations whose ancestors made early migrations into the Americas, Kim and her team were able to identify the genetic background of Indigenous people throughout the Americas and pinpoint three key time periods when they split up.

The first population split occurred between 26,800 and 19,300 years ago during the Last Glacial Maximum, the researchers wrote in the study, as Indigenous Americans split from North Eurasian people. These dates are consistent with Native American presence at White Sands in New Mexico in the form of ancient footprints and vehicle drag marks dated to 23,000 to 21,000 years ago.

Related: Ancient Indigenous lineage of Blackfoot Confederacy goes back 18,000 years to last ice age, DNA reveals

According to the study, the next major population split happened between 17,500 and 14,600 years ago, when the Indigenous population in North America split, and some people made their way south. This Mesoamerican group then split rapidly into four native genetic lineages around 13,900 years ago, the researchers wrote: Chaco Amerindians or ancestral Pueblo peoples in the southwest U.S. and Amazonians, Andeans and Patagonians in South America.

"Our estimation actually fits well with the archaeological records" of people in Patagonia, Kim said, which place people living in the furthest southern reaches of the continent by about 14,500 years ago. "It takes some time to accumulate genetic differences between the populations after they have settled in different regions in South America," Kim explained.

But as people made their way into the new continent tens of thousands of years ago, they experienced a reduction in their genetic diversity — due first to geographic barriers, and later to populations being decimated after the arrival of European colonists.

One key loss, the research team discovered, was in the variation in human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes. A high diversity of HLA genes in a population is important for immune system health. Previous studies found that, in regions such as Southeast Asia with a high number of disease-causing organisms, there was a higher diversity of HLA genes. But in the Indigenous South American genomes, the team found that there was significantly lower diversity in the HLA genes, which may have led to these people being more vulnerable to novel pathogens, Kim said.

The researchers wrote in the study that one of their aims is to emphasize the special medical needs of contemporary Indigenous peoples, as some have gene variants associated with problems like adverse drug reactions.

"Most existing medicines were developed based on studies of European populations, often excluding Indigenous populations," Kim said. "It is critical to provide tailored healthcare and disease prevention strategies that consider their specific genetic profiles."

Deep in an underground cave in Guatemala, archaeologists stumbled upon hundreds of fragmented human bones showing signs of injury. The discovery paints a chilling picture: The people here were sacrificed during the dry season to appease the Maya rain god — or parts of them were.

"The emerging pattern that we're seeing is that there are body parts and not bodies," Michele Bleuze, a bioarchaeologist at California State University, Los Angeles, told Live Science. "In Maya ritual, body parts are just as valuable as the whole body," she said.

In the early 1990s, a survey underneath the archaeological site of Dos Pilas in Petén, Guatemala, revealed more than a dozen caves that were used by the Maya between 400 B.C. and A.D. 250. One of them — called the Cueva de Sangre, or "Blood Cave" — had a large collection of human bones scattered on the floor, many of which showed evidence of traumatic injuries around the time of death.

In a presentation at the annual Society for American Archaeology meeting on April 24, Bleuze detailed the team's analysis of the Cueva de Sangre bones and explained why they believe the cave was the site of an ancient Maya sacrifice two millennia ago.

Related: Mysterious Tikal altar that wasn't Maya after all includes at least 4 skeletons — and 1 was a child

"There are a few lines of evidence that we used to determine that this was more likely a ritual site than not," Ellen Fricano, a forensic anthropologist at Western University of Health Sciences in California who examined the injuries to the bones, told Live Science. For example, the bones were on the surface, rather than buried, and the injuries to the bones suggest ritual dismemberment, rather than immediate burial.

A fragment of the left side of the forehead, for instance, had a mark suggesting that someone used a tool with a beveled edge — like a hatchet — on the skull, Fricano said. A child's hip bone had a similar cut. Both appear to have been made around the time of death.

Some human remains were also arranged in a nonanatomic way, pointing to a ritualistic nature to their collection. On the ground in one part of the cave, excavators found a series of four stacked skull caps.

The combination of injuries discovered on the bones; the high density of human remains in the cave; and the presence of ritual items, such as red ocher and obsidian blades, strongly suggests that Cueva de Sangre was the site of an ancient Maya ritual sacrifice rather than a standard burial practice, Fricano said.

Sacrifices for a rainy season

Cueva de Sangre is accessed via a small opening and a descent into a low passageway that opens onto a pool of water. Both today and in the past, the cave would have been flooded for most of the year.

The cave was likely accessible only during the dry season, between March and May, and the researchers think this timing is a clue to the meaning of the sacrifice. One important contemporary Maya ritual celebration is called the Day of the Holy Cross. Occurring on May 3, the celebration happens just before the onset of the rains, and people visit caves to pray for rain and a good harvest.

A clear answer to the mystery of the bones in the cave will need to wait a bit longer, Bleuze said. Analysis of the bones from Cueva de Sangre has only just begun. Further work, including ancient DNA and stable isotope analyses, is planned, followed by peer-reviewed publications.

"Right now, our focus is who are these people deposited here, because they're treated completely differently than the majority of the population," Bleuze said.

A Sherlock Holmes-style investigation has revealed the ancient method for the stunning pigment known as Maya blue — and it's different from a previous method uncovered nearly 20 years ago by the same researcher.

Maya blue, discovered by modern researchers in 1931, is not an easy pigment to make. Echoing the color of an azure sky, the indelible pigment was used to accentuate everything from ceramics to human sacrifices beginning in the Late Preclassic period (300 B.C. to A.D. 300).

Maya blue is a highly unusual pigment because it is a mix of organic indigo and an inorganic clay mineral called palygorskite. The rich blue color does not fade over time; it has maintained its vibrancy even in the harsh tropical forests of southern Mexico and Guatemala where the Maya Maya civilization thrived.

For decades, scientists tried to decode the precise method of manufacturing Maya blue, but they did not succeed until 2008. By analyzing traces of the pigment found on pottery at the bottom of a well at Chichén Itzá, a Maya site in the Yucatán Peninsula, a team of researchers led by Dean Arnold, an adjunct curator of anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago, determined that the key to Maya blue was actually a sacred incense called copal. By heating the mixture of indigo, copal and palygorskite over a fire, the Maya produced the unique pigment, he reported at the time.

But at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Denver on April 25, Arnold presented his discovery of a second method for creating Maya blue. The new research has been published in Arnold's book "Maya Blue" (University Press of Colorado, 2024).

Related: Strange altar found at Tikal wasn't made by the Maya — and it has at least 4 people buried inside it

After closely examining a dozen Maya bowls found at Chichén Itzá, Arnold realized that white residue in the vessels was probably palygorskite that was ground when wet, which would have left traces in the tiny fractures that grinding tools left in the pots. Microscopic examination of the 12 bowls further revealed tiny, burnt plant stems, and the bases of the bowls showed that they were heated from below, his detective work showed.

"Consequently, the observations of these bowls provide evidence that the ancient Maya used this method as a second way to create Maya blue," Arnold said in the presentation.

But Maya blue was not just a pretty paint, Arnold told Live Science. It's also part of Maya cultural heritage. "This is a genius discovery that they made, and apparently the knowledge of it was limited to specialists like priests," he said.

Arnold thinks Maya blue was particularly important in sacrifices made to the Maya rain god Chaak (also spelled Chaac and Chac) during periods of drought. The result of mixing indigo, palygorskite and copal, Arnold said, "is also perhaps an incarnation of the rain god Chaak in this bowl after you heat it."

The question of how the Maya made this blue pigment is still not completely solved, however. Arnold said future research will include a microscopic study of the plant remains found in the bowls to see if the genus and species that produced the blue color can be determined.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:36 a.m. ET on May 7 to clarify when the Maya started using the blue pigment.