Archaeologists in Peru have discovered the skeleton of an infant with a rare birth defect that left only one central eye socket in the child's skull. DNA analysis of the remains confirmed a chromosomal abnormality caused the deadly condition in the infant over 1,600 years ago, according to a new study.

"We cannot really say how long this individual survived," study co-author Lars Fehren-Schmitz, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Live Science in an email. But "the burial of this infant suggests that the Nasca treated this individual in death like most other infants."

The skeleton of this female infant was discovered alongside a second one inside a ceramic urn at the archaeological site of Jauranga in Peru's Palpa Valley, where numerous geoglyphs known as the Nazca Lines have been found. Archaeologists uncovered several dozen other burials dated to the Middle Nazca (also spelled Nasca) period (A.D. 325 to 440) at the site, but one of the co-buried infants had an extremely rare condition, researchers wrote in a study published Monday (Nov. 9) in the journal PNAS.

The infant had a very small skull and a single eye socket in the middle of her face, along with other developmental issues of the cranial bones. These traits match modern clinical descriptions of cyclopia, a lethal condition that occurs when the front part of a fetus's brain fails to divide into left and right hemispheres.

This condition can also cause alterations in the nasal structures, resulting in a missing nose or a tube-like nose above the single eye.

"The cause of the malformation was present at fertilization, but manifestation occurs around the fourth to fifth week in utero [in the womb], when the frontal lobe of the brain has to divide," study first author Elsa Tomasto-Cagigao, an archaeologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, told Live Science in an email.

Cyclopia is a rare condition, occurring in about 1 out of every 100,000 births. To learn more about the infant's short life, the researchers sequenced her genome. (DNA suggested the infant carried two X chromosomes, typical of a female.)

The team detected an extra copy of chromosome 13, meaning the infant had a genetic condition called trisomy 13, or Patau syndrome. It's known to be a major chromosomal cause of cyclopia; that said, only a small percentage of trisomy 13 cases involve cyclopia.

While trisomy 13 is associated with advanced maternal age, it is not clear whether that was the case for this infant, Fehren-Schmitz said.

"This condition has been documented in historic and modern anatomical collections, but to my knowledge this is the first archaeological example of this developmental abnormality," Siân Halcrow, a bioarchaeologist at Durham University in the U.K. who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

The researchers' estimate of the infant's age at death suggests she may have survived for several weeks or months after birth, Halcrow pointed out. "This raises important questions about how infants with profound congenital differences were cared for and treated in past societies," she said.

The infant was buried in a ceramic urn, the researchers noted in the study, which was a common burial method in the Nazca period, along with a second female infant who had no skeletal abnormalities. "The baby with cyclopia was at the bottom of the jar, while the other baby was on top. Nevertheless, it appears that they were interred in a single event," Tomasto-Cagigao said. The genetic analysis showed that the two infants did not have the same mother.

A burial of two infants in one urn is unusual for this culture, the researchers said, but there is not enough archaeological evidence to conclude that the infant with cyclopia was given a different type of burial.

"The fact that the individual was buried with a 'healthy' individual in a regular cemetery, without any special grave goods, suggests that, to some extent, the individual was not treated differently in death, even though it had such a rare condition," Fehren-Schmitz said. "It was neither 'excluded' because of it nor treated in a 'special' way."

In ancient Andean societies, some people with disabilities took on special societal roles, such as ones associated with religious practices. "If that reflects Nasca society as a whole, we can't say based on one case," Fehren-Schmitz said, "but it does reflect the community this infant was part of, even if only briefly."

Despite engaging in human sacrifice, the people who lived in the Lambayeque Valley of northern Peru had low levels of violence, a new study of their remains finds.

Human sacrifice occurred in the valley over the millennia. It's thought that at least some of these mass sacrifices were attempts to appease the gods in the wake of El Niño, a periodic weather phenomenon that can lead to intense rains and flooding in Peru and droughts in other parts of South and Central America.

"We have one example at the site of Sicán where around [A.D.] 1050/1100, around 200 individuals were killed and ritualistically buried during an intense El Niño event," study co-author Haagen Klaus, an anthropology professor at George Mason University in Virginia, told Live Science in an email.

Other human sacrifice findings include more than 200 children found near the modern-day town of Huanchaco who were sacrificed sometime between 600 and 800 years ago, possibly during an El Niño.

However, despite the occurrence of human sacrifice, levels of violence unrelated to sacrifice were actually quite low in the Lambayeque Valley. In the study, scientists analyzed the skeletal remains of 1,519 people from the Lambayeque Valley who lived between roughly 1500 B.C. and A.D. 1800, and whose remains were preserved enough to detect signs of violent trauma, including interpersonal violence.

Of these skeletons, "only 25 (1.6%) exhibited traumatic lesions consistent with interpersonal conflict, and 77 exhibited post-cranial traumatic lesions consistent with accidental trauma (5.1%)," Klaus and co-author Thomas Snyder, a bioarchaeologist at New York University, wrote in the paper, which was published Nov. 8 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

The team didn't find any link between a person's sex and violence, they noted. The findings mean that despite the presence of human sacrifice, the amount of violence unrelated to sacrifice was low. This leaves a question: Why?

"Ritual violence may have alleviated non-ritual violence by creating spaces where social tensions could get worked out in a few different ways," Klaus said.

It's important to remember that other areas of Peru also practiced human sacrifice but didn't have the same low levels of interpersonal violence. Klaus noted that areas in the Peruvian highlands sometimes had higher rates of interpersonal violence. In their paper, Klaus and Snyder noted that societies that originated in the highlands, such as the Tiwanaku, Wari and Inca had to grapple with poorer soils and cold temperatures, and these challenges may have been a factor in increasing the levels of interpersonal violence.

The "evidence of sub-lethal and lethal violence forceful enough to break bone is significantly higher in some areas of Peru's highlands," Klaus said. He and Snyder noted in their paper that the inhabitants of the Lambayeque Valley may have had better access to marine and water resources, such as seafood and rivers that could be used for agricultural irrigation, than those who lived in highland areas. Access to these resources may have helped alleviate interpersonal violence in the valley by providing more food resources, they wrote.

Scholars react

Aside from practicing human sacrifice, people in the valley may have engaged in other practices that helped lower levels of interpersonal violence, researchers who were not involved in the new study told Live Science.

Environmental conditions may have helped reduce conflict or there could be "really unusual cultural practices in this region of avoiding or mediating conflict — both between and within groups," Elizabeth Arkush, an anthropology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said in an email.

Constanza Ceruti, an anthropologist and explorer with the National Geographic Society, said in an email that she's glad that researchers are studying human sacrifices "after decades of being ignored as a taboo topic in academic discussion." She praised the study’s large sample size and noted that human sacrifice is a "phenomenon primarily associated [with] the manipulation and concentration of power by elites."

Jordi Rivera Prince, an anthropology professor at Tulane University, said that the findings dovetail with her excavations in the region, where she has "found little evidence of violent trauma during the Salinar (400-200 BCE), a period of great social change in the Andes."

Weston McCool, an archaeology professor at Cal Poly, said in an email that the newly published paper "is an interesting study that provides additional evidence for a sharp break in patterns of violence between the Andean coast and highlands." He noted that it "supports the hypothesis that coastal populations were buffered from terrestrial environmental downturns in ways that highland populations were not. The nature of that resilience, however, remains an important question for future research."

The Maya used so much red paint that they accidentally poisoned their lakes and waterways with mercury, a new study finds.

The problem was cinnabar, a vivid-red mercury-sulfide mineral that can be used as the pigment vermilion in red paint. The run-off from the paint can enter waterways, where anaerobic bacteria then transform cinnabar into highly toxic methylmercury in the sediments of lakes. Over time, the methylmercury accumulates to higher levels in the food chain.

The ancient Maya, a people who lived in what is now southern Mexico and Central America and whose descendants are still around today, painted almost everything red. Archaeologists have found countless artifacts that the Maya reddened, including sculptures, monuments, walls, plazas, pottery and the dead for ceremonial funerals. Cinnabar was a common pigment in the paint they made, along with red ocher, which gets its color from a nontoxic iron mineral called hematite.

But the Maya passion for the color red — which to them represented the sun, blood and life — caused an environmental disaster when the nearby waters were poisoned by the cinnabar runoff, said study first author Matthew Waters, a paleolimnologist (a scientist who studies ancient waterways) at Auburn University in Alabama.

"They would have seen a strange color change in the water … and a drop in its productivity, such as fish for protein," he told Live Science. The Maya depended heavily on freshwater fisheries, including for freshwater shellfish.

Previous studies had already found evidence for high levels of mercury in the Maya's southern highlands and south-central lowlands, but no one had fully examined levels of the toxic mineral in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.

To investigate, Waters and his colleagues studied mercury levels in Maya-era mud in the Yucatán, and found overwhelming signs of mercury poisoning, probably from cinnabar paint, they reported in their study, published Nov. 4 in the journal Science Advances.

"We did not suspect [the Maya] used it in the quantities that we were seeing," he said.

Troubled waters

The study found extreme levels of mercury in sediment cores from two Maya-era sites: Cobá Lake, a shallow lake beside the Maya city of that name, and Cenote Xcach (also spelled X-Canché), a flooded sinkhole beside a ruined city in the jungle that few have excavated.

The sediment cores chronicle the composition of earth and water over more than 2,000 years, and the times of mercury poisoning coincide with several periods during the Preclassic and Classic periods of the Maya civilization from about A.D. 40 to 820.

Waters explained that the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. has determined it is unsafe to drink water with mercury levels above 2 parts per billion, while the official limit for the level of mercury in fish, where it builds up over time, is 1 part per million — any number above that means the fish can be seized by authorities.

Severe poisoning occurs when the mercury levels in human blood exceed about 100 parts per billion, from drinking contaminated water or eating contaminated marine animals, such as fish. In humans, mercury poisoning can cause severe symptoms, including permanent lung damage, brain damage and death.

The most polluted parts of the Yucatan cores had a mercury level of 2.3 parts per million, the team discovered. "They experienced this for decades and, in one case, for centuries," Waters said.

The researchers then examined the sediment cores for signs of environmental damage caused by the mercury poisoning. They found that the cores lacked tiny fossils of freshwater shellfish, indicating that the high mercury levels were killing marine life. The team also noticed that the sediment cores had hardly any traces of algal blooms, which should have happened frequently, Waters said. That's likely because algae could not survive in the poisoned water nutrients.

Maya collapse

Scholars debate why the Maya civilization collapsed in the eighth and ninth centuries, but a leading suspect is the disruption of food supplies caused by drought.

But although mercury levels were high during the Preclassic and Classic periods, the environmental damage caused by mercury levels had been falling in many places for hundreds of years by the time of the Maya collapse, Waters said, although it may have been a contributing factor.

Cinnabar does not occur naturally in the Yucatán, so it must have been imported there, probably from what's now Honduras, the researchers said. It seems these cinnabar imports eventually stopped at Cobá Lake, and the poisoning there fell to a background level of about 20 parts per billion by A.D. 520. However, the sediment cores showed that the mercury poisoning continued at Cenote Xcach until the collapse, they said.

What do you know about the civilization that built pyramids across Mesoamerica? Find out with our ancient Maya quiz.

On the last day of an ecology field trip to Virginia's Eastern Shore, a biology undergraduate student discovered more than she expected. While searching for shark teeth, Brooklyn Rolph, a student at Mary Baldwin University in Virginia, stumbled upon a stone spearpoint estimated to be around 4,500 years old.

"Wow, this is so crazy," Rolph said in a statement. Already primed to look for pointy objects underwater, Rolph found a stone spear and immediately alerted the professors running the trip. "They were ecstatic," she recalled.

The stone artifact is about 6 inches (15 centimeters) long and, according to local archaeologists, a type known as a Lehigh/Koens-Crispin point. This kind of stone tool was made by Indigenous people across the East Coast of the U.S. from around 4,500 to 3,000 years ago. Sometimes called a "broadspear," the stone point also may have been used as a knife by prehistoric hunter-gatherers in the Late Archaic period.

The field trip was part of an ecology course led by Mary Baldwin University faculty members who had secured a permit from the state to explore the barrier islands off the Eastern Shore, the southern part of the Delmarva Peninsula that includes most of Delaware and parts of Virginia and Maryland.

Just after a lunch break on Sept. 21, the last day of the excursion that aimed to let students study plants and animals in the coastal ecosystem, Rolph set out to quickly explore a mound of shells on the island and noticed the spearpoint at the edge of an inlet. Her professors were blown away by the lucky discovery.

"The set of circumstances that came together that made this possible is quite unbelievable," Paul Callo, a biology professor at Mary Baldwin University who was co-leading the trip, said in the statement. "The tide was coming in, so the spear point was soon to be buried."

When Rolph showed Callo the artifact, he was "truly at a loss for words," he said. "It is certainly awe-inspiring to see and touch something that was made by human hands thousands of years ago."

The barrier island where Rolph found the stone point is part of a natural area owned by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, which means the artifact is now the property of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Archaeologists collected it from the Mary Baldwin group and have taken it to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources for further study.

Rolph was fine with not keeping the spearpoint. "That's how you get cursed!" she said.

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Archaeologists in Peru have found an elaborate 1,500-year-old tomb that may hold the remains of a high-status toddler from a pre-Inca civilization.

The burial, which is from the Moche culture, also contained vessels depicting prisoners with rope around each of their necks and a sculpture of a human-bird deity.

Moche (also known as Mochica) culture developed along the northern coast of what is now Peru from the third to the ninth century. They created agricultural lands in the region's desert landscape, and their archaeological record includes monumental temples, water canals, pottery, metallurgy, textiles and a distinctive form of art. The Moche didn't have a written language, but they left behind thousands of realistic portrait vessels, which are somewhat similar to the prisoner sculptors found in the toddler's burial.

In the newfound tomb, the team unearthed a small skeleton, which is likely the remains of a toddler who was, at most, 2 years old, Carlos Rengifo-Chunga, director of the University of Trujillo's Huacas de Moche Archaeological Project, told Live Science. The child's sex is unknown.

Rengifo-Chunga and his colleagues also found two copper objects in the burial: a mask-like disk covering the child's face, and a half-moon object on their feet. In addition, the burial contained 32 ceramic objects associated with Moche culture, including those depicting the prisoners and the deity.

The tomb was large compared to the child's small size, and could have easily held an adult, Rengifo-Chunga said. It dates to the sixth or seventh century, he added.

The team unearthed the tomb inside the Uhle Platform at the Huacas de Moche archaeological site in northern Peru. The Uhle Platform is a mausoleum, attached to the Huaca de la Luna temple, with a patio archaeologists call the Patio of the Serpents. Of the more than 80 burials previously uncovered there, the tomb represents the only known child to receive this sort of lavish burial.

The elaborate funerary treatment, including the use of copper, and the location of the tomb all suggest that the child belonged to an elite class of Moche society, Rengifo-Chunga said.

The two prisoner sculptures are associated with the "ritual of combat," a common theme in Moche art. In this sort of imagery, two warriors fight each other, and the loser is stripped of his clothes and weapons, tied around the neck with a rope and offered as a human sacrifice, Rengifo-Chunga said. The prisoners depicted on these two vessels were the losing warriors, and their presence in the burial of a child is rare.

"One would normally presume that these kinds of vessels represent something related to the deceased's life," Rengifo-Chunga said. For example, a vessel like this might signify that the individual took part in combat.

But a toddler couldn't have taken part in such an activity. In general, archaeologists wouldn't expect to see elements of an adult ritual in the burial of a child. "This expands our knowledge on Moche funerary practices," he added.

The sculpture of the presumed deity depicts a human body with bird wings and a bird tail, although for some scholars it might be interpreted as a god in transformation, Rengifo-Chunga said. The deity holds a square shield in one hand and a goblet in the other, and is flanked by two bird "assistants" wearing ceremonial garments.

Researchers will have to investigate whether the deity is a known Moche god, or a newfound addition to the pantheon. Either way, the object joins a contentious debate over whether the Moche pantheon consists of many gods, or just a few that can transform into many different versions, Rengifo-Chunga said.

The artifacts are now in the laboratories of the Santiago Uceda Castillo Museum in Peru, where they will undergo conservation treatment.

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This copper plate was discovered in the late 19th century in a prehistoric Native American burial at the Etowah Indian Mounds archaeological site in Georgia, but it was likely made hundreds of miles away at Cahokia Mounds in Illinois. While the decorative plate showcases long-distance trade and a shared ritual culture among early Indigenous groups in the southeastern United States, the nature of the human figure depicted on the artifact has been debated for over a century.

The "Birdman" relic is one of two hammered copper plates that Smithsonian archaeologist John P. Rogan unearthed in the 1880s while digging in a burial mound at Etowah, a centuries-old village occupied by thousands of Native Americans from 1000 to 1550. Etowah was part of the "mound-building," or Mississippian, phase of Indigenous occupation; other famous sites include Moundville in Alabama and Cahokia in Illinois. These groups had extensive trade networks and shared a common artistic and ceremonial tradition known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex.

This copper artifact, known as Rogan Plate 1 or the "Birdman" plate, is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The plate is roughly 11 inches (28 centimeters) tall and had been buried with a high-status person who likely died at Etowah in the mid-14th century. But experts believe the copper plate was an heirloom made decades earlier, at Cahokia, and traded south to Etowah.

A human figure dominates the copper plate with its elaborate bird costume. The person carries a severed head by the hair in their left hand, while their right hand holds a club or mace. The figure also wears a pleated skirt or loincloth that may have been made from human scalps. This bird-human figure is commonly depicted in the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex and has been called a dancing warrior, eagle warrior, eagle dancer, hawk dancer, falcon dancer and falcon warrior. But more often, the figure is called Birdman or Morning Star, a prehistoric Mississippian hero associated with agriculture and rebirth.

Archaeologists' interpretations of the Birdman plaque from Etowah have long assumed that the represented figure is a male warrior. In a 2004 study, for example, archaeologist Adam King wrote that "this plaque would have served as an emblem of office awarded to a chieftain, and would have accompanied him as a sign of his strength among the ancestral spirits."

But the sex of the skeleton in the Etowah burial is unclear, and there were high-status graves of both men and women at Etowah, archaeologist Billie Follensbee and art historian Katie Buford wrote in a 2017 study. Although experts previously assumed that both Rogan Plate 1 and Rogan Plate 2 represented male warriors, Follensbee and Buford found that the figures have slender bodies with prominent right breasts, suggesting the "Birdman" may have actually been female.

"A female bird-human warrior could have represented a gender variant individual in the form of the well-known Native American phenomenon of the 'manly-hearted woman,' a woman who has assumed the usually male role and the garb of a combat soldier," Follensbee and Buford wrote. In addition to the historic term "manly-hearted woman," third-gender or gender-variant individuals in Indigenous North America are often referred to as "two-spirit," a broad term Indigenous people coined in 1990 to describe people who take on gender-nonconforming roles.

The commemoration of a two-spirit individual on a copper artifact, as well as the use of the artifact as a high-status grave good, "not only demonstrates the Native American cultural acceptance of such gender variant roles but also further serves to celebrate the elite status and achievements of these 'manly-hearted women,'" Follensbee and Buford wrote.

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

Archaeologists digging at a 13,800-year-old site in interior Alaska have unearthed thousands of artifacts and fossils, including what may be the bones of the earliest domesticated dogs in the Americas, the earliest needles and dwellings in the Western Hemisphere, and stone tools that reveal cultural connections across the Bering Land Bridge.

At a site called Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ (which means "They Were There" in the Alaska Native Athabascan language), about 34 miles (55 kilometers) southeast of Fairbanks, archaeologists have excavated an encampment that some of the first people to settle in North America used off and on for a millennium.

Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ is located in eastern Beringia, the geographical region that connected northeast Asia and northwest North America during the last ice age. The most recent archaeological and genetic studies suggest that the ancestors of today's Indigenous Americans entered the continent around 21,000 years ago. But since Beringian sites are often the remains of small seasonal hunting camps and are scattered across a large geographic area, much is still unknown about the earliest people who called the Western Hemisphere home.

"I expected we'd find hunting tools and knapping [stone tool making] debris surrounding a hearth or two, but I had no idea that we'd stumble into a base camp with tens of thousands of artifacts," study first author Kelly Graf, an archaeologist at the University of Kansas, told Live Science in an email. "It was a total surprise!"

In a study published Wednesday (Oct. 14) in the journal Science Advances, Graf and co-authors detailed their discoveries at Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ, focusing on the earliest occupation, which occurred around 13,800 years ago, as evidence of people "settling in" to their new territory.

The researchers found a hearth, a small pit, and a dirt stain where a wooden post had once stood, likely the remains of a lean-to or early tent house. Additionally, the archaeologists unearthed stone tools, bone needles and a pendant made from an antler. Nearby, they found an earth oven, which was full of charcoal and animal bones and was likely used to slow-cook meat for a large family group.

"The complex feature at Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ represents the earliest potential case of a habitation structure in North America," the researchers wrote in the study. "Early Alaskans knew their surroundings well."

Cross-cultural links

The archaeologists were also surprised by the stone tools recovered at Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ because they are distinctively shaped and unique to central Alaska. Known as diamond-shaped hafted bifaces, the tools were crafted from rhyolite and basalt and are similar to those typically found much farther west in Beringia, in modern-day northern Siberia. Additionally, obsidian artifacts discovered at Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ reveal that people brought the volcanic rock to the site from a geological source hundreds of miles to the northwest.

Bones from more than a dozen wolf-like animals suggest a further connection to Asia, according to the researchers. An analysis of the jaw of one of the animals showed that it was not from a dire wolf (Aenocyon dirus) or from a Pleistocene Beringian or gray wolf (Canis lupus sp.) but rather a population of wolf-like animals unique to central Alaska. Current genetic evidence suggests that early domesticated dogs in North America came from Siberian wolves. The timing and geographical location of Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ provides circumstantial evidence that the people may have been dog owners.

"Like humans, potentially, the canids of Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ and other early Alaskan sites were recent immigrants from Asian Beringia," the researchers wrote.

Although Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ reveals a relationship with sites in Asia, there is also evidence of connections with early American sites south of the Canadian ice sheets, according to the study.

One clue to these connections is the presence of bone artifacts in a sewing kit. The archaeologists found eight bone needle fragments at Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ. Previously, the only recovered eyed needles had come from Paleoindian sites in temperate North America. Therefore, the needles from Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ are the oldest needles ever discovered in the Western Hemisphere, and they reveal connections with sites farther south, according to the study.

Another clue is the pendant, which was crafted from antler. The pendant had a hole drilled at one end and was fashioned into a point at the other end. This piece of ancient jewelry is similar to personal adornment items found farther south in North America.

"The co-occurrence of these cultural features at the single site of Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ is truly notable," the researchers wrote, and they "highlight the strong cultural connection between early Beringians and Americans."

It is still unclear whether the people at Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ were traveling to make these connections. "It would be hard to pin down whether or not they were moving back and forth during a lifetime, but at least we can say there is a connection," Graf said.

Further work in Beringia is needed

Future excavations in Beringia could help archaeologists learn more about the earliest people in the Americas, according to Graf. "Alaska is a big place and so remote, so there are really just a few small areas that have been intensively investigated," she said.

Spencer Pelton, an archaeologist at the University of Wyoming who was not involved in the research, wrote in an accompanying perspective published in the journal Science Advances that early Indigenous sites in Beringia are key to understanding the peopling of the Americas.

"Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ is remarkable because it is the oldest site in the Americas containing a large and rich assemblage of features, artifacts, and faunal refuse indicative of prolonged residential occupation, providing an unprecedented glimpse into the lives of North America's first residents," Pelton wrote.

Graf is already planning future archaeological excavations in the area. "We're hoping to bring some younger Alaska Native folks out with us in the coming summers," she said, as incorporating local knowledge is important to the project. "Two of our co-authors are elders from Alaska Native corporations nearest to the site," she said. Elders named the Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ site and have visited it to discuss where to excavate and what the archaeologists might find.

There is much left to learn about what was happening in Beringia 14,000 years ago, the researchers wrote, particularly since there are currently only two archaeological sites — including the 24,000-year-old Bluefish Caves site in the Yukon — that suggest humans were settling in Beringia considerably earlier.

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

Ancient DNA from skeletons buried in a historic cemetery in Quebec is changing people's understanding of their Indigenous ancestry. Contrary to popular belief, there may be little truth to stories of intermarriage between Indigenous and French people during the early days of colonization, according to a new archaeology study published Oct. 5 in the journal PNAS.

"Family stories of an Indigenous ancestor are very common" in Quebec, study first author Diane Martin-Moya, a biological anthropologist at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières in Canada, told Live Science in an email, and "commercial genealogy and DNA tests have amplified this." But distant or claimed Indigenous identities can actually undermine the rights, resources and recognition of Indigenous nations, she said.

To learn more about the founders of Quebec, Martin-Moya and co-authors investigated Notre-Dame Cemetery, which was established in Montreal in 1683 and used for Catholic burials until 1796. Based on previous studies of the skeletons in the cemetery, experts disagreed on whether people of Indigenous, European, African or mixed ancestry were buried there. To settle the question, Martin-Moya and her colleagues sequenced DNA from 45 people buried in the cemetery and compared it with the genomes of people from Europe, West Africa and Indigenous groups in the Americas.

"The ancient DNA showed that all 45 individuals we analyzed had French European ancestry, with no sign of recent Indigenous or African admixture," Martin-Moya said of the research, which she conducted while at the University of Montreal.

These findings suggest that people descended from Indigenous and African populations may have been marginalized in early Montreal, challenging the popular narrative of cooperation and intermarriage, she said.

"Our sample is small and comes from a single cemetery, so this does not show that such unions never happened," Martin-Moya cautioned. "It is, however, consistent with genealogical and genetic studies suggesting that Indigenous ancestry among present-day French Canadians is very limited."

The apparent lack of genetic mixing among European, African and Indigenous populations in this cemetery group "provides a perspective on population relationships during the colonial period, one where perhaps nongenetic interactions were present but no biological relationships were found," Raquel Fleskes, a molecular anthropologist at Dartmouth College who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.

The DNA helped the researchers find several genetic lineages of people that spanned multiple generations. But the graves were scattered across multiple areas of the cemetery, suggesting that burials were not organized into family plots. This finding suggests that, in the 17th century, people in Montreal may have been burying their dead in a way that was not defined by strict biological kinship ties, Fleskes said.

One cemetery, many possibilities

Martin-Moya stressed that the results of the new study do not necessarily apply to all of colonial Montreal.

"Not identifying recent Indigenous or African admixture in this sample does not imply that Indigenous or African-descended people were absent from the city," Martin-Moya said.

In addition, "biological ancestry cannot by itself establish Indigenous belonging," as it "is rooted in kinship, community and relationships with land, not in blood or DNA," she added.

Changes in the use of the cemetery over time also may have influenced the findings, as reburials and later urban development disturbed or destroyed earlier graves.

"Those buried inside the church, mostly clergy and wealthier residents, were more likely to be exhumed and moved," Martin-Moya explained, while the city's poorer residents were buried outside the church and further buried beneath the expanding city. This means that the skeletons in the study may have been the remains of lower-class French colonists.

Archival records show that some Indigenous people were buried in Catholic cemeteries in Montreal as early as the 17th century, Martin-Moya said. "Over time, though, Indigenous communities were increasingly separated from the colonial town through land dispossession and the relocation of missions away from urban centers," she explained. "Their dead would most likely have been buried in those communities. Enslaved people, both Indigenous and African, were often buried on their enslaver's property or in cemeteries for the poor."

The results of the study don't mean that Québécois have no Indigenous ancestors or that relations between French settlers and Indigenous peoples were only hostile, Martin-Moya said. Those relationships were complex and included alliances, trade, conflict and, sometimes, family ties.

"What our results suggest is that when such ancestry exists, it needs to be put in context," Martin-Moya said. "A single ancestor who lived more than 300 years ago does not say the same thing about a person today as being raised within an Indigenous family, community or nation."

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Some of the first people in North America lived through extreme climate change at the peak of the last ice age, a new study suggests.

Researchers studied ancient pollen locked in rocks at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, which houses an archaeological site thought to contain the oldest human footprints in the Americas. The researchers previously dated those footprints to around 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, though their age is the subject of some scientific debate because they are significantly older than other Indigenous sites in the Americas.

The new findings, published Wednesday (Oct. 14) in the journal Science Advances, suggest that humans kept using White Sands after temperatures warmed and thus saw the landscape undergo rapid changes during the coldest era of the last ice age, known as the Last Glacial Maximum (26,500 to 19,000 years ago).

"It's remarkable that early humans in the region were real-time witnesses to a rapidly changing environment discernible within a human lifetime — that is really food for thought," study co-author Kathleen Springer, a research geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said in a statement.

The White Sands footprints suggest that people from Asia reached the Americas via the region around the Bering Strait much earlier than scientists initially thought, challenging a long-held assumption that humans arrived on the continent around 13,000 years ago. While some scientists have disputed the methods used to date the footprints, evidence is building that they are around 23,000 years old.

White Sands contains footprints from various time periods, including footprints of a caregiver and a toddler who were there 10,000 years ago. Over thousands of years, people trudged across the New Mexico landscape alongside iconic ice age animals, including mammoths and giant ground sloths. The researchers have also discovered sled-like drag marks alongside ancient footprints at White Sands, providing evidence for a kind of travois — a wooden frame made from two poles bound together — that people likely would have used for transporting goods.

By looking at ancient pollen for the new study, researchers could deduce which plants grew across the millennia when humans lived in the area. The site's rock samples also contained waxes from plant leaves, membrane lipids from bacteria, and other organic molecules that helped the researchers better understand the environmental conditions of the time.

The analysis revealed that around 24,200 years ago, White Sands had a large lake and its surrounding mountains were coated in conifer trees (Pinus, Abies, and Picea). Then, over the next two millennia, temperatures rose, the lake began to shrink, and the conifer trees were replaced by oak trees (Quercus) and sagebrush, according to the statement.

"Throughout these periods of change, the people continued to visit and live in this area," study co-author Sally Reynolds, a paleoanthropologist at Bournemouth University in the U.K., said in the statement. "The sediments containing their footprints show us their environment changed significantly within individual human lifetimes."

The researchers speculated that people might have returned to White Sands at different times to benefit from the changing climate, with a shrinking lake potentially providing higher concentrations of animals and plants. However, while the footprints document that humans were present, they reveal little about their behavior.

"The footprints give us a snapshot of the people who lived there over 20,000 years ago," Reynolds said. "But they are not a continuous movie of their lives. They are individual frames — showing moments when humans, mud, water and chance came together."

The prehistory of Indigenous Americans goes back tens of thousands of years before the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Bahamas, and recent scientific studies suggest prehistoric people were on the American continents a lot longer than many experts believed. For Indigenous Peoples Day, here are seven locations in the United States that outline the Native American story.

1. Chaco Canyon (New Mexico)

This centuries-old settlement, whose name may be a Spanish adaptation of an Indigenous word for the area, was the political and ceremonial center for the Ancestral Puebloan people from about A.D. 850 to 1250. At its heart is Pueblo Bonito ("Pretty Village"), a four-story stone complex with more than 600 rooms and 35 subterranean ceremonial chambers called kivas.

Experts estimate that builders hauled over 200,000 timber beams from distant mountains to construct these complexes, where the beams were used to strengthen buildings made mostly from sandstone blocks. The town once stood at the hub of a road network that spanned more than 400 miles (640 kilometers), and excavations of imported Mesoamerican macaws and cacao there confirm trade with distant regions.

2. Cahokia (Illinois)

Cahokia was once the largest Indigenous American settlement north of Mexico and home to up to 40,000 people in A.D. 1100 ‪—‬ comparable in size to major cities in medieval Europe, historian Christoph Strobel, a specialist in Indigenous history at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, told Live Science. Residents there lived in houses made from "wattle and daub" — clay or mud plastered on a framework of sticks — in a town at the site, with large public plazas, wooden palisades and dozens of ceremonial earthen mounds. Indigenous people even transported a 5-ton (4.5 metric ton) tree from more than 110 miles (180 kilometers) away, and then turned it into a marker known as the Mitchell Log.

Archaeological studies indicate that many people from distant places also visited, perhaps to take part in ceremonies. The location is now a UNESCO World Heritage site and features Monks Mound, a 100-foot-tall (30 meters) terraced earthwork, as well as the reconstruction of a "woodhenge" of timber circles that tracks solstices and equinoxes. Strobel thinks Cahokia may be the most significant pre-Columbian location in the United States. "It's an incredibly important site," he said.

3. Mound Key (Estero Bay, Florida)

Mound Key is the largest of several islands made of piles of shells around Estero Bay. Long ago, it seems to have been two small islands created by mangroves, but centuries of feasting on shellfish by Indigenous Americans transformed it into two artificial mounds of shells covered with vegetation. In some places, the mounds extend more than 30 feet (9 m) above the water; it is so large now that it is split in two only at high tide. Mound Key itself is estimated to consist of several millions of shells, mostly from oysters.

Before Europeans arrived here in the 16th century, this shell island was called Calos by the Calusa people who lived there and developed it into a thriving maritime city.

4. Sitka (Alaska)

Sitka National Historical Park preserves the battlefield of the 1804 Battle of Sitka, which was fought between Tlingit warriors and colonial Russian troops and was the last major armed conflict between Europeans and people native to Alaska. At that time, Russia claimed to own Alaska (they sold it to the United States in 1867). The battle was sparked when Russian fur traders encroached on tribal territory by building a fort at Sitka in 1802, but the Tlingit destroyed the enemy fort and expelled the Russians.

They then built their own fort to withstand the expected Russian counterattack, but they were forced to abandon it when they were bombarded by Russian ships in 1804. The dispute continued for several decades and was only fully resolved when the United States purchased Alaska.

5. Walnut Canyon (Arizona)

This site preserves more than 80 cliff dwellings built by the Northern Sinagua people between A.D. 1125 and 1250. People can reach the site by following a walking trail through a deep limestone and sandstone gorge about 10 miles (16 km) southeast of Flagstaff. The cliff dwellings were constructed inside natural caves in the limestone, which gave them insulation against cold and heat, while their location high above the canyon floor was defensive.

Strobel said Walnut Canyon is a lesser-known site but a remarkable example of Indigenous Americans overcoming relatively dry conditions by carefully managing water. The inhabitants of the caves farmed crops on the flat land along the canyon rim but took water from the river at the bottom of the canyon to fill cisterns.

6. Chimney Rock (Colorado)

Chimney Rock is a single feature within a large forest that contains more than 80 archaeological sites of the Ancestral Puebloan people. The rock itself is one of two natural spires (the other is named "Companion Rock") that were used roughly 1,000 years ago to mark the position of a "lunar standstill" every 18.6 years ‪—‬ a key astronomical observance among Indigenous Americans, Strobel said.

A multiroom "Great House" made of sandstone, clay and timber ‪—‬ in exactly the style of Chaco Canyon, about 100 miles (160 km) to the south ‪—‬ stood on a ridge near the rock spires, with sweeping views of the surrounding territory. Archaeologists think the Chimney Rock settlements made up a regional ceremonial center, with common people in the lower valley supporting elites who lived on the ridge and watched the skies.

7. Blackwater Draw (New Mexico)

Blackwater Draw is the main archaeological site with evidence of the Clovis culture, which was once thought to be the oldest Indigenous culture in the Americas. The Clovis people (named after the nearby town of Clovis) lived there about 13,000 years ago, and archaeologists have found evidence of the stone and bone tools they used and the animals they hunted, including mammoths and dire wolves. The first evidence of the Clovis people was found nearby in 1929, and at Blackwater Draw itself in 1932.

However, later archaeological finds predate this evidence, and the discovery of footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico now seems to confirm that there were humans in this region up to 23,000 years ago, long before the Clovis people.

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

This wooden figurine was discovered in 1977 in an early house built by the ancestors of the Inuit on Baffin Island in northern Canada. The unique carving represents a person wearing European clothing and a cross on their chest. Dated to 1350, the figurine is the earliest Indigenous representation of a European anywhere in the Western Hemisphere and probably depicts a Norseman.

The tiny driftwood carving, which is currently on display at the Canadian Museum of History, measures just 2.1 inches (5.4 centimeters) tall. According to the museum, the featureless face and stumpy arms are common in 14th-century Inuit carvings, but the depiction of a non-Inuit is unique.

The mysterious figure wears a long robe or tunic with a cross on the front ‪—‬ a garment that is similar to those worn in the 11th to 13th centuries by Norse Christians from Greenland. The Norse sagas mention a place called "Helluland," which Leif Eriksson (also spelled Erikson) visited in the early 11th century and is most likely Baffin Island.

Around A.D. 1000, Norse explorers landed in what is now Newfoundland and set up camp at a site archaeologists call l'Anse aux Meadows. Wood buildings and remains from iron production are all that is left of the earliest European settlement in the Americas.

The Norse likely made multiple trips from Greenland to Canada over the centuries in order to trade metal and cloth with the Inuit's ancestors, known as the Thule, and procure walrus ivory in return, as European-origin artifacts have been found in early Inuit houses on Baffin Island. But the Norse eventually abandoned their westward trade routes, possibly due to the resistance of the Indigenous people and the long distance.

This wooden figurine may commemorate a meeting between the Inuit and the Norse and is especially important because it was crafted long before sustained contact in the late 15th century, according to the museum. It is also the earliest evidence of the Indigenous perspective of visitors from the east, revealing which characteristics of the Norse the artisan observed and felt were important to depict.

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

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When Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Americas on Oct. 12, 1492, he encountered Indigenous Lucayans living on the Bahamian island now called San Salvador. Columbus wrote in his diary about "great multitudes of men" who greeted him that day, bartered with him and told him about other groups who lived on nearby islands.

But within a few decades after Columbus' arrival, the Indigenous people of the Americas were decimated by what anthropologist Eric Wolf called the "Great Dying" — a combination of epidemic disease, warfare and enslavement that led to a rapid decline in the Native population.

For centuries, researchers have been trying to figure out how many Indigenous people lived in the Americas just prior to the fateful arrival of European colonizers.

The answer to that question has been surprisingly elusive, and estimates based on historical censuses, archaeological sites and land carrying capacity in the Western Hemisphere have varied wildly.

Recent research into Native American demography has revealed that the population peaked several centuries before Europeans showed up on the shores of North America — and that if Europeans had arrived at that peak, the entire history of the continent may have been different.

Early estimates of the Indigenous population

People have lived in the Americas for at least 14,000 years, having entered the continents via the region around the Bering Strait. Archaeological evidence shows these first Americans dispersed throughout the newly encountered lands fairly quickly. But what happened to the population between that dispersal and the arrival of Columbus is a huge unknown; estimates of the number of Indigenous people living in the Western Hemisphere in 1492 have ranged from 1 million to 112 million people.

"We don't have good quantitative estimates," George Milner, an anthropologist at Penn State, told Live Science. "The numbers are all over the place."

One of the first modern researchers who attempted to quantify the Indigenous population prior to Columbus was anthropologist Henry Dobyns. In a 1983 book, Dobyns used estimates of how many people each type of landscape could support as well as historical records of 16th-century disease epidemics to arrive at an Indigenous population estimate of around 112 million people — more than 100 times larger than some previous experts had believed.

"In essence, Dobyns filled up the landscape to its maximum carrying capacity, so that all environmentally similar places were occupied by the same number of people," Milner said. "He also made the assumption that epidemic disease spread widely and universally, which would make sense if the landscape was filled up."

But a burst of archaeological research in the 1970s and 1980s revealed that the Americas were not uniformly settled, Milner said. Dobyns' estimates were therefore much too high.

Researchers then began to focus on creating population estimates for specific regions of the hemisphere, using techniques such as the relative density of pottery sherds at a site, the number of stone tools and flakes, the number and size of houses, and mortality trends from human skeletons.

In a 2019 study, geographers compiled 129 population estimates from 82 published studies to model the hemisphere-wide distribution of the Indigenous population in 1492. The researchers split the hemisphere into seven regions — the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, Inca territory, Amazonia, North America and the rest of the Americas — and reached a combined estimate of 60.5 million. Their estimate for North America (modern-day Canada and the U.S.) was about 3 million to 6 million, less than one-third of Dobyns' estimate of 18 million.

A regional perspective – North America

The 2019 study found that the most populous groups in the Western Hemisphere in 1492 were the Aztecs, largely in modern-day Mexico; and the Inca, who lived along the west coast of South America.

But the people we know the most about from an archaeological standpoint are Indigenous groups in the U.S. and Canada.

In a 2010 study, Milner and geographer George Chaplin zoomed in on the data from eastern North America, compiling historic group sizes and sizes of archaeological occupation areas to estimate the location and size of "population aggregates." Using this method, their overall estimate for the eastern U.S. and southeastern Canada was about 1.6 million people.

"Our mean estimates," Milner and Chaplin wrote, "indicate that North America held roughly 2.8 to 5.7 million people" or a "best estimate" of 3.8 million people in the early 16th century, before European diseases dramatically decreased the size of the Indigenous population.

"If you want to start estimating specific populations, you should use measures that work across regions," Robert Kelly, an archaeologist at the University of Wyoming, told Live Science. "People produce things that can be carbon-dated everywhere, because everyone had to build fires for heat and for cooking."

Charcoal from hearths is one of the main human-made things that archaeologists use to radiocarbon-date a site. The radiocarbon data provides a range of dates showing when the firewood was likeliest to have been used.

In North America, many of those carbon-14 dates from charcoal, as well as from animal bones and plant remains from archaeological sites, have been entered into the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD).

In a 2009 study, Matthew Peros, a geographer at Bishop's University in Quebec, and co-authors mathematically combined the radiocarbon date ranges in CARD to generate a single curve that revealed how common C-14 dates were over time. At the time, CARD had about 25,000 records.

Because time periods with more people most likely produced more material that could be carbon-dated, the shape of the radiocarbon date curve gave the team an idea of when the population of North America increased and decreased.

They found that the population of North America increased rapidly around 50 B.C. and peaked around A.D. 1150. From that time until European contact, the Indigenous population may have been declining, possibly because of increased mortality from diseases like tuberculosis as people aggregated into denser settlements.

"The 1150 date was an interesting finding that also surprised us," Peros told Live Science. "I had assumed it would be more like 1500 just following the arrival of the Europeans."

In a 2025 study, Kelly and co-authors found a similar temporal peak. By that time, CARD's dataset had ballooned to over 100,000 dates, making the estimate more robust.

"Although devastated by European contact, the Indigenous population did not simply increase to a peak at 1500 CE and then decline," the researchers wrote in the study. In fact, they found evidence for a slight recovery in population numbers just prior to 1500.

But how large was that population? By combining the radiocarbon date curve with a starting population and factoring in average annual population growth, researchers can estimate the number of people living in North America around 1492, Peros said.

In their study, Peros and co-authors assumed that a handful of extended families — around 1,000 people — entered North America about 15,000 years ago as the founder population. With those inputs, the researchers estimated that the maximum population of North America was about 2.5 million in 1150 and had declined to about 1.8 million in 1492. But if people arrived significantly earlier than 15,000 years ago — which might be the case, given evidence from sites like White Sands in New Mexico, which dates to 23,000 years ago — or arrived in greater numbers, those population figures would be even higher.

"Had Europeans tried settling the continent at A.D. 1000, they would have run into a much, much larger Indigenous population," Kelly said. At that time, the city of Cahokia, near modern-day St. Louis, encompassed 6 square miles (16 square kilometers) and had a population of nearly 20,000 people.

"They could have fielded thousands of warriors, and it would have been a very different experience for the Europeans," Kelly said. "It could have been a very different history."

Why does this matter?

Experts told Live Science that the pre-1492 population of what is now the U.S. and Canada was between 2 million and 4 million. The archaeological deep dive in this region sets up the possibility that a full Western Hemisphere population estimate may be made someday.

Milner is optimistic they'll eventually get there. "Will it be done in my lifetime? Probably not," he said. "It's time-consuming, laborious and not especially flashy work to do."

Nonetheless, demography is important work, he said, because it can help us make estimates to prepare for the future.

"The world's population has more than doubled in my lifetime; that's unheard of in human existence," Milner said. "Environmental scientists are really trying to look at what's happened over long periods of time to give us a range of variation of what might happen in the future. We have to make some informed decisions about how to manage our landscape and accommodate these changes."

Understanding the number of Indigenous inhabitants in the Western Hemisphere in 1492 is also key to understanding the history of North America.

"North America was not an empty continent when the Europeans arrived," Peros said. "There were people and civilizations pretty much everywhere in the Americas for a long period of time. It is important for people to understand that when we talk about questions of reconciliation and when we do land acknowledgements."

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

This colorful ceramic urn depicts a person wearing a jaguar costume and surrounded by human skulls, about to be received into the Maya underworld. The urn once held the bones of an ancestor for their descendants to venerate.

The urn was anonymously gifted to The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore in 2008. According to the museum, the urn is about 17.5 inches (44.5 centimeters) tall and was likely produced in Guatemala by the K'iche' Maya people more than a millennium ago. Originally, the urn probably had an elaborate lid that was tied on with string through the loops near the lip of the vessel, but it is now missing.

The decoration on the urn is striking. A person wearing a jaguar costume splashed with blood — claws and teeth bared — looks out at the viewer from the center of the urn. This individual may be a deceased ruler who is entering the world of the dead, which is symbolized by two pairs of human skulls and the dark figures of two Maya gods of the underworld. Behind the underworld gods are raised spikes representing thorns of the tropical kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra).

The Maya believed that the kapok tree, which was also called the Maya "world tree" or the Yaxche, had roots in the aquatic underworld, so its depiction on this funerary urn may reflect how it is a conduit between realms, according to The Walters Art Museum. Jaguars also held important spiritual meaning to the Maya; they were thought to move fluidly between the three realms — sky, Earth and underworld. Therefore, the depiction of the deceased ruler wearing a jaguar costume to enter the underworld may have suggested that they could also mediate between the world of the living and the Maya gods.

This colorful and symbol-laden urn shows that death was not an ending for the Maya, according to The Walters Art Museum, and that the urn "serves as a graphic reminder of how the dissolution of the body could be a positive change, transforming a beloved ancestor into an honored spirit who would continue to guide the living for eternity."

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

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Archaeologists have been arguing for more than a century about whether people first entered the American continents before, during or after the coldest peak of the last ice age, called the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Now, a new study of the available genetic evidence suggests the group that gave rise to today's Indigenous people migrated to the Americas no earlier than 21,000 years ago.

"The evidence points to the arrival of humans ancestral to contemporary Indigenous peoples likely near the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, but earlier migrations may also have occurred," study co-authors Bethany Potter, an archaeologist at the Kansas Geological Survey, and Savannah Hay, a biological anthropologist at the University of Kansas, told Live Science in an email.

In a study published online Sept. 23 in the journal Current Opinion in Genetics & Development, the researchers used genetic evidence to investigate the three main archaeological models for Native American origins: an entry into the Americas before the LGM more than 25,000 years ago, entry during the LGM some time between 25,000 and 14,000 years ago, and entry after the LGM more recently than 14,000 years ago, sometimes called the Clovis First theory.

"The reason this topic is so contentious among anthropologists is because not all archaeologists agree about which of the earliest sites are legitimate, and that influences which model they think is most accurate," Potter and Hay said. "We know that humans were definitely in the Americas by about 13,500 years ago. We still don't know if they arrived earlier than that and, if so, how much earlier."

Genetic evidence of the first people in the Americas is scarce. The first whole genome from an ancient Indigenous person, who lived around 4,000 years ago in Greenland, was sequenced in 2010. Since then, the researchers wrote in the study, scientists have published around 250 whole genomes, along with genome-wide data from around 1,200 ancient Indigenous people.

These DNA studies have revealed key information about the first people in the Americas. During the LGM, around 25,000 years ago, a group of people living somewhere near Siberia or Beringia, which included the land bridge connecting Asia to Alaska, split into different groups ‪—‬ ancient Native Americans, ancient Beringians and one or more "ghost" lineages ‪—‬ and moved quickly along the Pacific coast, possibly splitting again around 16,000 years ago into Northern Native Americans and Southern Native Americans.

"Huge gaps in our genetic dataset"

Although the current genetic data lines up with archaeological evidence of people entering the American continents at least 14,000 years ago and perhaps as far back as 21,000 years ago, more DNA evidence is needed to fully understand how and when the first Indigenous people arrived from Siberia.

"There are huge gaps in our genetic dataset," Potter and Hay said. "For example, there are still no published ancient genomes from the Great Plains, despite that being where our lab group is situated." And these gaps could be hiding evidence of earlier migrations.

Human footprints found at White Sands, an archaeological site in New Mexico, have been dated to 23,000 years ago. If this date is correct, it implies that people were living there prior to the LGM. The Acoma Pueblo people living in the region of White Sands today recognize these footprints as traces of their ancestors, Potter and Hay said.

But genetic data from contemporary and ancient Indigenous peoples in the Americas currently shows that the White Sands population did not make a significant genetic contribution to the ancestors of today's Indigenous people, the researchers said. "However, it is possible we have not sampled their descendants' lineage, or that they contributed a low proportion of genetic ancestry to ancient North American populations," they said. "Perhaps we've just not found DNA from the White Sands population yet."

There are several scenarios compatible with a pre-LGM entry of people into the Americas, the researchers wrote, but assessing those models also requires more genetic data. To date, the earliest sampled genome is from a 12,800-year-old individual known as the Anzick-1 child, whose bones were found in Montana. Extrapolation from the DNA of the Anzick child and other early ancestors points to an initial migration that occurred no earlier than 21,000 years ago, Potter and Hay said.

"Expanding geographic coverage in general would be hugely beneficial, but many of us are intentionally slow with our ancient DNA approaches to ensure research relevant to descendant communities is ethical and collaborative," Potter and Hay said.

It is unclear when or if the longstanding question of when people first entered the Americas will be resolved, as current archaeological and genetic evidence do not unequivocally point to a single answer, Potter and Hay said, but "the publication of new ancient genomic data from the Americas is powerful, as it has the potential to fill in these gaps and reframe how we see these early peopling events."

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

An international team has reconstructed the face of a man who lived in what's now Ecuador more than 3,000 years ago and whose skull featured in one of history's great anthropological debates.

The facial reconstruction is based on the Punin-2 skull, which a farmer discovered in a ravine near the town of Punín in the Chimborazo region of Ecuador's central Andes in the 1970s.

A similar skull, Punin-1, had been found in the same ravine in 1923 during an expedition led by the American Museum of Natural History. Some scientists at that time suggested its physical features were archaic, especially its prominent brow.

As a result, scientists proposed in 1925 that the first Punin skull was evidence of Oceanic ancestry, possibly through ancient contact with people from Australia or the Pacific Islands.

The ancient sediment layer where it was found — and where the Punin-2 skull was also discovered about 50 years later — predated modern humans (Homo sapiens), prompting some to wonder if they came from a now-extinct relative, such as Homo erectus or the Neanderthals.

But later studies challenged these ideas, and the new facial reconstruction indicates the Punin-2 skull belonged to a modern human man with purely Native American ancestry.

Christopher Rynn, an independent forensic craniofacial anthropologist based in the U.K., said there's no question that the Punin-2 skull was an Indigenous American who originally had descended from an ancestral group of North Siberians and East Asians during the last ice age. "Punín-2 resembles an East Asian skull from the front, but not at all from the side," Rynn told Live Science.

Rynn's colleagues in Ecuador shared their access to the skull, and he started working on its reconstruction last year. The Punin-1 skull is now at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Rynn and his colleagues, led by the sculptor Hector Flores Franco from the University of Chimborazo in Ecuador, are raising funds for further investigations, which will include a reconstruction of the Punin-1 skull and attempt an ancient DNA analysis of both. "DNA will tell us the true genetic lineage," Rynn said.

Disputed dating

When the Punin-2 skull was discovered, researchers suggested it might be the same age as fossils of extinct ice age animals found in the ravine, including mastodons and giant sloths, that were dated to the Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). Similar claims were made about the Punin-1 skull.

But geological studies of the ravine have since disproved this idea, suggesting instead that erosion and soil movements had mixed the much younger human remains with the Pleistocene fossils.

Rather, it appears the Punin-2 individual lived as a hunter-gatherer in the Chimborazo region between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago. According to recent anthropological and osteological studies, the man was aged about 50 when he died.

Rynn said he had purposefully learned as little about the skull's origin as possible so the face would be based solely on the skull's shape, rather than on his assumptions. But he did follow local guidance about the hairstyle shown on the reconstruction, which was unique to particular tribal groups in the Chimborazo region where the skull was found. The hair is black in color and parted in the middle; real hair will be used in a physical bust of the reconstruction due to be completed in 2027.

"The hairstyle is very specific," Rynn said. "If it's wrong, it looks like a different tribe."

In addition, some of Rynn's early reconstructions made the eyes too protrusive, as they would be in a skull of East Asian origin, so he followed local advice to make them deeper set. The result is a face that looks distinctly Indigenous American. "It explains a lot to me about the broader nature of skull and face shape differences between Native Americans and East Asians," Rynn said.

Faces from the past

Facial reconstructions have been carried out from the remains of hundreds of ancient humans, because archaeologists think these faces provide an important connection to people who might otherwise exist only as old bones.

Rynn has also worked on the reconstruction of a Neanderthal face from about 50,000 years ago. He uses techniques developed at the University of Manchester in the 1970s that are now known as the "Manchester Method," although they are actually a combination of techniques from all around the world, he said.

For the Punin-2 skull reconstruction, Rynn combined digital techniques and partial physical reconstructions with wax to create the face, using libraries of data to determine the right thickness of tissues in particular places.

The digital face has been presented to a select group of people from the Chimborazo region who are likely to be the man's descendants. "It's a portrait of their actual ancestor," Rynn said. "They seem to like it!"

Bones from extinct elephant-like creatures discovered along the shore of Lake Tagua Tagua in central Chile bear human-made cut marks and were found alongside stone tools, revealing that some of the first humans to live there were killing and eating these animals 13,000 years ago, new research shows.

Archaeological excavations carried out over the past two years in the basin of the ancient lake revealed a large concentration of megafauna remains and stone tools, according to a Sept. 24 statement from the Catalan Institute for Human Palaeoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA). Several bones from gomphotheres, an extinct group of tusked mammals related to modern elephants, displayed clear cut marks, suggesting that Indigenous people butchered the animals at the site.

The animal bones and artifacts date to around 12,000 to 13,000 years ago, according to the statement, which means they provide further evidence of early human occupation in southern South America as hunter-gatherers repeatedly visited the ancient lake shore.

The earliest confirmed archaeological site in South America is Monte Verde, which dates to about 14,500 years ago and is also located in Chile. Other early Indigenous sites on the continent include Huaca Prieta in Peru and Arroyo Seco in Argentina, both of which are around 14,000 years old.

Archaeologists had previously discovered the remains of other animals in the Lake Tagua Tagua basin, including now-extinct American horses and deer species, some of which also show evidence of cut marks and burning that suggest ancient humans were cooking and eating them.

The well-preserved assemblage of animal bones, plant remains and stone tools that archaeologists have unearthed constitute "a record with no known parallels currently in South America," IPHES-CERCA representatives said in the statement, providing key information about when people first arrived in the Americas and the earliest Americans' exploitation of the continents' megafauna before the animals went extinct.

Now that the research team has completed their fieldwork, they will study the samples of sediment and remains they've excavated over the past few years.

According to the statement, the analyses will help narrow down when humans first lived in the Lake Tagua Tagua basin and help figure out how humans were killing, butchering and eating the animals they encountered as some of the first people to reach the Southern Cone of South America.

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This massive limestone carving depicts a Maya queen known as Lady K'abel (meaning Water Lily Hand) and Na Kan Ajaw (meaning Divine Woman of the Snake Polity). The stela, or carved stone slab, was likely erected in A.D. 692 to mark the end of a k'atun, a 20-year period in the Maya calendar.

The stela is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). It has been reconstructed from more than 40 fragments of carved limestone but is only the front part of the original freestanding monument. The enormous carving is roughly 9 feet (2.74 meters) tall and weighs about 2,500 pounds (1,134 kilograms). It was found in a provincial Maya town called El Perú-Waka' in the Petén region of northern Guatemala.

In Petén, this carved portrait of Lady K'abel stood next to a similar one of her husband, K'inich Bahlam II, a man of lower rank. As a member of the powerful Kaanul or Snake dynasty, Lady K'abel ruled El Perú-Waka' as the military governor, according to the CMA. The stela also describes her as Ix Kaloomte', meaning Lady Supreme Warlord, and experts think Lady K'abel may have led an army from the city of Calakmul against the city of Tikal.

On the stela, Lady K'abel is "smothered in finery," Susan E. Bergh, then curator of Pre-Columbian and Native North American art at the CMA, wrote in 2014, which "allies her with a Maya supernatural being, either the maize god or the moon goddess." Her headdress is a fan of green quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno) feathers, and she wears a netted garment and necklace, both made of jade beads. The net dress is belted with the head of a fish-like creature, and Lady K'abel carries a scepter and a circular shield, alluding to her role as Lady Supreme Warlord. In the lower-left corner is a person with dwarfism, likely an attendant or courtier.

The stela was created to celebrate 20 years of Lady K'abel's rule. Portraying her as the maize god conveys themes of creation and renewal, archaeologist Phil Wanyerka wrote in a 1996 study. "By wearing the attire of a god, a mortal being becomes divine, and here a woman is transfigured into the maize god to summon the associated powers of renewal and rebirth for the passage of the old k'atun and the inauguration of the new," Wanyerka wrote.

Although Lady K'abel's stela was acquired in 1967, her tomb was not discovered until 2012, when archaeologists excavating at El Perú-Waka' stumbled across it when digging at the bottom of a previously unknown staircase near where the stela was found.

According to archaeologist Olivia Navarro-Farr, who led the excavation, the royal tomb was full of artifacts made from jade, obsidian and shells, including a bivalve shell placed on the skeleton's pelvis. The shell exactly matches one depicted on Lady K'abel's pelvis on the stela. In the tomb, the archaeologists also found a small alabaster carving with hieroglyphs that named Lady K'abel as its owner, almost certainly linking the occupant of the tomb with the imposing limestone stela that was discovered outside.

"It's not rare to find royal tombs," Navarro-Farr said. "But it is rare to have the perfect confluence of evidence that leads one to be able to make that kind of historical identification."

Editor's Note: This story was updated on Aug. 25 at 9:35 EDT to correct the headline. The stela is 1 ton, not 2 tons.

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Archaeologists have discovered a possible human sacrifice near the pyramid of Huaca Pucllana in the center of Lima, Peru. The skeleton may represent an offering connected to a ceremonial well that was closed up nearly 1,400 years ago.

Bones of an adult male were excavated from an underground water channel at the archaeological site earlier this year, according to an Aug. 18 translated statement from Peru's Ministry of Culture. The man was found resting on his left side, with his skull facing the ocean and the Huaca Pucllana pyramid, hinting he was intentionally placed that way.

The settlement at Huaca Pucllana was established around A.D. 400 in what is now Lima, Peru, and was occupied by different pre-Hispanic cultures until around 1440. The site is well known for its large platform pyramid, which was built by the Lima culture as the focal point of a ceremonial center.

The Lima people performed three main rituals at Huaca Pucllana, according to a 2023 study: the ritual destruction of massive pots, ritual banquets and human sacrifice.

The ritual sacrifices at Huaca Pucllana over four centuries varied in the number of people killed. For example, in 2007 and 2009, archaeologists discovered burials of an adult male and an adult female in the foundations of the pyramid. They believe these individuals were sacrificed to satisfy rituals associated with construction and architectural modifications of the pyramid.

The newly discovered burial, which has been dated to around A.D. 650, was found in a water channel near the pyramid that leads to a ceremonial well. Although the Lima people used small mud bricks to erect the pyramid, they created the well and water channel with river stones, which was an unusual building technique for the Lima people, according to the statement.

The archeologists determined the newfound skeleton likely belonged to an adult male based on the shape of the pelvis and skull. That said, additional studies will officially confirm the sex, as well as the age at death and any trauma on the skeleton that could suggest the person was sacrificed.

Further analyses of the skeleton and the underground water infrastructure may also reveal new clues to the "closing ceremonies" at the ritual well, according to the statement.

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Two Chilean mummies have provided scientists with the earliest known smallpox genomes found in the Americas, dating between 1492 and 1631.

The genomes are the first-ever DNA evidence that proves European colonization introduced smallpox to the Americas, according to a paper that published Thursday (July 30) in the journal Science.

Smallpox, an infection caused by the variola virus, was one of the deadliest diseases in the world until it was completely eradicated in 1980. While the disease has been found in 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummies, the first documented outbreak in the Americas was in 1518, during the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean. The virus then spread rapidly throughout Central and South America.

Experts have estimated that the disease caused the deaths of three to four million Indigenous people with no prior immunity to the disease. The combination of smallpox, violence, slavery and other diseases wiped out about 90% of the original inhabitants of the Americas by 1600.

While historians and scientists have long understood the toll of the disease, the story of smallpox's spread comes primarily from historical records, which were written by European colonizers and may not have fully captured transmission among Indigenous peoples. There's also a lot scientists don't know about the specific viral strains responsible for the pandemic because of the lack of ancient smallpox DNA evidence in the Americas.

In the new study, the researchers identified ancient smallpox virus DNA from the bones of two mummified Indigenous Inca individuals from northern Chile: an adult female and an adult male who lived between 1492 and 1631.

"None of us expected to find variola virus DNA from the sample that they collected, so it was completely a surprise," study co-author Shigeki Nakagome, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin, told Live Science. The research team was not targeting ancient pathogens but rather looking to understand human population history in the region. "I don't think there was any historical record documenting smallpox in this particular community, so no one expected the smallpox evidence."

Analysis of the two ancient viral genomes showed them to be almost identical, suggesting the two individuals were likely infected during the same outbreak or by the same circulating strain.

Comparing the genomes of ancient and modern variola viruses, the researchers found that the genome matched an extinct lineage that split from another European strain around 1296, but that predates modern strains. That means the variola virus found in the mummies is an evolutionary step between medieval European strains and modern strains, proving that Europeans brought smallpox to the Americas.

"We provide the first molecular evidence of smallpox introduction to the Americas through colonization," Nakagome said.

"This paper is really lovely because we know from the historical record that smallpox had a huge impact on Indigenous populations in the Americas," Anne Stone, an anthropologist at Arizona State University who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "This paper gives us the first description of the pathogen during the colonial period," she said, adding that it corroborates the "historical record that a smallpox epidemic went through [the Americas]."

The genome also showed that, through a series of mutations, the genes that enable variola to infect species other than humans — genes present in related viruses that infect animals, like mpox or cowpox — were inactivated, Bruno Romero González, a computational biologist at Trinity College Dublin and lead author of the study, told Live Science. Over time, this ancient variola strain became less able to infect animals. "Because of that, variola started to focus on targeting only humans," Romero González said, ultimately adapting to become more successful in infecting people.

The researchers hope that more samples of ancient variola virus are found throughout the Americas, to complete the picture of smallpox's evolution and movement.

Studying ancient DNA can also give scientists insight into how modern day diseases might behave, Stone said. Understanding the evolution of this pathogen is particularly important because Mpox is in the same group and closely related, she said. Studies have suggested Mpox might behave similarly to the historical variola virus, in that it seems to mutate to adapt to human hosts. "It's always useful to study ancient pathogens," Stone said, "helping us learn how these pathogens adapt to us."

The study adds to growing evidence for smallpox on ancient Indigenous skeletons, including two 16th-century toddlers buried in Peru whose bones have lesions suggestive of smallpox infection.

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Using laser scanning technology to peer beneath the dense canopy of the Amazon rainforest, archaeologists have discovered hundreds of ancient earthworks that were made by a complex, enigmatic society over two millennia ago, a new study finds.

This ancient civilization, called the Aquiry, arose 2,500 years ago in Brazil. Based on the large number of earthworks, called geoglyphs, the Aquiry may have had 3 million people before the society collapsed, the researchers suggested in the study.

"The cultures and societies that composed the Aquiry shared a common worldview and constructed ceremonial centers in a variety of monumental geometric forms, characterized by deep ditches and high outer embankments, commonly known as Amazonian geoglyphs," Martti Pärssinen, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, told Live Science in an email.

In the new study, published Wednesday (July 29) in the journal Nature, Pärssinen and co-authors presented findings from their survey of nearly 1,740 square miles (4,500 square kilometers) of Amazonian rainforest, which revealed 396 new geoglyphs and allowed them to approximate the geographical extent of the Aquiry civilization.

Pärssinen has been investigating geometric earthworks in Brazil's Acre state for more than two decades. In a 2021 study, he officially introduced the name Aquiry for the multicultural ancient civilization, named after the Acre River, which flows from Peru and Bolivia through the present-day states of Acre and Amazonas in Brazil. Aquiry means "river of caimans" in the language spoken by the Indigenous Arawakan people.

Because of the dense canopy of trees in the rainforest, archaeological investigation in the area has been limited. Most of the evidence for the Aquiry civilization comes from lidar and airborne laser scanning of monumental geoglyphs that were constructed between 600 B.C. and A.D. 850, according to the study. People lived in multifamily longhouses around the earthworks, and they farmed crops like maize and squash.

"According to native oral traditions, the Aquiry centers were built to foster relations among communities" and with significant otherworldly beings, Pärssinen said. These centers also served as venues for gatherings and political decision-making, and they enabled chiefs to display their generosity, he added.

To date, archaeologists have identified around 1,700 known geoglyphs in the area. But the researchers think the total is significantly higher, with more than 20,000 Aquiry earthworks waiting to be found in places that haven't yet been surveyed. And based on an estimate of 300 people needed to build and maintain each geoglyph on average, the researchers estimated that the Aquiry civilization likely peaked at 1.25 million to 3 million people between A.D. 100 and 300.

Similar geoglyphs dating to between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500 have been found in Peru. Known as the Nazca Lines, these earthworks are shaped like animals, humans, plants and fantastical figures, in addition to having geometric motifs. The Nazca were an interconnected regional society of precolonial farmers who were able to survive in a forbidding geographic region, but they lived roughly 1,050 miles (1,700 kilometers) from the Aquiry.

"The Nazca geoglyphs represent a different phenomenon and were probably unrelated to the Aquiry civilization," Pärssinen said. "Nevertheless, in both cases, the straight roads and lines, as well as the geometric forms and motifs, are best appreciated from the air."

The presence of thousands of geoglyphs in the southwest Amazon region is leading archaeologists to rethink assumptions about precolonial civilizations and urban development — but it's also bringing up questions about the fate of the Aquiry.

"We do not know why the geoglyphs were suddenly abandoned between A.D. 850 and 950," Pärssinen said. "The available evidence points to a relatively rapid collapse" that may be related to the disappearance of other major precolonial powers, he said, "including the Classic Maya in Central America and the Tiwanaku and Wari civilizations in the Andes."

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Archaeologists in El Salvador have uncovered the unusual burial of a face-down human skeleton that was interred along with a ceramic vessel shaped like a sea turtle nearly 3,000 years ago. The burial may be from a pre-Maya civilization that practiced human sacrifice.

According to a translated statement from El Salvador's Ministry of Culture, the burial was found July 2 in Antiguo Cuscatlán, a suburb of San Salvador, during excavation work directed by Carlos Flores Manzano, an archaeologist and doctoral student at Yale University.

Although the skeleton has not been radiocarbon-dated yet, it was discovered underneath a layer of volcanic ash from an eruption of the Plan de la Laguna volcanic crater thought to date to between 850 and 830 B.C., during the Middle Preclassic period (roughly 1000 to 400 B.C.) in Mesoamerica.

During this period, societies in southeastern Mesoamerica were becoming more sedentary and developing more complex cultures, archaeologists have found. But in addition to the archaeological remains of crop cultivation and painted ceramics discovered over the years in Antiguo Cuscatlán, experts have pointed to some burials as evidence of human sacrifice — and the newly uncovered burial may be similar.

In the late 1970s, archaeologist William R. Fowler excavated at Chalchuapa, an ancient town east of Antiguo Cuscatlán with thousands of years' worth of history. While digging in an area known as Structure E3-7, Fowler found 33 human skeletons — mostly adult males — that he interpreted as sacrifices of war captives due to signs that their feet and arms were bound.

According to the El Salvador Ministry of Culture's statement, the newly uncovered burial is likely not the only one in the area. Archaeologists may eventually find a burial mound with several dozen skeletons, similar to what Fowler uncovered at Chalchuapa. However, Fowler's interpretation of human sacrifice has been questioned in recent years, including by Flores Manzano in a 2020 study.

Instead of being linked to sacrifice, the unusual burial position might be related to an ancient understanding of the cosmos and underworld, Flores Manzano told Diario El Salvador. If that's the case, the sea turtle ceramic vessel found near the skeleton's hand may be associated with Orion's Belt, which features in later Maya astronomy as part of a sacred journey.

The fragile burial was encased in plaster before being removed for further study. Flores Manzano said the skeleton will now undergo chemical analysis so researchers can learn more about the individual's life, diet and possible cause of death. He expects the analyses to take about a year, after which the results will be announced to the public.

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Inca boys and girls chosen for human sacrifice trekked through Inca communities for thousands of miles on sacred pilgrimages before their ritual deaths, often near high peaks in the Andes Mountains, a new analysis of their mummies reveals.

The research also looks again at the manners of their deaths and found that none of three children in the Inca ritual, known as Capacocha, died in the ways that scientists previously thought.

"Capacocha was not limited to the final act of offering at the mountain," study first author Verónica Silva-Pinto, an archaeologist at Diego Portales University in Santiago, Chile, told Live Science in an email. "It was an extended ritual process that began months earlier and involved mobility, dietary changes, the participation of different communities, and the creation of sacred landscapes."

But some other experts, while welcoming the study, are cautious about some of its details.

The new study is based on new examinations of three Capacocha mummies from two sites: The "Niño de El Plomo" or El Plomo Boy, who was about 8 or 9 years old in the 15th century when he was sacrificed near the 17,700 foot (5,400 meter) summit of Cerro El Plomo, now in central Chile; and two girls, one about age 9 and the other about 18, who were sacrificed about 30 years earlier near the top of what's now Cerro Esmeralda in northern Chile's Atacama Desert.

It was long thought that the El Plomo boy had died from hypothermia, or exposure to freezing temperatures, on the high peak, and that the Cerro Esmeralda girls were killed by strangulation. But the new study, published July 15 in the journal Science Advances, rejects those ideas.

Human sacrifice

Archaeologists found the El Plomo Boy in 1954 and the two Cerro Esmeralda girls in 1976. The new study applies modern archaeological techniques to them for the first time.

It "demonstrates that previously investigated contexts can continue to provide crucial information when revisited using new technologies, minimally invasive methods, and an ethical perspective," Silva-Pinto said.

Their examinations with CT scans and microscopy revealed that El Plomo Boy had been killed with blunt force trauma to the head — an injury that wasn't apparent to the initial investigators. The two Cerro Esmeralda girls, meanwhile, were previously thought to have been strangled because of marks on their necks. But the new study found that the marks were probably caused by their clothing after death, and that the hyoid bones of their throats were not fractured or displaced, which happens in most strangulations. The cause of the girls' deaths should now be considered "indeterminate," the researchers said.

Silva-Pinto said the forensic examination should be considered within the Andean worldview, which didn't see death as the end of existence.

"Death was not necessarily understood as an absolute end, but rather as a transformation or passage into the realm of divinities, ancestors, and sacred forces," she said. "The individuals who were offered acquired a new ritual status and could become mediators between communities, mountains, divinities, and the state."

Sacred pilgrimage

The researchers carried out chemical studies on tiny samples of hair from the mummies by looking at isotopes, or different versions of the same element that have varying numbers of neutrons in their nuclei. The isotopes from food and water people consume are incorporated into their hair, shedding light on where they've lived. The team also examined samples of fractured bones for radiocarbon dating.

The hair isotopes showed that the children had moved over long distances between "ecologically distinct regions." The researchers estimated that El Plomo Boy traveled between 1,615 and 1,740 miles (2,600 and 2,800 kilometers) over his last nine months, probably starting from the Inca capital Cuzco, at the heart of the Inca Empire. The Cerro Esmeralda girls probably traveled between 560 and 745 miles (900 and 1,200 km) in their final three months.

Silva-Pinto said the pilgrimages connected outlying regions with the high mountains and other sites where the ceremonies culminated. "Along the routes, local communities would have received the pilgrims and participated in ceremonies involving the sharing of food and beverages," she said. The routes thereby became sacred landscapes, and the central Inca state used this to consolidate its presence in incorporated territories, she said.

The radiocarbon dates for the mummies showed they were all sacrificed in the 15th century: the Cerro Esmeralda girls in about 1450 and El Plomo Boy in about 1480. "The chronology shows that these were not isolated events, but rather a practice carried out at different moments," Silva-Pinto said.

Bioarchaeologist Dagmara Socha from the University of Warsaw in Poland, who studies the Capacocha mummies but who was not involved in this particular examination, cautioned that the conclusions drawn from the isotope analysis might be flawed. "Isotopic analyses alone do not allow us to reconstruct the potential route taken during the journey," she told Live Science in an email. "In several cases, the observed isotopic changes were not statistically significant and may also reflect seasonal variation in diet."

The study is "interesting and potentially valuable, but some of the interpretations go beyond what can be reliably concluded from the available evidence," she told Live Science in an email.

Archaeologist Pablo Mignone of Argentina's Institute for Research in Social Sciences and Humanities, who was also not involved, said the paper's interpretive framing could be questioned. "The paper leans on a fairly centralized, top-down narrative: children brought to Cuzco and then dispatched as instruments of 'biopolitical conquest,'" he told Live Science in an email.

But earlier studies showed that Capacocha individuals sometimes started their trek in Inca regions, not only at the capital: '''Cuzco as the sole engine of conquest' is an interpretive choice that neither this study nor the broader body of comparative evidence on Capacocha unequivocally supports," Mignone said.

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This wooden mask, which is decorated with human hair and a textile headband, adorned an Andean mummy up to a millennium ago. Made by an artist of the Chancay people, the mask was also painted red with the mercury-containing pigment cinnabar.

The Chancay were a pre-Inca people who lived along the central coast of Peru in the Late Intermediate Period (1000 to 1450). A common tradition among the Chancay was the funerary bundle — the end result of wrapping their dead in layers of textiles, vegetal material and animal skin. The bundle was then buried in a pit along with grave goods such as tools, food and figurines. Because the bodies were usually wrapped in a fetal position, however, it was not always clear exactly where the head was located once the bundle was complete.

According to The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which has this mask in its collection, "false heads" made from textiles or wood were sometimes tied onto the Chancay funerary bundles to act as a focal point for venerating the ancestor.

The mask is roughly life-size, measuring 12 by 8 inches (30.5 by 20.3 centimeters). Chancay funeral masks were not meant to be realistic. Instead, they had simplified features, such as the diamond-shaped eyes; triangular nose; and tiny, U-shaped smile on this mask. The wig was almost certainly made from human hair, according to a microscopic analysis The Walters Art Museum undertook in 2017.

The Chancay artist who made the mask painted it red using cinnabar, a toxic substance that is the brick-red form of mercury sulfide. Cinnabar was frequently used in Andean funerary rituals, and the color was associated with purification and commemoration rituals. But the mask was likely not placed on the outside of the bundle burial, as a patterned impression has been left on the cinnabar of this mask, probably from being wrapped in even more textiles, according to The Walters Art Museum.

Although the Chancay culture is not as well known as the Inca, recent research into the ceramics the Chancay left behind and the tattoos on their mummified ancestors has revealed that they were a complex society with a high degree of artistic talent.

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A team of conservationists has discovered and restored the tombstone of Sebastian, a formerly enslaved man who died free in 1729.

"That discovery is likely one of the oldest gravestones of a free Black person in America," Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston, said in a July 4 speech. "It's been there all along. We just had to go look and share the story."

The stone marker is inscribed with Sebastian's chosen name, Boston, and features an image common in 17th- and early 18th-century tombstones in New England: the death's head. The symbol includes a stylized skull flanked by wings, which were possibly intended to symbolize spiritual resurrection.

On the tombstone, a simple, five-line inscription reads:

In 18th-century American writing, the word "the" was often abbreviated with a Y-shaped letter form called a "thorn" representing the "th" sound. Tombstones also frequently abbreviated "deceased" and the month. Somewhat confusingly, before 1752, the American colonies regularly used the Julian calendar, as did Britain, in which the new year started on March 25. Boston's year of death is listed on the tombstone as 1728, but his February 28 death was actually in 1729 in our modern Gregorian calendar.

Kelly Thomas, the director of the Historic Burying Grounds Initiative for the Boston Parks and Recreation Department, told WBZ News Radio that she identified the gravestone during a restoration project at the Granary Burying Ground, the city's third-oldest cemetery. Established in 1660, the cemetery includes over 5,000 graves, including the final resting places of Declaration of Independence signers Samuel Adams and John Hancock; the U.S. Revolutionary War officer Paul Revere; and Crispus Attucks, a sailor of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry who is thought to be the first American killed in the Boston Massacre.

"I was reviewing the photos of headstones, and then I noticed that the stone only had one name," rather than a first and last name, Thomas told WBZ News Radio, suggesting that Boston was either enslaved or free when he died. Based on a search of historical records, Thomas determined that Boston's enslaved name was Sebastian and that he also went by Bastian.

A surprising amount of information was recorded about Boston and his wife, Jane Lake. In 1701, they had their daughter, also named Jane, baptized at First Church in Boston, where they regularly attended worship services. But while the two were married with children, they were also both enslaved and lived in different households, historian Gloria Whiting wrote in a 2016 study.

Boston was likely freed in the early 18th century, some time after the 1702 death of John Waite, who had held him in slavery. By 1708, a list of free Black people included the name Boston, and he had gained a reputation in the city as a hardworking handyman, according to Whiting's study. He had been freed for roughly 30 years when he died in 1729 and was well-known enough to have an obituary published for him in the New-England Weekly Journal, a rare occurrence for enslaved or freed Black people in colonial America.

Wu also said that, in recent weeks, archaeologists in Boston had discovered musket balls and gun flints from the infamous Battle of Bunker Hill that took place on June 17, 1775. The battle was fought by British Crown forces and New England troops in the first stage of the American Revolutionary War.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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."

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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.

First Americans quiz: How much do you know about the first people to reach the Americas?

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?