Some of the last surviving Neanderthals displayed greater genetic diversity than scientists previously thought, a new study of ancient DNA reveals, challenging the idea that genetic decline was the main cause of their extinction.

Neanderthals were among the closest relatives of modern humans, with their lineages diverging around 500,000 years ago. Although Neanderthals once ranged across Eurasia, they are usually thought to have gone extinct about 40,000 years ago.

Much remains a mystery about why Neanderthals went extinct. Previous genetic analyses of DNA from Neanderthals in Siberia revealed that those groups lived in small, isolated communities with signs of frequent interbreeding between close relatives. This raised the possibility that Neanderthals might have died off due to genetic deterioration from inbreeding.

However, DNA from Neanderthals is rare, and high-quality genomes are especially uncommon; until the new study, only four were available, three of which came from Russia, at the edge of the Neanderthals' geographic range. As such, it was uncertain whether DNA analyses of just a few Neanderthals accurately reflected why the entire lineage went extinct.

In the new study, published Wednesday (June 24) in the journal Nature, scientists recovered genetic data from 27 more Neanderthals, including a new high-quality genome, one with enough DNA for scientists to analyze many times to ensure the accuracy of their results.

"Some people might think the retrieval of ancient DNA from Neanderthals is now conventional; the truth is that this is far from trivial," Carles Lalueza-Fox, director of the Natural Sciences Museum of Barcelona in Spain, who did not take part in this research, told Live Science. Adding 27 more Neanderthals "to our general knowledge is a remarkable achievement."

The new data comes from 10 archaeological sites in northwestern Europe, in present-day Belgium and France. Seven of these sites were located in the Meuse Basin in Belgium, an area with a high concentration of late Neanderthals — those who lived after about 70,000 years ago. One of these sites was the Goyet cave system in Belgium, which recent findings suggested may hold evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism.

The genetic analysis revealed the late Neanderthals of northwestern Europe separated from a common ancestor with other known Neanderthals about 54,000 years ago. The newly studied late Neanderthals were more closely related to one another than late Neanderthal groups in other parts of Europe.

The scientists discovered that unlike other Neanderthal groups, many of the Neanderthals they examined showed little evidence of inbreeding. In addition, the new high-quality Neanderthal genome did not show lower genetic diversity than earlier Neanderthals. This finding suggests that reduced genetic diversity may not have been the primary reason Neanderthals died off.

"I am very happy to dispel the misconception that all Neandertals went extinct because they were too inbred," Alba Bossoms Mesa, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and first author of the study, told Live Science.

The study also revealed that the late Neanderthals of northwestern Europe that they analyzed were a large population of genetically interconnected groups, rather than the genetically isolated communities seen among Siberian Neanderthals.

"Neanderthals lived across vast regions of Eurasia over hundreds of thousands of years, so of course there is a lot of variation between them," Bossoms Mesa said. "It's not good to generalize about Neanderthals. We have to keep diversity in mind."

In addition, the newly analyzed late Neanderthals of northwestern Europe displayed a significant level of genetic diversity, dividing into at least four distinct groups, the researchers found. The splits between these groups appeared to originate during relatively warm spans of climate, perhaps reflecting times of population expansion during periods of favorable environmental conditions, the team noted.

Striking asymmetry

The late Neanderthals of northwestern Europe were contemporaries of modern humans (Homo sapiens) in Europe for up to 500 generations, the researchers said. Previous research has discovered Neanderthal DNA in modern-human genomes, revealing these lineages had mingled, with most modern-day humans outside Africa possessing some Neanderthal DNA. However, the new study found no evidence of recent modern-human DNA in these Neanderthals of Belgium and France, suggesting the two groups didn't mate there.

The new findings add to a striking asymmetry seen between Neanderthals and modern humans. "We have several examples of early modern humans who had a Neandertal ancestor only a few generations back," Bossoms Mesa said. "But in contrast, we do not yet have a single confirmed example of a Neanderthal individual with a recent modern human ancestor in their family tree."

There are several possible reasons for this asymmetry, Lalueza-Fox said. For instance, maybe there were genetic problems that prevented H. sapiens DNA from integrating with the Neanderthal gene pool. For instance, a 2025 study suggested that different versions of a gene tied to red blood cell function might have caused Neanderthal-human hybrid women to miscarry their fetuses.

However, "in my view, this conspicuous bias likely reflects a pattern of differential social acceptance among Neanderthals," he noted. "In brief, early modern humans were able to accept kids with Neanderthals but not the opposite, for whatever reason. This pattern, coupled with declining diversity in some Neanderthal populations, could explain their final extinction."

Future research can see if Neanderthals at other sites, such as the Iberian or Italian peninsulas, displayed similar levels of genetic diversity, Bossoms Mesa said. However, analyzing samples from these latter areas "is currently a bit more challenging, because ancient DNA preserves better in colder areas," she noted.

How much do you know about our closest relatives? Find out with our Neanderthal quiz!

For the first time, archaeologists have analyzed the genetic material of Homo naledi, a mysterious 300,000-year-old relative of modern humans discovered deep in a South African cave system. What they found is unique in human evolution studies: Every skeleton known from the species is female.

"I think it is fair to say that they surprised us," Lee Berger, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, told Live Science in an email, but H. naledi "has always been an enigmatic discovery."

Since 2013, Berger has headed the Rising Star project, which discovered nearly two dozen skeletons of small-brained, two-legged creatures, which the research team named H. naledi, within a cave system in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind.

Research over the past decade has revealed that H. naledi was unusual for having a small brain and upper body, similar to earlier australopithecines like Lucy, but a face, hands and lower limbs that were more human-like. In 2023, the Rising Star team suggested H. naledi may have used fire in the cave, and in 2025, they advanced the controversial claim that H. naledi buried their dead — a complex behavior unexpected for a human relative with such a small brain.

But a new study of H. naledi teeth published Wednesday (June 24) in the journal Cell may bolster the team's interpretation of the Rising Star cave as a burial site.

An international team of experts studied 20 teeth from H. naledi skeletons using proteomic analysis, a minimally destructive technique that sequences genetic material from ancient proteins. Proteomics is a burgeoning field, especially because these proteins can last longer than DNA. The team focused on amelogenin genes (AMEL), which code for proteins in dental enamel and vary by sex. While the gene variant called AMELX is found in both males and females, another one, AMELY, is found only in biological males.

In analyzing the H. naledi teeth, the team found no AMELY proteins but plenty of AMELX ones, suggesting that all of the skeletons were from females. These included the nearly complete skeletons of Neo and DH1, the main representative of the species, both originally assumed to be male.

The result is surprising because there are no known ancient human cemeteries or collections of nonhuman primate skeletons that contain only females.

"The most likely reason for these robust results are, in my opinion, cultural selection after death for burial by sex and perhaps gender," Berger said. "There are many past human societies with sex-specific burial practices," study co-author John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement, but the H. naledi skeletons "are older than any known Neanderthal or modern human burial site, and it's remarkable to see that they may all be female."

"An already weird hominin"

The discovery that everything we know about H. naledi comes from female skeletons has surprised paleoanthropologists.

"The bottom line is this is a weird result from an already weird hominin," Elizabeth Sawchuk, curator of human evolution at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "The key thing to remember is that failure to detect evidence of AMELY does not mean there are no males in the sample — it just means that none were detected."

One possible reason for the lack of this gene in H. naledi skeletons is an AMELY gene deletion that is known to occur very rarely in some modern-human populations and that has been found in one Neanderthal male. If the AMELY gene doesn't exist in this H. naledi group, then the protein profiles of males would look identical to the profiles of females.

However, "it's very unlikely that this would be the case among even half of the 20 individuals we studied or for an entire population," study co-author Enrico Cappellini, a paleoproteomics professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, said in the statement. "Either scenario, namely the absence of H. naledi males in the Rising Star cave system or a systematic deletion of their AMELY gene, is fascinating and would have deep implications for a better understanding of the biology and evolution of this species."

Studies of H. naledi, a species known from a single site, "continue to yield more questions than answers," Sawchuk said. "As the authors point out, this is a surprising result that requires more investigation."

Other hominins in South Africa

A second surprising result in the proteomic analysis was that H. naledi shares a gene variant with Paranthropus robustus, a human relative with a massive face and teeth that lived in South Africa around 1 million to 2 million years ago.

Proteomic analysis of four P. robustus skeletons in 2025 proved that limited genetic material could be recovered from ancient human relatives in Africa. The new study has revealed that some members of this species and H. naledi shared a gene variant related to collagen production, which is different from the genes found in modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

While H. naledi and P. robustus inhabited the same general geographic area, it is unclear if they lived there at the same time and overlapped or if they may have had an ancestor-descendant relationship.

"It is early days for sampling fossil hominins with ancient proteins, and until we build a better, bigger sample, we just don't know" what the shared genetic variant means, Berger said.

Building a larger database of ancient proteins from other human relatives that evolved in Africa, such as Australopithecus africanus and Homo erectus, may clarify where H. naledi fits into the picture of human evolution.

"Key data are missing from H. erectus and A. africanus that would help put this evidence into context," Sawchuk said. "For now, this is another curious finding that bears further investigation."

What does sex change?

In 2015, Berger and colleagues named the new hominin H. naledi and described what they presumed to be male and female variants of the species based on the skeletons' sizes. In many groups of human relatives and in modern humans, males are physically larger than females, on average. This assumption led the researchers to classify the presumed male individual DH1, discovered in the Dinaledi chamber of the cave, as the main representative of the new species.

But a 2024 study was the first to question the assumption that the H. naledi skeletons came from two sexes. In that study, researchers found variation in the teeth of H. naledi that was "so low that the possibility that one sex is represented by few or no individuals in the sample cannot be excluded," they wrote.

"Our study helps resolve the long-standing mystery of why Homo naledi lacked significant variation," study first author Palesa Madupe, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said in the statement. "It's probably because they could have all belonged to one sex."

If the proteomic sex analysis is correct and H. naledi does not have AMELY deletion issues, it means everything we know about the species comes from females. But this doesn't mean interpretations of the species are wrong.

"The only thing that has changed is that we have never seen a male!" Berger said. "When and if we do, we will have to extend the description to include male sex characters and the likely extension of certain aspects of variation."

The researchers hope their study paves the way for more proteomic analyses of human relatives in the future.

The new analysis proves that protein analysis of fossils from the Pleistocene (2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago) can be done in a minimally destructive way, Madupe said. "This means potentially opening the door to a whole new way of sustainably investigating the differences between sexes in groups of extinct hominins and other animals without causing visible damage to these priceless fossils."

What do you know about early humans? Test your knowledge with our human origins quiz!

Oil lamps have been simple and popular light sources for more than three millennia. But during the Roman and Byzantine empires, many oil lamps were highly decorated works of art. This hanging lamp in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was made nearly 1,600 years ago in the shape of a human right foot wearing a sandal, likely as an early Christian symbol.

The bronze oil lamp is significantly smaller than a life-size foot, measuring just 3.25 inches (8.3 centimeters) long. Still attached to the lamp is a chain with a hook for hanging, which is over 17 inches (43.5 cm) long.

The right big toe rests against the spout of the lamp, which would have held the wick. A sandal covers the foot, its leather or cord thongs tied at the ankle. The sole of the sandal is decorated with a swastika, which in Byzantine times was known as a gammadion cross and represented good fortune.

At the back of the lamp, there is an opening at the ankle where the lamp could be filled with oil. The flat cover for the opening is topped with a cross, identifying the lamp as a Christian artifact, Vera Ostoia, a curator of medieval art at The Met, wrote in a 1969 study of objects from the The Met Cloisters.

The foot shape may have been a protective image that symbolized good health and healing, according to The Met, and it may have doubled as a symbol of Christian pilgrimage. But the symbolism may have run even deeper.

In early Christian times, oil lamps and the light they produced were metaphors for enlightenment and immortality rather than just functional, Ostoia wrote. This foot lamp may have been connected to Psalm 119:105, which reads: "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path," meaning that people should follow the word of God as their path in life.

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

Some people from Oceania harbor thousands of genetic variants inherited from the Denisovans ‪—‬ a mysterious group of extinct humans ‪—‬ that are still active in their immune systems today, a new study finds.

The findings, published June 11 in the journal Science, come from the largest-ever map of Denisovan-inherited DNA ever created. The discovery shows that Denisovan DNA "is not just a remnant of ancient liaisons; it continues to influence our biology today," study co-author Serena Tucci, an assistant professor of anthropology and head of the Human Evolutionary Genomics Laboratory at Yale University, said in a statement.

Experiments revealed 3,127 variants inherited from Denisovans that still function in the immune systems of modern-day people; some of these variants switch genes that turn the immune response on or off, according to the new research.

However, because many of the immune system genes identified also affect other bodily functions, it is unclear exactly how these genes benefited survival, study first author Patrick Reilly, an evolutionary genomics researcher at Yale, told Live Science.

Denisovan DNA is active in humans today

Previous research has already found that some modern-day people in Oceania ‪—‬ a region that includes New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Fiji ‪—‬ have some Denisovan DNA. For example, people from Papua New Guinea are known to carry up to 5% Denisovan DNA in their genomes thanks to prehistoric trysts with the enigmatic group of humans who lived in Asia and disappeared around 30,000 years ago. This is among the highest proportion in the world, with modern-day East Asians typically carrying only around 0.1% Denisovan DNA.

Previous research has also shown that modern-day Tibetans carry a Denisovan version of the EPAS1 gene that supports their adaptation to living at high altitudes. People living in the highlands and lowlands of Papua New Guinea have different Denisovan gene variants depending on their local environments.

Yet Oceanians are vastly underrepresented in genomic databases. Sequencing the genomes of Oceanians can give a glimpse into the lives of the Denisovans and is essential for closing gaps in health disparities in Pacific Islanders as a whole, Reilly said.

To fill this gap, Tucci and her team sequenced the genomes of 177 Oceanians from 12 populations and compared them to 1,284 previously published genomes from populations worldwide. Then, they compared these segments to the known Denisovan genome and three Neanderthal genomes.

Combined, the team built a catalog containing three times more Denisovan genetic sequences inherited from Denisovans than were previously identified, over 70% of which were unique to Oceanians.

Natural selection increased the frequency of some of these variants in people from Near Oceania, which includes New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean, including genes linked to bone development, metabolism and fertility.

The team also ran experiments to assess whether any of the Densiovan DNA was changing how genes behaved in these populations, Reilly said.

This revealed that Denisovan genetic variants can switch various immune system genes on or off, although the exact immune functions that were targeted varied among the Oceanic populations studied.

Early migrants to Oceania at least 42,000 years ago benefited from Denisovan genes when they entered their new environment and encountered new disease-causing pathogens, Reilly said.

"This is consistent with multiple independent instances of local adaptation in response to novel immune environments and pathogens during human dispersal into the Pacific," the authors wrote in the study.

Although the researchers don't know exactly why natural selection acted on these genes, the findings highlight the major role pathogens played in shaping the way humans and our extinct relatives evolved, Reilly said.

The research is an "outstanding effort to try to understand the biological implications" of the enduring Denisovan genetic variants, Mathilde André, an evolutionary geneticist at the Pasteur Institute in France who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

The tripling of known Denisovan-inherited genetic sequences, most of which are unique to Oceanians, highlights the need to sequence the genomes from previously unrepresented populations to capture the diversity of Denisovan DNA, André said.

See how much you know about early humans with our human evolution quiz!

Evidence of two ancient wooden posts aligned with the summer and winter solstices has been discovered near Stonehenge in southwest England. The posts have rotted away, and only traces of the postholes survive. But archaeologists say the structure predated Stonehenge, and they think it was a temporary religious monument until a permanent one was built. They even suggest it may have been a Stonehenge prototype.

Analysis suggests that ancient people used the posts to mark the summer and winter solstices, Phil Harding, an archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology who's leading the project, noted at a news conference on Wednesday (June 17).

"These people were capable of establishing the points on the horizon where the sun rises in the midsummer and sets in midwinter," he said. "This was a pioneering achievement." (The 2026 summer solstice will be celebrated at Stonehenge on June 21.)

Harding's team at Wessex Archaeology, a private firm that often works for the government and local authorities, publicly announced the finds June 18 in the U.K., and a report on their research will be peer-reviewed and published. The ancient monument consisted of the two large, wooden posts, about 400 feet (120 meters) apart, on land near the village of Bulford, a few miles east of Stonehenge.

The land is now controlled by the U.K. Ministry of Defence, but archaeologists have been allowed to excavate there since 2015. They previously found traces of two "henges" ‪—‬ rings of ditches and banks made from earth ‪—‬ and dozens of Neolithic pits from about 5,000 years ago, centuries before Stonehenge was completed. The pits were filled with animal bones, pottery, flints and charcoal, and the researchers think they date to the time that the first phase of Stonehenge was being built.

Solstice alignment

The posts were aligned to point along an axis that marked the direction of sunrise on the summer solstice, or "midsummer's day," and the setting of the sun exactly six months later, at the winter solstice, or "midwinter's day," according to a statement from Wessex Archaeology. The same astronomical alignments are seen at Stonehenge.

The animal bones and other signs of feasting in the pits at Bulford are evidence of large numbers of people gathering for religious festivals. (Signs of ancient feasting have also been found at Stonehenge.)

"When we talk about the solstice, we're talking about religion," Matt Leivers, an archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology and one of the researchers, said in the statement. "What we see at Bulford, and later at Stonehenge, is a way of celebrating and marking the passage of time, but it's also about making sure the world keeps working as it should."

The site predates the largest circles of stones at Stonehenge, which have the same alignments. "What we've discovered at Bulford is 500 years earlier than the famous stones we know so well," Harding said. The researchers even suggest that the Bulford monument may have been a sort of prototype for Stonehenge itself.

Ancient stones

Stonehenge is the world's most famous Neolithic monument, but its original purpose was long a mystery. Archaeological investigations have established that the first earthwork henge was started there about 5,000 years ago, and the famous central stones were added about 500 years later.

Recent discoveries at Stonehenge include evidence of ancient cremations, and many archaeologists now think the monument was originally a burial site. If that's the case, the alignment with sunset on the winter solstice might have represented "new life," as the days then became longer and warmer after the depths of winter. However, no human remains have been found at the Bulford site.

Susan Greaney, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter who was not involved in the research, said the new finds show the importance of the region to prehistoric people. "It is intriguing to think that simple posts were erected here to align with the solstices around 500 years before Stonehenge was built," she told Live Science.

The Bulford monument may have been a temporary "model" for Stonehenge itself, Amanda Chadburn, an independent archaeologist who wasn't involved in the research, told Live Science "If you were designing a very complicated piece of engineering like Stonehenge," she said, "you would have had to understand how to make it before starting."

See how much you know about Stonehenge with our Stonehenge quiz!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hunter-gatherers in Siberia fell victim to lethal plague outbreaks around 5,500 years ago, marking the oldest known evidence of plague to date, a new study finds.

A research team investigating the Stone Age remains identified ancient DNA ion over a dozen individuals that came from previously unknown strains of Yersinia pestis, a bacterium that causes pneumonic, bubonic and septicemic plague.

The disease that infected these hunter-gatherers, most likely pneumonic plague, probably spilled over from wild marmots, and ravaged through family groups living around Lake Baikal, according to the study, published Wednesday (June 17) in the journal Nature.

Ancient DNA from the two newfound plague strains revealed a unique gene that codes for proteins that trigger massive immune responses, perhaps explaining why children were the most likely to die from the disease, the authors wrote in the study.

The discovery of two deadly plague outbreaks in prehistoric hunter-gatherers challenges the long-standing assumption that epidemics first occurred after the rise of agriculture, study first author Ruairidh Macleod, a researcher of ancient genomics at the University of Oxford, told Live Science.

"We got the really striking result that we found lots and lots of plague here far earlier than we expected," Macleod said. This is "the closest we'll probably ever get to a direct smoking gun demonstrating the virulence [the ability of germs to cause disease] of these early plagues."

Plague has played an extremely important part in human history and continues to infect people today. The strain of Y. pestis that affects people today still causes epidemics, predominantly in Africa, although seven human cases, on average, are reported in the U.S. each year. Nowadays, Y. pestis cases that are caught early can be treated with antibiotics.

Understanding how the disease has evolved over time is essential for gaining insight into how Y. pestis may change in the future, study co-author Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, said at a news conference Tuesday (June 16), ahead of the study's publication.

Prehistoric plague outbreaks

Research suggests that plague outbreaks devastated communities long before the Black Death, the catastrophic epidemic that swept through 14th-century Europe and killed around 25 million people, or between 25% and 33% of Western Europe's population at the time.

For example, repeated plague outbreaks have been identified from between 5,300 and 4,900 years ago in farmers from what is now Scandinavia. However, whether these early plague strains were deadly or simply caused mild sickness has been hotly debated because the bacterium lacked some known disease-causing genes.

Now, a close inspection of the ancient DNA of hunter-gatherers buried in four cemeteries along the banks of the Angara River, which flows out of Lake Baikal, has provided "the best kind of evidence that we could probably hope for" that prehistoric plague strains were lethal and resulted in mass death, Macleod said.

During previous excavations of these cemeteries, researchers noticed that an unusually high number of children had been buried over a short period. There were no signs of violence or other injuries, Macleod said at the news conference, leaving the archaeologists stumped as to why so many children died.

Macleod and his team stepped in to see if ancient DNA could shed light on this mystery.

The researchers extracted ancient DNA from the teeth of 46 individuals at the four cemeteries. They checked whether any were related while also scanning for ancient DNA from known germs.

To their surprise, they identified large amounts of Y. pestis in 18 individuals. These cases spanned two distinct disease outbreaks: one lasting from around 5,596 to 5,341 years ago, and another most likely spanning 5,126 to 4,926 years ago.

Some graves contained the remains of multiple infected individuals who were buried at the same time, suggesting they died during the same outbreak. One grave belonged to three closely related young girls, while another held a nephew and aunt.

"There must have been survivors who knew these people when they were alive and what their identities were and what their biological relationships were to bury the dead and bury them in shared graves," Macleod said.

It is currently not possible to identify plague-specific antibodies that would identify which individuals survived the outbreaks, he added.

The findings help to support the idea that prehistoric populations were impacted by plague, Aida Andrades Valtueña, a researcher who specializes in ancient pathogens at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany but was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

However, more complete sequencing of the plague DNA is needed to confirm that the various cases were from the same outbreak, rather than from separate infections, she noted.

What do you know about the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic eras? Find out with our Stone Age quiz.

Archaeologists in Germany have unearthed an unusual burial of an injured man who was thrown into an abandoned kiln nearly 5,000 years ago. Because archaeologists don't typically find artifacts or bones in kiln pits, they suspect the man may have been a human sacrifice.

While workers were constructing a power line near Gerstewitz, a village in central Germany, archaeologists found a Corded Ware culture grave, according to a June 15 statement from the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology (LDA) Saxony-Anhalt.

The Corded Ware culture, named after the distinctive cord-like impressions found in their pottery, spread across Northern Europe between the Late Neolithic and the Bronze Age, around 2900 to 2050 B.C. Graves of Corded Ware people tend to follow a strict pattern: Men were buried on their right side, women were interred on their left, and everyone was buried in a crouched position facing south. But sometimes, graves deviate from this pattern.

The newly excavated grave at Gerstewitz revealed the skeleton of a man who was about 25 years old when he died. He was buried in a crouched position facing south, but rather than being placed in a grave or under a small mound, he was found in a kiln pit. This pit, essentially a hole that had been dug into the ground, held ancient evidence that people had used it to burn material, such as wood or food, or to fire clay. Additionally, the man's skull showed signs of injury.

Experts have suggested three possible explanations for the unusual burial. The skull injury may have resulted from violence, meaning someone murdered the man. Alternatively, he could have perished in a Copper Age battle lost to history. But a third possibility is that he was placed in a kiln pit as a human sacrifice.

Oliver Dietrich, an archaeologist at LDA Saxony-Anhalt, wrote in the statement that, in rare cases, Corded Ware kiln pits contain cow or dog bones thought to be sacrificial offerings to unknown deities. While it's possible this man was a human sacrifice, Dietrich noted that future laboratory analysis should provide more information about the grave and the person buried there.

This is not the first time a sacrificial pit has been found in Gerstewitz. Last year, archaeologists with LDA Saxony-Anhalt discovered 12 pits ringed by a moat-like ditch. The pits were full of dog bones, human skulls and complete ceramic pots and had been sealed with the rubble of burnt houses, according to a 2025 statement about that discovery. An additional human skeleton was found buried in a converted oven pit. These finds, however, were attributed to the Salzmünde Culture (3400 to 3050 B.C.), which predated the Corded Ware people.

Other discoveries near Gerstewitz have revealed that the area was settled and occupied for over 6,000 years. The excavation there will last until at least 2027, when the power line project is expected to be completed.

What do you know about the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic eras? Find out with our Stone Age quiz!

The wreck of a Japanese prison ship that was sunk by U.S. warplanes and went down with more than 1,000 Allied prisoners of war in 1944 has been discovered in the Philippines.

The vessel was one of the notorious "hellships" used by the Japanese to ferry POWs between work camps. Many of the prisoners who died when the ship sank had worked on the infamous Burma-Thailand "Death Railway."

"Sadly, a lot of these prisoner transport ships were sunk by the Allies," expedition leader and American TV show host Josh Gates told Live Science. "The ships were painted to just look like military vessels, and they were inside the Japanese convoys — so the Allies thought they were legitimate military targets."

Gates teamed up with the Hellships Memorial Foundation, a U.S.-registered non-profit based in Subic Bay in the Philippines, to investigate the sinking of the hellship Hōfuku Maru. Its wreck had never been found, probably because searchers were guided by incorrect U.S. records to look too far north, he said.

But Japanese wartime records were more precise about the wreck's location, helping the team find the remains of the Hōfuku Maru in January, Gates said. His team has since made five dives to the wreck, which sits a few miles off the west coast of the main Philippines island of Luzon at a depth of about 160 feet (50 meters).

Prison ships

Japan used more than 130 hellships during World War II, but the wrecks of only a few have been found. Many hellships, including the Hōfuku Maru, were converted freighters. The Hōfuku Maru was used as a prison ship from 1942 until its sinking about two years later.

Gates said the vessel was part of a Japanese military convoy sailing from the Philippines to Japan when it was attacked on Sept. 21, 1944. U.S. warplanes had spotted the convoy, and one dropped a torpedo that cut the Hōfuku Maru in half. It quickly sank.

But the ship had roughly 1,200 Allied POWs on board, from the British and Dutch armies, many of whom had been forced to work on the Death Railway. Some were able to swim ashore, but they were recaptured by the Japanese. About 1,040 died in the sinking, Gates said.

War captives

The 1929 Geneva Convention placed strict limits on the use of prisoners of war for labor, but Japan was infamous for flouting these rules during World War II, claiming that it never ratified the convention and that wartime made POW labor important. Japan used POWs for slave labor on railways and docks, as well as in factories and mines. Of the roughly 132,100 prisoners captured from the United States and United Kingdom armies, nearly a third of them — about 35,000 people — died of exhaustion, malnutrition and disease.

Gates said the Japanese hellships used to ferry thousands of POWs between work camps were miserable places themselves: there was little light, air or food, and prisoners might be kept there for months. Human remains have been identified on the newfound wreck, and it will now be considered a war grave, he said. International conventions aim to prevent such wrecks from being disturbed.

The team first spotted the wreck with sonar, and then dove to identify parts of the structure that confirmed it as the Hōfuku Maru. They also mapped the wreck with a remotely operated underwater vehicle, which helped them determine that the ship had split into separate parts, just as accounts of the sinking had reported.

The Hellships Memorial Foundation would now work to try to locate the families of the victims, Gates said.

A clandestine excavation on the outskirts of Rome has brought to light a "splendid villa" that may have belonged to a member of the Antonine imperial family, according to archaeologists with the Special Superintendency of Rome. The remains of the first-century villa, which was previously unknown to archaeologists, include frescoed walls and mosaic floors that showcase the elite social status of the owners.

The villa was discovered at Castel di Guido, a village about 12 miles (19 kilometers) west of the ancient city walls of Rome. In ancient times, the area was known as Lorium, and it was frequented by prestigious Roman families, including the Roman emperors Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius.

In February, the local police were alerted to illegal excavations at Castel di Guido on government-owned land, according to a June 15 translated statement from the Italian Ministry of Culture's Special Superintendency of Rome. The unauthorized excavations had been undertaken with a backhoe, which made deep cuts into the villa and left huge piles of dirt.

Superintendency archaeologists led by Alessia Contino carried out emergency excavations to document and stabilize the architecture at the site.

"Thanks to the local report and prompt intervention, it was possible to identify part of a large, previously unknown Imperial-period villa and uncover a splendid array of decorations, as well as the discovery of a statue in fine white marble," Contino said in the statement.

The excavation revealed the atrium at the entrance of the villa, two rooms decorated with frescoes and mosaics, and several other spaces related to the agricultural activities of the large, rural house. The villa was likely built in the early first century and abandoned in the third century.

The atrium's central impluvium — a marble basin in the center of many ancient Roman houses that collected rainwater from an opening in the roof — was surrounded by a floor decorated with bands of black-and-white botanical and geometric mosaics. The rear wall of the room, about 5 feet (1.5 meters) of which was still preserved, was painted red as part of a fresco that featured multicolor panels with human figures and botanical elements.

Surrounding the large room were four smaller ones, three of which still have preserved mosaic floors. One room includes nine black-and-white geometric panels, another includes black octagons on a white background, and the third has black rectangles.

Within the villa's central basin, archaeologists found a broken statue, about 31 inches (80 centimeters) tall, depicting a bearded man wearing a short tunic and carrying a basket with birds and fruit. The statue may represent Silvanus, the Roman deity of woods and other uncultivated lands, who watched over domesticated flocks of animals. Silvanus was also a companion of Bacchus (known in Greek as Dionysus), the god of wine and ecstasy.

The scale of the villa and the quality of the mosaics and frescoes suggest that the villa's owners were Roman aristocrats and may have even been members of the imperial family, according to the statement. In the Roman Empire, elite families like the Aurelii and the Arrii — the paternal and maternal families of Antoninus Pius, who reigned from A.D. 138 to 161 — lived in Lorium. Ancient sources suggest that Antoninus Pius spent his childhood in Lorium, built his imperial palace there, and died there at age 74.

Lorium was also frequented by Emperor Hadrian, who adopted Antoninus Pius to make him his heir, and by Marcus Aurelius, who was Antoninus Pius' nephew, adopted son and son-in-law. Because of Lorium's strong connection to the Antonine imperial dynasty, numerous villas and ancient estates have previously been discovered in the region.

But the newly uncovered villa "is another important piece of the puzzle," Contino said, "opening up new perspectives for understanding and preserving our history-rich territory."

Further work on the villa and its artifacts will help archaeologists date the building more accurately and work out whether it was abandoned when the imperial household was relocated out of Lorium, according to the statement.

Although work on the villa has not been completed, the public has a chance to visit the newly excavated villa and its mosaics on June 20 through a free archaeological hike and guided tour organized by the Special Superintendency of Rome.

From Augustus to Nero, see how much you know about ancient Rome's famous leaders with our Roman emperor quiz!

Some of the earliest Viking "pennies" were made with silver that contained melted-down coins from the Islamic world, a new study reports. The finding confirms the relationship between early Viking and Islamic silver, which was likely the result of long-distance trade.

The silver coins make up the Damhus hoard, a trove of 226 Viking Age pennies found near the town of Ribe on Denmark's Jutland Peninsula in 2018. The trove dates to between A.D. 830 and 850, which makes the silver pieces some of the earliest Viking coins ever discovered, according to the study, which was published June 5 in the journal Archaeometry.

Although the coins are formally called pennies, their weight in silver alone means they were much more valuable than modern pennies when they were made in the ninth century, study first author Thomas Birch, an archaeologist at the National Museum of Denmark, told Live Science. "The word comes from the Old English word 'pening'," he said – similar to "pfennig" in High German. A single pening was enough to buy ale, bread or simple tools.

The ancient coins are also remarkably well preserved after more than 1,000 years in the ground, Birch said. One side shows a face said to represent Wodan or Odin, the chief Norse god, while the other side portrays a stag.

Viking treasure

Crucially, the dies used to stamp the sides of the coins were replaced by similar dies as they wore out, resulting in tiny changes that modern scientists can identify, Birch said.

As a result, Birch and his colleagues saw that at least 30 dies had been used, and they estimate that hundreds of thousands of this type of silver Viking penny were produced by the single mint at Ribe, which was a major settlement at the time.

Early medieval Denmark was a center of the Norse world, and raiders from the coasts of Scandinavia were known as Vikings after the Old Norse word "vikingr," which meant something like "pirate."

The Vikings became notorious in 793 when they raided Christian monks on the English island of Lindisfarne. This event sparked the Viking Age, which ended in 1066 when a Viking army was defeated at Stamford Bridge in England only a few weeks before the Norman Conquest.

Ancient silver

Birch said the Damhus hoard came from a time when Denmark was divided among pagan Norse kingdoms, more than 100 years before their unification and Christianization under Harald Bluetooth.

Examination of 25 of the coins with X-ray fluorescence and other analytical techniques looked at the different isotopes — elements with different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei — of the trace elements mixed in with the silver. The results indicated that, in some cases, more than half of the precious metal had come from Islamic silver coins called "dirhams," he said.

The Viking coins were probably minted from ingots of silver produced outside Scandinavia, in part by melting down Islamic coins in bulk, Birch said, and these ingots had likely been traded to the ancient mint at Ribe.

"This silver has already had a life cycle; it's not coming straight from a mine," he said. "[The silver] has been made into dirhams and then been melted in a pot somewhere."

The coins in the Damhus hoard came from the precise time when silver from the Islamic world was becoming common in the Viking world, he noted; Islamic jewelry from that time has also been discovered in Scandinavia.

"We're right at the juncture of when we can see Islamic silver coming in," Birch said. "If these coins are being minted in the hundreds of thousands, that's a huge quantity of Islamic silver."

See how much you know about ancient norsemen with our Viking quiz!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Humans are the only species known to use fully symbolic language: a system capable of expressing abstract ideas, imaginary worlds and endless combinations of meaning. But how did we get there?

The origins of language have fascinated philosophers, scientists and storytellers for thousands of years. Despite all our advances in linguistics, archaeology and cognitive science, we still don't know exactly how language began.

That uncertainty hasn't stopped people from trying to solve the mystery. In fact, some of the earliest theories of language's origins are among the strangest and most entertaining ideas in the history of science.

Bow wow, ding-dong

In the 19th century, scholars proposed a flurry of curious theories to explain how speech first emerged. Many of these theories were given playful nicknames by the German philologist Max Müller, who intended them partly as satire. Yet the theories were genuine attempts to tackle one of humanity's biggest questions.

The most famous is probably the Bow-Wow Theory. This suggested language began through imitation of natural sounds. Early humans, according to this theory, copied the noises around them: animal cries, splashing water, thunderclaps and birdsong. Words such as "buzz," "hiss," "bang" and "splash" seem to support the idea because they sound like what they describe.

But there is a problem. Different languages hear the same sounds differently. English dogs go "woof" or "bow-wow," but in Turkish they go "hev-hev," while Indonesian dogs go "guk-guk." Even animal noises, it turns out, are filtered through culture and language.

And onomatopoeic words (words that imitate sounds) make up only a tiny fraction of our vocabularies. Most words sound nothing like their meanings. For instance, there is nothing inherently tree-like about the word "tree."

That brings us to the Ding-Dong Theory, which argued that sounds and meanings are naturally connected in some deeper, almost mystical way.

Some words do seem to fit their meanings uncannily well. "Mini," "teeny" and "itsy-bitsy" feel small and delicate. "Lump," "rump" and "plump" sound heavier and rounder.

Modern linguists call this sound symbolism. One famous experiment asked participants to match two nonsense words, "bouba" and "kiki," to two shapes: one rounded and one jagged. Most people matched "bouba" with the soft shape and "kiki" with the sharp one.

The effect is real, but it is limited. Most language still appears to be arbitrary, which means there is no natural reason why a particular sound should mean a particular thing.

Pooh-pooh, la-la, ye-he-ho

Other theories focused less on imitation and more on emotion and social interaction.

The Pooh-Pooh Theory proposed that speech began with instinctive emotional cries such as "ouch," "oh" or perhaps less publishable exclamations uttered after stubbing a toe. According to this idea, language evolved from spontaneous vocal reactions to pain, surprise, fear or joy.

Again, though, there are complications. Interjections vary widely across languages. English speakers say "ouch." Greeks say "aou." Czechs might exclaim "ach." Emotional sounds are not nearly as universal as they seem.

Then there is the wonderfully named Yo-He-Ho Theory, which suggested language emerged from rhythmic chants used during collective labor, like sailors chanting "yo-heave-ho" while hauling ropes, or workers singing together to coordinate physical effort.

The theory may sound quaint, but modern researchers do think rhythm, cooperation and social bonding played important roles in human evolution. Language is, after all, deeply social.

Another proposal, the La-La Theory, linked language to music. Charles Darwin entertained the possibility that speech evolved from musical calls used in courtship and emotional expression. Before humans spoke, perhaps we sang?

Some modern theories echo this idea. One hypothesis suggests that, as early humans began walking upright, parents increasingly needed to soothe babies from a distance. Sing-song vocalizations, cooing and proto "baby talk" may have helped strengthen emotional bonds and eventually paved the way for speech.

Gestures, symbols and brains

Today, most scientists think no single theory fully explains language origins. Instead, language probably emerged gradually through a combination of gestures, vocalizations, facial expressions, social cooperation and increasing cognitive complexity.

Some researchers argue that language began with gestures before shifting to speech. Others believe language evolved as a tool for social bonding, allowing larger groups of humans to cooperate and share information. Still others see language as tied to the evolution of symbolic thought itself: our ability to imagine, plan, remember and communicate abstract ideas.

Biology is also a factor. Humans have developed unusually precise control over the tongue, lips and vocal tract. We have evolved specialized brain regions linked to language processing.

But anatomy alone cannot explain language. Parrots can mimic speech sounds. Many animals communicate. None, however, appear to possess grammar and symbolism on the human scale. And, frustratingly, early language leaves no evidence behind. Spoken words don't fossilize.

That lack of evidence is one reason the topic became so controversial that, in 1866, the Société de Linguistique de Paris banned discussions about language origins altogether, dismissing the field as hopelessly speculative.

Of course, theories about language origins also appear in religion and mythology. In Greek mythology, the messenger god Hermes was associated with language and communication. In the Hindu tradition, the goddess of knowledge and speech Saraswati bestowed Sanskrit upon humanity. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, language was a gift from God, who enabled Adam to name the animals in the Garden of Eden.

These stories reflect something deeply human: our urge to explain where language came from, because language itself feels almost magical. Every theory of language origins captures a small piece of the puzzle. Imitation, emotion, rhythm, music, gesture, cooperation and symbolic thought probably all played some role.

But none can provide a complete answer. The truth is that language evolved so long ago, and likely so gradually, that we will never pinpoint a single moment when it began, unless someone invents a time machine.

The birth of language will probably remain one of humanity's greatest unsolved mysteries. Still, the theories themselves tell us something important. Humans are always trying to explain what makes us human. And language may be the most human thing of all.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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.

See how much you know about mummies with our mummy quiz.

Archaeologists in Russia have discovered a rare elite burial of a medieval woman who was accompanied in death by a newborn child and a flayed horse. A mirror and silver stirrup found in the grave were decorated in the style of Chinese art, revealing multicultural connections in 10th-century Asia.

"It's quite clear that this is far from an ordinary burial," Andrey Poliakov, an archaeologist and director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for the History of Material Culture, who led the excavation, said in a translated statement. "There are no more than a few dozen similar burials in the entire Sayan-Altai region" in Inner Asia.

Archaeologists discovered the burial in 2014 as part of an excavation ahead of railway construction in the Sayan Mountains, a range in southern Siberia that runs through southeastern Russia and northern Mongolia. They found several dozen graves and small settlements spanning multiple centuries. But their excavation of one stone-ringed mound yielded the unique grave of a woman who was about 40 years old when she died. She was buried with the skeleton of a newborn child, the spine of a sheep and a "horse skin" — the skull, limbs and skin of a horse — a rare ritual practice among medieval steppe nomads.

Because of the uniqueness of the grave and the multitude of artifacts that had to be stabilized after excavation, a full analysis of the tomb took more than a decade to complete. Two studies detailing the unusual burial and the horse equipment were published recently in the journal Bulletin of Novosibirsk State University, Series: History, Philology.

The woman had been buried with only a few personal items, including a pair of gilt-bronze earrings, fragments of a ritually broken mirror, an iron knife and a stone spindle whorl used for hand-spinning wool, the archaeologists wrote in the burial study. The decoration on the mirror resembled a winding vine with grape clusters ‪—‬ a motif on mirrors found in elite Tang dynasty (A.D. 618 to 907) burials in China.

Among the dozens of pieces of horse equipment found in the burial was a pair of stirrups. One of these stirrups was decorated in the style of Chinese art, with influences from Indian and Persian art styles, and functioned as a "ceremonial" stirrup. Nomadic tradition in this time period was to have one stirrup on display on the most presentable side — generally the left — the researchers noted in the horse equipment study.

While radiocarbon dating gave the archaeologists a broad time frame for the burial — between the ninth and 13th centuries — based on the style of the artifacts in the grave, the archaeologists determined that the woman and child were most likely buried in the 10th century.

The huge number of multicultural artifacts found in the grave suggests the woman and child were part of the "highest aristocracy" of their society, the researchers wrote in the horse equipment study. But the woman probably didn't use the objects in her daily life, they added; it is more likely they were family relics that her clan offered as grave goods.

The nearly complete set of antique horse paraphernalia found in the grave is a "very rare combination for the region," study co-author Oleg Mitko, head of the Humanities Research Laboratory at Novosibirsk State University, said in the statement.

What do you know about the bones in your body? Test your knowledge with our human skeleton quiz!

About 2,000 years ago in the far North of Scotland, a woman was buried after her brain was scooped out and her bones were whittled into tools, a new analysis reveals.

The highly unusual burial is giving archaeologists new insight into social networks and funeral traditions in prehistoric Britain.

Archaeologists excavated a low stone burial cairn near Loch Borralie, a lake in northern Scotland, in 2000 after locals reported discovering human bones that had been dislodged from the soil by rabbits. The rectangular cairn, or pile of stones, included the partial skeletons of an adult and a teenager, both of whom were buried between the first century B.C. and the first century A.D., during the Iron Age.

While the original report suggested the Loch Borralie corpses had been scratched and gnawed by rats or dogs, a new study, published Wednesday (June 10) in the journal Antiquity, reveals that some of the bones were purposefully modified by humans in a funeral ritual that may have involved the veneration of an important ancestor — and cannibalism.

Researchers found that the adult skeleton, named "Individual 1," was from a woman who was over 30 years old when she died. The base of her skull had an unusual fracture, and there were incisions made by a sharp tool on the inside of her skull.

"Taken together, breakage of the cranial base and internal cutmarks are suggestive of deliberate removal of the brain soon after the death of this individual," the researchers wrote in the study. Removal of the brain could relate to cannibalism or could have resulted from an attempt to clean and preserve the skull for display, they noted.

The archaeologists also noticed that four of the woman's bones — three arm bones and one leg bone — were damaged but had not been scavenged on by animals. The bones' "internal layers have been whittled/worked to a sharp edge and a singular pointed end," the researchers wrote.

Although the bones had clearly been modified after the woman's death, someone took care to put them back in her grave in their correct anatomical positions.

"The motivation behind the extensive manipulation of the skeletal remains of Individual 1 is very difficult to interpret," study first author Laura Castells Navarro, an archaeologist at the University of York in the U.K., said in a statement. "However, the care with which she was reassembled and deposited in the cairn possibly suggests she commanded a level of reverence and respect by her community."

The other skeleton in the burial cairn, Individual 2, was a boy who was about 15 years old when he died. His skull and bones were not manipulated in any way, but the analysis of ancient DNA from both skeletons showed that the individuals may have been second cousins (sharing a pair of great-grandparents).

The DNA analysis also revealed distant genetic connections between the two Loch Borralie skeletons and people buried at other prehistoric Scottish sites, including the remote Orkney Islands. Although this part of Britain is sparsely populated today, the abundance of prehistoric tombs in the area spanning nearly four millennia suggests people in ancient Scotland had complex social networks that they maintained over long distances.

"More broadly, our research shows that prehistoric maritime communities periodically moved around the north coast and Northern Isles of Scotland, possibly in small groups," Castells Navarro said.

What do you know about the Empire's conquest of the British Isles? Find out with our Roman Britain quiz!

At the entrance to a Stone Age neighborhood in Slovakia, archaeologists have uncovered a ditch full of headless human skeletons.

While the bones reveal cut marks that signal decapitation, researchers think the practice was not a violent mass killing but rather part of a complex burial ritual more than 7,000 years ago. In other words, the individuals were likely beheaded postmortem.

The Neolithic site of Vráble was occupied between 5250 and 4950 B.C. by the people behind the Linear Pottery culture (LBK), whose pottery covered in parallel lines has been found throughout Central Europe. Located in the southwest region of Slovakia, the settlement, which was first investigated in 2012, included more than 300 houses grouped into three distinct neighborhoods.

One of the Stone Age neighborhoods was surrounded by a double ditch roughly 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers) in length. When archaeologists began excavating the ditch in 2022, they found four pairs of headless skeletons as well as a mass burial of at least 77 headless skeletons. Only one skeleton still had a head, and it belonged to a child.

Although the archaeologists have not yet finished excavating the ditch, they reported their preliminary findings in a study published June 2 in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society.

"First analyses suggest, above all, that violent 'decapitations' were not conducted here, but rather skilful removal of the skulls," study co-author Katharina Fuchs, a biological anthropologist at Kiel University in Germany, said in a statement.

The researchers analyzed cut marks on the upper neck vertebrae of the headless skeletons and found that the skulls had been removed with sharp tools. The lower jaws were missing as well, suggesting that keeping the head and face intact was important to this ancient society, the researchers wrote. Because the neck vertebrae of many individuals were found touching the ditch wall, the researchers think they were likely deposited there after their heads were removed, in a practice of intentional manipulation of corpses.

"The deposition of bodies and body parts may have been part of more complex, meaningful and recurring practices," study co-author Nils Müller-Scheeßel, an archaeologist at Kiel University, said in the statement.

Headless bodies and body parts have been found in burials at other Neolithic sites in Europe. For example, a Neolithic family was apparently massacred and eaten 5,600 years ago, according to an analysis of the bones of 11 people found in a cave in Spain. And in a Neolithic village in Italy, archaeologists found a pile of 15 human skulls that were probably handled repeatedly as some form of ancestor ritual 7,400 years ago.

The researchers noted in the study that they do not yet know if violence played a role in how the individuals in the ditch died. However, given the fact that some of the headless individuals were buried together as couples and some were buried in clusters in a mass grave, the beheading practice may have been motivated by a burial rite that focused on the human head, possibly as a symbol of personhood and life.

This interpretation would fit in with head-focused ancestor worship in other parts of the Neolithic world, such as at Çatalhöyük in southern Turkey and Jericho, now a Palestinian city in the West Bank. In Jericho and other Neolithic Near East sites, people often extracted skulls from venerated ancestors, plastered over them to form a face, painted them, and then displayed them in the community.

But Vráble is particularly unusual because, to date, no skulls belonging to the headless skeletons have been found.

"Currently, the heads are archaeologically 'invisible' to us," the researchers wrote in the study, noting that this makes it hard to determine whether these individuals were the targets of violence or ritual.

It is possible, the researchers wrote, that some sort of community tension existed between the three Neolithic neighborhoods at Vráble. This tension could explain why only one neighborhood was surrounded by a protective ditch and why its entrances faced away from the other two neighborhoods. Burying human bodies in the ditch may have been a way to manipulate the community's space or mark it as specifically belonging to the group and its ancestors.

Further work is planned at the site to excavate the rest of the ditch and to further analyze the human remains in the hopes of resolving the open questions about the Stone Age settlement.

"The first results already show that Vráble is an exceptional excavation site," study first author Martin Furholt, an archaeologist at the University of Kiel, said in the statement. "It provides us with the keys for the discussion of fundamental questions; for example, how were death and the body understood in the Neolithic and what role did the associated practices play in the social fabric of early farming societies?"

What do you know about the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic eras? Find out with our Stone Age quiz!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Variation in starch digestion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archaeologists have discovered thousands of preserved shoes at Vindolanda, an ancient Roman fort along Hadrian's Wall. But this one is quite possibly the world's oldest example of a shower shoe.

The "bath clog" — which consists of a wooden platform sole and a leather upper — was a version of the kind of slip-on shoe people today wear in locker room showers or at a nail salon to avoid issues like foot fungus. But the Romans wore the platform clogs — which they called "sculponeae" in Latin — to protect themselves from the hot, slippery floors of the bath house.

Roman bath houses were communal gathering places, according to English Heritage, a historic trust that conserves artifacts and heritage sites. A bather would undress then move from a cold room to a warm room to a hot room, then back to the first room for a cold plunge. One of the most important inventions in Roman bathing was the hypocaust system, which involved stoking a furnace underneath a raised floor to heat the warm and hot rooms and their baths. This radiant heat system also made the floor incredibly hot to the touch.

Because Roman shower shoes were made from perishable materials, the oldest and best-known examples come from Vindolanda, a Roman fort in Northumberland, England, where organic remains have been preserved in oxygen-free layers of mud. Archaeologists have found over 5,000 Roman shoes at Vindolanda — around 50 of which are bath clogs, according to Elizabeth Greene, an archaeologist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.

Most of the bath clogs feature a wooden platform 1 to 2 inches (2.5 to 5 centimeters) high and a leather strap across the top. According to Greene, some of the clogs were plain and others were decorated with geometric patterns or representations of toes cut into the surface.

Whether or not the Vindolanda bath clogs are the world's earliest shower shoes is up for some debate.

Archaeologists have found much earlier examples of sandals, including King Tut's, dated to 3,300 B.C. in Egypt, for example. And the Etruscans had metal-framed sandals as early as the sixth century B.C., Elizabeth Semmelhack, the director and curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Canada, told Live Science. "But they were not for bathhouse wear."

Two wood-soled children's shoes were discovered in 2025 at Isarnodurum, a Roman-era archaeological site in France that slightly predates Vindolanda. If these are confirmed to be bath clogs, they would be the oldest ones in the world.

One research angle Greene is pursuing is questioning whether bath clogs were only used in bathing. A few centuries after the Romans left Europe, medieval people invented similar looking footwear that functioned as a type of overshoe (a shoe strapped or worn over another shoe) to protect their feet from mud, water or snow on the ground. Some of the wooden clogs found at Vindolanda may have served an overshoe purpose — or they could have pulled dual-duty two millennia ago as shower shoes and overshoes.

This bath clog from Vindolanda can be seen from now until September 2027 at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto as part of their Unearthing Vindolanda exhibit.

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

For years, students at a high school just steps from the Colosseum in Rome have spun tales of mysterious rooms hidden underneath the gymnasium floor. Now, it turns out those rumors have more than a grain of truth to them.

Students on several clandestine explorations happened upon an ancient structure beneath their school. Upon notifying their teacher, who notified the authorities, archaeologists arrived to take a more detailed look. Following an excavation earlier this year, archaeologists have announced that the dark corridors and dimly lit chambers actually belonged to a luxurious second-century villa.

The Liceo Scientifico Cavour (Cavour Scientific High School) is located in a building near the Colosseum that originally housed a Catholic missionary congregation. When the missionaries' headquarters were constructed in the late 19th century, early archaeological exploration of the foundation revealed part of a "domus" — a large ancient Roman house. This neighborhood is incredibly important in Roman history, as figures such as Cicero, Pompey and Octavian (later known as Augustus) lived there, but is not well-understood archaeologically because of all the modern buildings on top of the ancient layers.

Claudia Marino, a history and Latin teacher at the high school, reported the students' discoveries in the subterranean tunnels to the Special Superintendency of Rome, but crews did not begin excavating the site until January 2026. The discovery was presented to the public on May 28 by Marino and Filippo Coarelli, an archaeologist at the University of Perugia in Italy.

The rooms preserved under the high school's gym are part of a mid-second-century house that, based on an inscription found in the late-19th century excavation, was likely owned by a member of the Umbrius family. Little is known about this family, but the Umbrii may have originally come from Samnium, a region of south-central Italy not far from Pompeii, where Mt. Vesuvius famously erupted in A.D. 79. For now, the house is being called the Domus Liceo Cavour (the House of the Cavour High School).

Archaeological excavation revealed figurative and floral frescos on the walls and stucco decorations along the ceiling vaults of the villa. In one room, archaeologists discovered a mosaic with large, irregularly shaped tiles — a style fashionable among elite Romans in this time period. They also found much more recent graffiti made by students, tourists and other subterranean explorers in the 20th century.

Only a portion of the Domus Liceo Cavour has been explored so far, as it extends far beneath the school, but additional excavation may be carried out in the future. The school and the archaeological superintendency plan to work together to eventually open up the site to visitors, potentially with students as guides.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:25 a.m. EDT on June 5 to note that Mount Vesuvius, and not the city of Pompeii, erupted in A.D. 79.

From Augustus to Nero, see how much you know about ancient Rome's famous leaders with our Roman emperor quiz!

For the first time, shipwrecks associated with the real pirates of the Caribbean have been discovered in the Bahamas.

A team of archaeologists and filmmakers found six shipwrecks in and near Nassau, the capital of the island of New Providence. Three of the wrecks are linked to the "Golden Age of Piracy," according to a statement emailed to Live Science. One of them, found in Nassau's harbor, mostly consists of ballast stones, according to the team's report for the Bahamian antiquities authority. These stones were used to stabilize the ship, and they were found on top of the submerged remains of the ship's burnt wooden hull.

Attacking a vessel and pillaging its goods wasn't all these pirates did to their victims.

"After seizing a ship and taking its cargo, cannon and fittings, pirates had to get rid of all signs of their crime," Michael Pateman, director of the Bahamas Maritime Museum in Grand Bahama, said in the statement. "Burning ships to the waterline was an infamous tactic to hide felony from authorities. The Nassau hull shows all the signs of pirate mischief." The remains also include the ship's planks, frames and wooden treenails. The use of treenails, essentially wooden nails, indicate that the ship was built in the 1700s.

The Golden Age of Piracy was a brief but iconic time period from the 1680s to the 1720s marked by increased pirate activity in the Atlantic, as well as the Indian and Pacific oceans. It starred a significant number of notorious sea raiders. The port town of Nassau became the headquarters for the likes of Blackbeard, Calico Jack Rackham, Henry Avery, Benjamin Hornigold and Anne Bonny, among others.

At the height of the golden age in 1718, 40 shipwrecks burnt and sunk by pirates off Nassau’s shore were seen by Woodes Rogers, the governor of New Providence. But until now, none of these ships have been excavated. That changed when the crew received permission from the Antiquities, Monuments and Museum Corporation of the Bahamas to dive around Nassau, which they did in September and October 2025.

"Nassau harbour is huge," explorer and project filmmaker Chris Atkins said in the statement. "Tides flush dangerous currents through its waters twice a day. It's home to notorious packs of sharks. This was a risky expedition with high chances of finding nothing." But the team, aided by knowledge from local divers, were able to find six wrecks in all.

Another newfound golden age shipwreck — probably an early 18th-century armed sailboat with a single mast known as a sloop — is roughly 22 miles (35 kilometers) east of Nassau, and features a ballast pile, a large deck cannon and an iron swivel gun. The team also found a grinding stone for sharpening swords, lead musket balls and three cannonballs.

The presence war-related objects and the style of the swivel gun suggest that it was either a golden age pirate ship, or a sea vessel from that same time period with defenses against piracy, Sean Kingsley, marine archaeologist, co-director of the New Providence Pirates Expedition, and founder of the magazine Wreckwatch, confirmed to Live Science. The absence of cargo remains might make the pirate ship scenario more likely, however, he added.

The third shipwreck, which they spotted thanks to a tip, is beneath Nassau's old bridge, "where a very grumpy bull shark lives," according to the report. The site includes two poorly preserved hulls, one of which is pierced by a modern pipeline. Nonetheless, the team identified rigging, glass bottles, hull planks and cooking galley bricks, Kingsley said in the statement. The ship probably sank after striking an underwater sandbank in a storm, he told Live Science in an email.

Furthermore, the diving team found the remains of shipping containers and dozens of clay tobacco pipes bearing the British coat of arms. They were probably made in London in the 1740s or 1750s. The ship was likely also English and traveled to New Providence shortly after the pirates were no longer a threat, when Nassau was transitioning to a pirate-free life.

In addition to hunting for shipwrecks, the team wanted to understand life in this pirate capital. When they weren't diving, they were studying old maps and 300-year-old documents and investigating pirate caves, a plantation with enslaved people, and a lookout tower where it's rumored Blackbeard once lived. Unsurprisingly, Nassau in the Golden Age of Piracy was "nothing like the Hollywood fantasy," Kingsley said. "Nassau's Piratetown was more like a combination of a cowboy frontier town meets an 18th-century holiday camp."

The team's members come from the New Providence Pirates Expedition and Wreckwatch TV, and they are the first to have ever received diving permission in the closed zone of Nassau harbor. Kingsley and Chris Atkins, Wreckwatch TV co-founder, have produced a Wreckwatch TV documentary series about the findings. Wreckwatch Magazine will also share the New Providence Pirates Expedition's preliminary outcomes.

"It might have been a short life, but for a brief period of mayhem, sailors found freedom and wealth unmatched anywhere on earth," Pateman said. "That escape was the pirate dream."

Most archaeologists study the things that past people left behind to recreate a picture of a bygone culture. Researchers are now applying those same archaeological techniques to more modern — and extreme — environments.

Justin Walsh, an archaeologist at Chapman University in California, is an innovator in the field of "space archaeology," or the study of human activity in the space environment, defined as 100 kilometers [62 miles] above Earth and beyond. Since the founding of the ISS Archaeological Project in 2015, Walsh has been studying how astronauts experience the International Space Station. Shawn Graham, a digital archaeologist at Carleton University in Canada, joined the project in 2023.

Now, Walsh and Graham are launching a new project — Archaeology Impossible — that looks at the things humans leave behind on Mount Everest. Live Science spoke with the duo about their ISS work and about why humans are obsessed with conquering extreme environments, like the highest spot on Earth.

Kristina Killgrove: You both started your careers in traditional archaeology but now you're doing something very different. Tell me about space archaeology.

Justin Walsh: My background is in Greek archaeology. But in 2008, I had a student in a cultural heritage seminar ask me a question: What about stuff in space? Is that heritage? And this question just completely blew my mind. I had never considered for a second that this idea could extend beyond Earth. But as soon as she asked the question, it was obvious. Yes, absolutely, there's stuff in space!

KK: So you're not using classic trowels and brushes to excavate artifacts?

JW: Space archaeology can use traditional archaeological tools and methods and techniques, but it also can require us to develop completely new methods and techniques.

KK: I assume you're not going up in a spaceship to record information at the International Space Station?

JW: It's now $75 million to pay Axiom Space for a seat to go to ISS for two weeks. There's no grant that's going to allow me to do that. So we had to come up with other ideas. I knew NASA was trying to develop a mission to Mars that's going to take three years, and they're going to put people in a tin can for that long. If you don't know the first thing about how that crew creates its own little society and culture and you can't support them effectively, how can you expect to have a successful mission? I wanted to try to show them what they were missing out on.

The inspiration for the ISS Archaeological Project was [UCLA anthropologist] Jason De León's Undocumented Migration Project, where he was using all kinds of creative ways of digging into the lived experience of migrants crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S. One of them was giving disposable film cameras to the migrants in Mexico and retrieving them in the U.S. so that the migrants could take images of the obstacles they faced that he couldn't otherwise observe. And that was another light bulb moment for me.

Here we have, in the case of the ISS, tens of thousands of digital photographs that NASA has made public that show people doing things in the space station and show the places that they're occupying and the objects and the tools that they're using. And if we put the photos in order and track that change over time, it is possible to study the material culture of a space habitat over the very long term.

Shawn Graham: My background is in Roman archaeology, but I became a digital archaeologist. One of my previous projects was looking at human remains being bought and sold online with my colleague Damien Huffer [an osteoarchaeologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia]. We were looking at tens of thousands of images and trying to understand: What are the large-scale patterns? What are the changes over time? How do you map that?

Given my interests, Justin called me up and said, so we've got these photographs and we're trying to map change over time and to understand stratigraphy. Is there a way we can do that?

KK: What can you learn about humans in space from just photographs?

JW: From photos, we were able to map the distribution of population groups across the space station because, at that time in 2020, there had been about 250 people. We can easily find out information about them: their gender, their space agency affiliation, their nationality. The gender split at the time was 84% men, 16% women. And the U.S. had sent something like 35 women at that point.

On the U.S. side of the space station, we saw that women were underrepresented in the photographs of areas for science, eating, sleeping and exercise. There was one area where they were overrepresented: the cupola — the beautiful panoramic window looking out onto Earth. Women were 24% of the people in the published cupola photographs — 50% higher than you would expect based on the population.

So what this indicates is that NASA Public Affairs has at least an unconscious bias in selecting images of women in this aesthetically appealing location and not choosing the images of them in those other areas where they're working, living, and being human. That was interesting.

SG: Correct me if I'm wrong, Justin, but aren't the interior spaces of the station hyper-managed? But the actual archaeological investigations show that the astronauts aren't behaving the way the mission planners want them to.

JW: You're exactly right, Shawn. In one experiment, we had ISS crew members take a photo of each of six locations for 60 days. The clearest example is an area that's called the Maintenance Work Area. It's basically a workbench with a folding table and a blue aluminum panel with 40 pieces of Velcro on it. If you read the design protocol for this work station, NASA has delineated seven ranked priorities. Number one is the maintenance of equipment. Number two is science that doesn't need to be done in a specific kind of facility. And then there are others.

We actually found that, over 60 days, this location was never used for maintenance that we could see. It was used for science on four or five occasions. The rest of the time it was just a pegboard in your garage or your basement where you store things that don't have a better home elsewhere because there's a ton of Velcro there.

KK: You found that the ISS needs a junk drawer, basically?

JW: Yes, absolutely! That's a great way of putting it. The space agencies wouldn't have known that this wasn't being used in the way it was designed because, if you look at the historic photographs, there's always somebody doing science or maintenance there, but nobody takes a photograph of that space when nobody's working there. We did — and it showed a pattern.

KK: What do the ISS astronauts think about this?

JW: We got to debrief the crew that carried this out after they came home. They were just really interested in the idea that, by observing these spaces, we could improve future space habitats. And I can say that we actually have. The space station company Vast has told me that they have used our published research, and it has influenced the design of the interior of what's called Haven-1. That's really gratifying and exciting!

KK: That's awesome! I understand that you're both working on a new project that uses similar techniques but applied to Mount Everest. What do you want to learn about the mountain and the humans who attempt to climb it?

SG: If you look at photographs of Machu Picchu, there's this beautiful pristine view. But if you turned around the other way, you'd see the line of 200 tourists waiting for their two minutes on it. Climbing Everest is like that.

If we can pay attention to incidental details in people's photographs, we can map those over time and figure out how climbers construct a society there. By looking at all of these photographs and adapting the method from the ISS project, that gives us this opportunity to see how humans adapt in this impossible place where we have no business going.

KK: What kinds of artifacts or objects are you looking to document? What kinds of things do people deposit on Everest?

SG: There's oxygen tanks, there's human waste, food packaging, tents, prayer flags, poles, respirators.

JW: I've been reading a history of Everest and noting every time I see somebody encountering something that was left behind by somebody else who was exhausted or on the verge of death. But even in more orderly retreats, the early mountaineers made no effort whatsoever to bring things back. They're leaving mementos on the top of the mountain. You have all these different routes, different campsites, and different materials.

SG: Base camp has a couple of landmarks that appear in hundreds of photos. There's this boulder that has spray painted on it, "Everest Base Camp." It gets repainted periodically and there's always lots of different stuff around that boulder. I'm really interested in that boulder because it is a very clear point that we can keep an eye on and how that changes.

JW: There's an area with monuments to the deceased below and farther away from the mountain. It has also changed over time, of course, as memorials have been added and as people have died, but also as people have brought things to honor the dead.

KK: On the ISS, you found differences in the way nations were using their space. Mount Everest is also an extreme environment with international people coming and going. Do you think you're going to find cultural differences when you start looking at the photos?

SG: Any place I've ever traveled, Canadians are annoying because they always have a flag stuck on every piece of their clothing. So I would expect to see some knuckleheads doing that. [Graham is Canadian.]

JW: Nationalism has been a huge part of Everest expeditioning. Until the 1990s, it was all about which nation could do which route first, in the most extreme way. Nationalism is really significant in this environment, just as it is in space.

KK: Are you starting a new subfield of extreme or impossible archaeology? Are there other environments that you think would benefit from your approach?

JW: Some people have asked me about Antarctic research stations. Also oil rigs, submarines — places that humans go and carry out activities but archaeologists can't go. There's obviously a kind of macho-ness about the discipline of archaeology — we go to these distant places and live in crowded dig houses and ride around in falling-apart cars in 120-degree Fahrenheit [49 degrees Celsius] weather. But because of the ISS project, I volunteer as part of a nonprofit group called AstroAccess, which is actively working to open up space to people with disabilities. Everybody who goes to space is disabled by virtue of the space environment, which is also true of Everest —you are not at your full capacity when you're climbing.

So I'm really interested in how the perspectives of people with disabilities can open up new avenues of interacting with these environments and how we can open up the field of archaeology to people who have traditionally been excluded.

The other thing I would mention is we are developing a crowdsourcing project because we want folks who have been to Everest to submit their images so we can analyze them. Once we get that approved, we will be moving forward. So people should stay tuned!

Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

See how much you know about human exploration into space with our spaceflight quiz!

Ötzi the Iceman's skin and stomach are teeming with yeasts that infiltrated his remains shortly after his murder 5,300 years ago — and some may still be active, a new study reveals.

The yeast strains covering his body are adapted to cold environments, having stemmed from the Alpine glaciers Ötzi once called home. This means the spores have continued colonizing his mummified remains despite being stored in a refrigeration chamber at 21 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 6 degrees Celsius) following his discovery in 1991. Scientists revealed their findings in a study published June 3 in the journal Microbiome.

Intriguingly, some of these yeasts might be just right for baking bread. Preliminary testing demonstrated the yeasts' potential for making sourdough.

"It worked," study first author Mohamed Sarhan, a microbiologist at the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies in Italy, told Live Science. "As a dough, it was very very good."

These yeasts could be cultivated by fermentation industries in the future, such as for making bread or beer, Sarhan said.

Ötzi is also covered in modern microbes that have been inadvertently introduced during conservation efforts. However, it is currently unclear whether these microbes and the ancient yeasts are harming the preservation of his remains. Research is now needed to investigate this, Sarhan said.

The Iceman's microbiome

Research into Ötzi's naturally mummified remains has been ongoing since his discovery by German hikers in the Ötztal Alps of Italy in September 1991. Ötzi stood at approximately 5 feet, 3 inches (1.6 meters) tall, and was in his 40s when he died, likely by murder. An inspection of his stomach contents revealed he ate ibex, red deer and wheat just before his death.

Scientists have previously identified some aspects of the microbiome in Ötzi's mouth and intestines, including the discovery of gut microbes most commonly found in today's non-Westernized communities, such as the Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania and people living in rainforests in north-eastern Madagascar. But no study has investigated whether any microbes were capable of growing under the current storage conditions, the authors wrote in the study.

So, in 2019, Sarhan and his colleagues began studying swab and water samples of Ötzi's internal and external microbiome, soil from the site where he was found and his immediate storage environment. From there, the team pieced together the genetic material to discover which microbes were present.

Ötzi's gut microbiome looked very different to the microbial makeup of his skin, which has been "directly and dominantly shaped" by preservation techniques used during conservation efforts, the authors wrote in the study.

Unexpectedly, the team was able to cultivate four cold-adapted yeasts in samples taken from Ötzi's skin and thawed water from his insides. Evidence of ancient DNA damage in these yeasts strongly suggests they either laid dormant for 5,300 years, or were descendants from the original yeast colonizers, the authors wrote in the study.

Comparing the 2019 skin samples to those taken in 2010 revealed that one yeast strain — the cold-loving Glaciozyma — had transitioned to being the dominant strain in the intervening years. This suggests the glacier-derived Glaciozyma yeast had been slowly but actively proliferating.

"These yeasts have accompanied Ötzi on his long journey through the millennia," study co-author Frank Maixner, director of the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies, said in a statement. The Iceman is "not a static relic, but a dynamic biological system."

This study offers a rare glimpse into Copper Age gut microbiomes, but Sarhan stressed Ötzi is not necessarily representative of all people from the period. Rather, it's just "a snapshot [of] one individual," he said.

What do you know about the Iceman mummy who was murdered 5,300 years ago in the Alps? Find out with our Ötzi quiz!

For a century, experts dismissed a series of parallel red lines discovered in a Welsh cave as a phenomenon of nature rather than human-made rock art. But a new study shows the lines are a rare example of Paleolithic art — and at 17,000 years old, they're the earliest example of rock art in the British Isles.

Bacon Hole is a cave in the limestone cliffs of Gower, a peninsula in southwest Wales. In 1912, a team of geologists and archaeologists found a panel deep within the cave covered in a series of 11 horizontal lines.

The discovery made waves on both sides of the Atlantic as the experts claimed the lines were the first known Upper Paleolithic (50,000 to 12,000 years ago) rock art in Britain. But by 1928, skeptics had cast doubt on the explanation of the lines as human-made and suggested they were a natural phenomenon.

The debate died down, in part, because the lined panel's location within the cave was never specified and the knowledge was lost. In 2022, an international team of researchers rediscovered the panel and were able to scientifically analyze the composition of the paint and estimate its year of creation.

In a study published May 26 in the journal Quaternary, the researchers used uranium-thorium dating of the calcite crust overlaying the panel to show that the horizontal lines were created, at a minimum, 18,300 to 15,700 years ago. Uranium-thorium dating can be prone to overestimating the age of rock art because groundwater can leech uranium from calcite, making it appear older than it is. But scientists are working to address this issue, by including other lines of evidence when creating an age estimate.

The team also discovered that the lines were red-hued because of hematite, an iron-oxide compound naturally secreted by rocks in other parts of the cave. The fact that the lines were equidistant from one another suggests they were made by humans in a deliberate and structured pattern, the researchers wrote in the study, as do the patterns of finger dots and splashes of hematite they found elsewhere in the cave.

But the team cautioned in the study that their date is based on a single analysis, and the cave walls require further analysis.

What did the cave and its art mean to prehistoric people?

"It is difficult to determine exactly how Bacon Hole was used during the Upper Palaeolithic, and the evidence suggests it may have served multiple purposes over time," study first author George Nash, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. "The presence of rock art in the deeper, darker parts of Bacon Hole suggests that at least some areas of the cave may have held symbolic or ritual significance."

But it's challenging to speculate as to what ancient hunter-gatherers may have meant when they inked nearly a dozen red lines on a cave wall thousands of years ago.

One of the archaeologists who originally found the lines, rock art expert Henri Breuil, often interpreted Upper Paleolithic cave art as "sympathetic magic," an anthropological term referring to the idea that art could influence the real world. For instance, if Paleolithic hunters drew a bison on a cave wall, Breuil might assume it was intended to bring about a successful bison hunt.

At Bacon Hole, the red-lined panel is located deep within the cave with an absence of natural light, according to Nash, which may have created a sense of foreboding and mystery.

"The darkness itself may have been an essential part of the ritual experience," Nash said. "Deep cave chambers are acoustically unusual, visually disorienting, and separated from the everyday world. Entering such spaces could have created a sense of transition to a different realm."

Bacon Hole is also notable for having been visited again and again over the millennia. Archaeologists in the 19th century found pre-Roman potsherds in the cave, as well as a Roman-era bone pin, a seventh-century Irish brooch, Saxon-era beads, and a medieval cooking pot. And in 1894, a local fisherman covered many of the walls of Bacon Hole with modern graffiti.

While the mouth of the cave overlooks a fertile plain and a coastline that were likely full of animal resources, such as wild game and fish, for thousands of years, "practical considerations alone may not explain why people continued to visit the cave across such long periods of time," Nash said.

"Once a place becomes embedded in cultural memory, it can acquire meanings that endure long after its original purpose has been forgotten," he said. "Bacon Hole's prominent location, natural resources, and enduring presence within the landscape likely combined to make it a place repeatedly returned to by successive generations."

What do you know about the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic eras? Find out with our Stone Age quiz!

In April 2011, excavators working on a natural gas pipeline in northern Germany unearthed one of the largest gold hoards from prehistoric Europe. Dated to about 1300 B.C., the Gessel gold hoard consists of 117 artifacts that together weigh over 3.7 pounds (1.7 kilograms).

The hoard was discovered in the village of Gessel near the town of Syke and is now the centerpiece of the Forum Gesseler Goldhort museum. Around 3,300 years ago, someone placed the gold objects in a linen bag, secured the bag with six bronze pins, and buried it in the dirt — but archaeologists aren't sure why.

The Gessel gold hoard includes 82 spiral rings linked into eight chains of 10 rings and one chain of two rings. An additional 32 spirals of various sizes were also in the hoard. Rather than jewelry, these spirals were likely a form of currency in the Middle Bronze Age and were crafted from recycled gold, according to prehistoric archaeologist Babette Ludowici.

Only three items in the hoard were personal accessories: a large, gold bracelet; a twisted armband; and a brooch. While the two armbands appear to have been unfinished, the brooch was elaborately decorated.

Originally, the brooch was about 6.3 inches (16 centimeters) long, but it was bent and the pin was removed prior to burial in the hoard. An artisan created a ladder-band pattern around the top and bottom of the clasp. The main part of the clasp features five raised sun symbols and six sets of concentric rings stamped into the metal. According to a 2012 study, it is the only ancient brooch made of solid gold to have been found in Central Europe.

Although the Gessel gold hoard is the first scientifically excavated hoard from prehistoric Germany, its burial is still a mystery. The fact that the objects were tightly compacted and that some were bent before burial led archaeologist Stefan Winghart to suggest they were deliberately collected into a hoard rather than hastily thrown together.

Excavations near the hoard's discovery did not reveal any evidence of a contemporaneous settlement or grave, but experts think the hoard may represent a collection of personal wealth or be part of a metalsmith's collection.

A new research project announced in spring 2026 will attempt to determine where the gold came from, as an initial analysis suggested a possible Central Asia origin. Experts will also try to figure out who owned the Gessel gold hoard and why they buried it over three millennia ago.

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

The 4,000-year-old skull of a Bronze Age child buried in what's now Uzbekistan bears scars from a cranial surgery known as trepanation. It is the oldest documented evidence of surgery in Central Asia and one of the oldest examples of surgery in all of Asia, the researchers report.

The skeleton of the child, who died at about age 5, was unearthed in April. The body had been buried in a single grave alongside the body of a child who died at about 3 years old, researchers said in a translated statement.

The 5-year-old's skull has "clear signs of cranial trepanation" involving stone or bone tools, according to the statement. Trepanation was commonly performed in ancient times, perhaps in attempts to treat maladies like epilepsy, migraines or behavioral problems. But the researchers noted that the "frontier between medicine and ritual" would have been far less defined at that time than it is now.

A research team from Italy and Uzbekistan made the discovery in the Northern Bactria region, near the border with Afghanistan.

Ancient Oxus

The excavations focused on the site of the prehistoric settlement of Djarkutan, and the researchers dated the grave to the late third millennium B.C. At that time, Djarkutan was an urban center of the Oxus civilization, an Early Bronze Age culture that dominated Central Asia from about 2500 to 1500 B.C. The ongoing project to investigate the site and other aspects of the Oxus civilization began in 2024.

Archaeologists sometimes call the Oxus civilization the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, or BMAC. It was centered along rivers and in oases in the region, and it is renowned for its advanced agricultural economy and rich material culture. The demise of the Oxus civilization is thought to have been triggered by climatic changes that caused important rivers to dry up.

While evidence of ancient trepanations is relatively common in some places, the fact that this surgery was performed on a young child is perplexing, the researchers said.

"Djarkutan continues to surprise us," Enrico Ascalone, an archaeologist at the University of Salento who led the excavation, said in the statement. "A cranial trepanation on a child, four thousand years ago, in Central Asia: until yesterday it was unthinkable. Today it is in our data."

Yet the discovery also leaves mysteries. "Which group of 'specialists' within the town could have practiced such an intervention? What anatomical and surgical knowledge did such an operation presuppose? And why a five-year-old?" the team wrote in the statement. They hope to answer those questions in further investigations in the coming months.

Whether using family records, DNA tests or genealogy websites, many people can trace their family histories back generations. The world-record holder for the longest family tree is Chinese philosopher Confucius (551 to 479 B.C.), whose family tree extends more than 80 generations from his ancestors in the eighth century B.C. to his living descendants. That's almost 3,000 years.

But our species has been around for 300,000 years, based on scientific dates of the oldest known fossils. So how many generations do we go back as a species?

To find out, you need to know how long modern humans (Homo sapiens) have existed and the length of a generation, according to Matthew Hahn, a population geneticist at Indiana University Bloomington. The number of human generations that have lived would be equal to the time since H. sapiens emerged as a species divided by the length of a generation, also called the generation interval.

The generation interval is typically defined as the average age at which humans have children, Hahn said. It tends to be longer for men than for women because men can have children later in life, Hahn explained.

There are many estimates of our species' generation interval, each of which produces a different answer to the question of how many human generations have come before us.

For example, a 2003 study of Icelanders published in the American Journal of Human Genetics based generation interval estimates on the country's extensive records from churches and other sources. Using these records, researchers at the company deCODE Genetics created a genealogical database of the country's entire population. They found that the average generation interval in Iceland over the past 300 years was 30.3 years.

A 2005 study used data about the average age at which European women had children between 1960 and 2000 and estimated the generation intervals for men to arrive at an average generation interval of 29.1 years.

But those are estimates of the generation interval in the recent past. A study led by Hahn and published in the journal Science Advances in 2023 estimated the generation interval over the past 250,000 years. Hahn's study put together data from two others. A 2017 study of Icelanders, also led by deCODE Genetics and published in the journal Nature, found that as parents age, the blend of mutations that arise in their children changes. Using this data, Hahn and colleagues built a model of the mix of new mutations that you would expect to find in a group of people according to the generation interval at the time.

"If you know the types of mutations that individuals leave to their children according to their age, if you have a collection of mutations, you can try to estimate how old the mixture of individuals was," Hahn said.

A 2020 study in the journal PLOS Biology estimated when millions of mutations found in humans today first arose. Hahn and colleagues grouped the mutations from the 2020 paper according to when they arose and then determined the blend of new mutations that popped up during each time period. With that information, they could estimate the generation interval for each time span. While the generation interval varied over the course of an estimated 250,000 years, it was an estimated 26.9 years, on average. Using that generation interval, there would have been an estimated 11,152 generations of humans over 300,000 years, Hahn said.

Moisès Coll Macià, an evolutionary biologist and population geneticist who works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, told Live Science that while a generation interval of 26.9 years is "not unimaginable," he prefers to give a range of possible generation intervals.

In Coll Macià's view, the lower bound would be the generation interval for one of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Because humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived during the Miocene epoch (23 million to 5 million years ago), you would expect that past human generations would have had a generation interval somewhere between that of contemporary humans and that of contemporary chimps, Coll Macià said. Chimpanzees have an estimated generation time of about 24.6 years, according to a 2012 paper in the journal PNAS.

As for the upper bound in modern humans, Coll Macià suggested 26 to 30 years. That's based on a 2016 PNAS study that analyzed fragments of Neanderthal DNA found in ancient and contemporary human genomes to estimate the human generation interval across the past 45,000 years.

Based on Coll Macià's upper-bound generation interval of about 30 years, there have been at least 10,000 generations of humans. Based on the lower-bound generation interval of 24.6 years, there have been at most 12,195 generations. These numbers attest that the human family tree is pretty tall, however you look at it.

See how much you know about early humans with our human evolution quiz!

Archaeologists working in a 14th-century monastery in Barcelona were surprised to find 25 skeletons when they opened eight graves — including the remains of a medieval queen.

Seven centuries after Queen Elisenda of Montcada, the wife of James II of Aragon and Valencia, founded the Royal Monastery of Santa Maria Pedralbes in Barcelona, a team of experts opened her tomb to learn more about her life and about the living conditions of the 14th-century female monastic community, according to a May 28 translated statement from the Culture Institute of Barcelona.

The investigation of the tombs revealed that the queen was buried in austere clothing in a small wooden box, but also that the tombs of Elisenda's closest circle of companions included men who had been stabbed to death and a woman who died halfway through pregnancy.

Elisenda of Montcada was 30 years old when she married the 55-year-old James II just one month after the death of his third wife, becoming stepmother to his 10 children. James II, also called James the Just, was the king of Aragon and Valencia in what is now east Spain from 1291 until his death in 1327. When James was ill toward the end of his life, Elisenda founded a monastery for the Order of the Poor Clares, a group of cloistered Catholic nuns, in Barcelona. After James II died, Elisenda lived in a small palace next to the Pedralbes monastery until her death in 1364.

As part of the commemoration of the 700th anniversary of the founding of the Pedralbes monastery in 1326, researchers opened eight historic graves of people associated with the early years of the monastery, including the tombs of Queen Elisenda and the monastery's first two abbesses.

When the researchers opened Elisenda's tomb, they found a box of her bones in one corner of a larger space between the church and the cloister that was partitioned into two by a low wall. This arrangement was likely created on purpose to represent the queen as both a sovereign next to the church and as a penitent next to the cloister, reinforcing her dual political and spiritual roles, according to the statement.

An initial analysis of the queen's bones revealed she was about 70 years old when she died, which lines up with historical information about the monarch, with her remains showing evidence of osteoarthritis associated with aging. Although the queen was buried in a plain monastic habit, there were traces of a gold-embroidered silk textile in the tomb as well as the aromatic herbs rosemary and myrtle.

In the tomb of Sobirana Olzet, the monastery's first abbess, researchers found bones consistent with what is known about her life. But they also noticed a traumatic injury to her face that happened shortly before or at the time of her death. An investigation into the injury, which appears to have been made by a knife, is ongoing.

Another tomb, originally thought to belong to the knight Artau de Foces, actually contained the bones of five people, the researchers discovered: two adult women and three children. No male bones corresponding to Artau were found in the tomb. The long ponytail of one woman was preserved and still attached to her skull.

And in the tomb that was thought to belong to Francesca Saportella, the second abbess of Pedralbes and the queen's niece, researchers found the bones of at least nine people who were placed in the tomb in different time periods. This included four male skulls, all of which had stab wounds, and the mummified torso of a woman with the remains of a 20- to 23-week fetus in the birth canal. Papers and parchment recovered from this tomb, including sheet music, are currently being conserved and studied.

"The study of the foundational graves offers a unique opportunity to delve deeper into the first decades of the monastery's life, a decisive period for understanding its evolution and its role within medieval Catalan society," the Culture Institute of Barcelona wrote in the statement.

So far, the researchers have found that the majority of these early tombs contained high-status adult women, many of whom were quite elderly and had signs of physical aging, such as osteoarthritis. These findings are consistent with what is historically known about the early burials at the monastery and the lives of nuns.

But genetic analysis has only just begun — at the moment, only 6% of the queen's genome has been sequenced, according to the statement. The team plans to use DNA from bone and tooth samples to confirm the identities of the skeletons in the tombs, establish family relationships among them, and investigate the possible presence of ancient pathogens. Definitive results from the archaeological analysis of the bones, textiles, papers and plant remains are expected in mid-2027.

"The challenge for the next year will be to transform these first findings into a complete historical interpretation that allows us to better understand not only who these people were, but also how they lived, how they died and how they were remembered," the Culture Institute of Barcelona wrote.

What do you know about the bones in your body? Test your knowledge with our human skeleton quiz!

Archaeologists in Saudi Arabia have unearthed a clay pot full of gold, silver and gemstone-encrusted jewelry that may have been buried by an Islamic pilgrim en route to Mecca more than a millennium ago.

The team nicknamed the hoard the "Dhariyah Treasure" after the archaeological site where it was discovered. Located in the Al-Qassim region, Dhariyah was a key station on the Hajj route for Islamic pilgrims between Basra, Iraq, and Mecca, Saudi Arabia. According to archaeologists with the Saudi Heritage Commission who have been excavating Dhariyah for six years, radiocarbon analysis of organic remains puts the main settlement in the period of 743 to 753.

During the recent excavation season, archaeologists discovered gypsum water basins and the walls of several residential buildings. Inside the structures, they found fragments of pottery and glass — but the buried ceramic jar containing over 100 pieces of jewelry was a surprise.

"One of the most important discoveries of this sixth season was the uncovering of the 'Dhariyah Treasure,' which consists of a collection of gold pieces, gemstones and oxidized copper fragments," a laboratory expert with the Saudi Heritage Commission said in a translated video.

The treasure hoard was likely buried during the early years of the Abbasid caliphate, which came to power in 750 and was destroyed by the Mongols in 1258. Named after one of Muhammad's uncles, the Abbasid caliphs helped usher in the Islamic Golden Age in which cultural and scientific activity flourished. Geographically, the Abbasid Empire stretched from North Africa to Iran but was concentrated primarily in the Arabian Peninsula and present-day Iraq, with its capital at Baghdad.

According to Islamic tradition, every adult who can afford it and is physically able to make it is supposed to make a pilgrimage — called the Hajj — to the holiest Islamic city, Mecca, at least once. During the Abbasid period, Dhariyah was an important stop on the pilgrimage route between Basra, a port city in southern Iraq near the Arabian Gulf, and Mecca on the west coast of Saudi Arabia.

Experts do not yet know why the jewelry decorated with floral patterns and geometric motifs was buried at Dhariyah or whether it belonged to a pilgrim. But it is clear that skilled metalworkers crafted the pieces, Gulf News reported, by shaping sheets of gold, embossing them, and inlaying semiprecious gems.

Additional archaeological excavation at Dhariyah is planned for the future.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:55 a.m. ET on June 1 to note that the discovery was made at the Dhariyah archaeological site in the Al-Qassim region rather than Diriyah located on the outskirts of Riyadh, as previously stated.

See how much you know about gemstones with our gold and gems quiz!

The Romans controlled much of Britain for nearly 400 years, but they left relatively little genetic evidence of their occupation, new ancient-DNA research reveals.

Instead, the Roman occupation, from A.D. 43 until about 410, seems to have changed the culture of their Britannia province, with most people native to Britain converting to Imperial Roman ways.

A preprint of the study was posted to the bioRxiv server April 29 and has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet. Some experts agree with the conclusions, but others are cautious.

However, some of the study's findings agree with the results of earlier genetic studies of the Germanic migration into Britain, Duncan Sayer, an archaeologist at the University of Lancashire in England, told Live Science.

"These results absolutely confirm the data we've had previously," said Sayer, who was not involved in the study.

For their investigations, the researchers looked at the genomes of more than 1,000 individuals who had been buried in Britain between 2550 B.C. and A.D. 1150. They found that Roman DNA — identified as having ancestral origins "outside Britain" — accounted for only about 20% of the genetic profile of individuals buried in Britain during its Roman era. By comparison, in the later Anglo-Saxon era, DNA from "Germanic" sources accounted for about 70% of the genetics of people buried there at that time.

These findings indicate that the native British interbred surprisingly little with people from elsewhere in the Roman Empire but often interbred with people of Anglo-Saxon origin, Sayer said.

"In the Roman period, although people are settling in Britain, it's not in quite the same way as Germanic speakers [Anglo-Saxons] are in the fifth and sixth centuries," James Gerrard, an archaeologist at Newcastle University in England who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.

The team who worked on the latest study said they also found very little genetic evidence of the later Viking Age in the North of England, when most of that region followed Danish traditions and was called the Danelaw: only about 4% of the genetic profiles of people buried in England at this time showed they had Iron Age Scandinavian ancestry, they reported.

Meanwhile, ancestries from Central and Southern Europe rose from the eighth century onward that signified more people migrated into England during the medieval period, the team wrote in the preprint.

Cultural transformation

The authors noted that "previous DNA sampling from Roman Britain has been relatively small-scale and regionally or context specific" and suggested that their "dataset bridges this gap."

But Gerrard, who was not involved in the study, cautioned that the new research might not give an accurate picture of Britain's genetic history.

To begin with, while the new study examined the DNA extracted from 1,039 people buried in Britain between the Bronze Age and medieval times — a span of roughly 3,700 years — only about 200 were from the Roman period.

This is a small sample size compared with archaeological investigations in Britain, where the origins of several thousand people buried during the Roman period have been examined over decades, he said.

In addition, the burials in the new research tended to be from cities, rather than from the countryside, where intermarriage rates may have differed. The results of the study might have also been skewed because the Roman presence would have been greater in the North of England, where many troops were stationed at camps, and in the East of England, where Roman urban settlements were more common, he said.

"We have a problem, I think, of whether ancient DNA is representative of the whole population," Gerrard said.

Celtic women

The Romans invaded and annexed most of Britain at the command of Emperor Claudius in A.D. 43, although his great-great-granduncle (by adoption) Julius Caesar led two short-lived invasions in 55 and 54 B.C. The Roman occupation ended in about A.D. 410, when Roman troops guarding the northern frontier were recalled to the continent to defend Roman territories against Germanic invasions.

Although the study found relatively little genetic evidence of the Roman occupation, the researchers noted that the Romans seemed to have had a marked effect on burial practices. Pre-Roman burials in Britain were often grouped by matrilineal relationships, perhaps reflecting the traditionally Celtic importance of women as the heads of their families, and the researchers found evidence that this practice continued for a time in the West of England — a native stronghold. Under this cultural tradition, women were relatively empowered and stayed in their ancestral homes, and the men they married moved into their communities.

But the DNA extracted from the remains in Roman-era cemeteries in Britain showed no such patterns, the researchers said, which might reflect traditional Roman patriarchal practices.

The authors of the new research declined a request from Live Science to comment, noting that they wanted to wait until the paper is published in a peer-reviewed journal before talking with the media.

What do you know about the Empire's conquest of the British Isles? Find out with our Roman Britain quiz!

A 600-year-old set of surgical tools found in a tomb in China has revealed the world's first chemical evidence of a topical anesthetic. Used to numb the skin in surgical procedures, the anesthetic was made from the highly toxic plant Chinese wolfsbane. However, the toxic plant was likely detoxified first with urine, among other things.

"Six centuries ago, a Ming Dynasty surgeon performed an operation with a pair of iron scissors and tweezers, and today we have read the traces of anaesthetic medicine left on those instruments using a beam of laser light," study co-author Congcang Zhao, an archaeologist at Northwest University in China, said in a statement.

In a study published Tuesday (May 26) in the journal Antiquity, Zhao and colleagues analyzed two surgical implements discovered decades ago in the Ming Dynasty (circa 1368 to 1644) tomb of Xia Quan in the city of Jiangyin, roughly 90 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of Shanghai.

Based on an X-ray fluorescence analysis, which is a non-destructive technique that reveals the elemental composition of an object, the researchers determined the scissors and tweezers were both made from iron. Then, under a microscope, they selected three tiny particles of rust-colored residue on the tools with the hope of identifying traces of organic compounds.

To figure out the composition of the residue, the researchers used micro-Raman spectroscopy, a technique in which a laser is beamed at a sample, causing the sample's photons to scatter. The pattern of that scattering can then be analyzed to generate the structural fingerprint of the molecules in the sample.

The Raman spectroscopy analysis of the two surgical tools revealed the presence of the cyano functional group, which is found in hydrogen cyanide, as well as the organic components of oils and fats. Taken together, these results indicated "medicinal and potentially anaesthetic properties for the residues," the researchers wrote. "The alkaloid toxin aconitine is suggested as a probable component of the residues."

Aconitine is found in plants of the Aconitum genus, which are native to North America, Europe and Asia. Also known as aconite, monkshood and wolfsbane, the flowering plants are extremely poisonous — but they have also been used in traditional Asian medicine for centuries, primarily for their analgesic properties. Practitioners in the Ming Dynasty knew how to mitigate the plants' poison, the researchers wrote, by using acidic substances such as mung beans, vinegar or the urine of young boys to detoxify the aconite and turn it into an anesthetic powder or liquid.

"Ming physicians used iron surgical instruments and controlled the toxicity of aconitine through topical application, compound prescriptions and strict procedural controls, demonstrating a practical ability to balance drug potency with patient safety," Zhao said.

The 600-year-old iron implements were likely used in minor surgeries, the researchers noted. First, the practitioner would apply the numbing agent to the area, then use the tweezers to hold the skin and the scissors to trim away the outer layer. Anesthetic residue was present on both tools and was concentrated in functional areas consistent with application during surgery. It's likely that the anesthetic in this case was in liquid form; it may have splashed onto the iron implements, escaping cleaning and eventually corroding the metal.

This analysis represents the first time that researchers have found direct chemical evidence of anesthetics on ancient surgical tools. "Combined with records of anaesthetic prescriptions in Ming Dynasty medical texts, the study confirms that Aconitum was employed as a topical anaesthetic, safely and precisely applied during surgical procedures," Zhao said.

Can you guess the diagnosis in these strange medical cases? Find out with our diagnostic dilemma quiz!

Ancient Egyptians wove impressively detailed nets of colored beads to create funeral shrouds around 2,500 years ago. The popular bead nets were placed on top of mummies wrapped in linen and symbolized the transformation of the deceased into Osiris, the god of fertility and the sovereign of the dead.

This beaded funerary shroud is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), which purchased it in the late 19th century from Rev. Chauncey Murch, the director of the American Presbyterian Mission at Luxor, who was an avid collector of ancient Egyptian art. The shroud measures 18 inches long and 15.8 inches wide (45.7 by 40 centimeters), meaning it can easily cover a person's head and upper chest.

The bead-net shroud has three main components: a human face, a winged scarab and a broad collar, according to Egyptologist Emily Teeter, who published a close analysis of the artifact for the museum.

The person's face has been crafted primarily from dark-blue beads, while their facial features and eye makeup are abstractly depicted with black, red and yellow beads. A false beard similar to the famous example on the mask of Tutankhamun has been added in teal beads. The use of numerous blue beads may be a nod to the sky goddess Nut, whose body was sometimes depicted as a series of stars in a field of blue, Teeter wrote.

Just under the face is a winged scarab rendered in multicolored beads. It probably invokes Khepri, a scarab-faced sun god who represented creation and renewal, according to the AIC. While scarab amulets were often added to mummies during the wrapping process, this artwork depicts the scarab in beads on the shroud itself.

Below the scarab is a collar made of dark-blue, red, yellow, black and light-blue beads that create a series of yellow lotus flowers and red floral pendants.

Bead-net shrouds were typically placed over red linen that covered the wrapped mummy, according to Teeter. The shroud would have been held in place with ties that wrapped around the back.

"Together, the shroud and net imitated the wrappings of Osiris, hence symbolizing the assimilation of the deceased to the god," Teeter wrote. The goddess Nut also appeared frequently on mummies' chests. "Just as the arms of Nut encircled the deceased, the bead net enveloped the mummy," she wrote.

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

Castles were a common sight in the Middle Ages, which lasted from roughly 500 to 1500. Most castles were built to be the fortified residences of local nobility during this politically tumultuous period, but they also functioned as territorial defenses.

Giant stone castles were challenging to take but were not unconquerable. Many fell through sieges, through direct assaults or by bribing the defenders to abandon their posts. But some castles withstood the slings and arrows of their times.

Here are six medieval castles that were never conquered, including one that may have been saved by a dead-cow catapult.

Bohus Fortress (Sweden)

Bohus Fortress, in what is now southwestern Sweden, withstood at least 13 sieges without being taken, according to the Swedish National Property Board. Originally constructed on top of a hill in the 1250s on the orders of the Norwegian king Bohus, it was expanded into a wooden castle in the 14th century. Over the following two centuries, most of the wood was replaced by stone.

At its height, the fortress had multiple towers connected by a complex system of interlocking stone walls. This design meant that if one of the towers was taken, the remaining defenders could continue to fight in another. In 1566, Swedish attackers succeeded in capturing one of the towers. The castle's defenders kept fighting in the other towers and even managed to ignite a gunpowder magazine in the captured tower that then blew up the Swedish invaders.

Bohus was initially built on the old border between Norway and Sweden. But through the peace treaty of Roskilde in 1658, the border was moved and Bohus was ceded to Sweden.

Hochosterwitz Castle (Austria)

Hochosterwitz Castle, in what is now southern Austria, was built on top of a steep hill that rises about 500 feet (150 meters) over the surrounding valley, according to Hochosterwitz Castle's website.

A castle existed on the site at least as early as A.D. 860 and was continually modified and repaired over time, but it does not appear to have been conquered. In the late 16th century, to guard against Turkish invasions, the nobleman who owned the castle built 14 gates, each equipped with different defensive structures.

According to one story, which may be fictional, Hochosterwitz was almost conquered during the 14th century, when the castle was laid siege by an army loyal to Margaret, Countess of Tyrol. The defenders were nearly out of food, so they slaughtered their last cow, filled it with grain and catapulted it at the enemy. Margaret's army concluded that if the defenders could afford to catapult a dead cow with grain in it, they must be well supplied ‪—‬ and they broke off their siege.

Burgdorf Castle (Switzerland)

Burgdorf Castle, near Bern, Switzerland, gave its medieval attackers a lesson in 1383: If you can't conquer it, then buy it.

During a war between the city of Bern and the counts of Neu-Kyburg, the castle, which was controlled by the Kyburgs, was besieged for 45 days by an army sent by Bern. The siege failed, and the Bern army faltered, according to the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland. However, the Kyburgs and the city reached a deal in which the city paid 37,800 guilders, a currency used in the Holy Roman Empire, in exchange for control of the castle.

Burgdorf is far from being the largest medieval castle, but it is sizable: The castle has a residential tower, a keep (fortified tower) and a great hall, all connected by a system of walls, according to the castle's website. It doesn't seem to have been conquered during its 800-year history.

Mont-Saint-Michel (France)

Located on a tidal island in northwestern France, Mont-Saint-Michel is part abbey and part medieval fortress, and it withstood multiple sieges throughout its history. During the Hundred Years' War — a series of conflicts fought between England and France between 1337 and 1453 — Mont-Saint-Michel was besieged by the English multiple times but never fell. The site's location on a tidal island and the strength of its ramparts made the fortress practically impregnable, the fortress Mont-Saint-Michel website says.

In addition to being a powerful fortress, Mont-Saint-Michel was an important abbey. According to legend, the archangel Michael appeared before Bishop Aubert three times in 708 and asked him to build a sanctuary in his honor at this location, the website notes.

Kost Castle (Czech Republic)

Located in the northern Czech Republic, in an area known as the "Bohemian paradise," the Gothic-style Kost Castle was built in the 13th century and expanded over the following two centuries. It contains a series of walls and fortifications, with the "Great White Tower" (the tower's stones have a white color) being the most prominent. It also has a chapel, farm buildings and even a brewery that was built in the 16th century, the Kost Castle website notes.

According to one story, after a failed attempt to take the castle during the 15th century, the leader of the force that attacked it, Jan Žižka, said its walls were as hard as bone. While the story may be fictional, the castle retains the "bone" in its name ("kost" means "bone" in Czech), and it appears to have remained unconquered throughout its history.

Château Pèlerin (Israel)

Château Pèlerin (also known as Atlit Castle) is a Crusader castle located on the northern coast of what is now Israel. Constructed in 1218 by the Knights Templar, its seaside location meant that it could be resupplied by ships, making it more difficult to besiege. The Knights Templar built the fortress as a way to control the coastal route and take back Jerusalem, which fell in a siege in 1187, according to UNESCO.

Within the walls and towers of the fortress were residential areas and a chapel. Château Pèlerin was never conquered, but in 1291, it was evacuated and abandoned after the Kingdom of Jerusalem fell and the Crusaders lost control of most of the Holy Land.

This week's science news was filled with unearthed mysteries from ancient tombs, including the discovery of the possible true purpose of hundreds of stone jars scattered across Laos' highlands.

The Plain of Jars, which consists of 2,000 hollowed-out stone urns dotted across the Xieng Khouang Plateau, has puzzled archaeologists for almost a century. Now, researchers have found the remains of at least 37 people inside one of these jars, suggesting that the site was a vast burial complex where ancestors were worshipped for generations.

We also reported on burial mysteries in other areas of the world this week. Satellite remote sensing uncovered circular mass graves that predate the ancient Egyptians, while analyses revealed that ancestors of Aboriginal people in Australia "fed" the grave of a pet dingo for 500 years and that Poland's 'hugging skeletons' were a same-sex double burial. And in further tomb news, excavations of a High Arctic graveyard unveiled the perils that plagued 17th-century whalers.

This week, we also got an answer to a long-standing mystery of why the Giza pyramids have survived for more than 4,600 years.

Global warming moves 5,000 times faster than rice can evolve

Global warming is accelerating 5,000 times faster than rice can evolve

The rapid warming of Earth could be pushing rice-growing regions to their "thermal limit," according to a troubling new study we covered this week.

That means the staple crop could be facing serious disruption that affects a billion people who depend on rice cultivation for their livelihoods. It also puts farmers and rice itself "closer to the limits of what we can reasonably adapt to in that time frame," study first author Nicolas Gauthier, an anthropologist and geographer at the Florida Museum of Natural History, told Live Science.

By analyzing 9,000 years' worth of data, Gauthier and his colleagues found a hard upper temperature limit that could soon be breached.

Discover more planet Earth news:

—A transition may be looming for a massive Italian volcano

—The Appalachian Mountains hold enough lithium to make 500 billion cellphones, researchers discover

—Complex animals evolved up to 10 million years earlier than previously thought, fossil discovery shows

Life's Little Mysteries

How hot is Earth's core?

Earth started out as a ball of molten rock floating in space, with the heavier elements slowly sinking to form its planetary core. That core is still scorching. But how hot is it? And how did scientists even figure out its temperature?

—If you enjoyed this, sign up for our Life's Little Mysteries newsletter

Common asthma drug fights hard-to-treat cancers

Common asthma drug helps fight hard-to-treat cancers, including aggressive breast cancers, early study finds

Montelukast, a common drug used to treat asthma and allergies, could soon be repurposed to tackle hard-to-treat cancers, such as triple-negative breast cancer.

Early lab studies found that the drug could reverse the hijacking of key immune cells by tumors, thereby reversing the cancers' resistance to common immunotherapies. With this finding in hand, scientists now hope to launch a clinical trial with cancer patients.

Discover more health news

—Loneliness may contribute to memory issues, but not dementia — they are 'not the same thing'

—Why aren't brain transplants possible?

—Deadly Ebola outbreak is a public health emergency of international concern, WHO declares

Also in science news this week

—Physicists confirm 'negative time' is real by asking the atoms themselves

—China installs world's largest floating wind turbine in deep water test — it generates enough energy to power 4,200 homes annually

—Deadly, highly venomous box jellyfish discovered in Singapore is a newfound species

—'Last titan' of Thailand discovered, and it's the longest-necked dinosaur on record from Southeast Asia

—China's real-life 'transformer' mech is a giant humanoid robot that can switch from bounding on 4 legs to walking on 2

—How can we prevent AI models from cannibalizing themselves when human-generated data runs out? Scientists say they've found the answer.

Science long read

Scientists claimed the world's oldest rock art is 67,800 years old. But is the science behind that estimate flawed?

A controversy is rocking the prehistoric art world, as a technique that once rewrote the timeline of prehistoric paintings has been called into serious doubt.

The method, called uranium-thorium dating, used the radioactive decay of uranium into thorium to generate all sorts of eye-popping headlines showcasing the artistic talents of our ancient ancestors.

However, a new paper casts doubt on the validity of this method and, therefore, the dates it finds. But are the new study's findings rock solid? Live Science contributor Sandee Oster investigated.

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for things to keep you busy over the weekend, here are some of the best news analyses, crosswords, book excerpts and polls published this week.

—More young people are getting colorectal cancer — here's what scientists think might be happening [News analysis]

—Ebola outbreak in Central Africa will be a nightmare to contain, experts warn [News analysis]

—Live Science crossword puzzle #44: Founder and first ruler of the Mongol Empire — 8 across [Crossword]

—'I have no doubt that life is out there': Why radio astronomers are convinced alien contact is only a matter of time [Book excerpt]

—Poll: What do you think of PMOS, the new name for PCOS? [Poll]

Science news in pictures

Webb and Hubble sink deep into the dazzling Whirlpool Galaxy — Space photo of the week

This image, showing the spiral arms in the Whirlpool Galaxy (Messier 51), could help astronomers to solve a big cosmic mystery: how stars are birthed from their gaseous cocoons.

The image combines observations from the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, and shows gaps in colorful gas that was blasted away by the formation of bright-white stars.

The image reveals a pattern showing that larger groups of stars clear their swaddling gas more quickly than smaller ones do, suggesting that our universe's current shape has been heavily influenced by early eruptions of gigantic stellar furnaces.

Follow Live Science on social media

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In recent years, researchers across the world have been publishing increasingly older ages for prehistoric rock art. Among the headliners is a painting of a warty pig in Indonesia that reportedly dates to 51,000 years ago and a hand stencil that researchers claimed was an eye-popping 67,800 years old.

Most of these dates have been determined by measuring the radioactive decay of some versions, or isotopes, of uranium into thorium ‪—‬ a method called uranium-thorium (U-Th) dating. However, the validity of some of these dates has been called into question, with Georges Sauvet, a researcher at the Center for Research and Studies of Prehistoric Art in France, proposing that the method tends to overestimate the ages of dated samples.

In a short communication published March 23 in the journal AOJ of Histoarchaeology and Anthropological Exploration, Sauvet criticized the published dates for some prehistoric rock art, stating that researchers are being less cautious in a "race towards the earliest rock art."

If these dates go unchallenged, Sauvet argued, it distorts our understanding of the intelligence of early Homo sapiens and human relatives, such as Neanderthals.

Sauvet thinks it is absolutely necessary to cross-date with other dating methods to ensure accuracy of the U-Th dating which on its own "is not acceptable," Sauvet said.

What is uranium-thorium dating?

When water washes over and breaks down limestone and then drips into caves, it slowly deposits calcite. As the calcite forms, it traps small amounts of uranium that is also dissolved in the water. The uranium then radioactively decays into several "daughter" isotopes, including thorium isotopes.

The method in question, U-Th dating, involves uranium-234, which contains 92 protons and 142 neutrons and will spit out two protons and two neutrons (called an alpha particle) to form thorium-230, which has 90 protons and 140 neutrons. It takes about 245,629 years for half of a given amount of uranium-234 to decay into thorium-230. So, assuming nothing is added to or taken away from the system since the uranium was deposited, the ratio of these two isotopes can determine the age of a calcite layer deposit.

In theory, this type of U-Th dating can be an incredibly powerful tool for archaeologists.

That's because in some cases, rock art contains carbon, an organic element that can be dated. But often, rock art is made from the mineral ocher or from etchings in stone, neither of which can be radiocarbon-dated.

This is where U-Th dating comes in handy. Calcite can grow over the art, creating a minimum age for its creation.

Questioning the age of rock art

However, in his paper, Sauvet argued that U-Th dating may provide unreliable dates and that all of them need to be cross-checked with other methods before a date can be estimated.

"My first alarm against the danger of the method was reading" a 2018 paper by Dirk Hoffmann, a researcher in the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and colleagues, "in which they announce that three Spanish cave [drawings] were dated to 65,000 years and were due to Neanderthals," Sauvet told Live Science in an email. The drawings show red ocher dots, a ladder and hand stencils, and some researchers suggested they show Neanderthals' ability to think artistically.

In a response in 2020, Sauvet and 42 other researchers published a reply highlighting the drawbacks of U-Th dating. The problem, Sauvet said, is that the method relies on calcite deposits forming and remaining in a "closed system," meaning no uranium is leached from the calcite deposit from the time of its formation. In an "open system," rainwater and groundwater percolate through the calcite and leach out uranium, skewing the U-Th ratio and making the deposit appear artificially older than it is.

"Dating of rock art is a particularly challenging subject," Adelphine Bonneau, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, told Live Science in an email. "In theory, Mr. [Dr.] Sauvet is right. U-series dating [which includes U-Th dating] can lead to overestimated dates."

According to Sauvet's paper, the hunt for increasingly older dates is in part due to grant awards and the prestige that comes with them. This has resulted in a series of increasingly older dates, including the supposedly 65,000-year-old art in Spain.

This date would "imply that paintings were made by Neanderthals, whereas there is absolutely no archaeological proof" that Neanderthals were capable of artistic creation, Sauvet said. (Other researchers, however, disagree, and think Neanderthals did create art.)

The debate was revived with the discovery of negative hand stencils in Sulawesi, Indonesia, that were U-Th-dated to around 67,800 years ago, which recently surpassed all previous records.

To highlight U-Th dating's unreliability, Sauvet cited several cases in his new paper in which U-Th and radiocarbon dates did not match when cross-checked. At Nerja Cave in southern Spain, a U-Th date yielded an age of 119,000 years, while a radiocarbon date of a charcoal mark that was part of the same drawing was around 19,000 years old; meanwhile, another radiocarbon date of a calcite layer from the same art was around 14,000 years old.

At Leang Balangajia, the outer calcite layer, which should be the youngest, was dated to 37,300 years old — roughly 7,800 years older than the layer underneath. In all of these cases, the suggestion is that the calcite layers were open systems.

In defense of U-Th dating

Not all researchers agree with Sauvet's assessment. João Zilhão, a research professor at the University of Lisbon and co-author of the Spanish rock art studies, said any dating method can be susceptible to errors. In an email to Live Science, he drew parallels to radiocarbon dating, in which the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 is measured ‪—‬ a method that can be subject to contamination.

Similarly, optically stimulated luminescence, which measures when something was last exposed to light, can give an artificially old age if someone doesn't account for residual emissions from mineral grains in a sample, he noted.

There will always be ways that dating estimates can be subject to error, and U-Th is not particularly special in that regard, experts told Live Science.

"Saying that uranium-series dating does not work for rock art because there are cases where some calcite samples show open-system behavior is an overgeneralization," said Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist at Griffith University in Australia, whose team was behind the Sulawesi dates.

Aubert acknowledged that uranium can leach out of or into calcite deposits, thereby distorting their true age. To get around this problem, his team has in recent years developed a laser ablation approach that allows zones altered by outside water seepage "to be identified and excluded from age calculation," he told Live Science.

To ensure their dates were accurate, including ones for the oldest hand stencil art in the world, Aubert's team used lasers to remove small sections within each sample. Next, they measured the isotope ratios in several of these sections to create a map of the isotope ratios across each calcite layer. Finally, they excluded layers where the isotope ratios varied a lot, which would have suggested contamination.

Scientists have developed other ways to ensure their dates are reliable, Bonneau added. "There are several ways to deal with these open-systems and correct the dates accordingly … Using laser-ablation and having a map of the calcite layers makes it possible to select the most reliable parts and then extract the dates," she said.

Bonneau noted that Hoffmann and colleagues did not have access to laser ablation at the time of their study, as the technology was still being developed.

To get around this, in past work Aubert "always published a lot of information regarding the different isotope ratios, the composition of the calcite layers, etc.," Bonneau said. "These data are needed to evaluate the reliability of the dates." Hoffmann's study is missing that data, she added, "so we cannot evaluate the reliability of the dates."

While U-Th dating can be subject to error, that doesn't make their age estimates worthless, she said. "Sauvet is right in principle, but if scientists do their job correctly, the dates are reliable," Bonneau concluded.

How much do you know about our closest relatives? Find out with our neanderthal quiz!

About 800 years ago, two people were buried in an embrace in a prominent church in Poland. Now, a new DNA analysis of the "hugging skeletons" reveals that both individuals were women and that they were not genetically related.

The discovery, which researchers say is the first known same-sex double burial in medieval Poland, raises questions about the women's relationship.

"The discovery of an atypical burial in such a unique setting naturally raised questions about the nature of the relationship between the individuals buried together in a single grave," Agata Cieślik, a biological anthropologist at the Ludwik Hirszfeld Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy in Poland, told Live Science in an email.

Mysterious double burial

The skeletons were uncovered during archaeological investigations at the 13th-century Cathedral of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in Opole, Poland, between 2022 and 2025.

One of the individuals had been buried according to Christian rites typical for the time: lying on their back, with their arms placed along their body. The other person had been placed on their side, with one arm beneath the other person's head, as if in an embrace. Based on the burial positions, the researchers think the people were interred simultaneously.

Typically, double burials of adults are interpreted as married couples. However, assumptions based on body position and physical sex estimation can be misleading. So in a new study, published in the September issue of in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Cieślik and her colleagues analyzed the two skeletons' DNA to better understand their relationship.

They extracted DNA from the bones and reconstructed parts of the individuals' genetic code, study co-author Joanna Romeyer-Dherbey, a postdoctoral DNA researcher at Kiel University and Yale University, told Live Science in an email. "We then sequence these fragments and use computational tools to reconstruct parts of the genetic code," Romeyer-Dherbey explained, comparing the process to "trying to reconstruct a book after it has been shredded into countless tiny pieces."

The DNA analysis confirmed that both skeletons were female and that they were not closely related, making the grave the first genetically confirmed same-sex burial in medieval Poland. But the researchers are unsure why two unrelated adult women were buried together.

Some unusual interments in the medieval period were intended to ritualistically prevent the dead from returning or causing harm. These feared individuals — sometimes called "revenants" — were typically buried in isolation and in unholy ground, and were often decapitated or weighed down with stones. But the women's burial next to the cathedral walls ‪—‬ a position often reserved for kings and local notables ‪—‬ and the lack of other evidence of protective rituals suggest that these women were not marginalized by society.

Medieval legal and religious sources harshly condemned same-sex partnerships, often punishing them with execution. If these women had been suspected of being lovers, they would not have been afforded such a prominent grave, the researchers wrote in the study.

The women's exact connection to each other remains a mystery, but past relationships came in diverse forms.

"People might have been connected through religion, shared households, economy, or work, which researchers term 'fictive kinship,'" Cieślik explained. "These socially recognized bonds functioned in ways similar to family ties and might have been reflected in the funerary practices."

According to the study, future genetic analysis of other medieval graves could provide insight into whether such same-sex burials were isolated incidents or part of a larger trend.

In the meantime, the Opole excavations revealed many artifacts, such as coins, jewelry, animal bones and pottery fragments that are still under investigation. "Future analyses will help us better reconstruct the historical landscape and everyday life of medieval Opole," Cieślik said.

Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza, also known as the Great Pyramid of Khufu, has stood for more than 4,600 years, even through powerful earthquakes. Now, new research explains why: The structure is remarkably resilient to vibrations.

The pyramid has lost only about 33 feet (10 meters) of height since its construction during Egypt's Old Kingdom (2649 to 2150 B.C.). That's despite experiencing strong earthquakes over the millennia, including one with an estimated magnitude of 6.8 that struck south of Cairo in the city of Fayum in 1847 and a temblor with a magnitude of 5.9 in 1992 that knocked some of the topmost stones to the ground.

The new study of vibrations throughout the pyramid's structure suggests that certain architectural features, such as a series of chambers known as the pressure-relieving chambers above the chamber where the pharaoh Khufu once rested, dampen seismic movement toward the top of the structure.

"[T]he study highlights the extraordinary practical engineering knowledge of ancient Egyptian builders, who developed highly effective construction practices through centuries of experimentation and refinement," study co-author Asem Salama, a geoscientist at the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics in Cairo, wrote Live Science in an email.

Salama and his team placed vibration sensors in 37 sites in and around the Great Pyramid and recorded ambient vibrations when no tourists were inside the pyramid. "In heritage conservation, this information can provide important insights into structural stability, hidden vulnerabilities, and long-term preservation strategies while fully respecting the integrity of the monument," Salama explained.

The team found that throughout the pyramid, vibrations were remarkably similar, ranging from about 2.0 to 2.6 hertz. This was quite different from the frequencies on the ground nearby, which were typically around 0.6 hertz. This gap in frequencies means that during earthquakes, the pyramid sits apart from the vibrations traveling through the ground, perhaps contributing to its resilience, the researchers reported Thursday (May 21) in the journal Scientific Reports.

Other features contributing to the pyramid's stability include its massive base, strong limestone foundation and symmetrical geometry, Salama said. The vibrations do increase toward the top of the structure, which is typical in most buildings (imagine a skyscraper built to sway in an earthquake), but this pattern is interrupted by the pressure-relieving chambers that sit about 200 feet (61 m) high inside the pyramid. These chambers lie over the King's Chamber and are thought to have been built to take some of the weight off the pharaoh's final resting place. They also, it turns out, dampen vibrations that otherwise might travel toward the structure's apex.

The researchers plan to take more measurements at the Great Pyramid and hope to use similar methods at other important Egyptian archaeological sites. It's likely that some of the same features of the pyramidal shape help protect the other pyramids at Giza, but each structure is likely unique, Salama said, as ancient Egyptian architects evolved their methods over time.

"Earlier pyramids," he said, "show evidence of experimentation and structural evolution, including changes in slope geometry and internal layouts."

Are you a fan of mummies and hieroglyphs? Find out with our ancient Egypt quiz!

Archaeologists investigating a 17th-century graveyard in the High Arctic are uncovering evidence of the perils that plagued early modern whalers, including extensive physical labor in their jobs and diseases such as scurvy. But the burial site is disappearing rapidly due to climate change, making archaeological excavations a race against time.

Likneset, which means "Corpse Point" in Norwegian, is the largest whaling burial site on Svalbard, an archipelago halfway between the North Pole and the northern coast of Norway. Hundreds of shallow graves marked with stone cairns have been found there in a cemetery that dates to the 17th-to-18th-century boom in Arctic whaling.

In a study published Wednesday (May 20) in the journal PLOS One, archaeologists examined 20 burials from Likneset and found that the men buried there lived short, difficult lives — and that these burials are at risk of disintegrating due to climate change.

"Early modern Arctic whaling was among Europe's first large-scale extractive industries, and the labor was highly manual," study first author Lise Loktu, an archaeologist at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, told Live Science in an email. Loktu co-wrote the study with Elin Therese Brødholt, a forensic anthropologist at Oslo University Hospital.

The work carried out by the whalers was extremely physically demanding, involving tasks like rowing boats, hauling live whales, towing carcasses, processing blubber, and performing heavy shipboard work under cold, wet and physically exhausting conditions.

"What is striking in the skeletal material is that we can actually see this workload reflected in the body," Loktu said.

In their analysis of the whalers' skeletons, Loktu and Brødholt found evidence of degenerative joint disease, trauma, and extensive strain in the men's shoulders, upper chest, spine, hips, knees and feet.

"Several very young adults already show advanced wear and degeneration normally associated with much later stages of life," Loktu said, suggesting these men were overusing their bodies for a long period of time.

The vast majority of the whalers also had evidence of scurvy, a deficiency of vitamin C that leads to muscle weakness, bleeding gums, tooth loss, anemia and a host of other problems. Scurvy is rare in modern countries where fresh fruit and vegetables are available, but it frequently affected sailors on long-distance journeys in the 15th to mid-19th centuries. At that time, Europeans did not understand the biological cause of scurvy and tended to avoid eating foods that Indigenous Arctic people consumed to prevent it, such as muktuk, a dish of whale skin and blubber that is a good source of vitamins C and D.

"Scurvy does not only affect bones; it also compromises the immune system, increases vulnerability to infection, weakens wound healing and contributes to overall physical decline," Loktu said. "We believe this likely played an important role in weakening the men physically."

The researchers also found dental evidence that most of the men smoked a pipe. By constantly clenching a clay pipe between their teeth, the men developed circular indentations in their enamel. Smoking is known to deplete the body's stores of vitamin C, which could have contributed to the development of scurvy.

"While smoking itself cannot explain the scurvy, tobacco use may potentially have worsened overall health and nutritional stress," Loktu said. "It seems likely that prolonged hard labor, nutritional stress, disease and general physical frailty ultimately became the 'last straw' that tipped already weakened bodies beyond recovery."

Loktu and Brødholt also focused their study on Likneset because parts of the burial site have already been lost to coastal erosion. They compared graves excavated at three times — the late 1980s, 2016 and 2019 — and discovered that the permafrost-preserved burial area found 40 years ago was already collapsing due to climate-driven processes, including rapid Arctic warming. This may present problems for future studies of early modern whalers.

"Rapid Arctic warming is accelerating the degradation of permafrost-preserved archaeological sites, placing organic-rich whaling burials on Svalbard among the most vulnerable heritage contexts," the researchers wrote in the study. These findings suggest that preservation conditions should continue to be monitored, "as climate-driven degradation and coastal erosion are rapidly reducing the informational value of archaeological archives on Svalbard," they wrote.

What do you know about the bones in your body? Test your knowledge with our human skeleton quiz!

Archaeologists have excavated a perfectly preserved wood-and-wax notebook in a leather satchel from a medieval latrine in Germany. The 10-page notebook, which features Latin cursive writing, was likely dropped by a medieval merchant nearly 800 years ago — possibly while he was wiping with silk toilet paper.

The book and satchel were discovered in the northern German city of Paderborn during construction for a new building, according to a May 12 translated statement from the Regional Association of Westphalia-Lippe (LWL). Archaeologists excavated five medieval latrines that were sealed and airtight, which preserved a number of organic artifacts that would have decomposed otherwise.

During the routine cleaning of the items in the lab, experts realized that an inconspicuous clod of earth was actually a small leather case with a lid.

"Even after so many centuries in the ground, the latrine find still had a rather unpleasant odor," Susanne Bretzel, a conservator at LWL, said in the statement.

The small notepad measures about 3.4 by 2.2 inches (8.6 by 5.5 centimeters) and was kept in a slightly larger leather case decorated with a fleur-de-lis pattern. Eight pages of the wooden notebook are double-sided, and two are single-sided; all contained wax that could be written in with a stylus.

Inside the notebook, experts found numerous lines of cursive Latin text, some of which had been written over other lines and in different directions, making it difficult to translate.

"Individual words are recognizable, but the transcription will take some time, as some words may have been corrupted by incorrect spellings," Barbara Rüschoff-Parzinger, an archaeologist and head of cultural affairs at LWL, said in the statement. Based on the characteristics of the script, the book was used between the 13th and end of the 14th centuries.

The leather case is also being studied. The embossed fleur-de-lis decoration may suggest the book was a prized possession of an elite member of society, as the lily was a symbol of royal power and divine favor in the Middle Ages, according to the statement.

But the notebook's owner is still a mystery. "A Paderborn merchant may have been the author, jotting down business transactions and recording his thoughts," Sveva Gai, the LWL city archaeologist in Paderborn, said in the statement. Unlike most people in this time period, merchants were educated and could read and write, making them among the elite of society, Gai said.

Other artifacts found in the latrines included barrels, a knife, stoneware pottery, pieces of baskets and fragments of silk fabric. These finds help confirm the 13th-to-14th-century date of the book and the elite status of the book's author.

"The silk fabric remnants from the latrine were partially torn into rectangular pieces, some extremely finely woven and decorated," Bretzel said. "Perhaps this was used as toilet paper after the once-elegant fabric was to be discarded."

Further research may be able to identify the bumbling merchant who accidentally jettisoned his notebook into the toilet.

"As soon as this latrine can be assigned to a specific plot of land, archival research could be used to try to identify the residents of that plot. Then, in the best-case scenario, it would be possible to link the wax tablet to the name of a specific person," Gai said.

The entire conservation process could take up to a year, Bretzel said, after which the notebook and case will be exhibited at the LWL Museum in Paderborn.

See if you know what these mysterious artifacts are with our archaeological fragments quiz!

Archaeologists excavating an unusual "death jar" in Laos have discovered that it was used to collect the partly decomposed remains of multiple generations of people around 1,200 years ago. And rather than being the deceased's final burial spot, the jar may represent one step in a complex mortuary process.

The large death jar, called Jar 1, is also the first of its kind on record to contain undisturbed human remains, the excavation team reported in a new study. Thousands of centuries-old death jars have been found in Southeast Asia over the decades, and while researchers suspected that the vessels may have been used for burials, there was no solid evidence for that until now.

"It is among the largest jars currently known in Laos," study co-author Nicholas Skopal, an archaeologist at James Cook University in Australia, told Live Science in an email. With unusually thick walls, a broad base and a bowl-like appearance, "combined with the extraordinary quantity of human remains inside, Jar 1 currently stands apart from other jars excavated in Laos," he said. Skopal and colleagues published their findings Tuesday (May 19) in the journal Antiquity.

The researchers excavated a large stone vessel at Site 75 on the mysterious Plain of Jars — a landscape in the Xieng Khouang Plateau of northern Laos that consists of more than 2,000 hollowed-out stone jars used in ancient burial rituals over the course of at least a millennium. The jars range in size from about 3.3 to 10 feet (1 to 3 meters) tall and were constructed along trade routes that were heavily used between 500 B.C. and A.D. 500. But little is known about the civilization that made the jars or their exact purpose.

While excavating the 6.7-foot-wide (2.05 m) jar at Site 75, the researchers were surprised by the sheer number of human bones inside the vessel and by the fact that the bones came from select parts of decomposed individuals. For example, skulls were placed along the edges of the jar, while arm and leg bones were bunched together, hinting that the jar was not the primary burial location. Also present in the jar were multicolored glass beads, many of which were manufactured in India.

Radiocarbon dating of several teeth from the jar produced an even bigger surprise: a series of dates much more recent than expected. The bones of the people, who ranged in age from young children to adults, were placed in the jar at several times between 890 and 1160. "The current evidence suggests this was a collective mortuary space used repeatedly over generations, potentially by extended family or community groups," Skopal said.

More research is needed to better understand who the people were. "Ancient DNA will hopefully allow us to investigate biological relationships between individuals," he said. "We have not yet completed the ancient DNA analysis, although this is one of the major next steps in the project."

A jarring discovery

Although numerous researchers over the decades have hypothesized that the large stone vessels on the Plain of Jars were used for burials, this study is the first to confirm that idea.

"The functions of the stone jars were always speculated," Anna Pineda, an archaeologist and doctoral candidate at Australian National University who has studied jar burials but was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "To finally find human bones in situ inside the jars finally definitively answers one of those uses: as a mortuary container for secondary burials."

Don Matthews, an archaeologist at Australian National University who was not involved in the study but has also worked on jar burials, agreed. "Certainly there has been deliberate human burial recorded outside the jars, but none inside the jars until now," he told Live Science in an email.

It is still unclear, however, whether all of the jars functioned in the same way or whether this particular jar was part of an unusual or local custom.

"The discovery of human remains inside a large stone jar is a new and significant addition to the Plain of Jars research," Matthews said, "but needs to be tempered until wider research and excavations observe similar burials within the Plain of Jars."

The glass beads are also a key line of evidence that could help archaeologists understand more about the Plain of Jars culture and their burial practices.

"The concentration of beads and objects within Jar 1 suggests these items were likely important components of the final mortuary ritual and ancestral commemorative practices," Skopal said. The high quantity of likely trade beads speaks to mercantile connections across Southeast Asia, Pineda said.

"It is always good to be reminded that communities in the past were globally well-connected, while still understanding that local customs, including mortuary practices, were being observed," Pineda said.

What do you know about the bones in your body? Test your knowledge with our human skeleton quiz!

A man who died in Pompeii during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 had a medical kit with him when he perished, a new analysis of his body cast reveals.

The medical kit indicates that he was probably a physician — a "medicus" in Latin.

The man was one of 13 people who died while taking shelter in a Pompeii vineyard later called the "Garden of the Fugitives." But instead of finding refuge, the group was overcome by an explosive burst of deadly gas, likely carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, and ash from the volcano, which killed thousands of people in Pompeii and the nearby town of Herculaneum.

Pompeii was discovered in the 16th century, but most of the scientific work at the Roman seaside city was done more recently. In 1961, plaster casts were made of the voids left in the ash by the bodies of the volcano's victims in the Garden of the Fugitives ‪—‬ some of the roughly 104 plaster casts of victims made at Pompeii.

New examinations show that the man had been carrying surgical instruments and other "tools of his trade," according to a translated statement from the Italian government archaeological park that runs the site. But it's not known whether the man planned to treat people affected by the eruption or if he was hoping to escape the disaster.

"This man brought his tools with him to be ready to rebuild his life elsewhere, thanks to his profession, but perhaps also to help others," Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of Pompeii Archaeological Park, said in the statement.

Destructive eruption

The eruption of Vesuvius killed about 2,000 people in Pompeii and nearby towns, although archaeologists now think many others escaped. The event has been studied extensively, in part because of the remarkable preservation of many features of Roman life under the layers of ash. Witnesses also made written accounts of the eruption.

According to the statement, a small case made from "organic material" (possibly leather) was found within one of the plaster casts made when the Garden of the Fugitives was excavated in 1961. However, the case's contents had remained a mystery until now.

The new investigation, which used X-ray and CT scans, revealed that the case contained several small, metal instruments thought to be surgical tools as well as a tablet made from slate, which was probably used for preparing medicines. (Ingredients like honey, wine, vinegar and plant extracts were common.) The case was locked with a mechanism based on a toothed wheel.

These findings suggest the man was a medicus trained in medicine and surgery, the statement said. Educated Greek slaves sometimes had this role but by the time of the Vesuvius eruption — when Titus was the Roman emperor — medicine had a higher status (Julius Caesar granted Roman citizenship to all physicians in 46 B.C.).

The practice of medicine was valued by wealthy Romans, but the last resort of surgery entailed serious risks — there were no antibiotics and no modern anesthesia, and patients often died from infections. In addition, the causes of illnesses were not well understood — diseases like malaria were thought to be caused by "bad air" (under the Greek "miasma" theory), and Roman medical treatments often dealt with supposed curses and malign spirits.

Other artifacts found with the victims of Mount Vesuvius include house keys and oil lamps, and some people were killed while carrying precious jewels and coin "treasures" away from the eruption. The victim thought to be a medicus was also carrying a small fabric bag of bronze and silver coins, the statement said.

How much do you know about the Roman town destroyed by Mount Vesuvius? Find out by taking our Pompeii quiz!

A 950-year-old dingo burial in Australia reveals clear archaeological evidence of humans ritually "feeding" an animal's grave for centuries, a new study reports.

The symbolic feeding involved river mussels and continued for roughly 500 years, radiocarbon dating showed. This suggests that the people who buried the dingo — namely, ancestors of the Aboriginal Barkindji people, whose traditional lands surround the Darling River in western New South Wales — profoundly valued the animal and passed on this care to subsequent generations, researchers say.

"It's a similar practice to what we see in many other cultures where descendants return to shrines and ancestral sites over the generations to bring gifts and offerings to the deceased," study co-author Amy Way, a research archaeologist at the University of Sydney and the Australian Museum, told Live Science in an email. "It tells us that this relationship is really strong and retained through time."

The dingo was buried in a pile of discarded mussel shells called a midden. This was not unusual for Barkindji ancestors, because they tamed dingoes to keep as pets and hunting helpers, and mussels were a common food that left heaps of shells, said study first author Loukas Koungoulos, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Western Australia. However, this is the first time that researchers have interpreted the addition of mussel shells to a midden as "feeding," thanks to Barkindji Elders' input.

"It is the first time that we have an Aboriginal perspective as to why people kept adding mussel shells to the site after the burial occurred," Koungoulos told Live Science in an email.

Koungoulos, Way and their colleagues excavated the dingo at the request of the Menindee Aboriginal Elders Council. They worked alongside Barkindji custodians to analyze the burial, which was identified 25 years ago by a Barkindji Elder named Uncle Badger Bates and National Parks and Wildlife Service archaeologist Dan Witter.

"The dingo skull had eroded away since it was first identified in the early 2000s, and so the Elders Council felt it was very important to conserve the rest of the skeleton by working with archaeologists, before it too was lost to time and floods," Way said.

A close examination of the dingo revealed that it was male and between 4 and 7 years old when it died sometime between 916 and 963 years ago. What remained of the skeleton was well preserved, though some bones showed light bite marks from a scavenging predator. The teeth were heavily worn due to the dingo's relatively long life, and the right ribs and one leg carried signs of healed traumatic injuries that were consistent with being kicked by a kangaroo.

The dingo likely survived and recovered from these injuries thanks to the care of Barkindji ancestors, according to the study, published Monday (May 18) in the journal Australian Archaeology.

The researchers dated four mussel shell fragments from the midden, three of which were several hundred years younger than the dingo's remains. The study proposes that mussel shells were added to the burial by generations of Barkindji people to honor and symbolically feed the dingo, known as a "garli" in the Barkindji language.

"The idea, as explained to me by the Barkindji, is that it involved a cross-generational remembering of this garli ancestor, which specifically involved generation after generation returning to the burial site to add mussel shells to the midden that was initiated at the time of the dingo's burial," Way said.

The results expand a region along the Darling River where archaeologists already knew that Aboriginal ancestors buried dingos but where they hadn't documented the feeding practice.

"It's a way of remembering important connections with the past," Way said.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:05 a.m. ET on May 19 to note that this burial is the first known archaeological evidence of people ritually "feeding" an animal burial in a midden, but not first evidence of humans ritually "feeding" a grave anywhere in the world, as was previously stated.

Centuries before the Romans took over southern Italy, the heel of the peninsula was occupied by the Daunians, whose unique pottery and grave markers are some of the only remains of this enigmatic group. One common archaeological discovery is the Daunian kyathos, a one-handled, painted piece of pottery that may have functioned as a ladle for mixing wine.

The Daunians did not leave any literary records, so much about their culture is unknown. They were first mentioned in ancient literature in the seventh century B.C., and they were taken over by the Romans around 275 B.C., after the end of the Pyrrhic War. The Daunians were mainly farmers and animal breeders who traded with the Greeks and the Illyrians across the Adriatic Sea in what is now Croatia.

Archaeologists excavated the Daunian city of Herdonia, in the present-day province of Foggia, for four decades and discovered that the city was one of the primary places where Daunian potters produced the "extraordinary" vessels "that rank among the finest products of pre-Roman Italian ceramics," Popular Archaeology reported.

The Daunians' unusual style of ceramic decoration can be seen in their take on the single-handled cup that art historians call a kyathos. The base is a small, rimmed plate about 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) in diameter, and a human figure with raised arms and wide-open eyes has been attached to the side as a handle. The figure is decorated with geometric designs, and a stylized, bird-like figure is in the middle of the base. This kyathos was found at Herdonia and is in the collection of the Civic Museum of Foggia.

A number of Daunian ceramics are also kept in the Herdonia Archaeological Museum, whose logo includes a similar human-handled kyathos, as well as in international collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the British Museum in London.

Although the exact purpose of the Daunian kyathos is unknown, there are two main ideas. One is that it served as a wine ladle. The ancient Greeks used a vessel called a kyathos, which was a cup with a tall vertical handle, to dip into containers of wine and mix with water at feasts. But the Daunian examples slightly predate the common use of the kyathos in Greece and look more like a bowl than a cup, so it is unclear if they served the same function.

A second hypothesis is that many Daunian ceramics were used in religious and healing contexts. In a 2023 research study, scientists tested a series of Daunian ceramics and detected opium alkaloids in most of them, supporting the idea that some vessels were used to create opium mixtures, perhaps to induce religious trances or to aid in pain relief. It is not clear, though, if the distinctive appearance of Daunian ceramics can be explained by opiate use.

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

We have been on a years-long campaign of satellite remote sensing of the vast desert landscapes in Eastern Sudan.

This involved using satellite aerial imagery to systematically and painstakingly search for archaeological features in Atbai Desert of Eastern Sudan, a small part of the much larger Sahara.

Our team — which includes archaeologists from Macquarie University, France's HiSoMA research unit, and the Polish Academy of Sciences — wanted to tell the story of this desert region between the Nile and the Red Sea, without having to excavate.

One mysterious archaeological feature stood out. We kept finding large, circular mass graves filled with the bones of people and animals, often carefully arranged around a key person at the center.

Likely built around the fourth and third millennia BCE, all these "enclosure burial" monuments have a large round enclosure wall, some up to 80 meters [262 feet] in diameter, with humans and their cattle, sheep and goats buried inside.

Our new research, published in the journal African Archaeological Review, reveals how we found 260 previously unknown enclosure burials east of the Nile River, across almost 1,000km of desert.

Who built them?

Already known from a few excavated examples in the Egyptian and Sudanese deserts, these large circular burial monuments have long puzzled scholars.

What seemed once isolated examples emerge now as a consistent pattern. It is suggestive of a common nomadic culture stretching across a vast stretch of desert.

Most are within the borders of modern Sudan on the slopes of the Red Sea Hills. Unfortunately, satellite imagery alone cannot communicate the whole story of these enclosure burial builders.

The carbon dates and pottery from the few excavated monuments tell us these people lived roughly 4000–3000 BCE, just before Egyptians formed a territorial kingdom we know of as Pharaonic Egypt.

But these "enclosure burial" nomads had little to do with urbane and farming Egyptians.

Living in the desert and raising herds, these were Saharan desert nomads through and through.

A new elite?

Some enclosures show "secondary" burials arranged around a "primary" burial of a person at the center —perhaps a chief or other important member of the community.

For archaeologists, this is important data for discerning class and hierarchy in prehistoric societies.

The question of when Saharan nomads became less egalitarian has plagued archaeologists for decades, but most agree it was around this time of the fourth millennium BCE that a distinctive "elite" class emerged.

This is still a far cry from the sort of huge divisions between ruler and ruled as seen in societies such as Egypt, with its pharaohs and farmers. However, it ushers in the first traces of inequality.

Animals held in high esteem

Cattle seem very important to these prehistoric nomads (a theory also supported by ancient local rock art in the area).

Burying themselves alongside their herd, these nomads show they held their animals in esteem.

Thousands of years later, local nomads chose to reuse these now "ancient" enclosures for their burial plots — sometimes almost 4,000 years after they were first built.

In other words, the prehistoric nomads created cemetery spaces that lasted for millennia.

What happened to these people?

No one can say for sure.

The few dates we have for these monuments cluster between 4000–3000 BCE, nearing the end of a period when the once-greener Sahara was drying, a phase scientists call the "African Humid Period".

From north to south, the summer monsoon gradually retreated, reducing rainfall and shrinking pastures. This led nomads to abandon thirsty cattle, increase the mobility of their herds, migrate to the south or flee to the Nile.

The monuments are overwhelmingly located near what were then favorable watering spots; near rocky pools in valley floors, lakebeds and ephemeral rivers.

This tells us that when the monuments were being built, the desert was already quite challenging and dry.

At some point, as grass and bush made way for sand and rocks, keeping their prized cattle became unsustainable.

Having large herds of cattle in this desert, at this period, may have been a way of showing off an expensive and rare possession — a prehistoric nomad's equivalent to having a Ferrari. This may help explain why cattle were frequently buried alongside their owners in enclosure burial monuments.

A bigger story

These enclosure burials are only one part of the greater story of human adaptation to climate change across North Africa.

From the Central Sahara, to Kenya and Arabia, keeping cattle, goats and sheep transformed societies. It changed the food they ate, the way they moved around, and community hierarchies.

It's no coincidence communities changed how they buried their dead at the same time as they adopted herding lifestyles.

These burial enclosures tell us even scattered nomads were extremely well-organized people, and expert adapters.

Our discovery reshapes the story of the Sahara deserts and the prehistory of the Nile.

They provide a prologue for the monumentalism of the kingdoms of Egypt and Nubia, and an image of this region as more than pharaohs, pyramids and temples.

Sadly, many of these enclosure monuments are currently being destroyed or vandalized as a result of unregulated mining in the region. These unique burials have survived for millennia, but can disappear in less than a week.

Maria Gatto (Polish Academy of Sciences) was an author on our paper. We also want to acknowledge Alexander Carter, Tung Cheung, Kahn Emerson, Jessica Larkin, Stuart Hamilton and Ethan Simpson from Macquarie University for their contribution. We are also grateful to the National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums (Sudan).

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enslaved people and indentured servants

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An elaborate Roman-era coffin containing the remains of a woman who appears to have been buried with gypsum and exotic resins has been discovered in the city of Colchester in the U.K.

"This is one of the most fascinating Roman burials we have worked on in Colchester in recent years," Adam Wightman, director of archaeology at Colchester Archaeological Trust, said in a statement. The combination of the coffin, grave goods and scientific evidence make it a compelling burial, he said.

The elite Roman woman was in her late 20s or 30s when she died, and she lived at a time when the Roman Empire controlled England. Exactly when she was buried is unclear, but it was likely during the late Roman period, which lasted from roughly the late third century to early fifth century A.D., archaeologists said in the statement.

"The high-status woman was buried in a decorated lead coffin accompanied by a rich group of grave goods," according to Colchester Archaeological Trust. "She was buried with objects including jet hairpins, a group of rare glass flasks, and other grave goods. This indicates a carefully staged and richly furnished burial."

The woman was also buried with exotic resins, including frankincense, dried sap from trees in the Boswellia genus, many of which grow in Africa, the Middle East and India. Frankincense can be burned as incense and was thought to have medicinal properties.

Her coffin also had gypsum, meaning the woman's body may have been covered in liquid gypsum, a plaster-like paste, before her burial. "This suggests usage of valuable imported substances in the treatment of the body after death," according to the statement.

In Roman Britain, elite individuals sometimes had liquid gypsum poured on them after they died. In cases where the gypsum is well preserved, it can leave a haunting image of the deceased. In one case, the outline of a deceased baby was preserved in a liquid gypsum burial found in York.

"Over decades of working with Colchester Archaeological Trust on excavations of the Roman burial grounds around the Roman town, this is certainly the most spectacular I have seen," Robert Masefield, the archaeology director at Tetra Tech Consulting Limited, the company the carried out the excavation, said in the statement. "The young woman was clearly cherished by her family and by her community."

The burial was discovered in 2023 when archaeologists were excavating the site of a defunct hospital that was being redeveloped for housing but only recently announced by Colchester Archaeological Trust. The coffin and its contents will be put on display at Colchester's Roman Circus Visitor Centre starting May 16, 2026.

What do you know about the Empire's conquest of the British Isles? Find out with our Roman Britain quiz!

Around 60,000 years ago in Siberia, a Neanderthal opened their mouth so that a rotten tooth could be drilled — and the case is the oldest evidence of an intentional dental treatment to date, a new study finds.

A lower molar tooth belonging to a Neanderthal adult was originally unearthed in 2016, but it was not clear what had caused the deep hole in its surface. Now, experimental evidence indicates the hole was made with a small stone drill used to clean out bits of severely rotten tooth tissue, according to a study published Wednesday (May 13) in the journal PLOS One.

This intricate procedure shows Neanderthals — our closest human relatives who lived from around 400,000 to 40,000 years ago — had the brains to recognize this painful tooth cavity could be treated and possessed the fine motor skills to successfully execute the procedure.

"The fact that this invasive treatment took place and the person survived lends me to believe that this is another example of the really very sophisticated Neanderthal understanding of human biology and when you need to intervene," study co-author John W. Olsen, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Arizona, told Live Science.

It's unclear whether this was self-treatment or dentistry performed by another individual. Even so, "it suggests that the roots of invasive medicine and surgery do not belong exclusively to Homo sapiens, but are part of a broader legacy shared with our closest relatives," Gregorio Oxilia, an associate professor of human anatomy at the Free Mediterranean University in Italy who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email.

The oldest evidence of our own species, Homo sapiens, treating tooth decay dates to roughly 14,000 years ago in what is now Italy. By pushing back the date of intentional dentistry by roughly 45,000 years, this new finding "fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the evolution of human healthcare," said Oxilia, who was the first author on the study detailing the 14,000-year-old finding.

Prehistoric healthcare

There are now multiple known cases of Neanderthal healthcare. For example, different sites in Spain show that Neanderthals seem to have cared for a child with Down syndrome and ate medicinal plants.

However, in part because their generally low-carbohydrate diets kept the rates of tooth decay low, evidence of dental interventions in Neanderthals has been limited.

So, to determine whether the unusual hole in the roughly 59,000-year-old Neanderthal molar found in Chagyrskaya Cave was deliberately human-made, the researchers inspected the tooth and ran experiments using three modern human teeth.

Microscopic analyses of the Neanderthal molar revealed two patches of deep demineralization, indicative of severe tooth decay. One area of tooth decay was located where the tooth would have met the gumline. Here, the researchers identified straight grooves characteristic of tooth picking.

The other decayed patch overlapped with the 0.17 inch long, 0.11 inch wide and 0.10 inch deep (4.2 mm long, 2.8 mm wide and 2.6 mm deep) cavity on the tooth's surface. There were tiny markings along the top edge of this hole.

The team then ran experiments on three modern human teeth to see which tools and motions were required to replicate these markings. This revealed the grooves could be made by the twisting motion of small stone tools made from locally available jasper. Multiple examples of tools with long, thin, pointed tips that could have served this purpose have previously been found in Chagyrskaya Cave.

Evidence of chew marks overlaying the grooves around the cavity indicates this individual "not only survived the operation," Olsen said, "but that they lived for some significant period of time, allowing their normal chewing activities to begin to erase the evidence of the original drilling."

While scientists cannot be certain the hole was made using a stone dental drill, the very localized markings make this conclusion more likely than other possible explanations, such as the hole being the result of damage after the individual died, said Marina Lozano Ruiz, a bioarchaeologist who researches Neanderthal teeth at the University of Rovira i Virgili in Catalonia, who was not involved in the study.

The case is "exceptional precisely because it shows that they were able to react to an uncommon pathology with a highly targeted and technically complex response," Oxilia said.

Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge and author of "Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art" (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020), thinks the procedure was likely self-treatment. "Digging into this rotten tooth probably didn't need anyone to help," Sykes, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

Although group members may have provided emotional support during the painful procedure, "we've learned from other primates that they can actually survive really serious conditions without any help from their group," she said.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:33 a.m. ET on May 14 to update Gregorio Oxilia's title to associate professor of human anatomy.

How much do you know about our closest relatives? Find out with our Neanderthal quiz!

In a first, researchers have sequenced genetic material from 400,000-year-old Homo erectus fossils — and the results reveal deep genetic links to both modern humans and the enigmatic Denisovans.

H. erectus was the earliest human ancestor to travel outside Africa and successfully spread into Europe, Asia and Oceania beginning 1.8 million years ago. With a relatively large brain and the ability to craft complex stone tools, H. erectus was the longest-lasting human ancestor until it disappeared around 108,000 years ago. But paleoanthropologists have long wondered if H. erectus overlapped and interbred with Homo sapiens, which evolved around 300,000 years ago in Africa.

In a new study published Wednesday (May 13) in the journal Nature, researchers detailed their analysis of dental enamel from six H. erectus skeletons discovered in three locations in China, all dating to about 400,000 years ago. The researchers extracted 11 different proteins from the enamel and identified hundreds of positions of amino acids, the building blocks of the proteins.

Two of those amino acid variants surprised the researchers — one was present in all six H. erectus individuals but not in any other human lineage, while the other was present in all H. erectus samples as well as in Denisovans, a group of archaic humans who lived in Asia and went extinct around 30,000 years ago. This amino acid variant was then passed from Denisovans to some H. sapiens groups through interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago.

The results are the first to show "deep genetic links" between these H. erectus individuals and present-day modern humans, the researchers wrote in a statement. The results are also a step forward for the relatively new technique called paleoproteomics, which allows scientists to sequence genetic material that lasts longer than DNA does.

"I don't believe that any previous DNA or proteomics have been done before" on H. erectus, study first author Qiaomei Fu, director of the Ancient DNA Laboratory at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, told Live Science in an email. But "how they evolved into modern humans and are related to the Denisovans, we really need to get DNA to understand that," she said.

DNA has a shorter shelf life than proteins do, and so far, researchers haven't found any H. erectus DNA that can be sequenced. However, Denisovan DNA has been sequenced.

The muddle in the middle

The Middle Pleistocene era (also called the Chibanian age) spanned from 774,000 to 129,000 years ago. During this era, a number of ancient human groups overlapped in Africa, Europe and Asia, including H. erectus, H. sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans, presenting paleoanthropologists with the difficult task of figuring out how they were all related — a confusion they call a "muddle."

"Scientists used to call this 'the muddle in the Middle Pleistocene,'" John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email, "and now we know that muddling is just mixing." The new study of 400,000-year-old enamel proteins shows that mixing of different evolutionary branches was important to our evolution, "even earlier than DNA evidence can show us," Hawks said.

But what exactly the new results mean for the evolution of H. erectus — and the possibility that it interbred with modern H. sapiens in Eurasia — is still murky. "I think this raises the question of whether we know what Homo erectus even is," Hawks said.

Paleoanthropologists often define an ancient human species based on a group's physical features, such as the size and shape of their bones and teeth ‪—‬ a method called the "morphological species concept." But that way of determining species has been complicated by the rise in genomic analysis over the past two decades, which has revealed interbreeding among groups such as Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans, proving that there is some biological overlap among these groups.

But whereas the genetic information shared among groups around 50,000 years ago in Europe and Asia is relatively clear-cut thanks to DNA and genomic analysis, the newly revealed amino acid variations in 400,000-year-old fossils from China are just the first step in clarifying the "muddle in the Middle Pleistocene."

"What I'm concluding is that probably paleoanthropologists of the past were too willing to glom these Middle Pleistocene fossils from China into Homo erectus," Hawks said. "Many of these fossils are probably Denisovan relatives, or possibly they came from other groups we've been calling 'erectus' just because we don't really understand them."

The bottom line, according to Hawks, is that the new study is a great piece of work. "It's tough to look at data like these and not be impressed with the uncertainty of boundaries and the mixing between them in these past people," he said.

What do you know about early humans? Test your knowledge with our human origins quiz!

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

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

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

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

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

30 scientists slam stratigraphic study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back and forth in Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1987, the Cleveland Museum of Art acquired an unusual pendant depicting a lion's head carved out of amethyst on a gold base decorated with baboons. But one part was much older than the other and was originally carved as a game piece.

The lion's head pendant was crafted out of an ancient Egyptian gemstone as far back as 3,500 years ago. Then, around 2,700 years ago, an artisan in Sudan set the much-older Egyptian gemstone into a new metal mount made of eight seated baboons to create a magical religious object.

According to the Cleveland Museum of Art, the pendant measures about 1.4 inches (3.5 centimeters) tall. A hole just under the lion's chin pierces the pendant, which would have been suspended on a string.

The purple amethyst and gold frame are a unique combination. The lion is similar to pieces found in the ancient Egyptian game senet, in which players would move their pawns across a board with 30 squares. The amethyst likely dates to the New Kingdom period (circa 1550 to 1070 B.C.), according to a 1996 study of the artifact. But the gold mount was added considerably later, likely in the Napatan period (circa 750 to 300 B.C.), named for the town that was used as the religious center of Nubia.

Recycling of old stone carvings was common among the ancient Nubians, who lived in what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan. In the early first millennium B.C., Nubian rulers viewed themselves as descendants of Ramesses II (who reigned from 1279 to 1213 B.C.) and repurposed and retrofitted semiprecious gems into new gold mounts to show their Egyptian connections. Under the later Kushite kings (circa 712 to 664 B.C.), this practice continued in Napata as the rulers incorporated Egyptian customs into their own culture.

Both the lion and the baboon were sacred in Kushite religion. The lion was associated with the god Amun, who was tasked with protecting the state and who merged with the sun god, Ra, and became known as the powerful creator deity Amun-Ra. The baboons were connected to the sun and the moon and were often depicted with their arms raised. In this pendant, the baboons lift the representation of Amun.

The lion's head pendant was meant to be worn in life, rather than as a funeral gift, and it demonstrates the ancient Nubians' clever use of Egyptian heirlooms to create new and religiously charged jewelry.

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