The death of Cleopatra is among the most famous in history. In 31 B.C., the Egyptian queen and her Roman ally and lover, Mark Antony, lost the Battle of Actium to Octavian, who would later become Rome's first emperor, Augustus. The following summer, Cleopatra was captured during a Roman ambush inside her royal tomb in Alexandria.

According to Octavian’s account, rather than facing the disgrace of defeat, the queen allowed a venomous asp snake to bite her and quickly succumbed to its poison. Some Roman writers, such as the historian Velleius Paterculus, repeated that story without question.

But others were far less certain of this account, calling it Roman propaganda to cement Octavian's rise to power. And most historians today doubt that a snake was involved at all. So how did Cleopatra die?

Live Science spoke with experts, who told us that the queen's death is still shrouded in mystery.

"We cannot know for sure exactly how Cleopatra died," Prudence Jones, a professor of classics at Montclair State University in New Jersey and author of "Cleopatra: A Sourcebook" (University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), told Live Science in an email.

What historians largely agree on is that Cleopatra VII, the last queen of Egypt's Ptolemaic dynasty, took her own life and that she chose a method that left her body composed and dignified.

Lost evidence

Physical evidence of Cleopatra's death is elusive. Much of Alexandria's royal quarter now lies underwater, and underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio, who has been excavating it, hasn't found the queen's mausoleum, Jones said. Even if Cleopatra's remains surfaced, bones would be unlikely to show evidence of snake venom, she added, noting that forensics is outside her area of expertise.

The best witness may have been Olympus, Cleopatra's personal physician. "Unfortunately, nothing survives of Olympus' account," Jones said.

What does remain is a story told largely by Cleopatra's enemies. The earliest surviving account is a poem by the Roman poet Horace, whose patron was a close friend of Octavian, said Jane Draycott, a historian at the University of Glasgow. His Ode 1.37, written around the time of her death, celebrates Octavian's victory and already pictures the queen handling serpents — yet it ends with grudging admiration for a woman who refused to be paraded as a trophy.

A queen out of options

Following her capture, Cleopatra was held under military guard. By then, she had already tried to end her life twice. Cleopatra had tried to stab herself when Roman soldiers broke into the mausoleum where she had barricaded herself, and she later tried to starve herself, stopping only after Octavian threatened her children.

To Draycott, those attempts leave little doubt that Cleopatra would rather die than live as a captive. "She does not want to be a prisoner; she does not want to be led through the streets of Rome in triumph as a defeated foe," she told Live Science.

In the Greco-Roman world, suicide didn't carry the stigma it later acquired under Christianity, she added. "It was a way of wiping the slate clean, removing any shame, any disgrace from yourself." After the defeat of his remaining forces at Alexandria and hearing a false report of Cleopatra's death, Antony was the first of the two lovers to die by suicide.

According to the Greek biographer Plutarch, who based his account on that of Cleopatra's personal physician, Cleopatra visited Antony's tomb, bathed, ate and sent Octavian a sealed letter asking to be buried beside Antony, signaling that she meant to die. Octavian realized what was happening and sent messengers rushing to her, but they arrived too late. They found her dead in her royal regalia, with her attendants Iras and Charmion dying beside her.

The trouble with the snake

Jones has compiled what ancient historians, biographers, geographers and physicians wrote about Cleopatra's death. Every source mentions a snakebite, but several also suggest other possibilities, including a poisonous ointment, poison hidden in a hollow hairpin, and snake venom poured into a wound the queen made by biting herself. Only one of these writers, the geographer Strabo, was alive when Cleopatra died, and the only people in the room with her died, too.

The Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote that the sole clue was a pair of faint pricks on her arm. That doesn't settle much, however. "A cobra bite can appear as two small puncture wounds, but not all cobra bites appear this way and not all double puncture wounds result from snakebites," Jones said.

Jones traces the snake version of the story to Octavian, who was in Alexandria when Cleopatra died. Plutarch reported that an image of Cleopatra with an asp clinging to her was carried in Octavian's triumphal procession in Rome. "Octavian, however, was Cleopatra's enemy and for that reason we may not want to accept his account uncritically," Jones said.

Draycott suggested another possible source of confusion: Snake-shaped jewelry was fashionable in Alexandria at the time, so Romans viewing an effigy of the queen may have mistaken a snake bracelet for a real snake.

Draycott doesn't think one snake could have killed all three women. Jones is less certain. Snakes don't inject the same amount of venom with every bite, and some "dry bites" deliver none at all, Jones said. "On the other hand, I don't think it is impossible, as the body of a cobra contains enough venom to kill multiple people," she added.

A quiet poison

The general view among historians, Draycott said, is that Cleopatra took some kind of poison — one that worked quickly and didn't cause seizures or vomiting. The absence of these symptoms is telling: An asp is believed to be what is now known as the Egyptian cobra (Naja haje), whose venom causes a slow, agonizing death with respiratory failure.

Cleopatra likely would have had other means, then. Alexandria was the Mediterranean's center of scientific study, and texts from the period, such as Nicander's "Theriaca," catalog venomous animals, Jones noted. Cleopatra's father, Ptolemy XII, even consulted the pharmacologist Zopyrus about antidotes. Plutarch claimed that Cleopatra personally oversaw experiments that observed the effects of deadly poisons on condemned prisoners.

Still, that claim and other poison stories should be read with caution, Draycott said, because they draw on Roman stereotypes about women. In the Roman view, "manly men will battle with swords," while women, seen as "deceitful and weak" at this time, were thought to kill in secret. "They'll sneak it into your food," Draycott said, summing up the stereotype.

Roman writers were equally suspicious. Poisoning allegations dogged the Hellenistic dynasties of ancient Egypt and the neighboring Seleucid kingdom, as well as Rome's own imperial family. Some were probably true, Draycott said, but others may have been foodborne illnesses or other health conditions people didn't understand.

The method may remain a mystery, but for most historians, the motive doesn't change: Cleopatra chose to die on her own terms.

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The great and "godless" English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, whose remains have been on display at a U.K. university for over 150 years, suffered from severe dental problems, according to X-ray scans of his skull.

The scans were conducted with CT (computed tomography) scanning equipment to create a digital 3D model of his head and highlight Bentham's lengthy "presence" at University College London (UCL) as it celebrates its 200th anniversary.

The scans revealed that Bentham was missing many teeth and had advanced arthritis in his lower jaw when he died of natural causes at the age of 84. During the scanning process, project leader Tannis Davidson, curator of UCL's Grant Museum of Zoology, saw how thin the jawbone had become. "He must have been in excruciating pain," she told Live Science.

Bentham's utilitarian philosophy inspired UCL's founders; it was only the third university in England, after Oxford and Cambridge, which was founded as London University in 1826 and opened to students in 1828.

As a young man, Bentham had declared that he would donate his body to science after his death. This was a radical idea at the time; in the U.K., dissection after death was looked down upon, even if it was for scientific purposes, and it was reserved for the worst criminals. After Bentham died in 1832, his remains were fashioned into an auto-icon — a supposed replica of himself — to memorialize him in the way a tombstone might, Davidson said.

Except for brief visits across Europe and to the Met Breuer in New York City, this auto-icon has been in a display case at UCL since the 1850s, where it can be seen by students as they pass by.

Brainless auto-icon

To make the auto-icon (which is not a mummy), Bentham's body was dissected and studied. Then, his skeleton was dressed in his clothes, which were padded with straw. His severed head was badly disfigured during an attempt to preserve it with sulfuric acid, so a wax reconstruction based on paintings and death masks was attached to the body.

Bentham's real head was displayed at the feet of the clothed skeleton that had a lifelike wax head; the real head's eyes were replaced with highly detailed glass eyes, which can be seen in the scans. According to UCL lore, the real head was stolen in 1975 and held ransom for a few days by rivals from King's College London, after which it was locked away.

Davidson explained that Bentham had coined the term "auto-icon" to mean "self-representation" and was setting an example for others. "He imagined a future where people were making auto-icons to keep their dead relatives around," she said.

The CT scans of the real head show that Bentham had dental damage and jaw arthritis, and that his brain had been removed before it was preserved—although some of his dura mater, a layer of connective tissue that covers the brain and spinal cord, was preserved. Davidson said the brain extraction was done to keep with Bentham's instructions that his head be mummified in the same way as Māori heads, which had their brains removed. The scanning process is shown in a short film called "Bentham Revealed."

"Godless" philosopher

Bentham wrote about his dental problems several times, Davidson said, but it is not clear if he understood that he also had severe arthritis in his lower jaw, which must have made the problems with his teeth much more painful. In addition, modern ideas about cleaning teeth had not been established by Bentham's time. "Dentistry 200 years ago was a very different kettle of fish than it is today," Davidson said.

Bentham was a polymath who hoped to improve the lives of ordinary people through social reform. He wrote extensively about subjects as varied as law, economics, education and animal rights, and he believed that society could be engineered to produce better outcomes through legislation and the objective measurement of "utility."

His most famous idea was the panopticon in 1791, a ring-shaped prison with one warden to watch all of the prisoners, which he proposed as a humane alternative to Australia's penal colonies. Today, however, it is a symbol of state control and surveillance. Bentham also invented a "felicific calculus" to numerically assess the benefits and drawbacks of any given action, based on variables like its intensity, duration, certainty, purity and extent.

Bentham's philosophy put him at odds with the established Church of England; he called himself an "unbeliever," while critics called him "godless."

This rift with the church may have played a part in Bentham's wishes for his remains. Davidson suggested that the auto-icon may have been a means for Bentham to avoid being buried with traditional Anglican rites. "Maybe this was a way he could 'stick it to them' a little bit," she said.

All that remains of a larger-than-life statue of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius once erected in Scotland is a lower right leg. Experts have now reconstructed what the entire sculpture looked like but are still unsure why it was carefully dismantled over 1,800 years ago.

The gold-covered bronze foot and calf, also known as the Milsington leg, was discovered in a bog in 1820, according to a Nov. 12 statement from National Museums Scotland. It is the only example of a monumental Roman emperor statue ever found in Scotland and was likely made around A.D. 140.

Initially, experts thought the bronze statue had been looted from York, England, which was founded by the Romans in A.D. 71 as the town of Eboracum. But as research into the Roman frontier advanced over the years, it became clear that equestrian statues were often set up in forts along the border of the Roman Empire.

This lower leg, experts now believe, originally came from an equestrian statue of Emperor Antoninus Pius that was similar to the famous statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome.

Antoninus Pius was Roman emperor from A.D. 138 to 161, succeeding Hadrian, who had built an enormous wall to defend the northernmost limit of the Roman Empire. To add to Rome's territory, Antoninus Pius directed the imperial governor of Roman Britain to move north, invade southern Scotland and build a second wall, called the Antonine Wall. But that wall was left undefended after Antoninus Pius died, and the Romans retreated from Scotland.

During that retreat, the Romans may have dismantled any valuable statues that they had set up, according to the statement. An examination of the Milsington leg ahead of a new exhibition showed that the bronze had no cut marks, suggesting it was removed carefully and not "brutally hacked off."

"This contrasts with examples of statues being deliberately destroyed after a battle, when an emperor's memory was condemned, or when they were chopped up for scrap," according to National Museums Scotland.

With the Scottish provenance firmly established, National Museums Scotland curators were able to learn more about Antoninus Pius and his approach to imperial expansion.

"This really turns on its head our understanding of Rome's second attempt at conquering Scotland," Fraser Hunter, principal curator of prehistoric art and Roman archaeology at National Museums Scotland, said in the statement. "This was a big deal for the Emperor, something which was worth celebrating."

But while the boot-clad bronze leg provides a glimpse into the monuments that may have graced southern Scotland nearly two millennia ago, it raises an important question for Hunter: Where is the rest of the statue?

The Milsington leg, the Inveresk Mithras altars and other Roman-period finds are on display beginning Nov. 14 in the exhibit "Roman Scotland: Life on the Edge of Empire" at the National Museum of Scotland.

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

Archaeologists have found what may be the world's oldest poisoned weapons at a 125,000-year-old site on an ancient lakeshore in Saudi Arabia. The stone tools, which were likely used to hunt large animals, had traces of residue from a poisonous tree historically used for its toxins.

"At 125,000 years old, these would be substantially older than the poisoned arrowheads recently identified in South Africa, which date to around 60,000 years ago," study co-author Chris Clarkson, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany and Griffith University in Australia, told Live Science in an email. "But we haven't demonstrated exactly how the poison was prepared or whether it was effective. So I'd describe these as potentially the oldest evidence for poisoned hunting weapons, rather than an unequivocally established first."

In the new study, published Thursday (Nov. 12) in the journal Science, researchers investigated a 125,000-year-old site in southern Saudi Arabia known as 'Uruq Aljelibah, which means "sand dunes of a watering hole," study co-author Frans van Buchem, a geologist at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, told Live Science.

Today, the area is "hot, extremely dry, with extensive sand dunes," Clarkson said, located as it is within the Empty Quarter — one of the hottest, driest deserts on Earth. But the scientists found the site was once home to a freshwater lake measuring about 130 square miles (340 square kilometers) and up to 95 feet (29 meters) deep. Fossils there suggest it once supported a rich diversity of flora and fauna, including hippopotamuses, buffalo, ostriches, camels, gazelles, oryx, palms, reeds, trees and shrubs, which early modern humans likely exploited for food and other resources.

"The idea of hippopotamuses and enormous buffalo living around a lake in what is now the Empty Quarter really brings home just how dramatically these landscapes, and global climates, have changed," Clarkson said.

Astonishing stone tools

The archaeologists discovered more than 5,500 stone artifacts at the site, along with extraordinarily preserved traces of plant materials, such as fibers, resins and wood. Several of these artifacts were stone points that showed impact damage consistent with hunting large animals, and a microscopic analysis revealed traces of animal tissue near the point tips. The distribution of the stone tools closely matched clusters of animal bones, suggesting that the lakeshore was a focal point for hunting and processing game, according to the study.

"At most Paleolithic sites, we're lucky if we get the stone tools and perhaps a few animal bones," Clarkson said. "Here we can actually begin to reconstruct what those tools were doing and what other materials people were combining with them."

The researchers found that people may have hunted animals with poison-tipped tools. Several stone points had chemical residues linked with the arrow poison tree (Acokanthera schimperi), which is known historically for its toxins and is native to eastern and central Africa and southern Arabia. African hunters have coated spear tips and arrowheads with extracts from this plant to paralyze or kill game.

It remains unclear how hunters who poisoned their targets might have avoided poisoning themselves upon eating the game.

"The effects of a poison depend on the substance, the dose and how it enters the body," Clarkson said. "A poison introduced directly into a wound doesn't necessarily behave in the same way when swallowed." Hunters throughout history "are known to sometimes remove the meat around the wound before eating the rest of the animal," he added.

These findings emphasize how researchers have often underestimated the technological complexity of early human populations, because so much of what they made was organic and has simply disappeared," Clarkson said. "These weren't just people knocking stone flakes off cores," Clarkson noted. "They were combining stone with wood, plant fibers, resins and potentially toxic substances to make complex tools and weapons."

To have so much evidence for how people were making and using tools in a site like this "is remarkable," Eleanor Scerri, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany who did not take part in this research, told Live Science in an email. "This goes from both the micro-scale, in finding traces of how people hafted spear tips, for instance, up to the bigger scale of the whole site and the very convincing spatial relationship between hunting-related tools and the bones of animals such as hippos."

Sites in Arabia that possess both stone tools and animal bones are rare, Jeffrey Rose, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Algarve in Portugal who did not participate in this study, told Live Science in an email. "This one has thousands of artifacts on an old lakeshore alongside hippo, buffalo and ostrich, and some of the flakes fit back together, so the tools were made on the spot," he said. "It's valuable new data."

Out of Africa

The Arabian Peninsula sits between Africa and the rest of Asia and was a major corridor for humans as they dispersed across the world. Recurring spans of increased rainfall could have made its otherwise hostile landscapes more habitable in the past. However, the hot desert that now covers much of Arabia has made it difficult for scientists to excavate many details about this vital bridge during this critical point in human history.

The researchers did not unearth any human remains. Still, they suspect the site most likely belonged to modern humans (our species, Homo sapiens), as opposed to a different human species.

"We know that H. sapiens had already expanded out of Africa and were present in Southwest Asia during this period," Clarkson said. "The age of the site fits with those early movements."

These findings add to growing evidence that wetter intervals in Arabia created migration corridors between Africa and Asia and supported productive habitats capable of sustaining repeated human occupation.

"What our site shows is that people weren't necessarily just passing through these environments," Clarkson said. "They were exploiting them in quite sophisticated ways, using a range of technologies and resources."

But Rose cautioned that all of the stone artifacts found in this study were collected from the surface. "Not one was excavated from the layers that were dated," he said. "The 125,000-year date belongs to the lake, not to the tools. For the tools, it is only a maximum age." Future research at the site should look for stone artifacts sealed in lake beds. "That's hard in Arabia, where wind has stripped most sites down to surface scatters, but it can be done," Rose said.

Clarkson agrees that further work is needed. "I'd really like to keep going back to this site to find more fossils, both animals as well as hopefully human fossils," Clarkson said. "I'd also really like to push the chemical and functional analyses further, particularly the evidence for toxic plant compounds. It would be fascinating to determine exactly which substances were being used, how they might have been prepared and whether they were deliberately applied to hunting weapons."

Future research focusing on the ancient lake margins may reveal more information. "There must be other places where people were living and carrying out activities, and some may preserve better stratified archaeological deposits," Clarkson said.

But the combination of discoveries at this site is amazing, the researchers said.

"I've spent much of my career studying stone tools, and one of the great frustrations is that we're usually only looking at the small fraction of ancient technology that survives," Clarkson said. "Here we have a chance to see much more of the complete technological system."

Maritime archaeologists investigating a 17th-century shipwreck off the coast of Sweden have discovered a fancy shoe and two metal rings used as currency in the transatlantic slave trade. The items were lost during a mutiny on a slave ship in 1683, during which the governor of the Danish West Indies was thrown overboard.

The Danish frigate Havmanden (which translates to "Merman") was en route to St. Thomas, a Caribbean island that is now part of the U.S. Virgin Islands, with convicts and indentured servants aboard destined for work on the island with the Danish West India Company. The plan for the Havmanden, after dropping off the new colonists, was to sail to West Africa to buy enslaved Africans. But due to a shortage of food and water, several crewmembers and convicts aboard seized control of the ship near the Azores in the North Atlantic and began sailing it back to Copenhagen.

The mutineers shot the ship's captain and threw other officers ‪—‬ including Jørgen Iversen Dyppel, the first governor of the Danish West Indies ‪—‬ overboard in the English Channel. After the ship ran aground, the mutineers were tried for their crimes in Copenhagen and sentenced to death.

The story of the Havmanden is one of the most violent mutinies in Denmark's history, according to a Nov. 11 translated statement from the National Museum of Denmark. But now, underwater archaeologists are learning more about the fateful voyage from the wreck, which lies on the seabed just east of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Archaeological divers discovered the rear half of a man's "unusually fine" shoe in the wreckage, according to the statement.

"I see a great many shoes from shipwrecks, but I have never before seen a shoe of such high quality," Vivi Lena Andersen, director of the Rudersdal Museums in Denmark, said in the statement.

The sole has a high level of craftsmanship, Andersen said, which can be seen in the minuscule holes perforating the edge of the shoe. The regularity of the holes would have required tools and expertise that only the most skilled shoemakers had at the time. It was "undoubtedly an expensive and exclusive shoe that only the elite could afford to buy," Andersen said.

Because the shoe was likely owned by an upper-class individual, experts think it could have belonged to Iversen, the Danish West Indies governor who was thrown overboard.

"The shoe testifies not only to Jørgen Iversen Dyppel's life and dramatic death, but also provides a personal point of entry into the larger story of the establishment of the Danish colonies in the West Indies and the widespread slave trade Denmark was a part of," Andreas Kallmeyer Bloch, a maritime archaeologist at the National Museum of Denmark's Center for Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage, said in the statement.

Additional clues to the Danish slave trade on board the Havmanden included two manillas, ring-shaped pieces of metal that were used as currency in West Africa. European merchants cast manillas from copper, brass or iron and traded them for enslaved people in West Africa, particularly along the coast of modern-day Nigeria. But manillas are rarely found in Scandinavia, according to the statement.

"The manillas add another layer to Havmanden's story and underscore the connection to the slave trade, which was a central part of Denmark's colonial activities in both the West Indies and on the west coast of Africa," Kallmeyer Bloch said.

Denmark continued to engage in the transatlantic slave trade for more than a century after the Havmanden sank. Although King Christian VII of Denmark-Norway banned the trade in 1792, slavery continued in the Danish West Indies until 1848, when hundreds of enslaved people revolted and were finally granted their freedom.

Archaeologists in Kazakhstan have discovered a unique gold bear figurine in a 2,200-year-old burial mound that looters had hit but failed to empty completely.

The sculpted bear stands on its hind limbs and holds a pot-like container between its front paws. The artifact would have been worn as part of a headdress, and holes at its base indicate that it could have been sewn onto the garment, according to a translated statement from the Kazakhstan government.

The gold bear was unearthed at an Early Iron Age burial mound at the Karagaily burial ground in the southern city of Almaty, along with a surprisingly high number of human bones for a single burial mound.

Although other gold-crafted animals have been found in the region, the newly unearthed bear is the first of its kind.

"The sculpted bear figurine is unique to Kazakhstan. No similar finds have been discovered previously," Lyazzat Sagyndykova, director of the Almaty Museums Association, which conducted the excavation, said in the statement. "This discovery allows us to trace cultural parallels across the whole of Eurasia, from the Black Sea region to Altai."

The figurine dates to the Saka period, named for a nomadic horseback-riding people from Iran who lived on the Eurasian Steppe and Tarim Basin of what is now western China. Archaeologists have found comparable gold objects at other excavations in Kazakhstan, according to the statement. For example, a headdress element shaped like a small leopard previously came to light at the Almaty Kok-Kainar burial ground, which dates to the fourth century B.C. Also, the headdress of Kazakhstan's famous "Golden Man," a young Iron Age warrior buried in an extraordinarily lavish grave, also has a gold, sheep-shaped decorative element.

It's unclear which bear species the figurine depicts, but today Kazakhstan is home to two subspecies of brown bear: the Tien Shan or Himalayan brown bear (Ursus arctos isabellinus), which lives in the Tien Shan Mountains in the southeast, and the East Siberian brown bear (Ursus arctos collaris) in the Altai Mountains in the east, according to a study published earlier this year.

Preliminary analyses date the recently excavated site to the fourth to third centuries B.C., according to the statement. Based on the number of bones they excavated, experts suspect that the mound, which is around 8 feet (2.4 meters) tall and roughly 85 feet (26 m) wide, may have been the final resting place for four adults and three children.

"Of particular interest is the unusually large number of human remains in a single burial mound, as such burials are atypical for Kazakhstan," Marat Mugalovich Nurpeisov, a senior research fellow at the Almaty Museums Association, said in the statement. "As a rule, burial mounds of a comparable size were intended for the burial of one or two people."

Archaeologists also found pieces of Saka pottery, most of which had been strewn about after the burial had been looted in ancient times, according to the statement. The thieves left behind a 10-foot (3 m) looting pit.

"Research into the Karagaily burial ground is ongoing," Nurpeisov said in the statement. "To clarify the circumstances of the burial and determine the exact number of individuals interred, further analyses are planned, including the involvement of anthropologists."

After all of the investigations are finished, some of the artifacts will be put on display at the Almaty Museum, according to the statement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scholars react

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

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

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

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

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

This small terra-cotta vase, which is shaped like a cockerel or young male chicken with human feet, was discovered in central Italy and was made by the ancient Etruscans. The potter inscribed the Etruscan alphabet on the body of the chicken, giving modern researchers clues to a language that has never been fully deciphered.

The vase stands just over 4 inches (10 centimeters) tall and is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The dark-black ceramic, known as bucchero, was made through a unique firing method that prevented the kiln from getting enough oxygen, which caused the clay to absorb carbon. Bucchero is considered the trademark Etruscan ceramic, and it was produced from the seventh to the fourth centuries B.C. by this pre-Roman society. It is unclear where the cockerel vase was originally found, but it may have been discovered in a grave in one of the many cemeteries that surround Viterbo, which was originally an Etruscan town about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northwest of modern-day Rome.

According to The Met, the vase may have been a portable inkwell used by an ancient Etruscan who was learning how to write. The cockerel's head was the stopper, and it was loosely attached to the body by a cord through a set of loops. The inscription on the body of the vase is known as an abecedarium ‪—‬ the sequential list of letters in an alphabet.

The Etruscan alphabet is well known, since it was adopted from a regional version of the Greek alphabet in the early eighth century B.C. There were 26 letters in the Etruscan alphabet, but one of them in this abecedarium is incorrect. A close look at the end of the alphabet shows that someone inscribed an S twice; the second one should look more like an X, according to The Met.

The terracotta cockerel vase was one of several ancient Etruscan artifacts that helped experts partially decode the mysterious ancient language, as it preserved the order of the letters in the early alphabet, archaeologist Gisela Richter wrote in a 1930 catalog of The Met's classical artifacts.

Thanks to the adoption of the Greek alphabet, it's possible to fully sound out the Etruscan language. But although more than 10,000 Etruscan inscriptions have been found, the language is still only partially understood because those inscriptions are short and any lengthy Etruscan literature that once existed has been lost.

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

Archaeologists excavating in northeastern France have unearthed a small fifth-century cemetery containing the graves of two Germanic chieftains and two warhorses. The burial ground is providing new information about the transitional period after the fall of the Roman Empire.

The burial complex was discovered near the city of Colmar, just a few miles from the Rhine River, which forms the border between France and Germany. This area had a Gallo-Roman village from the first to the third centuries, and archaeologists found several ancient houses, hearths, wells and craft areas, according to a Nov. 6 translated statement from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap).

Archaeologists also uncovered a rare fifth-century cemetery at the site, which was used from about A.D. 450 to 500, a critical time period in Western Europe because of the collapse of the Roman Empire. While scholars have debated for centuries about why the empire fell, one key issue was the repeated occupation of Rome in the fifth century by Germanic tribes known as the Goths and the Vandals.

Archaeologists discovered 11 adult graves, three graves of children and two horse burials at the site, according to the statement. In two of the female burials, archaeologists found silver bird-shaped brooches, glass bead necklaces and a bone comb, suggesting that these may have been high-status women.

But two of the male burials, in particular, stood out because of their high-quality grave goods, including a sword with a partially preserved wooden scabbard, a shield, a javelin and a scramasax, a type of Germanic short sword, which was decorated with a gold-and-garnet accessory. The weapons are characteristic of the burials of Germanic chieftains or mercenaries, according to the archaeologists, and two horses were buried nearby with their harnesses.

In addition to the weapons and warhorses, archaeologists noticed evidence on the men's bones that hinted that the individuals were likely warriors. Two people suffered stab wounds that showed no signs of healing, which suggests they died quickly and violently, according to the statement. And another man's right knee bones had completely fused together, which would have prevented him from bending it. This condition, called ankylosis, commonly results from an improperly healed injury.

The archaeologists believe the warrior's grave goods weren't just for show, but further study of the skeletons is planned to confirm whether the injuries seen during the excavation could have been sustained in a conflict.

Few Germanic settlements and cemeteries from the fifth century have been found, so the newly excavated site should provide important information about the upheavals linked to the fall of the Western Roman Empire and how that political collapse affected communities on the edge of the empire.

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

The Vikings were explorers, farmers, merchants and, most famously, warriors who launched raids across large parts of Europe.

Stereotypes of Vikings usually conjure up images of muscular men. But over the past few decades, researchers have turned their attention to women of the Viking Age (roughly A.D. 793 to 1066) and the roles they held. For instance, there are stories of "shield maidens" who fought alongside men, and some of these texts mention Viking women who fought in battle. The archaeological record also holds evidence, including graves of Viking Age women who were buried with war-grade weapons and shields.

It's still a matter of debate whether women who lived during the Viking Age could be warriors, but this discussion raises another question: It's one thing to have texts describing female fighters and archaeological records of women buried with weapons, but what can the evidence tell us about how frequently Viking women fought in battle?

The answer, experts told Live Science, largely depends on our interpretation of texts, artifacts, and burials of Viking Age women, which often face higher scrutiny than burials of men who were buried with similar (or even fewer) weapons.

"They put toughness before allure"

The Vikings used a runic system of writing, but they left precious few texts behind. Instead, much of what we know about the Vikings was written about them by people from other cultures or by their Norse descendants.

One of the most evocative texts was written in the 12th century by the Danish historian and theologian Saxo Grammaticus. In "Gesta Danorum" (Latin for "History of the Danes" and translated by Jenny Jochens), he wrote that "there were once women in Denmark who dressed themselves to look like men and spent almost every minute cultivating [combat] skills." As "if they were forgetful of their true selves they put toughness before allure, aimed at conflicts instead of kisses, tasted blood, not lips, sought the clash of arms rather than the arm's embrace, fitted to weapons hands what should have been weaving, desired not the couch but the kill, and those they could have appeased with looks they attacked with lances."

Another text about the Vikings, the medieval Irish "Cogadh Gaedhelre Gallaibh" ("War of the Irish with the Foreigners"), refers to a woman known as the "Red Lady" leading a Viking fleet in a raid on Belfast in the 10th century.

There's a lot of uncertainty, said Neil Price, an archaeology professor at Uppsala University in Sweden who has written extensively about the Vikings. The text in the "Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh" that refers to the Red Lady is of debatable accuracy, Price told Live Science in an email.

He suspects that Viking women fought in battle but not frequently. In addition, "female warriors were probably a very small minority," Price said.

The account written by Saxo Grammaticus is also contentious. Thomas Kristian Heebøll-Holm, a history professor at the University of Southern Denmark, said Saxo Grammaticus is not a reliable source.

"Saxo Grammaticus does write about female warriors, but only in the parts of his work concerned [with] the legendary past of Denmark," Heebøll-Holm told Live Science in an email. "Furthermore, these writings are not accurate, but moral and fictitious," Heebøll-Holm said, noting that, in some instances, Saxo Grammaticus seemed to be drawing on the stories of the Amazons, a group of legendary female warriors whom the ancient Greeks believed in with stories about them dating back more than 2,500 years.

Turning to archaeology

Archaeological evidence can also be challenging to interpret. Archaeologists know of about 30 Viking Age female burials containing weapons, including three with swords in Scandinavia. Even more Viking Age women's graves have items that could have been used as weapons ‪—‬ including spears, axes and knives ‪—‬ although these tools also could have been used for hunting or tending to farms. Either way, we can't be sure if these women fought in battle.

"The first concern is that the weapons were really used by the deceased and were not merely included as signs of special status or social rank acquired through inheritance," Deborah Shepherd, an independent researcher who holds a doctorate in archaeology and has studied the Vikings extensively, told Live Science in an email. She noted that graves are often not well preserved, making it difficult to gather information.

There were likely "some few female warriors, but they were probably only found in the highest ranking families, and their warrior career was probably short-lived," Shepherd said. "They wouldn't have fought in the great armies of later centuries but possibly did fight in pre-Christian skirmishes." (The Vikings began gradually converting to Christianity between the ninth and 12th centuries.)

There is at least one known case of a Viking woman found with what may be combat-related injuries. A Viking woman found in Solør, Norway, had a head injury consistent with a sword strike. She was 18 or 19 at the time she died, was buried with weapons and lived around 900.

Ole Kastholm, a curator and senior researcher at the Roskilde Museum in Denmark, said there is a lot of uncertainty regarding how frequently Viking Age women fought in battle.

Weapons "do occur as a grave good in a handful of graves with female human remains," Kastholm told Live Science in an email. "Often it is just a single weapon [such] as a spear or [a] battle axe. But we know of at least one example of a female grave with a full set of weapons as well as riding equipment," which is located in Birka, Sweden.

"If this was a man's grave, researchers would have no doubt that it was a warrior grave, and this explanation must necessarily also apply when the interred is a woman," Kastholm said.

That said, there were female warriors in other cultures. "One can also note in passing that female warriors were an almost common feature of central Asian societies for at least a millennium before the Viking Age," Price wrote in his book, "The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age" (Basic Books, 2026).

For instance the Scythians are a people who flourished in eastern Europe and Asia and Scythian women have been found buried with horses and weapons. In some cases, the Scythian women suffered combat wounds such as arrowheads and it's been speculated that they may have been an inspiration for stories of the Amazons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Troubled waters

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maya collapse

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

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

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

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

Archaeologists have unearthed the oldest evidence of cannabis use from a 2,800-year-old monumental tomb in Siberia. The presence of plant seeds in the grave and chemical traces of the drug in mummy hair suggest people practiced a funeral ritual that may have involved a grim practice: calming human sacrifice victims with cannabis.

In a study published Thursday (Nov. 5) in the journal Science, researchers investigated the contents of a "royal mound" burial at the Tunnug archaeological site in the Uyuk valley of southern Siberia. Archaeologists discovered four wooden structures containing several log coffins in the middle of the mound. On top of the wooden burial structures were the skeletons of horses that once formed a "spectral cavalcade," a Scythian funeral tradition that involved sacrificing horses and humans. And inside the burial structures, the archaeologists discovered piles of tiny seeds from the plant Cannabis ruderalis, a wild type of cannabis or marijuana.

Cannabis likely originated in Asia and was cultivated thousands of years ago for various purposes, including for ropes and textiles, and 6,000 years ago as an oilseed crop, according to the study. But it's unclear when people learned about the psychoactive properties of the plant. In the fifth century B.C., the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Scythian nomads inhaled the fumes from burning hemp seeds. And evidence of cannabis use was previously discovered in a cemetery in China dated to about 500 B.C. The new study, however, pushes back this date by three centuries.

Researchers discovered more than 1,000 whole cannabis seeds and around 500 partial seeds in the Tunnug burial mound, and they carbon-dated them to between 800 and 760 B.C. They also recovered several human hair samples from the grave. An analysis of the hair revealed signals matching cannabinol and THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), psychoactive chemical compounds found in cannabis. The tests could not determine how much of the drug people consumed, however.

"The molecular traces in the hair and the cannabis seeds come from the same grave and suggest that cannabis was used for its intoxicating properties," study first author Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, said in a statement.

But given the burial context of the discovery, the use of cannabis may have had a darker purpose.

"In this princely tomb, the burials were accompanied by extensive horse sacrifices and, most likely, human sacrifices as well," Caspari said. The tradition of human sacrifice, in particular, "would have potentially made the plant a useful agent to calm individuals who were to be included in the rituals," the researchers wrote in the study.

The new study confirms the ancient use of cannabis in funerals in Central Asia and extends the date back to 2,800 years ago, the researchers noted. Future work is planned but will focus on other aspects of ancient cannabis.

"We have already begun sequencing some of the plant samples," Caspari said. "This will help us learn more about the history of the domestication and spread of the crop soon."

An Elizabethan padlock has been opened for the first time in more than 400 years after researchers used X-ray imaging techniques to crack its four-letter combination.

The brass lock was part of the Ann Francis treasure hoard, named after the British merchant ship that wrecked during a storm off the coast of Wales in 1583. Researchers believe the lock once secured a chest aboard the ship, before becoming separated from whatever riches it was protecting.

Some of the Ann Francis' cargo was recovered at the time of the wreck, while the rest was claimed by the sea. In recent decades, dredging and storms on Margam beach in South Wales have exposed some of the ship's lost treasure.

Between 1996 and 2017, metal detectorist Peter Hughes found the lock and much of the hoard, which included gold and silver coins. The lock was subsequently acquired by Amgueddfa Cymru — National Museum Wales, which worked with researchers at Cardiff University in Wales to decipher its combination.

To study the lock's internal mechanisms, the team used micro-CT scans, which make thousands of X-rays that can then be configured into a 3D digital image. By matching internal notches to external letters in the digital 3D image, the researchers were able to decipher the correct four-letter code — "ANCE" — and open the lock.

"We normally use this technology to study bones and other biological structures, so investigating a 400-year-old padlock was certainly a first for us," David Williams, a research associate at the Musculoskeletal Biomechanics Research Facility at Cardiff University, said in a statement. "It's not every day you get to solve a 400-year-old mystery!"

Smugglers' ship

The Ann Francis was owned by Francis Shaxton, a merchant and notorious smuggler. Francis claimed the ship was sailing along the eastern English coast from King’s Lynn to Hartlepool, when it was actually traveling in the opposite direction, heading to Spain to deliver a cargo of wheat. Spain was dependent on grain shipments at the time and paid for such shipments in gold and silver from colonial conquests in Central and South America, according to Amgueddfa Cymru.

The ship was traveling back from Spain to England when, on the evening of Dec. 28, 1583, it was caught in a violent storm. After heading off course, the ship ended its journey in ruin off Margam beach.

A parish register noted the loss of 14 sailors during the same month as the wreckage, which could have been The Ann Francis's crew, according to Amgueddfa Cymru. The deaths were blamed on the nefarious work of a supposed witch.

Locals were quick to loot the Ann Francis wreck before a legal dispute ensued over who had the right to its goods. One Welsh lord claiming the wreck made an inventory list of items he impounded, which included cannons, guns, a piece of mast, Spanish silver and three chests with their locks broken. The newly cracked lock could have originally secured one of these chests, according to Amgueddfa Cymru.

Centuries after the ship was wrecked, Hughes found the lock near a previously undiscovered stash of Spanish silver coins and coin weights while metal detecting on the beach.

"When I found the lock I was immediately astonished by the incredible workmanship and its astonishing condition," Hughes said. "When I moved the ring dials of the combination they turned with ease after over 400 years beneath the sands and I was left in disbelief."

Hughes said he attempted to open the lock himself over many years but could never find the right combination. After Amgueddfa Cymru acquired the lock, staff were concerned that they could hear grit moving around inside the dials, and with more than 1,000 possible combinations, they didn't want to cause any damage.

The micro-CT scans offered a nondestructive view inside the lock, and an opportunity to finally identify the correct four-letter combination.

"Elizabethan combination locks are known in Britain, but this one is in exceptionally good condition and is associated with a dated wreck, making it a unique find and the code a tantalising mystery to solve," Alastair Willis, the senior curator for numismatics and the Welsh economy at Amgueddfa Cymru, said in the statement. "Of course, now we've solved it, we are left wondering if the code meant something to its owner."

Archaeologists investigating the genomes of a dozen people buried in an abandoned Roman-era settlement in northwestern Germany have discovered a surprising organism lurking in one man's remains: a rare strain of Mycobacterium leprae, which causes leprosy.

This strain of leprosy has never been seen in this part of Europe before, which hints that the individual had traveled and interacted with people from across the Roman world. The man was buried in a wooden boat surrounded by unusual objects, indicating he was a high-status person, according to a research study.

"The results were particularly striking in the case of one individual," study co-author Ben Krause-Kyora, an archaeologist at the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology (IKMB) at Kiel University in Germany, said in a Nov. 3 statement. "He could, for example, have been a mercenary in the Roman army who later settled between the Elbe and the Weser [rivers]."

In the study, published online Oct. 15 in the journal iScience, Krause-Kyora and colleagues analyzed the genomes of people buried at the coastal settlement of Fallward. The settlement originated in the first century B.C. but gradually declined and became a cemetery by the fifth century A.D. Among the 200 cremation burials and 60 inhumation burials originally excavated in the 1990s was a distinctive grave made from a wooden boat.

The oak boat was over 13 feet (4 meters) long and sealed with a roof-like structure, the researchers said. It held the skeleton of a man who was about 50 years old when he died some time between A.D. 425 and 450. His grave goods included a small box shaped like a water bird, an ornate chair or throne carved out of alder wood, a bronze basin and a maple stool with a hunting scene and a runic inscription. The maritime artifacts coupled with the man's well-developed upper arm bones suggest he may have worked as a fisherman or boatman just before he died, the researchers wrote.

"The grave goods placed in the tomb aroused particular scientific interest," study co-author Hauke Jöns, an archaeologist at the Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research, said in the statement. "The man possessed a late Roman military belt, which suggested that the deceased had had connections across great distances."

A rare form of leprosy

To learn more about this unusual burial and to determine where the man was from, researchers analyzed his DNA.

"Genetic analyses confirm that a man buried at Fallward originated from the Danube region," study first author Daniel Myburgh, an ancient DNA researcher at IKMB, said in the statement. "He was also infected with a very rare leprosy pathogen."

The researchers found the DNA of the bacterium M. leprae in one of the man's teeth and in a foot bone. Because the leprosy DNA was so well preserved, the researchers were able to narrow down the strain that had infected him. This strain of leprosy may have evolved in Egypt around the fourth to second centuries B.C. and had never before been found in Central or Northern Europe, according to the statement.

But the man showed no signs of leprosy lesions in his skeleton, the researchers said. Leprosy first attacks the nerves and skin, but it can eventually eat away at the bones of the skeleton, particularly affecting the nose, jaw, hands and feet.

"Leprosy is a chronic disease," study co-author Almut Nebel, a biologist at IKMB, said in the statement. "Either he was affected by an asymptomatic form of the disease, or the disease had so far only affected soft tissues. He may have travelled long distances whilst carrying the disease."

While the researchers don't know exactly what happened in this man's life, they suggested he might have been a mercenary who served in the Roman army and later retired to northwest Germany, becoming a high-status member of the community who was honored with an alder-wood "throne" in his burial. But he also may have acquired the Roman belt through trade, inheritance or as a war trophy, the researchers wrote.

Either way, the man's skeleton and his grave goods suggest that northwest Germany had long-distance connections in Europe even after the fall of the Roman Empire, according to the statement.

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

Archaeologists in Ukraine have found a colorful belt buckle that may have been worn by a nomadic equestrian warrior 1,800 years ago on the fringes of the Roman Empire.

The belt buckle was unearthed by local residents in the Tsetsyn Forest in southeastern Ukraine and given to Antonii Moisei, a professor at Bukovinian State Medical University, according to a translated statement. The roughly square metal buckle, which is about 0.8 inches (2.1 centimeters) on each side, has teal, blue and yellow enamel decorations.

The style of the decoration and the metal construction place the creation of the buckle in the second to third centuries A.D., when this part of Ukraine was in the ancient province of Roman Dacia, according to Moisei.

Under Emperor Trajan, Rome fought the Dacian Wars (A.D. 101-102 and 105-106) against the denizens of the Dacian kingdom and its leader, Decebalus. Roman legions destroyed Dacia and annexed it as a new province. Trajan celebrated his victory in Rome, complete with a famous column that depicts details of the Dacian Wars.

In addition to the buckle, Moisei collected a decorative belt fitting and three small, round metal objects that probably belonged to the same belt. Moisei created a reconstruction of what the belt might have looked like before it was lost in the forest nearly two millennia ago.

But it's unclear who lost the belt. One of Moisei's theories is that the belt belonged to a horse-riding Sarmatian warrior originally from the Black Sea region. The Sarmatians were a group of tribes that lived outside the borders of the Roman Empire, in what are now central Ukraine, southern Russia and the Balkans. While some Sarmatian warriors fought against the incursion of the Roman Empire, others fought with Rome as mercenaries.

The metal belt fragments are part of a Roman provincial craft tradition, according to the statement, and they may have been obtained through trade or as a trophy of war. But Moisei is still studying the artifacts to confirm whether they were Sarmatian. Either way, the military belt provides new evidence of Roman military contact on the outskirts of the empire, and future work could help experts understand how the Romans interacted with the local Dacians during wartime.

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

A Bronze Age man buried in a monumental tomb near the Black Sea may have died from complications of a urinary tract infection (UTI) more than five millennia ago, according to a new study. Archaeologists identified a grape-size object consistent with a kidney or bladder stone in the man's burial.

"He lived with a chronic urogenital infection," study lead author Natalia Berezina, an anthropologist at Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia, told Live Science in an email.

"It was not a brief episode," she said. "His last years were probably marked by considerable and more or less constant pain."

Berezina and colleagues investigated a small, stone-like object found in an Early Bronze Age burial in the Stavropol Upland region of southwestern Russia. They published their findings Sept. 30 in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

The burial was part of a kurgan cemetery, an ancient steppe funeral tradition that involved constructing a large mound of dirt over a grave. Archaeologists discovered a catacomb when they excavated the mound, and inside was the skeleton of a man who was in his 40s when he died around 5,300 years ago. The researchers found a flint arrowhead near the man's pelvis.

But during a laboratory analysis after the skeleton was excavated, researchers noticed an odd stone-like object in the collection of hand bones. The brownish object was round with several protrusions and measured about 0.8 inches (2.1 centimeters) in diameter, or roughly the size of a grape. A small crack in the object showed a crystal-like structure inside.

To learn more, the researchers used several analytical methods to determine what the tiny object was made of. First, X-ray fluorescence analysis revealed that the main components of the object were calcium and phosphorus. Then, they used X-ray powder diffraction analysis to identify the crystal structures.

In addition to common minerals, the researchers discovered the presence of whitlockite, a rare calcium salt that is known to occur in kidney, bladder and prostate stones. These "stones," collectively called calculi, are hard masses of minerals, such as calcium-containing salts. They differ in terms of the organ they form within, the exact mechanism of how they form, and their chemical makeup, although kidney and bladder stones tend to contain very similar compounds.

Whitlockite is strongly associated with bacterial infections in the human body, which suggests that the Bronze Age man had a chronic infection that resulted in the stone, the scientists concluded.

"On the balance of the available evidence, we regard a renal [kidney] stone secondary to chronic upper urinary tract infection as the most probable origin," the researchers wrote. That is, the man dealt with chronic or recurrent UTIs, which led to the formation of the stone and likely caused him considerable discomfort. UTIs can contribute to the formation of kidney stones by altering the acidity of urine and making minerals more likely to accumulate.

The researchers aren't sure why the man had urinary tract issues or whether it contributed to his death.

Notably, kidney stones can sometimes travel to the bladder, so it's unclear exactly where the stone was in the man's body when he died. If the stone had obstructed the man's ureter ‪—‬ one of the two long tubes that connect the kidneys to the bladder ‪—‬ it may have caused kidney swelling, a secondary infection or sepsis. These conditions were frequently fatal prior to the invention of antibiotics.

Other possibilities for what caused the stone include a bacterial infection of the man's prostate gland or even a sexually transmitted infection.

The man was likely on the move frequently within this Early Bronze Age steppe society, and other injuries to his skeleton suggested he had a physically demanding life, the researchers wrote. His bones showed that he was well muscled but was also dealing with degenerative joint disease in his spine, shoulders, hips, hands and feet. He had a series of healed fractures in his right shoulder, ribs and forearm.

"These were people who worked with cattle and heavy wagons on the open steppe," Berezina said, "and the injuries that follow from that are the injuries we find." In a previous study at a nearby cemetery, Berezina and colleagues found the skeleton of a man who was injured when a wagon ran over him, several years before his death. "Against that background, four healed fractures in our man look unremarkable," she said.

But the urinary tract stone would have made the man's life difficult, the researchers noted. "This individual suffered from a painful and debilitating chronic urogenital infection, a condition that would have significantly impacted his quality of life," they wrote.

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

Egyptian researchers have found a hidden 2,600-year-old structure the size of a football field after using satellites to peer below the ground. But what they found beneath the structure may be just as remarkable as the building itself.

The site they examined is known as Buto (modern-day Tell el-Fara'in), a sprawling mound of layered history in the northwestern Nile Delta. To the ancient Egyptians, it was the sacred home of Wadjet, the cobra goddess of Lower Egypt, and one of the most religiously important cities in the pharaonic landscape.

Archaeologists have excavated its upper layers for decades, finding remains from the rule of the Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty (305 to 30 B.C.) and Roman era (30 B.C. to A.D. 395). But the deeper, older layers at the site — including a mound called Kom C, sitting below groundwater level in waterlogged delta clay — had stayed stubbornly out of reach. Kom C itself rises above the surface as a visible mound, but earlier excavations had reached only the Ptolemaic and Roman layers before hitting the water table.

Now, researchers have turned to noninvasive tools, including satellite imagery, to delve into the mysterious subterranean layers.

First, they turned to the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 satellite, which can produce radar images by beaming down microwave pulses from orbit and then measuring how they reflect back; the returning signals can reveal subtle differences in surface moisture, elevation and reflectivity that can hint at buried structures beneath the ground. After looking at these radar images, the team spotted a large oval-shaped anomaly buried beneath Kom C that was 420 feet long and 203 feet wide (128 by 62 meters).

To learn more without disturbing the site, the team ran 15 parallel lines of electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) across an area of roughly 58,100 square feet (5,400 square meters). This technique reveals the underground landscape by passing electrical currents through the earth, measuring how they travel and creating a map that archaeologists can read.

The picture that came back was layered. Between the surface and 10 feet (3 m) down, the team found scattered Ptolemaic and Roman debris, including displaced mudbricks, pottery shards and broken limestone, which point to centuries of continued occupation and rebuilding on the site. Later residents dismantled older structures for reuse and left a scatter of displaced material behind.

Deeper still, between 10 and 20 feet (3 and 6 m), the researchers found a large mudbrick structure from the 26th dynasty (688 to 525 B.C.), also known as the Saite period. They were able to date this discovery based on its layer, the unique shape of the mudbricks and other artifacts such as pottery, which the team dated by style and their archaeological layer, with carbon-14 dating applied to associated organic material. The large structure may be a tomb, a house for priests or a religious shrine, the team wrote in the study, published in March in the journal Acta Geophysica.

And below that, at 20 to 23 feet (6 to 7 m) underground, the researchers unexpectedly found a thick, clean layer of sand.

That sand is the discovery within the discovery, the team wrote in the study.

The Nile Delta's clay is notoriously treacherous to build on. It absorbs moisture and swells, and then contracts and shifts as it dries — posing a slow-motion threat to anything heavy sitting on top of it. The Saite builders, it seems, knew this. Before laying the foundations to their structure, they packed a cushion of clean sand beneath it. This sand would have spread the building's weight, let groundwater drain through, and stopped the clay from creeping. It is the same logic behind modern load-distributing foundations — applied here more than two and a half millennia ago.

"By combining satellite radar with deep ERT profiles, we didn't just map the walls of this massive Saite-era structure — we were also able to analyze the subsurface layers," study co-author author Abdelaziz Elfadaly, an associate research professor at Egypt's National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, told Live Science. "The detection of a significant, clean sand foundation layer beneath the mudbrick walls explains how these heavy structures survived the high water table and shifting clayey soil of Buto."

The sand layer, in effect, acts as a barrier; it stops groundwater from wicking upward into the mudbrick, which would soften and dissolve it. The sand also lets water drain sideways instead of pooling against the foundation, according to Elfadaly.

A 3-by-3 foot (10 by 10 m) excavation trench that was around 20 to 23 feet (6 to 7 m) deep confirmed the presence of thick mudbrick walls resting on that sand layer, and nearby, a spread of objects that hint at the site's sacred function. According to Elfadaly, these finds included ushabti and shawabti figurines — small servant statues typically placed in tombs to serve the deceased in the afterlife — and a limestone altar whose carved channels bore dried residues consistent with animal blood, pointing to offering rituals performed at the site. The study also noted a rarer find: a faience baboon figurine, the kind associated with Thoth, the god of wisdom.

The Saite period was a moment of cultural revival. After generations of Assyrian and Libyan domination, Egyptian pharaohs retook the throne and poured resources into restoring Egypt's religious landscape, particularly in the Nile Delta, which had been their power base. Buto, with its deep ties to Lower Egyptian identity, was a natural focus. The Saite kings ruled from the nearby delta city of Sais, so restoring Buto reinforced their roots and their claim to the throne.

"A monumental building of this scale underscores the Saite pharaohs' intense commitment to glorifying the Delta region," Hussein Bassir, director of the Antiquities Museum at a cultural research center known as Bibliotheca Alexandrina who wasn't involved with the study, told Live Science in a WhatsApp message. "Using pure sand as a stabilizing cushion was a brilliant, deliberate tactic — the ancient builders profoundly understood their environment."

The team is planning a return visit, this time using wider-spaced electrical resistivity surveys to reach deeper layers, along with specialists who study ancient plants and also understand how geological features changed over time, which may help reconstruct what the landscape around Buto looked like when these walls were first laid.

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

The Lycurgus Cup is a Roman-era glass goblet that changes color from jade green to ruby red depending on if a light is shining on its front or back. But experts are unsure where the cup was found, where it was made, or whether the glassblower who made it created the color-changing effect on purpose.

In 1958, the British Museum acquired the cup from the Rothschild banking family, which had owned the artifact since the mid-19th century. Known colloquially as the Lycurgus Cup for its depiction of the mythical king who angered the god Dionysus, the glass is about 6.3 inches (15.9 centimeters) tall and weighs around 1.6 pounds (700 grams).

The glass is a remarkably well-preserved example of a Roman "cage-cup," according to a 1959 study of the artifact by archaeologists D. B. Harden and Jocelyn Toynbee. Only a handful of cage-cups still exist, and experts believe the goblets were made by cutting and grinding decoration into thick glass. Because small bridges were left to ensure the decoration remained on the glass, the overall effect is like a cage. Harden and Toynbee estimated that the Lycurgus Cup was manufactured in the fourth century, likely in Italy, but they noted that the bronze frame that forms the stem and rim of the goblet is probably a 19th-century addition.

Depicted on the cup is the myth of the punishment of Lycurgus, king of the Thracian tribe called the Edoni (also called the Edonians). Lycurgus did not approve of the worship of Dionysus and banished the god into the sea with an ax. But one of Dionysus' priestesses, Ambrosia, decided to fight Lycurgus. Ambrosia changed herself into a vine and wound herself around Lycurgus, who was unable to escape. The other priestesses thronged around them and tormented Lycurgus. Given that Dionysus was a god of wine and merriment, the depiction of Lycurgus' punishment may have been particularly appropriate for this goblet. Additionally, the change in color from green to red may have been meant to mimic the ripening of grapes on the vine.

Color-changing cups, also called dichroic cups, were mentioned in ancient Roman historical records. For example, a second-century letter possibly penned by Emperor Hadrian to his brother-in-law mentions a gift of two dichroic cups to use during banquets. But very few fragments of this mysterious type of glass survive today, a 2007 study noted.

For decades, experts have been working out how ancient Romans produced dichroic cups, and some have even replicated the Lycurgus Cup's color-changing effect. A 1963 study confirmed that the key seems to be the addition of microscopic nanoparticles of gold and silver during glassblowing that produce the appearance of milky-green glass when lit from the front and nearly translucent red glass when lit from behind. The metal nanoparticles are smaller than grains of sand and interact with light, creating the perception of a color change.

A replica of dichroic glass made by Corning Glassworks in the 1960s went from green to amethyst in the light, the 2007 study reported, and in 2020, researchers included silver and gold nanoparticles in 3D printing to replicate the color-changing properties of the glass.

More recently, experts at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. reproduced the dichroic glass by reverse-engineering the "recipe" from the original Lycurgus Cup. The team then commissioned a glass artist to create a Lycurgus-inspired design from the replica.

But because so few examples of dichroic glass exist, experts are still unsure whether Roman artisans created the color-changing effect on purpose or whether traces of gold, which would have been available in an ancient craft studio, slipped into the molten glass and made a rare and unusual material that mystified even the most skilled glassblowers.

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

Archaeologists have discovered a ghostly human-shaped artifact at a fifth-century burial mound in Japan. The clay figurine's appearance suggests it represents a female shaman who once guarded a tomb.

The artifact was unearthed at the archaeological site of Nishikaminomiya, northwest of Tokyo, according to a translated statement from Japan's Gunma prefectural government. At the site, archaeologists found nearly a dozen burial mounds known as "kofun" dated to the fifth and sixth centuries.

This time period in Japanese history, which lasted from about A.D. 300 to 710, is called the Kofun period. Many tombs in this period had cylindrical clay sculptures called "haniwa" that were used as offerings to the dead and were often thought to contain the souls of the deceased.

The newly unearthed haniwa is about 16 inches (40 centimeters) tall; but only the head and torso remain, so it would have originally been a lot larger. The figurine was discovered in a moat around an enormous burial mound that measured about 145 feet (45 meters) in diameter. It's likely that the haniwa was originally placed near a boat-shaped sarcophagus archaeologists discovered in the mound and that it slipped down the hill over time to land in the moat, according to the statement.

Experts think the haniwa represents a female shaman known as a "miko," or "shrine maiden." These priestesses bridge the gap between the human and spiritual realms in the Shinto religion. During the Kofun period, miko would have performed important funeral rituals and offered spiritual guidance.

The haniwa figurine has a traditional Japanese topknot hairstyle called a "shimada," which indicates that the haniwa represents a miko, according to the statement. Both of the figurine's wrists have bracelets made from clay and red pigment. The haniwa's fingers have been carefully molded, and the figurine has a prominent nose. In addition, she wears a red sash painted on her torso and holds a rod-shaped ritual implement in her left hand.

"These details suggest that considerable care was taken in making the figure, even in features that would not be visible from a distance," representatives of the Gunma prefectural government said in the statement.

Archaeologists discovered the haniwa this year during excavations of the main burial mound at Nishikaminomiya, but they have been working at the site since 2020.

The haniwa is currently on display at the Gunma Prefectural Archaeological Research Center's Excavation Information Museum in the city of Shibukawa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Researchers have virtually reconstructed the face of a man who was decapitated after his death almost 2,000 years ago and then buried near a Roman military fort in Scotland.

While it's unclear why the man was beheaded, other burials hundreds of miles away may offer a clue. A chemical analysis of the man's remains suggests that he grew up in southern Britain. Beheading bodies may have been an obscure burial rite for some southern Britons, as other decapitated bodies from about the same time have been found in that region, John H. Reid, an archaeologist at the Trimontium Trust who was not involved in the excavations, told Live Science.

Another mystery is why a southern Briton was on the Roman frontier, but it seems that he was working for the Roman army when he died, researchers at National Museums Scotland said in a statement. However, his skeleton shows the man's right arm had such limited movement that he could not have used a sword, so he was probably not a soldier, they added.

Despite this disability, however, it's possible that the man used weapons in his other hand, or had a job in the Roman army that did not require frontline fighting, such as a clerk.

"He could have been left-handed, or he could have had a 'desk job'," said Reid, who is the author of the book "The Eagle and the Bear: A New History of Roman Scotland" (Birlinn, 2023).

The man was probably about 50 years old when he died between A.D. 142 and 165. His remains were then buried near the Roman fort at Inveresk, on Scotland's east coast just southeast of what's now Edinburgh, according to the statement.

An analysis of the man's skeleton indicated that he had lived an active life. His nose had been broken and healed, and his right elbow showed extensive bone growth, perhaps from arthritis. Reid said the bone growth may have been his body's response to a physical injury.

Researchers at National Museums Scotland and the independent U.K.-based forensic anthropologist Christopher Rynn created the facial construction based on the man's skull.

Romans in Scotland

The Roman fort at Inveresk was built around A.D. 140 and acted as a command-and-supply center for Roman forts along the Antonine Wall, which ran along the shortest route between Scotland's west coast and east coast — roughly the line between Glasgow and Edinburgh, although neither city existed at the time.

The Romans had hoped to secure all of Scotland under their rule after their invasion of Britain under Emperor Claudius in A.D. 43. They tried to impose control after their victory against a coalition of native Caledonian tribes at the Battle of Mons Graupius (possibly near the Scottish city of Perth) in about 83. But by about 120, the Romans had retreated to the heavily fortified line of Hadrian's Wall, near the modern border of England and Scotland.

The fort at Inveresk was built for a second push that aimed to secure Roman control over southern Scotland by establishing the Antonine Wall. But this failed too, and after A.D. 162, the Romans withdrew again to Hadrian's Wall, until the final collapse of Roman rule in Britain in the early fifth century.

Strange burial

Reid told Live Science that Scotland's soil seldom preserved human skeletons, making the discovery of a Roman-era burial an uncommon find. Although the man had been decapitated after his death, other aspects of his grave indicated he was buried with dignity. In other words, his burial was unlike those of executed criminals, who were often decapitated in Roman-era Britain, he said.

The remains from six Roman-era burials have been found at Inveresk, and four of the dead had been similarly beheaded, the statement said.

There are several ways non-Romans could have served with the Roman army, Reid told Live Science. They might have been employed as servants or artisans attached to the Roman legions, or they might have been soldiers in Roman auxiliary units or even citizen-based legions, he said. By the time of the Antonine Wall, few members of the Roman army in Scotland would have been from the Italian peninsula, he added.

The chemical analysis looked at the ratios of isotopes, or variations of chemical elements, in the man's remains. This analysis suggested that the man had grown up in southern Britain. Alternatively, he may have been recruited from a nearby region, such as the coast of what's now the Netherlands, that gave the same isotopic profile, Reid said.

Reid and his colleagues have found extensive evidence of the Roman army at the Burnswark site in southern Scotland, including the deadly whistling sling bullets they used against their "barbarian" foes. Archaeological work there is ongoing.

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

Deep in a limestone cave on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, two very different sets of humans left behind nearly identical traces of their lives — similar stone tools, the remains of the same prey animals, the same types of seashells pierced and strung into ornaments. They may have been separated by thousands of years and may not have directly interacted. Yet the overlap between them was striking enough that researchers studying the site had to look twice.

The site, Üçağızlı II, offers one of the clearest examples of a conundrum that scientists have long wrestled with: Neanderthals and modern humans (Homo sapiens) didn't just collide and go their separate ways. They inhabited the same areas, and, as dozens of genetic studies have confirmed, had sex, across tens of thousands of years and on multiple continents. The DNA of nearly every person alive outside Africa today carries the proof: Roughly 2% of the non-African genome is Neanderthal.

And yet, there is not a single archaeological site that shows them living together. Knowing that modern humans and Neanderthals mated is not the same as understanding how it happened. Who approached whom? Were these interactions consensual? Were they the result of violence or trade alliances? Who raised these hybrid babies? And what does the genetic record tell us about the social lives of two different kinds of humans navigating each other's existence for the first time?

Some of the answers, it turns out, are written on the X chromosome — and they are stranger than expected.

A puzzle on the X chromosome

The first high-coverage Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010, and for the next 15 years, researchers kept noticing something puzzling: Neanderthal DNA was less common from the X chromosomes in people alive today.

One of the two sex chromosomes in humans, the X chromosome represents about 5% of the DNA in cells. Most females carry a pair of X chromosomes in each cell, while most males have one X and one Y.

Everywhere else in our genome, traces of long-ago breeding between Neanderthals and modern humans showed up in roughly consistent proportions. But on the X chromosome, there was far less Neanderthal DNA.

The leading explanation was negative selection — the idea that Neanderthal gene variants unique to the X chromosome were somehow incompatible with modern-human biology and had been gradually eliminated from the gene pool over thousands of generations. It was a reasonable hypothesis, given that incompatibilities elsewhere in the genome did lead to the weeding out of Neanderthal DNA on other chromosomes over time.

To understand why the negative selection explanation didn't explain the X chromosome data, however, it helps to know what different parts of the genome actually do. Some stretches of DNA are protein-coding regions; they contain the instructions for building proteins, the molecular machinery that does most of the work inside cells. Others are regulatory sequences that don't build proteins themselves but help control when and how much of a protein gets produced. And then there are still other stretches of DNA that don’t appear to code for proteins or directly regulate gene expression, though researchers suspect at least some have functions we don’t yet fully understand.

Alexander Platt, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, hypothesized that if the problem was that Neanderthal gene variants on the X chromosome were inherently harmful, modern-human X gene variants would have been advantageous in Neanderthals. As a result, X chromosomal DNA extracted from Neanderthal skeletons should show an excess of modern-human DNA in stretches of the genome where they'd provide measurable benefit. They reasoned that this excess would likely appear in protein-coding genes or the regulatory regions that control their expression, not noncoding DNA.

But that's not what they found. Instead, Neanderthal X chromosomes carried more modern-human DNA in the noncoding regions of the genome than in coding regions. This pattern didn't reflect selection for better gene variants. It was a signature of reproduction ‪—‬ a record of who was passing chromosomes to whom.

In a typical pregnancy, the mother contributes an X chromosome via the egg, and the father contributes either an X or a Y via the sperm cell. So, while an individual is guaranteed to inherit their mother's X, they don't necessarily carry their father's — males exclusively inherit their mother's X. That pattern differs from the other 22 pairs of chromosomes, which mothers and fathers contribute to equally. Across a population, then, two-thirds of X chromosomes are inherited from mothers and one-third from fathers.

This fact makes the X chromosome a particularly sensitive recorder of who was reproducing with whom.

Long-standing sexual preference

Tracking the flow of X chromosomes can reveal trends in Neanderthal-human mating. If Neanderthal males paired with modern-human females more often than Neanderthal females paired with modern-human males, you'd see more modern-human X chromosomes flow into the Neanderthal gene pool.

When the team ran simulations to explore this idea, the data suggested what Platt described as a persistent, recurring mating preference: Males with more Neanderthal ancestry tended to reproduce with females with more modern-human ancestry. And this trend held across at least two distinct mating periods separated by around 200,000 years, said Platt.

This finding gave the researchers a new window into the timeline of mating between Neanderthals and modern humans. Platt's team identified at least two distinct pulses: one roughly 45,000 years ago, which produced the majority the Neanderthal DNA that lives on in non-African genomes today, and an earlier period over 200,000 years ago, whose genetic traces survived not in modern-human populations but in Neanderthals.

The pattern of Neanderthal males having offspring with H. sapiens females appears in both periods, separated by more than 150,000 years.

What the X chromosome data alone cannot say is why the pattern exists. It documents who reproduced with whom. It says nothing about who wanted whom.

Biological incompatibility

That distinction matters, because the same genetic signature can emerge from very different causes, and some have nothing to do with sexual preference.

Rajiv McCoy, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins University, pointed out that biology alone could produce a genetic signal like this one. When closely related species interbreed, the success of a pregnancy can depend not just on whose genes are inherited but on which parent belongs to which group.

Even if Neanderthal genes work fine in a modern-human genetic background, hybrid pregnancies may simply have been more likely to succeed when the Neanderthal was the father rather than the mother. That's not because of either parent's sexual preferences, but because of how their respective biologies interacted in the womb, McCoy told Live Science.

Researchers have recently proposed a few mechanisms that fit neatly with this theory. One study suggests that Neanderthal red blood cells restricted fetuses' growth in the womb. Another proposed that Neanderthal mothers carrying hybrid offspring may have been more prone to preeclampsia, a life-threatening pregnancy complication. Nothing in the existing data definitively rules such causes, McCoy said.

In practice, the two explanations are hard to separate. "Our models have no way of distinguishing mating from mating that produces a viable and fertile offspring," McCoy said. If hybrid pregnancies failed more often when the mother was Neanderthal, the genetic record would look similar to a world where Neanderthal females mated less often with H. sapiens males. Sexual encounters that didn't result in offspring left no genetic trace.

For now, the question of what drove that bias — social preference, or biology — remains open. Whatever barriers existed between the groups, they clearly weren't absolute. Multiple distinct episodes of interbreeding over thousands of years, McCoy noted, is itself evidence that the fertility of hybrid individuals was "sufficiently intact to leave a lasting mark."

How Neanderthal and human groups interacted

Bridget Alex, a researcher in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University who has spent her career reconstructing the timing and geography of Neanderthal-H. sapiens overlap, cautioned that all this is hampered by one fact: no direct archaeological evidence reveals how the two groups interacted.

"Despite a century and a half of Neanderthal research," she told Live Science, "no one's ever found a Neanderthal and Homo sapiens fossil in the same exact layer dated to the same exact period at the same exact site."

Instead, we have a regional and variable patchwork shaped by conditions that shifted over thousands of years and hundreds to thousands of miles.

Neanderthals inhabited a territory stretching from Siberia to Iberia to Southwest Asia between roughly 250,000 and 40,000 years ago. Modern humans were evolving in Africa during much of that span and came out repeatedly, in multiple waves, meeting Neanderthals in different times and places, with likely very different outcomes each time, Alex said.

"It's not like the Neanderthals living in what's now Spain could call up the ones in what's now Uzbekistan and be like, 'OK, what's our policy with modern humans? Do we kill them, have sex with them, ignore them?'" she said. "My assumption has always been that interactions would vary across time and space depending on the particular environmental conditions, social conditions, and just the whims of a particular group."

At Grotte Mandrin, a cave in the Rhône Valley in southern France, archaeologists found one of the most illuminating records of what those encounters may have looked like. Ludovic Slimak, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toulouse who has spent years excavating the site, described it as something genetics alone can't offer: "an extraordinarily precise archaeological sequence of Neanderthals and [Homo] sapiens occupying exactly the same place," he told Live Science in an email.

Neanderthal artifacts fill layer after layer of radiocarbon and luminescence dating up to about 57,000 years ago. And then, in one thin layer dated to between 56,800 and 51,700 years ago, there's a set of different stone tools and a single tooth that appear to belong to H. sapiens. Then, in layers immediately above, beginning around 51,700 years ago, Neanderthal artifacts appear again. That group of modern humans arrived, lived briefly in a continent otherwise inhabited entirely by Neanderthals, and then disappeared.

"What strikes me most is not mixture but proximity without fusion," Slimak told Live Science in an email. In other words, the two groups left no trace of cultural exchange or shared practice.There were "two human populations occupying the same landscape, probably encountering one another, while remaining culturally and biologically very different," Slimak said.

Genetics also paints a portrait of two very different social architectures. Two sites exemplify the trends: At Sunghir, a burial site in Russia dating to around 34,000 years ago, two H. sapiens adolescents were interred head to head beneath thousands of ivory beads and mammoth-bone spears. Ancient DNA analysis showed they were not immediate family members, yet they were buried together in an elaborate ceremony that implies a social world much wider than their immediate group.

In contrast, at Chagyrskaya, a cave site in Siberia, Neanderthals buried in what appears to be a single community layer included a father and his teenage daughter, and a second pair of individuals who shared roughly a quarter of their DNA.

While these are just two sites, they reflect a broader trend that shows up repeatedly in genetic data: Human groups tended to operate through what Alex described as a nested structure: Tens of thousands of years ago, small groups of perhaps 20 or 30 individuals maintained broader ties through ceremonies, intermarriage between human groups and exchange with other groups.

In contrast, data from Neanderthal sites reveal that they tended to cluster in small, tightly knit groups that remained relatively separate from other Neanderthal populations.

Unlike modern humans, Neanderthals didn't regularly mate with individuals in other communities, Alex said. The result, written in their genomes, is that individuals within a single Neanderthal group were often closely related. Their genomes show low genetic diversity across the board, — "kind of suggesting they're always a population on the verge," Alex said, "like an endangered species."

Still, there had to be some out-group mating. At sites where researchers have extracted genomes from several Neanderthal individuals, the pattern is consistent: Male Neanderthals were more closely related to each other than female Neanderthals were to each other. Females, by contrast, seemed more likely to have come from elsewhere. This is the signature of a "patrilocal" social structure in which males stay in their birth groups and females move between them.

Neanderthals' insularity sharpens a key question: If Neanderthal groups weren't regularly folding in Neanderthal females from distant communities, they would probably be even less likely to incorporate female H. sapiens. So how did modern-human women end up producing offspring with Neanderthal men at all?

A numbers problem

Fernando Villanea, a population geneticist at the University of Colorado Boulder, thinks the question may be framed backward. The image of Neanderthal males raising hybrid children with modern-human females within Neanderthal communities, he argues, probably inverts what actually happened.

Something the genomes of late Neanderthals — those living toward the end of their long history in Eurasia — make clear is that they were roughly 10 times more inbred than the modern human ancestors who were then expanding out of Africa in large numbers, he noted. That level of inbreeding isn't usually a choice; it reflects how small and fragmented Neanderthal populations likely were.

Archaeological and paleoclimatic data fill in the context: The ecosystems Neanderthals were best adapted to were shrinking as the planet entered a warmer, more humid period. Modern humans, who had evolved in hotter, wetter African environments, were simply better suited to Europe's new conditions, experts think.

The resulting numerical imbalance changes how scientists think about mating between Neanderthals and modern humans.

"We need to imagine scenarios where a majority of modern human groups traveling into Eurasia are encountering a vanishing minority of Neanderthals," Villanea told Live Science.

In the crucial period between roughly 50,000 and 44,000 years ago, when much of the interbreeding that left a trace in our DNA took place, Neanderthal DNA made up 5% of the modern human genome. Given how heavily humans outnumbered Neanderthals at the time, "that's a lot of matings occurring between the two." The most likely story, Villanea proposes, is "human groups absorbing surviving Neanderthal individuals and raising their children in a mostly human group."

His 2018 study in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution established that this happened across multiple distinct episodes — and the later ones are particularly telling. Some ancient H. sapiens genomes from Europe around 40,000 years ago, according to the study, carry Neanderthal ancestry from individuals who lived just a few generations after archaeologists can no longer find any physical trace of Neanderthals in the region at all.

Even the very last Neanderthal survivors were still contributing to the H. sapiens gene pool. A 2024 study by Leonardo Iasi and colleagues similarly determined that almost 90% of total Neanderthal ancestry in humans today came from a main pulse roughly 50,000 to 45,000 years ago, likely in the Middle East, with the rest trickling in from more sporadic encounters scattered across Eurasia.

That paints a picture of meetings becoming rarer and rarer as Neanderthals disappeared, with hybridization continuing whenever they did meet up. "This, to me, says deliberate integration of Neanderthal individuals into human groups," Villanea said.

The cost of being hybrid

We know that some hybrid Neanderthal-H. sapiens survived because "we still carry the legacy of their existence," Alex said. However, we know they didn't thrive, because the Neanderthal ancestry of our ancestral populations eroded quickly.

Most genes work in concert with other genes across the genome. When Neanderthal-specific variants entered the modern-human genome, it was like trying to put gears from one machine into a slightly different one; the parts didn't quite fit together. As a result, natural selection removed the Neanderthal variants rapidly. Villanea's calculations, based on the rate at which chromosomes recombine during cell division, suggest the drop from the original approximately 5% Neanderthal DNA roughly 50,000 to 45,000 years ago to the roughly 2% carried today happened in around 10 human generations.

"That's very fast," he said. "In real-life terms, that means a lot of hybrids did not survive to reproduce, and the ones that did probably had to deal with life-long health problems."

Platt's team looked at genetic evidence from multiple sites across Eurasia and found that the genetic purge ran in the opposite direction, too. Modern-human DNA was also being selected out of Neanderthal genomes.

Neither had inherently superior genes, Platt concluded. The gene variants were simply optimized for the separate evolutionary histories of their respective lineages, hundreds of thousands of years of independent adaptation that made certain combinations disadvantageous, if not fatal.

Where the hybrids ended up

If Neanderthal males and modern-human females really were producing more surviving offspring than the reverse pairing, where did those children end up?

Villanea was cautious about reading too much into the X chromosome pattern on its own to answer that question. The imbalance Platt found is real, he said — not a statistical quirk. But "there is nothing in the X chromosome data that says it's based on human or Neanderthal mating preference," as Platt proposes.

The same pattern could, in theory, emerge from Neanderthal males leaving their birth groups to find mates, but as archaeological evidence suggests, this was not typical behavior. More likely, he argues, is something biological.

In Peromyscus maniculatus and Peromyscus polionotus — two closely related species of North American deer mouse — a phenomenon called genomic imprinting causes hybrid offspring to develop differently in the womb depending on which species was the father and which was the mother. This pattern has nothing to do with behavior or preference. A similar process in early humans could have made Neanderthal father-H. sapiens mother pairings more likely to produce surviving offspring than the reverse, without either group consciously choosing anything.

"We simply don't know enough yet," Villanea said.

Distinguishing between these explanations — social behavior versus biological incompatibility — will require more Neanderthal genomes from the critical period of contact, ideally spanning multiple geographic regions, experts said.

There's another clue in genetic evidence from a 2026 study of 27 late Neanderthals who lived between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago in what is now Belgium and France. None of those individuals showed any sign of recent ancestry from modern humans, even as H. sapiens from the same era demonstrably carried Neanderthal DNA.

If hybrid children had been raised in Neanderthal groups and went on to reproduce there, those groups' genomes should retain traces of those events ‪—‬ but they don't.

As for whether modern-human groups were patrilocal — with males staying, females moving — the answer is considerably more variable than in Neanderthals. Modern-human communities across cultures show a range of patterns, with both sexes leaving their birth groups depending on circumstance, Alex said. That flexibility may have been part of what made human groups better able to absorb outside individuals.

What we still don't know

Neither genetics nor archaeology has yet been able to answer the question at the center of this story: whether these encounters were by choice, by circumstance, or by force. Platt's team set it aside deliberately, and Alex is careful about it, too.

"We still wouldn't know if it was consensual or coerced," she said.

It's worth being specific about what different scenarios would look like archaeologically. If Neanderthal and modern-human individuals mingled through peaceful alliances, we might expect to find toolmaking techniques or symbolic objects crossing between groups at contact sites — precisely the kind of evidence that is absent at Grotte Mandrin, where, as Slimak noted, the two groups' technical traditions remained entirely distinct.

Slimak, writing from Grotte Mandrin in the middle of his excavation season, urged even more restraint. The genetic data, he said, are "consistent with an asymmetry" — gene flow moved more successfully through Neanderthal males and H. sapiens females than the reverse — but that is where the certainty ends.

The data says nothing about culture, desire, attraction or intent. "That entire social world has been added afterwards," he said.

The same signal, he pointed out, could emerge from a variety of histories — female mobility, demographic imbalance, alliance, exchange, capture, differential survival among hybrids. And these factors could contribute alone or in combination. Even the categories available for describing female movement may be too blunt. A single instance of migration, in traditional societies, can involve marriage, family strategy, alliance, obligation and violence all at once, in combinations that leave no trace for archaeology to disentangle.

"We may identify that a woman came from elsewhere," Slimak said. "We cannot recover her consent."

However, the convergence of genetics, demography and archaeology does reveal a structural picture, if not a sociological one.

The interbreeding was directional and repeated, patterned in ways that map onto the social organization of both groups — and driven in large part, Villanea's model suggests, by the sheer demographic weight of a growing human population folding in what remained of a disappearing one. Neanderthal males, in dwindling and insular communities, appear to have been the ones whose genes crossed into the larger H. sapiens world. Their children, in all likelihood, were raised as humans.

"Genes do not preserve past loves," Slimak said. "They preserve what was transmitted. And between transmission and lived experience lies almost the whole of human society."

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Archaeologists have recovered a well-preserved bronze sword from a volcanic lake in Italy. The 3,300-year-old weapon may have been deposited in the lake as an offering to a deity or for a high-status warrior who lived long before the rise of the Etruscans or the Romans.

The sword was found in Lake Mezzano, which is located in the crater of an ancient volcano roughly 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of Rome, according to a translated statement from the Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Province of Viterbo and Southern Etruria. Dating to the Late Bronze Age (14th to 13th centuries B.C.), the sword has maintained its sharp edge. It is the third such sword found in Lake Mezzano in the past 50 years.

Bronze Age people erected pile dwellings or stilt houses in what is now Lake Mezzano, and archaeologists recovered parts of the submerged settlement during their recent investigations. According to the statement, researchers also found numerous intact vases, axes, arrowheads, daggers, spearheads, pins and a bronze razor.

The sword and the razor were found near each other, suggesting the two artifacts may have been linked to a person of high social status, such as an elite warrior. But the placement of the metal weapons in a lake may also be related to a wider Bronze Age ritual practice where hoards of jewelry and bent or ritually "killed" artifacts were tossed into bodies of water. This practice continued through the centuries into Etruscan times, when wells were ritually "closed" with artifacts and human sacrifices.

During the 13th century B.C., people in central Italy engaged in trade networks that spanned the Mediterranean. "In this context, bronze weapons were not only instruments of combat, but also symbols of prestige, identity, and power," according to the statement.

The sword and other artifacts discovered in Lake Mezzano are giving archaeologists new information about the people who flourished in prehistoric Italy long before the Romans and Etruscans. Additional research is planned in the coming years, according to the statement.

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The enigmatic and now-extinct Denisovans of China shared traits with Neanderthals, modern humans and Homo erectus, according to a new study that looked at ancient proteins and fossils. But the Denisovans also had several unique skull traits and genetic variants that made them a distinctive ancient human group, according to the researchers ‪—‬ and these traits have now revealed a new face for a Denisovan man.

In the study, published Oct. 21 in the journal Nature, researchers analyzed Denisovan skulls from the archaeological site of Xujiayao in northern China. The Denisovans were a group of ancient humans who lived in Asia and disappeared around 30,000 years ago. This human relative was first identified in 2010 from the DNA of a finger bone discovered in a cave in Siberia.

The Xujiayao bones and teeth were excavated in the late 1970s, long before scientists knew about the existence of Denisovans, and were initially thought to be either Neanderthals or archaic Homo sapiens due to the shape of the fossils and their age: 138,000 to 199,000 years old.

But recent advances in paleoproteomics ‪—‬ the study of bone and tooth proteins that persist longer than DNA ‪—‬ have helped researchers identify Denisovan individuals due to specific genetic variants that differentiate them from other ancient human groups.

In the new study, researchers used paleoproteomic analysis on 20 remains from Xujaiyao and determined that all of them were from Denisovans. This determination then allowed the researchers to study the skull bones closely and figure out what Denisovans might have looked like.

The Xujiayao skulls had some features similar to H. erectus, the researchers wrote, including a low and wide braincase and thick cranial bones. But they also had anatomical features more similar to those of Neanderthals and modern humans, particularly in their bicuspids (the teeth between the canines and molars). The researchers also identified some unique Denisovan cranial traits. The back of the skull, for example, was more vertical and less rounded than in Neanderthals or modern humans.

Armed with a better understanding of Denisovan skull shape from the Xujiayao fossils, the researchers compared them with East Asian Denisovan remains that some experts have assigned to other species, such as Homo juluensis and Homo longi. But the researchers identified similarities that may preclude splitting Denisovans into different species.

"This unique combination of morphological traits, distinct from H. erectus, modern humans and Neanderthal-lineage hominins, supports the assignment of most members of East Asian late Middle Pleistocene archaic Homo as Denisovans," they wrote in the study. This means that Denisovans may have been one human lineage that adapted to diverse ecological zones across Asia over hundreds of thousands of years.

"It is still possible that there are some other lineages that existed in East Asia during the time Denisovans are known to have existed," study co-author Qiaomei Fu, director of the Ancient DNA Laboratory at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Live Science in an email.

"We know from DNA that Denisovans were a very varied group genetically, which split early into different populations," Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email. "These could have developed a lot of morphological variation, which may well surprise us as the sample of fossils grows."

The researchers also produced a new reconstruction of what a Denisovan man might have looked like. A previous DNA study suggested that Denisovans likely had dark skin, brown hair and brown eyes. The new reconstruction shows the Denisovan looking directly at the viewer, with his low, wide braincase mostly obscured by dark hair flowing back from his massive brow ridge. There are clear similarities between the Denisovan man and Neanderthals as well as modern humans, but the Denisovan has a distinct visage all his own.

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Scientists have sequenced the genomes of three Late Stone Age people who lived in Europe 30,000 years ago and discovered that they had closer biological ties than researchers previously thought. The new finding suggests that places like southwestern France may have been critical cultural hubs during the last ice age.

Shortly after Neanderthals disappeared from Europe, a Stone Age culture known as the Gravettian spread across the continent. Artifacts found during archaeological excavations ‪—‬ including portable art, such as "Venus figurines" ‪—‬ have shown that the Gravettian culture lasted from about 34,000 to 25,000 years ago. But ancient DNA has been recovered from only two dozen human skeletons from the Gravettian period, so questions about these people's ancestry remain unanswered.

Based on the small number of genomes from Gravettian people that were previously sequenced, experts believed that groups in Western Europe were largely separate from groups in Eastern Europe. But in a study published Oct. 23 in the journal Science Advances, researchers sequenced the genomes of three people who lived in what are now Spain, France and Italy during the Gravettian period. They discovered that one person had mixed genetic ancestry that revealed East-West exchange at least 30,000 years ago.

"Our results show that eastern and western European populations were not as genetically isolated as previously assumed," study first author Pere Gelabert, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Vienna, said in a statement.

The new information about mixed ancestry comes from a woman who died around 30,000 years ago and whose bones were found in Isturitz Cave in southwestern France. Originally used by Neanderthals, Isturitz Cave was occupied off and on from about 80,000 to 10,000 years ago. Cups made out of human skulls dated to roughly 15,000 to 12,000 years ago have also been found in Isturitz Cave.

Researchers found that the DNA from the Gravettian woman in Isturitz Cave was most similar to the previously known Western European genomes, but with an intriguing connection to Eastern and Central European groups.

This discovery of gene flow from the East is uncommon for the Late Stone Age, also known as the Upper Paleolithic, the researchers wrote in the study. It "could be explained by movements of people from Eastern Europe during the Gravettian period, which eventually contributed to this ancestry in Isturitz." Specifically, the researchers dated this "pulse" of gene flow to about 31,500 to 32,500 years ago.

The DNA evidence supports the archaeological theory that Isturitz Cave was an important cultural and biological hub for tens of thousands of years during the Late Stone Age, as the cave was located at a critical passage between continental Europe and the Iberian Peninsula, the researchers wrote.

All three newly sequenced Gravettian genomes revealed close biological connections to Western European groups, as well as genetic traits suggesting they had dark skin, dark hair and dark eyes. What's more, all of them had parents who weren't closely related to each other, suggesting that those populations may have actively avoided inbreeding.

"Overall, our results suggest that population structure and gene flow in western Europe during the Gravettian were more complex and dynamic than previously assumed," the researchers wrote.

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Native Hawaiians and Easter Islanders genetically descend from the same "ultravoyager" Polynesian group that crossed vast distances of ocean to reach these remote islands, a new study finds.

Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui) and Hawaii are part of Polynesia, a group of more than 1,000 islands spread over an area of the Pacific Ocean roughly equal to the areas of North and South America combined. Hawaii and Easter Island are the farthest of these isles from each other, at about 4,500 miles (7,200 kilometers) apart — around the distance from San Francisco to Lima, Peru.

The researchers discovered the connection by analyzing the genomes of 1,050 modern individuals across Polynesia, including 317 Native Hawaiians and 12 Easter Islanders. "Each person's genome contains genetic code from both parents, and from all four grandparents, and their parents, and so on," study co-author Alexander Ioannidis, a computational geneticist at Stanford University, told Live Science. "Each genome encodes an enormous number of ancestors. So with even a few individuals, we can get information about an enormous number of people from each island."

Specifically, the scientists compared the length of chromosomal segments shared among people from different islands. The longer these shared segments are between two people, the more recently they shared a common ancestor.

Even though Hawaii and Easter Island are far-flung, the researchers discovered that the Indigenous people of Hawaii and Rapa Nui are the most genetically related to one another. The team reported its findings Oct. 8 in the journal Science.

"This was really shocking at first — these islands are so distant from one another," Ioannidis said.

The scientists found that Hawaii and Easter Island were likely both settled by members of a single "ultravoyager" culture from the Mangareva islands, about 3,440 miles (5,530 km) southeast of Hawaii and 1,600 miles (2,600 km) west of Easter Island. (In 2020, the researchers found that members of this ultravoyaging group had mixed with Indigenous people in what is now Colombia, although it's unclear if this partnering occurred on an island or on the continent.)

"Once you know there was this extremely capable long-distance ultravoyaging culture capable of reaching one of these islands, having it reach the other makes more sense," Ioannidis said.

The area near Mangareva, including the Austral Islands, the Society Islands, the Marquesas Islands, and the Tuamotu Archipelago, "spans an area the size of Europe," Ioannidis said. "Sailing in-between these islands would have required skilled navigation. So it makes sense that developing such long-distance navigation skills would have ultimately helped people settle far-off Easter Island and Hawaii."

All in all, these genetic findings suggest the ancestors of Native Hawaiians and Easter Islanders shared some time together as a common group after splitting away from the population of ancient Mangareva. Some members of this group then went on to settle Hawaii, and others from this Mangareva group voyaged to Easter Island.

This new genetic data linking Hawaii, Easter Island and Mangareva "agrees very well with what we see archaeologically," Patrick Kirch, an archaeologist at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa who did not take part in this research, told Live Science. "It gives scientists a lot of confidence when independent lines of evidence from different disciplines give similar results."

Founder effect

The researchers also investigated the effects of genetic bottlenecks that resulted when these islands were settled by small numbers of people — phenomena known as "founder effects."

"If you have a rare genetic trait that happens to occur in this small number of individuals, if this small population grows rapidly, this trait can go on to show up in a high percentage of the resulting population," Ioannidis said. "So if a rare genetic variant once only affected a few people, it can start affecting a decent number of individuals."

The scientists found that Native Polynesian populations examined in the study often experienced a compounding set of founder effects over time. This is because islands settled by a few people then went on to send out small groups to settle other islands, and so on.

Previous research has looked at the founder effects in groups of European descent, such as the Amish, Finns and Ashkenazi Jews, resulting in standard screenings for certain genetic conditions in these groups.

The new study revealed that an even stronger founder effect has been overlooked among Native Hawaiians, with founder effects more than 10 times larger than in those European groups.

"The founder effect doesn't just reflect genetic diversity, but also cultural and linguistic diversity," Kirch said. "It probably helps explain why the cultures of eastern Polynesia all share a lot in common — they all trace to one central group."

These findings not only shed light on Polynesians' past, but also their current health. The researchers found that three genetic variants that are exceedingly rare among the global population — linked with dislocated lenses in the eyes, progressive vision loss, and kidney failure — are carried by 2 to 3% of the eastern Polynesians they studied.

"There should be a lot more resources going into learning more about gene variants of potential clinical significance among this population of Native Hawaiians, which is twice as large as the U.S. Amish population," Ioannidis said. "There are really opportunities for precision health here."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In 1833, stone quarry workers discovered an ancient burial mound at Goblins' Hill near the town of Mold in Wales. At the center was a stone-lined grave that contained a fragmented skeleton and a gold, cape-like accessory that had been crushed over time. The Mold gold cape has a unique shape and style, and it is one of the finest examples of prehistoric goldwork ever found, according to the British Museum, where the artifact is on display.

The cape dates to Britain's Early Bronze Age (2500 to 1200 B.C.), a time that saw a metalworking revolution as artisans shifted from crafting flint tools to making weapons and jewelry out of gold, copper and bronze.

When the cape was originally unearthed, experts assumed that it had belonged to an ancient warrior, chief or religious leader, due to the spectacular design of the object, Benjamin Roberts, then curator for the European Bronze Age collections at the British Museum, told the BBC in 2010. But after the broken pieces of the cape were put back together, the small size of the artifact suggested it may have been worn by a woman or a child.

The Mold gold cape measures roughly 9.3 inches (23.5 centimeters) tall and 18.3 inches (46.5 cm) wide. It weighs about 1.2 pounds (560 grams) and was probably crafted from a single lump of gold about the size of a ping-pong ball.

The gold ingot was beaten incredibly thin, fashioned into a cape, and then embellished with decorations that mimicked beads or necklaces, according to the British Museum. Additionally, several hundred amber beads were found on the cape in the grave, which likely added to the gilded appearance of the accessory. Perforations around the neck opening suggest the cape originally had a lining made of leather or another perishable material that did not survive.

Because the gold cape, when worn, would restrict a person's upper arm movements, it may have been a ceremonial accessory that conferred religious authority and was worn only on special occasions. But experts are still unsure why the cape was buried in a grave. Nor can they confirm whether the person it was interred with was male or female, as the skeleton was not recovered by the quarry workers in the 19th century.

"The cape is unique — there is really nothing to compare it to in the whole of Europe," Roberts told the BBC. "This makes it more difficult to understand why it was made and what significance it had."

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

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In the 17th and 18th centuries, the fear of vampires reached extraordinarily heights. People believed corpses could reanimate and wander around, terrorizing villages and spreading disease. They went to extreme lengths to prevent a vampire from rising. Some chopped the deceased person's head off, others placed sickles across their necks. Many were placed face down in their graves. In one grave in Poland, the remains of a boy were found with an iron padlock around his foot.

In this excerpt from "Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World" (Princeton University Press, 2025), author and historian John Blair reveals the impact the printed press had on the spread of vampiric lore — and the grizzly purported practice of ingesting the blood and organs of a vampire to prevent other people becoming one.

With the invention of printing, the circulation of European stories about restless corpses moved up several gears. Occasional early references were followed by a clutch of theological and philosophical discussions during c. 1580-1610, and then — from the 1670s — a steadily growing volume of printed academic and historical debate and commentary, reaching a climax in 1732.

Another landmark came in 1746 when the Benedictine scholar Dom Augustin Calmet published his survey of supernatural beings, which was quickly reissued in several editions, including an English one of 1759. This book's section on vampires was the most influential academic work on the subject ever published. Its straightforwardly evidence-based approach was a breath of fresh air after a long series of increasingly derivative works.

It achieved its remarkable popularity because it entered the market at the right point: saturated with so much fragmented and repetitive discussion of "vampires" (still a relatively new word), the reading public wanted a textbook. Calmet inspired a huge progeny of followers and popularisers, bringing the stories to a much wider readership; a good example of the genre is the Histoire des vampires et des spectres malfaisants [History of Vampires and Malevolent Specters] of 1820, a pocketbook that re-packages Calmet for the mass market.

Calmet's book remains the ultimate source of much modern vampire literature in Europe and America, both fi­ctional and supposedly historical, and was transformative in bringing the topic to a wider reading public. There and elsewhere, stories were now frozen on the printed page, where later generations could read them. But they were stories still: not necessarily more reliable, and by no means stable in transmission.

The complexity of interactions between learned discourse and popular practice is illustrated by one particularly bizarre and repellant (not to say dangerous) strand in the belief-system. This is the practice of ingesting blood or organs from a supposed vampire corpse, or ashes derived from burning them, as a remedy for vampire-induced illness.

Although not wholly dissimilar from the idea that victims will recover as they watch the smoke rise from burning vampire organs — already known in 11th-century England — its shocking physicality sets it apart. Did people in pre-modern Europe really do this?

A complicating factor is the medicinal use of human blood and bodyparts, in accordance with the theories of the physician, philosopher, and alchemist "Paracelsus" (Theophrastus von Hohenheim, c. 1493–1541). A brilliant experimenter, Paracelsus believed that substances healed through occult 'influences' or 'spirits,' the most powerful being those derived from what they were meant to cure: the human body.

The fact that medicine now rejects these hypotheses should not make us view them patronizingly: in the early modern period, ingesting or anointing with substances from Egyptian mummies or the blood of executed criminals seemed as rational as doing the same with any other substance. These Paracelsian ideas entered popular practice: at a beheading in Vienna in 1668/9, a man ran forward and caught the spouting blood to cure his epilepsy.

The tangled story of consuming blood from vampire corpses starts in a different and very unexpected place. In 1687, a major ethnographical account of parts of West Africa by the Capuchin missionary Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi was published in Bologna. In it, Cavazzi describes magical and medical practices among the Mbundu of Angola, including a method of obtaining vital curative fluid from undecayed corpses:

When they are in a fresh and intact state when unearthed, their heads are cut from their bodies, from which it is said that blood flows out (which may happen through some illusion or deceit). It is collected and made into poultices for the sick, or mixed into their food, which infallibly guarantees health. Thereafter the dead person, having lost his strength, will no longer be able to harass them.

From Angola to Paris: in May 1693, a story appeared in the society magazine Mercure Galant. The author was the courtier and polymath Pierre des Noyers (1607–93), who spent several years in Poland in the entourage of Queen Louise-Marie. Much earlier, in 1639, he had written to a friend about the being known as upior (Ruthenian) or striga (Polish): born with teeth; eating its shroud and then its hands and arms in the coffi­n; causing successive deaths of family members; and extinguished by decapitation and release of pent-up blood.

This story is rather highly coloured (eating the hands and arms is unusual), but it does probably originate in genuine oral accounts of the shroud-chewer belief.

Very different is des Noyers’s account from 1693. Now the striges and upierz have become corpse-hijacking demons: 'It is said that the demon takes this blood from the body of a living person, or from certain animals, and carries it into a dead body; for it is alleged that the demon goes out from this corpse during a certain period, between noon and midnight, after which it returns and stores there the blood that it has gathered.'

The blood comes out of the mouth, nose, and ears of the corpse, the corpse swims in blood, and it starts to eat its shroud. The demon especially troubles former associates and relatives of the dead 'host,' appearing to them in the guise of parents or friends, and does not leave until all the family members have died in succession. The remedy is to exhume the corpse, which is found soft, flexible, bloated, and red:

When they are found in that state, having the likeness of those who had appeared in dreams, their heads are cut off and their hearts are opened, and a quantity of blood flows out. It is collected and kneaded into flour, which is made into bread, which is a certain remedy to guarantee against such a terrible affliction. After the heads [of the dead people] have been cut off, those whom the Spirit torments at night are no longer troubled by it, and are well thereafter.

This narrative has problems. The idea of the demon using the corpse as a safe-deposit for its hoard of blood seems to be unique; so, probably, is the time-slot between noon and midnight. These read like clerical rationalizations, perhaps fed to des Noyers by some Polish priest and overlaid on his earlier, more authentic observations. But more fundamentally, it seems obvious that des Noyers’s account of Poland shamelessly re-works Cavazzi's account of Angola, published eight years previously.

It might not be quite so simple. An earlier common source, still unidenti­fied, remains possible. The descriptions of mixing blood into food and poultices look remarkably close to Paracelsian ideas, extended from ordinary corpses to undead ones: was even Cavazzi's account distorted by his own medical learning? But in any case des Noyers’s account is a piece of unprincipled plagiarism, worthless as evidence for Polish folk-belief.

Even so, it has bounced down through the echo-chambers of vampire literature ever since. The following year, a lawyer called Marigner built on the narrative — which he took at face value — with long philosophical musings on the nature of vampires. Inevitably, in 1746, it was republished in Calmet's book, which made it permanently available to vampire-aware readers.

While otherwise faithful to des Noyers, Calmet's version irons out the motif of demonic corpse-possession by calling this predator a vampire 'or a demon in its form.' This process of moulding to a more familiar template culminates in a recent version that presents the story as straightforward ethnographic reporting, omitting the demonic motif completely.

So far, this has just been a morality tale of plagiarism and uncritical copying. But in 1713, at Dąbrówka (now western Ukraine), some villagers were tried in the Uniate episcopal court for exhuming a woman's corpse and mutilating it in inventive ways. They admitted to the exhumation (because the dead woman had been walking around and attacking people), and to drinking the corpse's blood mixed with vodka. They denied cutting out the heart, mixing the blood into flour, and baking cakes with it, but the judges were sceptical and made them swear an oath.

This will sound very familiar to readers of early modern witch trials, where suspects were regularly bullied into admitting bizarre fantasies formulated by the persecutors. In this case, it seems clear that at least the idea of the blood-cakes was suggested by the judges; the same could be true of the blood-drinking, even though the accused were induced to confess that. It is distinctly possible, not to say likely, that an ordinary corpse-killing was embellished with luridly fi­ctitious detail by judges who knew des Noyers's report from twenty years earlier.

Killing The Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World. Copyright © 2025 by John Blair, published by Princeton University Press and reprinted here by permission.

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At nearly 10 feet (3 meters) tall and around 500 pounds (230 kilograms), Gigantopithecus was the largest primate that ever lived.

Foraging across the dense tropical forests of Southeast Asia between 2 million and 200,000 years ago, the giant ape may have shared the habitat with new arrivals — hominins such as Homo erectus. (Hominins are members of the group that includes modern humans, their ancestors and closely related species, after the evolutionary split from great apes.)

Despite their immense size Gigantopithecus mainly consumed plants and is closely related to modern-day orangutans.

So what would have happened when Gigantopithecus encountered these human ancestors?

Experts suggested a variety of possible scenarios, including that Gigantopithecus and human ancestors didn't encounter each other at all.

It's "very difficult to say with any certainty, as we have no direct evidence documenting interactions between Gigantopithecus and human ancestors," Renaud Joannes-Boyau, director of higher-degree research training at Southern Cross University in Australia and an archaeologist who has conducted extensive research into human evolution, told Live Science in an email.

"That said, if we look at the broader pattern of human evolution, our lineage [Homo] has consistently behaved as an apex predator," Joannes-Boyau said. "Humans and our ancestors have shown a remarkable tendency to explore, exploit and, at times, eliminate large animals that shared their environment. I think it is reasonable to imagine that those interactions may have involved a mixture of indifference, curiosity and violence, depending on the circumstances."

Friedemann Schrenk, a professor of paleobiology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, thinks Gigantopithecus would have likely tried to avoid humans. "Humans were and are the most aggressive primates ever on earth using tools and weapons and were probably encroaching on Gigantopithecus habitats," he told Live Science in an email. Homo erectus made use of hand axes and possibly hafted spears.

Schrenk envisions the hypothetical interactions as similar to those between modern-day humans and orangutans, which has resulted in humans encroaching on orangutan habitats and the apes' populations declining. "After all, Gigantopithecus was a gigantic orangutan," he said, noting that if there was hostility in a direct encounter, early humans would have been the aggressors.

Different environments?

Yet it's also possible that Gigantopithecus and hominins lived in different environments in Southeast Asia, which would have minimized the number of interactions they had, said Hervé Bocherens, a professor of biogeology at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

The "carbon stable isotopic ratios measured on some teeth of both taxa suggest a different habitat, closed forests for Gigantopithecus and open savannah for Homo erectus," Bocherens told Live Science in an email. However, because of limited data, "we cannot exclude that some hominins were also present in more forested environments," he added. Grinding patterns in their teeth suggest that Gigantopithecus' diet was essentially plant-based and may have included bamboo.

In a 2024 study, scientists investigated the demise of Gigantopithecus and found no evidence that hominins contributed to Gigantopithecus' extinction. Instead, they determined that the main cause was environmental change that resulted in a reduction in the forested environment where Gigantopithecus lived and foraged. In fact, hominins and Gigantopithecus may not have encountered each other at all, Yingqi Zhang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and first author of the paper, told Live Science in an email.

We can only imagine what hominins would have thought when they glimpsed these gigantic creatures. It’s not clear how hominins and Gigantopithecus would have interacted, if they ever did, said Frido Welker, a professor of biomolecular paleoanthropology at the University of Copenhagen. He thinks they would have avoided each other but they may have "been in awe when they did happen to run into each other."

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The Nazca Lines are the most famous geoglyphs in the world. Dating back around 2,000 years and reaching a combined length of more than 800 miles (1,300 kilometers), they depict a variety of motifs, including humans, animals, geometric shapes, plants and flowers. These designs were constructed on the arid hills and valleys of coastal Peru by the Nazca people between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500, long before writing was used in the region.

It's not clear exactly how many Nazca Lines there are, but they number in the thousands, with new geoglyphs continuing to be discovered with the help of AI.

But why were the Nazca Lines built?

Scientists have been debating this question since the lines were first formally investigated in the early 20th century. Although the definite answer remains unknown, experts have proposed various reasons for the famous geoglyphs.

There "are many ideas out there about their function and meaning," Ana Nieves, a professor of art history at Northeastern Illinois University, told Live Science in an email. "If you look at the area's geoglyphs closely, though, there are different styles of geoglyphs, some are relatively larger and some smaller, some are on hillsides while some are on the pampas. It is not likely that a single explanation would apply to all."

Different perspectives

A vast array of theories for the lines' uses have been proposed over the years, with the most outlandish of these suggesting that they were sites for aliens to land spaceships.

More grounded theories link the lines to cultural and religious practices.

"The question of why the geoglyphs exist is difficult to answer, given that we lack any type of preserved oral or written testimony," Karsten Lambers, an art history professor at the University of Augsburg in Germany, wrote in an essay published in the book "Los geoglifos: imágenes y escenarios en el desierto de Nazca y Palpa [The Geoglyphs: images and settings in the desert of Nazca and Palpa]" (University of Augsburg, 2017). It's possible that the uses for the geoglyphs changed over time, he added.

One suggestion is that they were initially used to mark routes for travelers and caravans and later became places for gathering and feasting.

In a 2026 study, researchers noted that some of the earlier Nazca geoglyphs were constructed on hillsides, seem to be located on trails, and "were visible from considerable distances." This means the geoglyphs may have been used to mark travel routes and indicate areas that were good for temporary camps. The team suggested that the markings became places for gathering and feasting.

Another idea is that the geoglyphs were used to match astronomical alignments to serve as a kind of calendar. In December 1941, historian Paul Kosok examined the lines and determined that they had astronomical alignments. Mathematician Maria Reiche followed up on Kosok's work, examining the Nazca Lines for more than 40 years to identify many geoglyphs she believed have an astronomical relationship to various celestial bodies, a research team noted in a 2021 paper. Yet after analyzing the geoglyphs, the modern-day team found that only a relatively small number had a possible alignment to a star or solar event such as a solstice.

"The results suggest that the geoglyphs, as a whole, certainly cannot be interpreted as a calendar system," the team wrote. However, this doesn't discredit the idea that the Nazca Lines had an astronomical significance, Christiane Richter, a researcher at the University of Applied Sciences in Germany and first author of the 2021 paper, told Live Science in an email.

Since the paper's publication, Richter and her team's research has indicated that around 8% of the geoglyphs have some form of lunar alignment. It is "highly probable that celestial bodies played a role in the creation of the drawings," Richter said in an email.

Offerings such as ceramics, crabs, corn and earrings made from Spondylus shells (a genus of bivalves known as thorny oysters) were also placed on low rock platforms near some of the geoglyphs, especially those shaped like trapezoids, Lambers noted in his paper. Spondylus shells are normally found farther north, in Ecuador, but during El Niño events, they can appear farther south, in Peru. These shells, alongside crabs and corn, tend to be associated with water and fertility, Lambers noted.

Another idea is that the geoglyphs themselves may have been used for ritual processions. Some of the geoglyphs are made with a single, uninterrupted line," Nieves said. "Those are the ones that would lend themselves for processions since people could walk them in a single file."

Some of the activities at the Nazca Lines may have helped foster a sense of community and equality, said Darryl Wilkinson, a professor of religion at Dartmouth University who has written about the geoglyphs. For instance, "walking the lines was a group activity, and participating in such processions would have likely created a feeling of community among those involved," Wilkinson told Live Science in an email. "I interpret the Nasca lines as geared towards the realization of a relatively more equal expression of community."

Whatever the reasons for their construction the Nazca Lines are awe inspiring today. Lambers wrote in his essay that the Nazca people who built them "succeeded in transforming one of the driest deserts in the world, over the course of many centuries, to serve the region’s inhabitants as an expression of their cultural ideas and a setting for their social activities."

A rare silver coin minted during the reign of a famous Viking king has been discovered in a massive hoard in Norway that now comprises 5,500 coins and counting.

The coin is inscribed with the name of the Norwegian king Olaf Haraldsson, who ruled from 1015 to 1028 and, as St. Olaf or "Olaf the Holy," is considered the national saint of Norway.

Fewer than 20 coins minted during Olaf's reign have ever been discovered, and the newfound coin is a "national treasure," according to a statement from the University of Oslo's Museum of Cultural History.

"Here we have a coin bearing the king's portrait and a cross, with another cross on the reverse," University of Oslo coin expert Svein Gullbekk said in the statement. "It is a Christianisation coin on a grand scale."

Olaf is credited with establishing Christianity in Norway — an early step toward its full conversion about a generation later.

"We can see how King Olaf used coinage to legitimise the new faith and to establish himself as a Christian king of European standing," Gullbekk said. "This is branding."

Viking king

Haraldsson learned about Christianity when he joined Viking raids against England and France as a young man, and he was baptized in the French city of Rouen in about 1013, according to the statement.

He became Norway's king in 1015, and in about 1024 proclaimed that only Christianity would be legal, according to the University of Bergen. Much of Norway, however, remained faithful to the Norse gods during his rule, especially around the central Trøndelag region and in the eastern parts of the country.

But Olaf was made a Christian saint shortly after his death in 1030. He is now recognized as one of the first Christian kings of Norway and the first Norwegian king to issue coins in his own name.

The newfound coin is part of the Mørstad Hoard, which was discovered near the village of Rena in April. At that time, the buried hoard was described as the largest ever found in Norway and was estimated to contain almost 3,000 silver coins. However, subsequent research has determined that it includes anywhere from 5,500 to more than 6,000 coins, the statement said.

Mistaken identity

Anne Skogsfjord, a museum researcher charged with cataloging the coins, thought the Olaf coin was an Anglo-Saxon penny at first. But then she read the inscription and realized it was minted in Norway under Olaf.

"I could see that it read ONLAF R+ NORMANORV. … Could this really be a coin of Olaf Haraldsson that I was holding?" Skogsfjord said in the statement. "And it was! It was a very special moment."

The coin was struck between about 1024 and 1028, near the end of the Viking Age, and circulated for 20 to 25 years before someone deposited it in the hoard, the statement said.

Although the minting of the coin was a political and religious act, the coin also seems to have been used as currency; both sides bear numerous small cut marks, which was a common way of determining whether a coin was made completely of silver.

Gullbekk said Haraldsson himself had decided what the coins would look like and may have been present when they were minted.

"It is entirely possible that this very coin from Mørstad was once held in the king's own hand," he said in the statement.

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

In the late 1800s, Westminster Abbey clergy stumbled upon a mysterious sarcophagus. The lid was decorated with an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon cross, but the base had a fourth-century Roman funeral inscription. For nearly 150 years, the tomb has baffled experts, but the abbey's consulting archaeologist may have finally figured out who was buried there, according to a new study.

Westminster's chief mason unearthed the stone sarcophagus in 1869, but when experts investigated it, they discovered that the burial had been looted earlier that century. Experts also noticed that the carved decoration on the side of the sarcophagus was stylistically Roman, with a Latin inscription that can be translated as "To the memory of Valerius Amandinus. Valerius Superventor and Marcellus made this for their father." But an enormous medieval cross had been carved into the lid of the sarcophagus, suggesting that the tomb had been reused to bury an important religious figure hundreds of years later.

The mystery of the medieval individual buried in a Roman sarcophagus remained unsolved for 150 years, as no one thought that any bones were left inside. But when the stone coffin was opened for conservation in 2016 and a full skeleton was discovered, clues to the identity of the deceased finally came to light, Warwick Rodwell, the consultant archaeologist for Westminster Abbey, wrote in a study published Wednesday (Oct. 21) in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association.

Although the skeleton had been disturbed over the years, with a hole accidentally made in the skull and arm and leg bones mixed up, it was clear that the person was male, middle-aged, and of average height, bioarchaeologist James Langthorne of Pre-Construct Archaeology wrote in a 2016 report. The man also had some evidence of osteoarthritis, two healed rib injuries and gout. The bones were carbon-dated to between 987 and 1052, confirming that the Roman-era sarcophagus was reused in the Middle Ages.

"This brings us to the final question of importance: who was he?" Rodwell wrote in the study. Despite the lack of grave goods, which may have been stolen in the early 19th century, "he was almost certainly an abbot" who was given a dignified burial in a stone sarcophagus with a large cross, Rodwell wrote.

Based on the birth and death dates of the abbots of Westminster and their tenure as clergy, Rodwell narrowed the candidates down to Wulfsige (abbot from 988 to 993), Ælfwig (abbot from 993 to 1020) and Wulfnoth (abbot from 1020 to 1049). Given that Wulfsige left Westminster to become a bishop elsewhere, he was likely not buried in the abbey.

"Consequently, we have two viable contenders for the occupant of the sarcophagus," Rodwell wrote. "The fact that Ælfwig was already a monk of Westminster might favour him."

Although the final resting place of Ælfwig may have been found after a millennium, some questions remain unanswered.

For example, it is unclear why an 11th-century abbot was buried in a recycled fourth-century Roman sarcophagus. The reuse of Roman coffins is extremely unusual, Rodwell noted in the study, and nothing comparable to this sarcophagus has ever been found. One explanation for the reuse may rest with the Latin inscription, whose first word — "memoriae" (to the memory) — suggests that Valerius Amandinus was an early Christian himself. This Roman may have been a significant figure in Roman London, Rodwell wrote, but "unfortunately, nothing is known about his career."

Experts are also unsure where the Roman sarcophagus came from. It was made from limestone sourced from Oxfordshire, a county in the South of England. But perhaps the coffin was originally buried in a Roman mausoleum and they were unearthed and moved at some point, Rodwell noted. But as Rodwell pointed out in the study, "there could be a villa and its cemetery somewhere in the vicinity of Westminster Abbey, awaiting discovery."

The sarcophagus is currently on display in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries at Westminster Abbey.

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

The mysterious and undeciphered Voynich manuscript has caused consternation among code-breakers, linguists and scholars of medieval literature for more than a century. But now experts think they've worked out why it's so hard to crack: It was bound incorrectly in the 15th century, meaning the pages are out of order. The new linguistic analysis of the document has moved researchers closer to figuring out what the text was all about.

The Voynich manuscript is a medieval codex made up of leaves of parchment carbon-dated to the early 15th century. Its 240 pages are covered with about 38,000 words of a unique script called "Voynichese" along with illustrations of people, plants and astrological symbols. Also known as the Beinecke Cipher manuscript, the document was initially owned by a Holy Roman emperor and was purchased by Wilfrid Voynich in 1912. Since 1969, the manuscript has been in the collection of Yale University's rare book library. Experts have unsuccessfully tried to decipher the manuscript for more than a century.

"We don't know if it's a code," Lisa Fagin Davis, study co-author and executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, told Live Science. "But there are some odd characteristics of the Voynich manuscript in terms of its physical structure."

When doing research on the number of scribes who copied the document, Davis realized from the handwriting that the manuscript's pages alternate in ways that don't make sense. In addition, she said, "there are several examples where the image goes off the page in the middle and comes out on the other side, even though there are a bunch of pages in between."

In a study published Monday (Oct. 19) in the journal Digital Medievalist, Davis and co-author Colin Layfield, an information systems researcher at the University of Malta, suggested that the inconsistent structure of the enigmatic manuscript is the result of someone mis-binding a manuscript they were unable to read.

Medieval manuscripts were made up of rectangular sheets of parchment (animal skin), typically folded in half to produce what experts call a bifolium. Around five bifolia would typically be nested together, creating what experts call a quire. Then, a stack of quires would be bound together along the spine to create a book. However, Davis and Layfield suggested that the Voynich manuscript was intended to be a stack of singulions — a series of loose bifolia never meant to be bound together as a quire or a book.

This is not the first time a researcher has suggested the Voynich manuscript has pages out of order. But Davis and Layfield analyzed the graphic properties of the untranslated document to see if their hypothesis made sense.

"We're viewing it as a text and assuming it has a message," Layfield told Live Science, which means it should be possible to statistically compare blocks of text to see if they're similar or disconnected. Layfield used a technique called latent semantic analysis (LSA), which is a natural language processing technique invented in the late 1980s to find hidden patterns in texts.

LSA is particularly useful for small sets of data, Layfield explained. "Modern AI techniques need ridiculous amounts of data to train on, which we just don't have. We've got just 35,000 or so words. That's it." The researchers' LSA analysis of the Voynich manuscript revealed that some pages had low similarity, suggesting they may not have gone together, while others had high similarity, bolstering the idea that they were supposed to be read together.

By looking at the Voynich manuscript as a collection of singulions, Davis and Layfield solved some of the nagging issues with the document.

"When you start to think about it in the context of the other strange features of the manuscript, all of those problems are resolved," Davis said. "It solves the problem of each scribe writing one sheet. It solves the problem of the images crossing the gutter."

This means that any previous work on the Voynich manuscript that assumes it was ordered correctly now needs to be reconsidered, she said, but it also means there is new progress on the book.

"This work helps us think about whether there's actual meaning underneath it all," Davis said. "It doesn't get us there," she said about a definitive translation, "but it moves the ball because you can't make sense out of a book where all the pages are mixed up."

Davis is optimistic that someone will crack the Voynich mystery, in part because a similar modern puzzle known as Cain's Jawbone has been successfully deciphered by a handful of people. This devilishly difficult linguistic puzzle from the 1930s consists of 100 pages of a murder mystery arranged in the wrong order. Due to the unique nature of the text and its vague, stylized language, even AI has failed to solve it.

"We have some ideas for other work we want to do," Davis said. For example, there's a large water stain in the upper margin of some of the pages of the Voynich manuscript. "The stain should be symmetrical from one page to the next but it's not. That also supports the idea that the manuscript is bound out of order."

Davis and Layfield are thinking about ways to compare the stain shapes across the pages, as that may help them reorder the incorrectly organized pages.

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Archaeologists have unearthed an 11th-century wooden kitchen gadget with an ancient board game carved into the back. Medieval bakers may have used the wooden paddle not just to transfer bread into an oven but also to pass the time while they waited for the food to cook, the researchers said.

"We discovered a fragment of a fairly large shovel," Sergey Toropov, director of Novgorod State University's Center for Archaeological Research, said in a translated statement. "Most likely, it was a bread shovel, which was used to bake bread in an oven. On the reverse side, however, three squares have been carved, one inside the other."

The "bread shovel" — also known to contemporary home bakers as a wooden bread peel, a pizza paddle or a pizza peel — was found at the archaeological site of Pyatnitsky in the center of Staraya Russa, a medieval town between Moscow and St. Petersburg where last month, archaeologists reported their discovery of a "snake amulet."

The preserved portion of the bread peel measures about 12 by 16 inches (30 by 40 centimeters), and it was likely crafted from oak. While one side is flat, likely for baking tasty treats, the other side had been carved with a board for the ancient game known as merels, merrelles, mills, nine-men's morris or cowboy checkers.

The origin of the game is unknown, but historical records and archaeological artifacts suggest a similar two-person logic game was played by the ancient Romans two millennia ago — and the game may be even older than that. In the Middle Ages, merels became particularly popular across Europe and Asia, possibly because it requires little equipment and can be set up quickly.

A typical merels board has three nested squares connected by horizontal and vertical lines. Each player has nine pieces of the same color. The goal is to arrange the pieces into columns of three along the lines. When a player forms a line, they can remove any one of their opponent's pieces. In this way, merels is a mixture of tic-tac-toe and checkers. A player wins when their opponent has only two pieces left or is completely blocked. (You can play an online version here.)

"Perhaps special boards for playing merels existed in antiquity," Toropov said, "but more often, one finds playing boards scratched or carved into the flat surfaces of household objects."

The archaeologists are not sure whether the wooden bread peel served two functions or whether it was repurposed as a game board after it broke and was no longer useful.

"At any moment, one could mark out a board on a flat surface, find suitable pieces — for example, small stones lying underfoot, and while away some time," Toropov said.

Merel boards and playing pieces have been recovered from ninth-century archaeological sites in the kingdom of the Rus', whose ancestors were Vikings who arrived in what is now Russia in the eighth century, according to the statement, but "a find as well-preserved as the one from Staraya Russa is practically unique."

Archaeologists have unearthed a Roman military camp in Spain, where they found fragments of weapons and metal tacks from soldiers' shoes. The camp was used during the Cantabrian Wars fought by Emperor Augustus as he expanded the Roman Empire in the first century B.C.

The fortified military camp is made up of an earthen platform roughly 39 feet (12 meters) wide, which is surrounded by a stone perimeter wall about 5 feet (1.5 m) thick, according to a translated statement. Uncovered during excavations earlier this year, the camp is situated about one-third of a mile (500 m) from where an Iron Age settlement was once inhabited by the Cantabri people, a group of Celtic tribes that lived among the Cantabrian Mountains in modern-day northern Spain.

The Cantabri fiercely resisted Roman rule for a decade, but in 19 B.C., they were conquered by the military commanded by Emperor Augustus. The Cantabrian Wars marked the end of local control over the territory, as the Iberian Peninsula then came under control of the Roman Empire.

"It's not easy to find a camp associated with a hill fort in this condition," Eduardo González Gómez de Agüero, an archaeologist at the University of León who co-directed the excavation project, said in the statement.

Among the well-preserved remains at the camp were metal weapon fragments and small iron tacks known as hobnails, which were hammered into the bottom of Roman soldiers' leather military sandals to help provide traction on rocky and muddy terrain. These objects are evidence that the Roman military was prepared to attack and subdue the Iron Age community, according to the statement.

The archaeologists also uncovered evidence of a major fire that destroyed most of the pre-Roman settlement, including two temples. González Gómez de Agüero suggested that the Romans may have deliberately set the fire as part of their conquest.

"It's not just about defeating the enemy, but about humiliating them, erasing their identity, and breaking their connection to the land," he said in the statement.

Researchers are still working on establishing the chronology of the Romans' final attack on the Cantabri and want to understand if the settlement was destroyed in a single event or over time. Previously, another research team found 66 Roman camps in northern Spain, showing the immensity of the empire's attacks against the Cantabri.

The latest find is helping researchers understand the scale and location of Rome's fight for control of the Iberian Peninsula.

"It is an important step in understanding how the conquest was carried out on the Cantabrian slope of León, an area where it was necessary to link the Roman camps with Iron Age settlements," Carlos Fernández Rodríguez, an archaeologist at the University of León, said in the statement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross-cultural links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further work in Beringia is needed

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

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

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

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

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

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

While working on his land in a village in northern Egypt, a man made an astonishing discovery: the remains of two massive statues of Ramesses II.

The man, Khaled el-Shahat, immediately notified the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, which sent a team to the village of Behbeit El Hagar to excavate and study the statues, the ministry said in a translated statement.

Ramesses II had one of the longest reigns in Egypt's history, ruling from around 1279 to 1213 B.C. During his 66 years in power, Egypt controlled an empire that stretched as far northeast as modern-day Syria. He initiated many building projects throughout the empire, and numerous Ramesses II statues have been found throughout Egypt.

Archaeologists had previously found architectural fragments bearing the name of Ramesses II at Behbeit El Hagar, which is known for its temple dedicated to Isis, a goddess associated with healing and magic, said Mahmoud Emam, an Egyptologist at Cairo University who has worked on remains from the site but was not involved with the recent excavation. He noted that the newly found statues were unearthed on the western side of the temple complex.

"Strong Bull"

Both of the newfound statues were once larger than life, with the bigger one likely standing nearly 28 feet (8.5 meters) tall when it was originally built. However, most of what remains is its head, which is 5.2 feet (1.6 m) tall and depicts the pharaoh wearing the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt.

Part of this large statue's back pillar has a hieroglyphic inscription that gives the pharaoh's "Horus" name: Hor-Ka-Nakht-Mery-Maat. This name means "Strong Bull, Beloved of Right, Truth," Joyce Tyldesley, a professor emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Manchester in the U.K., wrote in her book "Ramesses: Egypt's Greatest Pharaoh" (Penguin Books, 2001). In Egypt, it was common for pharaohs to have several alternate names with a Horus name, given in honor of the sky god Horus.

The second statue, which stands about 7.9 feet (2.4 m), also likely depicts Ramesses II, the statement said. The king is shown wearing the "Nemes" headdress, a type of striped headcloth that pharaohs wore, the Egypt Exploration Society notes on its website.

Near this statue is a block of pink granite with two hieroglyphic inscriptions that name Ramesses II and describe him as "King of Upper and Lower Egypt" and the "Son of Ra," an ancient Egyptian sun god, the statement said.

Previous Ramesses II finds

The new finds add more evidence that Ramesses II was heavily invested in the site.

Previous discoveries include two architectural fragments bearing the name of Ramesses II near the Isis temple at Behbeit El Hagar, Emam and his colleagues reported in a 2017 paper. One is believed to be from the upper part of a statue, and another seems to originate from the upper part of a wall.

"We concluded that Ramesses II had undertaken major building works at the temple and recommended further archaeological investigations to shed more light on the early history of the site," Emam said. He noted that the site is threatened by urban growth and that excavation work should be carried out at the temple.

Live Science reached out to the team but did not hear back by the time of publication.

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

A Neanderthal who was buried 75,000 years ago in Shanidar Cave in Iraq died from a wooden spear straight through the chest, archaeologists have revealed.

While it's impossible to know exactly what happened, the violence may have been a targeted hit.

"The position of the wound and the force required to push it right through the Neanderthal's body bear the hallmarks of an intended kill shot directed towards the heart," study first author Emma Pomeroy, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement.

In a study published Thursday (Oct. 15) in the journal Scientific Reports, Pomeroy and co-authors analyzed the bones of Shanidar A, a Neanderthal who died violently at about age 45 and was then buried in Shanidar Cave.

The archaeological site at Shanidar is famous for its evidence of purposeful burial, which experts once thought was only done by modern humans. Although the Neanderthal "flower burial" at Shanidar has since been debunked, the cave holds other evidence of repeated Neanderthal burials, which shows that these extinct humans placed specific meaning on that location, the authors wrote in the study.

The skeleton of Shanidar A was incomplete when it was discovered in 2019, consisting of a mostly complete right hand, three ribs, six teeth and a left scapula or shoulder blade, which meant they could not figure out the sex of the Neanderthal.

Near the edge of the shoulder blade, archaeologists noticed a round hole about 0.6 inches (1.5 centimeters) in diameter and a round piece of bone that had been punched out of the shoulder blade. The researchers ruled out post-mortem damage to the bone, including animal gnawing and insect burrowing.

"The perforation is best explained as resulting from perimortem [around the time of death] penetrating trauma, such as that caused by a projectile or a thrusting implement such as a spear," the researchers wrote in the study. Specifically, the Neanderthal was killed by a spear that entered their chest from the front at a high velocity and pierced their shoulder blade.

The shape of the wound in the shoulder blade appears to match experimental evidence of injuries made by wooden spears rather than stone-tipped weapons, the researchers wrote in the study. Neanderthals would have used wooden spears for both thrusting and throwing. But it is unclear if this individual died because of a violent interaction with another Neanderthal or by accident, such as a hunting incident.

"All we can ever know about the end of this Neanderthal's life is that it was violent, and came at the end of a wooden spear," study co-author Graeme Barker, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, said in the statement.

"Care and support from other Neanderthals"

Even though this Neanderthal had an untimely demise, evidence on the teeth suggested that the individual was cared for during life.

The six teeth from Shanidar A were heavily worn-down in an unusual manner, the researchers wrote. One of them — a front tooth with a large quantity of tartar on it — had been split in half during the Neanderthal's life, and the individual continued to use the damaged tooth for a considerable amount of time. The collection of teeth suggests the Neanderthal sustained a major trauma to the face that fractured the lower front tooth and may have caused additional injuries to the jaw.

"There’s no doubt that Shanidar A would have had difficulty communicating and been in absolute agony for a long period of time," Pomeroy said in the statement. "Surviving a blow that splits a tooth in this fashion, then continuing to live and eat for a period of at least a year and maybe more, would have required care and support from other Neanderthals."

Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an archaeologist and author of "Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art" (Bloomsbury, 2020) who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email that the apparently fatal chest injury is an important addition to our understanding of Neanderthals. While it is plausible the Neanderthal was stabbed by a wooden spear, Wragg Sykes said, "it would be interesting to also compare whether a wild goat horn, the most intensely hunted species at Shanidar, might have been responsible."

Shanidar A is not the first mortally wounded Neanderthal to be found at the site. In 2009, researchers analyzed the skeleton of Shanidar 3, an older adult male who died 50,000 years ago, and found a deep slice in one of his ribs. The researchers suggested that the Neanderthal may have been killed by a stone-tipped spear possibly thrown by a modern human. Although modern humans first reached Europe around 54,000 years ago, experts aren't sure exactly how they interacted with Neanderthals.

Pomeroy told Live Science in an email that the discovery at Shanidar of two stabbed Neanderthals 25,000 years apart is interesting but possibly just a coincidence.

"We know from the archaeology that Neanderthals were repeatedly coming back to Shanidar and using it for short periods at a time, both around 75,000 years ago and around 45-50,000 years ago, as well as leaving their dead there," Pomeroy said.

The traumatic injuries, purposeful burial and indirect evidence of wooden spears all show that 75,000 years ago, Neanderthal life — and death — were complex, the researchers wrote in the study.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One cemetery, many possibilities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archaeologists digging in the medieval city of Great Zimbabwe have discovered pieces of jade-green Chinese pottery, suggesting that the enigmatic empire had long-distance connections with East Asia more than 1,000 years ago.

Great Zimbabwe, located in the southeastern part of modern-day Zimbabwe, was the capital of an ancient empire that arose in southeastern Africa in around A.D. 1000. Little is known about this precolonial empire because its people did not leave a written history, but new archaeological excavations are shining a light on the enormous scale of the centuries-old civilization known for its intricate metalworking and ritual stone carvings.

In the new PBS documentary "Secrets of the Dead: Africa's Golden City," filmmakers followed a team of archaeologists from the field to the laboratory to try to answer questions surrounding the origins of the understudied civilization, its ritual and trade activities and why it disappeared after 500 years.

"When I was growing up, I was surrounded by symbols of Great Zimbabwe," University of Oxford archaeologist Shadreck Chirikure, who is leading the new excavations at the site, said in the documentary. "It was only when I started studying archaeology at university that I started realizing that there was this very big debate around who built Great Zimbabwe."

The site was first excavated in the late 19th century and quickly looted by British colonists for its ivory, metal and gold artifacts. These colonists insisted that Africans hadn't built Great Zimbabwe, instead claiming it arose from the Phoenicians, a people originally from the Mediterranean; they used that inaccuracy to justify taking all the artifacts to England, according to the documentary. Today, many Great Zimbabwean artifacts are held in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford.

But excavations are showing that Great Zimbabwe was a highly connected African kingdom that flourished from the 11th century until at least the 15th century, when the population may have gotten too large for the dry, over-farmed land to feed. Archaeologists have already discovered glass artifacts at Great Zimbabwe that came from Southeast Asia, India and the Middle East via boat.

"From India or Sri Lanka to Great Zimbabwe, it's at least 8,000 kilometers [5,000 miles]," Chirikure told Live Science. Merchants sailed the Indian Ocean using winds kicked up by monsoon cycles.

"It's time we try to understand a bit more about trade and exchange," Chirikure said, "particularly by comparing the communities in places like Sri Lanka and southern Africa. Because it's the water that separated people, but it was also the water that connected people."

In this exclusive clip from the documentary, Chirikure and archaeologist Muchen Zhou, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, examine a jade-green piece of pottery unearthed from the hillside at Great Zimbabwe. The glossy sheen on the sherd suggests the pot was fired at an extremely high temperature, a technological achievement that had only been accomplished in China at that early date. This style of pottery, called Longquan celadon, was made in eastern China starting around A.D. 950.

"We find it across the site of Great Zimbabwe," Chirikure said, but in small quantities. "This means the Chinese ceramics are a rarity. Perhaps they were used by the elites. They would have been quite a significant or highly valued exotic ware."

Other evidence of long-distance trade has been discovered at Great Zimbabwe, Chirikure said, including metal objects from what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo, around 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) away. The people of Great Zimbabwe were also sourcing copper and tin from modern-day South Africa, more than 300 miles (500 km) away. And chemical analysis of cattle bones has shown that some of the animals were being traded across an 87-mile (140 km) area.

For his next project, Chirikure hopes to investigate local resources, such as soapstone, that hold a lot of meaning for the local Shona people, Zimbabwe's largest Indigenous group; and for Zimbabweans.

"Soapstone birds are an important part of Great Zimbabwe," he said, "but no one really knows where they got their soapstone from."

The Zimbabwe Bird, designed based on a series of birds carved from soapstone that were found at the archaeological site, is the national emblem and appears prominently on the country's flag.

"There are a number of soapstone outcrops around Great Zimbabwe," Chirikure said. "Next time in the field, that's one of the things I want to do — just go out there and try and find the geological sources of that soapstone."

The PBS documentary "Secrets of the Dead: Africa's Golden City" premieres Wednesday, Oct. 14, at 10 p.m. U.S. Eastern time.

Archaeologists in southern Russia have unearthed the 2,000-year-old grave of an elite warrior who was buried with his weapons, horse — and a human sacrifice. The grave and sacrifices were found with other lavish goods, including two gold coins featuring Alexander the Great.

A team found the elite grave in Russia's Kuban region east of the Crimean Peninsula, in a necropolis of more than 150 ancient graves arranged around it. This central placement indicates the man had been a member of the social elite, according to the study, which was published in September in the journal Russian Archaeology.

The evidence of a human sacrifice comes from another burial assemblage beside the warrior's grave. This neighboring burial had the remains of three horses, two cattle, a pig, a dog and a fragment of a human pelvis that seems to have come from a sacrificed person, the researchers wrote.

The two gold coins — one found on the warrior's skeleton and one found nearby — indicate that the burial took place in the early first century B.C., while the location and style of the burial indicated the warrior had been a noble of the Indigenous Maeotian people. At that time, the Maeotians were allied with the neighboring Mithridatic Empire, a Hellenistic-Persian kingdom and the enemy of the expanding Roman Republic.

The researchers think the two gold coins were prestige items, rather than ordinary currency for commerce. "It is likely not money in the conventional sense, but rather a means of storing wealth, akin to a … cryptocurrency," study first author Mikhail Abramzon of the Institute of Archaeology at Russia's Academy of Sciences, told Live Science in an email.

Ancient gold

The two gold coins are key to the discovery. One was found in a ritual shaft near the burial in the center of the necropolis; the researchers think it was placed there as an offering to the gods.

The second was found beneath the jaw of the skeleton of the ancient warrior, which indicates it had been placed in the dead man's mouth before the burial and is an example of "Charon's obol" — the traditional ancient Greek payment for the mythical ferryman of the dead.

Both coins are gold "staters" in the Greek style adopted by Alexander the Great (who lived from 356 to 323 B.C.) and show portraits of Alexander.

Experts have determined that these coins were minted during the much later reign of Mithridates Eupator (lived 135 to 63 B.C.), also known as Mithridates the Great, who claimed descent from both Alexander and the Persian nobility and who initiated the three Mithridatic Wars with Rome. The Alexander portraits on the coins are designed to also look like Mithridates Eupator, the researchers wrote in the study.

According to the Greek geographer Strabo, writing in the first century A.D., the Maeotians were an Indigenous people integrated into the nearby Bosporan kingdom, a Greek and Scythian state founded on the north side of the Black Sea in the fifth century B.C. The Greek historian Appian, in the second century A.D., wrote that the Bosporan kingdom became part of the expanding Mithridatic Empire in the second century B.C. — and so the Maeotians were Mithridatic allies at the time of the burial in the first century B.C.

Grave goods

The warrior was buried with weapons — two iron spearheads and an iron arrowhead were found in his grave — as well as his riding gear and his horse, which had been sacrificed. The grave also held luxury items, including a rare glass "alabastron" — a small vessel for oil or perfumes, which had probably been imported from Cyprus or the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, the researchers wrote.

A two-handled clay cup, called a "kantharos" in ancient Greek, was also found in the grave. Its surface was engraved with a pentagram, a symbol of the sun, which the researchers think was considered spiritual protection against magical threats.

The researchers think the sacrifices in the nearby burial assemblages could have had different purposes. The cattle may have been offerings in the style of an ancient "hecatomb" — a mass slaughter of animals that would supposedly please a god. The horses were for riding in the afterlife, the pig was for eating in the afterlife, and the dog may have been intended to guide the dead warrior's spirit. The role of the human sacrificed with the animals is unknown, but it may have been to act as a servant for the warrior.

The researchers wrote that the coins and grave goods illustrate both the beliefs of the Maeotian people at this time, and the extent to which they had been influenced by the ancient Greek traditions of the neighboring Bosporon kingdom.

In the early medieval period, the Vikings were just one part of a vast tapestry of Scandinavians who ruled, sailed, traded and fought around the world, from North America to Asia. In his new book, "The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age" (Basic Books, 2026), author Neil Price, professor and chair of archaeology at Uppsala University in Sweden, reveals the true diversity and complexity of people who lived during the Viking Age (often dating from A.D. 793 to 1066).

Price investigates more than 20 burials from the Viking Age, lingering on details that can tell us about these individuals and their world. He also shines a light on frequently overlooked groups, including the enslaved people known as thralls that the Norse ruled over and even sacrificed in some of their burials. Price also delves into the realms of powerful women, including a "shield-maiden" buried with war-grade weapons in Sweden, a "sorceress" in Denmark, and an elderly matriarch whose children carved out a local empire in Sweden.

In an interview with Live Science, Price talks about his new book, and the evidence we have for the familiar yet foreign lives they lived centuries ago.

Read an excerpt: 'The back of her head had been removed by a single blow from a sharp blade': Archaeological clues are revealing the horrific lives and deaths of the people enslaved by Vikings

Laura Geggel: The Vikings are popularly known for being brutish and bloodthirsty pillagers, but the individuals in your book show the rich diversity of people from this time. Why did you decide to write this book and feature their stories?

Neil Price: I think quite simply because of the cliche that you've just mentioned, the idea that the Vikings are all barbarian raiders who go about burning down churches and frightening the English and things. Those raiders were certainly real, but they were only ever a tiny minority of the Scandinavian population, and I wanted to bring out all the different kinds of Viking lives, and that's why this book really came together.

It's divided into chapters, each one of which looks at a different kind of person, you know, a farmer, or an ambassador, or someone who uses magic, or a hunter. And I'm quite pleased that the Viking — the sort of raiding and pillaging Viking — it takes a while to get to him.

LG: How would you define the epitome of a Viking from that age?

The actual Viking, it comes from an old Norse word from their own language: víkingr. And really it's a job description, it means something like pirate — not necessarily negatively. It just describes maritime robbery with violence. So it is the classic image of the Viking stereotype.

But it was never a name for a people. If we could go back in time and just meet some people in Scandinavia and say, "Did you know that you're all Vikings?" — they'd be astonished.

It's a name, a collective name that we've given them. It started in the 19th century, really. So, they wouldn't have called themselves that.

LG: Your book starts with the sea-king, a commander and his crew who were buried in boats with swords and shields in Estonia. Usually, the Viking Age is said to have begun in 793 with the raid on the island of Lindisfarne in the U.K., but you say this burial suggests that the Viking Age started earlier and in another part of Europe. Can you tell us more about this?

NP: When I started studying Vikings at college — so this is back in the early 1980s, a long, long time ago — the Viking Age did start not just in 793; It started on the eighth of June 793 with the Lindisfarne raid.

Obviously it's absurd that an entire period of time starts on an afternoon, you know, not the day before or the day after. So it's obvious that we're talking about something that is really a matter of social processes, things that go on over a long period of time. But the thing that makes the finds that are in the sea-king chapter — they're from this place called Salme in Estonia — really interesting is that they seem to be the remains of, or the traces of a raid.

It's decades before Lindisfarne, it's about 750. And obviously on an island on the Estonian coast, it's going east, not west. So it really pushes that [raiding] behavior a lot earlier and it reorientates it. Even then, we shouldn't see the Vikings in that find as being the first Vikings. Actually the Scandinavians had been raiding all over the place for generations.

LG: I really enjoyed your focus on women, since stereotypically the Viking Age is associated with burly male warriors. What are some roles that women held in the Viking Age that you don't think most people know about?

NP: Something that particularly interests me, which is something I've worked on for a very long time now, is that when we think about Norse religion, everyone thinks about the gods. You know, they're still around in Marvel movies and things — we think of Thor and Odin and Freya and so on.

But actually, the [thing that was] far more present than the gods in people's lives were lots of kinds of local spirits and creatures and the elves that live in the stone behind your house. Getting in contact with that world of supernatural creatures and forces and powers — or whatever we call them — was something that was very much in the domain of women.

And it's a really important thing. So we shouldn't just say, "Oh, and some of them did magic." They're like negotiators, because you want to get on well with all these little creatures. If you don't, they could mess up your life, you know — your cattle could die, your crops could fail, that kind of thing. You could get sick.

So the practice of, it's hard to know what to call it in English. Sorcery or magic — they're not very good words, but there's lots of Norse words for it. To be able to do that is a very powerful thing and it's a very prominent role in society. And this was very much in the domain of women.

I think actually women could take on many of the roles that we conventionally assign to men. In terms of capability, of course they could. There are some, rather few I think, but there are some female Vikings, like actual Vikings, there are women conducting trade, owning property, investing in business ventures, things like that. So they have a very prominent role in Norse society.

We talked about Lindisfarne just now. When I started studying the Vikings, Viking women were one display case in the museum exhibition, next to the display case on pottery or something. Not half the population, and that has really changed. I think we look at Viking Age people now, not just assuming they're male by default.

LG: Actually, to linger, you described a number of women and their professions. Could you tell me more about these two amazing women in your book from Birka: the merchant and the warrior?

NP: Birka is this huge town. It's Sweden's first urban center, and it's absolutely surrounded by burial mounds. So you have the area of the town and then all the people who lived in it. You can wander through their cemetery, which is a pretty spectacular place — there's 5,000 burial mounds.

The merchant woman that you mentioned, she's one of the earlier graves [circa 840s], so she's one of the first people who would have identified as being someone who lives in a town. Today we talk about "I'm a city person" or a "country person," and that's an identity that was only just beginning to be created in the Viking Age, because everybody was country people. With the first towns, people start to live in a different way, and this woman was one of them.

If we look in her grave, she has things that have come from all over the western Viking world, things that I think probably came as loot from the raids, so she knew somebody who was involved in those things.

But you look at the stuff that's there, it seems pretty likely that she is a merchant in her own right, perhaps someone dealing in textiles. This idea of a businesswoman setting up a shop in Birka and maybe importing textiles or making them, having them made, because she's probably not working the loom, you know. It gives us a glimpse of a different kind of Viking life, one that I don't think we're accustomed to seeing and we should.

And then the warrior is about 100 years later than the merchant woman, when Birka has grown; it's quite a big settlement by then that's a really powerful place.

It's become quite militarized, so it has a fortification wall and it has a fortress, and there's a garrison building, which is a really amazing structure actually. It's partly made of weapons. There are weapons in the walls and on the floors. Around the building are a number of burials with lots of weapons in them. It's quite easy to say that a burial with lots of weapons is a warrior, but that's an interpretation. We can't be sure that the things buried with the dead were their possessions. We kind of assume that that's the case, but clearly not always. So there's a bit of a question mark there.

This burial was excavated like most of the ones in Birka in the 1870s, so a long time ago. And this grave is absolutely full of weapons. It's got all the weapons. And out of all the about 1,100 burials that were excavated on Birka, only two have a complete set of weapons, so this is rare. It's a very spectacular grave.

This burial has been reprinted again and again. [Iit's] in like every book on the Vikings. So it's been put forward as a kind of ultimate Viking: This is what proper Vikings looked like, you know, all the gear. And because it was excavated in the 1870s, it's always been assumed that this person was male. It's not hard to see where that assumption comes from, but it's actually been consistent ever since.

Then, between 2011 and 2017, first a series of osteological studies looking at the bones, and then DNA, confirmed that this person was female. And actually the team that worked on it, which included me, none of us were particularly surprised.

It was kind of exciting and interesting, but it's like, "Oh wow, you know, they really did have female warriors." So all the previous interpretations, it seemed to us, were pretty valid, it's just that this is a female, the ultimate Viking.

[Editor's note: Following the 2017 study, there was an intense reaction to the interpretation that the woman in the grave was a Viking Age warrior.]

LG: So you weren't expecting the backlash that occurred afterward?

No, we weren't, it was extreme. I'm not going to go into that in any detail, but some people were very, very happy, and some people were really not, and there we are.

It also highlights that all of these things are interpretations. You very rarely find something that is beyond any doubt what it is. Then there's also things with all of the burials in the book and all the burials that we excavate — people have quite long lives, hopefully. And if you were a warrior when you're 18 and you live to be 70, are you buried with all the weapons? Maybe not. Who knows?

That applies to any other kind of profession. So we don't know [if the different events and professions] in somebody's life course [are] represented in the burial. Is it when they die, or is it somebody who did something famous when they were young, and that is in the grave. We don't know. So there's lots of question marks, but the one thing it does show is the diversity of life in the Viking Age. There's so many different kinds of people, which is not a surprise, really, but it's something I just wanted to bring out in the book.

LG: You don't just talk about Vikings, but about those who lived alongside them. In one chapter, you describe a Sámi burial of a bear that they had killed and feasted on. What do we know about bear burials and why the Sámi did them? [Editor's note: The Sámi are an Indigenous people who currently live in the northern Nordic countries and part of Russia.]

NP: Well, the bear is a holy animal to the Sámi, and it's obviously a massive source of protein and food and pelts, you know, all kinds of useful things. But what I really wanted to get at was the idea of personhood. If you think about all the different kinds of prejudice, some people are sort of "more people" than others. Think about racism, for example.

In the Viking Age, not every human was [seen as] a person, but not every person was human. There are animal persons as well, sentient animals. Everything is sentient actually, and the idea that you converse with animals, that you talk to them, you respect them, they have their personalities.

I wanted to bring out in that chapter a different kind of way of looking at "persons." So the fact that the Sámi bury the bears they hunt with tremendous respect, it's partly to ensure that the bear will come back in the future from the spirit world as another bear, so that the cycle of hunting and life can go on.

LG: You also talk about "thralls," people who were enslaved by the Norse. Can you share some of the archaeological evidence we have for thralls and what their burials look like?

NP: We don't really know whether they have burials at all, actually. The institution of slavery, or thralldom, is absolutely central to the Norse economy, and just putting that back into the picture is very important, I think.

They are a group of people who have been neglected in our studies. There's a lot of people working on this, this isn't just me by any means. When we find them in the burials — well, when we think we find them, because it's extremely rare to find someone buried in their own right that we think might have been enslaved. But there's also the question of how do we tell? Unless somebody's sort of buried in chains or something, it's very hard.

But we do find — not often, but it's not that uncommon — that people have been killed in the course of funerals. You have a burial of a man or a woman, and then an extra body is in the grave, which has clearly been treated very differently. So their hands might be tied or they've been decapitated or something, and there's people who have very clearly been killed at the funeral.

Just the fact of that presumably means that they have a very different kind of status to the primary occupant of the burial. [They're] not necessarily enslaved; they could be prisoners or criminals. But there's been more recent studies looking at the diet of those people. You can use isotopes to study what people have eaten. [Editor's note: Isotopes are variations of elements. When people consume different foods and water, different amounts of certain isotopes are incorporated into their teeth and bones.] And in some cases, the people who've been killed at funerals have a much, much worse diet than other people, which implies that they have a much lower status and poorer nutrition and so on.

So the implication really is that they might be enslaved. So I think that's where we are with the burials of enslaved people.

LG: You spend an entire chapter on Viking Age children. What was it like to grow up in Scandinavia during this time, and what can we learn about their lives from grave goods and skeletal analyses?

NP: The first thing is that an awful lot of people didn't make it out of childhood at all. Putting numbers on this is a bit of a game, but probably less than half the population got past the age of 10. So child mortality is massive.

When we imagine the Viking Age or think back to it, remember that almost every single family will have lost children, with the psychological effects of that and the emotional effects and so on. And we shouldn't be entirely sure what those effects were, because if child mortality is so high, they have different coping mechanisms. But it still must have been utterly awful.

We don't find as many child burials as we should. There are a couple of written sources that mention that dead children are effectively discarded, and maybe this is connected with a coping mechanism for child mortality that people don't become sort of "full people" until they get to a certain age. We don't know.

But there are child burials and, quite often they're buried with scaled-down versions of the things that adults have. So young girls are buried with women's jewelry, but smaller. And they obviously had their possessions; they had their clothes and their jewelry, and we find toys, not in the graves, but on settlement sites — we find dolls, wooden animals, there's a fantastic horse on wheels that you can roll it about, lots and lots of little wooden boats that you can sail down. So they're thinking about boats quite early. I think their lives are quite recognizable up to a point, though very hard.

The age of maturity seems to be somewhere between about 14 and 16. After that, you're an adult, and then you're just out there with the rest.

LG: To us that seems young, but for them to make it that far would have been an accomplishment.

NP: And even in adults — you asked about skeletal analysis — there are an awful lot of adults that are malnourished as children, and it leaves traces in their bones.

There's also a rather grim set of data from a fairly small sample, but still — the proportion of adult women who were malnourished as children is much greater than the proportion of men. In other words, if food was scarce, they gave it to the boys. So it's also a glimpse of their priorities and the realities of their world.

LG: The Scandinavians settled in the Rus' in what is now Ukraine. What do we know about these people? Were they traders, warriors, or a mix of many things?

NP: I think [it's] a mixture. The identity of the Rus' is one of the big questions of the Viking Age. They used to be seen very simply as what the Vikings are called when they go east. And there's some truth to that. They seem to be culturally Scandinavian in the beginning, so we're talking the early ninth century or probably the eighth century.

Over time, as they travel on the eastern rivers, they become much more ethnically diverse. So it's a culture that grows up around an activity, rather than people from a particular place. Probably the closest parallel [is] if you think of the fur trade on the Canadian rivers and some parts of the states as well — the sort of 1600s and 1700s.

They're certainly militaristic though; they're armed traders. There's no doubt about that. And they found trading settlements, together with local people and other incomers as well. And they settle there. After a time, they're not actually [newcomers], they live there. And then, over time, quite late in the Viking Age and on into the Middle Ages, you get this Rus' state, with its capital of Kiev. But they range over a very large part of Eastern Europe and actually I think further east as well.

LG: You focus on this group of Rus' warriors, the Varangians, and you give the example of them leaving graffiti on a marble lion statue that's now in Venice. Can you tell us the story about these runes they carved?

NP: Yeah sure, it's a bit strange that the best monument to these guys is a lion that's much, much older than the Viking Age. It's from classical antiquity. It's outside the Arsenal now in Venice, but it used to stand in the harbor of Athens at a place called Piraeus.

The Varangians were kind of a subset of the Rus', but they're basically Scandinavians who take very clear contracted employment in the armies of Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire. So they're mercenaries, and they were very sought after, and there's lots and lots of written sources about them.

This lion, which once stood in the Athenian harbor, had three inscriptions in runes over its shoulders and legs and things. Two of the inscriptions are very fragmentary, so you can't get much from them. But the biggest one is a memorial to a guy called Haursi. It actually calls him Haursi the farmer, so it really does emphasize that you could be a farmer, but maybe you do a season in the army down in Greece and make a bit of money and go home. So people have professions and they have choices, and they do this for a bit, but then they go back and do what they did before.

This inscription is written by this guy's friends or his comrades, and it specifically says that he was killed before he got paid. And it's kind of a hint. It's "So, pay up, because you owe him, or you owe his family."

You get this little vignette of a soldier's life. And also carving the inscription on this lion is a pretty major job. This isn't like scribbling on a wall or something — they're carving it, and so they're there a long time. And presumably have control of the harbor because you can't just chisel this thing on, you know, people are trying to stop you.

We can think of the Varangians being stationed in Athens or waiting for a ship or something like that. It's this wonderful snapshot.

LG: Your book is loaded with details about Viking Age people. What do you hope readers will take away from your work?

NP: That they were more than actual Vikings. The people of the Viking Age were individuals, every bit as varied and complicated as we are. So that's it.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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Slavery has existed for thousands of years, permeating ancient and modern societies across the world. The Vikings were no different. Enslaved people were valuable commodities, being captured and then traded across the Vikings' vast networks. Legal texts and written sources show how enslaved people were sold at trading centers in the same vein as cattle.

In this excerpt from "The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age" (Basic Books, 2026), author and archaeologist Neil Price looks at the horrific lives of the "thralls" — the Viking term for the enslaved. In it, he highlights the inhumane treatment of enslaved people, from the raids to kidnap people into the slave trade to a woman who appears to have been killed as a tribute to a high-status man.

Neil Price interview: 'It gives us a glimpse of a different kind of Viking life': Archaeologist Neil Price on the sea-kings, sorcerers and Sámi who lived during the Viking Age

The vast majority of the Norse population were farmers, but there is another group of people who were almost as numerous, though very hard to find in the archaeological record: the enslaved. They have only recently begun to be properly acknowledged in our histories, partly because of the long-standing neglect of the marginalized and vulnerable in many cultures, but in the Viking world also due to a particular coincidence of terminology. For the Norse, the unfree were þrælar, translated into English as "thralls," which is too mild a word to convey its true meaning.

Today, we can be enthralled by a work of art or even a person, but we do not say that we're enslaved by them. Norse thraldom took many forms, some less severe or permanent than others, but all involved the loss of liberty and rights, and the subjugation of one person to another through servitude. A chapter here, even with tangential references in a few others, is nowhere near enough to do justice to this side of the Norse experience (or rather, often the non-Norse experience, since many of them were kidnapped abroad during raids and other campaigns). Archaeological recognition can at least restore some measure of individual dignity, though more comforting to us than to them.

Slavery, as both a practice and an integrated economic system, was an indivisible part of Viking-Age Norse society and had probably already become established in Scandinavia centuries or even millennia earlier. People could be born into slavery, or be forced into it through kidnap or war, and then find themselves sold on, sometimes through many hands and over great distances. Some free people might even temporarily sell themselves in a form of indenture, as a means of paying off debts or other obligations.

Thralls on Norse settlements were ranked in a hierarchical and quite specific nomenclature of service categories and forced to undertake all the tasks of the farm and household. In a few, rare cases, thralls could take on senior responsibilities of estate management, with a special title — bryti — to match. One such man ran the royal estate at Hovgården opposite the island town of Birka, and was allowed to raise a runestone to himself and his wife, though one wonders who paid for it. Nonetheless, the vast majority of thralls endured lives of drudgery.

The grim reality is summarized with derogatory terminology in the poem Rígsþula, the "List of Rígr" (another name for the god Heimdall, or perhaps for Odin): "They fixed fences, dunged fields, worked at the pigs, watched over the goats, dug the peat." Even their names are shaming, mocking their appearance or hygiene: they translate as Badbreath, Stumpy, Fatty, Bedmate, Craneshanks, Dumpy, and many more. Thralls were extremely vulnerable to sexual exploitation. The textual records of viking raids, coming from every culture that was attacked, emphasize that women were particularly targeted for kidnapping and enslavement.

In the ninth century, as the viking attacks escalated both in Western Europe and on the rivers of the east, the taking of captives came to be one of their prime objectives, feeding the lethal trinity of raiding, trading and slaving. In the words of Ibn Miskawayh, a Persian official who described a viking attack on the city of Bardha'a in what is now Azerbaijan in 943: "They kept the women and boys, whom they raped and enslaved [ . . . ] They dragged the women, boys and girls they wanted with them."

The repetition drives home the point, and little imagination is required to sense the undiluted horror. Some of these raids were informed by advance intelligence gathering and directed against high-profile targets for whom ransom could be demanded, but many were destined for sex trafficking, especially to the Arab world. Enslaved humans, particularly from the Baltic region, were among the main commodities exchanged eastwards along the Silk Roads.

In late ninth-century Scandinavia, the logistical needs of the escalating raids brought new demands on the workforce at an ever-larger scale, especially in all the many industries connected with shipbuilding (including textile production, timber management, tar manufacture, ironworking, and much more). This in turn drove the need for unfree labor to still greater levels.

As economic expansion enlarged the capacity for ship-borne aggression and released the agricultural workforce to crew these expeditions, the increased flow of human victims enabled its continuance in a vicious circle. Enslavement was one of the primary characteristics of the Viking Age: the raids were a key component of it and of the Norse diaspora that resulted.

To what degree these people are visible in the funerary record is hard to know. There were probably no diagnostic items that were used exclusively by thralls, so we cannot perceive them through specific objects in the graves. It also seems unlikely that those without rights and with few possessions, indeed with hardly any legal identity as individuals rather than chattel, would be accorded conventional burials. Ibn Faḍlān says that thralls who died while traveling were simply discarded, but this is unlikely to have been the case in settlements. When we do encounter them, it is often because they were killed as part of funerary rituals and their bodies deposited in burials. One example that we can explore here comes from an excavation at the site of Ballateare, in Jurby parish on the northwestern coast of the Isle of Man — the best preserved of all the Viking-Age graves on the island.

At Ballateare, it is instructive to see just how normal the initial funeral, and its circumstances, appear to have been, albeit for a high-status individual. By Viking-Age standards he was in his prime when he died in the early tenth century, somewhere between eighteen and thirty years old. He may have been among the early Norse settlers on Man. We have no reason to believe that the clothes he was buried in, and the things laid in the grave, are not reflections of his life and the international milieu he came from.

He had been interred in a wooden coffin, dug down quite deep into the ground. A sheathed knife was suspended on a lanyard round his neck and he wore a cloak held by an Irish ringed pin. Inside the coffin was a sword — probably from Norway, but with a belt from the British Isles — that had been cut into pieces before being sheathed in the scabbard; the hilt lay broken off beside it. A spearhead also lay in the coffin by the man's feet, snapped off because there was no room for the shaft. A shield, also deliberately damaged with two heavy blows to the boss, had been slid vertically down the outer side of the coffin; the shield board itself may have been smashed too. This was not battle damage; all his weapons were made unusable for reasons we can only guess. Fragments of the shield also revealed traces of paint: it had been decorated with white gesso, banded with black, with rows of red dots along the stripes. Two more spears had been laid across the top of the coffin.

The burial pit was then filled with fine white sand, and a mound was built on top — about 3 metres [10 feet] high and 22 metres [72 feet] in diameter. It was made of thick-cut turfs, which had been brought to the mound from a wide area rather than simply dug up in the vicinity. The earth of the mound seems to be an offering of the land itself, a territorial tribute to the dead man.

I do not wish to relate what happened next in terms of dramatized reconstruction; archaeological description must suffice. On top of the mound lay the body of a woman aged between twenty and thirty, who had been deliberately killed: the back of her head had been removed by a single blow from a sharp blade, probably a sword. Rigor mortis had set in, and some twelve to seventy-two hours had elapsed between her death and the time when her body was covered. She had either lain exposed on the mound for some time after her death, or been killed elsewhere (perhaps more likely, as the missing part of her skull was not present with the body). The woman seems to have died while kneeling, and had fallen forwards with her hands raised. A post was raised on top of the mound beside her body, presumably a grave marker.

A paragraph is not enough to convey what actually occurred, let alone to extrapolate the life that the woman had led before her death — possibly decades of servitude and enslavement, with all that this implies. Her corpse was covered by a very thick layer of cremated animal bone, including considerable numbers of oxen, horses, sheep and dogs. (Somewhere nearby must have been a truly massive cremation pyre.) The mound was finally sealed with turf, covering her body and the ashes of the animals.

Excerpted from The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age by Neil Price. © 2026 by Neil Price. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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Six people buried in a single grave in Latvia more than 1,000 years ago may have been killed in a bloody Viking raid, a new study suggests.

Genetic research into the deceased — four men, a boy and a girl — reveals family connections: The boy was the son of one of the men, while another man was a third-degree relative, perhaps a first cousin or great uncle, the researchers found.

The father, the relative, and one other man died from "sharp force" injuries — maybe wounds from an ax or a sword; but it's unknown how the other three individuals died, the researchers reported in the study, which was published in the September issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

One possibility is that those in the grave were killed in a battle, maybe with a neighboring community. But suspicion also falls on the Vikings: "We will never know if they were killed in a raid, but it remains a possibility because of the date of the grave" and the fatal trauma suffered by three of the men, said study co-author Elīna Pētersone-Gordina, an archaeologist at the University of Latvia.

Radiocarbon dating indicates that the grave is from the second half of the ninth century, which is considered the early Viking Age.

The grave is one of hundreds at the Čunkāni-Dreņģeri cemetery, near the Gulf of Riga, a sheltered bay of the Baltic Sea. The cemetery site was discovered in 1924 and contains people who were buried in riverside terraces there between the seventh and 11th centuries, during Latvia's Iron Age.

Most graves in the region contain only a single set of remains. But here, six people were buried in a single grave, and it seems that at least three were killed during a violent event, the researchers reported.

Strange burial

Despite the apparently violent deaths, the group was buried with care and interred with traditional grave goods and according to local customs. The only female was buried with her head pointing toward the northwest, while all of the males were placed in a row beside her, with their heads pointing toward the southeast ‪—‬ a distinction also seen at other local burials from this time.

The researchers stressed that this was not a "mass grave," where bodies were quickly dumped without order. Instead, they consider it a "multiple burial," where each body was properly laid out and accompanied by traditional grave goods.

This careful burial hints that the dead were members of a respected group, while their burial in a single grave indicates that they died at the same time, the researchers wrote in the study.

"They were most likely local people," Pētersone-Gordina told Live Science in an email.

Genetic studies showed that all of the dead had Indigenous Baltic ancestry, while aspects of the burial matched others in the Čunkāni-Dreņģeri cemetery, she said.

In the ninth century, Latvia was not part of the Scandinavian Viking world but was inhabited by descendants of Indigenous Balts, which included peoples such as the Semigallians and the Curonians, she said. The six people in the newly analyzed burial were Semigallian, an Iron Age group who farmed the region's large and fertile plains.

It's plausible that the people in the grave were killed by raiders, and the Vikings were the most obvious suspects, the researchers noted. "Given the timing, a Viking raid remains a possibility," Pētersone-Gordina said.

It's known Vikings or their predecessors were in the Eastern Baltic area around that time: two Scandinavian boat burials dated to around 750, for example, were found on the Estonian island of Saaremaa in 2008 and 2010. These burials held the remains of men with battle wounds, indicating they had suffered violent deaths.

No relation

Although two of the men and the boy buried in the Semigallian grave (‪and possibly the girl, but ancient DNA could not be extracted from her remains)‬ were related, the two other men were not.

This suggests that the two unrelated men were from the same community or extended household as the other victims, rather than from the same family, but were killed in the same violent event, the researchers wrote in the study.

Whatever it was — a raid or a battle — the event was brutal. Marks on the bones show that one man suffered defensive cuts on his forearm and hand, another was killed by a blow that shattered his jaw, and the third was almost decapitated.

It's possible that the fourth man and the two children died from soft-tissue injuries that could not be determined from the surviving remains, the researchers noted.

Rimantas Jankauskas, an anthropologist and archaeologist at Vilnius University in Lithuania who was not involved in the study, welcomed the investigation into the Eastern Baltic's Viking Age.

Although these individuals could have died from violence within their own community or from a neighboring community, it's also possible that they perished in a Viking raid, he told Live Science in an email.

Additionally, the study provides new insight into the social organization of the Semigallian people at that time, including hints of an emerging aristocratic structure that was reflected in the care lavished on the burial, Jankauskas said.

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

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

1. Chaco Canyon (New Mexico)

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

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

2. Cahokia (Illinois)

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

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

3. Mound Key (Estero Bay, Florida)

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

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

4. Sitka (Alaska)

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

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

5. Walnut Canyon (Arizona)

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

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

6. Chimney Rock (Colorado)

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

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

7. Blackwater Draw (New Mexico)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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