Archaeologists excavating near the ancient town of Aspendos in Turkey have discovered the grave of a person who may have been a pro athlete over two millennia ago.

"Coins with depictions of wrestlers and other artifacts found in the tomb indicate that the person buried here may have been involved in sports, perhaps even a wrestler," Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, Turkey's minister of culture and tourism, said in a translated statement Monday (Aug. 10).

The archaeologists found the skeleton and artifacts in a box-style sarcophagus made of stone slabs while digging in one of the cemeteries outside Aspendos. The tomb likely dates to between 475 and 300 B.C., during the city's Classical period, according to the statement.

Aspendos was a Greco-Roman city in southwest Turkey, roughly 10 miles (16 kilometers) inland from the Mediterranean Sea. The city was founded by Greek colonists in the fifth century B.C. and quickly rose to prominence as a trading center for salt, olive oil, wood and horses. Aspendos had a large Greek gymnasium as well as a large stadium that was erected in the second century A.D. and could hold up to 8,000 spectators who watched footraces, javelin contests and wrestling.

The ancient sport of wrestling is linked to Aspendos primarily through the city's coinage. Aspendos minted its own silver coins with the image of two naked wrestlers on one side.

These coins, called staters, were minted for well over a century, which suggests wrestling held civic significance for Aspendos, Oğuz Tekin, an archaeologist at Koç University in Turkey, suggested in a 2000 study.

Although wrestler-type Aspendos coins were discovered in the newly excavated grave, it is unclear whether the deceased was a wrestler.

"There will need to be much more analysis before a positive identification of the body as a wrestler can be determined," Sarah E. Bond, a historian at the University of Iowa who was not involved in the discovery, told Live Science. For example, signs of a broken and healed nose could indicate the person was an athlete.

"Coins alone cannot indicate this was a Classical era Greek wrestler," Bond said, because "these coins were numerous and used as payment by the entire populace, not by wrestlers alone."

The grave is part of the ongoing excavation of a newly discovered cemetery at Aspendos, according to Ersoy. "With every new find in Aspendos, we will continue to complete the missing pages of our history, protect our cultural heritage through scientific studies, and carry it into the future," he said in the statement.

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

This tall, conical hat made from a single sheet of hammered gold was likely worn by an ancient priest during a sun cult ceremony. The Berlin gold hat is the best preserved example of only four Bronze Age accessories of this type that have been found in Central and Western Europe.

The gold hat is in the collection of the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin. The museum acquired the artifact in 1996 after it circulated on the antiquities market. As a result, it is unclear where the hat was found, but the other three known Bronze Age gold hats were discovered in southern Germany and western France.

The hat is roughly 29 inches (74 centimeters) tall and weighs just over 1 pound (480 grams). It is accented with a flat bronze band with a bronze wire bordering its brim. A wool or felt lining was likely worn underneath the gold hat to stabilize it, but no traces of a lining remain.

Bands of decoration on the Berlin gold hat make the artifact stand out. The repeated motifs of concentric circles, disks, ovals and other symbols encode numerical values that correspond to a calendar, archaeologist Wilfried Menghin argued in a 2008 study. Each band represents a numerical value, and combinations of bands can help calculate lunar months and solar years, as well as convert between lunar and solar dates. The calendar can also be used to predict lunar eclipses.

"The person who wore this hat was the carrier of secret and very special knowledge," Matthias Wemhoff, director of the Museum of Prehistory and Early History, said in a translated 2018 video. Wemhoff described the hat's wearer as a priest who may have come out on a mountaintop at sunrise. The glistening gold hat would have caught the sun's first morning rays, dazzling the other participants in the ceremony.

Although there are no historical records of a Bronze Age sun cult in Europe, other astonishing artifacts, such as the Trundholm Sun Chariot and the Nebra Sky Disk, showcase the importance of celestial bodies to these prehistoric societies.

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

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The brain preservation paradox — the discovery of well-preserved human brains among otherwise skeletal remains — has puzzled archaeologists and pathologists alike for decades. Now, new research finally provides a scientific explanation for this longstanding mystery.

"We found that brain preservation isn't a rare anomaly, it's a novel chemical pathway," first study author Alexandra Seviour, a doctoral researcher of paleobiology at the University of Oxford, told Live Science in an email about the new work, published June 19 in the Journal of Proteome Research. "Under the right conditions, preservation actually arises from decay itself: the same reactions that degrade tissue can also weld the breakdown products together into something far tougher."

Despite being one of the first tissues to begin decomposing after death, human brains are surprisingly prolific in archaeology: more than 4,400 preserved brains have been discovered among human remains spanning the last 12,000 years, according to earlier work published by Seviour.

Mummification, freezing, and even saponification (where body fat turns into a greasy substance called grave wax) can all preserve soft tissues, sometimes for millennia. Usually, these processes conserve the structures of multiple body parts, including the internal organs and skin. But bizarrely, around one-third of the archaeological brains recovered don't fit this model, and a shrunken mass of protein is the only surviving tissue left among a cluster of bones.

The bulk of these unexplained brains were found in waterlogged, oxygen-poor (hypoxic) ground — anything from riverbeds and lake shores, to flooded caves and sunken shipwrecks. "Water, being nature's solvent, is typically associated with decomposition, not preservation, " Seviour said. "So the surprise is really the selectivity." In other words: Why is it only the brain which survives under these conditions?

Burying mice

Seviour's team hypothesized that this specific burial environment, combined with the brain's unique structure and chemistry, divert the normal decay pathway away from total breakdown — instead stabilizing the brain's proteins via a different chemical sequence. To test this theory, they buried mouse carcasses in four different water and oxygen conditions and evaluated their decay pathways over a period of six months.

"At 24 hours, 72 hours, one week, six weeks, three months, and six months, we dissected the brains and analysed them using high-resolution mass spectrometry to see exactly which proteins were still present and in what state," Seviour explained. "We were looking for which specific peptides survived and which vanished, and what chemical marks were left on the survivors."

Overall, their analysis yielded more than 1.26 million protein decay trajectories, enabling the team to draw patterns about how and when the chemistry diverged under the different conditions. Early analysis showed that the initial steps of decay were fairly similar, but that after a few weeks, oxygen levels became the controlling factor, with more oxygen leading to faster and more widespread decay. Conversely, wet, low-oxygen conditions favored the formation of toughened protein structures, which resisted further decomposition and preserved the remaining brain tissue.

The solution comes down to free radicals — extremely reactive particles with a single, unpaired electron. Abundant oxygen initiates a chain-like free radical chemical sequence in the brain proteins, which quickly degrades the entire protein structure, Seviour said. However, in hypoxic conditions, there is simply not sufficient oxygen for this same cascade to occur; instead, intermediates in the sequence form crosslinks with other neighboring parts of the brain protein, creating tough and insoluble aggregates that resist decay.

Brain tissue is particularly well-adapted to this localized and self-limiting pathway, Seviour added: it's rich in metals that promote free-radical chemistry, packed with membranes where radicals can accumulate, and contains many "redox-active" amino acids that can absorb free radicals to form crosslinks. The physical barrier of the skull also likely plays a part, restricting the exchange of fluid and oxygen compared with the rest of the body, the researchers said.

Richard Evershed, an organic geochemist at the University of Bristol who was not part of the study, was impressed by the team's comprehensive analysis. Evershed believes it would be fascinating to expand this to other proteins found in the archaeological record.

"Comparing more tissues — other organs and muscles — would be really useful to get an idea whether what was happening in the brain was special compared to what was happening elsewhere, and also to resolve questions regarding proteins preserved in other environments in archaeology such as pots or dental calculus," Evershed told Live Science.

But the implications of the work extend beyond archaeology. "For medicine, the more unexpected finding is that the molecular fingerprint of these decay-resistant peptides closely resembles the fingerprint seen in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's," Seviour said. One interesting future direction will therefore be to explore how far this similarity extends and whether preserved brains could ultimately help scientists understand the progression of these devastating diseases.

See how much you know about the most complex organ in the human body with our brain quiz!

Ancient slingstones found in northeastern Spain may be evidence of a local uprising against Roman rule in the first century B.C.

Archaeologists think the lead sling "bullets" were fired by Roman soldiers after an ambush orchestrated by the local Indigenous Ceretani (also spelled Cerretani) people, who by this time had spent almost 200 years resisting Roman expansion in Iberia.

The findings, which were unearthed during an archaeological survey of the area, reinforce that "the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula was neither a brief nor a peaceful process," researchers explained in a statement from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

The ancient Roman historian Cassius Dio (who lived from around A.D. 150 to 235) wrote that the Ceretani revolt took place in 39 B.C., but it was generally thought to have occurred farther west. The new finds, however, pinpoint an ancient Roman military camp in what's now Cerdanya, a region of the eastern Pyrenees on the Spanish side of the modern border with France. At the time, this location was in Ceretani territory.

Roman expansion

The archaeological team found the sling bullets last year among the remains of the camp at Collet de Jovell, an alpine pass in the region. The bullets were poured from lead (it was easier than collecting stones), and two were emblazoned with the letters CND, which stood for the Roman governor of the province of Hispania at that time, Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus. These letters help date the ambush to exactly 39 B.C., when he was in office.

The archaeologists also unearthed the distinctive iron studs that Roman legionaries wore on their sandals, called clavi caligae; Roman fibulae, or brooches for fastening clothing; and several Roman coins that reinforced the team's dating of the site.

The Romans started expanding in Iberia, known to them as Hispania, after first landing on the Mediterranean coast in 218 B.C., during the Second Punic War with Carthage. But they were opposed by the Ceretani and other Indigenous peoples.

The two sides battled for centuries. But the Ceretani revolt in 39 B.C. failed to oust the invaders and was followed by severe Roman repression of the local people, according to the statement.

The Romans suffered, too ‪—‬ the governor ordered that some of his troops be punished for running away when the Ceretani ambushed the camp.

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

A century ago, American archaeologists excavating at a cave site in France unearthed a cache of seven rock crystal tools made by Neanderthals. The discovery was one of the first to prove that Neanderthals were not the unintelligent brutes that many scientists of the time believed they were.

This rare quartz scraper was found at the archaeological site of Abri Des Merveilles in the Dordogne region of France in 1924 by a team from the American School of Prehistoric Research (now a department at Harvard University) led by George MacCurdy. The unique tool is now in the collection of France's National Archaeological Museum.

Neanderthals typically crafted their stone tools from flint or chert because these rocks would predictably fracture into sharp edges. But a small handful of Neanderthal sites in Europe have yielded tools made from microcrystalline quartz, also known as rock crystal, resulting in stunningly clear scrapers and points.

According to MacCurdy's April 1931 excavation report, this was the first rock crystal tool the team discovered. It is transparent but yellow-tinged, and it may have been used as a combination scraper and point. In addition to six other rock crystal tools, MacCurdy found tiny rock crystal chips that meant the tools were likely fashioned on-site in the cave. The rocks may have tumbled downstream from the headwaters of the Vézère, a tributary of the Dordogne River that runs near the site. Abri des Merveilles has never been precisely dated. However, based on stratigraphy, tool types and the presence of a Neanderthal molar, the rock crystal tools were likely made between 45,000 and 80,000 years ago.

MacCurdy's discovery proved that Neanderthals, not modern humans (Homo sapiens), were the first to create innovative tools from rock crystal ‪—‬ a conclusion that surprised many scientists of the time.

A century ago, most experts believed that Neanderthals were ape-like and unintelligent, thanks in large part to paleoanthropologist Marcellin Boule's 1909 analysis of a Neanderthal skeleton from the site of La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France. The skeleton of an older male Neanderthal with osteoarthritis influenced Boule's incorrect characterization of Neanderthals as knuckle-dragging cavemen. This perception of Neanderthals lasted well into the 21st century, when paleogeneticists finally proved that Neanderthals and modern humans mated.

MacCurdy, however, saw the rock crystal tools as an indication that Neanderthals had a sense of aesthetics. "We are accustomed to think of Neandertal man as devoid of the artistic sense," he wrote, because, a century ago, archaeologists had not yet found evidence of Neanderthal rock art, carved artifacts, engravings or use of pigments.

The Neanderthal "was not an artist in the strict sense; that he had an eye for beauty of form and color is evident from even the limited use he made of rock crystal," MacCurdy wrote in the journal PNAS in November 1931. "Neandertal man must also be given credit for discernment of beauty and quality of the material employed in his industry."

According to France's National Archaeological Museum, which profiled this tool as their Object of the Month in September 2025, MacCurdy drew highly innovative conclusions about Neanderthals from the rock crystal tools, which helped pave the way for our modern understanding of our enigmatic extinct cousins.

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

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The ancient Celts thrived in Europe, earning a reputation as fierce warriors. They sacked Rome around 390 B.C. and, decades later, were received by Alexander the Great while he was conquering his empire.

It's no surprise, then, that archaeologists find many weapons in Celtic graves. However, over the decades, some of those weapons have been found in burials of women, hinting that they may have used these weapons. What's more, recent genetic studies suggest that elite Celts inherited power through maternal lines.

The Celts lived throughout Europe, from what is now Spain to Turkey. They shared a similar language and culture, and clues of female power have been found throughout their old lands and hinted at in ancient texts. This raises an interesting question: Did the Celts have women who fought in battle?

Opinions vary, but some experts Live Science interviewed thought it was possible that Celtic women could have fought in battle, although perhaps not regularly. One problem is that there is an ongoing debate among scholars as to whether the inhabitants of the British Isles around 2,000 years ago were, in fact, Celtic.

Genetic hints

Although it's not directly related to answering the question about Celtic women warriors, a few recent genetic studies have found that elite Celtic women held powerful roles. A 2024 study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour that looked at ancient DNA in several Celtic burials from Germany found a matrilineal inheritance of power, and a 2025 study of burials from Iron Age England revealed that men married into local, powerful female lineages.

This supports textual evidence that Celtic women had more power than many of their female counterparts across Europe. Women "of the Celts did generally enjoy more freedom and opportunity than their counterparts in the Greek and Roman world," Philip Freeman, a humanities professor at Pepperdine University, wrote in his book "War, Women and Druids: Eyewitness Reports and Early Accounts of the Celts" (University of Texas Press, 2002). "It is hard to imagine a Greek wife joining her husband on the battlefield or even leading an army, as did the British queen Boudicca."

"Flashing-eyed" women

Another piece of possible evidence is a particularly colorful ancient quote about the Gauls, a Celtic group that lived in what is now France.

The Roman soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus (who lived circa A.D. 330 to 395) wrote in his book "Res Gestae" ("Achievements") that "a whole group of foreigners cannot stand against one of them in a quarrel if he involves his wife, stronger than him by far and flashing-eyed — least of all when she swells her neck and gnashes her teeth and, swinging her vast, white arms, proceeds to rain down punches mixed with kicks, like shots discharged from the twisted cords of a catapult" (translation by Gavin Kelly).

In other words, don't mess with a Gallic wife.

But we have to be careful with the Ammianus quote as it refers to brawling rather than warfare, said Gavin Kelly, a professor of Latin literature and Roman history at the University of Edinburgh. We shouldn't take the quote to mean that Celtic women fought in battle, Kelly said. He doesn't know if Celtic women fought in battle but, if they did, Kelly suspects it was rare.

Weapons in burials

Rachel Pope, an archaeology professor at the University of Liverpool who has studied the Celts extensively, told Live Science in an email that "we have good evidence now across Europe that a small number of women were buried with weapons." In a 2021 Journal of Archaeological Research study, she mentioned cases in which women were buried with daggers or spears, including a 2,500-year-old cemetery in eastern France where some women were buried with daggers.

Some of the best evidence is from Britain, where "we have osteological evidence from three hillforts now that [some] women took part in combat," Pope said, noting that there "is evidence too for women fighters in northern Britain, where women are buried with chariots."

Simon Mays, a senior human skeletal biologist at Historic England who has studied a woman buried with weapons on the Isles of Scilly, off the southwest coast of Britain, said women in the region were probably involved in battle. There "is little doubt that violence was a routine part of Iron Age life, and [thus] female involvement is likely," Mays told Live Science in an email.

However, just because someone fought in battle doesn't make them a "warrior," Emmet Taylor, a lecturer at the School of Irish Learning at University College Cork, told Live Science in an email. Taylor noted that it "is important for us to think about martial identities complexly," and in ancient and early medieval Ireland, there is little evidence that women were allowed to join social groups that could be considered warriors.

Can ancient Britons be considered Celts?

Most famously, there is Boudica (sometimes spelled Boudicca), a queen of the Iceni (a people in England) who led a revolt against the Roman Empire around A.D. 60. She led her forces to several victories against the Romans before being defeated at the Battle of Watling Street in A.D. 61, after which she died — either by illness or by taking poison to avoid being captured by the Romans.

However, whether the Iceni or other ancient groups in Britain were Celtic is a matter of debate among scholars. The ancient geographer Strabo (who lived circa 64 B.C. to A.D. 24) actually "distinguished Britons from Celts," John Collis, a professor emeritus of archaeology at the University of Sheffield, wrote in his book "The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions" (Tempus, 2003).

Terms such as "Celt" and "Gaul" were "never used for the inhabitants of the British Isles except in the most general way for all the inhabitants of western Europe including non Indo-European speakers such as Basques," Collis wrote.

However, although ancient writers didn't refer to people in Britain as Celts, they did note their cultural and linguistic similarities, Freeman wrote. Following this line of thought, it's not too far-fetched to call Boudica a Celt.

Miranda Aldhouse-Green, a professor emeritus of archaeology at Cardiff University in the U.K., told Live Science in an email that she prefers "to refer to Boudica as British rather than Celtic" but noted that Boudica's rebellion is part of substantial evidence for warrior women in Britain.

"There is archaeological evidence for war-women in Britain in the form of Iron Age chariot [burials]," she said. For example, she noted the story of Cartimandua of the Brigantes in Yorkshire, who allied herself with Rome and fought against anti-Roman groups in the region.

"So yes, women did fight particularly in Britain," Aldhouse-Green said. But there is "less evidence" on the European continent for women fighting in battle, she noted.

In Britain the evidence for women in battle is very strong. "In the texts, we have Boudica, raising an army and razing three cities, and [the ancient writer] Tacitus tells us women commanding combat was not unusual," Pope said.

See how much you know about the celts with our Celtic quiz!

Traces of two "ghost lineages" of extinct human populations lie hidden within our genome, a new study reveals.

One of these ghost lineages left its DNA scattered in all present-day people. The other, a "super-archaic" lineage, dates back nearly 2 million years, researchers reported Thursday (July 30) in the journal Science.

"These extinct populations may have lived hundreds of thousands — or even more than a million — years ago, yet traces of their genetic legacy remain preserved in our genomes today," study co-author Priya Moorjani, a human evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science.

For decades, experts have found DNA evidence that our species, Homo sapiens, once mated with now-extinct relatives such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. Most people not of sub-Saharan ancestry living today possess about 1% to 2.4% Neanderthal ancestry, and Asians and Oceanians (people from the island nations of the Pacific Ocean) harbor about 0.1% to 6% Denisovan ancestry.

But scientists have suspected that modern humans may have interbred with other now-extinct human groups that have not been identified yet. However, the scarcity of ancient DNA samples makes it challenging to identify what these unidentified groups, often called ghost lineages, might have contributed to our species.

"Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of human evolution, but it can only tell us about populations for which DNA has been preserved," Moorjani said. "DNA survives only under very specific conditions — typically in cold, dry environments — which means that much of our evolutionary history, particularly in Africa, other tropical regions, and at very deep timescales, remains inaccessible."

Looking for "long-extinct ancestors"

In the new study, Moorjani and her colleagues reasoned that everyone's genome contains a record of their ancestry. They investigated whether it was possible to uncover signs of "long-extinct ancestors preserved within the genomes of present-day people," Moorjani said.

The researchers developed a new technique to scan and compare more than 500 complete genomes of present-day humans from around the world. Using this data, they reconstructed the complete genealogies of each spot in each person's genome, developing family trees of the people's ancestors that mapped out every time genetic lineages diverged and merged. They focused on ancestors who had profound genetic differences from modern humans ‪—‬ a sign they evolutionarily split from the modern human lineage a long time ago.

"Most regions of our genome share a common ancestor relatively recently in our evolutionary history," Moorjani said. "Occasionally, however, we find stretches of DNA whose common ancestor lies much farther back in time, indicating they originated from a long-separated human lineage."

Unlike previous approaches, this new method does not require DNA samples from fossils in order to spot ancient genetic sequences in the modern-human genome. "We no longer have to wait for extraordinary fossil preservation to learn about extinct human populations," Moorjani said. "Instead, the genomes of living people contain traces of these ancient ancestors, and genealogical methods allow us to recover some of that hidden history."

The researchers experimentally tested the new method, which correctly identified Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestors in modern-human genomes. However, it also uncovered previously unknown instances of interbreeding with now-extinct groups.

The researchers said one ghost lineage's DNA was found in all modern humans. This finding suggested that the lineage interbred with modern humans in Africa more than 50,000 years ago, before the most recent migration of H. sapiens out of Africa and into the rest of the world.

"Previous publications suggested that there might be ghost ancestry — ancestry from unknown archaic lineages in modern humans — but they hadn't concluded whether this unknown ancestry is present only in Africans or not, and when this introgression event happened," study co-author Yulin Zhang, a computational biologist at UC Berkeley, said in a statement. "We were actually able to find and map genomic locations in modern humans that are from this ghost lineage and show that this ghost ancestry is in all modern humans, not only in Africans."

This newfound lineage's DNA constitutes about 0.5% to 1% of the genomes of modern humans, comparable to the amount of Neanderthal DNA in many people living today. The scientists estimated that this ghost lineage diverged from the ancestors of modern humans about the same time Neanderthals and Denisovans did, about 800,000 years ago.

Ghost candidates

One possible candidate for the ghost lineage is Homo heidelbergensis, the researchers wrote in the study. This human species lived from about 700,000 to 200,000 years ago in Africa and Europe.

"I agree with their speculation that this ghost could have been the species Homo heidelbergensis, which was present in Africa as recently as 300,000 years ago," Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

The scientists also found evidence that people from Oceania inherited traces of a "super-archaic" human lineage that diverged from the ancestors of modern humans about 1.8 million years ago, before the emergence of the common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. This super-archaic DNA, on average, made up about 0.002% of the Oceanian genomes investigated and appeared within regions of Denisovan DNA, suggesting that the super-archaic DNA got into modern humans through interbreeding with Denisovans.

The age of this super-archaic DNA suggests it may have come into Denisovans, and then modern humans, from Homo erectus, the longest surviving human species to date, Fernando Villanea, a population geneticist at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. That could make sense, because H. erectus skulls found in Yunxian, China, share some features with Denisovan fossils, Villanea added. But to date, only a limited amount of H. erectus genetic material has been analyzed.

The study's findings highlight that modern humans are the product of multiple species and that "hybridization is the norm and not the exception," Villanea said. "We see hybridization being a common trait in the evolution of many other species, and these findings help us reframe our scientific thinking away from a mentality of human exceptionalism."

The DNA segments from these newfound lineages are spread throughout the human genome, but they are most numerous in parts of the genome associated with the immune system and metabolic function. Moorjani said this makes sense, as the need to adapt to new germs and sources of food has been one of the strongest drives in human evolution. Interbreeding with other now-extinct human groups allowed modern humans to acquire potentially beneficial DNA.

"This work reinforces a fundamental shift in how we think about human evolution," Moorjani said. "Rather than a simple branching tree, human history is increasingly emerging as a complex web of populations connected by repeated episodes of divergence, migration and mixing."

Stringer agreed, adding that this new technique provides "indirect ways of reconstructing parts of the genomes of more primitive species like H. erectus and H. heidelbergensis."

In the future, the scientists hope to use their new method to detect signs of more ghost lineages, "particularly those from regions such as Africa and South Asia that remain underrepresented in ancient-DNA studies," Moorjani said. The new technique can also help researchers "study evolutionary history in other species where fossil DNA is scarce or absent," she added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archaeologists excavating in the famous prehistoric Hohle Fels cave in Germany have uncovered two bird figurines carved from mammoth ivory. ‪‪The thumbnail-size carvings add to the existing ‬‬evidence that ice age humans had a sophisticated artistic sense 40,000 years ago.

"The figurines demonstrate that the earliest artists were skilled ivory-carvers, who could depict delicate motifs in miniature form," Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany and director of excavations at Hohle Fels, said in a July 29 statement.

When the birds were found in 2025, they were lying just 5 feet (1.5 meters) from each other in a layer dating back 40,000 years, according to the statement. The sculptures bring the total number of bird figurines from Hohle Fels up to three; a small water bird was found there in 2001.

Hohle Fels was occupied by early Homo sapiens during the Aurignacian period of prehistory (43,000 to 28,000 years ago), following the decline and disappearance of Neanderthals from Europe. At that time, humans launched a creative explosion, creating the world's first musical instruments, jewelry and small sculptures. The Venus of Hohle Fels, a 41,000-year-old statuette of a woman with exaggerated breasts and buttocks discovered in the cave in 2008, is generally considered the oldest figurative sculpture in Europe. Archaeologists have also found figurines of animals and an ivory rope-making tool at Hohle Fels, a German name that means "hollow rock" in English.

At roughly thumbnail-size, the two new bird carvings are significantly smaller than the figurines found previously at Hohle Fels. Despite their tiny dimensions, "the carvings are not highly stylized but instead include many specific and unique features," Conard said. "The artist has recorded detailed observations that allow us to consider which kind of bird is represented and what the bird could be doing."

One bird appears to be lying on the ground, possibly brooding over its eggs. This position suggests the bird is a ptarmigan, a game bird that is related to chickens and grouse and whose bones have been discovered in the prehistoric layers at Hohle Fels. The second bird has spread wings that are suggestive of flight or posturing in courtship, according to the statement. This bird may also be a ptarmigan, or possibly a bird of prey.

The two tiny ptarmigans raise many new questions about early humans in Europe, Conard said. They are among the earliest evidence of modern humans in Europe, suggesting art was a major feature of early human life. Archaeologists do not know what meaning the carvings held for the Aurignacian people who lived at Hohle Fels, but the objects may have been personal talismans or a symbol of a specific group of people.

Hohle Fels is unique among ice age cave sites because, to date, it is the only one with bird figurines. This may reflect people's keen observations of the natural world around them.

"Our region and landscape have always been the home of a vast range of birds," Stefanie Kölbl, managing director of the Museum of Prehistory and Ice Age Art, said in the statement. "Their calls signaled warnings, and the residents of the region often used their hollow bones and even mammoth ivory to make flutes that produced magical sounds."

The figurines are on display at the Museum of Prehistory and Ice Age Art in Blaubeuren, Germany, through April 4, 2027.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Cut marks suggestive of cannibalism have been discovered on the fossils of an ancient human relative in a cave in Spain, new research finds. But many of the bones from the species, known as Homo antecessor, were from adults ‪—‬ not just children, as previous discoveries had found ‪— adding a new dimension to the cannibalism that was practiced in this area 850,000 years ago.

The two dozen bones and teeth were recently found in Gran Dolina cave, part of the Sierra de Atapuerca archaeological complex in northern Spain, according to a July 24 translated statement from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES). Among the remains were fragments of a skull, spine, arm and leg bones, as well as three teeth from several members of the now-extinct H. antecessor, a relative of modern humans that lived in Europe between about 1.2 million and 770,000 years ago. Several of the bone fragments had cut marks from stone tools.

Over the past few decades, researchers have identified numerous cases of cannibalism at Gran Dolina, meaning H. antecessor is the oldest known human relative to eat its own group members for nutritional reasons. In a 2010 study, researchers noted that most of the evidence of cannibalism at Gran Dolina came from the bones of infants and juveniles, who would have been easier to capture and kill as the young, defenseless members of a rival group. But the newly excavated fossils have upended that assumption.

"The discovery of more adult individuals, some of whom also bear cut marks, demonstrates that cannibalism was not restricted to younger individuals," Palmira Saladié, a biological anthropologist at the IPHES who coordinated the work, said in the statement.

The number of individuals found at Gran Dolina has now risen to at least 13, and about half of them are adults. "The increase in the number of individuals, and especially the addition of more adults, allows us to begin understanding this population from a much more complete perspective than ever before," Andreu Ollé, an archaeologist at the IPHES, said in the statement.

Excavation at Gran Dolina has also brought to light an assemblage of stone tools made from flint, quartzite and sandstone, along with animal bones from hyenas, beavers, deer, horses and rhinoceroses, according to the statement.

Evidence of cannibalism at the site is extensive. Stone tools found in the cave are consistent with the cut marks on the human bones, and the animal bones have revealed butchering techniques that were also used on humans. Some of the human bones also had human bite marks, Saladié told Live Science in 2025, which is the "most reliable evidence that the bodies found at the site were indeed consumed."

But while the practice of cannibalism at Gran Dolina has been confirmed, the reason for it is still unclear. Researchers hope the newly discovered adult bones may help them better understand the practice among H. antecessor groups.

"We have only just begun excavating this new area" at Gran Dolina, Marina Mosquera, an archaeologist at the IPHES, said in the statement, "and the first results already demonstrate its enormous scientific potential."

Further analyses on the bones are now underway to explore questions about age-related differences in cannibalism, the number and length of cannibalistic episodes, and the social organization of H. antecessor, according to the statement.

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The ancient Egyptians sometimes reused crafted materials. This block, which features a battle scene, was likely created during the reign of Amenhotep II between 1427 and 1400 B.C., during the 18th dynasty. But when it was discovered, the block was being used as part of the foundation of the unfinished mortuary temple of Ramesses IV (who ruled from 1153 to 1147 B.C., during the 20th dynasty).

The painted sandstone slab was discovered in Luxor in 1912 by Egyptologist Herbert E. Winlock, who later became the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has the block in its collection. In his original publication describing the artifact, Winlock wrote that it featured a scene of an Egyptian pharaoh slaying his enemies with a bow and arrow. "The block may be taken as one of the best preserved specimens of the great imperial pictorial-relief yet discovered," he wrote.

The excellent preservation of the artifact and its vibrant colors was likely due to its reuse in Ramesses IV's temple foundations, Catharine Roehrig, the Met's curator emerita of Egyptian art, wrote in a 2008 explanation of the relief fragment.

Measuring roughly 24 by 45 inches (61 by 115 centimeters), the painted sandstone carving was likely part of a larger scene depicting an Egyptian pharaoh vanquishing an enemy army, according to Roehrig. The pharaoh's chariot and horses appear in the upper-right corner, while a rival soldier tries to avoid being trampled to death. Three of the enemies have been pierced by arrows.

The pointed beards and distinctive clothing suggest the enemies were ancient Syrians or possibly the Hyksos, a Semitic-speaking foreign dynasty that ruled Egypt from around 1640 to 1530 B.C., during the Second Intermediate Period, James P. Allen, former curator of Egyptian art at the Met, wrote in 2005. The battle scene may therefore reflect historical conflicts fought between dynasty 18 pharaohs like Amenhotep II and Asiatic rulers.

But the relief was unlikely to have been created as a commemoration of a specific historical battle. "Their primary purpose was to portray the pharaoh in his role as the victorious defender of Egypt," Roehrig wrote.

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Science word of the day: Lithics

Pronunciation: LITH'-iks

What it means: In archaeology, lithics refers to artifacts made of stone. Scientists used to think Homo sapiens was the only human species to make stone tools. But like many oversimplified stories about human evolution, this one turned out to be a bust. Humans in Indonesia were making sharp-edge stone flakes 1.5 million years ago, before our species even existed.

How to use it in a sentence: Lithics preserve well, so scientists base a lot of what we know about ancient civilizations on their stone tools, while artifacts such as textiles or leather rot away.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

Archaeologists have uncovered a rare and unusual burial of premature twins in a 1,200-year-old tomb near the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in Turkey. Although the burial was found in an abandoned latrine, researchers think the intention was to protect the babies in the afterlife.

"This interment was made in an unexpected and exceptional setting," Lilli Zabrana, an archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences who co-authored a new study detailing the discovery, told Live Science in an email. Burials previously discovered at Ephesus were made in a dedicated cemetery outside the boundaries of the ancient temple.

"What is even more unusual is that the burial contains two premature infants, who were probably twins, which is a rather rare occurrence," study co-author Caroline Partiot, a bioarchaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, told Live Science in an email. Evidence of a rare genetic condition found in one of the infants makes the finding even more unique, the researchers noted.

In the study, published online July 13 in the journal Childhood in the Past, Partiot and Zabrana analyzed bones found in a tomb that was likely built in the eighth to ninth century, during the middle Byzantine era. The grave was placed within an abandoned latrine channel, originally built during the second or third century, Zabrana said, but the latrine was a later addition to a Roman odeum — a building used for musical performances — that was built in the first century within the sacred area of the famous Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), which was originally built around 550 B.C.

When excavators opened the cist, or stone-lined grave, they saw two tiny skeletons buried side by side. Based primarily on the size of the bones, Partiot and Zabrana estimated the skeletons were from infants who were likely born prematurely at around 33 to 34 gestational weeks, or 7.5 months in utero. (A full-term pregnancy typically lasts between 39 and 40 weeks.)

"The hypothesis that they were twins is based on the fact that they have very similar ages at death and were buried in direct contact with one another," Partiot said. "However, it will only be possible to confirm whether they were indeed twins through future DNA analyses."

Although the researchers did not find any evidence of trauma or disease on the babies' skeletons, they did notice a rare bone called a supernumerary cervical rib. This hereditary trait involves the growth of an extra rib bone that forms at the back of the neck in about 1% of people and usually doesn't cause any problems. However, Partiot has found that, in babies, there is an association between cervical ribs and anomalies in Hox genes — a group of genes that code for specific body parts during embryonic development — that can lead to stillbirth, prematurity or sudden infant death.

"To the best of our knowledge, no cases of twins with cervical ribs have been documented in an archaeological context" before this one, the researchers wrote.

The twins may have been buried in an odd location outside the known burial grounds at Ephesus because they died as premature infants who probably hadn't been baptized yet, the researchers proposed. The infants' final resting place was likely a kind of "practical compromise" between Christian burial practices and local customs, the researchers wrote in the study.

The team found no evidence of the twins' mother nearby or in the Ephesus cemetery. "It is possible she died at the same time, but it is also possible that she did not; it is difficult to say," Partiot said. "Both infant mortality and maternal mortality were very high at the time."

But the twins' protective cist grave preserved their skeletons for more than a millennium, which "clearly indicates that this was a respectful burial rather than the disposal of human remains," Zabrana said. Ultimately, the tomb reveals a family's "intention to care for the two deceased infants in death, and to acknowledge their fleeting place within the community," the researchers wrote.

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

Archaeologists in Slovakia have uncovered a large Roman military camp likely used by Marcus Aurelius' troops during conflicts with Germanic tribes in the late second century. The "extremely rare" camp came as a surprise to archaeologists, as it holds the hastily buried remains of numerous soldiers in unusual graves, including wells.

Remains of the 18.2-acre (7.4 hectare) camp were found near the town of Šurany in southwestern Slovakia, according to a translated July 17 statement from MH Invest, which excavated the area along with the Institute of Archaeology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAS).

"We have a unique opportunity to explore practically an entire Roman marching camp, which is extremely rare in the European context," Matej Ruttkay, director of the SAS Institute of Archaeology, said in the statement. "We are clearly investigating a place that disappeared immediately after the military conflict between the Romans and the Germans."

Between A.D. 166 and 180, the Romans fought a series of battles against a Germanic people called the Marcomanni, who lived north of the Danube River along the border of the Roman Empire in what are now Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Marcus Aurelius, who reigned as Roman emperor from 161 to 180, commanded troops in the Marcomannic Wars with the goal of defending and securing Rome's border against barbarian invasions. But the wars ended upon Marcus Aurelius' death, when his son Commodus negotiated a peace with the Marcomanni, according to third-century Roman historian Cassius Dio.

The newly discovered Roman military camp had clear defensive characteristics, including five entrance gates, fortifications, and a curved ditch-and-rampart system typical of marching or legionary camps, according to the statement. The Šurany camp is only the second Roman military installation ever found in western Slovakia; the first camp, discovered in 2024 by SAS archaeologists, is thought to be where Marcus Aurelius wrote part of his Meditations.

The Šurany camp surprised archaeologists with a large number of skeletons — and parts of skeletons — buried in ditches, wells and hastily dug shallow graves, according to the statement.

"Our preliminary findings indicate that in most cases these are Roman soldiers," Marek Vojteček, an archaeologist at the SAS Institute of Archaeology, said in the statement. "Numerous components of Roman military equipment and weaponry were also found with the skeletal remains, such as spears, arrowheads, parts of helmets, segmented and scale armor, legionary brooches, coins, and the characteristic 'caligae' military sandals, from which iron nails on the soles have been preserved," he said.

X-ray analysis of blocks of clay revealed the intact sandal nails, which are now stored at the SAS Institute of Archaeology's specialized laboratory for further analysis. "It is literally a miracle to see the original footwear of a Roman soldier and even to be able to determine its size," Michal Cheben, an archaeologist at the SAS Institute of Archaeology, said in the statement.

The unusual burials raise important questions about the use and abandonment of this Roman military camp, according to Cheben, including whether the soldiers died from combat injuries or disease and why the bodies weren't looted before being thrown into storage pits and wells. "Laboratory analyses and further genetic and anthropological research may provide answers," Cheben said.

Because the camp was so large and the artifacts so numerous, a comprehensive analysis of the site will take several years and will involve international experts in carbon dating, soil analysis, isotopic analysis and ancient DNA, according to the statement.

"This is a long-term process, so many results will only become known in the coming years," Ruttkay said.

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

The face of a young woman crowned with a laurel wreath, buried in elaborate clothing and unusual cork sandals, has appeared nearly 1,700 years after her death.

She is one of 16 people from Aquincum, a Roman-era city in present-day Hungary, whose faces have been reconstructed for "Once We Were Like You," a new exhibition at the Aquincum Museum in Budapest. The display pairs skulls excavated in and around the ancient city with scientifically informed approximations of how their owners may have looked in life.

Six of the reconstructions are hyperrealistic silicone models, complete with artificial eyes, human hair, eyebrows, eyelashes and, in some cases, beards. The exhibition, which runs through Oct. 31, includes men, women and a child who lived during the region's period of Roman rule.

"The face is the most important feature for recognizing a person," Emese Gábor, a forensic facial reconstruction specialist who sculpted the silicone faces, told Live Science in an email. Although a skull cannot reveal every detail of a person's appearance, reconstruction lets museum visitors encounter the faces as those of "a real human being rather than as skeletal remains," she said.

Rebuilding a Roman face

Aquincum stood on the Danube frontier of the Roman Empire in what is now Budapest. The city was home to a diverse population in the first through fourth centuries, and genetic and archaeological analyses of the individuals in the exhibition point to connections with regions including present-day Italy, Scotland and Syria, as well as Sarmatian groups from the Eurasian steppe and Celtic communities that lived in the region before Roman rule.

The remains of those who lived here have also been unearthed, and continue to be discovered today during the excavation of cemeteries," according to a statement from the museum.

Creating a reconstructed face begins with a high-resolution 3D CT scan of the original skull. Specialists then produce an exact 3D-printed replica, allowing experts like Gábor to work without repeatedly handling or disturbing the ancient remains.

"The latest scientific advances — including 3D scanning, CT imaging, archaeogenetic (ancient DNA) analysis and facial approximation research — are incorporated whenever possible," she said.

"If a hyper-realistic reconstruction is required, I create a mould and cast the face in coloured silicone, finishing it with real human hair, eyebrows, eyelashes and, where appropriate, a beard," she said.

Ancient DNA can sometimes provide additional clues about pigmentation, including probable eye, hair and skin color. But the results are still approximations, not portraits. For instance, hairstyle, expression and many details of the person’s appearance are usually more speculative.

The woman with the laurel wreath

Of all the people she reconstructed, Gábor said she found it especially difficult to forget the woman known as the Jablonka Road mummy.

The woman's skeleton was relatively well preserved, but the soft tissue on her face had decayed, leaving only the skull. A laurel wreath still rested on her head, and, according to Gábor, her burial contained fine clothing, a spindle for weaving, bird-shaped cork sandals and a painted male portrait that had been placed near her feet. Archaeologists have suggested that the portrait may have represented her husband or father, although his identity is unknown.

"Based on these details, the archaeological context and the anthropological data, it was the archaeologists who pieced together her story while I reconstructed her face," Gábor said. "That was very moving."

Other individuals selected for the exhibition include those of a young girl who died in childhood and a woman interpreted as a nurse or healer who was buried in a children's cemetery. Some of the other reconstructions include a construction worker, a military officer and a blacksmith.

Two women appear to have met particularly violent or punitive ends. They were buried face down with their legs bound together, Gábor said. The exhibition's interpretation associates one woman with an accusation of witchcraft and the other with poisons, although such details are historical interpretations rather than evidence-based findings from the burials.

"Every reconstruction is a journey," Gábor said. "As I shape each face, I find myself reflecting on that person's life again and again, and by the end, they no longer feel like anonymous remains, but like real people."

Analyses of the skeletons suggest that many of the individuals endured strenuous physical labor, periods of hunger and chronic inflammation. This evidence led museum curators to conclude that many represented the less wealthy inhabitants of Roman society — people whose names and experiences were unlikely to appear in surviving written histories.

For Gábor, the physical reconstructions offer something that a digital image cannot: Visitors can stand face-to-face with a life-size person, walk around the model and study it from different angles. Her hope is that this encounter encourages visitors to think beyond the scientific data and imagine the full lives that once surrounded the excavated bones.

"When you see a face, you don't just see bones in a display," Gábor said. "You see a person — someone who was born, who grew up, who worked, who loved, who laughed, who struggled, who fought with challenges, who raised children. Some were sick. Not everyone died of illness. Some died in accidents. Some through violence. And eventually, all of them died. That sense of shared humanity helps spark empathy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human sacrifice

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

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

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

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

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

Sacred pilgrimage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It's long been debated what started the 1789 smallpox outbreak that devastated the Indigenous population in Australia. Now, a new modeling study has the likely answer: It was brought in 1788 by the "First Fleet" of British ships to settle Australia.

The finding is based on mathematical modeling of the disease's impact on Indigenous Australians and rejects a contrary idea that the outbreak originated through contact with Indonesian islanders fishing in the far North of the country.

Alan Williams — an archaeologist at the private firm EMM Consulting and co-author of the study, published July 9 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour ‪—‬ told Live Science that the likely source of the outbreak were vials of dried smallpox scabs that British medics kept for inoculations (a precursor of smallpox vaccines, which weren't invented by Edward Jenner until the 1790s).

Some historians had argued that the live smallpox virus could not have survived the eight-month ship journey from Portsmouth, England, to Botany Bay, south of what is now the modern city of Sydney, where the British ships first landed.

But the investigation showed that the vials of smallpox scabs may have been replenished during the voyage when the fleet stopped at either Cape Town, South Africa, or Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, only a few months earlier, Williams said.

The smallpox outbreak devastated Indigenous communities and contributed to the rapid demise of Indigenous Australian culture, he said. The study estimates approximately 220,000 people died from the disease, and that early-20th-century Australian authorities did not comprehend the true extent of the Indigenous population when they attempted to document historical accounts.

Mystery outbreak

Within a few decades of the British Royal Navy officer James Cook charting Australia, the British sent ships to settle the continent. The British "First Fleet" to Australia consisted of 11 ships: two naval vessels, six convict transports and three ships for provisions. The British claimed that Australia legally belonged to nobody. They soon left Botany Bay because the land and water there were poor, and they moved to Sydney Cove in Port Jackson, which is now part of modern Sydney. There, they raised the British flag, claiming the whole continent.

There were no signs of a smallpox outbreak among nearby Indigenous communities when the First Fleet arrived, but the disease took a devastating toll in the decades that followed. Because there were no recorded cases of smallpox on the fleet, it was argued that the disease must have arrived in Australia on the tropical north coast of the continent through contact with islanders from the Makassar region of Sulawesi, which is now part of Indonesia.

But the new computer modeling of the proposed north coast outbreak showed the disease could not have spread from there to Australia's Southeast. Among other issues, the two regions were separated by thousands of miles of uninhabited desert, Williams said. Meanwhile, modeling of the smallpox outbreak in Indigenous communities near Port Jackson indicated that the outbreak had originated there, the researchers found.

Co-author Matthew Cody Nitschke, an expert in computer modeling at Flinders University in Adelaide, told Live Science that it is now clear that the outbreak was very unlikely to have originated in the North; by contrast, "there is very strong evidence that it was the First Fleet."

At the time, disease theory was not known, so the spread of smallpox may have happened by accident, Williams said.

Revising earlier ideas

The new study in Nature Human Behaviour refers to a second study by the same researchers that is now being prepared for publication by the same journal. It proposes that there were up to 3 million Indigenous Australians at the time the First Fleet arrived — many more than the 300,000 or so proposed in some earlier studies.

That second study, based in part on archaeological investigations of early Indigenous Australian communities, suggests that the theoretical population capacity of Australia before the British arrival was up to 5 million people, especially in the resource-rich areas of the North and Southeast.

The former estimate of roughly 300,000 Indigenous Australians seems to have come from a study in the 1930s based only on their depleted numbers. "By the time people actually sat down and said how many people were here, we had 100 years of disease, frontier violence, and everything else going on," Williams said.

University of Tasmania historian Henry Reynolds, who was not involved in the studies, told Live Science that the research debunks the old idea that the smallpox outbreak started on the north coast. "The idea that it came from the North and arrived at exactly the time [as the First Fleet] was always improbable," he said.

Ann McGrath, a historian at the Australian National University in Canberra who was not involved in the work, agreed. "The strong interdisciplinary approach of this latest research convincingly refutes this, and it also provides a much expanded estimate of the Indigenous population prior to 1788," she said in an email.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

Archaeologists in Russia have discovered a rare medieval wild-boar tusk that was likely used by a warrior or noble as a good-luck charm, a new study reports.

The unusual finding, a large tusk mounted with an engraved metal cap, dates to between the mid-12th and early 13th century. It was found in Novgorod the Great (also called Veliky Novgorod or Novgorod), one of the oldest major towns in Russia. One characteristic of the amulet, in particular, stood out.

"It's extraordinary because of its size. It's extremely big," Natalia Eniosova, co-author of the study and a metal scientist in the Department of Archaeology at Lomonosov Moscow State University, told Live Science. The tusk isn't complete, but the length of what's left is 3.9 inches (10 centimeters) long, with the widest point measuring 1.1 inches (2.8 cm) across. She and her colleagues' research revealed that the tusk came from a wild boar that was at least 8 years old and weighed over 220 pounds (100 kilograms).

"Such an animal would not have been hunted for food," she said, explaining that domestic pigs were a more practical and common food source at the time. The wild boar may have been eaten anyway, but the team doesn't know for sure.

Another trait that makes the amulet unique is its mount. While it looks like it's made of silver, Eniosova was surprised to find that it was almost 100% tin ‪—‬ specifically, a silver-imitating tin-lead alloy. Just like today, tin wasn't as valuable or as expensive as silver, but because there weren't many tin sources in Europe at the time, it was still rare.

It's interesting that such a soft material was carved with engraved decorations, Eniosova pointed out. "It wouldn't have been easy, and this ornament is quite elaborate," she said. "It's a very, very well-done object."

All of these unusual characteristics seem to align with the artifact's discovery in a part of the Troitsky XVI excavation area that would have been inhabited by wealthy individuals. In fact, it was probably a hunting trophy belonging to an aristocrat, noble or military man, Eniosova said.

Historical texts report that wild-boar hunting in medieval times in what is now Russia was a privilege of the "druzhina," or military retinue, and the nobility, according to the study, which was recently published in the journal The Volga River Region Archaeology. Regardless of whether the wild boar was eaten, at least one of its tusks was extracted and then mounted with metal. The team thinks it was kept as a good-luck charm, mostly because of its size.

"It is highly probable that this mounted tusk functioned as a martial or hunting talisman," the researchers wrote in the study. "It symbolized the transfer of the beast's physical prowess to the hunter and served concurrently as a charm for good fortune."

Similar animal amulets with holes at the top, worn as necklaces, were popular in Veliky Novgorod during this time period, Eniosova noted. The newfound wild-boar tusk is missing its top part, but it may have once had a hole.

It still would have been a rare object, however. Boar tusk amulets were common in earlier periods, but they were very rare between the second half of the 11th century to the first half of the 13th century, despite the enduring widespread belief that these tusks had magical qualities.

The amulet could be linked to Scandinavian mythology, according to Eniosova. Indeed, some of Veliky Novgorod's first settlers were from Scandinavia. But the amulet was created over 150 years after they left the area, so the relation is hypothetical, Eniosova said.

Veliky Novgorod first appears in historical documents in the ninth century and was a major trading hub in the medieval polity known as Kievan Rus. Archaeologists theorized that at the time the boar tusk amulet was made, the city was inhabited by landowners and/or people involved with the fur trade, Eniosova said.

The finding is a "highly significant and unusual discovery," Alexei Gippius, a philologist at HSE University in Moscow who is familiar with Novgorod archaeology, told Live Science in an email.

Gippius, who knows the researchers but wasn't involved in the new study, added that the research sheds "new light on the origins and functioning of the mythological beliefs of the early Rus elite."

Nowadays, the word "weapon" may evoke modern-day technologies such as firearms, blades and missiles. Yet archaeological evidence shows that weapons have existed for hundreds of thousands of years. Of course, early humans wielded weapons that looked quite different from those used today.

So what is the oldest weapon?

Generally, weapons are defined as objects used to impart violence on other living beings, said Ben Fitzhugh, a professor of anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle. That includes objects used in interpersonal conflict among hominins (a group that includes modern Homo sapiens and our relatives that evolved following the split from chimps and bonobos) and for hunting, Fitzhugh told Live Science.

But archaeologists don't automatically consider just any object that could cause harm to be a weapon; context and intent matter, Rolf Warming, founding director of the Society for Combat Archaeology and a doctoral candidate in archaeology at Stockholm University, told Live Science in an email. For instance, experts excavating a site with potential weapons might look for evidence of hunting, such as butchered animal bones; or artifacts like pointed bone tools that can be used to craft weapons. They may also consider what objects were made out of and residue or wear marks on the weapons themselves, which can help determine how they were used.

According to Warming, archaeologists generally consider three finds as contenders for the oldest evidence of weaponry in the archaeological record: the Clacton spear, the Schöningen spears and throwing sticks, and the Kathu Pan 1 spear points.

Clacton spear

Scientists have estimated that the Clacton spear is over 400,000 years old. Experts think the uncovered 15-inch-long (37 centimeters) spear point was broken off from a longer shaft, perhaps by accident while the user was hunting, or deliberately as a ritual. It's made from yew wood and was worked with a tool to a sharp point on one end. The broken end was never found.

Excavated in 1911 from Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, England, the Clacton spear is now on display in London's Natural History Museum, where it is labeled as the oldest preserved wooden spear fragment in the world.

Archaeologists believe it was fashioned by either Homo heidelbergensis or Neanderthals — two hominins that predate H. sapiens. In fact, the spear appears to be older than our species, as the oldest known H. sapiens fossils date to around 300,000 years ago. The Clacton spear's shape, size and wood suggest that it was a thrusting weapon and that its makers engaged in cooperative hunting strategies.

Schöningen spears and throwing sticks

Since 1992, archaeologists have excavated between 20 and 25 wooden weapons at a site in Schöningen, Germany, including complete and fragmented spears, and throwing sticks made predominantly from spruce and pine wood.

They're considered the oldest completely preserved wooden weapons in the world, according to the Schöningen Research Museum; today, archaeologists' varying estimates place the weapons' age between 200,000 and 300,000 years old. Their creation has historically been attributed to H. heidelbergensis, an early human species that lived about 700,000 to 200,000 years ago throughout Europe, parts of Africa, and possibly in what is now China. More recent dating suggests the spears could potentially be the work of Neanderthals, according to a 2025 study.

Scientists think these spears, which average just over 6.6 feet (2 meters) long, were used as thrusting weapons, throwing weapons or some combination of both to hunt larger game mammals, like horses, according to a 2024 study. The shorter throwing sticks are believed to be projectile weapons and average around 26 inches (65 centimeters) long.

"In fact, the [Schöningen weapons] were found in association with butchered horses," Fitzhugh noted. The spears were sharpened, hardened and blackened using fire. "These things were shaped in a dynamically sophisticated way," he said.

According to Warming, the Schöningen weapons suggest hominins had clear material knowledge and used different hunting tactics depending how far they were from their target.

Kathu Pan 1 spear points

Hafted spear tips — stone points attached to some form of handle or shaft — became more common in the archaeological record between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago across Africa and Eurasia, and were previously thought to be created by Neanderthals or H. sapiens.

However, 500,000-year-old stone points excavated from the Kathu Pan archaeological site in South Africa have signs of wear on the edges, and the shape of their base is consistent with hafted spears, suggesting they were used as weapons. Their age predates both Neanderthals and H. sapiens, and the location they were found in suggests they could have been created by H. heidelbergensis, who lived in regions of southern Africa at that time. Archeologists think they could have been used as spear ambush weapons.

But some researchers have contested this evidence, arguing that it's "indirect" or even controversial, as no wooden shafts were uncovered with the spear points to solidify them as weapons as opposed to stone tools.

Something older?

These are some of the earliest examples of weapons in the archaeological record, but there may be older weapons that have not survived throughout time.

While hominins likely used organic materials like wood, sinew, fiber and adhesives to create objects and weapons, these materials break down or are destroyed over time, Warming noted.

Studying these ancient weapons gives us perspective about the present. After all, weapons are more than tools of harm: Warming said they are material clues that give us glimpses into how our early relatives combined materials, used their imaginations, shared knowledge and cooperated in groups.

Yet among these three important finds, Warming said that when inquiring about the oldest known weapon in the world, that "Clacton is the safest answer."

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

Female farm managers are hidden in plain sight in ancient Roman texts, mentioned in laws, literature and grave inscriptions across five centuries. Modern historians have generally assumed they were housekeepers, in charge of domestic tasks and household meals, and segregated from the productive business of the farm.

My new paper, published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, challenges this assumption.

In fact, there is evidence to suggest that many Roman female farm managers supervised wine production and other processes vital to farming and profits.

A false lead

A farming manual written by the Roman writer Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella in the 1st century CE is a window to the roles of the female manager.

An upper class landowner himself, Columella lists the responsibilities of farm managers, who were probably enslaved. The male manager was termed the vilicus, and the female manager the vilica, terms derived from their roles at the "villa".

But many historians reading this text have been side-tracked by a false lead: Columella begins his section on the vilica with a long quote from the Greek philosopher Xenophon, who wrote in Athens more than four centuries earlier.

The "natural" role of women, according to Xenophon, was to work indoors. Therefore in his discussion, the ideal upper-class married woman is depicted staying inside her town house to supervise the domestic work of the slaves.

The Greek writer is not discussing farm workers. In fact, Columella says four times that these ideas are not his own, but those of Xenophon, writing long ago.

Columella lists a completely different set of responsibilities for the vilica on a Roman farm: most importantly, the making of wine and olive oil, which were highly valuable commodities — the backbone of landowners' profits.

In his description of the vilica's duties, Columella includes the extraction of the juice from grapes during the harvest; adding flavorings and preservatives such as salt, wormwood, fennel or boiled grape-juice; and overseeing successful fermentation into wine.

According to Columella, the vilica also managed the processing of other farm products to make them long-lasting and profitable, such as turning inedible olives into olive oil for sale.

From archaeology we know that production of wine or oil, using huge machines in substantial buildings, could reach 50,000 to 100,000 litres per year, or even more. The vilica was therefore responsible for overseeing large-scale work essential to the operation of the estate.

Calling on the gods

Correct sacrifices to the gods were seen as vital to the success of the farm. Archaeology has uncovered altars for offerings in Roman wine-making buildings.

Wine-making in the Roman world was a precarious process, due to uncontrolled temperatures, bacteria or oxygenation. Wine could easily go moldy or turn into vinegar.

A striking element of Columella's account is that he includes carrying out offerings to avert such a disaster in his instructions for the female farm manager.

Looking for more clues

Other texts contain barely more than a mention of the vilica, revealing only her presence.

But we can still put together some clues.

Legal writings on inheritance, quoting the 1st century BCE jurist Trebatius, include her in the instrumentum fundi — whatever (including enslaved personnel) is required for productive work, gathering and preserving produce of the estate.

Another aristocratic landowner and writer, Cato the Elder, living two centuries before Columella, lists both the female and the male farm manager as essential staff for a vineyard or olive farm.

He devotes only one small section to outlining the female farm manager's tasks, but a close look shows these are not predominantly domestic. Cato includes keeping poultry and processing of seasonal farm products. Although he does include supervision of cleaning, this could refer to maintenance of work spaces such as stables and wine making buildings, an integral part of estate management – and also listed by Columella among the vilica's duties.

Cato also gives the vilica the responsibility for making sacrifices to the gods for the success of the farm. She must regularly offer garlands at the altar "for abundance", he writes.

A Roman mosaic showing estate work in different seasons depicts a scene of sacrifices for abundant crops to the god Jupiter (in his Celtic form as a sky and weather god). A woman is shown holding an offering of garlands, just as Cato instructs. Beside her are a jug for wine offerings and a male figure.

Perhaps this mosaic shows the vilica and vilicus, both essential to the success of annual harvests. While such images of female figures are rare, one fragmentary wall painting from Rome shows a female overseeing wine-making workers, just as Columella describes.

This combined body of evidence suggests we should expand outdated understandings of the roles that Roman women played in farm production, the dominant sector of ancient economies.

No vilica has left us an account of her work in her own words. But by paying careful attention to the evidence, we can hear an echo of her voice.

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

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

This week's science news reminds us how the past still speaks if we listen closely, with news of the discovery of 18 ancient Egyptian tombs filled with dozens of gold tongues topping the bill.

The ancient Egyptians believed that gold was the flesh of the gods, meaning that bestowing gold tongues upon the deceased could help them speak in the afterlife. But it's not entirely certain whether all of the newly found gold objects were tongues (one may actually depict a wheat ear, a symbol of fertility), and the mystery of a possible false door inside the tomb is also stirring up debate.

It's not the only ancient Egyptian discovery causing disagreement among archaeologists this week; an analysis of the nearly 4,000-year-old skeletal remains of ancient Egyptian princesses reveals they may have hunted or trained with the military — though not all experts agree.

Elsewhere, archaeologists discovered a curious ancient chariot among the remains of a mysterious society that burned down its own buildings before disappearing. We also learned that an ancient Bronze Age shaman thought to be a man was actually a woman, and researchers revealed the origins of more than 150 liberated Africans who had been left to die by the British Navy on the island of St. Helena.

We anticipate further ancient discoveries after a new study revealed that DNA can last for up to 50,000 years in Africa. Meanwhile, we published an excerpt describing how experimental archaeologists used ancient techniques to mummify a modern-day person — part of our coverage of author Sam Kean's book "Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations."

Sugar found in space

Sweet! Sugar found in raspberries was discovered near the Milky Way's center, hinting that life's ingredients are common in space

Astrochemists delivered a sweet surprise this week, with news that they had detected a type of sugar called erythrulose in interstellar space, near the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

Erythrulose, consisting of four carbon atoms, is found in raspberries back on Earth. But its presence in space is a mouthwatering sign that the essential ingredients for life are highly abundant across our galaxy. That could make life much more prevalent than we thought, and could mean that aliens may also have a sweet tooth.

Discover more space news

—'Smaller than the tiniest scale in nature': Physicists made a black hole out of light and used it to test Stephen Hawking's elusive radiation theory

—'The moon looked wrong': Artemis II mission controller Chris White on taking historic lunar flyby photos from 250,000 miles away

—James Webb telescope captures never-before-seen glimpse of 'Centaur' galaxy's battle wounds — Space photo of the week

Life's Little Mysteries

What is the roundest animal?

Animals come in all shapes and sizes, but are any a satisfyingly perfect sphere? It turns out that this deceptively simple question holds some evolutionarily profound implications.

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

Amateur astronomer 'geoguesses' an ancient crater

'This was one of the most arduous expeditions I've ever done': Scientists confirm that 15-mile-wide pit found on Google Maps is ancient meteor crater

Geoguessing emerged in the last decade as a geography game (and later a popular esport) in which players deduce locations from Google Maps imagery. But what about geoguessing something completely undocumented, and one that only trained scientists should be able to recognize?

In that circumstance, amateur astronomer Joël Lapointe should be crowned this year's champion. Using Google Maps to plan a hiking trip in Quebec's Côte-Nord region, Lapointe stumbled upon an indentation that has now been confirmed by scientists to be a 390 million-year-old scar from a gigantic asteroid collision.

"I get lots of messages from the public thinking they have found a crater and 99/100 turn out not to be the case," Gordon Osinski, a professor of planetary geology at Western University in Canada who confirmed the find, told Live Science in an email. "This is one of those rare examples that shows this is possible."

Discover more planet Earth news

—Tropical forests stop absorbing carbon dioxide during El Niño events. This year could be the worst.

—Venezuela's devastating 'earthquake doublet' holds a warning for California's San Andreas Fault

—'These are striking forecasts': Super El Niño keeps getting even more likely, and it could bring a humanitarian crisis

Also in science news this week

—5 'extremely rare' iron shackles discovered in France highlight Celtic slave trade 2,300 years ago

—Nobel Prize-winning physicist and team use Claude AI to solve decades-old math puzzle

—New 3D silicon chip stacks circuits on top of each other to boost computing power

—Robot dog can climb stairs, navigate a forest and bound over logs thanks to new, rapid AI training technique

—Scientists are deep-freezing koala eggs and sperm to protect the species from extinction

—Heaven Lake: China's deepest lake sits atop a colossal volcano and belongs mostly to North Korea

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for things to keep you busy over the weekend, here's a selection from our best opinion pieces, interviews, diagnostic dilemmas and crosswords that we published this week.

—Tobacco companies are pushing nicotine pouches on teens — and we need to act now to stop them [Opinion]

—'It affects your daily life suddenly': Sea level researcher explains why once-in-a-century floods could become the new normal [Interview]

—Diagnostic dilemma: Junk-food diet caused a teen's permanent blindness [Diagnostic Dilemma]

—Live Science crossword puzzle #52: The moon's other name — 2 down [Crossword]

Science photo of the week

Orange-lipped monkey that roars and snorts deep in Congo rainforest is new species to science

Hello! A new monkey just dropped!

Named Colobus congoensis after the remote region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo where it was found, this striking newfound species has orange lips and makes unique roars and snorts.

The monkey's discovery is remarkable, most of all because finding new primates is extremely rare — with only five new ones being identified in Africa over the past 75 years — and also because of its relatively large size. Pinning down the species took years of careful tracking and documentation, alongside work with people from eight local villages who had knowledge of it.

Besides being a cool find in its own right, the discovery points to there being potentially many more undiscovered mammals, fish, reptiles and plants hidden inside the Congolian rainforest.

Follow Live Science on social media

Want more science news? Follow our Live Science WhatsApp Channel for the latest discoveries as they happen. It's the best way to get our expert reporting on the go, but if you don't use WhatsApp we're also on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Flipboard, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Several ancient Egyptian princesses buried with bows, arrows and a dagger may have trained with those weapons during their lives, possibly using them while hunting or practicing archery, a controversial new study suggests.

Researchers examined the remains of six royal individuals who lived during Egypt's Middle Kingdom nearly 4,000 years ago. After analyzing the muscle-attachment sites on these bones, the researchers suggested that certain pronounced areas might be linked to repeated activities such as archery and weapon handling.

"Members of the royal family, especially the women, were active participants in skilled, physically demanding activities such as archery and hunting," study first author Zeinab Hashesh, an archaeologist at Beni-Suef University in Egypt, said in a statement.

The finding, published Friday (July 17) in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, challenges the assumption that weapons placed in the women's tombs were largely ceremonial. It may also provide new information about the health and physical activities of royal women.

However, bioarchaeologists who were not involved in the study told Live Science that skeletal changes cannot reliably indicate a specific activity. Age, body size, genetics and other repetitive movements can produce similar results, they said.

Royals rediscovered in a museum basement

In the 1890s, French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan excavated a site near the tomb of pharaohs Amenemhat II and Amenemhat III. From these excavations, de Morgan found various royal individuals, whose partial remains were later stored at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

For decades, the remains were forgotten about. But in 2020, museum workers rediscovered the bones during a museum curation project. The collection included King Hor, Princess Ita, Khenmet, Itaweret and Noub-Hotep, as well as an unidentified woman who may have been Princess Sathathormeryt (also spelled Sithathoriunet). Four of the women are believed to have been daughters of the pharaoh Amenemhat II.

However, the skeletons' identities depend heavily on those 19th-century labels, which "means that we cannot be certain how reliable they really are," Sonia Zakrzewski, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Southampton in the U.K. who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email. Most of the individuals' skulls were missing, and only around 22% to 58% of each skeleton survived. Their soft tissues had largely decayed into powder, but the remaining bones allowed the team to estimate the sex and age and look for injuries, diseases and signs of physical activity.

Signs of weapons training?

Using X-ray scans and specialized infrared spectroscopy, which can help identify different materials, the researchers examined the entheses, the places where muscles, tendons and ligaments attach to bones. Repeated muscle use can contribute to enlarged or pronounced attachment sites, although several other processes can also create this result.

Princess Ita, who died between the ages of 28 and 34, had pronounced attachment sites on parts of her right shoulder, arm and hand. The team suggested that these changes could reflect repeated gripping and weapon handling, possibly involving the ornate dagger found in her tomb.

Princess Noub-Hotep, who died in her early 40s, had strongly developed attachment sites in her forearms and right hand. De Morgan had discovered "arrows with their barbs in an astonishing state of preservation" in the princess's tomb, according to an 1896 issue of the journal American Anthropologist.

Similarly, Princess Itaweret showed robust attachment sites around her shoulder and chest, while Khenmet had pronounced features on her arms and shoulders. King Hor also displayed differences between muscle attachments on the left and right sides of his body.

The authors argued that these patterns fit actions involved in drawing back a bowstring ‪—‬ a process that can create muscular asymmetry between the left and right upper body. They also posited that these muscular patterns could be from gripping objects like daggers or maces and suggested the weapons buried with the royals weren't just symbolic.

Experts remain doubtful

Despite the pronounced attachment sites on these individuals' bones, Zakrzewski said it's unknown if the royals got buff through archery or some other activity.

The sites on the bones show that "certain muscles appear to have been repeatedly used, but the actual cause of that use is uncertain," she said. "We cannot say therefore that these skeletal changes necessarily are associated with the use of weaponry," especially since the researchers didn't look at comparison groups from the Nile Valley or elsewhere.

Zakrzewski added that it's unknown why artifacts like arrows were included in the tombs. Perhaps they were meant to be "used by individuals associated with the deceased," she said.

Scott Haddow, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Turin in Italy who was not involved in the study, noted that some of the skeletal changes were present on both sides of the remains.

"Archery is a highly asymmetrical activity; finding generalized, bilateral robusticity in some bones (with some asymmetry observed in other bones) does not make a particularly strong case for these individuals practicing archery," he told Live Science via email.

The individuals' ages at death could also explain the differences. Khenmet was between 35 and 45 when she died, while Noub-Hotep was approximately 40 to 44. Muscle-attachment sites are influenced by aging, as well as by body size and genetics, Haddow said.

Princess versus pauper

One of the study's largest caveats was the absence of a comparative group, which would have shown how unusual the changes were compared with other Egyptians from the same period.

"It would be very useful to know how much such side differences exist in contemporaneous Egyptians, whether royal or not," Zakrzewski said.

Besides missing a comparison with a "control" group, other experts believe that the researchers are reading too much into the weapons being buried with the royals.

"Although the presence of funerary artifacts (e.g., arrows, daggers) makes the princesses' involvement in such activities plausible, the authors provide limited biomechanical or biomedical evidence to substantiate this claim," Sébastien Villotte, an anthropologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, told Live Science via email.

He added that "a more robust approach would involve comparing these individuals to non-elite contemporaries from the same region and period. This would help determine whether such degenerative changes (at these locations) were common in the general population (who were unlikely to engage in the same activities) or truly indicative of elite-specific behaviors."

Although the study has a number of uncertainties, Zakrzewski said they shouldn't diminish the value of examining the remains. "It allows us to sort of put flesh on the bones and understand more about their lives," she said.

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

Archaeologists in Spain have discovered the remains of a 2,400-year-old bronze chariot that was used to honor the gods and may have had links to the ancient Etruscans, who lived in what is now Italy. ‪The discovery is "without known parallels" in Iberia, according to the research team.

The roughly 24-inch-long (60 centimeters) chariot was designed with a flat, table-like top that people would have used as a surface for burning incense as a divine offering, according to a translated statement.

The side of the chariot showcases a face sticking out its tongue. This face appears to be an unusual fusion of a gorgon, an ancient protective symbol associated with Medusa; and Achelous, a powerful river god in Greek mythology who could turn into a bull, Guiomar Pulido González, an archaeologist at the Mérida Institute of Archaeology (part of the Spanish National Research Council) who was involved with the discovery, told Live Science.

Archaeologists unearthed part of the chariot, including two legs and two wheels, at an archaeological site called Casas del Turuñuelo (Spanish for "Houses of Turuñuelo") in Spain's Badajoz province, close to the border with Portugal. The two legs look like two people holding up the table part of the chariot.

Both of the short sides of the chariot feature a mythical creature associated with safeguarding: a lion with wings and an eagle head, called a griffin. "All the figurative parts of the chariots point to protective divinities," Pulido explained, though "we are not sure what they are protecting ‪—‬ maybe the content of the chariot, or the viewers looking at them."

Archaeologists have previously discovered similar chariots made by the Etruscans, a pre-Roman people who lived in Italy from about 900 to 100 B.C. However, the newfound one is the first known chariot to feature a gorgon-Achelous face mashup, and the first of its kind to be found in the Iberian Peninsula, according to Pulido, who is also a doctoral student at the Autonomous University of Madrid studying ancient Mediterranean imports throughout the Iberian Peninsula.

Restorers working on the artifact noticed that the two people holding the chariot are wearing skirts, which would be unusual for an Etruscan chariot; typically, Etruscan-crafted bronze figures are naked, Pulido said. Despite this anomaly, the theory is that the chariot was made by the Etruscans and arrived in modern-day Spain via trade routes.

The chariot was found in a layer suggesting it was discarded around the end of the fifth century B.C., though the design of the gorgon-Achelou face's iconography indicates that it could have been made as early as the sixth century B.C.

An enigmatic people

The archaeological site that yielded the bronze chariot is in an area known as the Middle Guadiana River Valley, which has 14 known sites left behind by an enigmatic people that completely disappeared from the archaeological record around 400 B.C., Pulido noted. They were probably local populations that were heavily influenced by or mixed with the Tartessians, a civilization that settled in the Iberian Peninsula around the eighth century B.C. and was known for its elaborate writing system.

Each of the 14 sites holds the remains of burnt buildings that were subsequently filled in with soil and fragmented objects, Pulido said. The recently discovered chariot had been intentionally broken — it has no other damage besides being halved — and included in the debris.

The current leading theory regarding these ruins is that, for some unknown reason and around the same time, the inhabitants of these centers burned down their buildings, filled them in and then abandoned the sites. The burning and filling seem to have been too intentional for it to have happened in the context of an enemy attack, according to Pulido. "Instead, they may have formed part of a carefully planned ritual of closure, a symbolic farewell to buildings that were intentionally decommissioned," she said.

Then, this culture "disappeared from the archaeological record," Pulido said. But other evidence, including imported pottery from Greece and other Etruscan bronze objects, suggests that whoever these people were, they participated in the ancient trade networks stretching across the Mediterranean, with their elite having enough wealth to afford imported objects, she said.

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

Little is known about the tens of thousands of liberated Africans who were buried on the remote Atlantic island of St. Helena in the 19th century. But now, a new chemical and dental analysis reveals where more than 150 of these individuals spent their childhoods in Africa.

About 27,000 liberated slaves ended up on St. Helena after the British Empire outlawed slave trading in 1807, with the Royal Navy enforcing the ban. St. Helena was used to drop off enslaved people whom the navy had liberated. However, about 8,000 of these newly liberated people, who were malnourished and in poor health, died on the South Atlantic island not long after landing there.

These burials were forgotten until they were found ahead of an airport construction project centuries later. The dig, carried out in 2007 and 2008, found the buried skeletons of the liberated slaves, according to a new study published Thursday (July 16) in the journal Science.

To determine the origins of the liberated slaves, scientists studied the teeth of 152 individuals, measuring the ratio of strontium isotopes, which are atoms of the element strontium that have a different number of neutrons in their nuclei. When a person's teeth grow during childhood, the strontium isotopes in the food they eat and the water they drink are incorporated into their tooth enamel. By studying the unique strontium ratios in a person's enamel, researchers can determine where individuals lived as children.

The study found that many of the liberated slaves lived near the coast of West Africa, although some lived farther inland.

"Most individuals likely came from coastal or near-coastal regions in western Central Africa, [and] others appear to have originated much farther inland, implying forced displacement over hundreds to thousands of kilometers before embarkation," the team wrote in the study.

In one case, a man who died between the ages of 19 and 25 had been moved from inland Angola to the coast as a child, between the ages of 7 and 9. The scientists detected this movement by comparing the isotope signatures of his teeth that grew when he was around 7 to those that grew when he was around 9. He may have been trafficked as a slave when he was between those ages, the team wrote in their paper.

It's "possible that their displacement during childhood was connected with their enslavement," study co-author Hannes Schroeder, an associate professor of molecular ecology and evolution at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science in an email. Unfortunately, we don't know much else about this individual, Schroeder said.

In addition to this man, the study found evidence that at least 10 of the liberated slaves had been transported as children or early adolescents.

Schroeder said it's not clear if any of the people in the study have living descendants on St. Helena but it's unlikely given that these people probably died not long after landing on the island.

The team also used historical records and DNA analyses of 20 of the individuals to help determine where they were from. The DNA analysis "revealed affinities with present-day populations from Gabon and northern Angola, while also showing considerable diversity," the team wrote.

"These results are consistent with eyewitness accounts by Royal Navy personnel on the island, who reported multiple languages among the captives, including Congo and Benguela dialects," the team wrote, noting that the findings also align with historical records from Angola, Cuba and Brazil.

"The tragedy of enslaved children"

The new study sheds much needed light on the lives of enslaved people, researchers told Live Science.

"This study is especially impactful because it investigates instances of slavery, where knowledge of individuals' ancestors and descendants have been erased from history," Steven Micheletti, a geneticist who has studied the trans-Atlantic slave trade but was not involved in the new research, told Live Science in an email. However, he said the study would have benefited from analyzing the DNA of more people.

David Head, a historian at the University of Central Florida who was not involved in the study, praised the study. We "know a lot about the embarkation/disembarkation of enslaved people, thanks to slave traders keeping records of their business but less about where people originate from and how they got to the ports," he said in an email. "It's not surprising that the study found most people came from relatively close to the coast but that there were cases of people who came from much farther inland as well."

What "seems most interesting to me is the promise of learning about individuals, which is often very hard to do since the slave traders kept the records," and records kept by slave traders tended not to include a lot of information on the lives of their slaves, Head added.

He was also struck by the study's findings that many of the enslaved people were moved at a young age. "It makes sense that slave traders wanted younger people, with the potential for many years as laborers, but to have [this] reinforced through their [teeth] reveals the tragedy of enslaved children."

Alex Bentley, an anthropology professor at the University of Tennessee who wrote an article discussing the study in the journal, praised the research, noting how it combined the isotope data with historical records and some DNA analysis.

This is important because "although strontium isotope ratios in human tooth enamel ultimately reflect local geology, they record a biologically available mixture of foods and water consumed while the tooth was forming during childhood," Bentley told Live Science in an email. "So it's rarely a unique geographic fingerprint." It's possible that similar approaches could be used to study the origins of enslaved people in the United States, Bentley added.

The remains were reburied in 2022. The scientists and members of St. Helena's community looked into the possibility of repatriating the remains to countries in Africa where the people came from, but no agreements were reached. In some cases, it would have been difficult to determine which country to return them to, the team noted in their paper.

An Early Bronze Age metalworker and shaman discovered over 200 years ago in a lavish burial near Stonehenge and long assumed to be male was actually female, a new genetic analysis reveals.

The results of the ancient DNA analysis of the "Upton Lovell Shaman," carried out by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London, break the previously held stereotype of Early Bronze Age women, according to a statement from the Wiltshire Museum, where the remains and grave goods are housed.

"It completely tears up previous assumptions," David Dawson, director of the Wiltshire Museum, told The Guardian. "We're so used to the assumption [that] men do everything, men are the leaders, men are the metalworkers. Here we have smoking gun evidence of a female metalworker. And metalworking was the space science of its day."

The nearly 4,000-year-old burial was unearthed in 1801 near the village of Upton Lovell, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) west of Stonehenge. The human remains were surrounded by an unusually rich tool kit containing stone axes, metalworking implements with traces of gold on them, a touchstone for testing metal purity by comparing streaks left by different metals, and pierced animal bones that were likely once sewn onto a garment as decorations, hinting at a ceremonial cloak.

The mix of high-status metalworking tools and objects thought to have ritual significance led archaeologists to interpret the individual as a spiritual specialist, earning the remains the nickname, the "Upton Lovell Shaman."

William Cunnington, the English archaeologist who excavated the burial mound, known as a barrow, noted at the time that, "from the largeness of the bones," the burial "appeared to be a stout man," according to the statement. For the next two centuries, the individual's assumed sex was male, with its museum display depicting a bearded male figure.

The DNA analysis was originally intended to trace the individual's ancestry, but the results showed sex chromosomes of XX, instead of XY, catching the researchers off guard. To be certain, the team tested DNA from a tooth and a toe — and got the same answer each time, with no evidence that the grave held more than one person, according to the statement.

Other clues in the skeleton revealed more details about the individual. She stood around 5 feet, 4 inches (165 centimeters), which was unusually tall for a Bronze Age woman, and died at about age 45. She was robustly built, with arthritis in her right wrist but not her left ‪—‬ a pattern that fits years of the repetitive work with metalworking tools, the statement reported.

A 2022 study found that the individual was likely a skilled goldsmith who fashioned gold ornaments. This ability may have seemed magical during the Bronze Age, Susan Greaney, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science at the time.

"The ability to transform other objects by the delicate and skilled process of covering them with gold sheet may have been seen as a magical or ritual process, a secret method known only to a few people," Greaney said in a 2022 email. "This research shows how metalworking was closely related to magical, ritual and religious beliefs."

This is not the first time an ancient elite individual has been mistakenly identified as male. For instance, an elite person from Sweden's Viking Age who was buried with weapons and strategy games was thought to be male but was later verified to be female, and a high-ranking individual from Copper Age Spain was thought to be male until a DNA analysis showed they were female.

"We now have a whole new understanding of this burial, rewriting their story, breaking stereotypes, and putting women front and centre in our understanding of early Bronze Age society," Lisa Brown, curator of the Wiltshire Museum, said in the statement.

The findings will be unveiled Thursday (July 16) in a new exhibition on ancient DNA, "We Go Way Back," opening at the Francis Crick Institute.

Researchers have extracted DNA from a 50,000-year-old tooth belonging to an African antelope, setting a record for the oldest DNA ever retrieved from sub-Saharan Africa, a new study reports.

The finding suggests that DNA preservation in sub-Saharan Africa is possible for tens of thousands of years. In most cases, the region's hot climate breaks down the molecule and prevents researchers from understanding the evolution of numerous species, including ancient human ancestors and relatives.

While some temperate regions are known for preserving ancient human DNA — for instance, the Sima de los Huesos ("Pit of Bones") in Spain preserved DNA from a mysterious relative of modern humans that lived around 400,000 years ago — the sub-Saharan African climate is less forgiving. The oldest human DNA from sub-Saharan Africa is about 18,000 years old and was discovered in bones found in a rock shelter in Tanzania. And the oldest sub-Saharan animal DNA is just 9,300 years old, from an extinct antelope in South Africa.

In the new study, researchers tested whether DNA could be successfully extracted from ancient skeletons even older than that. By analyzing more than 300 teeth from animals that lived in the past 110,000 years, they discovered that small amounts of DNA could be identified even in remains from the Late Pleistocene, the latter part of the last ice age.

In a study published online May 27 in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, researchers extracted DNA from dozens of Holocene bovid specimens younger than 11,700 years old and from four Late Pleistocene bovid specimens between 12,000 and 50,000 years old. Although many of the teeth didn't yield DNA, a handful did. The oldest DNA the researchers found came from a partial molar from an African antelope called a mountain reedbuck (Redunca fulvorufula) discovered in Boomplaas Cave in southern South Africa. The other old DNA samples came from three extinct long-horned buffalos (Syncerus antiquus) ‪—‬ two that died 21,000 years ago and one that died 12,000 years ago.

"The 50,000-year-old DNA is exciting," study first author Deon de Jager, a paleogenomics expert at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science in an email. "But I am myself skeptical of it, for two reasons."

The reedbuck DNA is significantly older than the next-oldest DNA the researchers retrieved, from the long-horned buffalo, de Jager explained, and the reedbuck specimen was contaminated with some human DNA, which they were able to remove. These two issues mean the 50,000-year-old antelope DNA result is not ironclad. However, since the publication of the study, the researchers have also sequenced the genome of a 42,000-year-old wildebeest from Ethiopia, suggesting DNA lasts a lot longer in Africa's climate than experts once thought.

"There is of course a limit to DNA preservation in Africa, but what it is, is not clear," de Jager said. "There are certainly parts of Africa where DNA will be preserved even better than from the sites we have surveyed. Deep caves with stable, low temperatures will certainly be good candidates, but also high-elevation sites where temperatures have been very low for a long time."

The Late Pleistocene teeth that de Jager and colleagues analyzed produced very low amounts of DNA, which is thought to have a half-life of about 521 years, meaning half of the DNA in a specimen disappears every 521 years until none is left. But the amount the researchers found is still useful, de Jager said.

The DNA is sufficient for identifying evolutionary lineages, de Jager added. If they can gather enough data, researchers might be able to compare gene flow and interbreeding among species and populations.

Although these results suggest that DNA analysis is possible for understanding the past 40,000 to 50,000 years of animal and human evolution in South Africa, we may never be able to extract DNA from ancient human relatives like Homo naledi, which went extinct around 240,000 years ago, or Paranthropus robustus, which died out around 1 million years ago.

"I think the chances of obtaining DNA from Homo naledi are very, very low, unfortunately," de Jager said. "One would have to get very lucky with an incredibly well-preserved skull with the petrous bone still present, which is the best bone for obtaining ancient DNA. To get DNA from something in Africa nearly 1 million years old would probably be impossible, as the conditions in Africa are just too harsh."

How much do you know about Earth's frosty past? Find out with our last ice age quiz!

Archaeologists have found five pairs of iron shackles at a 2,300-year-old Celtic site in France ‪—‬ a discovery that suggests the small settlement was frequented by metalsmiths and slave traders.

The "extremely rare" shackles were discovered in the town of Allonnes in France's Loire Valley in 2019, but the finds from the two-year-long excavation were announced to the public on July 9 in a translated statement from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP).

The settlement at Allonnes was established along with a religious complex in the third century B.C., according to the statement. Specialist artisans ‪—‬ including blacksmiths, coppersmiths, bronze workers and sheet-metal workers ‪—‬ plied their trade from small workshops, archaeologists found at Allonnes.

During the excavation, the team discovered a large number of high-quality metal objects — such as swords, spearheads, keys and horse harness fittings — but the iron shackles were a surprise because they are extremely rare for the time period. Excavators found a double-wrist restraint, an ankle restraint and three other portions of metal restraints.

The presence of shackles suggests that Allonnes may have been a hub for slave trading in the Late Iron Age (450 to 50 B.C.), according to the statement.

"The identification of restraints and weapons suggests a hierarchical social organization composed of dominant and subordinate groups — prisoners or slaves," Thierry Lejars, a specialist in Celtic metalwork, said in a translated interview with INRAP.

The Gauls, a loose association of Celtic tribes, were known to enslave prisoners of war, convicts and debtors, according to the statement, and they were often forced to work in the fields. These men, women and children then lost their rights and could be bought and sold by their owners. Because the Celts did not leave many historical records of their own, however, not much is known about the practice of slavery in pre-Roman Gaul. The shackles from Allonnes provide new insight into the lives of people who were typically invisible in historical accounts.

The small diameter of the wrist restraint ‪—‬ 2.4 inches (6 centimeters) ‪—‬ suggests it may have been used on a woman or a child, according to the statement. And the ankle restraint was over 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram), revealing the weight that enslaved people had to carry around.

Archaeologists also uncovered a religious sanctuary at Allonnes, along with offerings that included clothing and jewelry such as rings and amulets. Many of the offerings had been deliberately deformed or mutilated, likely to transform a mundane possession into a gift for the gods, the statement reported.

Hundreds of coins were also recovered at the site, and their mint dates spanned more than five centuries, Isabelle Bollard-Raineau, an ancient-coin expert with the French ministry of culture, said in the translated INRAP interview. About a third of the coins found at Allonnes had been filed, sheared or etched with a chisel.

"These mutilations reveal a ritual intention: the removal of the coin's commercial function in order to dedicate the object to the sacred, thereby ensuring the permanence of the offering," Bollard-Raineau said.

Allonnes was a significant Celtic site at the intersection of several major roads in ancient times, and the analysis of the metal finds has revealed important new information about some of the most powerless members of Gallic society.

See how much you know about the Celts with our Celtic quiz!

This unique helmet comes from the Elamite culture, an ancient civilization that flourished for nearly three millennia in what is now Iran. Likely worn by a warrior king more than 3,000 years ago, the helmet has been decorated with a large bird of prey that is swooping down over three divine figures.

The dome-shaped bronze helmet measures roughly 8.5 inches (21.6 centimeters) in diameter and has a thin, cutaway area on the front that would have gone over the wearer's eyebrows. Originally, a small projection would have extended down between them to cover the wearer's nose. Gold-covered silver studs line the edge of the helmet, and a bronze tube on the back likely once held a plume of feathers or hair.

The helmet, which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was made by a master artisan of the Elamite culture, one of the earliest civilizations of the ancient Near East. The Elamites lived in what is now southwest Iran, along the eastern Persian Gulf, from roughly 2700 B.C. until they were conquered by the Persian Empire in 539 B.C. Elam was frequently at war with neighboring Mesopotamian cities, including Ur and Babylon, and archaeologists have found numerous examples of the culture's elaborate weapons and armor.

But this particular helmet is "a masterpiece of ancient art" that "has no parallels in either the representative art of the ancient Near East or from excavations," archaeologist Oscar White Muscarella wrote in a 1988 book about the ancient Near Eastern bronze and iron artifacts in The Met's collection. This helmet's unique shape and decorations make it stand out from other Elamite armor.

On the front of the helmet are three gold deities: two females and one male. The male deity carries a vessel with water cascading out of it, suggesting he is an Elamite water god. The two identical goddesses wear horned headdresses and jewelry, and they are holding up their hands in a gesture of prayer. A raptor is positioned vertically over the water god, possibly symbolizing the bird of prey of the battlefield that awaits the victims of the warrior king who wore the helmet, Charles K. Wilkinson, curator emeritus of Near Eastern art at The Met, wrote in a 1965 study of the object.

The helmet certainly would have been worn by someone of high rank in the Elamite culture, Muscarella and Wilkinson both wrote, but it was likely symbolic as well as functional. The representations of important deities were probably intended to ward off evil and conflict on the ancient battlefield.

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

Archaeologists have discovered 18 ancient tombs in an Egyptian town along the Mediterranean Sea.

The tombs ‪—‬ which were unearthed in Marina el-Alamein (also spelled Alamin), about 60 miles (100 kilometers) west of Alexandria ‪—‬ date to the Ptolemaic (322 to 30 B.C.) or Roman (30 B.C. to A.D. 395) period, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a translated statement announcing the find.

During the Ptolemaic period, Egypt was ruled by the descendants of one of Alexander the Great's generals, while the Roman period started with the death of Cleopatra VII, when Egypt became incorporated into the Roman Empire as a province.

The team noted that 11 of the tombs had been carved deep into the ground, while the seven others were located closer to the ground's surface. The tombs held many artifacts ‪—‬ most notably, 24 "gold tongues" that were likely put into the mouths of mummies, and an offering altar with a base designed to look like a false door.

"The false door is one of the oldest and most recognizable elements of ancient Egyptian funerary architecture. In traditional Egyptian belief, it symbolized the interface between the worlds of the living and the dead, through which the deceased could spiritually receive offerings presented by the living," Hesham Hussein, the undersecretary for Lower Egypt and Sinai archaeology at Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, told Live Science in an email.

The fact that the design of a false door was carved into the altar "suggests that the symbolic meaning of the false door remained important even as its architectural function evolved," Hussein added.

Gold tongues from ancient Egypt

Gold tongues have been found in mummies at a number of ancient Egyptian sites. The ancient Egyptians considered gold to be the flesh of the gods, and they believed gold tongues could help the deceased communicate with them in the afterlife.

"Gold tongues are a well-documented feature of some burials dating to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods in Egypt," Hussein said. "They are generally interpreted as symbolic funerary amulets intended to enable the deceased to speak in the afterlife, particularly during the judgment before Osiris, or more broadly to communicate and recite sacred formulas in the next world."

Interestingly, one of the newly found gold tongues is shaped like the "Eye of Horus." Horus was a falcon-headed god associated with the sky and warfare. Artifacts shaped like his eye are often found in Egypt and were used to ward off evil, according to the statement.

However, it's unclear if some of these artifacts are actually gold tongues, Attilio Mastrocinque, a retired archaeology professor formerly at the University of Verona in Italy, told Live Science. Mastrocinque has written extensively about Greek and Roman religion but was not involved in this excavation.

After looking at the photos posted by the ministry, he noted that one appears to show a wheat ear. Wheat ears were associated with fertility and images of them were popular in the ancient world. The newfound artifact looks similar to silver wheat ears that have been found in Roman sanctuaries in Europe, Mastrocinque added.

Altar with a false door?

False doors are commonly found in ancient Egyptian tombs and offering altars are often near these doors. In this case, the base of an offering altar resembles a false door.

Krzysztof Jakubiak, an archaeology professor at the University of Warsaw who has excavated at Marina el-Alamein in the past but was not involved in the recent excavation, noted that this find likely needs additional analysis.

"I would exercise caution in asserting a direct comparison between the iconographic motifs visible on the discovered altar and those of the false door iconography," Jakubiak told Live Science in an email. He said it's possible that the altar was not finished and its existing appearance simply resembles a false door.

Hala Mostafa, an archaeology professor at Ain Shams University said in an email that he thought the altar may depict the hieroglyphic sign for "offering" rather than a false door.

Goddess statue and other finds

One of the tombs contained an 8.2-foot-long (2.5 meters) granite coffin whose lid was still on when the tomb was discovered. The team is currently examining the skeletal remains found inside.

Other finds included an incomplete statue of Aphrodite, a Greek goddess associated with love and beauty. During ancient Egypt's Ptolemaic dynasty, Greek culture and religion became increasingly popular in Egypt. Mastrocinque said it will be interesting to see if there is a structure for Aphrodite near the statue

"It is important to know where this statue has been found," Mastrocinque told Live Science in an email. "Was there a little cultic place of Aphrodite within this funerary complex?"

Dorota Dzierzbicka, director of the Polish-Egyptian Archaeological Mission to Marina el-Alamein, said that the new finds, along with finds made at the site in the past, reveal that the town was "a culturally diverse community in which Egyptian and Graeco-Roman traditions coexisted and blended in everyday life and funerary practices." She noted that the new discoveries were made by Egyptian archaeologists who work at the site.

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

Most archaeologists spend time digging in the dirt or piecing together broken artifacts or bones in the lab, attempting to make sense of the past in a painstakingly slow process. But others use that information — and a little ingenuity — to re-create the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of ancient societies through a practice called experimental archaeology.

In his book "Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations" (Little, Brown and Co., 2025), author Sam Kean delves into the overloaded sensory world of experimental archaeology practitioners. Along the way, he learns to knap a stone tool like early Homo sapiens did, create an intricate hairstyle that would make a Roman woman proud, tattoo someone using ancient tools, play an Aztec ball game, and bake the kind of sourdough loaf that King Tut once ate.

Kean spoke with Live Science about his book, which was a finalist for the 2026 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and was named one of The New Yorker's best books of 2025.

Related: Read an excerpt from Kean's book, "Dinner with King Tut."

Kristina Killgrove: What intrigued you about experimental archaeology?

Sam Kean: There was sort of a conflict within me because, on the one hand, I really love the questions that archaeology brings up. There's some big, meaty questions about who we are as a species, how we spread across the Earth, how we changed as we spread across the Earth ‪—‬ these really important, big questions about human history. But whenever I would go to an actual archaeological site, it just seemed to me like the most boring work I could imagine. It's just people sitting around in the dirt with toothbrushes or dental picks or whatever, picking up potsherds, and it just seemed so tedious to me.

Experimental archaeology seemed like a lot more lively, sensory-rich field because archaeologists in this field are actually doing things. They're re-creating stone tools, making ancient foods. You can smell the past. So it was just a lot more exciting way for me to get into archaeology.

KK: Tell me about your research process for this book. Did you "embed" with archaeologists and participate in their experiments?

SK: Each chapter is set in a different time and place, so you're really immersed in a day in the life of that person. There was a lot of reading about traditional archaeology and what we've learned from that, because we have learned a lot from it. But then I would go talk to experimental archaeologists and go through the process of brain-tanning leather or getting on a ship that they would have sailed on, and I just experienced it in the way that they're doing their research and experienced it more like people would have in the past too.

KK: Did you have a favorite experiment that you learned about or a favorite archaeologist you embedded with?

SK: There's a guy out in Utah who built a trebuchet — a giant medieval catapult. It was about 30 or 40 feet [9 to 12 meters] tall, I think. And we just spent a lovely day flinging these giant garden stones around at this palisade that he had built, as a stand-in for a fort, essentially. And we just spent a day flinging these huge stones at this fort and watching it smash in and splinter the wood and try to destroy this little fort. Getting to pull the trigger on this catapult — it was just like this majestic dragon coming to life, almost, as it started to fling these balls. And it was like a whip cracking of the sling as it would fling the stone out. That was just a really lovely memory, partly because everything worked properly that day.

A lot of the book was actually me floundering around, failing to complete the projects or figuring out what I was doing wrong. And I think that was a good learning method. I did learn a lot by flailing around, probably more than I would have had I gotten things correct the first time immediately. But it was nice when things went right every once in a while. And the catapult was a good example of that.

KK: That sounds so cool! And in the excerpt that we are publishing on Live Science from your book "Dinner with King Tut," you talk to people who used ancient Egyptian mummification techniques on a real human body. What did you learn from talking to these people? And did you get to try mummifying a body yourself?

SK: Not a body, but I did do a little mummification myself. I didn't know this before I started writing the book, but the Egyptians mummified a lot of animals, a huge variety of animals, dozens of different types, and on a big, big scale. There's one grave site they found with something like 4 million bird mummies. So there have been a fair number of archaeologists in modern times who have tried to — and succeeded in — mummifying different animals, even though the Egyptians didn't write down a whole lot about the process. We don't know if it was lost to time or if it was just sort of a guild secret where they didn't write things down. So they would do this to learn about the mummification process with animals.

But, of course, the thing that really intrigues us about ancient Egypt are the human mummies. And everyone thought we couldn't actually make a human mummy until two guys did in the '90s. It was one Egyptologist [Bob Brier] and the guy who was in charge of the Maryland state anatomy board [Ronn Wade], who got to decide where cadavers went that had been donated to science. He decided this was a worthwhile project.

The donor remains anonymous, but he was a 76-year-old man from Baltimore who had died of a heart attack. They went all out to be authentic for this project. They went to Egypt to get the mineral natron that they would have used to mummify him. They had ancient tools made, and they went through all the steps that were known in mummification and turned this person into a mummy.

KK: Did these researchers learn more than what is in the historical records? What did they learn from doing this themselves?

SK: It was a controversial project. People said, when you donate your body to science, that's not a blank check to do whatever you want. Some people called it horrifying. And some people said that they didn't think it had any scientific value. I understand the ethical concerns, but I don't think it's true that we didn't learn anything.

One thing that sticks out in my mind that I was surprised about is how they used authentic tools. Archaeologists have found obsidian blades with mummies — those are volcanic glass — and they found copper tools associated with them. So, when these guys were trying to open the body up initially, it turned out that the copper blades they had were not good at all. They could not get through the skin and the muscle of the abdomen very well. The obsidian tools turned out to be much better at that task, which surprised me. I wouldn't have thought that the stone tools would have been better than the metal tools. That's something we wouldn't have learned had we not gone through the process.

Also, the iconic look of the mummy: It has retracted teeth and sparse hair and a forehead pulled very tight. Bob Brier, the Egyptologist involved, had seen a lot of mummies, and he always wanted to know, do they look like that because they've been sitting in Egypt, a dry environment, for 3,000 years, or is it the mummification process that gives them that look? And he said that even after about five weeks, when they took a peek at the body, they could tell it had that classic iconic mummy look. He said it looked exactly like Ramesses the Great to him. So we did learn things about the mummification process through this that we just wouldn't have known otherwise.

KK: That's amazing that this controversial experiment produced new knowledge. You mentioned you mummified something — tell me about it.

SK: I did mummify a fish for the book. That was kind of a fun process, and it was a surprisingly easy thing to do. You can rub the oils in, wrap them up, include little spells like they did back then. But the basic process is just using natron — which is baking soda and salt — and you just put the fish or whatever you want to mummify underneath this. Then it just does the work on its own.

KK: Then I guess the real question is, did you eat that fish that you mummified?

SK: No, but it's sitting on my shelf still as a little memento. I did accumulate quite a nice collection of artifacts and things – stone tools I made, I opened and ate an ostrich egg. I made tapa or kapa — which is a type of Polynesian bark cloth. So I did get to do and make and take home a lot of cool souvenirs from this.

KK: That's so fun! And your book is a little different from some other popular science books because you include these fictional narratives based in archaeological and historical fact. In the introduction, you call them a "form of time travel." Tell me a bit more about why you chose this unusual structure for the book and what you hope readers will get out of that.

SK: What I really value about experimental archaeology is that it's pretty immersive, especially the sensory aspects of it. You do get to feel — to some degree, at least — that you are there and that you are doing the things that people back then were doing. I thought that fiction would allow me to take that even one step further and really get in the minds and be in the world that those people lived in. So you get to wake up where they did, eat the foods that they did, and experience their society. Something like religion or their beliefs in the supernatural or spiritual beliefs are not going to be amenable to experimental archaeology, but you can do that in fiction. And so it allowed me to take it one step further, and it was just fun to try and fun to write as well.

KK: Is experimental archaeology going to be something you cover more in a future book?

SK: I think I could do it if I wanted to revisit it because there were other cultures that, for various reasons, I decided to not include. People are doing work in ancient Greece, but that didn't make it into the book. I do have one chapter in sub-Saharan Africa tens of thousands of years ago, but that was the Cradle of Humankind. I could certainly do other aspects of that. There's definitely fodder out there for another book, especially as these techniques get more accepted. It has been heartening to see that people are more accepting of experimental archaeology, and even people on traditional digs now are running maybe an experiment or two. So they're not going all the way to experimental archaeology, but they're incorporating these practices.

It's just such a fun field. I really would encourage people to get involved with it and to try it out, because you can do a lot of basic things like gather acorns and try to make a recipe out of those. Or research some ancient Roman or Greek food and try to re-create that stuff ‪—‬ just little experiments and things you can do to get people excited about it and bring the past alive in a new way.

And I have a new book coming out in the fall called "The Museum of Lost Things: True Tales of Fabled Treasures, Legendary Cities, and Mythical Creatures That Vanished From History" [National Geographic, 2026]. It's about the greatest lost treasures in history and has some interesting archaeological angles in there.

KK: I'll look forward to reading that. Thanks for chatting with me!

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

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

In most areas of archaeology, excavators painstakingly dig layer by layer to reveal not just buried artifacts but also charred seeds, broken bones and microscopic grains of ancient pollen. This delicate process is followed by months of intensive lab work to study the newfound remains. But there is one kind of archaeologist that takes a different approach to understanding the past. Experimental archaeologists replicate how people did things in the past, using techniques they recreate from archaeological information and modern knowledge.

In his new book, "Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations" (Little, Brown and Co., 2025), science writer Sam Kean explores the experimental side of archaeology. Through a series of ancient and modern vignettes, Kean discovers how Stone Age city dwellers kept their houses cool 9,000 years ago, how the Romans used needle and thread to style hair, and how bog bodies were formed in Iron Age Europe.

In this excerpt, Kean meets two men who used ancient techniques to diligently mummify a human body in an effort to understand how ancient Egyptians took care of their dead.

Related: Read our interview with Sam Kean on 'Dinner with King Tut'

Cultures throughout history have mummified their dead, and a handful still do today, but Egyptian mummies remain the most iconic. Unfortunately, the Egyptians wrote down virtually nothing about their embalming process. This leaves experimental archaeology as one of the few avenues available for understanding mummification, and several practitioners have indeed re-created mummies in modern times. In most cases, they work with animals, but a few intrepid souls have mummified human beings, most famously when Bob Brier and Ronn Wade did so in 1994.

Wade grew up wanting to be a mortician like his father. After a stint as a medic in the Vietnam War, he became an anatomist and eventually the head of Maryland's state anatomy board. Brier also has training in anatomy, but is an Egyptologist by training and passion. He's accumulated so many books on Egypt over his life that he rents a second apartment just to accommodate them. Brier and Wade selected their mummy from the pool of people in Baltimore who donated their bodies to science. Ultimately, they settled on a seventy-six-year-old Caucasian man who died of a heart attack. His identity remains secret, but a bit crassly, Wade nicknamed him E. M. Balm.

For authenticity's sake, Brier and Wade used replicas of pharaonic-era tools and materials, including linen wraps, an oddly wide wooden embalming table, and copper and obsidian blades — although they quickly abandoned the copper ones, which couldn't cut flesh well. Before starting on their mummy, they practiced one important step on other cadavers: extracting the brain. Instead of using full cadavers for this, they obtained some decapitated heads leftover from a medical school's plastic surgery class. ("They were looking a little weird," Brier recalls. "They'd had facelifts and such.")

From some scant references, Brier knew that Egyptian embalmers removed the brain by inserting a hooked rod through the nostrils, but the details were vague. Brier and Wade first tried scooping the brain out with such a rod, but the tissue proved too soft and wouldn't come out. They finally took to squirting water up the cadaver's nose, then used the rod to whisk the brain into a slurry. After that, it poured right out. "Like a milkshake," Brier says. "A strawberry milkshake to be exact."

Skills honed, the duo began making their mummy in May 1994. The first step involved removing his organs.

Different organs met different fates in Egypt. Unclear about the purpose of the brain, embalmers typically threw it away. The heart, in contrast, was left in situ [in place]; it was considered the seat of all thinking, emotion, and intelligence. Abdominal organs were carefully extracted and preserved. Following this protocol, Brier and Wade made a 3½-inch [9 centimeters] incision in their cadaver's abdomen and removed the spleen, liver, gallbladder, lungs, and twenty-two feet [6.7 meters] of intestines. Given their size, extracting the liver and lungs required some creative geometry and determined squeezing. The most difficult part involved detaching the lungs from the heart while working blind inside such a tiny hole.

With the organs removed, the pair cleaned the abdomen with palm wine and myrrh, then stuffed frankincense into the skull. This was an important ritual step to prepare the body for the afterlife, and also helped kill microbes and mask bad smells. Ancient embalmers used other sacred substances as well, often imported from Europe and Asia at great cost — pistachio resin, beeswax, castor oil. Ramses the Great's mummy had peppercorns from India shoved up his nose.

Next, Brier and Wade dehydrated the body using natron, a mineral of equal parts salt and baking soda that forms naturally in Egyptian wadis, or dry gullies. Like a sponge, natron sucks the moisture out of flesh, leaving it too dry to support bacteria, maggots, beetles, and other putrefying agents; the leftover tissue is essentially jerky. (Fully committed to authenticity, Brier dug the natron himself in Egypt, and recalls that sneaking hundreds of pounds of unidentified white powder through customs at JFK Airport was one of the more ticklish aspects of the project. Luckily, he was traveling with a film crew, and could hide the powder in suitcases amid their equipment.)

In their lab, Brier and Wade placed the mummy's spleen, lungs, liver, and intestines into bowls and covered them with natron. They also packed 29 linen bags of the powder into the body's empty torso, laid the body on top of 211 more pounds [96 kilograms], and dumped 583 additional pounds [264 kg] over it. They kept the body in Wade's old office, with the heat cranked up to 104 degrees F [Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius] and dehumidifiers running night and day to simulate Egyptian air.

Over the next five weeks, the natron on top turned crusty and brown from absorbing bodily juices, forcing Brier and Wade to crack through it with an iron rod. (Today Brier remembers the odor as acrid but not unpleasant, although news reports at the time say he and Wade donned surgical masks against the smell.) Regardless, the sight of the body beneath thrilled Brier. As it dries, the skin of mummies tightens and shrivels, especially on the face and scalp. The lips retract to reveal the teeth, and skin with less melanin turns brown-yellow. Brier always wondered whether those changes resulted from the immediate mummification process, or from several thousand years of weathering in Egypt's arid climate. One glance at his mummy and Brier knew the answer: even after five weeks, "he looked just like Ramses the Great," he recalls, with leathery skin, a beaky nose, and wispy hair sticking up. The embalming process, not time, made the iconic mummies we know today.

Beyond changing the body's appearance, the dehydration process left the limbs as stiff as tree branches, and dropped its weight from 188 pounds [85 kg] to just 79 [36 kg]. (Thirty-one pounds [14 kg] of that represented the removal of organs.) The organs drying in the bowls withered as well, which helped explain another mystery of Egyptian mummification: as other archaeologists have noted, embalmers typically placed the organs in so‑called canopic jars, funerary vessels with slim necks — so slim that it seemed impossible to fit the larger organs inside. But the natron shrunk them down enough to slip right in.

After removing him from the natron, Brier and Wade gave Mr. Balm a full body massage with lotus, cedar, and palm oils, another step that, while important ritualistically, also had pragmatic benefits — restoring flexibility to the joints, making the mummy easier to handle. This accomplished, they wrapped the body in linen bandages. (Embalmers in ancient times started with the hands and feet, wrapping each digit separately, then proceeded to the arms, legs, and torso. The penis was individually wrapped as well — or, if embarrassingly shriveled, a cod‑piece of stiff linen was bound in place.) At this point, they let the mummy dry for three more months in the arid office, which dropped its weight to 51 pounds [23 kg]. Afterward, they added several more layers of wrappings. In between the layers, they slipped magic amulets and scraps of papyrus with spells on them, a common practice in ancient times.

For the past three decades, the mummy has been lying in a metal casket in Maryland, stored at room temperature. Brier and Wade have partially unwrapped it twice to check for rot, but found nothing amiss. "He's dead and well," says Brier.

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

Early Christian communities in Sweden often buried children in the same grave with adults, but archaeologists have found that these individuals rarely shared close biological ties, raising the question of how medieval people interred their dead.

In a new study, researchers analyzed the DNA of 142 skeletons from three cemeteries in Sweden dating to the 10th to 14th centuries, focusing on collective burials in which two or more people were buried in the same tomb.

"We often assume that adults and children sharing a grave were parents and children or other close family members," study first author Maja Krzewińska, a paleogeneticist at Stockholm University, said in a statement. "In most cases, that was not what we found."

The researchers determined that most burials containing multiple individuals held both adults and children and that the people buried together were usually of the same sex — a woman buried with a girl or a man buried with a boy. But the DNA analysis held a surprise: People buried together rarely exhibited close biological kinship, the researchers wrote.

When Christianity spread across Scandinavia starting in the late 10th century, burial practices became more uniform. Graves were oriented east to west, and people were buried in a simple shroud without any grave goods. Baptized individuals were allowed to be interred in consecrated cemetery grounds, while babies who died before they could be baptized were excluded.

"We have previously analyzed a burial containing an adult and the remains of a fetus, which we believe represents an unbaptized individual," Krzewińska told Live Science in an email.

These unusual burial arrangements likely point to early Christian traditions. For instance, some of the children buried with adults in the new study may have been unbaptized. Normally ineligible for burial in the cemetery, the children may have been opportunistically interred with an adult to get around religious norms. Other burials may reflect unrelated people buried together in the spring after passing away in the winter, when burial in the frozen ground was impossible.

"We also believe, based on more distant genetic affinity, that some co-burials represent more distant family relations, or even non-biological kin group relations," Krzewińska said.

In early medieval Scandinavia, households often included extended relatives, servants, employees and enslaved individuals, the researchers wrote. While biological kinship played a large role in the organization of society, membership in the local Christian community may have been equally important in determining where and with whom to bury a deceased person.

"Archaeologists have debated the relationships between people buried together in this type of grave for a long time," study co-author Anna Kjellström, an archaeologist at Stockholm University, said in the statement. "Ancient DNA has finally given us the tool we have been waiting for to test these interpretations directly."

We are family

In addition to collective burials of unrelated people, the archaeologists discovered evidence that some families were buried within the same cemetery over several generations. One burial, known as Lady 56, was a Christian pilgrim who anchored three generations of relatives.

Lady 56 died when she was around 30 years old. She was buried with a rare scallop shell, a symbol of the apostle James, that she obtained after completing a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, a town in northwest Spain on the edge of Christian Europe.

The researchers also identified Lady 56's kin group, which was of particular importance to the community and stretched over generations in the Västerhus cemetery, Krzewińska said. The DNA analysis revealed that Lady 56's parents, brother and daughters were also buried in the same cemetery, but in different places.

Västerhus was part of a wealthy landowner's farm from the 11th to 14th centuries, and the cemetery contained the remains of more than a dozen members of a biologically related group, many of whom were interred with members of a different kin group.

The DNA connections between the main Västerhus family and other kin groups in the cemetery support the special status of the main family. These close-kin burials highlight the importance of ancient-DNA testing, as different burials from the same time and region can follow very different traditions.

What do you know about Jesus Christ, the man? Test your knowledge of biblical archaeology with our Jesus Christ quiz!

A metal detectorist in Norway dismissed a rare 900-year-old silver coin as a button, before researchers realized it was a one-of-a-kind piece linked to Magnus Barefoot (also known as Magnus Berrføtt), the warrior ruler often called Norway's last Viking king.

The coin, found in a field near Utstein Monastery in southwest Norway, dates to Barefoot's reign from 1093 to 1103. It is the first coin of its type ever discovered on Norwegian soil, according to a December 2025 translated statement from the University of Stavanger Museum of Archaeology.

"It is a fascinating thought that we may be just one large treasure find away from having a completely different view of Magnus Berrføtt's coinage as well, and it underlines the importance of all new discoveries that are made," museum representatives said in the statement.

The button that wasn't

The metal detectorist, Morten Eek, found the object in April 2025. It came from the plow layer in the soil, about 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters) below the surface.

One side looked bright and silvery, but the other was covered by copper and had a dark spot in the middle, giving it a button-like appearance. Eek took it home and placed it with other buttons, worn modern coins and pieces of scrap metal he had collected.

It was only months later, when Eek showed his treasures to his fellow metal detectorists, that they noticed the silver side looked like a medieval coin. Its design resembled an illustration in the 1865 reference work "Norge's Coins from the Middle Ages," by C.I. Schive.

The detectorists then contacted the University of Stavanger Museum of Archaeology, where researchers took a closer look.

A coin with a second life

To the experts, the coin seemed strange because someone had altered it after it was minted. A copper plate had been placed over one side, and the coin's outer edge had been folded around it. Two rounded notches on the edge show where a chain or loop may have been attached, suggesting the coin was later worn as jewelry.

Researchers could have removed the copper plate to see what was underneath, but doing so would have damaged the object's fragile state.

The artifact's unique transformation reveals "something about people's relationship to what was initially a coin," museum representatives said in the statement.

To investigate the coin's covered side, the team X-rayed it. The scan revealed a griffin, a mythical creature with the body of a lion and features of a bird of prey. The motif has sometimes been interpreted as the lion of St. Mark, a Christian symbol, but the museum noted that the animal on these coins closely resembles a griffin. In medieval Christian art, griffins were used to symbolize Christ's dual nature as both human and divine.

The visible side revealed a "cross-over-cross" motif, with double-lined arms and small semicircles or bowl shapes at the ends. The pairing of the cross and griffin is what makes the coin so rare.

"Two-sided coins with the motif combination of griffin and cross over cross are only known from four copies," the statement said, with one coin from the Sandur hoard, found in the Faroe Islands in 1863, and three others from Denmark's Mørstad hoard, which was found this past spring and contains nearly 5,000 coins.

The rarity of such coins "may tell us something about the extent of Magnus Berrføtt's minting," museum representatives said in the statement.

In total, about 100 coins, spread across 12 discoveries, are known from Magnus Barefoot's reign, according to the museum. That makes every new example valuable for understanding how coins were produced and circulated in Norway in the late Viking Age and early Middle Ages.

Who was Magnus Barefoot?

Magnus Barefoot is sometimes called Magnus Barelegs, thanks to the kilts he wore. He became king in 1093 after the death of his father, Olav Kyrre (also called Olaf III of Norway), whose reign was remembered as a relatively peaceful period. Barefoot followed a different path. Like his grandfather Harald Hardrada, the Norwegian king killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, Barefoot built his reputation through warfare.

Barefoot spent much of his reign campaigning overseas. He sought to extend Norwegian power across the western sea routes, including the Isle of Man and parts of the Irish Sea. The museum noted that he was associated with the saying that a king was meant "for honor and glory, and not a long life." His death reflected this, as he died at around age 30, in 1103, when he was ambushed and killed during a campaign in Ireland.

The coin points to more than Barefoot's military ambitions. According to the museum, it also reflected one of his domestic reforms. Earlier Norwegian rulers had reduced the silver content of their coins, but Barefoot restored a high silver standard, with coins that were around 90% silver.

Whether the coin was lost at the Utstein Monastery during Barefoot's lifetime is impossible to know. Because it was turned into jewelry at some point, it may have circulated for years, or even generations, after it stopped being used as money.

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

Around 100,000 years ago, an early Homo sapiens man was probably stabbed in the face with a sharp stone tool and later buried in a cave in what is now Israel, archaeologists have determined. The Stone Age cold case appears to be the earliest evidence of this kind of interpersonal violence, according to the research team.

In a study published June 30 in the journal Scientific Reports, the international team of researchers closely examined the skull and lower jaw of a person who was deliberately buried in Qafzeh cave in Israel during the Middle Paleolithic period.

At least 27 people were buried in Qafzeh cave between about 145,000 and 92,000 years ago, making them some of the earliest members of our species to be found outside Africa. Previous analysis of the skeletons, which were excavated between the 1930s and 1970s, revealed that two people had head injuries resulting from blunt trauma.

But the new analysis, which employed microscopic and micro-CT scanning techniques, revealed that Qafzeh 25, an adult male, had a cut mark across his lower left jaw that affected one of his bicuspids and part of his upper jaw. The jawbone showed signs of healing, suggesting that the man lived for a significant amount of time after being injured, the researchers wrote in the study.

Archaeologists had previously identified only a few cases of trauma caused by sharp weapons or projectiles in Middle Paleolithic skeletons. Although these injuries could have resulted from hunting accidents, the researchers wrote, they have generally been interpreted as evidence of interpersonal violence.

The cut mark on the jaw of Qafzeh 25 was found on the left side of his face, lending further support to the idea that the injury was not an accident.

It's not clear what kind of tool made the cut mark, but stone tools found at Qafzeh included flint scrapers and sharp points that could have been fashioned into spear tips.

"Forensic studies of modern human populations have reported that craniofacial injuries resulting from blows are more frequently observed on the left side of the skull, a distribution commonly attributed to the predominance of right-handed assailants in face-to-face confrontations," the researchers wrote.

If the researchers' interpretation of the cut mark is correct, it "would represent the earliest documented case of sharp force trauma in the archaeological record," they wrote.

Qafzeh cave is already well known within archaeology for its clear evidence that early humans buried their dead. The new discovery confirms that the earliest human groups left Africa with a complex culture.

"These results provide new data to the debate on the origin of complex behaviors such as interpersonal violence, the care of injured or sick individuals and funeral practices," study first author Ana Pantoja Pérez, a paleoanthropologist at Spain's National Research Center for Human Evolution, said in a statement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fragile and battered remains of an infant who lived about 6,000 years in Mesopotamia may be the oldest documented case of child abuse from the Middle East and one of the oldest known cases of its kind in the world, a new study finds.

Researchers unearthed the infant's remains in Syria, but at the time the infant died, sometime between 4200 and 3900 B.C., it was buried in Tell Brak, one of the world's earliest cities. It's possible that the difficulties associated with early urbanization played a role in the child's abuse, the researchers noted.

The team determined that, based on the infant's tooth development, the child was 6 to 9 months old at death. An analysis of the remains, which were interred in a children's burial ground within a Late Copper Age workshop district, revealed that the infant had four fractured ribs near the breastbone. The right thigh bone had abnormal growth, while both sides of the skull bore active, porous lesions. These injuries point to the bones being subject to intense and repetitive external forces, and the nature of the lesions don't fit easily with an accidental fall, the researchers said.

"Ribs shouldn't break" in such a small child, study co-author Aleksandra Grzegorska, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Warsaw, told Live Science. Although rib fractures are relatively common in adults, they suggest child abuse in young infants, she said.

In the study, published May 21 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, Grzegorska and her colleagues systematically ruled out other explanations for the injuries, including rickets, scurvy, birth trauma and violent coughing from illnesses such as tuberculosis. Vitamin deficiencies were unlikely, the researchers noted, given that ancient Mesopotamia had ample sunlight and fresh produce due to the fertile land between the two rivers. Birth-related fractures typically heal within weeks in infants, and bone density and growth measurements for the baby matched those of its peers from that time, indicating that the child didn't have an underlying skeletal condition.

To gauge how unusual the injuries were, the team compared the infant to other children excavated from the same burial area. None of the other youngsters with substantial rib preservation showed similar fractures, making the infant's injuries an outlier in the local population.

It appears that the infant likely experienced "caregiver-induced violence," Grzegorska said. This term is used because the evidence can't identify who caused the harm or confirm intent, Grzegorska said. "We don't want to point fingers at any specific individual," she said, noting that in many ancient cultures, multiple family members, not just parents, helped raise children.

Other clues that might shed light on the infant's injuries are missing from this case, she added. Unlike modern clinicians, bioarchaeologists can't interview a living patient or bystander, or examine soft tissue that might reveal more about the abuse. The partially healed state of the fractures suggest the infant survived for some time after the injuries were inflicted, Grzegorska found — an indication that the trauma was not immediately fatal.

Around the time the infant died, Tell Brak was transforming into a city, so the authors suggested that the stresses of early urbanization and possibly less support from extended kin could have contributed to the violence. Centuries after the infant died, upheavals related to city building appear to have led to mass deaths that were likely caused by violent conflict, Grzegorska noted.

Documented cases of child abuse remain exceptionally rare in the archaeological record, with only a handful previously identified in places such as Egypt, France and Lithuania.

Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed the royal tomb of a pre-Roman "warrior-prince" along with the remains of his chariot and weapons. The tomb was just one part of an extensive sixth-century B.C. burial ground and reveals new information about the funerals of elite rulers from this mysterious civilization.

The funerary complex was found in the municipality of Sirolo, a small town on the Adriatic Sea on Italy's east coast, according to a translated July 1 statement from the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Provinces of Ancona, Pesaro and Urbino.

In the sixth century B.C., an Italic group called the Piceni or Picentes lived in the area, bordered to the north by the Etruscans. The Piceni left few written records, so much of what is known about the enigmatic group comes from archaeological excavations. In 2020, a "princely tomb" complete with an iron-wheeled chariot, a cache of weapons and a helmet was discovered in the Pini cemetery. Now, archaeologists have found a second one.

At the center of a monumental circular palisade, researchers unearthed a large male burial with a wooden "currus" — a two-wheeled chariot that had been buried intact with the nobleman around 2,500 years ago. The warrior prince was also buried with a helmet and an ax, as well as several bronze vessels sealed with ceramic lids and filled with organic remains, which may represent the traces of a funeral banquet or food offerings for the afterlife.

Next to the warrior prince was the tomb of a woman who was buried with textiles, shoes and numerous "fibulae" — ancient metal safety pins that likely fastened her clothing and burial shroud. An enormous fibula with a hunk of amber had been placed on or near her head, possibly as part of her hairstyle or a headdress. This burial is not far from the "Queen's Tomb" in the Pini necropolis, where, in 1989, archaeologists discovered a Piceni woman buried with two chariots, two mules and a large quantity of personal belongings.

While royal burials had been discovered in the Sirolo area for decades, the newly discovered cemetery surprised archaeologists because of its unprecedented shape. Previously discovered burial grounds in the territory of the Piceni were ringed with a ditch, symbolizing the separation of the dead from the living. But the newly discovered cemetery was ringed with a wooden palisade instead of a ditch, and it had been placed on a slight hill, possibly to emphasize its monumental character and symbolic value, according to the statement.

This is the the first time that archaeologists have observed "an entire aristocratic nucleus" of the Piceni, and the discovery can provide "new perspectives on the structure of the elites that led to the great Piceni center," archaeologist Stefano Finocchi, the director of the new excavation, said in the statement.

Although many of the artifacts are still being analyzed, the quantity and quality of the grave goods already recovered reveal that the "ruling groups integrated into a dense network of relationships connecting the central Adriatic with the principal centers of central Italy," Finocchi said.

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

Deep in a limestone cave on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, archaeologists have uncovered evidence that Neanderthals and the modern humans who moved in later left behind surprisingly similar traces of their daily lives — evidence that they hunted the same animals, crafted the same stone tools and collected the same type of seashells.

The findings, published Monday (July 6) in the journal PNAS, feed into some of the biggest questions in human evolution: How similar were the cultures of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, given that we're so closely related? And did we share information with one another?

A series of archaeological finds over the past few decades, including the new paper's finding that the two had similar cultural practices, suggests that Neanderthals and H. sapiens behaved far more similarly in the Middle East than once assumed.

The new evidence comes from Üçağızlı II Cave (pronounced Ooch-ah-UHZ'-luh), on a stretch of coastline just north of Syria that served as a prehistoric corridor between the Levant (an area of land east of the Mediterranean) and Eurasia. Although the team found only teeth and a partial jawbone within the cave, they were able to distinguish between the remains of Neanderthals and H. sapiens by analyzing the internal structure of the fossilized teeth. Meanwhile, they dated the sediment at the site using optically stimulated luminescence, a technique that reveals how long ago buried mineral grains last saw sunlight.

The team found that the Neanderthals had lived within the cave between approximately 77,000 and 59,000 years ago, while H. sapiens stayed there between about 59,000 and 47,000 years ago. Despite the different time periods, the layers from both of these periods show "substantially uniform hunting-gathering strategies and lithic technology," showing how similar the Neanderthals and H. sapiens were in their hunting-gathering strategies and stone-tool use, the team wrote in the study.

What's more, Neanderthals and H. sapiens got raw materials, such as flint, from the same local sources and hunted the same prey: wild goats (Capra aegagrus), fallow deer (Dama mesopotamica), roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) and wild boar (Sus scrofa). Layer after layer also turned up 29 shells of a small marine snail, Columbella rustica, carried into the cave not for food but seemingly as ornaments. Some were pierced as if meant to be strung, and one shell dating to the Neanderthal occupation showed signs of deliberate heating that altered its color.

"Our findings indicate a deep level of cultural interaction," study co-author Naoki Morimoto, paleoanthropologist at Kyoto University, said in a statement. "These two distinct but closely related human groups were not just adapting to the same environment: they were probably sharing symbolic preferences."

That pattern breaks from findings at Mandrin Cave in France, where Neanderthals and modern humans are thought to have alternated occupation in distinct pulses from about 56,800 and 41,500 years ago, but did not leave evidence of a continuous culture. Instead, it echoes evidence from Tinshemet Cave in Israel, where researchers recently reported similar signs of shared behavior between the two groups tens of thousands of years earlier, from about 130,000 to 80,000 years ago.

Üçağızlı II Cave in Turkey and Tinshemet Cave in Israel suggest that even though there was a "biological" turnover as the caves went from being occupied by Neanderthal groups to modern humans, there weren't major cultural turnovers, too.

"Rather, we hypothesize that the two human species that coexisted in the region were in contact and shared cultural aspects," the researchers wrote in the study.

"A fascinating region"

Sites like these are forcing a rethink of how these two types of human were culturally related to each other, April Nowell, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science in an email. "By demonstrating cultural continuity and elevated levels of interaction, sites such as Tinshemet and Üçağızlı II are changing what we thought we knew about Neandertals, Homo sapiens and other contemporary Homo groups … a fascinating region just got even more so!" she said.

But that cultural continuity only heightens the mystery of how modern humans and Neanderthals interacted, with Neanderthals eventually going extinct around 40,000 years ago. Two types of human can't occupy the same ecological niche indefinitely, Nowell noted, and some research into Neanderthal cognition suggests Neanderthals were less-flexible thinkers than modern humans, with more limited capacity for language and less of the kind of self-awareness and creativity that may have given H. sapiens an edge. (However, there is pushback against the idea that Neanderthals weren't as cognitively complex as H. sapiens.)

If the archaeological record at sites like Üçağızlı II shows this much overlap in behavior, Nowell said, the real differences between the two may be ones the fossil record simply hasn't revealed yet.

The authors noted that many big questions remain, including when and where these shared cultural practices took place and whether these cultural similarities happened because modern humans mated with Neanderthals.

Ongoing and future excavations at sites like Üçağızlı II Cave may help to answer these questions and build a "more comprehensive picture of human evolution and cultural development during the Late Pleistocene," the team wrote in the study.

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

This small, abstract sculpture of a woman, carved from milky-white marble, is known as The Stargazer because her head is tilted back and her eyes appear to stare skyward. Only about 30 figurines of this type have ever been found; all of them date to about 3000 B.C. and were crafted by a culture that left no written records of the figurines' meaning, according to art historian Amanda Mikolic.

This particular stargazer figurine was once owned by philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller, a member of the wealthy industrial family and vice president of the United States under Gerald Ford. It is now in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA).

The marble figurine is roughly 6.8 inches (17.2 centimeters) tall and weighs about 1 pound (454 grams). Clearly carved into human form but lacking a mouth, the statuette likely represents a woman, with the incised lines below the waist representing her pubic triangle. Her large, oval head is tilted back, and her tiny, dot-like eyes look upward.

Most stargazer figurines that have been discovered in western Anatolia (present-day Turkey) were broken at the neck before being buried in the ground millennia ago, making the CMA example one of the finest and most complete stargazer statuettes ever found.

But the meaning of the woman portrayed in The Stargazer figurine is unclear, since the culture that created it did not leave any written language explaining their art.

The figurine cannot stand on its own, suggesting that it was meant to be held or placed flat, according to Mikolic. "Deliberately rendered as female, she may be associated with fertility and abundance," she wrote. The statuette may be part of a trend of simplistic female figurines in the Mediterranean area linked to female fertility and the life cycle, such as the Cycladic figurines, according to The Getty, which has a stargazer figurine in its collection.

Regardless of the woman's specific meaning, "she must have been an important devotional object to some long-lost culture," Arielle Kozloff, former curator of ancient art at the CMA, wrote in the CMA Members Magazine.

Abstract female figurines like The Stargazer and other Neolithic examples are known to have inspired early-20th-century cubist masters, Kozloff wrote. This gives her "a sense of timelessness," according to Mikolic, "encouraging the viewer to think of humankind’s place and role in a larger cosmos."

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

With violent conflicts happening across the world right now, war feels like a permanent condition. But have humans ever lived without war?

The answer depends on how you define "war." If war means a fight between two governments, then yes, there have been peaceful periods "because for nearly 99% of human history, there were no governments," said Ian Morris, a historian at Stanford University and author of "War! What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

Violence, on the other hand, has always been with us. If the question becomes "Have people ever lived without violence?" then "the answer is pretty clearly no — people have always fought and killed each other," Morris told Live Science in an email.

The theory of a peaceful prehistory

According to a review of studies published in 2022, war was rare or nonexistent in early human history when people lived as nomadic hunter gatherers. Peter Stearns, a professor emeritus of history at George Mason University and author of "Peace in World History" (Routledge, 2014), agrees with this idea. There was "little or no war in hunting and gathering [cultures] before the rise of agriculture," he told Live Science in an email.

This idea is based on archaeological records. Researchers examining ancient human bones from around the world have looked for skeletal evidence of war injuries, for instance of multiple individuals with unhealed wounds from stabbing, slicing and blunt force trauma who were buried in mass graves. However, they found little evidence of war injuries before 8000 B.C. After that, when humans began transitioning from nomadic life to permanent settlements, such injuries appeared widely.

This doesn't mean that lethal violence was absent in prehistoric societies. Researchers in Kenya found 27 skeletons dating to 10,000 years ago at the archaeological site of Nataruk; these skeletons show signs of violent death, which some anthropologists interpret as evidence of intergroup violence among early hunter-gatherers. And at Jebel Sahaba, a prehistoric cemetery in Sudan, archaeologists unearthed 13,000-year-old remains bearing signs of intergroup attacks.

But these cases of interpersonal violence don't count as war, because of how researchers usually define it. "Researchers who focus on war as a specific category of violence usually define it by saying it has to be violence organized by a government or else collective violence that kills more than a certain number of people," Morris said. "Prehistoric societies rarely had formal governments and hunter-gatherer bands rarely had more than a few dozen members, so if you define war as a conflict run by a government or one that kills >100 people, then by definition there can't have been wars in [early] prehistory."

David Christian, a historian and professor emeritus in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University in Australia, echoed this idea. "For much of human history communities were so small that it is not clear if we can equate violence with war," he told Live Science in an email. "I guess we can say that humans have always been capable of violence and as communities got larger that violence began to take on forms that we might want to describe as 'war.'"

Peace between rival powers

Once large kingdoms and empires appeared, war became very common. A doctoral thesis written by Jared Morgan McKinney, now an assistant professor of international security studies at Air War College in Alabama, focused on periods of peace between major powers. He concluded that war was basically the norm throughout history and that famous "peaceful" eras, like the Pax Romana (Roman Peace), usually just meant one powerful group had beaten everyone else into submission.

But there were exceptions. "Wars are expensive and risky," said Peter Frankopan, a professor of global history at the University of Oxford. "So in many periods in history, stability and peace have been achieved by rivals, adversaries and neighbors being able to match each other's capabilities."

McKinney's thesis identified several periods when rival powers managed to avoid war.

From around 1400 to 1200 B.C., the big powers of the ancient Middle East — mainly Egypt and the Hittite Empire, an ancient civilization in modern-day Turkey — went through two unusually long stretches without major wars. Peace was possible because the "Great Kings" recognized one another as equals and settled their territorial and political differences through formal treaties rather than war.

For most of their history, Rome and Persia were at war. Then, from roughly A.D. 387 to around 501, the two superpowers mostly stopped fighting. Historians call this the "Long Fifth Century" and have put forward many explanations for this period of peace, including that both sides faced serious outside threats that made fighting less affordable and that the two sides developed a language of "brotherhood" that acknowledged each other as equals rather than enemies, McKinney wrote in his thesis.

Between roughly A.D. 1000 and 1200, the rich Song dynasty in China secured peace with its militant northern neighbors ‪—‬ the Liao and the Jin‪ —‬ by paying them regularly to keep the peace. Although these monetary gifts (or bribes) looked like weakness, the payments were tiny compared with what China was earning through trade, according to McKinney.

Another example, according to Morris, is the "long peace" between China, Korea and Japan between about 1600 and 1850. While European states spent those centuries competing for power and territory through war, the East Asian states lived in relative peace. "In Europe, we've tended to be a lot more aggressive and competitive — which gives the impression that war is a 'natural state' of being," Frankopan said.

A notable period of relative peace in North America was the Long Peace among the Iroquois nations, McKinney told Live Science in an email. For roughly three centuries, from about 1450 to 1777, five (and later six) Native American nations who had previously engaged in violent and costly conflict forged a peaceful relationship known as the "Haudenosaunee Confederacy" or "League of Five Nations."

In South America, McKinney pointed to the South American Long Peace. This refers to the absence of major interstate wars between sovereign nations in South America ever since 1935.

"War is 'normal' in history," McKinney said. But, as these examples show, "patterns have exceptions."

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

The diminutive, now-extinct humans known as the "hobbits" were scavengers who dined on dwarf elephants after Komodo dragons took the best cuts, archaeologists have discovered. The finding upends the assumption that Homo floresiensis, a human species that arrived on the Indonesian island of Flores at least 700,000 years ago, hunted big game.

First discovered in 2003, H. floresiensis has been nicknamed the hobbit because of its small size, averaging around 3 feet, 6 inches (106 centimeters) tall, along with its small brain, large teeth and big feet. But archaeologists also found stone tools, animal bones with cut marks, and charred bones that seemed to add up to sophisticated behavior common within our genus, Homo. The hobbits disappeared around 50,000 years ago as Homo sapiens began spreading around Southeast Asia.

But in a study published Friday (July 3) in the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers questions whether the behavior of H. floresiensis was really as advanced as previously assumed.

The researchers looked at fossil bones of Stegodon florensis insularis, an extinct dwarf species of elephant relative discovered at Liang Bua cave, where bones from H. floresiensis and stone tools have also been found, to determine whether the cut marks were from hunting Stegodon meat or from scavenging the remains of the feasts of the only other carnivore on the island: the Komodo dragons (Varanus komodensis).

To distinguish the hobbit cut marks from Komodo dragon tooth marks, the researchers first conducted an experiment, feeding a goat carcass to a captive Komodo dragon at Zoo Atlanta. Then, they recovered the goat skeleton and painstakingly documented all of the marks, pits, notches and furrows the Komodo dragon's teeth made in the bones. The tooth marks were concentrated in areas with substantial amounts of goat flesh, the researchers wrote in the study, suggesting the Komodo dragon had a preference for meaty areas.

The researchers then investigated the ancient Stegodon bones for evidence of cut marks made by H. floresiensis' stone tools and tooth marks from Komodo dragons. They found 54 cut marks on the Stegodon bones and nearly twice as many Komodo dragon tooth marks. More importantly, they discovered that the Komodo dragon marks were focused on meaty areas, while the human cut marks were made primarily in areas without a lot of meat, suggesting H. floresiensis did not hunt and kill the Stegodon.

The overall patterns of cut marks and tooth marks suggest "a combination of mostly primary access by Komodo dragons and secondary access by H. floresiensis where both predators consumed Stegodon," the researchers wrote. And the hobbits likely ate this meat raw, according to the researchers, as they found no evidence on the Stegodon bones that they had been cooked. Nor did they find any evidence of burning on over 4,000 mouse bones from the site, suggesting the previous evidence of charring was actually natural manganese staining.

A lack of hunting and fire-making technology suggests that the hobbits were not as behaviorally sophisticated as previously thought and raises questions about their ancestry, the researchers said.

It's possible that the ancestor of H. floresiensis branched from the Homo genus before humans accomplished the control of fire and hunting, study first author E. Grace Veatch, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told Live Science in an email.

One hypothesis for the origin of the hobbits is island dwarfism, which occurs when a large species' average body size evolves to be smaller over generations due to the limited availability of natural resources. Another theory is that hobbits descended from an earlier Homo species that was already small-bodied.

"I think our study highlights the importance of considering behavior in these debates," Veatch said. "Our study suggests that H. floresiensis evolved from a hominin population that did not require these dietary strategies [of hunting and cooking], such as a form of early Homo."

But the new study has not entirely settled the debate about the hobbits' ancestry, because very little is known about the behavior of early hominins in Southeast Asia, such as Homo erectus on Java and other areas of Sunda or Sundaland, a landmass between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean that has been exposed off and on over the past 2.6 million years.

If H. floresiensis really did branch off from H. erectus, that would suggest many evolutionary changes occurred.

"Taking place on an island that was cut off from contact with the Sunda mainland, this evolution from Homo erectus to Homo floresiensis may have involved not just profound anatomical transformations, such as reduced body size and brain volume, but also behavioural adaptations," Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

"Flores was clearly a wild card in the story of early human evolution, the sort of place where almost anything could have happened — including, potentially, the loss of deeply-rooted hominin behaviours, such as hunting and fire use," Brumm added.

Where H. floresiensis fits in with the rest of the Homo genus is still an open question, Veatch said. "Importantly, this study highlights the contribution of taphonomy [the study of what happens to organic remains after death] to speak to these larger questions about ancestry."

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

The enigmatic Scythians, a diverse group of nomadic tribes known for their ferocity in battle, were organized around elite dynasties of powerful men and women over 2,500 years ago, a new DNA study finds. The results reveal that social inequality arose in these nomadic groups around 900 B.C., during the Iron Age.

Most of what archaeologists know about the Scythians comes from ancient Greek and Roman accounts of the accomplished equestrians and from their large, mound-shaped tombs, called kurgans, that dot the Eurasian steppe grassland. The Scythians' tattooed mummies and intricate, animal-themed jewelry were as well-known in ancient times as their women warriors, who may have inspired the myth of the Amazons. But the Scythians left no written records of their own and were likely absorbed by other cultural groups after suffering several military defeats around 200 B.C.

In a study published Friday (July 3) in the journal Science Advances, researchers sequenced DNA from 85 Iron Age Scythians to better understand how these geographically spread-out groups were related and how their society was politically structured. They discovered that elite family dynasties ruled the nomadic groups from centralized locations, revealing the origin of social inequality among the Scythians.

The researchers generated genomes from the skeletons of 38 elite and 47 non-elite people buried in kurgan tombs across 20 archaeological sites between 900 and 200 B.C. The non-elite tombs were smaller than the elite tombs, and they lacked the impressive weapons and gold artifacts of the elite tombs.

Based on DNA, the researchers discovered that elite people were 11 times more likely to be related to each other than they were to be related to non-elite people, suggesting there was a powerful extended family group that ruled the steppe nomads.

Among the elite, they discovered two pairs of biological brothers, a brother and a sister, and a parent and child. In one case, the two brothers were buried at different sites some distance apart. They also found two elite grandfathers and grandsons buried in different cemeteries. But the elite people were still buried closer together than the non-elite people were.

"It is possible that this indicates some degree of geographic centralization of the elite burials being on average closer to each other," study co-author Ainash Childebayeva, a genetic anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, told Live Science in an email. "For example, in Siberia there is an area known as the 'Valley of the Kings' that contains many large mounds that are likely elite of the similar time period as in our study."

The researchers also investigated the historical claim by Greek authors such as Herodotus that women held high-status positions.

"An important observation from our study was the noticeable presence of elite women," study first author Ayshin Ghalichi, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said in a statement. "Nearly half of the elite individuals in our dataset were female, indicating that women held high social status within Iron Age Scythian society."

Mysterious "Golden Man"

DNA evidence also solved a long-standing question about the "Golden Man." This skeleton of a teenager, discovered in 1969 in a kurgan in Kazakhstan, was found with more than 4,000 gold ornaments and a silver bowl with an inscription that has never been deciphered. Although the skeleton's sex could not be determined based on the bones, experts assumed the person was a powerful male warrior, even though women held nearly equal power among the Scythians.

"Although the data we were able to generate is low coverage, we found that the individual was a lot more likely to be genetically male than female," Childebayeva said, but "we did not identify any relatedness for the Golden Man."

The young age of the Golden Man – 17 based on his bones – and his elite burial status together provide clear evidence of elite dynastic rule, Childebayeva noted. An additional example that is "even more striking" comes from the pairing of a grandfather and his 1-year-old grandson, both buried in elite kurgans, Childebayeva said. These burials of elite children reinforce the conclusion that Iron Age steppe nomads inherited their social status.

"The results presented here further our understanding of the rise of social inequality and differentiation among ancient Eurasian nomadic groups and highlight the practices of the earliest nomadic groups of Central Eurasia in the first millennium BCE," the researchers wrote in the study.

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

While scanning one of Scotland's richest prehistoric landscapes, archaeologists uncovered evidence of what may be a newfound stone or timber circle buried beneath a peat moorland. The find may add another monument to a ceremonial structure that has fascinated researchers for more than a century.

The possible circle lies beneath the surface of Machrie Moor on Scotland's Isle of Arran, a landscape already famous for its towering standing stones, burial monuments and ceremonial sites dating to between roughly 3500 and 1500 B.C. Researchers from Historic Environment Scotland identified the possible circle using geophysical survey equipment, which is wheeled aboveground and detects subtle magnetic changes underground without disturbing any archaeological remains.

The discovery emerged from a survey designed to test how well modern archaeological instruments work in peat-covered landscapes, but instead the project revealed the unexpected subterranean circle.

"We know that there is a lot of archaeology yet to uncover at Machrie Moor, but the discovery of a new circle completely surpassed our expectations," Nick Hannon, senior heritage recording manager at Historic Environment Scotland, said in a statement released June 30.

While Stonehenge is the world's most famous prehistoric circle, it is only one monument among hundreds built across Britain and mainland Europe during the Neolithic and Bronze ages. Machrie Moor is among the best-preserved examples of these ritual landscapes, with six ceremonial circles already identified since the 1980s.

In fact, the archaeologists found there was more to learn about some of the previously known circles. At Machrie Moor Circle 2, for instance, the team identified a ring of anomalies suggesting the circle may have had 14 stones instead of the seven or eight previously reconstructed.

The circles also share a striking orientation: They align with a notch at the head of nearby Machrie Glen where the midsummer sun would have risen, which suggesting astronomical observations may have played a role in ceremonies held there.

Archaeological anomalies

Unlike the circles that had already been discovered at the site, the newly detected monument has not been excavated yet. Instead, researchers identified a ring of magnetic anomalies ‪—‬ subtle disturbances in the soil that often indicate archaeological features such as pits or postholes.

According to the survey report, the feature consists of 12 circular, pit-like anomalies arranged in a circle approximately 92 feet (28 meters) across. The pits are spaced around 21 feet (6.5 m) apart, with two unusually wide gaps that the researchers say could represent the locations of two additional pits that are now decayed. If so, the monument may have originally contained 14 posts or standing stones.

"There is no indication that any of these anomalies contain a stone" at this time, the researchers noted in the report, so the circle could have been built from either timber posts or standing stones that were later removed.

Previous excavations have already revealed that several of the other stone circles at Machrie Moor were originally built as timber circles before the wooden posts were replaced with stones around 2000 B.C. Human cremations and bodily burials were later placed within some of the circles, suggesting the monuments' functions changed over time.

"It is likely that the newly-discovered circle dates from a similar period as the other circles still standing," representatives of Historic Environment Scotland said in the statement.

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

Two brothers from the wealthy and powerful Medici family died of malaria and were not poisoned as a rumor had suggested, archaeologists have confirmed based on a DNA analysis of the brothers' skeletons. The analysis also revealed a unique, mutated strain of malaria that may hold the key to understanding the evolution of the disease in Europe.

The Medici family rose to power in the 15th century by creating the largest bank in Europe. The family used their extraordinary wealth to fund Renaissance artists and to start a political dynasty that eventually included numerous dukes, four popes and two queens of France.

In the 16th century, Cosimo I took over all of Tuscany as grand duke. But within a span of 25 years, at least five of his family members died from high fevers. This gave rise to a rumor that some of them had been poisoned with arsenic by another family member, although most people believed they died of malaria.

To get to the bottom of the 500-year-old Medici cold case, an international group of researchers tested the bones of two of Cosimo I's sons: Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici and Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici, for the DNA of Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes the deadliest form of malaria and that is transmitted by mosquitoes.

The researchers extracted ancient DNA from the bones of Cardinal Giovanni, who died in 1562 at age 19 in the same month as his mother and younger brother Garzia, and from Grand Duke Francesco I, who died at age 46 in 1587 along with his wife. The team's study was published online June 17 in the journal iScience.

Because of the almost simultaneous deaths of Grand Duke Francesco I and his wife, a rumor circulated that another brother had poisoned them over a long-standing feud. But the Medicis were known to have frequented their family villas in marshy and swampy areas of Tuscany, where malaria was prevalent well into the 20th century.

Researchers found evidence of P. falciparum in the bones of both Medici brothers, confirming reports from court physicians at the time that described the brothers as sick with "tertian fever," a type of high fever that returns every three days and is a hallmark of malaria. The medical reports also revealed the brothers were treated with bloodletting.

"Now we can say with scientific certainty that malaria, not poisoning, killed Grand Duke Francesco de Medici," study co-author Valentina Giuffra, a medical historian at the University of Pisa, said in a statement.

But the ancient-DNA study held two additional surprises.

The Grand Duke's bones were positive not only for P. falciparum but also for Plasmodium malariae, a different parasite species that also causes malaria in humans, suggesting that both species contributed to the severe illness that killed him and his wife.

Cardinal Giovanni, on the other hand, had only P. falciparum, but the specific strain that infected him was previously unknown. The strain is similar to those found in ancient and early modern Europe, but with two mutations the researchers had never seen before, they wrote in the study.

"The study of ancient DNA offers us an opportunity not only to diagnose malaria in the remains of individuals from the past, but it also offers us a window for understanding the evolution of malaria species, Plasmodium falciparum in this case, which can help scientists better understand how the pathogen adapts over time," study first author Alexander Ochoa, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, said in the statement.

Further analysis of the brothers' bones is needed to determine the evolutionary relationship between the strains of malaria they carried, the researchers wrote in the study.

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

Two lumps of potato discovered in a roughly 500-year-old Inca storage room in Peru are a rare find: freeze-dried potatoes predating the Spanish invasion, a new study finds.

These freeze-dried potatoes, known as chuño, were once a backbone of the Inca Empire's food supply and a product so fragile that they almost never turn up at archaeological sites.

The new discovery, made along Peru's arid south coast, is only the second time chuño has been recovered from an Inca site, researchers reported in the new study. It is concrete evidence that the empire directed one of its most important food sources hundreds of miles from the Andes, down to the Pacific Ocean.

Chuño is made by repeatedly exposing potatoes to nighttime frost and daytime sun until nearly all their moisture has evaporated, leaving a lightweight, long-lasting vegetable that can be stored for decades. This technique works only at high elevations where hard frost occurs regularly, so chuño had to be produced in the mountains and then transported using llama caravans, often hundreds of kilometers, to feed people living elsewhere in the empire.

The Inca used the same drying method to preserve meat, producing a product called "charki" — the source of the English word "jerky," study principal investigator Lidio Valdez, an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary, told Live Science in an email.

In the new study, published May 1 in the Journal of Field Archaeology, Valdez and study co-author Katrina Bettcher, an independent archaeologist, reported that the chuño was found alongside an Inca pottery fragment and a broken spindle whorl, a tool used to spin fibers, such as raw wool, into yarn or thread.

The discovery happened during the 2024 field season at Tambo Viejo, an Inca provincial center in the Acarí Valley, where an archaeological team had worked for several years. Inside a small storage room, the team uncovered a clay pot sunk into the dirt floor, its top half long gone. As researchers scooped soil out of the broken pot, they reached its bottom.

"Almost at the base of the vessel, the two samples of freeze-dried potatoes were found," Valdez said. "They showed me without knowing what they were, and right away I said: chuño!"

Potatoes are roughly 80% water, and they typically rot within a week at lower, warmer elevations — making them a poor food choice for long-distance storage. Valdez said freeze-drying was likely discovered long before the Inca rose to power in the 15th century, perhaps when potatoes that were accidentally exposed to frost at a high elevation became dried out and people realized the result was still edible.

Because chuño can be made only above roughly 11,800 feet (3,600 meters), the samples at Tambo Viejo must have traveled down from the highlands, most likely via a llama caravan along the Inca road network, Valdez said.

"Chuño being a light product probably also made its transportation easier," he added.

The two freeze-dried potatoes survived thanks to the Acarí Valley's extremely dry conditions, which help preserve organic remains that would otherwise decay — the same conditions that have previously yielded naturally mummified guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus) in Valdez’s previous work at the site.

Beyond its archaeological importance, the ancient preservation method has lessons for today. "We still have so much to learn from the people of the past," Valdez said. "Food security is a main concern, even in our times; yet we waste food, perhaps more than at any time in human history."

Relatively few Inca sites along Peru's coast have been systematically excavated, and Valdez expects more evidence of chuño — and the long supply lines that carried it — to surface as archaeologists keep digging.

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

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius buried a vast collection of scrolls in ash and scorched them into solid black lumps. Now, without unrolling them, researchers have virtually read two of them —‬ and uncovered what may be a work by a well-known Stoic philosopher.

The breakthrough comes from the Vesuvius Challenge, an international research effort to digitally read the scrolls that were preserved when Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried by ash and pumice in A.D. 79. Papyrologists, who study and preserve the ancient manuscripts, announced June 25 that they had digitally unwrapped the surviving portion of one scroll, known as PHerc. 1667, revealing roughly 5 feet (1.5 meters) of continuous Greek text across 20 columns. Researchers also recovered more than 70 columns of text from a second scroll, PHerc. 172.

"For nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible," Brent Seales, Vesuvius Challenge co-founder and a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, said in a statement. "Today ‪—‬ after years of interdisciplinary work combining advanced imaging, artificial intelligence, academic research and an innovation contest ‪—‬ we are finally able to read them."

Over the past few years, Seales and his team have used a synchrotron to essentially X-ray inside the scrolls and detect the ink ancient Romans used to write. The letters are then studied by papyrologists, who translate the text.

Part of PHerc. 1667 was physically opened in the 1980s, but overlapping layers obscured the writing so badly that the scroll was given a readability score of zero, Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II, said in the statement.

The handwriting and text of PHerc. 1667 suggest the scroll dates to the second or third century B.C., making it one of the oldest scrolls in the Herculaneum collection. This early date means it could not have been authored by Philodemus of Gadara, the first-century-B.C. Epicurean philosopher whose writings dominated the Herculaneum library.

Experts think the text reads more like a Stoic treatise on ethics and human behavior, and it specifically mentions Aristocreon, the nephew and pupil of the influential Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. Very little of Chrysippus' own writing has survived, so if the attribution holds up, it would be a significant addition to the historical record of early Stoic thought.

In a separate discovery, researchers identified a new book title within scroll PHerc. 139. The end of the scroll references Philodemus' eighth book of "On Gods." While this treatise had previously been known to exist, the new discovery reveals the work extended across at least eight volumes. Experts plan to reexamine other texts in the Herculaneum collection for additional volumes that may belong to the same series.

More than 600 Herculaneum scrolls remain unopened. It's thought that the villa was once owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

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

Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" have inspired countless books, movies and works of art in the nearly three millennia since the epic tales were first written. This small, bronze sculpture, once attached to an ancient box, shows how the Greek epics influenced the aesthetics of the enigmatic Etruscans.

The Sleep and Death cista handle, which is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, features a set of bronze figurines welded to form a decorative handle for a cista ‪—‬ a small, cylindrical, lidded box used for a variety of purposes in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and Etruria, an ancient region in central Italy.

The handle is roughly 7.3 inches long and 7.2 inches tall (18.5 by 18.3 centimeters). The figurines represent Hypnos (the Greek god of sleep) and Thanatos (the Greek god of nonviolent death) bending to lift the body of Sarpedon, one of Zeus' sons who fought in the legendary Trojan War.

Sarpedon fought on the side of Troy, leading his men into battle against the formidable Greeks, according to Book XVI of the "Iliad." The Greek hero Patroclus entered the fray wearing Achilles' armor to trick the Trojans into thinking the greatest Greek warrior had joined the fight and scare off the Trojans. Sarpedon met Patroclus on the battlefield, and even though Zeus wanted to save his son, Sarpedon was mortally wounded. The Greeks stripped Sarpedon's body of his armor, but Zeus commanded Apollo to retrieve the corpse and deliver it to twin brothers Hypnos and Thanatos, "who bear men swiftly away" (translation by A. S. Kline).

The ancient sculptor of this piece "succeeded brilliantly in capturing the pathos and emotion in a scene from Homer's 'Iliad,'" Michael Bennett, former curator of Greek and Roman art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, said in a video. And on a technical level, the piece is much more detailed than a typical Etruscan handle; this one appears to be almost ergonomically designed, as Sarpedon's limply falling hair can be used as a finger grip, according to Bennett.

But the reason the Etruscans adapted the visual aesthetic of Homeric epic to many of their artworks, such as sculptures and wall paintings, is still unclear.

Because the Etruscan language is only partly understood, most information about this civilization, which arose around 900 B.C., comes from outside sources, such as the Greek historian Herodotus, who was writing several centuries later. Herodotus believed the Etruscans came from Lydia in Asia Minor, not too far south of Troy. Coupled with the later legend that Aeneas, a Trojan hero, wandered to Italy after the war and helped found Rome, some experts, such as linguist Robert Beekes, believe the Etruscans may derive from the Trojans or groups that fought on the Trojan side. However, a 2021 genetic study found the Etruscans may have been local.

The Etruscans may have used scenes from the Trojan War to decorate their vases and bronze boxes because they felt kinship with the antagonists in the "Iliad." But they also might have adopted the aesthetics because the Trojan War was a popular theme in Greek art at the time, and vases and other works decorated in this style reached the Etruscans through extensive trade networks. The Etruscans then put their own spin on the stories of the Trojan War, focusing in particular on scenes of death and brutality, classical archaeologist Larissa Bonfante argued in "Etruscan Myths" (2006, British Museum Press).

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

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