If you are an avocado toast or guacamole enthusiast, there’s a good chance to tasty green goodness you’re eating was grown in Mexico. In 2019, the United States imported $28 billion worth of agricultural products from Mexico, with fresh fruit and vegetables leading the pack.

It turns out that Mexican agricultural dominance goes back centuries, long before Spanish colonization began in 1519. Before the arrival of the Spanish, the agricultural system in the Basin of Mexico, a 3,700 square mile highlands plateau in central Mexico, fed a huge population for the time. Mexico City (called Tenochtitlan) was home to as many as 3 million people, compared with 50,000 in Seville, Spain’s largest urban center.

A study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) details how the Mexica, or Aztecs, were able to achieve such an accurate agricultural calendar.

[Related: Scientists still are figuring out how to age the ancient footprints in White Sands National Park.]

An accurate calendar was crucial to growing the food that fed so many people in a region with a dry spring and summer monsoons. Farmers needed advanced understanding of when these seasonal variations in the weather would arrive, since planting crops too early or too late could have been disastrous. They also needed a calendar that could adjust to leap year.

Colonial chroniclers documented the use of a calendar, but this new research shows that the Mexica used the mountains of the Basin as a solar observatory, and kept track of the sunrise against the peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains. 

“We concluded they must have stood at a single spot, looking eastwards from one day to another, to tell the time of year by watching the rising sun,” Exequiel Ezcurra, the study’s lead author and an ecology professor from the University of California, Riverside, said in a statement.

To find the spot, the team analyzed Mexica manuscripts, particularly the ones that referred to Mount Tlaloc. The mountain at the east of the Basin had a temple at its summit. Using astronomical computer models, the team confirmed that a long causeway-like structure at the temple aligns with the rising sun on February 24. Depending upon which calendar (Gregorian or Julian) is used as a comparision, February 23 or 24 is the first day of the Aztec new year.

“Our hypothesis is that they used the whole Valley of Mexico. Their working instrument was the Basin itself. When the sun rose at a landmark point behind the Sierras, they knew it was time to start planting,” added Ezcurra.

When viewed from a fixed point on Earth, the sun doesn’t follow the same trajectory every day. During the winter, the sun runs south of the celestial equator and rises toward the southeast. As the longer days of summer approach, the sunrise moves northeast due to the Earth’s tilt. This process is called solar declination. 

This study is potentially the first to demonstrate how the Mexica were able to keep time using this principle with the sun, and the mountains as guiding landmarks. Learning about these Aztec methods offers a lesson about the importance of using a variety of techniques to solve questions about the natural world.

[Related: Severe droughts are bringing archaeological wonders and historic horrors to the surface.]

“The Aztecs were just as good or better as the Europeans at keeping time, using their own methods,” said Ezcurra.

The observatory could also have a modern function today. Historical images show that the forest is slowly climbing up Mount Tlaloc, possibly due to an increase in average temperatures at lower elevation. 

“In the 1940s the tree line was way below the summit. Now there are trees growing in the summit itself,” Ezcurra said. “What was an observatory for the ancients could also be an observatory for the 21st century, to understand global climate changes.”

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It’s a starchy staple that goes well with all types of meat, vegetables, and can even be made into some tasty desserts. Rice is caloric, typically low-cost to produce, a great source of fiber and vitamins in its whole grain form, and there are more than 40,000 varieties of it around the world.

Rice is a staple crop for multiple countries and regions and some new research is shedding light onto just how long humanity’s love of the grain goes back. A study published yesterday in the journal PLOS ONE details the analysis of stone tools from southern China, that provide the earliest evidence of rice harvesting. The tools show that harvesting the grain could have begun as early as 10,000 years ago.

[Related: We have a lot to learn from Indigenous people’s oyster-shucking practices.]

In the study, the team identified two distinct methods of harvesting rice, which helped start centuries of rice domestication. Wild rice naturally sheds its ripe seeds, which shatter on the ground when they mature. Cultivated rice stay on the plants when they mature.

Some sort of tool would have been needed to harvest rice, and the tool usage meant that early rice cultivators were selecting the seeds that primarily stay on the plants. Over time, the proportion of seeds that remain on the plants increased, resulting in domestication.

“For quite a long time, one of the puzzles has been that harvesting tools have not been found in southern China from the early Neolithic period or New Stone Age (10,000 – 7,000 BCE) — the time period when we know rice began to be domesticated,” said lead author Jiajing Wang, an assistant professor of anthropology at Dartmouth, in a statement. “However, when archaeologists were working at several early Neolithic sites in the Lower Yangtze River Valley, they found a lot of small pieces of stone, which had sharp edges that could have been used for harvesting plants.”

The team’s early hypothesis was that some of those small stone pieces were tools that harvested rice, which the results confirm.

In China’s Lower Yangtze River Valley, the two earliest Neolithic culture groups were the Shangshan and Kuahuqiao. In the study, the team examined 53 flaked stone tools from Shangshan and Hehuashan sites.

The stone flakes have sharp edges, but are generally rough in appearance and are not finely made. The flaked tools are also mostly small enough to be held by one hand, at about 1.7 inches long and wide.

The team conduced use-wear and phytolith residue analysis, as a way to determine if the stone flakes were used to harvest rice.

In use-wear analysis, micro-scratches on the surfaces of the tools were examined under a microscope. It showed that 30 of the flakes have use-wear patterns that are similar to those produced by harvesting silica-rich plants, likely including rice. Also, rounded edges and tiny grooves are more characteristic of tools that are used for cutting plants than the tools that were used to cut animal tissue or scrape wood.

[Related: Ancient humans might have bred one of the scariest birds on the planet.]

The team also analyzed the microscopic residue that was left on the stone flakes called phytoliths. Phytoliths are the silica skeleton of plants, and 28 of the tools had these ancient plant remains on them.

“What’s interesting about rice phytoliths is that rice husk and leaves produce different kinds of phytolith, which enabled us to determine how the rice was harvested,” said Wang.

Through both of these tests, the team found evidence that two types of rice harvesting methods were used: the finger-knife and sickle harvesting techniques. Both methods are still used to harvest rice in Asia today.

In the finger-knife method, the panicles located at the top of the rice plant are reaped. The stone flakes from the early phase (10,000 – 8,200 BCE) showed that this method was the primary way to harvest the rice. The tools used here had grooves that were mainly perpendicular or diagonal to the edge of the stone flake. The team said this is evidence of a cutting or scraping motion and the flakes had phytoliths from seeds or rice husks, which indicates that the rice was harvested from the top of the rice plant.

“A rice plant contains numerous panicles that mature at different times, so the finger-knife harvesting technique is especially useful when rice domestication was in the early stage,” said Wang.

Sickle harvesting uses the lower part of the plant. The stone flakes from the later phase (8,000 – 7,000 BCE) had more evidence of this method. The tools from this era had grooves that were predominantly parallel to the tool’s edge, which means that slicing motion had likely been used.

“Sickle harvesting was more widely used when rice became more domesticated, and more ripe seeds stayed on the plant,” said Wang. “Since you are harvesting the entire plant at the same time, the rice leaves and stems could also be used for fuel, building materials, and other purposes, making this a much more effective harvesting method. Both harvesting methods would have reduced seed shattering. That’s why we think rice domestication was driven by human unconscious selection.”

Additional research on these tools is needed to further evaluate plant harvesting techniques, how blades were attached to tools, and the intensity of rice cultivation during later stages of agricultural transition after 7,000 BCE.

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With a direct hit by Category 4 Hurricane Ian in September and two unusual late-season storms, the state of Florida saw an active hurricane season this year. Severe beach erosion from the last two storms helped uncover what is likely a wooden ship that dates back to the 1800s in Daytona Beach Shores. It’s possible that the ship was buried on the eastern coast of Florida two centuries ago, and remained hidden despite all of the activity on the sand above.

The structure is between 60 and 100 feet long and was found sticking out of the sand over Thanksgiving weekend, near homes that had collapsed during November’s Hurricane Nicole.

“Whenever you find a shipwreck on the beach it’s really an amazing occurrence. There’s this mystery, you know. It’s not there one day, and it’s there the next day, so it really captivates the imagination,” maritime archaeologist Chuck Meide told the AP. Meide led a team of archaeologists from St. Augustine, Florida to examine the ship. Meide is St. Augustine Lighthouse & Museum’s director research.

[Related: Historic drought brings eerie objects and seawater to the surface of the Mississippi River.]

Meide strongly believes that the structure is a shipwreck due to how it is constructed and the materials, such as iron bolts, found on it. “It’s a rare experience, but it’s not unique, and it seems with climate change and more intense hurricane seasons, it’s happening more frequently,” Meide said, referencing the shipwreck.

Earlier this week, the team removed the sand and dug a shallow trench around the wooden timbers, made sketches, and took measurements in an effort to help crack the 200-year-old case.

When more of the structure was exposed, the team used their hands to keep digging to prevent damage to the wood. The process will take longer, but is safer than using shovels, according to Arielle Cathers, one of the team members working on the dig.

After the initial discovery of the ship about two weeks ago, some of the ships timbers were reburied by the waves and sand. The team doesn’t intend to intend to uncover the whole length of the ship, but merely enough to measure it, draw it and possibly take some wood samples to test for its origins.

Currently, there are no plans to removed the ship from the beach, due to being well protected in the packed, wet sand and a price tag in the millions of dollars.

[Related: Dead ships find solace under the treacherous surface of the Great Lakes.]

Hurricanes are not the only weather phenomenon that have been revealing buried relics of the past. In October, drought on the Mississippi River exposed a similar shipwreck find. Baton Rouge, Lousiana resident Patrick Ford found the shipwrecked remains of the Brookhill, a trading vessel dating back to the early 20th Century. “I immediately texted friends and was like, ‘holy moly, I think I found a ship, a sunken ship!’” Ford told WBRZ, the city’s ABC News affiliate.

Lousiana state archaeologist Chip McGimsey said that they’ve known about the Brookhill for quite some time. “We believe this is a ship that was manufactured in 1896 in Indiana for trade here,” McGimsey explained to WBRZ. This ship along with its sister ship the Istrouma faced destruction. “On September 29th of 1915, there was a big storm… both ships sank.”

It’s also not unusual for items to become uncovered or wash up on shore after storms. In Martin County, Florida (about 160 miles south of Volusia County), Hurricane Nicole’s wind and waves uncovered the skeletal remains of six people from what scientists believe to be a Native American burial ground.

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Owls have long been beloved animals representing wisdom and knowledge—just think of Mr. Owl eating Tootsie Pops for science or the Owl counseling Winnie the Pooh. Thousands of years ago, it seems people were celebrating owls as well by creating copper engravings of the birds on art found on the Iberian Peninsula.

A team in Spain examined 4,000 engraved slate plaques that resemble owls, showing two engraved circles for eyes and a body, that date to the Copper Age (between 5,500 and 4,750 years ago). The plaques were found in tombs and pits across Spain and Portugal, and the discovery is outlined in a study published last week in the journal Scientific Reports.

[Related: What ancient graves can teach us about the history of inequality.]

“The resemblance of this type of plaques with the owl species present in the region is more than evident,” study co-author Víctor M. Díaz, an art historian from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, says in an e-mail to PopSci. “This, together with the possibility that they were used by the youngest as dolls or toys, led us to think that perhaps they were objects made by children in a learning context to later use them in their games.”

The team examined 100 of the plaques and rated them on a scale of one to six based on how many of six owl traits they displayed. The traits included two eyes, patterned feathers, feathery tufts, a flat facial disk, wings, and a beak. They then compared 100 modern images of owls drawn by children age four to 13 with the plaques.

“The similarity of these plaques with the drawings made by children of our day is very remarkable,” says Díaz. “One of the things that they reveal to us about the children of that time is that their vision of what an owl is is very similar, if not identical, to what children of today have. They would also be proof of how certain useful skills for daily life can be acquired in a learning context that is not necessarily productive.”

The drawings also more closely resembled owls as children aged and their motor skills likely improved.

There were also two small holes at the top of many of the plaques, but the team does not believe that these were used to hang the owl-plaque like a modern parent might put a child’s drawing up on the refrigerator. Instead, it’s possible that feathers could be placed there to better resemble the feathery tufts on the heads of some regional owl species, such as the long-eared owl (Asio otus).

[Related: Climate change is threatening archeological treasures from Alaska to Egypt.]

It’s possible that these plaques had a few different roles from a toy to an object used in rituals or an image of a deity from the time or as a teaching tool. Plaques like these would have kept kids busy, while also teaching them a valuable skill, and could even have been a way for the adults at the time to identify future stone carvers.

It also connects modern life with prehistoric life, especially in showing that both societies have playful sides and care about aesthetics.

“Our proposal proves that we are not so different from our ancestors,” says Díaz.

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It’s a perfect plot for the long-running PBS series Antiques Roadshow. Several Roman coins first discovered in 1713 were long believed to be forgeries. But now, scientists say they are most likely authentic.

The new analysis is described in a study out this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. The study provides evidence that the engraving of the leader on one of the coins was an emperor named Sponsian who was considered a historical usurper of power and ruled in the 260s CE.

[Related: Fake Galileo manuscript suspected to be a 20th-century forgery.]

“Scientific analysis of these ultra-rare coins rescues the emperor Sponsian from obscurity,” Paul N. Pearson of University College, London and the a lead author of the paper said in a statement. “Our evidence suggests he ruled Roman Dacia, an isolated gold mining outpost, at a time when the empire was beset by civil wars and the borderlands were overrun by plundering invaders.”

For much of ancient Roman history, mints made coins that featured portraits of current emperors. A group of these coins was allegedly discovered in Transylvania in 1713. Some of the coins had a portrait labeled with the name “Sponsian,” on them, but no historical records that a Roman emperor with that name existed at the time.

The Transylvanian coins follow the general style of Roman coins from the mid-third century, like chunky lettering and bold portraits with prominent chins, but there are some stylistic differences on the coins and the metals that they were made from. These differences led many experts to dismiss the coins as fakes that were made to sell to collections. Additionally, the name “Sponsian” was not yet known to historians in 1713, according to the study.

Science met ancient history when visible light microscopy, ultra-violet imaging, scanning electron microscopy, and reflection mode Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy were used to investigate whether or not these coins were the real deal. Pearson and colleagues conducted the deeper assessment of the physical characteristics of four of the coins, including the Sponsian coin, with two undoubtedly authentic Roman gold coins as a comparison.

[Related: Researchers found what they believe is a 2,000-year-old map of the stars.]

The analysis showed deep micro-abrasion patterns that are generally associated with coins that were in circulation for a very long period of time, even centuries. The dirt deposits on the coins were also examined, and the team found evidence that after a long circulation, the coins were buried for a while before being unearthed. According to the team, this new evidence of circulation and burial strongly suggests the coins are authentic.

While looking at the historical record alongside the new evidence from the coins, the team suggests that Sponsian was also an army commander in the Roman Province of Dacia during a period of military strife in the 260s CE.

“This has been a really exciting project for The Hunterian,” said Jesper Ericsson, Curator of Numismatics at The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow, in a statement. “Not only do we hope that this encourages further debate about Sponsian as a historical figure, but also the investigation of coins relating to him held in other museums across Europe.”

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The United Nations climate change conference hasn’t been the only big news out of Egypt this month. There have recently been some exciting archaeological finds, dating back thousands of years.

From mysterious pyramids to miraculous tunnels, here are some of the coolest discoveries recently uncovered in Egypt.

Pyramid of an unknown queen found near King Tut’s tomb

A century after the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, a team of archaeologists unearthed several coffins, mummies, and artifacts, a series of interconnected underground tunnels, and the pyramid of a never-before known ancient Egyptian queen.

The team discovered her name was Neith, and she has yet to appear in the historical record according to Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s former state minister for antiquities. Therefore, more work will have to be done to learn about her rule and story.

Archaeologists have been digging at a site about 20 miles south of Cairo called Saqqara. The recently discovered trove of coffins and mummies, possibly belong to some of King Tutankhamun’s closest advisors and generals. The boy pharaoh ruled from about 1333 BCE until his death in 1323 BCE, and the discovery of his untouched pyramid in 1922 grabbed headlines around the world.

[Related: Egypt is reclaiming its mummies and its past.]

On this dig, the team also looked at a nearby pyramid, which belongs to the first king of the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt named Teti. “Teti was worshipped as a god in the New Kingdom, and everyone wanted to be buried alongside him,” Hawass told NBC News. The team had found close to 300 coffins near his pyramid, with many of them in good condition.

According to Hawass, most of the burials known in this area previously were from either the Old Kingdom or the Late Period in Egyptian history. The New Kingdom (also called the Egyptian Empire) period lasted from 11th century BCE to sixth century BCE.

And the discoveries at Saqqara may only just be getting started. “I really believe that this year and next year, this site is going to be the most important site in Egypt,” Hawass said, in reference to a network of underground rooms hidden 65 feet beneath the oldest pyramids in Egypt.

Egypt’s oldest tomb oriented to winter solstice

About a month before this year’s winter solstice on December 21, a team from Spain’s University of Malaga and the University of Jaen announced the discovery of Egypt’s oldest tomb that is oriented towards the sunrise on the winter solstice. Every year on the shortest day, the sun’s rays cover a spot that was meant to hold a statue of a governor of the city of Elephantine, who lived at the end of the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt, around 1830 BCE.

In a paper published in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry last week, the team explains that in order to achieve a perfect orientation with the sun, an Egyptian architect used a two-cubit pole, around three feet long, a square, and some robes, to calculate the orientation of the entire chapel and the location of the governor’s statue.

[Related: It may be time for museums to return Egyptian mummies to their coffins.]

By using these measurements, the tomb perfectly registered the whole solar cycle, related to the idea of rebirth and renewal. The winter solstice symbolized the beginning of the suns victory over darkness as the day grew longer, while summer solstice generally coincided with the beginning of the annual flooding of the Nile River. Both of these events held important symbolism linked to the resurrection of the deceased governor.

The tomb of this governor was cataloged as No. 33 and was possibly built by Governor Heqaib-ankh. It was excavated between 2008 and 2018.

“This study demonstrates that Egyptians were capable of calculating the position of the sun and the orientation of its rays to design their monuments. Although the tomb No. 33 of Qubbet el-Hawa is the oldest example ever found, certainly it is not the only one,” the team said in a statement.

A “Geometric Miracle” tunnel

During ongoing excavations and exploration of a temple underneath the ancient city of Taposiris Magna on the Egyptian coast, Kathleen Martinez of the University of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and her team uncovered a tunnel 43 feet underground. The roughly six-foot-tall tunnel had been built through 4,281 feet of sandstone. The team called the design a “geometric miracle.”

The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities says the design is similar to Greece’s Tunnel of Eupalinos, a sixth century BCE aqueduct on the island of Samos.

Parts of the Taposiris Magna tunnel are submerged in water, and its its purpose is currently unknown.

Martinez believes that the tunnel could be a promising lead in her 18 year-long search of the lost tomb of the famed Cleopatra VII. Previous excavations in the area have produced some clues that point to the notable queen and the last of Egypt’s Ptolemy dynasty, who ruled Egypt from 51 BCE until her death in 30 BCE.

The team believes the temple in Taposiris Magna was dedicated to the god Osiris and his queen, the goddess Isis. Isis is the deity that has a strong association with Cleopatra and coins bearing the names and images of both Cleopatra and Alexander the Great have been found in the area in addition of figurines of Isis.

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In September 2021, a study published in the journal Science rocked the archaeological world. A team of scientists from the United States found that a series of footprints preserved in White Sands National Park in New Mexico offer, “definitive evidence of human occupation of North America” during the last ice age and date back to between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago.

Scientists have traditionally agreed that the earliest dates that humans were found in North America is somewhere between 14,000 to 16,000 years ago, following the last ice age.

However, in a new study published yesterday in the journal Quaternary Research scientists from the Desert Research Institute (DRI), Kansas State University, the University of Nevada, Reno, and Oregon State University caution that the dating evidence used to age the White Sands footprints needs improvement to make a claim that changes scientific consensus.

[Related: These footprints could push back human history in the Americas.]

“It really does throw a lot of what we think we know into question,”David Rhode, a paleoecologist at DRI and co-author of the new study, said in a statement. “That’s why it’s important to really nail down this age, and why we’re suggesting that we need better evidence.”

The tiny seeds of an aquatic plant (Ruppia cirrhosa) used to age the footprints last year are at the center of the timeframe debate. The authors used radiocarbon dating methods to examine Carbon-14. These carbon isotopes decay at a constant rate over time, and comparing the amount of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere to the amount present in fossilized plant material allows scientists to determine their approximate age.

However, Ruppia cirrhosa, grows underwater and gets a lot of its carbon for photosynthesis from dissolved carbon atoms in water.

“While the researchers recognize the problem, they underestimate the basic biology of the plant,” says Rhode. “For the most part, it’s using the carbon it finds in the lake waters. And in most cases, that means it’s taking in carbon from sources other than the contemporary atmosphere – sources which are usually pretty old.”

[Related: What ancient graves can teach us about the history of inequality.]

According to Rhode and the team, this method is likely to give radiocarbon-based age estimates of the plant that are much older than the actual plants.

The dating of the footprints can be resolved through other methods, including radiocarbon dating of terrestrial plants (that use atmospheric carbon and not carbon from groundwater) and optically stimulated luminescence dating of quartz found in the sediment, the authors write.

However, both of these estimates of when humans first inhabited North America typically ignore indigenous knowledge that life and culture in North America exists far beyond even the 23,000 year estimate.

“There are many sites that have really good dating and really good reports that are much older,” Paulette Steeves, a Cree-Metis archaeologist at Algoma University who studies Indigenous history, and author of The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, told PopSci last year. Steeves has compiled hundreds of finds that she says presents credible evidence that humans in the Americas date back before 16,000 years.

Steeves approaches the existing ancient sites differently and finds that there’s a long history of what she describes as. “violent criticism against archaeologists discussing older sites.” Steeves says that this tendency to dismiss is rooted in archaeology’s use as a tool to discount Indigenous claims to North America. These footprints also aren’t the first find to contradict the 14,000 to 16,000 year settlement hypothesis. Possibly 30,000-year-old stone tools in a cave in central Mexico were discovered in 2020, with another find that may be more than 20,000 years old.

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Centuries before skin care influencers were selling advice like silk pillowcases for hair loss and wrinkles, sheet masks for an all-natural dewey glow, and using mayonnaise as a hair mask, there was a comb with a spell to treat one of human kind’s oldest pests: lice.

A small ivory comb dating to about 1700 BCE was found with engraved with a hopeful spell against the wingless insect that like to infest human hair. The inscription reads, “May this [ivory] tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard,” according to a study published last month in Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology. The 17 letters on the comb form seven words and belong to an early form of the alphabet used by the Canaanites.

[Related: What ancient graves can teach us about the history of inequality.]

The Canaanites lived in a region that includes parts of present-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan called Canaan. The region is mentioned throughout the Hebrew bible and historical texts dating as far back as 3600 BCE. The comb was uncovered at Tel Lachish, the remains of a major Canaanite city-state from the second millennium BCE. From 1800 to 1150 BCE, Lachish was the major center for the use and preservation of the Canaanite alphabet. To date, 10 Canaanite inscriptions have been found at Tel Lachish, but never one containing a full phrase—until now.

“This is the first sentence ever found in the Canaanite language in Israel. There are Canaanites in Ugarit in Syria, but they write in a different script, not the alphabet that is used till today, ” Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a co-author of the study, said in a statement. “The Canaanite cities are mentioned in Egyptian documents, the Amarna letters that were written in Akkadian, and in the Hebrew Bible. The comb inscription is direct evidence for the use of the alphabet in daily activities some 3,700 years ago. This is a landmark in the history of the human ability to write.”

The comb is about one inch long by 0.9 inches wide and has teeth on both sides that were likely used to remove lice and their eggs from hair, similar to the two-sided lice combs still used today. Combs during this area were made from bone, wood, or luxurious ivory. Ivory was the more expensive material that was likely imported. The authors theorize that the comb likely came from Egypt, since there weren’t any elephants present in Canaan during this time period. Importing such a swanky bug-picker shows that even wealthy and powerful people weren’t immune from the annoyance of lice.

[Related: Climate change is threatening archeological treasures from Alaska to Egypt.]

Tiny remains of some of the actual head lice (about 0.02 inches) were found on the combs second tooth of the comb. The weather and climate of Lachish didn’t allow for a whole louse to be preserved on the comb, but the outer chitin membrane of a bug in the nymph stage survived.

According to the study, many of the comb’s special features (despite its tiny size) are helping researchers fill in knowledge gaps about the culture of Canaan in the Bronze Age, which lasted from 3000 to 1000 BCE. It shows an entire verbal sentence written in the dialect spoken by the Canaanite inhabitants of Lachish for the first time, so scientists can compare it with other written languages of the Bronze Age. The inscription also sheds lights on some of the more mundane, but poorly understood aspects of daily life at the time, like haircare and dealing with itchy lice.

It also marks the first discovery in the region of an inscription that refers to the purpose of the object it was written on and shows off the skillful carving of the unknown engraver. They were able to successfully carve tiny letters less than an inch wide, which can help in future studies on literacy and carving in Bronze Age Canaan.

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Even the most fantastic, fascinating historic places on the planet can’t escape climate change. A study published earlier this week in the journal Antiquities finds that many of the world’s most treasured archaeological sites are at risk due to increasing threats from climate change, showing again how no location on Earth is immune to the wrath of a changing planet.

The impacts vary as greatly as the sites themselves. Hundreds of archaeological sites in coastal Scotland, Egypt’s North Sinai Archaeological Sites Zone, and The Old Chimney in Florida’s Pensacola Bluffs are threatened by coastal erosion and rising sea levels. Thawing permafrost in Alaska is destroying artifacts that were once preserved in ice. In Iran, sites dating back to 300 BCE are buried in sand due to desertification or when drought, farming techniques, or deforestation turn fertile land into deserts. Floods struck China’s central province of Henan in July 2021, a region home to five Unesco World Heritage sites and 420 national heritage sites. An estimated 400 cultural relics suffered varying degrees of damage during the flooding.

[Related: What ancient graves can teach us about the history of inequality.]

Author Jørgen Hollesen, an archeologist from the National Museum of Denmark, writes that climate change is impacting these sites, “on such a wide global scale, and within so many different contexts, that it is too great a problem for any single organization or discipline to tackle alone.”

Hollesen also found that climate change is undermining one of archaeology’s key tenants of preserving cultural heritage, which implies, “that the archaeological record can be protected with no, or only minor, degradation or loss,” Hollesen writes. “In the face of accelerated climate change, the wider principle of conserving and preserving as much as possible seems increasingly unsustainable.”

Hollesen compiled a list of strategies to better protect precious archaeological sites, but it needs more political action and technical ability for their slow or non-existent rollout. One example is improving the accuracy of climate prediction models so that archeologists and cultural preservation teams know ahead of time which regions and sites are in harm’s way to better prepare and assess the damage.

[Related: Severe droughts are bringing archaeological wonders and historic horrors to the surface.]

“Even if archaeologists and planners in years to come are equipped with tools efficient enough to pin-point the most vulnerable sites, they will still be faced with difficult decisions: which sites should be saved, and which sites should be allowed to decay?” he writes.

The paper also proposes that places that hold “outstanding value” can even be used to stress the greater urgency of climate action, referencing the National Landmarks at Risk report published in 2014 by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

One of the positive developments that the paper cites is a 2022 study from the University of Lincoln, describing the first integration of cultural sites into the climate change adaptation plans of low- and middle-income countries, such as Nigeria, Colombia, and Iran. While that study did find a disconnect between the cultural heritage sector and climate change policymakers, it represents a step towards ensuring that priceless cultural items are protected from the worsening effects of climate change.

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The species Homo sapiens (or “wise man”) began to evolve about 300,000 years ago, and eventually won out the evolutionary battle and became the only Homo species to reign on Earth about 40,000 years ago. During the early days of human life, another species named Homo neanderthalensis, or more commonly called Neanderthals, co-existed with Homo sapiens. In 2010, a ground-breaking analysis of a Neanderthal genome revealed that the two species could successfully interbreed.

It was once thought that war and violence caused the demise of the Neanderthals. However, a new study out this week in the journal PalaeoAnthropology adds to a growing body of research that proposes that Homo sapiens may have been responsible for the extinction of Neanderthals in a different manner—sex.

The researchers compared the genomes of Neanderthals and present day humans, and discovered that breeding in between the two species could have led to the eventual extinction of Neanderthals. When looking closer at the genomes of a Neanderthal with five modern humans, researchers discovered that Asians and Europeans share roughly one to four percent of their DNA with Neanderthals, while Africans don’t share any. This suggests that modern humans bred with Neanderthals after they left the African continent, but before they spread East to Asia and north towards Europe roughly 250,000 years ago.

[Related: Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to scientist who sequenced Neanderthal genome.]

However, there currently isn’t any evidence of Homo sapiens genetics in late Neanderthal genomes dating to between 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. Only 32 Neanderthal genomes have been sequenced, which makes it possible that a lack of Homo sapiens DNA within the Neanderthal genome is simply due to a low sampling. 

It is also possible this is due to hybridization—where one species starts mating with another, creating offspring of a new variety. There are plenty of examples of hybrids in nature, such as the liger, which is the offspring of a male lion and a female tiger, or a mule, which is the offspring of a horse and donkey. For some species combinations, it makes a difference which parent is from which species, and often the offspring are infertile.

The lack of mitochondrial DNA (inherited from mother to child) from Neanderthals present in living humans might be evidence that only male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens could successfully mate. If the researchers’ theory is correct, fewer Neanderthals may have been breeding with one another, opting for interspecies mating. This would decimate populations of the already existing small and scattered groups of Neanderthal families, eventually pushing them towards decline.

“We don’t know if the apparent one-way gene flow is because it simply wasn’t happening, that the breeding was taking place but was unsuccessful, or if the Neanderthal genomes we have are unrepresentative,” said Chris Stringer, the Research Leader in Human Evolution at London’s Natural History Museum and study author,  in a statement. “As more Neanderthal genomes are sequenced, we should be able to see whether any nuclear DNA from Homo sapiens was passed on to Neanderthals and demonstrate whether or not this idea is accurate.”

[Related: Researchers found proof of Neanderthals reproducing with other species.]

“Our knowledge of the interaction between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals has got more complex in the last few years, but it’s still rare to see scientific discussion of how the interbreeding between the groups actually happened,”  added Stringer. “We propose that this behavior could have led to the Neanderthals’ extinction if they were regularly breeding with Homo sapiens, which could have eroded their population until they disappeared.”

Around 600,000 years ago, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals diverged from each other and evolved in very different parts of the world. Neanderthal fossils have been found in Asia and Europe, with some as far from Africa and southern Siberia. 
Meanwhile, Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, but scientists are uncertain whether our ancestors are the direct descendants of one specific group of ancient African hominins or came about as the result of mixing between different groups spread across the continent.

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A moderate amount of sunlight is actually pretty good for us. While going outside might feel really difficult when you’d rather beat the next level of a video game, binge watch a gripping new series on Netflix, or read one more chapter of a page-turner, it turns out that getting those rays is crucial for survival. Not enough sunlight can be deadly. A new study published yesterday in Frontiers in Medicine takes a look at how important vitamin D is with the help of a centuries old mummy.

A team of scientists based in Germany examined the child mummy, combining cutting-edge scientific techniques with historical records to better understand what childhood was like during the Renaissance, a period of time between the 14th and 17th Centuries marked by a surge of scientific discoveries and artistic creativity. The conditions within the crypt preserved the soft tissues, allowing for a natural mummification process. This soft tissue contains critical information about the child’s life and untimely death. The paper describes how the team determined not only the cause of death, but the child’s identity.

A virtual autopsy and radiocarbon testing helped the team get a better look at the body and soft tissues, while also looking at family records and some key material clues from the burial. “This is only one case,” Andreas Nerlich of the Academic Clinic Munich-Bogenhausen and the lead author of the paper, said in a statement, “but as we know that the early infant death rates generally were very high at that time, our observations may have considerable impact in the over-all life reconstruction of infants even in higher social classes.”

[Related: Ancient poop proves that humans have always loved beer and cheese.]

A CT scan was used to conduct the virtual autopsy, where the team was able to estimate that the child was about one year old when he died based on the length and formation of the bones and its teeth. The preserved soft tissue indicated that the boy was also overweight for his age.

However, well-fed does not always means well-nourished. His ribs had undergone a pattern called rachitic rosary, which malformed them and has typically been seen in cases of severe rickets or scurvy. It appears that although he was able to get enough food to put on weight, he was still malnourished.

Going deeper into the viral autopsy, the remains showed inflammation of the lungs characteristic of pneumonia. Children with rickets are more vulnerable to pneumonia and it’s likely that this nutritional deficiency contributed to his early death. “The combination of obesity along with a severe vitamin-deficiency can only be explained by a generally ‘good’ nutritional status along with an almost complete lack of sunlight exposure,” said Nerlich. “We have to reconsider the living conditions of high aristocratic infants of previous populations.”

According to the study, the bone lesions in rickets must have come from a lack of vitamin D (which is found in sunlight) absorption. “It is interesting that in previous times socially highly ranked people avoided sunlight exposure, and particularly darkening of the skin. Aristocrats were expected to have white, pale skin, whilst laborers were expected to have suntans. This also applied to small infants, who, like the Starhemberg infant, were at risk of developing rickets due to the lack of ultraviolet rays on their skin,” write the authors.

After establishing the probable cause of death, the team turned their attention to finding the child’s identity. The clothing showed that he had been buried in a long, hooded coat made from silk. He was also buried in a crypt exclusively reserved for the powerful Counts of Starhemberg.

Land title-holders (typically first-born sons in the family) and their wives were buried in this crypt. Radiocarbon dating of a skin sample suggest that the boy was buried between 1550-1635 CE and is likely the first-born son of a Count of Starhemberg. According to historical records detailing the management of the crypt, the burial likely took place after a renovation around 1600 CE. He was also the only infant buried in the crypt.

[Related: It may be time for museums to return Egyptian mummies to their coffins.]

“We have no data on the fate of other infants of the family,” Nerlich said, regarding the unique burial. “According to our data, the infant was most probably [the Count’s] first-born son after erection of the family crypt, so special care may have been applied.”

By using the winning combination of science and history, it’s believed that these are the remains of Reichard Wilhelm, the first-born son of a Count of Starhemberg. The child was buried along alongside his grandfather and namesake Reichard von Starhemberg.

Since this study involved human remains, it had to be approved by the Diocese of Linz, Upper Austria and local church authorities. The head of the still-existing family branch consented to the research.

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For University of Michigan paleontologist Philip Gingerich, a day’s work is all about uncovering the mysteries of the past. “Life in the past was often different from what we see living on earth today,” Gingerich tells Popular Science. “There are a lot of strange and unexpected animals represented by fossils, and there are a lot of interesting mysteries and surprises in the geological past still to be discovered.”

Gingerich is the co-author of a study published yesterday in the journal PLoS One that describes the discovery and analysis of the skeletal remains of Pachycetus paulsonii, Pachycetus wardii, and Antaecetus aithai, ancient whales from a new whale genus called Antaecetus. These whales lived during the middle Eocene era (roughly 40 million years ago) in present-day Europe, North America, and Africa. Early in the Eocene, India began its collision with the rest of the Asian continent, forming the Himalayan Mountains. Most of Earth’s continents were still shifting around into their present day positions. It was also when the fossil record gives us the first evidence of two marine mammal groups: cetaceans (whales, porpoises, and dolphins) and sirenians (manatees and dugongs). The genus Basilosaurus aka the “King Lizard” is a more well-known Eocene era whale.

[Related: This whale fossil could reveal evidence of a 15-million-year-old megalodon attack.]

“The catalyst was co-author Samir Zouhri’s acquisition of the Moroccan skull and partial skeleton of Antaecetus, illustrated in the paper, which we were able to follow up by further excavation to recover more of the same skeleton.  We knew about the species before, based on a limited number of distinctive vertebrae, but the skull was not known before and we didn’t have this much of the skeleton before,” says Gingerich.

The study ties together multiple poorly known and incomplete fossils collected since the early 1870s, from Germany, Ukraine, and other locations in Europe and northern Africa. From these ancient skeletal remains, the team hypothesizes that these whales were slow swimmers similar to manatees (or sireneans) and lived in shallow coastal seas.

[Related: 3D models show the megalodon was faster, fiercer than we ever thought.]

Gingerich and the team were surprised by two major things in the study. “The small size of the skull and delicacy of the teeth for an animal with such large and densely mineralized vertebrae,” he says. “Another thing that surprised us as authors was the wide geographic distribution of Antaecetus and its close relative Pachycetus, which are now known across North Africa, Europe, and eastern North America.”

Antaecetus was also possibly an ambush predator due to the density in its back bones, or vertebrae, which would have provided it with the strength and inertia needed to overcome a prey and deflect predators. They were not likely a target of later predators due to their size and dense skeleton, but the team believes that younger animals may have been more vulnerable to other large archaeocete whales that lived in the same areas.

“The skull and teeth are relatively small and delicate for a fully aquatic ‘archaeocete’ or archaic Eocene whale, especially one with such large vertebrae and such a large body,” says Gingerich.  “This points to a diet of something relatively soft and easy to ambush and chew, possibly octopus, squid, or cuttlefish.”

Antaecetus shows that just because an animal isn’t fast does not mean that it can’t be fierce.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

The short answer is: No one knows who invented music.

No historical evidence exists to tell us exactly who sang the first song, or whistled the first tune, or made the first rhythmic sounds that resembled what we know today as music.

[ Related: “Archive Gallery: The History of Recorded Music“ ]

But researchers do know it happened thousands of years ago. The earliest civilizations throughout Africa, Europe and Asia had music. Back then, many believed it was a divine creation, a gift from the gods.

Indeed, gods and goddesses from many religions and mythologies are associated with music. Stories and works of art tell us that the African god Àyàn was a drummer; the Greek god Apollo played the lyre, a string instrument. In the Book of Genesis, Jubal – a descendant of Adam – is identified as the father of the harp and flute.

Scientists will probably never be able to credit one person, or even a group of people, with music’s invention. But as a musicologist–that’s someone who studies the history of music–I’ve seen many artifacts and much evidence that can help us understand how and why the ancients played music.

Singing

Some scholars say singing was the first kind of musical sound. Not that people back then were crooning full-length songs. Instead, they made simpler vocal sounds–perhaps just a few notes put together. If that’s true, perhaps early humans began to speak and sing at about the same time.

Why did they sing? Maybe they had an impulse to imitate something beautiful, like bird sounds. Vocal imitations of other animal sounds, however, may have been used for hunting, like a modern-day duck call.

It’s also possible singing was a way to communicate with infants and toddlers, like early versions of lullabies. But again, people were not singing complete melodies or songs; our modern lullabies–like “Rock-a-bye Baby”–took centuries to develop.

Singing in Catholic churches throughout Europe during the Middle Ages is well documented. At first there was only a single vocal melody, sung either by a soloist or a small group of male clergy. Nuns also learned to sing in convents. Later, polyphony became increasingly common–when two, three or four voices would each sing different melodies, adding to the complexity of the sound.

Instruments

Archaeologists have helped musicologists learn about ancient musical instruments from the artifacts they’ve uncovered. For example, they have found flutes and whistles made of bone, pottery and stone.

The archaeologists used a process known as carbon-14 dating to find out how old the bone instruments were. All living organisms–animals, plants and people–have some carbon-14 in them; when they die, the amount of carbon-14 decreases, little by little, over years, decades and centuries.

When the scientists measured how much carbon-14 was left in the flutes–which were made from the bones of large birds – they discovered some of the instruments were more than 30,000 years old!

In Japan, some ancient whistles and rattles, made of stone or clay, are about 6,000 years old. Through their small blowholes, these instruments created high, shrill tones. Those using them may have thought the sounds were somehow magical, and it’s possible they played them during religious rituals. Some of those stone whistles can still make sounds.

In China, pottery bells, which may be the ancestors to bronze bells, appeared at least 4,000 years ago. In Greece, instruments like the krotola, a set of hollow blocks bound with leather, were played 2,500 years ago. The Greeks also used finger cymbals and frame drums–similar to the kind you might use at school.

Musical instruments could also be associated with different types of people. Shepherds played the syrinx, a whistlelike instrument, known today as the pan flute. It was a simple instrument that was easy to take into the fields. The aulos was a more sophisticated woodwind instrument consisting of two pipes. Because it took more skill to play the aulos, you would need training from a teacher–or perhaps, if you were wealthy, you could just hire experienced musicians to play for you.

Manuscripts and artwork

In Africa, 4,000-year-old rock paintings and engravings found in Egyptian tombs show musicians playing what appear to be harps.

Greek pottery often depicts musical scenes; these images often appeared on vases and urns. The settings, though, are often unclear. Whether the musicians were part of a festival or celebration, or simply playing for their own entertainment, is not always known.

Handmade medieval manuscripts also provide clues. Illustrations with ink, and sometimes gold leaf, often show musicians playing an instrument.

A world without music

Can you imagine living today without music? I can’t. Not only does it entertain and enthrall, it allows us to communicate emotions. Music helps us celebrate joyful events and consoles us when we’re sad or in pain. Certainly, ancient music made its listeners feel powerful emotions, just as music throughout this century and beyond will do the same. Think for a moment what music in the 22nd century might sound like. And who knows? Maybe–in about 78 years–you’ll find out.

Laura Dallman is a Lecturer in Music History at the University of Florida.

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Earlier today, Swedish scientist Svante Pääbo won the 2022 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine today for his discoveries on human evolution. According to the award panel, his work provided key insights into the human immune system and what makes present day humans unique compared with our extinct cousins.

Pääbo sequenced the genome of a Neanderthal, a feat that was once believed to be impossible, according to the panel.

About 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens first appeared in Africa. But, they weren’t alone on the planet. Neanderthals, an extinct relative of modern day humans, developed outside Africa and lived in Europe and Western Asia from around 400,000 years until 30,000 years ago.

Roughly 70,000 years ago, groups of Homo sapiens migrated from Africa to the Middle East, eventually spreading around the rest of the world. This overlapping timeline shows that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted in large parts of Eurasia for tens of thousands of years. Genetic information is one of the only ways for scientists to understand what our relationship with these extinct cousins was like. Following the sequencing of the human genome in the 1990s, scientists were able to conduct more studies of the genetic relationship between humans. Neanderthal genome sequencing is offering another crucial step in understanding the relationship between humans of the past with those in the present.

[Related: From the archives: The discovery of DNA’s structure explained how life ‘knows’ what to do.]

After Pääbo and his team first extracted 40,000 year old DNA from a tiny finger bone found in a cave in Siberia in 2008, he discovered a previously unknown hominin species called Denisova in 2018. This discovery showed that the first generation of humans with parents from two different groups (Neanderthal and Denisovian) could produce successful offspring.

“Importantly, Pääbo also found that gene transfer had occurred from these now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens following the migration out of Africa around 70,000 years ago. This ancient flow of genes to present-day humans has physiological relevance today, for example affecting how our immune system reacts to infections,” the panel wrote in a press release.

This research has helped paleogenomics take off—a discipline of science devoted to genetic differences between living humans from extinct ones. It’s helped determine that human and Neanderthal evolution diverged about 800,000 years ago. “Pääbo and his team also surprisingly found that gene flow had occurred from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens, demonstrating that they had children together during periods of co-existence,” Nobel Committee chair Anna Wedell told the Associated Press. And this has had lasting impacts—people with ancestry outside of the African continent typically have 1 to 2 percent Neanderthal genes in their DNA, which can affect immune system responses and appearance.

The genome sequencing by Pääbo and his team also showed that Neanderthals and the newly discovered Denisovans were sister groups that split from each other about 600,000 years ago. Denisovan genes have been found in up to six percent of the population of modern humans in Asia and Southeast Asia, indicating that interbreeding between species occurred there too.

[Related: Why are there no black Nobel laureates in science?]

“By mixing with them after migrating out of Africa, homo sapiens picked up sequences that improved their chances to survive in their new environments,” said Wedell. One example is a gene that helps the body adapt to life at a high altitude that Tibetans share with Denisovans.

Pääbo conducted the prizewinning studies at the University of Munich and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He is the son of 1982 Nobel prize winner Sune Bergstrom who won the medicine prize for his work in understanding a hormone group called prostaglandins. According to the Nobel Foundation, this is the eighth time that the son or daughter of a Nobel laureate also won a Nobel Prize.

Winners of the annual awards recieve a cash prize of about $900,000 (10 million Swedish kronor) and will be celebrated at a ceremony on December 10.

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The Greek name for cacao translates to “food from the gods.” So who wouldn’t want to try this purest form of chocolate? According to new archaeological research, everyone in the ancient Maya community of El Pilar probably did. 

“To be a Maya, you had to have cacao,” says Anabel Ford, director of the Mesoamerican Research Center at University of California, Santa Barbara.

In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today, Ford and her team examined 54 vessels for residue of cacao biomarkers, seeking to close the gap on research about non-upper class Maya cacao consumption. 

Out of the dozens of vases, bowls, jars, and plates, 56 percent were found to have cacao seed residue. The artifacts were dug up from Central America and date back to 600 to 900 CE. The vast majority were recovered from residential units in and around El Pilar’s monuments rather than royal spaces. Earlier analyses of highly decorative ceremonial vessels led to notions that seed consumption was primarily limited to elite classes, which this new research refutes.

Although Theobroma cacao, the cacao tree, was domesticated as early as 5,400 years ago in South America, it was an incredibly decisive crop for the Maya of modern-day Belize and Guatemala. “It doesn’t surprise me at all to hear of a site where they’re finding cacao in commoner contexts as well as elite contexts,” says Cameron McNeil, a specialist in archaeobotany at the City University of New York. “Cacao was the only stimulant that was available to people in Mesoamerica. I think that’s why it became important across such a wide area.”

By looking at methylxanthines, the class that includes stimulants like caffeine in coffee and theobromine in chocolate, the researchers analyzed traces of compounds in Late Classic Maya pottery. But one chemical in particular, theophylline, proved to be crucial in identifying cacao remnants. While Theobroma cacao does contain caffeine and theobromine, “it is unique in Mesoamerica for theophylline,” the authors of the study write.

[Related: Climate change is coming for Indonesia’s cocoa farms]

Previously, chemical analyses of decorated vessels primarily revealed consumption patterns by Maya elites. Yet, the majority of Maya weren’t elites—they were farmers who had access to crops like Theobroma cacao. “The first question I would ask is, ‘who was growing the damn things?’ Not the elite, I am sure of it,” says Ford.

Royal or not, Ford says ritual consumption of cacao would have been important to the Maya of El Pilar for its sanctity and kick of caffeine. Cacao was also highly valued because of its difficulty to grow—so much so that it is believed to have been used as currency, and even traded for human beings, McNeil explains. But by no means does this indicate that it was reserved for the ultra-wealthy. Although McNeil says royalty would have had more consistent access to cacao because of its monetary status, non-elites would still use the stimulant in their everyday lives and rituals when they could get it. This, in part, mirrors our use of the plant today.

“Rituals can be sumptuous or not. It’s like the difference between Queen Elizabeth’s funeral and my father’s,” says Ford. Just as eating chocolate and drinking coffee are daily rituals for many now, cacao consumption may have gone far beyond extravagant ceremonial purposes.

[Related: How much chocolate would you have to eat for it to kill you?]

The results of this study help dispel inaccurate beliefs about class-based enjoyment of cacao in Mesoamerica that, according to McNeil, were in part perpetuated by Spanish colonizers. “They’re not writing about what the common farmer is doing and eating,” she says. Instead, they focused on practices of royalty, accounts that have since been passed down, repeated, and assumed by many to be the whole truth. 

For Ford, having evidence of working-class cacao consumption isn’t just exciting archaeological news: She also hopes it sends a message that Maya farmers, cooks, and community members are just as important to learn from as royalty. “Everyone likes to focus on the fancy things, but if you want to know about society, you need to learn about social history. There’s a lot more to understanding a landscape of ancient history and ancient Maya than these big dead kings and queens,” she says. “People should know when they’re making an assumption … otherwise it becomes writ.”

Correction (September 28, 2022): The origins of the word Theobroma are Greek, not Latin, as previously stated.

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Ritual enema ceremonies depicted in pottery. The synchronizing heart rates of new lovers. Scorpion constipation. Why the words in your iPhone “Terms of Agreement” are so complicated. Moose crashes.

Research into all of these burning topics and more was honored yesterday at the 2022 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. Now in its 32nd year, the good-natured parody of the Nobel prize recognizes the most unique, silly, and downright bizarre research that “first make people laugh and then make them think.” The Annals of Improbable Research gives out the awards less than one month before the real Nobel prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden.

The ceremony is usually held at Harvard University, but has been online since 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Per tradition, actual Nobel laureates handed out the prizes. The winners received a virtually worthless Zimbabwean $10 trillion bill.

And the winners are…

Art History: ancient Mayan enemas

Peter de Smet and Nicholas Hellmuth wrote “A Multidisciplinary Approach to Ritual Enema Scenes on Ancient Maya Pottery” in a 1986 paper, but withstands the test of time. The paper was adapted from de Smet’s doctoral dissertation and focuses on polychrome pottery of the late classic Mayan period (600–900 CE). Palace scenes, ball games, hunting parties, and dances associated with human sacrifice (via decapitation) are usually painted on this kind of pottery, but 55 years ago, scholars discovered one Maya jar showing the administration of an enema. Other discoveries of fine fecal art followed.

Applied Cardiology: syncing hearts with your crush

Eliska Prochazkova, Elio Sjak-Shie, Friederike Behrens, Daniel Lindh, and Mariska Kret discovered evidence that shows when two new romantic partners meet for the first time and feel attraction, their heart rates synchronize, publishing their findings in November, 2021. Prochazkova said she did not have problem finding matches on dating apps, but often didn’t feel that spark when they met in real life. She set people up on blind dates in real social settings and measured their physiological reactions, and found that the heart rates of the pairs with real chemistry synchronized. So, did the team discover “love at first sight”? “It really depends, on how you define love,” Prochazkova, a researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said in an email to the Associated Press. “What we found in our research was that people were able to decide whether they want to date their partner very quickly. Within the first two seconds of the date, the participants made a very complex idea about the human sitting in front of them.”

Literature: Terms of Agreement are too tricky

Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica, and Edward Gibson, did what has long needed to be done by analyzing what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand. Taking a closer look at any Terms of Agreement on a new software or device is enough to make you want to eschew all new technology forever. Martínez, Mollica, and Gibson were frustrated by all of this legal jargon. Their analysis focused on some key psycholinguistic characteristics: nonstandard capitalization (those written out in boistrous ALL CAPS), the frequency of SAT words (aforesaid, herein, to wit, etc.) that rarely appear in everyday speech, word choice, the use of passive versus active voice, center-embedding, where lawyers embed legal jargon within convoluted syntax. “Ultimately, there’s kind of a hope that lawyers will think a little more with the reader in mind,” Martínez told the AP. “Clarity doesn’t just benefit the layperson, it also benefits lawyers.”

Biology: scorpion constipation

Solimary García-Hernández and Glauco Machado did the grueling work of investigating constipation affects the mating prospects of scorpions. Scorpions are better known for their deadly venom and creepy crawly pincers, not so much for their poop habits. In a process called autonomy, scorpions can detach a body part to escape a predator. However, they also lose the last portion of the digestive tract when they do this. This can lead to a constipation and eventually death and the long term decrease in the, “locomotor performance of autotomized males may impair mate searching,” they wrote.

[Related: Cockatoos are pillaging trashcans in Australia, and humans can’t seem to stop them.]

Medicine: ice cream as cancer therapy

A team of scientists at the University of Warsaw in Poland showed in their 2021 study that when patients undergo some forms of toxic chemotherapy, they suffer fewer harmful side effects when ice cream replaces one traditional component of the procedure. This sweet study looked at cryotherapy, where cancer patients often suck on ice-chips to prevent oral mucositis (which causes sores in the mouth, gums, and tongue, increased mucus and saliva, and difficulty swallowing). But this can become uncomfortable really quickly. This now prize winning study found that only 28.85 percent of patients who used ice cream cryotherapy developed oral mucositis, compared with 59 percent who did not receive the Ben and Jerry’s approved cryotherapy.

Engineering: knob turning technique

Gen Matsuzaki, Kazuo Ohuchi, Masaru Uehara, Yoshiyuki Ueno, and Goro Imura, discovered the most efficient way for people to use their fingers when turning a knob. The 1999 study stressed the importance of a good universal knob design, particularly for, “instruments with rotary control,” particularly in elderly people who might find rotary knobs and faucet handles easier to use than a lever. Subjects in the study were asked to turn a series of different sized knobs clockwise with their right hand. They found that the the forefingers and thumb were used most frequently and extra fingers were used as the knobs became wider.

Physics: keeping your ducks in a row

Frank Fish, Zhi-Ming Yuan, Minglu Chen, Laibing Jia, Chunyan Ji, and Atilla Incecik, dove into the world of understanding how ducklings manage to swim in formation. Getting your ducks in a row appears to be all about energy conservation. They found that the ducklings instinctively tended to “ride the waves,” generated by the mother duck to significantly reduce drag. They then use technique called drafting, like cyclists and runners do in a race to reduce drag. “It all has to do with the flow that occurs behind that leading organism and the way that moving in formation can actually be an energetic benefit,” Fish told the AP.

Related: 8 animals being naturally hilarious.]

Peace: the gossip conundrum

An international group of scientists ranging from Bejing to Ontario developed an algorithm to help gossipers decide when to tell the truth and when to lie. Essentially, their work can help determine when people are more likely to be honest or dishonest in their gossip, drawing on models of behavior signaling theory. “Signals are adaptions shaped by marginal costs and marginal benefits of different behaviors, and the ultimate function of the signaler’s behavior is to maximize their fitness,” wrote the authors. The gossiper may be willing to pay some personal cost (being labelled a gossip or losing trust) to provide a benefit to the receiver. That’s because the gossip could gain a secondary benefit as a result of the receiver gaining juicy new information.

Economics: it pays to be lucky

Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda, used math to explain why success most often goes not to the most talented people but instead to the luckiest. The 2018 paper noted that the qualities most often associated as leading to success follow a normal Gaussian distribution around a mean. For example, the average IQ is 100, but nobody boasts an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000. “The same holds for efforts, as measured by hours worked,” the authors wrote. “Someone works more hours than the average and someone less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.” However, the distribution of wealth follows a power law, where there are significantly more poor people than the few hugely wealthy billionaires. The study suggests simple, random luck is the missing ingredient based on the agent-based model the authors developed.

Safety Engineering: moose tracks

Magnus Gens developed a moose crash test dummy, and shockingly it is actually useful information. Sweden’s highways are the scene of frequent collisions between the large mammals and cars, which can result in injury or death to both the moose and human. This crash test dummy will allow car makers to use animal crashes in their safety testing. Gens tested the dummy at the Saab facility using one modern Saab and one old Volvo traveling at about 45 mph and a second Saab at 57 mph. Fortunately for car makers, the dummy is robust and able to be reused in multiple crash tests before it needs to be replaced.

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At the beginning of the last Ice Age, 31,000 years ago, a community in what’s now Eastern Indonesia buried a young person in the dry floor of a mountainside cave painted with handprints. The people lived on the edge of what was then a low continent called Sunda, and they were likely part of the same group of early seafarers who crossed to Australia. They were sophisticated in other ways, too: According to a description of the burial published today in the journal Nature, the young adult is the oldest human known to have survived a surgical amputation.

Caring for the sick and wounded is an essential part of human evolution. To tend to a critically injured person requires communities to develop medicinal knowledge and have spare resources to devote to their recovery. Human and Neanderthal skeletons both show evidence of healed traumatic injuries going back tens of thousands of years, and some anthropologists argue that the ability to provide medical care allowed hominids to spread across the planet.

A successful surgery takes even more sophistication. “Surviving an amputation is a recent medical norm for most western societies,” said Tim Maloney, an archaeologist at Griffith University and the paper’s lead author, at a press briefing, made possible by the development of effective antiseptics in the late 1800s.

As Maloney and his team excavated the burial site, hoping to learn more about the people who had painted the cave at least 40,000 years ago, they noticed something odd: The skeleton was missing its left foot, while the delicate bones of the right foot were well-preserved. When they looked closer at the tip of the left leg, they saw that the tibia and fibula had been cut off, and the ends of the bone healed over.

When the researchers examined the tips of the bones, they didn’t find signs of an animal attack or rockfall, which would have left fracture or crush marks around the edges. The wound’s clean nature suggested that it had been made intentionally. Based on the age of the skeleton—about 19 at death—and the healed-over bone, the researchers believe that the surgery happened when the individual was a preteen, six to nine years before their death. Not only did they survive, but they managed to keep living in their rugged mountain home.

[Related: Skull research sheds light on human-Neanderthal interbreeding]

Even if this loss of a limb was accidental, “it is still significant that they managed to keep the person alive,” says Rebecca Gowland, an expert in human skeletal remains at Durham University who was not involved in the research. But she says she doesn’t have any reason to doubt the interpretation of the amputation. “I’ve seen a number of amputated limbs, and it looks like it could well be a healed amputation.” she says. 

A surgical procedure such as this, and the child’s survival, suggests experience, medical knowledge, and confidence. “You cannot survive the removal of your lower leg, particularly as a child, without managing shock, blood loss, and infection,” Maloney says.

Gowland agrees. It also indicates “that there are people within that community who say, ‘This is what we need to do in order to take the really drastic action of cutting someone’s leg off,’” she says.

Why exactly the child required amputation is a mystery. Because it happened so long before the individual’s death, no evidence from the actual procedure survives. It’s possible that they had an infection that had become dangerous, or suffered a catastrophic crushing injury to their foot and ankle.

But by comparing the wound to successful amputations in more recent history, the archaeologists can make some guesses about the details of the operation. The surgeons had to control bleeding, either with pressure bandages, tourniquets, or cauterization. The researchers believe that the cut was made with stone tools, which, though fragile, can be incredibly sharp—obsidian scalpels are used in some specialized medical procedures even today.

Maybe most surprisingly, the bone showed no signs of infection in an environment where it’s hard to avoid—even the excavation team regularly dealt with infected cuts. The answer might have to do with knowledge of medicinal plants. “It’s an open question whether this was a unique development associated with communities living in [the biodiverse] tropics,” says Maloney, “or whether it’s a combination of trial and error within a community that cared for their children, like most of us all do around the world.”

[Related: Modern medicine still needs leeches]

Gowland says that it’s important not to think of the surgery through a modern medical lens. People might have understood how to control bleeding and care for the wound without detailed information about blood vessels, veins, and limb anatomy. “People have had very different beliefs about healing and the body in the past,” she says. But “they absolutely had to have had an understanding that they had to stop blood loss, and they had to stop infection, and that’s pretty impressive.”

The skeleton was discovered in the central chamber of a limestone cave on the eastern edge of the island of Borneo, overlooking the headwaters of the nearby Amarang River, in a valley full of ancient rock art. “It is very cathedral-like,” Maloney says. The grave itself was marked by carved stones, and accompanied by stone tools and a bead of red pigment.

The individual’s unusual burial marked by the paint bead is, to Gowland, just as interesting as the actual amputation. “It might be that they had some kind of special status before the amputation,” which made them eligible for the surgery, she says. “Or maybe the amputation made them special.” 

Maxime Aubert, who specializes in dating rock art at Griffith University, and a coauthor on the study, notes that there’s still very little information about the culture the individual belonged to—the dig was part of ongoing work to understand who made the rock art. What the researchers do know is that the culture valued artwork. By the time the person was buried in the cave, some of the paint on its walls had been there for at least 10,000 years.

The amputation adds color to the technological and cultural sophistication of the artistic people, whoever they were. The second-oldest known surgical amputation is from 7,000 years ago, in Neolithic France, after the advent of settled farming. A favored model among archaeologists assumes that sophisticated technology must have accompanied sedentary life and agriculture. “This very much challenges, if not completely overturns the idea,” Maloney says, “that advanced medicine was beyond the capacity of these early foraging and hunting societies.”

Correction (September 15, 2022): A previous version of this article misstated Rebecca Gowland’s last name. Popular Science regrets the error.

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The 1947 children’s novel Misty of Chincoteague opens with a dramatic account of a small herd of horses escaping from the wreck of a colonial-era Spanish galleon. According to local folk stories, these same hardy animals thrived on the islands of Chincoteague and Assateague, which lie off the coasts of Maryland and Virginia. 

Scholars have long debated the likelihood of this origin story about the population of feral ponies that have made the islands famous. A new genetic analysis of a 16th-century horse tooth from the Caribbean doesn’t settle this question, but does offer some indirect support for the shipwreck tale’s plausibility.

Researchers found that the tooth fragment, which was discovered in present-day Haiti, belonged to a horse of southern European origin. Additionally, the specimen is most closely related to the Chincoteague pony breed, the team reported today in the journal PLoS ONE. 

“This helps us to have a better idea of what the origins of these early colonial horses are,” says Nicolas Delsol, a zooarchaeologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville and coauthor of the findings. “There is some documentary evidence from the historical literature stating that horses were boarded in southern Spain, where most of the first expeditions came from, but it’s always interesting to see how accurate these early colonial chronicles are.”

Michelle Delco, an equine orthopedic surgeon and assistant research professor at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine who wasn’t involved with the research, said the findings “fill in a major gap.” 

“There is a lot of historical evidence that the modern domestic horse was introduced to the Americas from the Iberian peninsula around 1500, but we have surprisingly limited archeological and scientific evidence about this,” she said in an email.

[Related: Ancient sea creatures pioneered the gallop]

The horse family (whose members are known as equids) evolved in North America roughly 50 million years ago and spread to Eurasia around 2.5 million years ago. Equids disappeared, along with many other large animals, from the Western Hemisphere around 10,000 years ago. In the late 15th century, however, domesticated horses were brought to the Americas during the European invasion.

“Because they were so central to the European lifestyle, they brought [the horses] with them,” Delsol says. “They first were introduced in the Caribbean islands, where the first European settlements were, and then diffused throughout the continent along with the developments of European colonization.”

The tooth he and his collaborators analyzed was excavated in 1980 from a 16th-century town known as Puerto Real on Hispaniola, the island shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The specimen dates to a period when occupation was sparse after Spanish authorities ordered the island’s northern ports abandoned in the 1570s in response to persistent pirate raids and smuggling. 

The tooth fragment was initially misidentified as belonging to a cow. But when Delsol examined DNA from the specimen, he realized that the tooth actually came from the molar of an adult horse. “Since it was the earliest horse genome that we had, we decided it was worth working a bit more on it and seeing what it could tell us,” Delsol says.

He and his team investigated a kind of genetic material known as mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down only through the maternal line. Mitochondrial DNA isn’t confined to the nucleus of a cell, which means it’s more abundant and easier to collect from ancient samples than nuclear DNA, Delsol says.

“Domesticated horses originated from a relatively small number of male ancestors and a great diversity of female ancestors,” said Delco, who studies the role of mitochondria in health and disease. “So, by fully reconstructing the mitochondrial genome of this early Caribbean horse, the authors could very specifically ‘place’ this individual in space and time—meaning both in the context of its origins from the Eastern Hemisphere, as well as its closest relatives among modern horses in the Americas.” 

The researchers determined that their specimen represents the oldest complete mitochondrial genome of a domestic horse in the Western Hemisphere. When they compared the Puerto Real horse’s genetic material with that of other breeds from around the world, the team concluded that it belonged to a group whose members are found in Central Asia, Southern Europe, and the Middle East—but not northern Europe. This suggests that the Puerto Real horse hailed from the Iberian Peninsula, which is occupied by Spain and Portugal. 

Additionally, the Puerto Real horse’s closest relatives turned out to be the feral ponies of Chincoteague and Assateague. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the ponies’ ancestors fled from a Spanish shipwreck, Delsol emphasizes, but it “gives more historical accuracy to this story.” 

Delco, who grew up reading the tale of Misty of Chincoteague, was excited to see a study put actual data and genetic findings behind these fables. “At the age of about 10, I persuaded my parents to take me to the Assateague Island National Seashore and will never forget the rainy, sandy week we spent with the wild ponies,” she said. “This scientific manuscript suggests the legendary origin story of the Chincoteague pony is true. It’s not often that reading a science paper gives me goosebumps.”

Beyond folk stories, Delsol adds, the ties between this Caribbean horse and the Chincoteague ponies may reflect an early Spanish presence along the Atlantic coast of North America. 

[Related: Ancient wolf DNA is being used to sniff out where our love story with dogs began]

“What we consider the different colonial spheres of influence—the French, the British, the Spanish—at that time weren’t completely watertight,” Delsol says. “Everybody was pretty much everywhere.”

However, the team acknowledges that the findings focus on a single horse and only include its mitochondrial DNA, which means that the tooth  “only gives us the story of the maternal lineage,” Delsol says. “To be more thorough, we would include an analysis of the paternal lineage.” Although DNA degrades more quickly in tropical climates, he’s successfully extracted snippets of nuclear DNA from similarly-aged cattle specimens and suspects it will be possible to do the same with the Puerto Real horse. Delsol and his team also plan to expand their analysis to the remains of other horses from Puerto Real.

The findings demonstrate how fragments of genetic material from organisms that died a long time ago, known as ancient DNA, can shed light on historical events.

“Ancient DNA is quite often associated with very remote periods of time and really ancient specimens, but it can also be pretty useful to clarify more recent history,” Delsol says. “Part of this history is the colonization of the Americas and how animals were a central part of the establishment of Europeans on the continent.”

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More than six centuries ago, the Black Death ravaged Europe, Asia, and North Africa. The plague killed up to 60 percent of the people in western Eurasia within eight years. How the bacterial strain responsible for this pandemic infiltrated human populations has been debated ever since.

In a study published on June 15 in Nature, an international group of researchers pinpoints the Black Death’s ground zero to early 14th-century Central Asia. They analyzed historical records, archaeological data, and DNA from the teeth of skeletons buried in two cemeteries in Kyrgyzstan. Within those 700-year-old remains, the scientists identified the plague-causing bacterium, Yersinia pestis. 

The team concluded that the pandemic germ’s ancestor evolved in this area, based on its relationship to present-day strains of Y. pestis. The findings solve a centuries-old mystery and can also help understand emerging infectious diseases, Philip Slavin, a historian at the University of Stirling in Scotland and co-author of the findings, told Popular Science in an email. 

“It’s always important to not treat different strains as isolated phenomena,” he said, “but as something that is situated within a much wider evolutionary picture.”

Experts who weren’t involved with the study say the results are intriguing but require more confirmation.

“[The] findings are interesting but preliminary, and further research is desirable and required to enlarge and deepen the findings,” Ole J. Benedictow, an emeritus professor of archaeology, conservation, and history at the University of Oslo in Norway and author of The Complete History of the Black Death, said in an email. “Paleobiological historical plague studies are still in an early phase of development, we can expect a wealth of new interesting findings and many surprises in the future.” 

Finding plague in teeth

Infected fleas, whose rodent hosts have perished, typically transmit plague to people. Y. pestis has afflicted humans for more than a millenium, causing three separate pandemics that began in the 6th, 14th, and 19th centuries. The Black Death took place between 1346 and 1353; after this initial devastating wave, the bubonic plague settled into a pandemic that lasted for several centuries.

Scholars—including scientists from the 14th century and modern historians—have speculated about many potential locations for the Black Death’s initial source. Those sites have included China, Central Asia, the steppes between the Black and Caspian Seas, Mongolia, Russia, and India, Slavin said. 

To trace its origin, Slavin and his collaborators examined the remains from two cemeteries near Lake Issyk-Kul in present-day Kyrgyzstan. The cemeteries had been excavated during the late 19th century but are much older: Tombstone inscriptions dated from 1338 to 1339 state that a number of the bodies had been victims of “pestilence.” To verify the identity of that pestilence, the team extracted genetic material from the teeth (which preserve the pathogens present in a person’s bloodstream) of seven individuals. They detected Y. pestis in three people from the Kara-Djigach cemetery. 

While the DNA had broken down over time, two of the teeth contained enough material for the team to reconstruct the bacterial strain’s position within the plague family tree. The researchers concluded that the strain of Y. pestis in the teeth was the most recent common ancestor of several branches of plague still found today, one of which included the strain responsible for the Black Death. Additionally, the team reported, the ancient Kara-Djigach strain is closely related to the Y. pestis that continues to circulate in marmots of the surrounding Tian Shan mountains. 

“We consider [it] most probable that the ancient strain evolved locally, within the extended Tian Shan Mountain region, and was not introduced into the Kara-Djigach community from a far-away source,” Slavin said. “At some point the bacteria crossed over from marmots to humans.”

The presence of gems, silks, coins, and other artifacts near the cemeteries indicate that the communities struck by the epidemic contained many goods that had been produced far away. Trade may have played an important role spreading the pathogen westward to the Black Sea, Slavin said in a call with reporters. 

An unsettled genesis

The new report confirms that the pestilence victims near Lake Issyk-Kul did indeed die of plague, said Nükhet Varlık, a medical historian at Rutgers University–Newark who wasn’t involved in the research. However, this doesn’t necessarily establish the source of the Black Death. “Here we are presented with one plausible origins scenario, but it does not exclude other possible ones,” Varlık said in an email. 

Many questions remain concerning the paper’s “larger implications” for the history of the Black Death and the pandemic it kicked off, she said. Among these are what conditions could have prompted the disease to spill from local rodents into people near Lake Issyk-Kul, or whether the infection might have instead been introduced from elsewhere. 

“Moreover, we still do not know how this local outbreak was historically connected to the earliest recorded incidence of the Black Death in the Black Sea region in 1346,” Varlık said. “Evolutionary studies of Yersinia pestis and our modern experience with the COVID-19 pandemic teach us that it may be nearly impossible to establish [the] ‘true origin’ of pandemics.”

[Related: You could get the plague (but probably won’t)]

The new findings suggest that the ancestor of the Black Death strain showed up considerably later than previous work has indicated, said Vladimir Motin, a microbiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston who studies Y. pestis. Earlier studies suggested it caused local outbreaks in Asia for at least a century, he said.

“Right now it’s a good hypothesis; is it true or not, I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s definitely an interesting question which we should take into consideration.”

Monica H. Green, an independent scholar who specializes in medical and medieval history, agrees with Varlık that the paper establishes 14th-century remains in Kyrgyzstan were infected with Y. pestis. But Green, who has studied the presence of plague in western Asia in the 1250s, isn’t convinced the findings determine the time period when this ancestral strain appeared. The plague bacterium mutates slowly when it’s circulating in marmots, she points out, which means that the strain might have made its debut well before the outbreaks.

“Have they documented emergence of a new stage in plague’s history…in the 14th century?” Green said in an email. “Or have they documented the persistence of a new lineage that had already been dispersing for several decades by the time these two communities to the west of Issyk-Kul were struck?” 

She suspects that the strain Slavin and his team retrieved is a “cousin” of the bacteria that spread westward to cause the Black Death. To unravel the pandemic’s genesis, researchers will need to collect more ancient DNA samples from the region and beyond. 

The history of plague offers important clues toward understanding how pandemics begin and spread, Green said. “We have never needed rigorous debate about pandemic histories more than now.” 

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This article was originally featured on MIT Press.

November 26, 1922, marks what is arguably the most famous discovery in the history of archaeology. On that day, the British Egyptologist Howard Carter made a small hole through which he could insert a candle in the sealed doorway of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber and thus lit the interior. As his eyes slowly adapted to the darkness, he was able to make out a chamber that had not been disturbed for over 3,000 years.

Tutankhamun was just an obscure pharaoh during his lifetime, and there is evidence that he was hastily buried; the second of the three nested coffins seems to have originally belonged to someone else. And yet the inner coffin, in which his mummy was discovered, is made of solid gold, weighing almost 250 pounds. One can barely imagine how impressive the burials of such powerful leaders as Khufu, Thutmose III, or Rameses II must have been; alas, they were all looted in antiquity.

But contrary to popular belief and cinematic glorification, most archaeologists would say that the search for spectacular treasures isn’t their main research objective; they want to understand the daily life of past civilizations. Still, both extremes—the fabulous wealth of kings and the hardscrabble existence of common people—contribute to an understanding of what can be argued is one of the main goals of archaeology: to document and study the evolution of inequality in ancient societies. This also involves the question of how to recognize and quantify it.

One of the most obvious approaches would be through the assessment of differential goods deposited in graves. But richly furnished graves may not simply be evidence of social differentiation; rather, they may be an attempt to demonstrate the importance and distinction of a family in relationship to other kindreds—a social importance that may not exist in reality. Moreover, social stratification can be based on wealth but can also be based on personal prestige and power. Therefore, it isn’t always possible to assess social differences by comparing graves with goods to those without them.

Some archaeologists have attempted to apply economic principles to examine social differences at specific sites and, crucially, compare the data from different places. A study led by Samuel Bowles from the Santa Fe Institute and published in Nature in 2017 tried to address this question by applying the Gini coefficient—a single number most commonly used to measure income inequality—across a large number of sites from the archaeological record, both in the Old World and the Americas. The list of sites included paradigmatic cities such as Çatalhöyük in Turkey, Pompeii in Italy, and Teotihuacan in Mexico; the authors measured the dimensions of houses as estimated indicators of wealth.

Among modern hunter-gatherers, the team found, the Gini coefficient is low—around 17 (on a scale of 0 to 100). This is not surprising as few objects can be carried in nomadic societies, and consequently, personal qualities such as the ability to hunt count for more. This does not mean that some people didn’t have a higher social status; material culture was probably so poor—or so different from our perceptions of status—that it is difficult to grasp social differences among past hunter-gatherers.

In the ancient farming societies under study the Gini coefficients are estimated to have been between 35 and 46; interestingly, the real measurements were lower than those obtained from records. For instance, among the ruins of Babylonia, researchers estimated a coefficient of 40, yet an estimate based on information from the Babylonian chronicles resulted in a higher coefficient of 46. The ancient accounts likely overemphasized the size of the largest houses in admiration. This is not unlike what happens when we return from a trip: We sometimes tend to exaggerate the things that we’ve seen.

Nevertheless, the most remarkable differences come from the comparison of the societies of the Old World and those of the Americas, with the latter being much more equal in the Gini coefficient, despite being highly hierarchical in some cases such as the mighty Aztec Empire. Researchers conclude that the root of these differences could be ecological since there were more and larger animals to be domesticated in Eurasia—such as cows, horses, pigs, sheep, and goats—than in the Americas, with only dogs and turkeys, and this trait alone created a differential system of accumulated wealth.

At the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, for instance, houses had highly standardized dimensions and were all quite similar. Aztec society, even with its horrific human sacrifices, was at the time of the Spanish conquest more egalitarian than Mexico 200 years later, when the European elite had created the encomienda system, under which the Indigenous population worked in semislavery. Within a few generations, the concentration of wealth had almost doubled in the colonial New World, with a consequent increase in inequality.

When did these differences between the Old and New Worlds emerge? Early farming societies had the possibility of generating and storing food surpluses, creating potential scenarios for differences in population size along with a certain degree of inter- and intrasettlement inequality. A recent application of the Gini coefficient to 90 sites from the Near East and Europe showed a remarkable increase of inequality thousands of years after the advent of agriculture—a finding that would indicate it was not farming per se that created unequal societies. According to the authors, at some point some farmers were able to maintain specialized plow oxen that could cultivate 10 times more land than other farmers, thereby transforming the economy toward a higher value of land in detriment of human labor.

This emerging inequality at the end of the Neolithic could explain a remarkable example of wealth dating from that period: the Varna burial. This burial was found in a Copper Age cemetery in modern Bulgaria and is dated to 4560–4450 BCE; it contained more gold than the rest of the world possessed at that time. It contained an adult male — likely a chieftain or king of some sort—who was buried holding a gold war mace; curiously he also had a gold penis sheath of unknown meaning. Still, such findings are exceptional, and there is a general consensus that Neolithic societies were more egalitarian than later ones.

Inequality clearly increased with the arrival of metals, which partly allowed, from 3000 to 2000 BCE onward, the appearance and development of a social organization based on the emergence of elites. Once the initial power structure was established, it attempted to perpetuate itself dynastically by increasing social control and building up familial alliances with other chiefs. Control mechanisms often involved violence. The possibility of using horses—and to lesser extent, camels—as instruments of war determined the success of conquests that would alter the pattern of settlements across Eurasia at the end of the Neolithic. This would at least partially explain how 30 empires or large states that emerged between 3000 and 600 BCE were all found in the Old World, where these animals roamed.

Consequently, tombs with signs of wealth became more abundant in the archaeological record, such as the famous Amesbury Archer, found three miles southeast of Stonehenge in 2002 (near today’s Salisbury) and dated to 2300 BCE. This grave includes more artifacts than any other Bronze Age British burial; besides numerous arrowheads, three copper knives, four boar’s tusks, two stone wrist guards that protected users from their bowstrings, and five pots that conformed to the Bell Beaker tradition, there were two gold hair ornaments—the earliest pieces made of this metal ever found in the British Isles. The arrival of the Bell Beaker complex to the British Isles is associated with an almost complete replacement of the prior local population and subsequent emergence of social elites. The Amesbury Archer must be considered in the context of the spread of metalwork and supraregional exchange networks in a process that archaeologists sometimes call “Bronzization.”

The rise in inequality during this period, both in the Middle East and parts of western Europe, seems to be partly influenced by an increase in population density. This correlation is likely related to a growing complexity in modes of subsistence, trading networks, and political organization associated with population growth.

Although the highest Gini coefficients for past societies determined by the Santa Fe Institute were similar to those found in some present-day European countries (for instance, with values of around 60 in Pompeii and Kahun, an Egyptian settlement from the 12th dynasty), they remained below the values for the most unequal modern societies such as China and the United States (with Gini coefficients of 73 and 85, respectively), which obviously have larger populations.

From a historical perspective this would suggest that an increase in population size brings higher inequality—an issue explored by the economist Thomas Piketty in recent times, but that likely has parallels in Bronze Age populations.

Still, the Gini coefficient cannot always be applied since some settlements have grown with time over the destruction of previous ones, piled one atop another like the layers of a cake. Many ancient sites could not possibly be studied in detail; for instance, at Hisarlik—the old Troy—at least 10 cities arose atop their predecessors in just 2,000 years, making them quite difficult to disentangle. In addition to this limitation, whether the Gini coefficient can be transferred between different cultural, geographic, and ecological environments to make direct comparisons has also been a subject of debate since such factors can influence their inhabitants differently. For example, a settlement established in a jagged terrain would favor smaller, more vertical houses than one extending over a vast plain.

The economic interpretation of past settlements has received some criticism from among the archaeological community; some argue that the quality and solidity of the building materials can be as important as the size of the houses. In our modern cities, we’re all aware that location—for instance, close to the city center—is usually more important than size. Finally, the ostentatious wealth—opulent furniture, wall paintings, mosaics, and so on—that can still be found in some excavated houses such as at Pompeii should be taken into consideration too, though such features aren’t usually well preserved.

One way around these limitations might be to compare the Gini coefficients with the so-called health inequality of each population, since buried human remains are sometimes better preserved than buildings. There are several skeletal indicators (dental cavities, arthrosis, traumas, vitamin deficiencies, etc.) that can reflect the health status of the population in each period. The frequencies of these pathological markers are in general higher during periods of higher inequality.

For example, the 2006–2013 excavation of nonelite cemeteries such as North Tombs Cemeteries at Amarna demonstrated deaths at an early age—mainly of children, teenagers, and young adults—widespread dietary deficiencies, and indications of hard labor, suggesting the poor state of health and substandard working conditions for most of this urban community. For instance, 16 percent of all children under 15 displayed spine injuries of the sort associated with carrying heavy loads; none of them had any grave goods, and sometimes were buried together with several others, with scant regard for the disposition of the bodies — a grim image that contrasts with the glamorous depictions of the pharaoh’s family in the Amarna style.

An additional indicator would be evidence of a high infant mortality rate, although the preservation of children’s skeletal remains is invariably more difficult than that of adult bones due to differential conservation processes, and this could represent an insurmountable bias in the results. Changes in health status can be used to ascertain cultural and ancestral transitions too. In this sense, probably the most striking change observed is between hunter-gatherers and the first farmers in Europe. The latter not only show signs of poorer health—such as cavities, almost unknown by the former—but also higher infant mortality rates and even lower stature than previous hunter-gatherers.

Correlated with this information, recent developments in the stable isotope analysis of carbon and nitrogen ratios in bone collagen can provide information on nutritional status and mobility patterns associated with specific individuals. For instance, the analysis of a high-status burial in Helmsdorf, Germany, related to the Únêtice culture, showed that this person had a higher protein intake than other contemporaneous peers, suggesting as well that diet can be as much an indicator of social status as it is in today’s societies.

Key to understanding the social panorama of the past is that ancient cemeteries can provide not only potential indicators of inequality in the form of grave goods and even differential health status but also genetic material preserved within human remains. The information retrieved from their DNA can be used, for the first time, to correlate ancestry with social power in each period. Furthermore, a crucial aspect of the accumulation of power is the possibility of bequeathing wealth to biological relatives—something that can be tested as well via the interface between genetics and archaeology, which enables us to reveal family links.

Like funerary goods, a privileged resting place could serve as a status marker too. Around 6,500 years ago, the phenomenon of building large funerary stone structures—known as megalithic tombs—emerged, mainly across Europe’s Atlantic seaboard, and culminated in the great passage tomb complexes such as Newgrange in Boyne Valley (Ireland), which has a mound almost 300 feet in diameter and 50 feet high. The origins and meaning of these monuments, which required a heavy investment in labor, have been debated for more than a century, as has the social organization of the farming communities that built them. The genetic analysis of two-dozen individuals found in various megalithic tombs from Scandinavia to Orkney Island and Ireland yielded some interesting social clues.

In some places, notably the British Isles, more males than females were buried in these preeminent spots, pointing to a sex bias. In accordance with this observation, the descent of most individuals with kinship links could be traced through the paternal line. In one case it was possible to find two related males buried in two different megaliths just over a mile apart (Primrose Grange and Carrowmore in Ireland), indicating a geographic expansion of these dominant families. Genetic analyses of skeletal remains discovered within the most intricately constructed chamber of the Newgrange passage tomb revealed that they belonged to the incestuous son of a brother and sister (or a parent and child), and therefore a quarter of his genome had no genetic variation.

This kind of first-degree offspring is extraordinary, only having been cited in royal families of the past headed by god-kings such as the Egyptian pharaohs seeking to maintain a pure dynastic bloodline. (It is known, for instance, that Akhenaten married his eldest daughter, Meritaten, and much later, Ptolemy II married his sister, Arsinoe II—hence his nickname, “Philadelphus” or “sibling loving.”) It has been suggested that this Neolithic elite may have claimed to possess divine powers to ensure the continuity of agricultural cycles by keeping the sun’s movements going.

The findings support the notion that these Neolithic communities were socially stratified and that the massive stone structures were used to bury transgenerational patrilineal members of these clans. Perhaps equally interesting is the fact that in one case relatives were separated by up to 12 generations, pointing to an unusual stability through time of both the funerary tradition and the stratified society where they lived.

One of the most illustrative examples of how the analysis of Bronze Age individuals that lived through continental-scale cultural changes can shed light on the process is a study led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Jena and published in 2019. Paleogenetic researchers analyzed more than 100 skeletons from 45 farmstead-related graveyards in the Lech River valley in southern Germany to explore the social mechanisms underlying the local spread of steppe ancestry across Europe. Additionally, isotope data were generated for these individuals to gather information on their lifetime mobility patterns, which could be correlated with differential composition in genetic ancestry.

Isotopic analyses revealed that females tended to be nonlocal (only 50 percent of them had values consistent with the local isotopic range) as compared to males and children from the same cemeteries (where 82 to 84 percent were deemed local). Isotopic data on early and late forming teeth in the same individuals—the first and third permanent molars that emerge at six and 18 years, respectively—suggested that females moved from their birthplaces during adolescence or later. One of them was found to come from a place at least 200 miles away. Most of the males carried the R1b Y chromosome lineage, while the mitochondrial DNA lineage composition was much more diverse. The results indicate that these Bronze Age settlements followed patrilocal residential rules—that is, males stayed in the groups where they were born, while females moved away from them. The fact that most males’ descendants shared their ancestry with a single female also suggests that the social structure, besides being based on patrilineal links, was likely monogamous.

The researchers were able to reconstruct six pedigrees in different graveyards, three of which spanned at least four generations. They detected 10 parent-offspring relationships, six of them between mother and child. Interestingly, the latter were always male; there were no adult daughters present. Again, this suggests that females were interchanged between households as a way to establish alliances; it is likely that their status was secured once they had children in the new household. It was also possible to correlate grave goods (daggers, axes, chisels, and arrowheads for males, and body ornaments such as neck or leg rings for females) with kinship.

This indicates that wealth and social status were inherited and ran with families. The fact that even children who died in infancy were buried with grave goods suggests as well that their status was inherited rather than acquired during their lifetime. A further observation was that members of each clan were buried near each other in the cemeteries, thus clearly delimiting preeminent areas within them. It is likely that the inheritance system of these households was based on male primogeniture—a custom by which the oldest son inherits all the family’s properties at the father’s death. With time, forged alliances granted families access to larger, regional clans—and eventually kingdoms.

An examination of the dynamics between kinship and social inequality can be applied to even more recent periods. The complex interactions underlying extended families and population levels can be better understood in geographically isolated places such as islands. Iceland remains the most studied island from a genetic point of view, mainly due to the efforts of a private company called deCODE Genetics that was founded in 1996 by neurologist Kári Stefánsson.

Iceland, a remote island in the north Atlantic, was first colonized around 874 CE, according to the Landnámabök, or “settlement book,” when the Norse chieftain Inólfr Arnarson arrived in the region of present-day Reykjavik. Over the next 150 years, groups of Viking migrants from Norway along with Celtic women and servants or slaves arrived on the island, establishing themselves on rather isolated farms. By 930 CE, all arable land was already occupied and all the forests were gone. The migratory influx slowed down afterward and almost ceased after the year 1000 CE. This resulted in a population that was small and isolated—yet at the same time big enough to have all the common European diseases and genetic diversity—and it suffered several demographic bottlenecks associated with volcanic eruptions, famines, and epidemics of the plague.

Until 1850, the Icelandic population never exceeded 50,000. The combination of two factors—an isolated population and a well-known genealogical database—makes Iceland an ideal laboratory for detecting genetic variants associated with common diseases that affect not only modern Icelanders but also the rest of Europe, where such information does not exist or the population is too big to make such an approach practical. Over the years, researchers from deCODE Genetics have generated a whole body of data on the genomics of modern Icelanders and also on how the original population was established. By working with uniparental markers from living Icelanders it could be observed that 62 percent of the mitochondrial DNA was Celtic in origin (meaning that the majority of these maternal markers derived from either the British Isles or Ireland), while 75 percent of the Y chromosomes were of Scandinavian origin. This suggested a settlement primarily established by Viking males and Celtic females.

In 2017, and thanks to paleogenomic techniques, it was possible to retrieve 27 ancient Icelandic genomes, most of them from the heathen period (prior to the year 1000 CE, when Icelanders decided to become Christians by the curious procedure of voting). At the nuclear genome level, these pioneers had a Norwegian-type ancestry (55.4 percent) that was greater than the Celtic one, and more prevalent among men (a recent genetic study of more than 400 Viking individuals has confirmed the spread of Norwegian ancestry mainly across the North Atlantic islands).

Modern Icelanders are not, however, a simple mixture of the two components; their ancestry demonstrates a differentiation from the two source populations at least partially due to genetic drift—promoted by geographic isolation—during the last thousand years. Interestingly, the Norwegian-type ancestry component in Iceland is nowadays 70.4 percent, suggesting an increase that was likely socially mediated. An example of this stems from seven individuals excavated in 1964 from a boat grave (a type of burial in which a ship is used as a container of the dead) at Vatnsdalur in the remote western fjords. The grave goods included a knife, 30 beads, a silver Thor’s hammer, a Cufic coin (dated circa 870–930 CE), and various items of jewelry. Three of the four skeletons sequenced showed mostly Scandinavian ancestry. One of these individuals is among the few sequenced early settlers to be genetically similar to modern Icelanders, indicating that he contributed disproportionately to their ancestry.

It seems that the Celtic servants brought to Iceland clearly had fewer opportunities to reproduce. Using isotopic analysis, it was also possible to detect that at least three people—two Scandinavians and one Celt —were first-generation migrants, having spent their childhood outside Iceland. One individual had mixed ancestry, indicating that his parents were from different places. The fact that the Celtic ancestry is still detectable decades after the first settlement also suggests that some kind of social discrimination between the two ancestral groups persisted for a while. After a few centuries, however, the admixing of the two communities was complete, to the point that Iceland has essentially become an extended family with a remarkably uniform population.

We have seen several case studies of past inequality correlating funerary archaeology with genetics that might no longer apply today, where legal regulations (and also the exponential increase of cremations) represent a certain degree of standardization in funeral practices. Nevertheless, an opposite trend could shape the future of the archaeology of death: the trend toward personalized coffins, unconventional funerary memorials, and special grave goods. One way or another, mortuary archaeology will always be an important subfield of this discipline, and one that will need to rely on the hard sciences such as genetics and forensics.

Perhaps one encouraging conclusion is that despite what we have seen on the archaeology of past inequality, societies have been able to evolve and change their social stratifications. One example is Iceland itself; the country has become one of the most egalitarian societies in the world. In 2018, Iceland passed a law that all companies employing more than 25 people will have four years to ensure gender-equal payment because, according to the head of the Equality Unit at Iceland’s Welfare Ministry, “equality won’t come about by itself, from the bottom up alone.”

Carles Lalueza-Fox is Research Professor and Director of the Paleogenomics Lab at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-Universitat Pompeu Fabra) in Barcelona. He participated in the Neanderthal Genome Project and led the first retrieval of the genome of an 8,000-year-old European hunter-gatherer. He is the author of “Inequality: A Genetic History,” from which this article is adapted.

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Humans are the most widely distributed animal on Earth. We live in the alpine plains of the Andes, and the mangrove swamps of the Mekong Delta. We’ve built civilizations on tropical islands scattered around the equator, and on tundra north of the Arctic circle.

A model of human species and climate change published Wednesday in the journal Nature proposes a way of understanding why that might be: The most widespread hominins—including us—were those that had adapted to changing climate.

The team began building the model by looking at how the climate has fluctuated over the last 2 million years in response to small wobbles in Earth’s orbit. Then, they overlaid the locations of fossil and artifacts belonging to different species on top of that climate model to estimate the habitat conditions that each species could clearly survive in. Those habitats allowed the team to predict global ranges for our ancestors. And those favorable conditions tracked the actual location of human artifacts.

“I was most excited about the fact that we could demonstrate that the real time evolution of climate…influenced where actual ancient humans lived,” says Axel Timmermann, a climate modeler at Pusan National University in Busan, South Korea, and the paper’s lead author. “If the climate evolution had been different, anthropologists nowadays would find the ancient human fossil specimens in different regions or corresponding to different ages. In other words, the anthropological and archaeological records implicitly include information on the climate conditions.”

The model helps illuminate the specific environmental conditions that our ancestors thrived in, and provides clues as to where we might look for yet-to-be discovered traces of them.

Homo erectus, which first emerged about 2 million years ago, was comfortable in diverse ecosystems, with a habitable zone stretching from Western Europe across the Central Asian steppe. That versatility fits the fact that they were the first of our ancestors to unequivocally migrate from Africa—the species was first identified from fossils found in Indonesia. And it’s a stark contrast to the older Homo ergaster and Homo habilis, the oldest species modeled. Their fossils have been found mainly along the Great Rift Valley in Kenya and Ethiopia, and in the highlands of South Africa, but the model suggests that the species could be found in a long band of livable habitat stretching across Central Africa, at what’s now the southern edge of the Sahara Desert.

Homo heidelbergensis, believed to be the most recent common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals, seems to have been somewhere in the middle, following a wet zone through the Rift Valley and into the Levant region in Western Asia before finding a suitable habitat in Europe.

The range of H. heidelbergensis also suggests a specific origin for the evolution of Homo sapiens. According to the climate model, both species were well-suited to the climate of Southern Africa between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago—during the exact period that modern humans enter the fossil record. But a period of drought could have put pressure on our ancestors, leading to population declines, genetic drift, and eventually, the evolution of modern humans.

“We determined that our own species was best equipped to cope with dry conditions,” the authors write. That could have been because our bodies are suited for drought, or because we had adapted culturally—which could have allowed us to expand across the continent of Africa, and then into the rest of the world.

Whether or not humans evolved in one place is a hotly debated question among paleoanthropologists. Another theory suggests that Homo sapiens didn’t have a single homeland, and instead emerged from the slow combination of ancestral populations across the continent. But Timmermann says that this patchwork origin isn’t supported by the team’s findings. “According to our calculations, other areas across Africa do not provide enough habitat overlap to justify the existence of species transitions,” he says.

“The paper does much to strengthen the hypothesis of strong causal connections between climate and human evolutionary events,” says Denné Reed, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin who studies human evolution and ecology and was not involved in the new paper. But he has questions about how the paper determined which ancient sites belonged to which species.

In particular, the paper attributed more than a dozen ambiguous European archaeological sites to H. erectus, which could dramatically expand the apparent range of the species. “It’s tough to be sure without replicating the analysis,” says Reed, “but I suspect a lot hinges on [those sites], all dated by methods with high error margins. Would the results hold if these European sites were excluded?”

[Related: Meat (probably) didn’t make us human]

The research is likely to serve as a foundation for future work on climate and evolution. And Reed says it highlights the importance of clearly and consistently defining individual human species in the fossil record. A commentary accompanying the piece noted that the analysis excluded several newly identified human ancestors, like Siberia’s Denisovans, who are known from only a few instances in the fossil or genetic record. And the distribution of known fossils is shaped by research funding and interest, as well as by prehistoric conditions—which could skew our understanding of where ancient people truly lived.  A next step would be to simulate the location of fossils based on these habitats and see if those projections match reality, Timmerman says.

Still, theories of human evolution have been criticized for overemphasizing the explanatory power of climate. Neanderthals, some of our closest extinct relatives, are often described in popular media as “cold adapted species,” biologically suited for ice ages and high latitudes. But as archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes points out in her recent book Kindred, Neanderthals would have lived in Europe when it was both open tundra and lush forest.

The new paper offers a more nuanced argument, that humans were indeed constrained by their environment: “Ancient humans always had to struggle for survival,” Timmermann says, even under optimal conditions. But by adapting to a changing world, Homo sapiens became a generalist species—an adaptation that allowed us and our ancestors to spread across the world, far beyond the places we first thrived.

Update: This story was updated to include comments from an independent expert.

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Across the United States, the remains of more than 10,000 people sit in museum and research collections. Some are as small as a fragment of bone. Others are whole bodies. For more than a century, these skeletons have been fundamental to our understanding of how society, culture, and technology have shaped human bodies—and even shaped forensics and epidemiology. Since the 1990s, the anthropological community has developed a framework for returning remains to their descendants. But it’s been slower to address an equally important question: how to conduct research on the bodies of dead humans with the consent and input of their living kin.

Now, researchers are working to formalize how anthropologists consult with descendant communities. In January, the American Journal of Biological Anthropology (AJBA) announced that any submissions to the journal would need to comply with ethical requirements for human remains used in the research.

The decision is part of an ongoing conversation within the field of bioanthropology—a discipline that uses biological tools like genetics to study human life throughout history—to redefine its responsibilities to both its subjects and their descendants. The conversation has taken on a new urgency with the emergence of advanced genetic and molecular techniques that dramatically increase the amount of information that can be learned from a body. That technology can also be uniquely invasive, requiring the destruction of bone, and producing data about living communities. The AJBA represents the perspective of a leading scientific association, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA), and is one of only a few other major journals in the field to articulate community engagement standards.

The ethics of utilizing human remains in the name of science is set against a dark history. In the 19th and 20th century, early bioanthropologists—including the AJBA’s founder Aleš Hrdlička—robbed Indigenous graves to build collections of human bones, and those collections were used to develop pseudoscientific theories about the biological nature of race. As anthropologist Chris Stantis wrote on Twitter recently, that founder wouldn’t have been able to publish much of his research under the new guidelines.

[Related: Don’t buy stolen artifacts—here’s how to ethically collect science memorabilia]

Trudy Turner, AJBA’s current editor-in-chief who studies the evolution and adaptations of primates at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, has been involved in discussions about the handling of human remains for decades, starting with questions about genetics research.

The new guidelines came about as journal reviewers asked for ethics statements on specific papers submitted to the journal. Until this year, “[the journal] had guidelines for animal studies, clinical trials,” says Turner. “we just didn’t have any set guidelines on the use of human remains.”

Plenty of bioanthropologists have worked closely with descendant communities, and have disproven biological interpretations of race. But the field’s longstanding practices on consent have been harder to shake, leading to high-profile legal battles. In the early 2000s, the Havasupai Tribe in Arizona discovered that their DNA, which they believed had been collected for diabetes research, was used in a wide range of studies on human migration. After suing the university that held the samples, the nation banned further research on their land. Between the 1990s and 2016, anthropologists fought the repatriation of a 9,000-year-old man found in southern Washington, on the basis that he was so ancient as to be culturally unconnected to specific modern Indigenous nations. Last year, Philidelphia medical examiners discovered that bones belonging to two people—believed to be two children—killed in a 1985 bombing by Philadelphia police were held for years in a University of Pennsylvania archive, and had been used in an online course without the knowledge or consent of their relatives.

The new journal requirements apply to research that uses data from a variety of remains, from physical bones, photographs, casts, genetic information, and isotopes extracted from skeletons. Authors submitting papers will need to provide a statement describing how they identified a descendant community, what permissions they received from that community, and a plan “for the free sharing of information with descendent groups while also guarding the privacy of sensitive information.”

The requirements still leave many of the thorniest ethical questions open. The journal doesn’t specify how authors should determine an appropriate descendant community, or what level of community consultation is appropriate. And critically, the requirements only apply to newly collected data—already published “legacy data” is exempted.

Turner stresses that the guidance is “not going to be the final word on everything.” The point of the current guidelines, she says, is to push researchers to begin studies with a different mindset.

“What we’re hoping is that as research is being planned, researchers take into consideration their obligations to the community,” says Turner—obligations like investigating questions proposed by a descendant community, and respecting when they do not want studies conducted. “You wouldn’t get to something contested, because you’ve thought about it ahead of time. That’s the goal.”

But Vanderbilt University geneticist Krystal Tsosie, who is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and ethics and policy director of the Native BioData Consortium, says she’d like to see more clarity from these guidelines to address field-wide concerns. “I see a step in a positive direction for transparency in community engagement, but we really should have more specificity on what [the guidelines] should look like,” she says. “Is this an ethical statement that will be front and center in the main manuscript, or will this be hidden in the supplemental materials?”

Participating in genetics research has not just hurt Indigenous people historically, Tsosie says—it poses ongoing risks. Badly framed research across the field has “reinforced stereotypes relating to genetic ancestry and race,” or assumed that a person’s Indigeneity could be boiled down to their genetic profile. That’s a risk for marginalized people across the world. Earlier this year, Nature documented dozens of papers on DNA from Roma people that used racist language or proposed biological racial distinctions.

[Related: Collecting missing demographic data is the first step to fighting racism in healthcare]

Turner says that AJBA will look to a newly formed AABA task force to continue revising its guidance, called the Task Force on the Ethical Study of Human Materials. The group is still in its early stages. 

“What we decided early on is that if we wanted to create something that is adaptable and meaningful to our members, trying to create a roadmap on a global scale is unrealistic,” says Benjamin Auerbach, an evolutionary biologist who specializes in anatomy at the University of Tennessee and co-chair of the task force. “We decided that we would focus on engaging with the African American community in the United States.”

The goal is to develop a framework for identifying communities that have a stake in research on human remains, and creating opportunities for conversations between them and scientists.

“Hopefully we can give [other bioanthropologists] a broad set of tools so they know how to enter into these conversations, and know what they need to communicate,” says Auerbach. “I think the biggest thing they need to learn is to listen, and not just talk at communities.”

That will require a culture shift within the profession, but one that should benefit science as well as descendant communities, says Fatimah Jackson, an evolutionary biologist who studies population biology at Howard University, and the task force’s other co-chair. “The communities that we tap to do the research, they never hear back from us [scientists] once the research is done,” says Jackson. “In the absence of full disclosure and completing the circle, there’s an opportunity for lots of misunderstanding.”

Addressing that communication gap also requires scientists to provide descendant communities with education to make informed decisions about the research process, she says. Setting clearer expectations for dialogue, Jackson says, will hopefully build a “kind of camaraderie will improve the quality of science.”

Jackson previously served as curator of the W. Montague Cobb collection at Howard, an early anthropological collection of the remains of Black people collected by Cobb, a prominent physician and the first Black person to earn a doctorate in anthropology. During her tenure, part of her work involved training undergraduates to participate in research on the collection. Cobb had kept careful records, and students could study a person’s family, the place they’d grown up, and the conditions of their death.

“I would start off my undergraduates by having them investigate the identities of these individuals,” says Jackson. “It personalized the skeletons, in a way that we’ve lacked in many of the labs where African American material is. This was a human being, who had a life, who loved, who had all the frailties of every other human being, and deserves to be respected.”

Correction (April 20, 2022): A previous version of this story misstated the name of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists.

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Researcher Barbara Huber’s favorite scent to wear is Hermes’ Jardin Sur Le Nil, with its hints of citrus and florals, accompanied by base notes of iris and musk. It’s a classic in the perfume world, but is far more contemporary than the millennia-old aromas and resins she works with at the Max Planck Institute’s Department of Archaeology. The odorous triterpenes and lipids of ancient goods offer a potential glimpse into the scents of the past—and how to recreate them. 

“It’s very tricky, because when archeologists come to the site, obviously the ephemeral and the fluid scents are gone,” Huber says. “We cannot have them anymore, and that’s how we tackle this question. We look for tiny remains of organic residues from the former substance that was used in order to produce the smell.”

Huber’s recent Nature Human Behavior paper on the reconstruction of historic fragrances outlined a “call to action” for archeologists to explore this relatively new science. She reviewed the potential uses for replicating scents from artifacts, as well as the tools behind the practice.

[Related: Eat like an ancient Roman by recreating bread from Pompeii]

Olfaction recreation is a tool used in sensory archeology, a research method that involves every piece of a historical site, beyond just the visual aspects of artifacts. It incorporates the sensorium: the entire apparatus of one’s perception of the world. By rebuilding the smellscapes of past civilizations with molecular science, Huber hopes that archeologists can come to a more complete understanding of ancient life in places like Egypt, Tayma, and beyond. 

To bring back faded scents from archaeological digs, Huber and her colleagues must first sample the artifacts before extracting odorous molecules. Then, they have to identify them within “the scent archive.”

The term “scent archive” might bring to mind images of rows of vials or tubes, like at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Instead of a physical archive of scents, however, Huber explains that it’s a library of sampled artifacts and data. After molecules have been identified through chemical analysis, it’s possible to reconstruct the ancient odors through modern forms of the scents.

“We just label them as an archive, like the soil, the dental calculus, the containers, the vessels,” Huber says. “They are like archives for us that still contain scented substances.”

Scent reconstruction has already been used in other aspects of Huber’s work, notably to study the smell of ancient incense burners at the Tayma oasis in modern-day Saudi Arabia. The assessment of the incense resin and soot on the artifacts found that the residents of the settlement burned frankincense, myrrh, and mastic nearly two millennia ago. Those results helped Huber’s team place the Tayma oasis on a map of trade routes, as well as outline the social uses of various compounds and smells during daily life.

“You can get a better understanding of a lot of different aspects like trade, perfumery, cosmetics, hygiene, and culinary practices if you look at spices and stuff,” Huber says. “So it is not just about the scent and recreating that. It’s also about all the different information we can learn about the past by studying this more closely.”

By analyzing aromatic compounds, researchers can more easily place artifacts in the paleo-environmental record and into an archaeological context. The rituals, perfumes, medicines, and trades of ancient peoples can be found within the scent record. But what impact does that have on the world’s populace today?

“If museums want to use specific exhibitions and have the scent there, the people can perceive the past in a different way,” Huber says. “It can bring the past back to life in a different way than it has been done before.”

The challenge, however, with reconstructing old scents is connecting the chemistry to the sensory experience. It might entail more than analyzing artifacts and making cocktails to spritz into the air.

Professor Charles Spence heads the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford’s Somerville College, studying the psychology of human perception and the interactions of senses. He argues that scent is closely linked to memory and emotion.

“I think it’s a part of the environment that we’re not aware of mostly, but is always present,” Spence says. “It does have a sometimes profound effect on our mood and well-being.”

Human responses to scents are largely learned instead of innately known, he explains. For example, the popular Victorian title Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management called garlic “offensive” and “acrimonious.” But today, it’s largely embraced in Western cuisine, indicating a shift in public perception over the last two centuries. As such, Spence is wary of hoping to experience the smells of the past in the same way that ancient people did.

“I think we can’t smell through their noses,” he says. Some scents do appear to be hardwired into organisms’ brains, according to recent medical research, mostly to help them avoid danger. However, mammalian brains leave space for learned responses to different stimuli as an individual grows, changing the perceptions to odors out in the world. 

Still, Spence believes that smelling the scents of past events, such as the spice parades through the center of London in the 16th and 17th centuries, would be a valuable “curiosity.” Beyond that, the technology can reveal valuable information to historians and archaeologists researching ancient human life.

“We want to get people’s attention because we believe that we can learn a lot about the past when we study scent,” Huber says. “My hopes are really that people are seeing that research in this field as another component of archaeology.”

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It’s an archaeologists’ day job to unearth stories out of the things we leave behind. Earthly possessions and artifacts can give a glimpse into ancient civilizations and even modern-day life. But as humans venture beyond our planet, how do you keep archaeology alive in space? One playground where archaeologists could answer this question already exists: the International Space Station.

In the first archaeological survey of its kind, scientists piloting the International Space Station Archaeological Project (ISSAP) are studying the physical objects used by astronauts aboard the 23-year-old laboratory and mini-community. But the ISS isn’t your typical excavation site with chisels and brushes. Instead of digging up evidence, researchers treated the ISS like an archive, sifting through a library of old and new pictures. The investigation will wrap up its data collection late this month, but once published, its results could provide both sociologists and space historians a window into what life in space really looks like.

Developed in 2015, ISSAP originally began as a way to show NASA that the social sciences also have a place amongst the stars. Since its inception, the International Space Station has been host to many disciplines of scientific research, says Justin Walsh, one of the project leads and an associate professor at Chapman University. 

“The socio-cultural component of long-duration spaceflight has essentially been left to the side,” he says. “We have designed a recording technique to capture archaeological data for archaeological questions.”

Space archaeology is an emerging field, with experts taking a wide range of approaches. Scientists have used the term to describe human activity in space, or human activity done with the goal of exploring space, like launch facilities, observatories or rockets. But according to Walsh, ISSAP is mainly concerned with how astronauts interact with and change the objects and spaces in the ISS—much like how loss or religion can shape an environment.

“All of our civilizations are documented in one way or another, whether that’s oral history or written documents,” says Chantal Brousseau, a masters student of history at Carleton University in Canada who helped develop a tool to help compile archaeological data for the project. “But we don’t have any sort of documentation about life in space as it is now.”

[Related: Sorry, you can’t eat these popular foods on the International Space Station]

Living on the station is a lot different than living on Earth. In fact, this small mirror of our society is guided by its own laws and heritage. For example, there is a hierarchy of the crew members that influences team dynamics. After astronauts arrive on the station, ISS partner agencies designate one crew member as the commander, a position that takes primary responsibility for all decision-making on board. All astronauts are also supposed to understand both English and Russian, but in reality, there’s varying degrees of fluency. 

The ISSAP team also observed that rules impact the presence of religious displays and personal effects. In the US segment of the station, there is a distinct lack of religious displays—a marked difference from the Russian side. But they do have a memorial to deceased colleagues, which is often left out of public photos. 

When the first long-term residents arrived on the station in 2000, photographs of the station and its inhabitants were often limited by how many canisters of film a mission could pack into the payload. But today’s digital photography has allowed astronauts to build a much larger repository of images. Walsh says that they’ve been able to use hundreds of thousands of images and the metadata associated with them to map out entire “behaviors and associations over the history of ISS.”

Their first project, called the Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment, or SQuARE, uses six locations on the station as sample areas to visually evaluate how items and areas change over time. 

Five of these locations were carefully chosen by the researchers, while astronauts were able to choose where the last “dig” would take place. Although ISSAP is collecting final data from the experiment at the end of this month, Walsh and his team were already able to make some initial observations. Areas, like the Japanese Experiment Module Kibo where astronauts conduct medical and educational experiments, experienced lower amounts of human activity—places astronauts didn’t visit as often. 

Meanwhile, other rooms, like the kitchen and the Hygiene Compartment, experienced higher amounts of human activity. Determining what areas get the most use could tell scientists a lot about the crew’s patterns, and even what kinds of equipment are getting the most use, Walsh says. 

Still, of the challenges of conducting archaeology in space, Walsh says in some cases it’s easier to conduct research on the environment because they can always ask astronauts about their surroundings, compared to archaeologists who study long-deceased civilizations. 

“Nobody has ever tried to systematically record the material culture of a space habitat before,” he says. 

According to Walsh, the project comes at an opportune time. Plans have been announced to retire the station in the next decade. Before that happens, learning how astronauts interact with their surroundings—and each other—inside these microcosms could help inform what the next generation of space stations will look like.

“We are perfectly positioned to give data-driven insights into the way a space habitat is being used, for the people who are designing and building space habitats,” says Walsh. These manufacturers might end up incorporating that data into their designs, which could affect how we view and create human-oriented structures in outer space.  

But to do that, Walsh’s team is working with collaborators like Chantal Brousseau to figure out how to interpret these archaeological insights. Brousseau ended up creating an independent web app to help record all information the experiment gathered. 

[Related: There’s a lot we don’t know about the International Space Station’s ocean grave]

After modifying an open-access image-annotator tool, she was able to modify its code to help create a database available to both the ISS and ISSAP team. Eventually, ISSAP’s goal is to eventually turn this information into legacy data—like a public file system for training computer models—that can be used by other archaeologists. 

“When you’re doing machine learning, you need to give the computer examples so it can learn,” says Brousseau. After the team annotates and labels the images from the ISS accordingly, they are able to sync multiple image databases using an application Brousseau created. “I’m thinking about developing it further for a data science tool.”

As humankind prepares to further explore the cosmos, it’s important to understand the fundamental aspects of how we change our environments, says Walsh.  He adds that this project is more than just food for thought for future space station engineers. 

It’s about understanding where we’ve been, and where that upward trajectory might take us next. 

“We have an obligation to look at the evolution of our technology,” says Beth O’Leary, a professor of space archaeology at New Mexico State University.

From an archaeological perspective, researchers and the public should remember that every culture on Earth has a relationship with the stars and the moon. Pushing the envelope of traditional archaeology is just another way to connect with each other. 

“The future of space is really international,” O’Leary says. “That’s why it’s really important to think about what’s important to preserve for humanity.”

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The 2,500-year-old city of Monte Albán sits on a mountain in the middle of the Valley of Oaxaca, a high plain in the mountains of southern Mexico. And according to archaeologists Linda Nicholas and Gary Feinman, both of the Field Museum in Chicago, the city’s founding represents a 1,000-year renaissance in the valley, kicking off an era of explosive population growth, ceremonial buildings, and even the adoption of the tortilla.

Why the city became so popular is a mystery: Monte Albán isn’t a particularly inviting place to grow food. It’s far from the rivers and aquifers elsewhere in the valley that serve thirsty corn, so its residents would have had to rely on unpredictable rainfall. 

What Monte Albán lacked in agricultural opportunities, it might have made up for in cultural cachet. A high standard of living, and lack of despotic rulers, is the best explanation for the region’s explosive growth, as Nicholas and Feinman documented in research published this week in the journal Frontiers in Political Science. 

After its founding in about 500 BCE, people flocked to the city and to the surrounding valley. “It tripled in size within a couple of centuries,” says Feinman. By around the year 0, it had about 17,000 inhabitants. Even migration from outlying settlements in the valley can’t explain that growth—people must have moved in from over the mountains. 

[Related: These footprints could push back human history in the Americas]

Archaeologists are still learning how to study societies like Monte Albán. Studies of societies with autocratic dynasties—like Egypt, or the city-states of Mesopotamia—dominate archaeology’s past in part because their status symbols are easy to see. Graves full of jewels, weapons, and sacrificed humans, the remnants of palaces, and art that glorifies rulers all fit nicely in museums. And, for a long time, archaeologists treated hierarchy and “complexity”—the ability to build ritual sites, heave stones around the landscape, or dig miles of irrigation canals—as part of the same package.

So what would evidence of equality look like? Feinman breaks it down into two parts: governance, or how people make decisions, and economics. 

Monte Albán seems to have grown for more than a 1,000 years without dynasties or centralized power—or at least, the city never put any effort into glorifying its leaders. Only one statue of a leader exists from the city’s first 400 years, and that person is wearing a mask. “Power was not concentrated in a single individual or family line,” says Feinman.

The reality was probably messier than either a centralized state or a democracy, says Deborah Nichols, an expert in early Mesoamerican cities at Dartmouth College. Nichols says she’s wary of the term “egalitarianism,” because it can suggest a society governed entirely by consensus. “Some people have used the term oligarchy—an elite that recognized that they also had to negotiate with their subjects.”

The Oaxacan city’s decentralized power contrasts with that of the neighboring people, the Maya, says Feinman. There, “you have the rulers, and you can trace their ancestry and their descendents” from written chronicles, he says. Those rulers built the limestone pyramids of the Yucatan rainforest, which held cramped ritual spaces that could fit only a select few.

And Monte Albán lacked huge economic extremes. The hilltop city towers over the surrounding plain. At the city’s highest point, where other societies might have built a palace, was a paved plaza, big enough for most of the city’s residents to gather. There are no palaces at all, in fact. Whole neighborhoods are built on terraces cascading down the hillside, which would have taken huge amounts of collective labor to flatten, drain, and buttress. At the base of the hill was heavily-used farmland, irrigated with a network of dams and deep wells.

“The housing situation of everyday people is telling,” says Feinman. “When some people live in a castle and others live in a shack, you probably have very little equity in that society.” As people moved into the city, the material differences between households shrunk, and more houses had access to high-quality goods. In the older towns of the valley, a certain kind of glossy, water-tight pottery was only used for ceremonial bowls. But that pottery was widespread in Monte Albán. And Monte Albán’s townhouses had plaster floors and stone foundations, often around an interior courtyard—the kind of dwelling where, in older cities in the region, only the richest few lived.

Those features add up to a picture of a city with a “social charter,” the archaeologists argue. Monte Albán certainly had wealthier people, who lived in bigger homes, sometimes with in-house steam rooms or tombs. But in contrast to their neighbors, the sheer abundance of wealth suggests that the needs of everyday people were a priority. Neighbors must have worked together to maintain their homes and water systems.

This is part of an emerging global picture of how civic projects could be managed—recent research in Mesopotamia has shown that irrigation canals, which could take thousands of people to build and maintain, were developed thousands of years before the region’s first kings.

[Related: The Maya dealt with a form of climate change, too. Here’s how they survived.]

In a previous study coauthored by Feinman on 26 pre-colonial cities in Central America, 12 appear to have been similarly organized, without deference to a king. The most famous of them, Teotihuacan–in the Valley of Mexico, where Mexico City is now located–built extensive apartment complexes that housed the city’s common people.

Nichols agrees that collaboration on housing, could be evidence of a city with at least some hyperlocal governing structures. “Think of a place like Chicago, with wards and ward bosses,” she says. “The mayor is obviously having to negotiate his position with these folks.”

Compared with other cities in the area, people didn’t seem to wear the consequences of inequality on their bodies. The skeletons of relatively poor people in Monte Albán were much less likely to show evidence of malnutrition than the poor of surrounding kingdoms. 

And Nichols says the skeletons of men and women contrast with bodies from the other kingdoms, too. Sex hierarchies were “much less exaggerated” in Monte Albán than in its neighbors, Nichols says. In another analysis of nearby states, “sex differences were huge and marked. Women were clearly not getting the same access to food,” says Nichols. Their skeletons showed evidence of anemia, and had thinner bones. Those differences weren’t so stark at sites like Teotihuacan and Monte Albán, she says.

A lack of kings doesn’t mean a utopia—the landscape around Monte Albán was cleared of its forests, and erosion began to strip productive soil from hillsides. And stone carvings on top of the hill show war captives, naked, waiting to be killed. It’s likely that the city was also popular because it was easily defended during raids. By 800 CE, some elite families began to carve statues glorifying their lineages.

But the lack of evidence for any kind of dictator or king flips long-standing archaeological wisdom on its head: “For close to 75 years, the idea is, with the exception of Athens and Republican Rome, all pre-modern societies were despotic,” says Feinman. “But what archaeology has told us is that’s just not right. Just like today, there are more autocratic and democratic societies, and they can fluctuate up and down over time.”

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For 750 miles, the San Andreas fault cuts a scar up and down the length of California. There, two colossal tectonic plates—the North American and the Pacific plates—crush against each other. When those plates give way and slip, the humans living above might suffer devastating earthquakes.

The keys to understanding those earthquakes may lie within the fault’s danger zone, inside the glass walls of a nondescript office building in Menlo Park, a suburb on San Francisco’s peninsula. There lies the regional office of the US Geological Survey, the keepers of earthquake hazard data. Thanks in part to geologists working in that building, this fault is one of the best-studied on the planet. 

Yet our understanding of how the Earth works under the surface is far from complete. To piece that puzzle together, scientists are looking millions of years into the past. What two groups have discovered—published in two papers, one in Science Advances and another in Geology—may help us better know where earthquakes happen. 

Modeling how mountains move

Menlo Park lies in the shadow of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Jagged like a dragon’s back, these peaks, known for their vineyards, split the sprawl of Silicon Valley from the Pacific Ocean. 

In geological time, these mountains are toddlers: Geologists think the mountains began to rise about 4 million years ago. They sit upon a “knot” where the San Andreas fault curves. Geologists think that bend pushed the mountains upward in a long sequence of earthquakes. What exactly about earthquakes caused that rise, however, remains murky.

[Related: When should we issue earthquake warnings? It’s complicated.]

Fortunately, Bay Area scientists have been measuring earthquakes and collecting rock samples for decades. Not all the data fit together, but they still make the area “one of the premier natural laboratories for answering some of these questions,” according to George Hilley, a geologist at Stanford University, and one of the authors of the Science Advances paper. That group also collected data of their own: They sampled rocks for helium, an element that can tell geologists at what temperature, and how long ago, a rock formed.

Using that data, Hilley, one of his graduate students, Curtis Baden, and their colleagues created a computational model, one of the first geological models to rely on dynamic physics, to demonstrate how mountains formed. They harnessed software used by engineers to study how materials stood up to various loads. As a result, their model could show how rocks might bend, break, and buckle as earthquakes caused mountains to rise.

Their simulation showed something surprising. “At least if the models are to be believed, much of the mountain-building could actually happen between earthquakes rather than during the earthquakes themselves,” says Hilley.

In most faults, moving tectonic plates try to force themselves past each other. For years or decades or even centuries, they’ll quietly keep pushing, building up energy at the boundary. 

Inevitably, something snaps. All that energy gets released in an abrupt tremor: an earthquake. But between quakes, that energy could go into building mountains, too, according to these simulations.

And data from these simulations, the authors say, can help fill gaps where other observations don’t match up.

A feat of earthquake archaeology

Fly about a hundred miles southeast from the Bay Area, to the area near Pinnacles National Park, and the nature of the San Andreas fault changes. Large earthquakes aren’t nearly as common here as they are to the north or further south, where the fault passes by Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, and Palm Springs. 

That is because this part of the San Andreas fault isn’t like the others. Here, the North American and the Pacific plates continually crawl past each other, without building up the stress that results in violent earthquakes. Geophysicists call this a “creeping” fault. 

Central San Andreas can see flurries of relatively harmless minor quakes, but there hasn’t been a Big One in recorded history—at least for 2,000 years. But just because central San Andreas is a creeping fault today doesn’t mean it was always so. Scientists wanted to peel away the rocks and peer into its past. 

They relied on biomarkers: The remnants of living organisms, trapped in the rock record and chemically transformed by high heat. This is how petroleum and natural gas form, and fossil-fuel hunters are very familiar with the idea of using biomarkers as a search tool.

“What we did was sort of take that idea and turn it on its head,” says Heather Savage, a seismologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an author of the Geology paper. “If you have some organic molecules in fault zones, they would only experience high heat for maybe a few seconds during an earthquake, but it can get really hot, so we should still see some of these reactions take place.” 

Drilling deep, almost 10,500 feet (3,200 meters) beneath the surface, these scientists found biomarkers that indicated a rather violent history. This placid fault had once been riven by a myriad earthquakes. These scientists found evidence for at least 100 quakes, some potentially as high as magnitude 7 on the Richter scale: stronger than the 1989 Loma Prieta and 1994 Northridge quakes in California’s recent memory. 

“As far as we knew, until this work, we didn’t know that there would be such large earthquakes this far into the creeping section,” says Savage.

These quakes might have happened anywhere from a few thousand to 3.2 million years ago; Savage and her colleagues are now seeking to put a finer date on these earthquakes. But it’s a sign that this fault is nowhere near as placid as it might have seemed. If it could violently rupture in the past, the conditions exist for it to violently rupture again.

From seismology to seismic retrofitting

Understanding the history of the San Andreas fault isn’t just about creating a picture of what California looked like when ground sloths and saber-toothed cats roamed the land, millions of years ago. The fault cuts past two of North America’s largest urban areas, and its earthquakes put tens of millions of people at risk. 

Geologists hope their research can, behind the walls of that United States Geological Survey office, inform better assessments of how earthquakes can threaten buildings and lives.

When tectonic experts evaluate earthquake hazards in a particular area, they’ll consider a few different types of data: satellite measurements of Earth’s shape, past earthquake patterns, or a long-term history of a fault. Sometimes—such as in the Santa Cruz Mountains today—those data don’t agree with each other. Hilley hopes that his group’s model can reconcile those disagreements by showing how these data connect to the same processes.

And the central San Andreas research could add nuance to Central California’s risk models. “I would like to think that our work can inform that, in fact, we do see earthquakes, and evidence for many earthquakes in this section,” says Savage.

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Elizabeth Sawchuk is a Banting postdoctoral fellow and adjunct professor of Anthropology, University of Alberta; Jessica Thompson is an assistant professor of Anthropology, Yale University; Mary Prendergast is an associate professor of Anthropology, Rice University. This story originally featured on The Conversation.

Every person alive on the planet today is descended from people who lived as hunter-gatherers in Africa.

The continent is the cradle of human origins and ingenuity, and with each new fossil and archaeological discovery, we learn more about our shared African past. Such research tends to focus on when our species, Homo sapiens, spread out to other landmasses 80,000 to 60,000 years ago. But what happened in Africa after that, and why don’t we know more about the people who remained?

Our new study, conducted by an interdisciplinary team of 44 researchers based in 12 countries, helps answer these questions. By sequencing and analyzing ancient DNA (aDNA) from people who lived as long ago as 18,000 years, we roughly doubled the age of sequenced aDNA from sub-Saharan Africa. And this genetic information helps anthropologists like us understand more about how modern humans were moving and mingling in Africa long ago.

Tracing our human past in Africa

Beginning about 300,000 years ago, people in Africa who looked like us—the earliest anatomically modern humans—also started behaving in ways that seem very human. They made new kinds of stone tools and began transporting raw materials up to 250 miles (400 kilometers), likely through trade networks. By 140,000 to 120,000 years ago, people made clothing from animal skins and began to decorate themselves with pierced marine shell beads.

While early innovations appeared in a patchwork fashion, a more widespread shift happened around 50,000 years ago—around the same time that people started moving into places as distant as Australia. New types of stone and bone tools became common, and people began fashioning and exchanging ostrich eggshell beads. And while most rock art in Africa is undated and badly weathered, an increase in ochre pigment at archaeological sites hints at an explosion of art.

What caused this shift, known as the Later Stone Age transition, has been a longstanding archaeological mystery. Why would certain tools and behaviors, which up until that point had appeared in a piecemeal way across Africa, suddenly become widespread? Did it have something to do with changes in the number of people, or how they interacted?

The challenge of accessing the deep past

Archaeologists reconstruct human behavior in the past mainly through things people left behind—remains of their meals, tools, ornaments, and sometimes even their bodies. These records may accumulate over thousands of years, creating views of daily livelihoods that are really averages over long periods of time. However, it’s hard to study ancient demography, or how populations changed, from the archaeological record alone.

This is where DNA can help. When combined with evidence from archaeology, linguistics, and oral and written history, scientists can piece together how people moved and interacted based on which groups share genetic similarities.

But DNA from living people can’t tell the whole story. African populations have been transformed over the past 5,000 years by the spread of herding and farming, the development of cities, ancient pandemics, and the ravages of colonialism and slavery. These processes caused some lineages to vanish and brought others together, forming new populations.

Using present-day DNA to reconstruct ancient genetic landscapes is like reading a letter that was left out in the rain: some words are there but blurred, and some are gone completely. Researchers need ancient DNA from archaeological human remains to explore human diversity in different places and times and to understand what factors shaped it.

Unfortunately, aDNA from Africa is particularly hard to recover because the continent straddles the equator and heat and humidity degrade DNA. While the oldest aDNA from Eurasia is roughly 400,000 years old, all sequences from sub-Saharan Africa to date have been younger than around 9,000 years.

Breaking the ‘tropical ceiling’

Because each person carries genetic legacies inherited from generations of their ancestors, our team was able to use DNA from individuals who lived between 18,000-400 years ago to explore how people interacted as far back as the last 80,000-50,000 years. This allowed us, for the first time, to test whether demographic change played a role in the Later Stone Age transition.

Our team sequenced aDNA from six individuals buried in what are now Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia. We compared these sequences to previously studied aDNA from 28 individuals buried at sites stretching from Cameroon to Ethiopia and down to South Africa. We also generated new and improved DNA data for 15 of these people, trying to extract as much information as possible from the small handful of ancient African individuals whose DNA is preserved well enough to study.

This created the largest genetic dataset so far for studying the population history of ancient African foragers—people who hunted, gathered or fished. We used it to explore population structures that existed prior to the sweeping changes of the past few thousand years.

DNA weighs in on a longstanding debate

We found that people did in fact change how they moved and interacted around the Later Stone Age transition.

Despite being separated by thousands of miles and years, all the ancient individuals in this study were descended from the same three populations related to ancient and present-day eastern, southern, and central Africans. The presence of eastern African ancestry as far south as Zambia, and southern African ancestry as far north as Kenya, indicates that people were moving long distances and having children with people located far away from where they were born. The only way this population structure could have emerged is if people were moving long distances over many millennia.

Additionally, our research showed that almost all ancient eastern Africans shared an unexpectedly high number of genetic variations with hunter-gatherers who today live in central African rainforests, making ancient eastern Africa truly a genetic melting pot. We could tell that this mixing and moving happened after about 50,000 years ago, when there was a major split in central African forager populations.

We also noted that the individuals in our study were genetically most like only their closest geographic neighbors. This tells us that after around 20,000 years ago, the foragers in some African regions were almost exclusively finding their partners locally. This practice must have been extremely strong and persisted for a very long time, as our results show that some groups remained genetically independent of their neighbors over several thousand years. It was especially clear in Malawi and Zambia, where the only close relationships we detected were between people buried around the same time at the same sites.

We don’t know why people began “living locally” again. Changing environments as the last Ice Age peaked and waned between about 26,000 to 11,500 years ago may have made it more economical to forage closer to home, or perhaps elaborate exchange networks reduced the need for people to travel with objects.

Alternatively, new group identities may have emerged, restructuring marriage rules. If so, we would expect to see artifacts and other traditions like rock art diversify, with specific types clumped into different regions. Indeed, this is exactly what archaeologists find—a trend known as regionalization. Now we know that this phenomenon not only affected cultural traditions, but also the flow of genes.

New data, new questions

As always, aDNA research raises as many questions as answers. Finding central African ancestry throughout eastern and southern Africa prompts anthropologists to reconsider how interconnected these regions were in the distant past. This is important because central Africa has remained archaeologically understudied, in part because of political, economic and logistical challenges that make research there difficult.

Additionally, while genetic evidence supports a major demographic transition in Africa after 50,000 years ago, we still don’t know the key drivers. Determining what triggered the Later Stone Age transition will require closer examination of regional environmental, archaeological and genetic records to understand how this process unfolded across sub-Saharan Africa.

Finally, this study is a stark reminder that researchers still have much to learn from ancient individuals and artifacts held in African museums, and highlights the critical role of the curators who steward these collections. While some human remains in this study were recovered within the past decade, others have been in museums for a half-century.

Even though technological advances are pushing back the time limits for aDNA, it is important to remember that scientists have only just begun to understand human diversity in Africa, past and present. ]

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The remains of the Endeavour, the lost ship that famed Captain James Cook sailed on his first voyage to Australia, have been found, the Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM) announced at an event in Sydney on Thursday.

But not all experts are in agreement with these conclusions. Immediately following ANMM’s announcement, the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP) released a statement saying the claim was “premature,” and that ANMM was “in breach of contract” of how the findings would be shared with the public. “There has been no indisputable data found to prove the site is that iconic vessel,” the RIMAP statement reads, “and there are many unanswered questions that could overturn such an identification.”

The Endeavour holds significance to Australians of British descent, because of its connection to Captain Cook. After Cook sailed the Endeavour to New Zealand and Australia from 1768 to 1771, the ship was sent back to England to be repaired and refitted into a naval transport ship. It was later renamed the Lord Sandwich, and purposefully sunk in the waters of Rhode Island in 1778. 

Researchers have been looking for the ship’s remains for almost 30 years. In 1993, archeologists and divers began archival research and sonar scans to narrow down regions where the ship could be. In 2016, RIMAP announced that it had located a wreckage site in Newport Harbor with five downed ships, one of which ANMM identified as the Endeavour this week. In 2018, experts were still conducting their forensic analyses of the timber from the vessels, working their way through the five shipwrecks. 

[Related: How scientists keep ancient shipwrecks from crumbling into dust]

In defense of the announcement, director and CEO of the Australian National Maritime Museum,  Kevin Sumption, said in a statement that he feels satisfied with the evidence to make a certain and confident claim about the Endeavour’s whereabouts. “The last pieces of the puzzle had to be confirmed before I felt able to make this call,” he said. ANMM cites timber samples, historical records, and matching measurements and specifications, which it says all point to the Endeavour’s positive identification. “Based on archival and archaeological evidence, I’m convinced it’s the Endeavour,” said Sumption.

Outside experts have also weighed in. Maritime archeologist and shipwreck investigator John McCarthy, who is not involved with any Endeavour projects, wrote in The Conversation that “the repeated headlines about the Endeavour may have made some of the project team wary about definitive claims.” At the same time, he writes, “there will also be sites that we cannot prove the identity of with absolute certainty, and we will be forced to make our best judgment call.” 

In its statement, RIMAP seems adamant that it is not yet time to conclusively ID the Endeavour’s remains. The organization wrote that “when the study is done, RIMAP will post the legitimate report on its website,” and that “RIMAP’s conclusions will be driven by proper scientific process and not Australian emotions or politics.”

Meanwhile, ANMM said in its statement that identifying the Endeavour is of cultural importance, and “the focus is now on what can be done to protect and preserve it.”

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Every domestic animal presents a mystery of how it came to be. Sometime in the distant past, an animal—whether wolf, wild ox, jungle fowl, or boar—started to trot down a road that ended with reliance on, or even trust in, human beings.

In Aşıklı Höyük, a Stone-Age town in the highlands of central Turkey, a team of archaeologists, writing in the journal PNAS earlier this week, have pieced together what that process looked like for sheep and goats, some of the earliest herded livestock. The village, one of many experimenting with raising animals, contains 1,000 years of bones, dung, and settlement all in the same place, allowing archaeologists to assemble a time-lapse of domestication. 

“The puzzle comes together,” says Mary Stiner, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Arizona, and the first author on the new study, “and you get to see the big picture.”

People first moved into the village 10,400 years ago, and set up seasonal homes on the banks of a river. People from Turkey to present day Syria, Iraq, and Iran, were beginning to experiment with food storage in this period, Stiner says, which occurred just after the retreat of the glaciers. The residents of Aşıklı Höyük played with gardening, even growing some forms of wheat, although they still ate mostly foraged plants. Most of their meat came from sheep and goats in the surrounding hills. These horned animals stood on long legs, unlike their rotund cousins you’d see on a farm today.

The relationship with those animals grew out of hunting. At first, the residents of Aşıklı Höyük kept young wild goats and sheep in small pens between their homes, where the captured animals left telltale traces of dung. The people of Aşıklı Höyük raised the animals for only a few months—most of the bones from this period are of adolescent animals, killed on the transition to adulthood.

The puzzle is why people would have raised young animals at all. “We can’t expect people to imagine an outcome”—like a herd of managed animals—”that was beyond any experience people would have had,” Stiner points out.

“It isn’t about turning them into docile domesticated animals,” she says. “It’s about live storage, probably to get through the next winter.” The people of this village may have been spiritually motivated to keep animals, too. Elsewhere in the region, the carcasses of pigs, goats, and sheep were butchered into huge chunks for roasting or smoking—and presumably sharing. That’s a practice that shares some similarities with  ritual sacrifice or other ceremonies. Keeping a few young animals around might have been a way of ensuring that there would be meat for a feast.

Four hundred years later, by about 8,000 BCE, the residents of the village lived there full-time. They began to keep bigger herds, and traces of dung became big piles. A few of those animals started to reproduce, as growing numbers of miscarried sheep and goat skeletons in the settlement show.

[Related: Did humans truly domesticate dogs? Canine history is more of a mystery than you think.]

Those unborn skeletons are also evidence of another kind: a steep learning curve for successfully raising livestock. Other research has found that these early captive animals suffered from joint problems, and the high rate of miscarriages suggests that the goats and sheep weren’t getting the food they needed. “Confinement is taking quite a toll on these animals,” says Stiner. “They’re making a lot of mistakes.”

But over a thousand years, the villagers seem to have figured out the skills they needed to keep the animals alive, and even breed them. Food from different sources—mountain pasture or village gardens—leaves a distinct imprint in the form of isotopes in the bones of livestock, as well as within the humans that eat them. Based on those signatures, as the  settlement neared its end, people were getting almost all their meat from domestic livestock—except in religious ceremonies, where wild cattle seem to have taken center stage.

At the same time, the villagers gave sheep and goats freer rein—they were let out into the forests and grasslands, where they ate wild plants, rather than being penned up near the village. That suggests the animals started to act tame. After all, to bring an animal out to pasture, you have to trust that it won’t run away. But even these mild-mannered animals didn’t look like the animals we know today: the sheep were still long-legged like their wild ancestors, and there’s no evidence that they were being raised for wool.

But by the end of the village’s existence, it seems that both people and animals were beginning to depend on one another.

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Picture some Viking warriors. What are they wearing on their heads?

Probably a helmet, right? Does it look like the one below?

The first thing that probably jumps out to you here is that there are no horns. The helmet, discovered at a Norwegian farm in the 1940s, is one of the few complete Viking helmets ever discovered. Crucially, none of them have horns.

The idea that Viking helmets ever even had horns is surprisingly recent, despite the fact that the culture is well-documented in written history. According to historian Roberta Frank’s summary of the horned-helmet myth, Vikings were first given their horns in an 1876 German production of a Wagner opera. Within 25 years of the show, horned helmets were synonymous with the Scandinavian raiders that colonized the British Isles and sailed to North America around 1000 CE.

The thing is, horned helmets did exist in northern Europe—but they predated the Vikings by at least 2,000 years. They’re products of a Bronze Age culture that predates written records in the region.

The Viksø helmets, as the pair is called, were discovered in 1942, buried in a peat bog near Copenhagen. They’re made entirely of bronze, including the twisted, bull-like horns. They’re probably not objects meant to be worn into battle, but are closer to religious gear, intricately decorated with a curling beak and two bulging eyes around the forehead. Recesses in the crown of the helmet likely held a horsehair crest, and a pair of long feathers.

These ornate helmets actually represent something more mysterious than Viking intimidation: the emergence of a new mythology, and possibly politics, in the time before written history.

In a new study, a team of Danish archaeologists scraped off a fingernail’s width of the organic glue used to hold the horns in place. Radiocarbon dating of that substance showed that the glue was last applied—and therefore helmets were likely last used—somewhere around 950 BCE.

That was a period of tremendous turnover in western and northern Europe. Scandinavians began trading with Phoenecians, a seafaring empire in the Mediterranean. “When these changes happened in the trading networks, there were other changes connected,” says Heidi Nørgaard, the senior author on the new research and an archaeologist at Denmark’s Moesgaard Museum. “Building structures were changing. The cosmology was changing. Burial rites were changing.”

The Veksø helmets hint at how the people living through those fluxes might have understood the world. The horns match imagery found in rock art in southern Spain and the nearby island of Sardinia from around the same time, as well as bronze figurines in Scandinavia.

All of the horned figures are drawn alongside swords and axes, and often ships and chariots, which another author on the new research has argued are religious symbols linked to the movement of the sun. In Spain, there’s an extra emphasis on the beauty of the horned figures, represented with combs and other cosmetic tools. And all of the artifacts appear within 200 to 300 years of one another, says Nørgaard. Over that time, the horned figures grow, and become the centerpieces of rock art.

Together, the images suggest a culture that was beginning to define itself around warlike, potentially divine individuals—what Nørgaard and her co-authors describe as “a new social regime backed by a mixture of political and religious power.” Graves from the time, excavated in Denmark and Germany, seem to hold some of those powerful individuals, sometimes described as Bronze Age royalty. “They erected huge burial mounds,” Nørgaard explains. “They built a wooden chamber in the mound. They added gold artifacts, and they added huge drinking vessels. These are two examples from the northern fringe, but this kind of burial was all over Italy.” That’s in stark contrast to earlier, more egalitarian-seeming funeral practices—suggesting that this symbolism may have accompanied a new kind of hierarchy.

In the German site, the dead were buried with an array of metalworking tools, but not a complete set that a craftsman would need to do their job, Nørgaard says. In other words, they may have been symbols of power, rather than the dead person’s trade. Scandinavia doesn’t actually have sources of bronze, and so all of the raw material needed to be brought in via trade. “In these huge rich burials,” she says, “You have signs of this control over craft and resources.”

As it happens, the logic of putting Vikings in horned helmets might not have been so different from the actual Bronze Age societies that crafted the headgear. Frank writes that the motif of horned Viking helmets came out of “an expansionist, empire-building era” fascinated with violence, nationalism, and individualism (trends that would lead to the First World War within decades.) It’s possible that the Viksø helmets were meant to embody similar values. “I find it fascinating that we still today are connecting horns and warriors,” says Nørgaard. “It supports this assumption of strength.”

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Popular culture depicts medieval warhorses as majestic creatures—tall, muscular, and powerful, with shining knights atop. But new research shows that the steeds of the Middle Ages were likely much smaller than we would expect.

A team of zooarchaeologists in the United Kingdom analyzed 1,964 horse bones from 171 different archaeological sites dated between 300-1650 C.E., and compared how those remains measure up to the horses of today. The horses of the Middle Ages, they found, were much slighter than their modern-day descendents—usually no more than pony-size. Their findings were published last August in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. 

Whether an equine animal is classified as a horse or pony depends entirely on its size. The animal is typically measured from the ground to the ridge between their shoulder blades, in units called hands, with one hand equaling 4 inches. Modern horses stand at at least 14.2 hands, or 4-foot-10-inches, and racehorses and showjumpers are often taller, around 16 or 17 hands. The archaeologists found that English medieval knights led their charges on horses shorter than 14.2 hands tall—today they would be classified as ponies, not horses. 

Yet those horses had a sizable impact, despite their short stature. “The warhorse is central to our understanding of medieval English society and culture as both a symbol of status closely associated with the development of aristocratic identity and as a weapon of war famed for its mobility and shock value, changing the face of battle,” University of Exeter archaeologist and principal investigator for the research, Oliver Creighton, said in a statement. 

[Related: Scientists are trying to figure out where the heck horses came from]

The authors note in their paper that while these horses may seem too small to engage in battle, historical records are “notably silent on the specific criteria which defined a warhorse.” They add that it is likely “throughout the medieval period, at different times, different conformations of horses were desirable in response to changing battlefield tactics and cultural preferences.” Size, in other words, was not the only thing that mattered. Medieval horses were probably bred and trained with a combination of biological and temperamental factors in mind, which may have shifted as military strategies changed, requiring the animals to perform different functions.

But it’s also impossible for archaeologists to definitively identify which horse remains belong to steeds who engaged in combat. Without other indications like specific burial records, there’s no way to discern the remains of a warhorse or a farm horse based on bones alone, even if researchers had access to whole skeletons, rather than the single bones they usually get from an individual site.

To tease out more of these horses’ histories, the authors write that they’ll need to conduct more detailed investigations on how bone shape differs between individual horses. Future studies may also use ancient DNA analysis to track ancestry and observe how English horse genomes changed over time.

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If you lived in antiquity and you wanted to paint something, then your colors probably came from squeezing a natural material into powdered pigment. If you wanted red, you had a few options: ochre, for instance, or madder, which comes from plant roots. But those pigments cannot produce nearly as vivid a red as vermillion, which comes from a scarlet-colored rock, cinnabar—prized for its vibrancy throughout the ancient world.

Vermillion has one slight downside. Chemists might know cinnabar by another name: mercury(II) sulfide. Ingesting that mercury, as you might imagine, is toxic. 

In fact, researchers recently found mercury’s fingerprints in the archaeological record in Spain and Portugal. Testing mercury concentrations in bones from ancient Iberia, researchers singled out a period in the region’s history when its denizens used a great deal of cinnabar—and may have suffered the brunt of its toxic effects. If so, this would be the world’s oldest known cases of mercury poisoning.

“These people, who had no written language, were using this [cinnabar], and their bones are telling us something about their lives now,” says Steven D. Emslie, a biologist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Emslie and his colleagues published their findings in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology on October 13.

In rock form, cinnabar isn’t toxic; the mercury is tightly bound to the sulfur. But when cinnabar is crushed into a powder, it becomes more dangerous. If you breathe cinnabar powder in, or if it makes skin contact—perhaps, by wearing vermillion-dyed clothes—it will enter your bloodstream.

The world’s richest known cinnabar deposits can be found at Almadén in central Spain. Almadén, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, reached its height in the 16th and 17th centuries, when liquid mercury extracted from cinnabar could be used to refine gold and silver ore that Spanish colonizers shipped back from the Americas. As Almadén’s importance grew, so did its infamy as a toxic place where prisoners and slaves withered away from mercury poisoning.

But the area churned out cinnabar long before Columbus—in fact, long before the Romans ruled Iberia. As early as 5000 BCE, its ancient denizens were mining and trading it.

This ancient time intrigued the study researchers. Archaeologists in Spain and Portugal sampled bone from 370 skeletons, found at 23 different sites across the Iberian peninsula. Emslie, who typically studies the bones of seabirds, offered to examine them.

[Related: Indigo, vermillion, and other ancient colors that have decorated the world for millennia]

The study authors weren’t looking for mercury at first, but a pattern quickly became clear. Bones dating from between roughly 2900 and 2300 BCE—part of a time period in Iberia that archaeologists call the Copper Age—had astoundingly high mercury concentrations.

Emslie and his colleagues found concentrations of mercury as high as 400 parts per million (ppm) in some Copper Age bones. Poisoning symptoms begin above 10 ppm in hair, another material used to measure mercury exposure, according to the World Health Organization. 

It’s hard to compare bone to the biomarkers typically used to measure mercury poisoning in humans today, which haven’t lasted those millennia. Hair, blood, and urine, for instance, tend to accumulate mercury quickly, and mercury will deposit in the liver, kidneys, and other organs. Bone will accumulate mercury much more slowly, and mercury there may indicate higher exposures elsewhere in the body.

“I don’t think this individual should be alive at those kinds of levels in bones, because the levels in the brain or the kidney or the liver would be significantly higher than that,” says Michael Aschner, a toxicologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, who was not involved with the study.

 At the same time, bone “provides a record of exposure. That’s the important thing: it provides a historical record that would otherwise be lost to time,” says Paul Wax, executive director of the American College of Medical Toxicology, who was also not involved with the study.

The researchers wondered whether mercury seeped into the bone from the outside, but there wasn’t enough mercury in the surrounding soil to seep in the bones at such high levels. So the researchers settled on another culprit: cinnabar.

The mercury-laced bones mostly came from Copper Age tombs, elaborate affairs housing the resting places of multiple people—one tomb, for instance, belonged to seven women who may have been priestesses. They were buried with a wealth of artifacts that archaeologists presume were grave offerings.

Some of those tombs are also resplendent in cinnabar. It’s found across the tombs’ rocks and sprinkled on the bodies. “There was a period of time when cinnabar was really important in this community, in these populations,” Emslie says.

Aschner wonders if, because of the high mercury levels in the bone, “either there was some ritual after [death], or the mercury somehow got into the bone after the person was buried.”

But not all the tombs with mercury-poisoned skeletons contained cinnabar. Those ancient people, then, may have encountered cinnabar in their life. They may have ingested it by accident, but archaeologists have raised another theory: that the Iberians knew perfectly well what they were playing with. 

“They must have known that it was toxic for the amount of time it was being used, and they might have actually taken it as a drug, for ritual, because of the effect it gave them,” says Emslie. “We don’t know for sure. We’ll never know.”

Toward the end of the Copper Age, mercury levels in the bones drop off. Archaeologists aren’t entirely sure why. Perhaps new people migrated there, bringing new rituals. What they do know, however, is that the Copper Age’s elaborate mass burials gave way to simpler, smaller tombs, and that cinnabar faded away. It would not be until Roman times, several millennia later, that vermillion would again color the walls of Iberia.

Archaeologists don’t know whether Iberia’s access to the mines at Almadén made it a special nexus of cinnabar. Cinnabar appears in volcanic regions around the globe. People in both the Old and New Worlds used it everywhere from Mesoamerica to China, where it was traded along the fabled Silk Road. People in pre-Columbian South America, in fact, may have known of cinnabar’s toxicity and sprinkled it in tombs to ward off grave robbers. 

“There’s just so many other places where this could be investigated,” Emslie says. “It’ll be interesting to see if similar high values show up in other parts of the world.”

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Just a river’s crossing away from St. Louis, Missouri, rests an ancient and mysterious anthropological site that few Americans know of. Scholars still discuss the potential reasons for the demise of Cahokia, a massive settlement that may have housed as many as 20,000 people by 1050 A.D. The metropolis, which sits in the fertile floodplain of the Mississippi River Valley that’s now western Illinois, was made up of towering, handmade earthen mounds, the largest of which still exists at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. While there are a lot of unknowns when it comes to this ancient civilization, including why it disappeared, remains have helped researchers paint a picture of what the city was like at its peak. 

Ancient teeth at this site hint that it was home to a diverse group of Indigenous people. Roughly a third of the population came to Cahokia from other areas in middle America, based on the varying strontium levels in the dental fragments. The architecture is telling too: The organization of the mounds in Cahokia leads archeologists to believe this city had some level of urban planning, and was not just a collection of villages. Rulers lived on top of mounds, looking down at the structures other inhabitants lived in. Farming, hunting, logging, pottery, and weaving were all conducted inside this massive city. 

[Related: The famous Nazca lines aren’t mysterious—but they are ingenious]

In the center of Cahokia, surrounding the biggest mound of roughly 100 feet tall, sat the city center, encircled by a massive wooden palisade. The area held a plaza that archeologists believe was inspired by the creators concept of the cosmos at the time, with the four corners marking the cardinal directions. Researchers believe this town center, and the buildings on top of the central mound, were actually where religious ceremonies and events took place. It’s even possible that people traveled from outside of Cahokia just to attend these gatherings. 

As for why Cahokia fell, a few theories have come into play, but with conflicting evidence. For a while, it was believed that the residents’ dependence on wood for their structures led to over deforestation of the land, which ultimately made it less fertile. But soil samples show that the land would still have been fertile shortly after the fall of Cahokia. Colonists did not reach this space until much later, making disease an unlikely calamity as well. Other experts believe that fighting with neighboring groups may have caused Cahokia’s fall.

Today, the mounds comprise a city park and state historic site, but are in consideration for a national park designation. Visitors can climb the steps of the highest mound still standing at Cahokia, among more than 65 other preserved mounds. It’s one of the few places in the US where people can freely walk through a millennia-old metropolis.

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A fossilized skull discovered in Ethiopia in the 1970s should be considered an entirely new species of human, scientists proposed this week in an effort to shed light on the very murky question of what to call our ancient ancestors. 

In a study published on Thursday in Evolutionary Anthropology Issues News and Reviews, researchers compared anatomical traits in fossil hominins—the group that includes present-day humans and our extinct close relatives—from Africa, Europe, and Asia. They concluded that two currently recognized species should be retired, and that the 600,000-year-old remains from Ethiopia, along with several other specimens, should be classified as a new species they’ve dubbed Homo bodoensis.

Not everyone is convinced that a new species name is needed—after all, none of these specimens represent lineages that have never been studied before. However, the researchers argue, the changes could help researchers decipher a murky period in human evolution and move past terms with vague meanings and racist legacies. 

[Related: Your ancestors might have been Martians]

“We’re becoming increasingly aware that these groups did move and did interact, and that’s why it’s important to have a proper way of talking about them,” says Mirjana Roksandic, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba and coauthor of the paper. “​​It really opens the possibility to talk about who moved when, and what happened to them when they moved, and who actually interacted with whom.”

She and her colleagues focused on hominins who lived during the Middle Pleistocene age, which spanned from 774,000 to 129,000 years ago. Although paleoanthropologists refer to these hominins as different species, they’re not using the term as most of us normally think of it. “They interacted, they interbred, and they cannot be considered as definite biological species,” Roksandic explains. Instead, the category is used to describe groups of hominins with very similar anatomical features.

These differences are more obvious in some groups of hominins than others. European Neanderthal fossils from this period differ in numerous ways from modern humans, Roksandic says. However, many other hominin fossils look very similar, making it harder to determine how they relate to each other and to Homo sapiens.

In the past, new species were often declared on the basis of a few teeth or other fragmentary evidence, says John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the new research. One such case was Homo heidelbergensis, which was first named after a jawbone found in a gravel pit in Germany in the early 20th century, he says. 

Then, in later decades, many fossils that didn’t seem to fit with Neanderthals, modern humans, or our ancestor Homo erectus were lumped in with Homo heidelbergensis. “The species was named after a mandible; we never knew what the head and face should look like,” says Shara Bailey, a biological anthropologist and director of the Center for the Study of Human Origins at New York University. “Basically it’s like a trash basket category.”

This helped spawn a “totally confusing” situation, Roksandic says, in which the name Homo heidelbergensis is sometimes used to refer generally to hominins from the Middle Pleistocene, and other times to refer to various specimens found in Europe. She and her colleagues argue that it’s time to abandon the name altogether, given that recent genetic evidence suggests that many fossils currently assigned to Homo heidelbergensis are actually early Neanderthals. 

Then there’s Homo rhodesiensis, which was first known from a skull uncovered by mining activity in Zambia in the 1920s. The term is sometimes used to indicate a common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, but can also refer to all the hominin lineages represented in the Late Pleistocene. But the name is rarely used in either context, because of its association with the atrocities committed under British colonial rule in the region of Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe). For these reasons, Roksandic’s team writes in the new study, Homo rhodesiensis has to go. 

[Related: Humans owe our evolutionary success to friendship

“Homo bodoensis would fill that void that’s left by Homo rhodesiensis,” she says. The researchers selected the enigmatic skull from Ethiopia to represent the species in their description. However, they also consider the Zambian skull and several other sets of fossils from Africa, and possibly the eastern Mediterranean, as members of Homo bodoensis. 

Like Neanderthals and some Asian hominins from the Middle Pleistocene, Homo bodoensis seems to have had an enlarged brain—a crucial development on the road to modern humans. It’s likely that Homo bodoensis was the first to split off from their shared common ancestor, with the remaining branch later splintering into Neanderthals and a group called Denisovans found in Asia, the researchers propose. 

Homo bodoensis’s most distinctive feature is a three-part segmented brow ridge. There’s no obvious advantage to having different kinds of brow shapes, but this region does vary among different kinds of hominins, Roksandic says. Neanderthals had thick, curved brow ridges, while in modern humans the brow is less pronounced and the sides are thinned out. 

As a next step, she and her colleagues are planning to investigate whether fossils from Europe and Asia might be members of Homo bodoensis, which could shed light on whether and when the group might have moved out of Africa.

“It’s really hard to understand what is happening in terms of human evolution in that time period unless you look at it on a very global scale,” Roksandic says. 

What’s in a name?

Hawks agrees that the two species that Roksandic and her colleagues propose jettisoning are “a problem.”

“These are confusing names, they have bad histories, and it would be way better if we had names that actually could be [scientifically] tested and that can apply in a sense that all of us are willing to use,” he says.

However, he favors a different solution. “All of these populations interbred with each other, and it seems like they’re the same species—and the name for that species is Homo sapiens,” Hawks says. “Why don’t we recognize that they’re the same species, and all these fossils going back to the common ancestor are representatives of that evolving species?”

Bailey also isn’t sure that Homo bodoensis brings clarity to this phase of human evolution. Given that the fossils seem to belong to a direct ancestor to Homo sapiens, she says, “Why don’t we just call that archaic Homo sapiens?” 

Nonetheless, Bailey says, the paper makes a good case for ditching Homo heidelbergensis and Homo rhodesiensis. “It also provides readers with kind of a glimpse into just how complex human evolution is, that it’s not this ladder-like [process in which] we evolved step-by-step into ‘Tada, we’re Homo sapiens!’”

The names we give bygone hominins reveal how we see them fitting into our family tree—and what makes the humans alive today unique. “That’s what people care about: what’s ‘us,’ when did we evolve, when did we develop the things we associate as being special about us?” Bailey says. 

Names allow us to understand the relationships between different hominin lineages and how they interacted, Hawks says, but they needn’t be set in stone. 

“It’s good to have these conversations,” he says. “Looking at the way that we describe groups, it’s really important to continue to have critical thinking about what are we accomplishing by naming them?”

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In 1982, before the eyes of watching television cameras, the wooden remains of the 16th-century English warship Mary Rose were lifted from its underwater grave. Since then, it’s proven a veritable time capsule into Tudor Britain. But, as you might imagine, nearly 500 years under the sea doesn’t do wonders for keeping the ship in shape.

That’s where some very modern X-ray scanning has now come on board. Researchers have turned to techniques used in chemistry and manufacturing to scan wood from the Mary Rose. Unlike previous techniques that rely primarily on finding one specific element, this X-ray technique allows researchers to scan a relic and see any potential contaminants and where they are. The researchers published their work in the journal Matter on October 27.

“It is vital when dealing with precious materials that you get as much information you can in one go, and this is what this technique offers,” says Eleanor Schofield, one of the study’s authors, and head of conservation at the Mary Rose Trust, the charity that takes care of the ship.

First, a bit of history. When the Mary Rose was built in 1511, it was one of the largest ships in the English fleet. And the ship was no stranger to battle; early 16th century England, during the reign of King Henry VIII, was a time of frequent wars, particularly with France.

It was in 1545, amidst one of those wars, that the French were planning to land an invading army on English soil. The Mary Rose was called to help fight them off. That brought the ship to the Solent, an offshoot of the English Channel that separates Great Britain from the Isle of Wight. It was there that the Mary Rose would sink, taking most of her crew down in the process.

But to conservators, perhaps even more important than that history is what happened when the Mary Rose was away from human eyes, during the long centuries it spent at the bottom of the Solent.  Since much of it was buried under the sediment, it avoided being eaten away by bacteria. But that doesn’t mean it was perfectly preserved.

“It did spend hundreds of years essentially marinating in seawater,” says Schofield, “and as such there are lots of things in the wood which you would not normally find in fresh wood.” 

And when the Mary Rose left its watery tomb, some of those substances came out of the woodwork and began reacting with oxygen in the atmosphere. Sulfur, for instance, can turn into acids or salts that can destroy the wood. Compounding the problem is a substance called polyethylene glycol (PEG), which conservators after 1982 sprayed on the outer layers of the wood to preserve it. The PEG has done its job admirably, but it’s also started to break down.

Naturally, trying to keep the ship’s wood intact, so that we can continue to study it in future, is something conservators like Schofield are rather concerned with. And that begins with knowing what and where potential contaminants are. That’s not as straightforward as it might seem.

“Typically techniques we have done in the past have characterised one particular element,” says Schofield. For instance, she says, “we know that sulfur is there so we use a technique to decipher what type of sulfur is there.” That’s useful if you know that an element is there, but that knowledge can’t be taken for granted.

So Schofield and her colleagues brought in some of the latest in modern physics. They took a sample of the Mary Rose’s wood, a 5mm sliver about the diameter of a pencil, to ESRF, a synchrotron light source—a facility that can produce very, very bright X-ray beams—in Grenoble, France.

Their technique relies on watching what those X-rays do as they pass through a sample. Some get absorbed by the materials inside. That’s how a hospital CT scan works; just replace your body with a small sliver of wood. But other X-rays get deflected, or scattered, off the molecules in the material. Detecting those X-rays can give researchers an in-depth map of the sample.

[Related: How scientists keep ancient shipwrecks from crumbling into dust]

Combining those two techniques with the power of computers, researchers can reconstruct the insides of their sample. Turning this technique to Mary Rose wood, the researchers found a variety of particles. They could also measure how far the PEG particles were from contaminants. 

Moreover, they found particles that previous methods hadn’t detected, such as zinc sulfide produced by bacteria. Those particles, the researchers think, are an early warning of chemical reactions that can acidify the wood. Finding them could help conservators preemptively stop that.

Their technique also has the benefit of not destroying the sample in the process, something that isn’t always a given in the world of analysis—and something that’s important, considering there’s only so much Mary Rose wood to go around.

“This is the first time this technique has been used on cultural heritage, I believe,” says Schofield, “and I think is a game changer.”

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Did you know that pale ales pair well with blue cheese? Maybe it’s not your go-to bar combination, but there’s now evidence that as far back as 2,700 years ago, people from current-day Austria were enjoying it. And we know that because of an analysis of paleofeces, a fancy term for very old poop.

A paper published this week in Current Biology focuses on four paleofecal samples from the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Baroque Age. While  the researchers from the Institute for Mummy Studies, the University of Trento, and the Vienna Museum of Natural History were able to learn what kind of beer and cheese these people consumed, the findings more importantly show that industrialization likely transformed the Western diet, and that archaeology and gut health, like beer and blue cheese, make an oddly perfect pair.

“By using molecular means, we can [make] a more detailed picture” of how people ate and preserved food, says Frank Maixner, coordinator for the Institute for Mummy Studies and the paper’s lead author. By studying the remains that contained traces of the beer and cheese, Maixner’s team has seen that humans as long as 2,700 years ago in the Iron Age were already using sophisticated techniques in flavoring the fermented foods.

The samples came from salt mines near the small town of Hallstatt, which is about 45 miles from Salzburg. (“Salz” means salt, and Hallstatt is part of Austria’s Salzwelten region, so the crystals obviously mean a lot to the area.) Maixner says people worked in the mines all day, so they had to eat and relieve themselves underground. With thousands of years of pressure, plus dehydrating salt in the soil, their feces turned into non-smelly, desiccated samples with biomolecules still intact. To be sure there was no contamination with the soil, Maixner and his team compared an analysis of the feces with that of the surrounding dirt. 

[Related: The answer to lactose intolerance might be in Mongolia]

“I think it is a good mix of using a technology to get scientific proof for what we are seeing that microbiome plays an important role,” says Ashutosh Mangalam, a pathology professor at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine who was not involved in the study.

The millennia-old poop was so well-preserved, it provided Maixner and his team with insight into the Iron Age miners’ gut microbiome. There were a few clues to what type of beer the workers were guzzling. One fungus they found was Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or brewer’s yeast. They were able to eliminate certain types of beer, like lagers and other beer brewed through spontaneous fermentation, based on what kinds of yeast were absent. Maixner says his team suspected a “traditional beer” like a pale ale, which also isn’t as sensitive to storage temperature as lagers and is more shelf-stable without refrigeration technology.

While the primary takeaway is that humans had sophisticated ways of preserving food, Maixner’s second conclusion is that they also had healthier, more biodiverse gut microbiomes because they were eating unprocessed foods.

“Our gut is a muscle, so it needs to be trained,” says Maixner. The historic poop showed that these people dined on whole grains and fibers, which promoted bacterial biodiversity and in turn, a healthy gut. But that has changed since the Iron Age due to industrialization, Maixner adds. The advent of processed foods decreased complex carbohydrates and fiber, which meant more modern Westerners needed fewer bacteria to break foods down in their stomachs, so their guts became less biodiverse. Maixner poo-poos processed foods, saying they train our guts to be “lazy.”

The quality of evidence in the Hallstatt findings might set a new bar for archaeological research. “This is very surprising because so far what we’ve seen is based on anecdotal data,” Mangalam says. This is the first study he’s seen that successfully analyzed bacteria in paleofecal matter.

Maixner believes the crisscross of archaeology and microbiology could be very helpful, illuminating the greater puzzle of human history. Well-preserved samples are hard to come by, so researchers must make hay while they can.

“Our duty is to make the best out of this,” he says of the wizened poop samples. “It’s always precious material.”

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Whether you’ve been chased by a goose or witnessed an ostrich run at top speed, you know birds can sometimes be terrifying. At the top of the list is the cassowary—a demon bird that clocks in between 4 and 5.6 feet tall. It can run up to 31 miles per hour on its powerful legs, each tipped with three dagger-like toes, and can leap almost 7 feet up in the air.

The three modern species of cassowaries reside on various Pacific islands, including New Guinea, where they’re prized for their meat, feathers, and bones. But how did ancient communities ever wrangle the fierce animals?

Turns out, they may have brought them home with them. There are clues that as early as 18,000 years ago, humans in New Guinea were systematically harvesting cassowary eggs, new research shows. The paper, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, details how a team of anthropologists from the US, Australia, and New Zealand used ancient eggshell fragments found at rock shelters and a combination of 3D imaging, modeling, and morphological descriptions to determine how old this practice was.

[Related: New Guinean singing dogs still roam the wilderness]

“The eggs were harvested very late in the developmental window of cassowary chicks,” says Penn State archaeologist Kristina Douglass, the study’s lead author. “The pattern that we found is not a random pattern—people were intentionally selecting them at that stage.” 

There’s two hypotheses why: Collectors may have immediately consumed the contents of the egg, as evidenced by cooking burns on the shells, or they may have tried to hatch and rear these chicks themselves. Cassowaries are dangerous and difficult to hunt, and given that their chicks identify the first being they see as their parent (a process called imprinting), it’s much easier and safer to try to raise them in captivity.

While it was probably wise that people didn’t take cassowaries head on, they didn’t domesticate them either. Douglass says that domestication entails human intervention for a species’ survival. Instead, she describes the egg-harvesting system as a possible form of management, where island dwellers bred the birds for their own purposes. This meant they may have been raising some cassowary chicks—even as many of the birds roamed free in the wild—and weren’t training the captive animals to depend on people.

Analyzing eggshells is cool, but to Douglass, what’s more interesting is that a pre-agricultural society had developed this practice of systematically harvesting and breeding chicks. “People who live off of the land have really sophisticated knowledge of that land,” she says. “We tend to think that it’s only when agriculture or industrialization developed that humans become savvy and civilized. All of those words are really loaded.” Calling hunter-gatherers and foragers primitive underestimates their level of knowledge.

[Related: Ancient hunter-gatherers didn’t all eat paleo]

Douglass and her team will continue to search for and analyze eggshells from all regions of New Guinea. The ecologically diverse island could yield different patterns at highlands zones versus at lowlands, potentially because cassowary development varied depending on region.

While cassowaries are still culturally important throughout New Guinea, Douglass says there’s no way to trace back one present-day group of people to the eggshells she analyzed because there have been so many migrations to and from the island in the past 18,000 years. Even so, it’s clear that this fierce creature’s esteem has persisted for millennia, rightfully earning it the title of “the world’s most dangerous bird.”

The post Ancient humans might have bred one of the scariest birds on the planet appeared first on Popular Science.

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A set of footprints buried in the dunes of New Mexico’s White Sands National Park has landed in the middle of an ongoing reevaluation of the human history of the Americas.

The prints were left over thousands of years by humans who walked among giant sloths, camels, and mammoths on the grassy shores of a lake 23,000 years ago, as determined by radiocarbon dating of grass seeds found around the footprints.

That’s in stark contrast to the conventional hypothesis in archaeology, which holds that the first Americans crossed over between 16,000 and 12,000 years ago, when the glaciers still covered North America, and Siberia and interior Alaska were part of the same grassy subcontinent called Beringia.

But the footprints aren’t the first find to contradict that hypothesis. In 2020, a team found what they believe to be 30,000-year-old stone tools in a cave in central Mexico, followed shortly by another find in Mexico that may be more than 20,000 years old. They haven’t reshaped consensus within the field, because of questions over either the artifacts themselves or the dating used on the site.

Yet even archaeologists who aren’t convinced of older habitation agree that these footprints could cause them to rethink their views. “White Sands is clearly different as there are no artifacts to debate,” says Jesse Tune, an archaeologist at Fort Lewis College. “It’s hard to imagine more conclusive evidence for human activity than the literal [footprint] of someone standing on the shoreline of a lake ~23,000 years ago.”

It’s hard to find an archaeological site that isn’t up for some interpretation. “If folks are walking on that lake bed for 2,000 years, there should also be a bunch of archaeological sites associated with them that are nearby,” says Jessi Halligan, an archaeologist who studies the early habitation of the Americas at Florida State University. “Hopefully a few were preserved and are dateable to tell us more. Having some kids and teenagers trekking around in the mud is exciting, but as archaeologists, we always want to know more of the story.”

If the footprints do tip the scales towards an older migration, that could lead to a wider reevaluation of other pre-glacial artifacts. And that wouldn’t be the first time in recent decades that the archaeological consensus around the settling of the Americas has changed. Until the 2000s, there was still open debate over whether a group known as the Clovis people were the first inhabitants of the Americas. More recent genetic and archaeological evidence, however, has made it clear that other peoples had arrived earlier.

[Related: Early humans hooked up with other species a whole bunch]

“There are many sites that have really good dating and really good reports that are much older,” says Paulette Steeves, an archaeologist at Algoma University who studies Indigenous history, and author of The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere. She’s compiled hundreds of finds that she finds credible that date back before 16,000 years.

Other archaeologists argue that these older sites contain less clear-cut evidence than the newer ones, making them less compelling against a widely held theory.

Once a hypothesis is established, it takes an extra lift to overturn it. “Archaeology is a careful balance of skepticism and open-mindedness, and I’m cautious to get too excited about the White Sands prints until we have more information,” says Tune.

Tune’s previous research on other possible pre-glacial sites, which might overturn the conventional hypothesis, has turned up blank: in 2018, he investigated three older sites and found that in each case, what had appeared to be stone or bone tools were either formed naturally, or couldn’t be definitively connected to the ancient layers.

But Steeves approaches the existing ancient sites differently. There’s a long history of what she describes as “violent criticism against archaeologists discussing older sites.” Steeves is Cree-Metis, and says that tendency is rooted in archaeology’s use as a tool to discount Indigenous claims to North America.

To her, the existing finds tell a consistent story of human habitation in the Americas that goes back hundreds of thousands of years. “There’s a word in the Cree language that means ‘when the glaciers went home,’ or ‘when the ice went home,’” she says. “People have those words in their Indigenous language because they were here before, right?”

She argues those non-physical pieces of evidence are important for contextualizing older archaeological sites. “Good science looks at every form of evidence available to highlight what you’re looking to discuss.”

“I always like to remind people to think critically,” says Steeves. “[Human] history has changed so much over the last 100 years, everywhere in the world. We’re always doing more excavations, we’re always finding out more.”

The post These footprints could push back human history in the Americas appeared first on Popular Science.

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ON JUNE 21, 2020, Mariusz Stepien headed to a farmer’s field to see what he could find. The pasture he picked that particular Sunday—the first time he’d been out in months, after Scotland imposed movement restrictions in the early phase of the COVID crisis—looked like a tourism ad. The small rise sits in the middle of a lush green field a few miles from the town of Peebles, once a center of the nation’s wool industry and now a bedroom community for nearby Edinburgh.

The River Tweed meanders through the valley below, and on a cloudless day the lush, rolling peaks of the Scottish Borders mark the horizon in all directions. A waist-high stone wall runs along the field’s edge, penning in some 200 sheep, and a narrow two-lane road runs along one side.

Stepien, a carpenter by trade, owns a small home remodeling business. But his passion is metal detecting. For the past nine years, regardless of the weather, he’s spent every Sunday he could walking fields and pastures in the countryside, searching for buried treasure. Sometimes he goes alone, sometimes with like-minded friends. “I wait the whole week for Sunday,” he says. “For me, it’s the nicest way to spend time in a beautiful landscape.”

To find buried metal, Stepien sometimes paces for 12 hours straight, sweeping the wand of a four-foot-long metal detector (a Minelab Equinox 800, to be exact, a popular model at the higher end of the market) back and forth. Based on technology developed during World War II to help find and defuse land mines, the devices use an electromagnetic coil to generate a current that, when it hits a conductive material, sparks a signal—a whine he hears in his worn black headphones.

Over the years, he’s learned to tell from the pitch what sort of treasure is hidden below the surface, and how much. A low tone might mean an iron nail. Slightly higher could be a silver coin, or the brass end of a hunter’s spent shotgun shell. The louder the noise, the bigger the find.

As he mounted a small rise in the middle of the meadow that summer day, his headphones filled with a clear, high tone—the strongest he had ever heard. Kneeling in the thick grass, he lifted a rock the size of a loaf of bread, then began clearing loose soil underneath with a small paintbrush. After a few minutes he plucked something green, round, and hard out of the dirt.

At the other end of the field, Stepien’s friend and fellow detectorist Dariusz Gucwa was making his own way through the grass when his walkie-talkie crackled to life. “Dariusz, please come now,” Stepien called. “I think I found something big.”

In the following weeks, this find would spur a massive excavation effort begun out of a unique Scottish office called Treasure Trove, a two-person team that fields reports of artifacts discovered in local soil. In practical terms, the agency is a go-between: On one side are hobbyists, keen-eyed gardeners, beachcombers, and anyone else who uncovers an artifact from the past. On the other are museums.

By law, amateur treasure hunters like Stepien are required to report anything with potential historical or archaeological importance, from stone tools to silver coins, along with information on where it was found. The scheme is rooted in the ancient dogma that any unclaimed property found in Scotland belongs to the government. Or, in the tradition-laden language of Great Britain, the Crown.

Over the past 20 years, Treasure Trove has emerged in Europe as an example of collaboration between heritage authorities and the metal detecting community—two groups historically very much at odds. Responsible recreational searching, advocates argue, helps find objects and sites archaeologists don’t have the budget or time to search for.

Finding common ground

The relationship between archaeologists and metal detectorists like Stepien is usually fraught. In Scotland and neighboring England and Wales, there’s an active community of hardcore hobbyists who share their finds in online chat rooms and meet for occasional metal detecting “rallies” that bring dozens of people together in farm fields to search, share stories, and show off their finds.

While the hobbyists like to think of themselves as treasure hunters or amateur archaeologists, many professionals prefer the term “looters.” Experts say metal detector finds often wind up damaged, disappear into dusty attics, or get sold on the black market for stolen antiquities. In countries like Italy, Greece, and Spain, where people have used metal detectors to locate and plunder intact graves or archaeological sites, police have special units devoted to tracking down illegal excavators.

Even well-meaning amateurs can do harm. Over-eager hobbyists sometimes dunk coins in vinegar to clean off their protective patinas or straighten bent pieces of metal, potentially erasing clues as to how they were once used or why they were discarded. Once they are removed from the find spot and that damage is done, the object’s “context,” in archaeological terms, is lost forever.

[Related: Archaeologists and construction workers are teaming up to save historic relics.]

There’s a philosophical element, too. In many countries, ancient artifacts and ruins are considered public heritage. “To us, archaeological items don’t belong to the owner of the land, but to the state, to everyone,” says Ignacio Rodriguez Temino, a curator at the Department of Heritage in Seville, Spain, who researches heritage laws. “We think no one has the right to become the owner of what they find if it is an archaeological object.” In Spain and most other European countries, using metal detectors to look for artifacts is against the law.

Until the 1990s, metal detecting occupied a sort of gray area in the UK, allowed on private land but frowned on by authorities and archaeologists. Instead of cracking down on hobbyists, in 1996 Scottish authorities decided to take an “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach. Though the legal principles behind it have been around for centuries, creating an official Treasure Trove office and a transparent compensation system with publicly listed fees gave metal detectorists and others an incentive to report finds that might otherwise be lost.

England, Wales, and Northern Ireland initiated a similar effort, called the Portable Antiquities Scheme, in 1997. Over the last five years, a handful of other European countries—including Finland, the Netherlands, and Denmark—have moved in the same direction. “It’s a pragmatic stance. Metal detecting is happening, and it’s very hard to enforce a ban,” says Pieterjan Deckers, an archaeologist at the Free University of Brussels who researches metal detecting and helped set up a reporting system in Belgium. “As archaeologists, we might as well engage with these people. You get a lot more information if you gain their trust.”

Ideally, metal detecting can be a way to enlist members of the public in data-gathering. Individual coins, for example, might not have much value on their own, especially when they’re plucked from farm fields torn up by decades of intensive plowing. But with a database of coins discovered by detectorists, a canny researcher might be able to understand the political reach of a past kingdom, or map out the places people were most likely to settle at different periods. Metal detecting has revealed new insights about the Viking colonization of England, for example, by allowing researchers to map coins and metal finds.

The Portable Antiquities Scheme has registered more than 1.5 million finds in a database since it began. “British archaeology has been revolutionized by the understanding of metalwork,” Deckers says. “If metal detecting happens within a certain set of rules, it can help preserve the past.”

When a lead comes into Treasure Trove—usually a few each day, typically cellphone snaps sent via email—agency head Emily Freeman and her colleagues reach out to archaeologists, museum curators, and other experts, sharing photos and adding finds to a national database. If they decide an object belongs in one of the country’s museums, the artifact is claimed on behalf of the government by the impressively named Queen and Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer. In most years, Scottish museums have intervened in around 150 cases this way, with each case representing anything from a single coin to a hoard of hundreds of artifacts.

Finders, meanwhile, are given a reward based on the market value. In 2017, that ranged from less than $15 for a musket ball to $2.5 million for a hoard of Viking treasures in Galloway – a sum Freeman calls “very unusual case for us.” (Out of about 60 finders that year, meanwhile, nine waived their reward.) Most are in the $15 to $10,000 range.

When she’s not identifying finds, Freeman spends a lot of time on outreach. She holds events at museums and pubs around Scotland to educate hobbyists like Stepien about the vast gap between archaeology and “nighthawking,” the term for searching without a landowner’s permission, or in national parks or other protected areas—all illegal in Scotland. “We’re trying to shift into seeing the value metal detectorists are adding to the archaeological record, or to museum collections,” she says

Stepien pausing in that field is a flicker of hope. He had never reported anything to Treasure Trove before, but thanks to friends in the community, he knew who to call.

Kneeling over the hole, Stepien and Gucwa snapped photos with their phones as Stepien brushed away more soil. The palm-sized find was metallic, but so dirt-encrusted he couldn’t make out what it was.

Over the next half hour, Gucwa watched and took pictures while Stepien lifted four more objects out of the earth. Three were D-shaped, and rounded at the edges like no coin Stepien had ever seen. When he rubbed the moist dirt away with his fingers, he could make out concentric circle patterns and what looked like bits of wood. He swore softly in his native Polish.

Stepien stopped digging, carefully lifted the stone back into place, and smoothed down the grass nearby to cover up any signs of disturbance. Buzzing with excitement, he and Gucwa snapped one last photo, carefully wrapped the metal objects, packed up their gear, and drove away. “Four things in such a small hole? That’s not normal,” Stepien recalls. “I knew we had to call Treasure Trove.”

Taking the bronze

When she opened the email from Stepien, Freeman wasn’t sure what she was looking at. But she did know the artifacts in the attached photos were old. Really old. “Most of the objects we deal with aren’t that valuable monetarily. But they’re archaeologically still significant, or we wouldn’t be claiming them,” Freeman says. “There’s a big element of decision-making: Is it rare, unique, unusual?”

At first glance, the finds checked all three boxes. A historian with two masters’ degrees and an encyclopedic knowledge of Roman coins, Freeman says they didn’t look medieval, Viking, or Roman—the most common categories of pre-modern artifacts that cross her desk.  

On a hunch, she forwarded them to Fraser Hunter, an archaeologist and curator at the National Museum of Scotland. Hunter immediately knew their green patina suggested something older still: metal from the Bronze Age, which lasted from around 2200 to 800 BCE in Scotland.

Bronze, an alloy of copper, tin and occasionally lead, and trace metals like aluminum and arsenic, is particularly exciting to preservationists because of its chemistry. As it corrodes, the bronze creates an anti-bacterial environment in the surrounding soil. That means it slows and prevents the decay of materials like leather, wood, and fabric from decay for centuries, or longer. “Organics take you into the lost worlds of the past, into things that don’t normally survive. That really is the lodestone as an archaeologist,” Hunter says. “When you ally that to the fact that Mariusz said he’d left things in the ground, I knew this was something we had to go investigate.”

Less than 72 hours after his detector first pinged, Stepien led Freeman, Hunter, and a few other archaeologists to the spot where he first found the discs. It was a sunny, warm morning, and soon the whole crew was working in T-shirts to clear turf from a 12-by-12-foot square around the site.

As the experts worked, the two metal detectorists scanned the cleared ground. Using their wands and a stubby, orange, hand-held metal detector nicknamed “the Carrot,” Stepien and Gucwa helped pinpoint the outer limits of the deposits.

They soon identified a zone three feet long and two feet wide where the signal was particularly strong. Using trowels, dental picks, and brushes, the researchers removed soil a fraction of an inch at a time, revealing the outline of more objects: first a bronze sword, then a jumble of objects like the ones Stepien found days before.

[Related: What a 5,000-year-old plague victim reveals about the Black Death’s origins.]

Within a matter of hours, Hunter and Freeman realized they had a hoard on their hands— something intentionally hidden, either in the hopes of returning for it later or as part of a ritual or ceremony. The last time anything like it had been found in the area was in 1864. To Hunter, the real treasure wasn’t the metal; it was the traces of organic material he could make out among the artifacts, including a tangle of leather straps and a wood-and-leather scabbard concealing the blade of the sword.

That a farmer’s plow hadn’t torn it apart was a near-miracle, perhaps a benefit of the rocky soil. Had Stepien used a shovel instead of a brush to dig out the first few objects, or pushed deeper into the hole to pull out the metal he knew was still there, he might have done irreversible damage to the 3,000-year-old material. “You could have destroyed it in five minutes with a spade,” Hunter says. “It takes an enormous amount of self-restraint to stop. We’re really lucky they did.”

Digging out

Over the next 10 days, a remarkable find emerged from the stony Peebleshire pasture. Fraser was joined by Matthew Knight, a red-haired Bronze Age specialist at the National Museum of Scotland who was called back from pandemic furlough to help with the find. Slowly, they removed soil, pebbles, and fist-sized stones a fraction of an inch at a time, revealing the outline of the hoard.

The scabbard, it turned out, was just the beginning. Underneath, what had at first looked like a jumble of odd bronze coins turned out to be a complete horse harness, its metal tabs, rings, and buckles still attached to leather straps.

Some of the fittings were stubbornly hard to place–including the rounded pieces Stepien first pulled from the ground. After 12-hour days kneeling in the field, Knight returned home and pored through old excavation reports and museum catalogs trying to find something similar. When he figured it out, he was stunned: The fittings were part of a rattle pendant, a set of interlinked rings designed to jangle and chime as the horse walked. “It’s Bronze Age bling,” Knight says. “You’re seeing how a Bronze Age Rolls Royce looked.”

[Related: What archaeologists got wrong about ancient women.]

The find, Knight says, connects this quiet corner of Scotland to a wider world. Though virtually unprecedented in Britain, similar jangle pendants are common features of upper-class Bronze Age burials in Denmark and southern Scandinavia. Was Peebles once home to a foreign dignitary from across the North Sea, or an itinerant master craftsman? “Every now and then,” Knight says, “you get glimpses of international trade networks. We’re starting to get a picture of a community that had these connections with that part of Europe.”

Left exactly as they were buried 3,000 years ago, the finds contain information metal alone wouldn’t convey—and illustrate the gap between archaeologists and the public when it comes to the definition of “treasure.” For Knight, the real booty is the site’s organic remains, which were preserved down to fragments of the thread used to sew the straps together. “This tiny piece of string is perhaps the best thing I’ve ever found as an archaeologist,” Knight says. “The fact that we have all the organics means we can see associations–we can see how all this stuff worked.” Archaeologists knew that horses were first introduced to Britain around 1000 BCE, and now Knight had a chance to reconstruct how they were ridden, how big they were, even how their tack sounded when they trotted.

As exciting as they were, the non-metal remains posed a difficult problem. The sunny, cloudless skies the team enjoyed for the first few days of excavation quickly gave way to “traditional Scottish summer weather,” Hunter says, “sunny one minute and howling winds and rain the next.” At one point, the owner of a neighboring farm spread manure on the field upwind, suffusing the area with its stench for days.

Stepien began spending 24 hours a day in the field. He helped pile hay bales around the excavation trench to shield it from the wind. As the archaeologists worked, he shooed grazing sheep to make sure they didn’t walk across the site. Worried that the tents and daily work would attract the wrong kind of attention from locals, he bought a tent and sleeping bag and slept next to the hoard every night. He kept the nearest police station on speed dial. Gucwa, who works at an Edinburgh supermarket, joined him when he could. “We owed the place something,” Stepien says. “I felt responsible for that spot.”

Bringing it home

During the day, Knight and Hunter filled the site’s guardians in on what researchers know about Scotland around 1000 BCE—and what might have prompted someone to bury such valuable equipment. Most people lived in small farming villages with a few dozen residents. Horses and wagons were brand-new technology, available only to the powerful and well-connected. And archaeological evidence in Scotland and elsewhere in Britain suggests life was becoming more violent and dangerous. Communities started to build protected, fortified settlments; swords, shields and other military equipment became more common.

Digging in Peebles, meanwhile, slowed. Because the crumbly hide straps were threaded through the bronze fittings, every move threatened to damage the fragile leather and fabric remains. “I’ve excavated a dozen hoards, and never worked on anything as complicated and difficult,” Hunter says.

The deteriorating conditions forced him to make a tough call: spend another two or three months excavating the priceless, fragile hoard in the field, or try to encase it in plaster and lift it out of the ground in one piece, a last-resort technique archaeologists call block lifting. If they succeeded, the find could be transported to Edinburgh, where it could be safely picked apart by conservators in a lab at the National Museum.

In the end, Scottish weather made the answer clear. About two weeks after the excavation started, conditions went from bad to terrible. Alone in the dark, Stepien awoke at 3:20 AM to the sound of wind hammering the sides of his tent–and then the sound of ripping nylon as the canopy covering the hoard collapsed outside.

Soaked to the skin by pouring rain, he spent three hours trying to keep the trench from flooding and the tents from blowing away before he finally gave up. “It was Armageddon,” he says. A block lift it would be.

Preparing for the lift meant digging several feet of soil all around the hoard, leaving it sticking out like a plaster-wrapped pimple in the rocky trench. As Hunter, Knight, and conservators from the National Museum prepared for the block lift, Stepien custom-built a wood box four feet long and three feet wide for the transport.

The work revealed another clue to the find’s past. On either side were the remains of walls, indicating that the treasure was originally buried in the entryway of a dismantled building. The sword on top was pointed like an arrow towards the outside.

Many Bronze Age hoards seem to have been deliberately buried as offerings or sacrifices. Giving up or destroying so much wealth willingly must have been as much a demonstration of power as devotion. The Peebles treasure seems to be no different. “We’re seeing the hoard as an offering,” Knight says. “Something significant must have happened so that they decided to bury all this stuff. In the context of a small farming community, it’s a big deal–something like this wouldn’t have happened every day, or even every generation.”

[Related: What unearthing ancient cities can teach us about outer space.]

Today, the so-called Peebles hoard is locked in a climate-controlled lab at the museum, still in the box Stepien built for it. As soon as the pandemic allows, Knight will remove the plaster and begin to excavate it in earnest, carefully documenting the location and position of each piece as he unravels its straps–and secrets. “I’ll be working on this find for the next 10 years,” Knight says.

Finally, three weeks and a day after they first started digging, the team heaved the 440-pound block of wet soil out of the trench together and slid it into the back of Stepien’s white van. Months later, Stepien still recalls the sense of relief and pride he felt when the door closed.

On the hour-long drive to the museum in Edinburgh, he and Gucwa sat in silence, alone with the treasure one last time. For the first time in weeks, they felt a sense of calm relief. “We knew we had the most important thing in the world in the boot of the van,” Gucwa says. “We were so happy we didn’t have to worry anymore, and the treasure was secure.” It’s a sense of historical stewardship Treasure Trove and approaches like it hope will spread as Stepien and his fellow metal detectors continue sweeping fields for buried treasure.

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On Monday night, a cornucopia of celebrities descended upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the annual Met Gala—the fundraising event that always becomes a dizzying who’s who of pop stars, actors, ballplayers, fashion designers and the like.

It’s a big event for fashion and the most popular part of it all isn’t even the event itself really, but rather when the stars dilly-dally on the red carpet, surrounded by swarms of photographers on either side furiously clicking away at their cameras.

Read more: A.I. made this dress with ‘too much side boob’ for the Met Gala

If you’ve ever bothered to scroll through photos the day after on the internet, you’ll notice they’re mostly full of women. And rightly so. Because many of the most interesting and unique outfits are worn by women. Well, some things never change. According to a Dutch archaeology study, European women in the Middle Ages often wore better quality clothing than men.

As could easily be surmised from looking at photos of the celebs at the Met Gala, clothes are often highly indicative of the identity and societal position of the wearer. This has been a truth all throughout human history, and as such, archaeologists will often look to material possessions or remnants of clothes to paint a picture of the person whose skeleton they may be inspecting.

Despite ancient clothes’ investigative importance, archaeologist Chrystel Brandenburgh of Leiden University in the Netherlands, noticed a lack of textile research in her home country. So for her PhD research, she took to museums and archives to collect textile remnants from burial grounds and settlements spread throughout the Netherlands.

Unfortunately trying to find thousand year old pieces of cloth is not an easy task. When people were laid to rest in the Netherlands around 400 to 1000 AD, the time period Brandenbergh looked at, they were usually heavily clothed and covered with another thick blanket of some kind. Yet despite being laden in multiple layers of heavy cloth, their skeletons today are generally completely bare, the textile fibers having all rotted away. “Of all that material, you might find just a couple of remnants of about a square centimetre,” Brandenbergh said in a release.

From these simple textile scraps, Brandenbergh was able to determine the type of material and occasionally the color. Turns out, in many regions of the Netherlands, women wore linen clothes, whereas men donned clothes made of modest twill. Linen fibers, which come from the flax plant, are notoriously strong and flexible and today, clothes and fabrics that are 100 percent linen are generally quite expensive.

Though garments of linen are of much better quality than clothes made of other fabrics, the process of making them is usually more laborious. Could Medieval men have been lazy as well as having poor taste in clothes? Wouldn’t be much of a surprise. That is, if they had the initiative to make their own clothes.

Despite the general lack of sartorial taste or intelligence that ​men have evidenced across time​, you have to ​presume that there were exceptions to the rule. There must have been a Medieval Times version of Idris Elba, ​right?

Idris Elba at the 2016 Met Gala

The post Women In The Middle Ages Dressed Better Than Men appeared first on Popular Science.

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Centuries-old tombs in Eastern Sudan are arranged in clusters that resemble galaxies, new research indicates, demonstrating how both geographic and social processes have shaped the region’s so-called funerary landscape.

Scientists used a statistical tool originally developed for cosmology to investigate the region’s burial sites, which range from ancient structures to medieval and modern Islamic monuments. They found an intricate pattern created when people systematically built new tombs around earlier ones, offering a rare glimpse into the cultural history of the region’s Beja people, who settled the area more than 2,000 years ago and have preserved a semi-nomadic lifestyle.

“Discovering a funerary pattern that very likely appears to be based on complex genealogic and group affiliations gives precious information on their society not only at the time in history when the medieval Islamic tombs were built, but even to previous eras due to their inherent traditionalism,” Stefano Costanzo, a PhD student in archaeology at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in Italy and coauthor of the new findings, said in an email.

The technique he and his colleagues used to analyze the tombs can also be applied to other remote deserts to understand the origin and development of archaeological sites and landscapes, Costanzo and his colleagues reported on July 7 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Sudan’s hilly, semi-arid Kassala region is dotted with thousands of raised monuments, which are particularly noticeable because of the limited vegetation. Some of these are relatively simple mounds called tumuli that are more than 1,000 years old. They can be earthen- or stone-built rings, disks, or rounded cones and range from half a meter to 20 meters (1.6 to 65.6 feet) in diameter. 

There are also well-preserved Islamic monuments known as qubbas. These square structures can be up to five meters long and two meters high (16.4 and 6.6 feet) and are built from flat slabs of rock. The qubbas range from two-storey domed buildings erected in the 16th and 17th centuries to shrines containing single tombs of holy men dating up to the 20th century. 

[Related: Your ashes might say more about you than you’d think]

Costanzo and his team used satellite imagery and field surveys to identify the monuments scattered over an area of about 4,100 square kilometers (or 1,583 square miles). The researchers expected to find several hundred tombs clustered around a small group of mountains. To their surprise, however, they identified more than 10,000 spread across the region. They pinpointed 783 tumuli in small clusters around foothills and large, looser clusters in open plains, as well as 10,274 unadorned qubbas arranged in tight clusters, typical of the 16th and 17th centuries.

To determine how these sites were chosen, he and his colleagues drew on their previous research on the region’s environmental conditions. They found that monuments tended to appear in foothill-flat or gently rolling areas with plenty of raw construction material in the form of naturally occurring flat slabs of hard rock from weathered hillsides.

However, while regional geographical features explained why the tomb clusters were found in certain locations, Costanzo says, they couldn’t fully account for the smaller-scale arrangement of these tombs. 

The underlying social reasons for these clusters are challenging to decipher because clear written or oral information about the sites is lacking, he says. The tombs all look “remarkably similar,” and none of them have ever been excavated. 

To unravel the monuments’ complex pattern, the researchers used a kind of model known as a Neyman-Scott Cluster process. This technique was developed to explore how large numbers of objects, such as stars, cluster around unidentified central points. The team found that the tombs are organized in galaxy-like clusters, in which a few ancestral tombs whose locations were driven by environmental constraints become gradually surrounded by hundreds of newer tombs. These new tombs occasionally become the seeds of additional clusters.

“The ‘galaxy-like’ arrangement comes in handy as a metaphor because it gives the idea of a process regulated by attraction,” Costanzo said. “The gravitational attraction of stars around strong and invisible centers of gravity becomes the socially induced attraction of new tombs around ancient tombs—or even just spots—of traditional importance.”

He and his team concluded that the clusters likely represent tribal or family cemeteries of the Beja people, where many distinct groups may have converged “according to general, handed-down sacredness of the locations,” Costanzo said. The findings may also have relevance for much older archaeological sites in Sudan and Egypt, where other Beja groups live.

Still, Costanzo cautions, the pattern he and his colleagues identified is merely a starting point for more thorough investigations. The next steps will be to explore and establish official protections for the many previously unknown sites and to interview the region’s Beja people for their insights on the tomb clusters. “The whole work would have not been possible without the lead of the Sudanese archaeological team, who directs the field activities, and the Beja People of Kassala,” Costanzo said. “[Their] hospitality and personal insights are the real ground to any heritage research being carried out within the region.”

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In the mid-16th century, the residents of a regional capital called Chikasha, situated in the prairies and flatwoods of eastern Mississippi, became some of the first inhabitants of the now-United States to encounter European colonists.

In the winter of 1540, a Spanish soldier named Hernando de Soto led a colonial expedition into the region, and a local leader, Chikasha Minka, gave them permission to overwinter in the town. Like most Spanish expeditions, de Soto’s travels left a trail of violence. Although the party was already weakened by a battle in Florida, it soon came into conflict with its hosts, executing two people and maiming another.

According to accounts published by survivors of the expedition, de Soto demanded that the city provide him with hundreds of captives to transport materiel. Instead, in the middle of the night, Chikasha warriors burned the Spanish encampment, killed members of the expedition, slaughtered livestock, and destroyed equipment.

Though most of the Spaniards survived the attack, they retreated west, the expedition in tatters. We know much less about what happened to the Chikasha who fended off the incursion.

Now, a trove of metal tools, discovered in 2015 by a team of archaeologists from the Chickasaw Nation—the descendents of the Chikasha people—and a trio of Southern universities, helps spell out the story of that meeting, and how local people responded to the Spanish expedition.

“I think these are undoubtedly from the [de Soto] expedition,” says Jeffrey Mitchem, who studies early European contact with the Arkansas Geological Survey, but was not involved in the research.

Many of the tools, like horseshoes and a standardized kind of triangular axe, appear to have come from 16th century European forges. But there are also clues that suggest they were left in a hurry rather than intentionally—the archaeologists found cannon balls and musket components, weapons that Spanish groups didn’t readily trade away at other sites.

Other pieces, particularly harness rings for horses, appear to have been hastily crafted in the New World by a supply-strapped force. “The expedition was not simply a military expedition,” Metchem says. “De Soto had a contract with the king of Spain that said he would come over and set up a certain number of towns and forts. There were farmers and blacksmiths.”

After its grueling overland trek and frequent skirmishes, de Soto’s group grew increasingly short on manufactured goods. The Mississippi site tracks that decline, and might even be a turning point. In Florida, Metchem says, the Spanish left a trail of trade goods “like a Mardi Gras parade.” By the time they got to Arkansas, on the far side of the Mississippi River, “we found one glass bead from the expedition. That’s it.”

“I really think by the time they got this far over in the country, they’d run out of that kind of stuff.”

[Related: ‘Forest gardens’ planted by Canada’s Indigenous people before the 1800s still benefit ecosystems today]

From Chikasha, things only went downhill for the Spanish. De Soto died on the banks of the Mississippi just three years after his arrival in the South. The survivors trekked towards Texas, trying to find an overland route to Mexico City, before turning back and building boats on the Mississippi. Much of what we know of the entrada comes from depositions of the survivors as various funders fought over the outstanding assets and liabilities.

The archaeologists, who published a survey of the findings in the journal American Antiquities, don’t believe that the site is Chikasha itself, since there’s no evidence of a burned settlement or the bones of slaughtered pigs and horses. Instead, they believe it’s an outlying village whose residents gathered Spanish-made objects through trade, and must have scoured the battle site.

Many of the tools recovered at the site were no longer just trade objects or spoils of war. They’d been adapted to fit into Chickasaw technology and society, which, having driven off the Spanish, wouldn’t be in direct contact with European colonists for more than a hundred years.

Two celts, a type of hand-held chopping tool, were fashioned from axes, with the blades snapped off by repeatedly bending the metal back and forth. Smaller celts were fashioned from pieces of swords, horseshoes, and even metal barrel hoops. Copper pendants seem to have been made from kettles and pots.

“What they ended up doing was using technology that they used on stone tools and ground shell tools to work the metal,” Metchem says.

Another pair of celts were formed from the raw iron bars that de Soto’s blacksmiths carried along with the expedition. The tools, shaped like giant incisors, are almost identical to celts that would have traditionally been made from stone—but the iron versions would have been ground into shape by hand, without the help of a forge.

“By all appearances, their manufacture was labor intensive,” the study notes. That’s an understatement: the process would be something like turning a stick of rebar into a sword using only a knife sharpener.

Perhaps the most arresting object is an awl, ground from a long piece of iron wire. That wire, the authors write, was likely made from a chain link, broken open and straightened out. The chain links themselves were carried by the expedition in part to hold Indigenous slaves.

The effort put into the tools speaks to the tremendous value they must have carried to their users. Except for copper in the Southwest and in the Great Lakes, American societies didn’t make tools with metal, making it inherently valuable as a commodity. But, unlike at other sites, where European-made metal tools were much rarer and often placed in funeral mounds, these tools seem to have been in widespread use.

Metchem says it’s not a surprise to see metal tools refashioned: metal is quite obviously a useful material, and people are quick to pick up new technology. As the authors of the paper put it, “the first commercial impulse of the people is not to become just like us, but more like themselves.”

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Neanderthals are often portrayed as Homo sapiens’s crude, primitive relatives, incapable of sophisticated culture, but new archaeological findings are subverting that narrative. In the latest example of Neanderthal art, archaeologists found a 51,000 year old bone carving in the mountain caves of Germany.

Archaeologists were excavating materials from the prehistoric entrance to Einhornhöhle, or the “Unicorn Cave,” in the Harz Mountains in Germany when they found the 2.2 inch-long bone. Scientists identified it as a phalanx, or toe bone, of a giant deer, and radiocarbon dating suggested that it is at least 51,000 years old. 

But what was most remarkable about this bone was how it had been modified: Etched into its surface were a series of lines creating a chevron-like pattern. The cuts were clean and uniform, and also served no obvious purpose, which led scientists to conclude that they must have been both intentional and symbolic. They published their findings in Nature Ecology & Evolution.  

It’s clear that whoever made the bone carving took time and care. Microscopic analysis of the phalanx shows that the lines are etched pretty deeply, which suggests that the bone was boiled before carving to soften the surface. Giant deer were also not very common in the area at the time. All this evidence points to the idea that the phalanx art had some weighty significance, and was thoughtfully planned and executed. 

“We were convinced this must be intentional and probably bears symbolic meaning,” Dirk Leder told VICE. Leder is an archaeologist at the Lower Saxony State Office for Heritage and led the research. But the exact meaning or function of that symbolism is a question that’s “difficult to answer,” he added. 

[Related: Neanderthal genes are still helping humans today]

While it is most likely that the bony token is indeed a work of Neanderthals, scientists can’t rule out that it might have been done by Homo sapiens. Uncovered symbolic trinkets and small art pieces are artifacts typically attributed to early humans. But the age of the carved phalanx, 51,000 years old, predates the earliest evidence for humans in the area (about 45,000 years ago).

The paper therefore concludes that “an independent Neanderthal authorship for the engraved bone is thus the most plausible scenario.” This puts more weight behind the idea that Neanderthals might have developed symbolic behavior independently from Homo sapiens—a theory that’s been controversial in the field.

But evidence shows that Neanderthals partook in plenty of other activities that were meaningful if not functional—like burying their dead and decorating themselves with bird feathers. Perhaps now we can add bone talismans to the list. 

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In 1875, amateur archaeologist Carl Georg Count Sievers conducted excavations near the banks of the Salaca River, in what is now modern day Latvia. He discovered two graves: one of a 12 to 18 year old girl (dubbed RV 1852), and another of a 20 to 30 year old man (RV 2039). Almost 150 years later, analysis of RV 2039 shows that not only is he more than 5,000 years old, but he had an ancient strain of the bubonic plague—the oldest case known to date. 

Scientists didn’t go in expecting to find remnants of plague. When they genetically analyzed RV 2039’s remains, they were surprised to find the genome of Yersinia pestis, the infectious bacteria responsible for the bubonic plague. The detected strain is the oldest discovered so far—it split from its bacterial predecessor more than 7,000 years ago. 

It also looks different from the Y. pestis of more recent epidemics. Genetic analysis of the bacteria in the ancient RV 2039 also revealed that the bubonic plague-inducing microbe lacked a crucial genetic element: the gene that lets fleas act as vectors to spread the plague, which is also the gene that lets the bacterium efficiently infect humans.

[Related: Five things you might not know about the plague (not including the fact that it still exists)]

The missing gene is additionally responsible for those infamous pus-filled buboes (or swollen lymph nodes, usually in the armpits or groin) that we associate with the medieval Black Death. Thankfully for RV 2039, his infection was likely not so painful, and he didn’t suffer the fates of the victims of the Middle Ages. Scientists deduced from the remains that his infection was probably mild, but longer lasting. He still likely died as a result of the infection, though. The findings were published in Cell Reports.   

Instead of transmission via flea, RV 2039 likely contracted the plague directly from a larger animal. He was a hunter-fisher-gatherer, and probably got the bacteria through the bite of an infected rodent—although he could’ve killed a rodent for food or personal decoration and picked it up that way, the study notes. 

Luckily for his companions, because of the plague’s still unevolved form, the bacteria wasn’t yet able to spread easily from person to person. None of the people buried in the same region as RV 2039 had Y. pestis in their remains. 

“What’s so surprising is that we see already in this early strain more or less the complete genetic set of Y. pestis, and only a few genes are lacking,” senior author Ben Krause-Kyora, head of the aDNA Laboratory at the University of Kiel in Germany, said in a statement. “But even a small shift in genetic settings can have a dramatic influence on virulence.”

Previous theories about the plague in early human civilization suggest that Y. pestis evolved mostly in cities around the Black Sea, where people lived in close proximity. But RV 2039 lived 5,000 years ago, long before humans created city life. These findings, which show that the plague at the time was relatively mild and not infectious, also contradict other theories suggesting the plague was responsible for mass deaths at the end of the Neolithic age some six millennia ago.

Nevertheless, research like this brings scientists closer to understanding how the Black Death came to be, and how the plague has influenced our own genetics. “Different pathogens and the human genome have always evolved together,” said Krause-Kyora. “We know Y. pestis most likely killed half of the European population in a short time frame, so it should have a big impact on the human genome.”

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For more than 80 years, Chris Stringer says a nearly intact, ancient human skull sat at the bottom of a well in Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province, China. As the story goes, the specimen was originally unearthed from the bed of the Songhua River by workers building a bridge in Japanese-occupied northeastern China in 1933. The crew foreman recognized the skull’s value and didn’t want it falling into the hands of the Japanese occupiers, so he stowed the Harbin cranium away. 

“He wrapped it up, and he put it down an abandoned well. And then about 80 years later, as he was dying, he told his grandchildren the story of how he got the skull. They went to look, and it was still down there. So incredible,” says Stringer, a paleoanthropologist studying human origins at the Natural History Museum in London. After more than an estimated 146,000 years buried in sediment and its additional decades in hiding, the Harbin cranium finally made it into researchers’ hands in 2018.

Now, three years later, the first scientific descriptions of the skull, dubbed the “Dragon Man,” were published on Friday in The Innovation, a new journal funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in a series of three papers. Stringer joined the research team in 2019 and is an author on two of the three papers. “The cranium is a fantastically preserved specimen,” he says. “I think it’s one of the most important finds of the last 50 years.” The publication of these studies occurred on the same day as publication of similarly seismic findings based on partial skull specimens found in Israel.

[Related: Controversial study claims Botswana may be the origin of modern humanity]

In the studies, Stringer and his colleagues date the skull to a minimum age of 146,000, placing it in the Middle Pleistocene period. The researchers also declare the specimen representative of a new species on the tree of human evolution, which spans from our first bipedal primate progenitors up to modern humans today. They name this proposed species Homo longi, derived from the Mandarin word for dragon, after the skull’s geographic origin in Heilongjiang, whose name means Black Dragon River. The researchers propose that H. longi may be a more closely related lineage to present-day humans than Neanderthals, the widely accepted “sister group” of our species.

To determine the skull’s age, the scientists analyzed ratios of chemical isotopes found in tiny deposits of sediment trapped in its nasal cavity and also looked at the ratios of uranium isotopes, which decay in a predictable pattern over time, in the bone itself. To place the specimen in evolutionary history, the researchers measured the Harbin cranium’s external physical features like the size of the brain case, facial dimensions and angles, and the single intact molar tooth. They then took those measurements and compared them to 95 other previously studied specimens, including other skull and bone fragments found in China. Using a computer model, Stringer and colleagues reconstructed a possible phylogenetic tree (a diagram representing evolutionary relationships through time).  

[Related: A primer on the primal origins of humans]

“It’s a weird combination of features,” says Stringer. The skull has a distinctive combination of primitive features, like a pronounced brow ridge and broad face, and those associated with more modern humans, like finer cheekbones. Above everything else though, what he says sets the Harbin cranium apart is its enormity, “It’s massive in size. It’s the biggest fossil human skull I’ve ever seen.”

But bigger brain volume doesn’t necessarily mean closer to modern humans.  And the conclusions presented in the new articles aren’t settled, even among the study authors. “I think calling it a different species [from Neanderthal and Homo sapien] is legitimate, but there are different opinions in the research team about what the name of this species should be,” says Stringer, who prefers to group the newly described Harbin specimen with a previously found skull known as Homo daliensis or Dali Man. The Dali Man skull has some differences from the Harbin finding, but Stringer considers that level of difference to be an acceptable amount of variation within a species. “From my point of view, [Homo daliensis] would take priority over Homo longi.” 

The classification and placement of the Harbin cranium as a new human lineage is additionally controversial among scientists unaffiliated with the new research as well.

“We need to have DNA before we really know where this fossil fits in,” says Shara Bailey, a paleoanthropologist at New York University specializing in early human specimens from the same time period as the Harbin skull. Bailey describes our knowledge of the Middle Pleistocene as “the muddle in the middle,” pointing out that lots of remains aren’t well preserved and provide mixed signals. She says the Harbin skull is “an exciting finding, because how often do we get a skull as complete as this?” but is skeptical of the new research’s conclusions. “Their divergence analysis should be taken with a grain of salt.”

Bailey believes the newly described cranium “could be the face of a Denisovan, which is what we’ve been looking for.” Denisovans are an extinct lineage of archaic humans believed to have lived throughout Asia between 50,000 and 300,000 years ago. Our understanding of Denisovans comes largely from DNA analysis of partial bone fragments, including the Xiahe mandible, which researchers say the Harbin skull shares many similarities to. “It’s exciting in its own right,” says Bailey “because it could be the first time we have the face of this enigmatic human group”

[Related: Ancient tooth yields DNA of ancient human cousins, the Denisovans]

Like Neanderthals, Denisovans overlapped and interbred with modern humans, leaving bits of their DNA detectable in populations of present-day people. A small percentage of Neanderthal DNA is common in people of both European and Asian ancestry, while Denisovan DNA is common in Aboriginal Australians, Papuans, and people of Asian ancestry, particularly Melanasians, Bailey explains.

That the Harbin skull represents an intact Denisovan specimen is, “the best hypothesis,” says John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hawks doesn’t rule out other possibilities, though, and points out that there are limits to the usefulness of comparing a jawbone like the Xiahe mandible with this skull, which is missing its lower jaw. But he says the similarities between the two specimens are significant. “They both are lacking their third molders. They both have very big second molars. There’s things that are similar. And so I think it’s a good hypothesis that these are Denisovans.”

If the Harbin skull is a Denisovan, Hawks points out that the researcher’s thorough analysis of the cranium’s physical traits doesn’t match the DNA record. The researchers place the skull as more similar to modern humans than Neanderthals, based on their analysis. While Denisovan DNA has placed the group as sharing a most recent common ancestor with Neanderthals, more distantly diverged from modern humans. Hawks and Bailey would believe the DNA over the trait analysis, as traits can diverge, emerge, and shift in non-linear ways, whereas DNA tells a more complete story. An alternate possibility, according to Stringer, is that all three groups diverged simultaneously due to geographic isolation. Their relation to each other may not be easily defined by the standard phylogenetic tree. “In reality, you might actually have something close to a three-way split.”

Stringer acknowledges the possibility that he and his fellow researchers have found a Denisovan, and not a new species, in the Dragon Man. “These are not highly resolved issues,” he says. “I certainly don’t have 100 percent confidence that this is definitely a sister species of Homo sapiens. We’re going to be looking for more data, so this is only the first stage of the research.” Stringer hopes to soon examine the skull’s internal features, like the inner ear bones, to get a better sense of how the specimen relates to both Neanderthals and modern humans. And he says his colleagues are looking into the possibility of extracting genetic material from the skull for DNA analysis.

Ultimately, the lineage name and placement that the Harbin skull represents are small details, says Strigner. “Species names, for me, are labels that enable us to group things together, but they’re not absolute. They’re humanly created categories, and nature does not always play along with our neat concepts.”

In a way, Bailey agrees. “Whether it’s a distinct species or not really depends on how you view species.” She points out that, in much of biology, a species is defined by reproductive isolation—yet we know modern humans interbred with earlier lineages. And, whatever you call it, the lineage the Harbin cranium represents did not “evolve” into the Homo sapiens presently living in Asia, says Bailey. This finding doesn’t change that our ancestors are African.

Even with limited interbreeding between past lineages, all present-day people have much more in common with each other, genetically and physically, than with any extinct group. All visible differences between humans living across the world today are a much more recent development than the divergence of these archaic human lineages, says Bailey. “We are a lot more like each other than we aren’t.”

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Doug Struck is a veteran reporter who covered the Middle East for The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun. He teaches journalism at Emerson College in Boston. This story originally featured on Undark.

In 1823, the chief surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, John Warren, prepared to autopsy a 2,500-year-old corpse. Warren figured examining the Egyptian mummy—a gift from a patron that had been placed in the hospital’s surgical ward to collect quarters from gawkers—would advance knowledge of the ancients. He carefully began cutting through the old linen, and then stopped. He had exposed a blackened but exquisitely preserved head: high cheekbones, wisps of brown hair, gleaming white teeth. As Warren later recounted, this was a person, and “being unwilling to disturb” him further, he stopped there.

Fast forward to last October, when the press was on hand as Egyptian archaeologists opened the first of a cache of 59 recently discovered mummies for the whole world to see, revealing a perfectly wrapped body. Video of the event went viral, and the Twitter pushback followed: “Even in death POC can’t escape the prying and opportunistic advances of white people,” wrote one user, in a tweet that gained nearly a quarter-million likes.

The question of whether it is unseemly, ghoulish, disrespectful, or even racist to display ancient corpses, or whether it’s a noble contribution to science and education, has nagged mummy displays since Warren took up his scalpel nearly 200 years ago. And the Black Lives Matter movement’s focus on issues of cultural ownership and appropriation has only added fuel to a persistent ethical dilemma for museums and experts who study mummies.

The issue is the topic of academic forums and scholarly papers, but the implications are real, both in Egypt and abroad. “It’s a huge subject of debate in our field right now,” says Pamela Hatchfield, the former president of the American Institute for Conservation, a professional association of art conservators.

In April, onlookers watched as 22 mummies were transported to a new museum in a lavish parade through the streets of Cairo. By one estimate, at least 350 institutions around the world display Egyptian mummies, and the abiding fascination with the ancient kingdom of the pharaohs has made those displays a vital draw for museums, leaving scientists and curators to weigh increasingly fraught questions: Should mummies whose linen wrappings have been removed be re-wrapped for sensitivity? Ought the body, linens and all, be placed back in its coffin? And should that coffin be open, closed, or removed from display altogether?

For Heba Abd el Gawad, an Egyptologist in Cairo, the idea of displaying human remains is “disturbing.” But, she says, she cannot speak for all Egyptians and that different perspectives should be considered. “Being an expert or a specialist,” she says, “doesn’t mean I have to dictate to people how they should feel about their ancestors, and even if they see them as their ancestors or not.”

Among the American museums that have reconsidered how they display mummies in recent years is the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence. The museum had a 2,100-year-old mummified priest named Nesmin in residence since 1938. Lying wrapped next to his coffin, he was a hit with sixth-grade field trips. But in April 2014, he was moved to a more conspicuous central hall and soon became the focus of a debate over how to treat racial and cultural histories.

Some critics called the display disrespectful, or even offensive. In 2016, the museum held a public discussion. One researcher with Egyptian roots said she was “struck at having to see one of my ancestors on display this way.” She offered hymns and moments of silence, and said she “wanted to bring flowers” to the old mummy.

After long reflection, the museum staff gently lifted Nesmin back into his coffin in August 2018. Then, they shut the lid, returning the mummy to eternal darkness.

Advocates for greater modesty say mummies did not agree to have their bodies put on public display, and that cultural respect demands they be removed from view. Other experts argue that ancient Egyptians embraced the union of death and life, and that the dead were mummified to give the spirit a body, and thus would have welcomed some modern interaction with the living. But those arguments fly against the current demand for greater cultural sensitivity.

“Everyone is afraid to speak up,” says Jasmine Day, a scholar and president of the Ancient Egypt Society of Western Australia in Perth, who says objections to displaying mummies are coming from “the fashionably offended.” She says she is “alarmed to hear about the wave of conservatism and risk aversiveness sweeping through the world of museums.”

Some critics maintain that racism infused the white-dominated collection of antiquities. White explorers, collectors, and archaeologists brought mummies by the hundreds back from Egypt in the 1800s and early 1900s, though many of them were dug up by Egyptian tomb raiders or bought from Egyptian authorities.

A French tourist reported in 1833 that “it would be hardly respectable” to return from Egypt “without a mummy in one hand and a crocodile in the other.”

At the entrance to the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum in Baltimore lies a partially unwrapped female called the Goucher mummy, with her arms crossed on her chest. In 2008, Sanchita Balachandran, associate director and conservator at the facility, said she worked for weeks to try to stabilize the condition of the mummy. “I spent a lot of time with just her,” Balachandran says, and developed “a personal relationship with a human being, with a person.” As a result, she says that her feelings about public exposure of the mummy have evolved.

“I think people are very disturbed by encountering a real person just lying there,” she says. Balachandran says she is conflicted about the display and has gradually become more protective of the Goucher mummy. Before the pandemic closed the museum, “people used to come in and take selfies of her, right? And I would say, ‘You know what, she doesn’t give you her consent to be photographed. So you can’t do that.’”

Activists and scholars calling for change say mummies have long been objectified by museums, which treat them as artifacts. Indeed, despite Warren’s 19th-century epiphany that the mummy in his care, named Padihershef, was a human being, the corpse remains under a glass case at the old surgical ward of the hospital, his head still unwrapped, staring forever skyward.

The ethical view of mummies began changing in the US after the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, and its echoes for Indigenous Americans. In 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act required the return of Indigenous remains to tribes in the US. Afterward, museum officials began to look uncomfortably at the Egyptians in their holdings. “When you begin to think about it, you know, what is the difference between Native American remains and Egyptian remains?” says Gina Borromeo, chief curator and curator of ancient art at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

“Do mummified human remains belong in an art museum? He’s not an art object. He’s a human being,” says Ingrid Neuman, a senior conservator who agonized alongside Borromeo when students began raising objections to the display of Nesmin during a packed meeting in 2016. “I think that a human body is different than a painting on the wall in a museum.”

The clash of opinions brackets the dilemma for museums. In choosing how to display mummies, whose voice counts: The perceived wishes of the ancients? Modern Egyptians? Scientists and scholars? Or museum patrons? In a Skype interview, Abd el Gawad says the views of modern Egyptians like herself are too often ignored because of the “racist colonial misperception” that “the human remains coming from ancient Egypt are unclaimed and uncontested.”

“We are not seen as the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians,” she says.

Others argue it is far from obvious what the ancient Egyptians—who desperately sought immortality—would have wanted, or who should speak for them now. Day, the Australian researcher, agrees that mummies deserve respect, but thinks removing them panders to a modern aversion to seeing the dead. Museums should “display mummies in a way that presents them as people, not ‘here is an object in an art museum,’” she says via Skype. But museums can humanize ancient Egyptians, she adds, by using “Human Remains” warning signs, hushed rooms, darkened lighting, and limited access to mummy displays.

Peter Lacovara, a former senior curator at the Carlos Museum in Atlanta and currently the director of the Ancient Egyptian Heritage and Archaeology Fund in New York, calls objections to the display of mummies “uninformed” about the ancient Egyptian religion. “More than anything, Egyptians wanted to be seen, they wanted their likenesses to be seen. They wanted to be remembered,” Lacovara says. “They wanted to be part of the world of the living. And of course, this is what museum displays do.”

Mimi Leveque, a Boston consulting conservator who has inspected or preserved more than 40 mummies, suggests that, handled correctly, mummies can be deeply edifying. “If treated with respect,” she says, “a body has a tremendous amount to tell us.” Leveque says she often worked on mummies in museum labs open to public view, which invariably boosted the number of visitors to the museum. “People wanted to see it.”

Leveque also says she believes the old Egyptians would have approved, and that museums are in fact helping to deliver on an ancient desire to be well-remembered into posterity. “From the point of view of the person who was excavated, what they wanted was to have their personality remembered, their name repeated,” she says. “The ancient Egyptians said that if your name is remembered, even if your body doesn’t make it, you will have an eternity.”

In that light, where better for a mummy to end up, she suggested, than in a museum? “[Mummies] are in, what is in effect, a glorious tomb,” she says. “Isn’t that what these museums are?”

Even if that’s true, however, Abd el Gawad suggests that at least some of the wishes of the ancients are known, and not open for interpretation. There are very clear instructions on what ancient Egyptians wanted to happen to their bodies after death, she says, “and that doesn’t include unwrapping mummies or displaying mummies out of the coffin.”

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The bones belonged to a young man, not yet worn down by the ravages of age, who died in a shipwreck, sinking into the deep alongside jugs, bronzes, and one of the most intriguing artifacts ever uncovered.

The discovery of the human remains was first reported by Jo Marchant in an article in Nature. As Marchant reports, we don’t know much about the person whose bones they are, but we may soon, thanks to advances in DNA technology.

It isn’t the first skeleton discovered at the site. Back in the 1970s, ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his crew found human remains as they excavated the site. Research on the site started even earlier than that, when sponge divers from Greece located and began salvaging artifacts from the wreck in 1900.

The most famous of those artifacts is the Antikythera Mechanism, considered to be one of the earliest computers in the world. The device could track the movements of the planets, and was created around 200 BC before being lost at sea in a shipwreck around 65 BC near the Greek island of Antikythera.

But even if this isn’t the first skeleton from the shipwreck, and doesn’t help us understand the mysterious mechanism that elevated the shipwreck into the public consciousness, the bones are important to researchers, as they are the first bones to be discovered in the wreck since DNA studies entered their heyday. The researchers hope that, with permission from the Greek government, they might be able to extract DNA from the bones, and figure out more details about what the young man looked like, and where he might have come from.

Some of his bones remain at the bottom of the sea, embedded in the sediment, waiting to be excavated in the next digging season. But researchers have gathered plenty of information about the remains (and the artifacts they were found with) in the meantime. The team scanned the bones in situ, creating a 3D digital copy that other researchers will be able to refer to in the future.

The team also created scans of the man’s femurs after excavation. Scanning the remains from the ship (both human remains and artifacts) is incredibly valuable to future research. Though the artifacts have survived for nearly 2,000 years underwater, some materials have become so fragile, that they can disintegrate soon after excavation. Creating a 3D model allows researchers to digitally preserve the artifacts for future generations to study.

Skull

Human Remains

Skull in situ

Amphoras

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Over the millenia, the Coxcatlan Cave, in the Valley of Tehuacan, Mexico has been home to tens of thousands of years of human history. Preserved in layers of dust, rocks, charcoal, and decaying plants are records of the early domestication of corn and the birth of agriculture. But beneath them all is something even more surprising: what might end up being one of the oldest records of humans in the Americas.

Based on a new radiocarbon analysis, animal bones found in that deepest layer are between 28,000 and 31,000 years old. Currently, the most popular theory is that humans first arrived in the Americas around 14,000 years ago, walking over a now-drowned continent that connected Alaska and Siberia.

If further studies bear out, the findings will help reshape the human history of North America.

“We weren’t trying to find these really old dates at all,” says Andrew Somerville, the lead author on the research. Instead, the team was investigating the history of agriculture in the region. But previous carbon dating techniques had led to contradictory results, so they used a newer technology on animal bones found at different layers in the cave. “We just noticed that no one had ever dated some of these bottom levels. We kind of expected them to be similar to what the original excavator suggested, which was around 12,000 years ago. So we were very surprised. They were about 20,000 years older than we were expecting.”

The cave had actually been excavated 60 years ago, so the evidence had been hidden in plain sight in boxes at a research center for decades. “I think this just goes to show how important it is to fund archaeological curation and hold on to all these old collections,” Somerville says.

The bones, which come from ancient horses, gopher tortoises, and pronghorn antelope, are from a period long before the land bridge opened. And the species themselves are telling. They’re the inhabitants of an open desert, of the kind now found in southern New Mexico and Texas—which is not what’s found around Coxcatlan. But other sites suggest that 28,000 years ago, with glaciers moving south, the whole area would have been more like a desert. Also telling is the fact that later layers contain mostly deer, suggesting that the bones are from different climatic eras.

The archaeologist who first excavated the Coxcatlan Cave, Richard MacNeish, thought that the deepest layer showed signs of human habitation, since it also contained what appeared to be early stone tools. But that classification needs to be revisited with a skeptical eye, since it would upend an entire paradigm.

As Shane Miller, an archaeologist at Mississippi State University who studies early human migrations, told the podcast Tides of History, proving human habitation requires at least two things: a dateable site, and “proof that you have an actual human artifact.”

“These tools are not incredibly diagnostic,” Somerville says. “There’s no beautiful, triangular projectile points. These are very simple blades or scraper type of tools, and a skeptic might argue that these were naturally produced chipped stones.” Somerville hasn’t been able to revisit the artifacts because of the pandemic, but he plans to reexamine the tools themselves to make sure that they aren’t, say, bits of the cave roof that shattered in the right way.

[Related: Dogs spread across the Americas alongside humans. Then they got eaten.]

The best evidence, Somerville says, will be examining the bones themselves “to look for cut marks, butchering, and signs of cooking.”

“That’s more like a smoking gun. Boom, 30,000 years, on a bone, with cut marks that were made by a human.”

The other possibility is that the bones were in the cave long before humans arrived—maybe another predator had taken up residence 30,000 years ago—and people simply made their homes on top.

That could help explain another mystery of the site: there’s a roughly 14,500 year gap between the oldest layer, and the next most recent, which is between 13,500 and 10,000 years old. If the oldest deposits were left by humans, they later abandoned the cave.

That’s not out of the question, Somerville says. The hole in the archaeological record corresponds to the “Last Glacial Maximum,” when the Tehuacan area presumably would have been its most inhospitable. One explanation for the gap—though he cautions that it’s just speculation—is that the cave’s inhabitants “migrated out of the valley, and then humans didn’t come back and repopulate the valley for [14,500] years, at which time the climate began to ease up.”

Although the bones are more than ten thousand years older than the widely accepted timeline for human habitation, they accompany a series of other recent findings that hint at a much older history. Last year, research published in Nature documented a possible 19,000-26,000 year-old cache of stone tools in northern Mexico, which it argued “push back dates for human dispersal to the region possibly as early as 33,000-31,000 years ago.”

But those sites also imply that early humans navigated an Asia-to-America migration along an iced-over Alaska. “The most likely explanation is by boat,” Somerville says. “Hopping down the coast, camping on the coast, setting up sites where they’re harvesting marine mammals, shellfish, resources from the kelp forest.”

While there’s plenty of archaeological evidence from people navigating interior Alaska around 13,000 years ago, there’s very little to flesh out the potential coastal route. “The big problem is that sea levels were lower back then, so any coastal campsite would be under 100 meters of water.”

In spite of those unanswered questions, Somerville says he’s leaning towards thinking that the site will turn out to be human. “This is such a contentious issue, and it is something that’s been debated for so long that I really hesitate to come down strongly on one side or the other,” he says. Still, he’s handled the bones and possible tools before. “Originally, I had no clue they were this old, so I wasn’t paying that close attention. But, I will say that my impression of it, and the impression of the original analysts of these animal bones is that, yes, they do appear to have been modified by humans.”

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The Durrington Walls site hailed as ‘Superhenge’ in last year’s announcement of findings from the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project has come up empty, at least from stones.

The site, which researchers believed could have been a stone circle many times larger than the nearby Stonehenge site, was thought to contain up to 100 buried stones. Instead, the Neolithic site two miles northeast of Stonehenge once comprised of timber posts, built before Stonehenge by the same people, according to BBC.

The researchers have found that the circle was not up for very long though, and was soon taken down. The timbers were then taken out, and the pits were filled with chalk rubble and then covered with a henge bank.

“For some strange reason they took the timbers out and put up the enormous bank and ditch that we see today,” Nicola Snashall, an archeologist for the National Trust, told BBC.

The new excavations of the site add to the discoveries conducted by the Hidden Landscapes project, which show that Neolithic men and women were continually changing the land to suit their needs.

The researchers don’t know why the people decided to take down and change what now we see as the Durrington Walls, but they believe it could be just a sign of the tumultuous times as the early peoples of England were transitioning into the Bronze Age.

[Via Motherboard]

Many monuments nearby

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New radiocarbon measurements from the silty bottom of a Japanese lake could be one of the most helpful tools for natural historians in decades. With this new record, archaeologists could nail down the precise timing of the demise of the Neanderthal. Or anthropologists could determine exactly when humans spread into Europe. Or climate scientists could better understand the last ice age, and what climatological conditions led to the glaciers’ retreat.

Core samples from largely unperturbed Lake Suigetsu, which scientists have been trying to obtain and study for almost 20 years, refine one of our best tools for understanding the past 50,000 years on Earth, in other words. “It it is no exaggeration to say that without that ability, fields like anthropology, archaeology and paleoclimatology would not exist as we know them,” said Jesse Smith, senior editor at the journal Science, which publishes the paper today.

To understand why, it helps to understand how radiocarbon dating works.

Carbon dating uses the predictable, unchanging decay of a radioactive isotope of carbon known as carbon-14. It forms in the atmosphere in the presence of cosmic rays, which break down nitrogen into this unstable form of carbon. But as far as life is concerned, it’s just more carbon, meaning it’s fixed in plants. Animals that eat these plants also have C-14 in their bodies.

C-14’s half-life is 5,730 years, give or take about 40 years. Using this known rate of decay, scientists can calculate how old a relic is by determining how much C-14 it still contains, relative to its stable cousin C-12. This can be used to determine the age of organic material in archaeological sites, for instance–human remains, wooden artifacts, and so on. This technique was invented in 1949, suggested by Enrico Fermi, and has been used since.

The problem is that cosmic rays and the atmosphere itself are variable, unpredictable things. This means the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere changes, so the amount incorporated into plants and animals changes, too. Calibrating this carbon record requires matching up radiocarbon data with items of a known age–like tree rings, for instance, or lakebed sediments.

“One must know how the C-14 content of the atmosphere changed in the past in order to know where to start the stop watch for any particular sample,” Smith told reporters. This new lakebed core does just that.

Until now, the oldest calibration sample came from 12,593-year-old tree rings. The sediment sample dates back 52,800 years.

Once you have something older than 12,000 years ago, it’s much harder to accurately pinpoint an age, explained Christopher Bronk Ramsey, lead author of the paper and a professor at the University of Oxford. This is largely because of major climate changes after the end of the last ice age. Scientists have some samples, from marine records and cave deposits that can be cross-checked with uranium measurements, but these don’t give atmospheric C-14 levels.

The new paper, which involves teams from several countries, studies core samples that contain yearly layers of algae. These diatoms cover the lakebed every year, and are followed by a sediment layer. It’s so clear you can see it with your naked eye, as seen below.

Lake Suigetsu Sediments

The lake is very still and its bottom is anoxic, so it’s very stable, the scientists say. It was never covered by glaciers, so even during the last ice age, leaves fell from trees around the lake. Fossil remnants of these leaves helped the team refine its carbon dates.

Takeshi Nakagawa, a professor at the University of Newcastle, was first involved in sediment sampling at this lake in 1993, he told reporters in a news conference. The first scientific paper from that core sample published in 1998. But the 1993 core was not a continuous sample, with gaps between different layers–so just like other calibration techniques, it was unclear exactly how the years matched up, making it an incomplete record. After obtaining funding from the UK’s Natural Environmental Research Council, Nakagawa took another core in 2006. It’s fully continuous, with overlapping layers, dating to 52,800 years ago.

In some cases, the layers were very thin and impossible to discern with the naked eye, so Nakagawa sought help from scientists in Germany and the UK. Teams of researchers took studied the samples with a particle accelerator based at Oxford and with a hand-made core scanner made by Swedish physicists. Using X-ray fluorescence, the team identified the spectral signature of chemicals in the core and how their makeup changed, explained Henry Lamb, a professor at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, UK. The team was able to identify seasonal layers deposited by snowmelt, volcanic ash, and more. It took several months to scan more than 40 meters of core, Lamb said.

“I always tell my students that chronology is crucial in studies of climate change, archeology, and human evolution. Now, I can tell them that Suigetsu provides a chronology that we can count on,” Lamb said.

The record won’t upend archaeology–there won’t be millenial-scale revisions in the measured ages of objects. But a swing of several hundred years, which is significant, is certainly possible. Those changes can be important when studying human responses to climate, for instance, Bronk Ramsey said. “A more accurate calibrated time-scale will allow us to answer questions in archaeology, which previously we have not had the resolution to address.”

24,700-Year-Old Leaf

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Africa is widely regarded as the place where modern Homo sapiens emerged. But scientists still know relatively little about the funerary practices of early humans who lived there. Now, researchers have documented one more burial site—and it’s the oldest to date on the continent.

Archaeologists uncovered the 78,000-year-old funerary site at Panga ya Saidi, a cave near the Kenyan coast. There, researchers found the remains of a boy, about three years of age, who was gently laid to rest. They named him Mtoto, the Swahili word for child. Based on analysis of the remains, scientists concluded that Mtoto was likely set down curled up on his side. He was then probably wrapped in some sort of shroud and given a pillow (both of which later decayed), before being covered with soil. The findings were published in Nature. 

Mtoto was actually first discovered in 2013, but the remains were so fragile that the bones disintegrated upon excavation. Archaeologists had to get creative in order to get samples to the lab. First they dug around the area and encased the grave in plaster. Then they lifted it all to the National Museum in Nairobi before taking samples to a specialist lab in Spain. They found bones and teeth, as well as some stone tools. 

The care that Mtoto evidently received indicates to archaeologists that this was some sort of cultural, meaningful burial—as opposed to a simple disposal of the dead you might see in earlier human relatives or animals. It’s a demonstration of intentional, symbolic, and complex social behavior, the study authors argue.

“Humans, unlike chimps, began to develop complex belief systems around death,” said archaeological scientist and study co-author Nicole Boivin to The Guardian. But funerary practices can vary so widely, she said, that we can’t necessarily know what exactly this burial signified to people at the time. 

[Related: Laos’s Plain of Jars revealed to be a burial site]

This discovery adds to the very small cohort of known early African burials. Before Mtoto’s discovery, the two earliest African burials discovered were in Egypt and South Africa and are approximately 68,000 and 74,000 years old, respectively. In contrast, archaeologists have documented plenty of human and Neanderthal burials in Europe, some dated as old as 120,000 years. 

The lack of discovered burial sites could be explained by differing cultural practices in humans back then, but could also be due to a scarcity of this kind of field work on the continent. The disparity “almost certainly reflects biases in where research has been done,” Boivin said. “The regions where earlier burials have been found have been much more extensively researched than Africa … despite the fact that Africa is the birthplace of our species.”

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Nestled in the mountain ridges and hilly slopes of northern Laos lies one of archaeology’s greatest mysteries. Strewn across about 30 square miles, in seemingly random formation, are thousands of large stone jars. Popularly called Laos’s Plain of Jars, this unique place became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2019, though its origins are still shrouded in mystery.

Archaeologists have spent years hypothesizing the purpose and origin story of these megalithic vessels, which range from 3 to 10 feet in height and can weigh up to 14 tons. But nobody has found strong evidence for any one theory until now. New research published in PLOS One in March shows that these jars were used as burial sites. And while the jars themselves could be more than 3,000 years old, analysis of human remains suggest people were buried alongside these jars as recently as 700 or 800 years ago. 

[Related: What archaeologists got wrong about female statues, goddesses, and fertility]

A multicultural team assembled to complete this research, which involved several excavation expeditions to four jar sites in the Laos mountainsides. During their last trip, in February 2020, they quickly uncovered more human burial sites and collected samples for later analysis. The team then promptly had to disperse, making it home in time for their respective countries’ COVID lockdowns. 

Using a variety of techniques including radiocarbon dating, team members in Australia concluded that vessels in the Plain of Jars were placed there as early as the late second millennium BCE. The human remains, on the other hand, seem to come from between the ninth and 13th centuries. That’s a pretty large age difference. It’s possible that the jars have always been used for burials, and that scientists only managed to find younger evidence. But it’s impossible to rule out other theories. 

It’s also possible that the jars were not originally used for mortuary purposes. Some theories say that these jars were for brewing celebratory rice wine or whiskey. Then, later descendants of the original jar users might have repurposed the vessels for burial rites. 

While this new research is illuminating, the study authors note that there are still plenty of jar sites in Laos that have not been examined. Those untouched jars could potentially hold new information that might reveal more of the history, and finally close the book on these jars’ mysterious origin story.

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Pings. Buzzes. Rumbles. Booms. Hums. Bumps in the night. Sounds of unknown origin can be more than unsettling; they can inspire decades of mythos and fear—and obsessive scientific inquiry. Some cases of enigmatic noise are now closed, like the southern Pacific “bloops” detected by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hydrophones in 1997 and finally, in 2005, tied to Antarctic icequakes. But other cacophonous culprits remain at large. From jarring radio broadcasts to harmonious dunes, here are some of the world’s great sonic mysteries.

The Loneliest Whale

When the U.S. Navy gave scientists access to a network of hydrophones built in the 1950s to eavesdrop on Soviet subs, researchers discovered a surprising song. It followed a beat (and migratory path) reminiscent of a blue or fin whale. But while those species bellow at pitches of about 15 to 25 Hz, the new notes hit 52 Hz—only about as low as a tuba can manage. William Watkins, the marine mammal researcher who discovered the singular singer and listened to it for 12 years, died in 2004. But the search picked up again when sensors heard a similar call in 2010. Was this the original swimmer, or a sign that Watkins’ musical mutant wasn’t so lonely after all? Researchers remain stumped.

The Seneca Guns

Ghostly detonations have plagued residents near upstate New York’s Seneca Lake and along North Carolina’s Outer Banks for more than a century. Scientists have speculated that earthquakes might be responsible for the cannon-like sounds, which rattle windows and can even open closed doors, but they’ve never found direct evidence of the connection. Other potential causes include meteorites, covert military operations, and methane gas bubbling up from beneath the water to burst with a pop. Though some geophysicists still debate the cause of this persistent phenomenon, they consider the harmless rumbles more of a curiosity than a pressing scientific problem.

The Buzzer

Numbers stations—shortwave radio transmissions of monotone coded messages—are inherently creepy. But call sign UVB-76 has outcreeped them all by playing the same jolting tone from Russia since 1982. Similar broadcasts are useful for sending messages where snoops might intercept digital comms, so “the Buzzer” could simply assist spies. But it plays far fewer words and digits than confirmed espionage outlets, so some suspect it’s a science project that bounces radio waves off the ionosphere to detect solar flares. The most intriguing theory posits that it’s a doomsday device that will go silent should Russia suffer a nuclear attack, thus triggering retaliation.

The Forest Grove Shriek

A Portland suburb screamed its way into the league of mysterious noises in February 2016 with a loud mechanical squeal. The tone, which rang like a squeaky door, disturbed residents’ sleep for about a month before ceasing. That was plenty of time to inspire loads of amateur theories, from alien invasions to burned-out lightbulbs. But attempts to pinpoint the true source, including those of a local physics professor who sought to triangulate the noisemaker using a Google Map full of complaint calls, all failed. Police closed their investigation when the trail went cold, speculating that a loud attic fan or water pump on the fritz might have been to blame for the disappearing screech.

The Hum

A clamor needn’t be high-pitched to cause alarm. People in New Mexico, England, Canada, New Zealand, and elsewhere have reported hearing similar bouts of pervasive, low-frequency droning for decades. This tone has the added intrigue of not being audible to all. Some speculate that tinnitus, which causes ear ringing, could be a factor. But not everyone who claims to be one with the hum suffers from the condition. Could they be imagining a rumble based on others’ reports? If it actually exists, where does it come from? With such vague humming and hawing, it’s difficult to know where a serious inquiry would begin, so this sonic conundrum remains uncracked.

Singing Sand

Go to the Gobi Desert in Asia or Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado, and you might just hear a spooky tune. The massive beachy formations make a low roar that has frightened and intrigued intrepid travelers going back at least as far as the 13th century, when Marco Polo compared it to “the sounds of all kinds of musical instruments.” But there’s a likely explanation: The dunes probably start to sing as grains slide, avalanche-style, off the slopes. A 2012 study—in which physicists triggered the necessary cascade by scooting downhill on their butts—​hypothesized that the phenomenon’s distinctive variations in pitch are due to differences in grain size.

The Vocal Memnon

(Sadly, there’s no video of this centuries-old puzzler.)

Built nearly 3,500 years ago, the Colossi of Memnon guard the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III near Luxor. But one sentinel was not silent at his post: He “sang” at dawn. This sparked a tourist craze, and visitors left ancient Yelp reviews in the form of graffiti. Julia Balbilla, a Roman noble who visited in 130 A.D., wrote a poem on the statue’s leg comparing the sound to “ringing bronze.” The music apparently died around the time Roman Emperor Septimus Severus ordered repairs to the sculpture in 200 A.D. That could be a clue: Perhaps cracks in the stone collected dew, creating sonic vibrations as temperatures rose and warmed the liquid.

This story originally published in the Noise, Winter 2019 issue of Popular Science.

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Last month, Egyptian excavators revealed a long-undetected trove of treasures in the Al-Asasif Cemetery in Luxor. The discovery, which included 30 beautifully preserved coffins and mummies, dating more than 3,000 years old, is one of the most notable archaeological finds in the past century. The bodies and sarcophagi have remained in pristine shape, thanks to Egypt’s nearly humidity-free climate and pure luck that robbers hadn’t happened upon the ancient burial first.

It’s been close to 100 years since a cache of this size has been dug up in the country, says Kara Cooney, an Egyptologist at UCLA. The mummies are from the 21st and 22nd dynasty, she adds, and the coffins likely belonged to the high priesthood of Amun, not royalty. Two of the bodies were identified as children.

“There was no king of power in Luxor at the time, so the people filled that power vacuum with a kind of theocracy or temple rule,” Cooney explains. “The priests were the ones with power and the positions and the ability to buy coffins.”

But there’s another groundbreaking nugget in the news. For the first time in history, the crew behind the find is all Egyptian.

“The last one in 1891 was [led by] foreigners. In 1881 [also] foreigners. But … 2019 is an Egyptian discovery,” Mostafa Waziri, the secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt, told CNN. “This is an indescribable feeling, I swear to God.”

For archaeologist Serena Love, who spent years working on sites in the Nile Valley, this is one of the most exciting and vital parts of the discovery.

“There’s a deeply-rooted colonialist attitude of, ‘they’re not capable of taking care of their own heritage,’ ” Love says. “That’s what’s been changing. They are taking charge of their own heritage now.”

The exotic roots of Egyptology

Modern Egyptology is a fairly new business. On paper it started with Napoleon Bonaparte, the infamous leader of France who rose to prominence in the late 18th century. During a campaign to invade Egypt in 1799, one of his foot soldiers stumbled upon the Rosetta Stone, leading some to think of Napoleon as the “grandfather of Egyptology,” says Love. This revelation set off a chain of European excavations around Africa, and some of the impacts still linger today.

As the first significant digs got underway in the mid-19th century, more Europeans arrived in Egypt to lead the archaeological work. They would outsource the physical labor to local teams, but take all the credit when it came to academic publications and media attention.

“The power imbalance was inherent in that division of labor,” says Meira Gold, a historian of science specializing in Victorian Egyptology. Despite working on almost every major excavation that took place in their country, “Egyptians were rendered invisible,” she adds. Sometimes they’d even tip Western archeologists off to prolific sites.

In the end, colonialists cast a long shadow over the ownership and interpretation of priceless artifacts. Europeans saw themselves as superior to current-day Egyptians, Gold says, and tried to “claim” the ancient culture as a part of the history of Western civilization. They sold the greatest treasures from the Nile Valley to museums in New York, London, Paris, and Berlin, where they continue to be housed to today.

After Great Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, archaeology turned into more of a “preservation practice” for white scientists who wanted to save Egyptian antiques. This practice continued until 1922—the same year the country won its independence—when a team led by English archaeologist Howard Carter discovered King Tut’s Tomb.

Egyptians take control of their narrative

After a military coup in the 1950s, the Egyptian government moved all of the country’s major archaeological institutions, including the four museums, under its supervision, says Sameh Iskander, an Egyptian-American archaeologist at New York University.

“Now, the picture is completely different,” he adds. Egyptians run their own digs and make their own discoveries—but it’s been a long process to get there.

Diana Patch, currently the Lila Acheson Wallace Curator of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, has worked on various sites around Egypt since 1979. In her time there, she and her colleagues noticed that many young Egyptians who were interested in field archaeology couldn’t get an education in it. Locals would be on dig sites as inspectors, but there was still a disconnect.

Through the American Research Center in Egypt and with a cultural grant from USAID, Patch began a solution in the mid-1990s: Egyptology field school.

Field school is a cornerstone of American archeology programs. Students spend a summer digging in situ, learning how to handle important historical quarry. Patch recruited Egyptian and American supervisors who’d been through field school in the US to lead groups of recruits in Egypt. Now, most of the Egyptian inspectors working on sites have gone through similar training.

But how does education help representation—and Egyptology—in the long run? “I feel that the Egyptians that I work with, the whole atmosphere has changed,” Iskander, who leads a field site at the Temple of Ramesses II in Abydos, says. “A lot of them have degrees now; a lot of them are pursuing graduate degrees.” And with more Egyptian archaeologists joining the ranks, there’s a larger well of expertise for scientists overseas to tap.

It also means that mummies and other priceless finds get to stay in the climate they were built and preserved for. After the King Tut artifacts come back from their current world tour, they will be permanently housed in Cairo at the new Grand Egyptian Museum, which is set to open at the end of 2020.

The treasures from the Al-Asasif dig are expected to remain in Cairo, too, overlooking the wondrous Pyramids of Giza.

A common language for archaeology

It’s still a leap to say that Egyptians are the dominant force in the study of their origins. Iskander gave a talk a few weeks ago at the International Congress of Egyptologists in Cairo, and out of the 350 or so people speaking, only around 50 were Egyptian.

Part of the reason for this may be that English is still the leading language in Egyptology, despite the fact that Modern Standard Arabic is the official language of the region. In the same way that museums continue holding on to Egyptian relics, Gold says language is another colonial battle left to fight.

“There’s still this lingering power imbalance,” Gold says of the relationship between Egyptian and Western archaeologists. A lot of Egyptology programs, she explains, require knowledge in a smattering of languages, including English, French, German, and some elements of ancient Egyptian languages.

Modern Egyptian languages? Not so much, she says.

“As a result, very few Egyptological publications are written in Arabic. I think that speaks volumes as to how Egyptian archaeologists are still excluded.”

On his field sites, Iskander says that American students knew very little Arabic and have to communicate exclusively in English. Most Egyptologists have been forced to do the same. That’s not necessarily a problem, he says: If more Egyptian programs taught English, archaeologists from all over, including Egypt, would have better access to international journals that aren’t printed in the native tongue.

In Iskander’s view, the best way to fight back Victorian notions of Egyptology is by bringing more Egyptians to the table through education. Last year he started up a new field school for Egyptian archeologists—something he hopes international institutions take note of as the numbers of home-grown experts slowly rise in the field.

“Every foreign mission should consider having at least one field school session,” he says, “to give back to Egypt what Egypt has been giving all of us over the years.”

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For February, we’re focusing on the body parts that shape us, oxygenate us, and power us as we take long walks on the beach. Bony bonafide bones. These skeletal building blocks inspire curiosity and spark fear in different folks—we hope our stories, covering everything from surgeries and supplements to good old-fashioned boning, will only do the first. Once you’ve thoroughly blasted your mind with bone facts, check out our previous themed months: muscle and fat.

Imagine sitting down to a meal of ground-up bone, served on a plate made of burned bones, while two musicians—one rattling two sawed-off ribs together and the other ominously shaking part of a horse’s skull—provide grim ambience in the dim candlelight. Off in the corner, an oracle shoves some bones into a fire in an effort to predict whether the crops you just fertilized with shattered bones will yield a hearty harvest.

It might feel like you’re in the opening scene of the latest binge-worthy adaptation of a popular fantasy series, but this is real life. Or, at least, it would be if you mashed everything you’re about to read into one time period.

Humans have found unique uses for skeletal remains since prehistoric times. You may be familiar with bone arrowheads, fish hooks, and jewelry, but you may be surprised to learn how bones have found their way into the everyday lives of both ancient and modern people. Let’s journey beyond the grave.

Musical instruments

There are plenty of musical instruments that look like bones or include bones as part of their design. For example, artist Bruce Mahalski and guitar maker David Gilberd teamed up to build a bone guitar that features about 35 skulls. Super metal, yes, but not quite bony enough. It’s still, at its heart, a guitar.

For instruments straight-up made out of bone, two stand out: the aptly named “bones” and the jawbone. Even if you only listen to the latest pop songs, it’s possible you’ve heard the former without realizing it. In 1949, Freeman Davis, known as “Brother Bones,” recorded a version of the Jazz Age standard “Sweet Georgia Brown,” which found widespread fame after the Harlem Globetrotters picked it up as their theme song three years later.

You’re more likely to find them made out of wood today, but in their most basic form, bones are a pair of animal rib bones—usually sheep or cow— cut down to between 5 and 7 inches long. Players hold them between their fingers, curved sides facing each other, and knock them together with deft flicks of their wrists. Like skilled tap dancers, experts can create a vast range of percussive sounds.

The bones have their roots in traditional Irish and Scottish music, and immigrants from those countries brought them to America, where they found a home in bluegrass and other folk genres. They’re similar to other clacking percussion instruments like the spoons, the Chinese paiban, and castanets.

The jawbone, meanwhile, is originally an African instrument that made its way to the Americas as a result of the slave trade. It’s usually the jawbone of a horse or another equine (like a donkey or zebra), that’s been stripped of all flesh and dried.

Once it’s dry, the teeth become so loose they rattle around in their sockets. But it’s more than a simple rattle—players can create other sounds by striking the jawbone with a stick or rubbing the wood across its teeth.

It’s a little more niche, but you may have also heard the sound of a jawbone without realizing it—the vibraslap, patented in 1969 by Martin B. Cohen, was designed to sound exactly like it. Cohen said in his patent application that he’d found it hard to replace actual jawbones when they break.

Fortune telling

Yeah, you’ve heard of necromancy, and probably pyromancy. Now, get ready for scapulimancy and plastromancy. Relatives of pyromancy, these two divination practices involve writing questions on bones (usually large animal shoulder bones or turtle plastrons), heating them up until they crack, and then interpreting the cracks.

How they were heated is unclear and likely varied. Some sources simply mention fire, while others describe diviners inserting hot metal rods into holes drilled in the bones.

These practices weren’t restricted to any particular region, either, and ancient people worldwide had their own versions. Inhabitants of Europe, western Asia, and North Africa simply inspected the natural condition of the bone after all flesh was scraped away, but those who lived in North America and other parts of Asia used fire, according to David N. Keightley, a former professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Berkeley.

Perhaps the most well-preserved oracle bones come from China, most of which date back to the Shang dynasty (1600-1046 BCE). About 20,000 pieces (mostly ox scapulae and turtle plastrons) were dug up between 1928 and 1937 during official excavations around the dynasty’s capital city of Yinxu, about 300 miles southwest of modern-day Beijing. Most turned out to be predictions performed for the royal family. This discovery, among others, helped Chinese archaeologist Li Ji prove that the Shang dynasty actually existed.

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh has a large collection of these bones in storage for research purposes. Amy Covell-Murthy, who manages the museum’s archaeology collection, said the inscriptions on their bones ask questions like whether or not someone will have a baby, which crops to plant in a field, or how a war will turn out. She also said some are fakes, but that they still hold value because they’re at least 100 years old themselves.

Bone china

Unlike true porcelain, which contains only minerals, the ceramic material known as bone china includes bone ash. It originated in England in the 1700s and for a long time, most, if not all, bone china was made there.

A few potters and companies experimented with bone ash as they sought to bulk up their soft-paste porcelain to rival the stronger hard-paste ceramics made in China, but Josiah Spode I is generally understood to have been the one who standardized bone china production. When he died, his son, Josiah Spode II, took over and continued to improve on his father’s work.

Today, bone china is made across the globe by companies such as Lenox, which has made numerous pieces for presidents dating back to 1918, and the Spode family’s eponymous business, Spode.

Fertilizer

All living things need phosphorus, and bones have a lot of it. This is why bone meal, as ground-up bones are called, has found its calling as plant fertilizer. Without phosphorus, plants can’t function, can’t grow, and can’t photosynthesize, says Dennis Stevenson, vice president for science at the New York Botanical Garden. Bone meal is also high in calcium, which plants need for their cell walls.

But with its benefits come some potential problems. Health experts say some bone meal can be high in lead, and possibly also mercury. It’s also got a bit of a dark history in the U.S., dating back to the near-total destruction of the American bison.

The hunting of these thousand-pound animals was driven by their highly prized skins, but also by the U.S. government, which promoted hunting in an effort to starve Native Americans and force them onto reservations. Hunters would kill and skin bison, but often left the carcasses littering the Great Plains. As settlers moved west, they began picking them up and selling them to use as fertilizer.

Gelatin and glue

The revelation that gelatin is made out of animal parts is a common one. But the simple fact that everyone seems to have this somewhat traumatic revelation at some point in their lives made it seem relevant for this list. If you already know this, great—maybe you’ll learn something new here anyway. And if you didn’t, now you do, and you can reveal it to others in your life.

Most gelatin is made from the byproducts of the meat and leather industries, usually bones and skin. In its purest form, it’s 98 to 99 percent protein and is nearly tasteless and odorless. Its use dates back to the medieval era, and because it was hard to make, it was originally just for rich families.

Today, it’s still pretty complicated to make, but industry has taken much of the hands-on labor out of it. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the 20-week process for making gelatin out of cattle bones starts like this: The bones are crushed and cooked at 180 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit before being spun in a centrifuge, dried at 160 to 270 degrees, degreased, and treated for five to seven days with a weak hydrochloric acid solution.

Then, the ground-up bones are washed several times with water and treated with a lime slurry (not the tasty tropical kind) for one to two months in an effort to remove everything that’s not collagen. After that, the almost-gelatin is washed again, made more acidic, and may be filtered. Finally, its pH is made more neutral (between 5 and 7), it’s sterilized at 280 to 290 degrees for several seconds, cooled, and dried with hot air for 1 to 3 hours.

This stuff ends up in obvious foods like gummies, but can also be used in a wide variety of ways to stabilize, thicken, and add texture to the things we eat. It’s also used to make modern film.

Gelatin and animal glue are closely related, though use of the latter has largely disappeared. At least as late as the early 2000s, gelatin-based glues were used to stick those “organic” stickers on fruits and vegetables, the USDA says.

Animal glue has a long history, and in 2014 researchers found that it was used to hold together the painted layers of Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang’s massive terracotta army. It was used worldwide until the early 1900s, but was essentially eliminated by the invention of synthetic adhesives.

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The attempt to explain where humans come from has long preoccupied theologians, scientists, and laypeople alike. A new paper shows just how complicated our origin story could be. Written by scientists in Australia, South Africa, and Korea, the study uses DNA from individuals in southern Africa to track some of the oldest known genetic traces of so-called modern humans—people who looked like we do today. But though the paper zooms in on a northern Botswana river valley as the ancestral “homeland” of all modern humanity, other experts say there’s no such thing.

The new study looked at the mitogenome, or the mitochondrial DNA passed along the maternal line, of 200 living people from southern Africa. All are members of an ethnolinguistic indigenous group broadly known as the KhoeSan (unified by their traditional foraging way of life and use of languages that involve a unique “click” consonant), which previous genetic research suggests was once the largest group of people on the planet. Researchers examined their mitogenomes alongside others collected for earlier studies in the same region. Among the mitogenomes, they identified approximately 1,200 carriers of a single lineage known as L-0, and created the largest L-0 database to date.

Mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed on by mothers, is the focus of many studies of ancient human migration. While we get much of our DNA from both parents, which results in a mash-up that’s difficult to untangle while tracing the roots of a family tree, your mitochondrial DNA tells a single story: that of your mother, and her mother, and her mother’s mother. That creates a record that’s easier to track back in time. Mitochondrial DNA also mutates much faster than the rest of our genetic material, creating generation-to-generation changes researchers can use to track movements and meetings between groups of ancient people. It’s a way of understanding genetic change over centuries, rather than over millennia, and many researchers think it gives a clearer picture of our species’ family tree.

The authors of the new study compared different L-0 groups among the KhoeSan using these small shifts, and tracked the oldest of the bunch. Hayes and her colleagues propose that all modern humans are descended from the L-0 lineage, carried out of an ancestral “homeland” they’ve identified using geographic and historical climate data alongside information about the KhoeSan’s traditional territories.

On the basis of all this information the researchers propose that ancestral homeland of all anatomically modern humans is located in what is today northern Botswana. Hayes and her colleagues propose that the valley there, which is now quite dry, was the lush and fertile home of our ancestors for 70,000 years before a changing climate prompted them to spread out and begin humanity’s long trek around the world, taking with them their L-0 lineages, which spread out and differentiated.

“Our study demonstrates that our genetic maternal ancestors likely originated from a wetland region in Southern Africa—in present Botswana,” study author Axel Timmermann, a climate physicist at Pusan National University in Korea, told Popular Science in an email. “It also shows that climate played a fundamental role in setting in motion early human migrations, which contributed to the development of genetic diversity and eventually cultural and ethnic identity.”

It’s a compelling story, but the paper has already generated controversy. “The idea that we’re looking for a single origin [of anatomically modern humans] is out of fashion,” says John Hawks, a University of Wisconsin-Madison paleoanthropologist. That was the goal in the 1980s and ‘90s, Hawks says. But since then, modern genetic technologies have proven that our ancestors interbred with other species, such as Neanderthals, making the picture of humanity’s origin more complex than the Edenic story scientists sought to tell a few decades ago.

In other words, there was no one place or time when we suddenly became human. It’s probable that early “modern humans” travelled extensively and met, cohabitated, and mated with many other members of the genus Homo along the way. And although the river valley was apparently an inviting place in its prime, many other locations in Africa could have sustained modern humans at the same time. Today our ilk live in many different kinds of places, from the Arctic to the Sahara: There’s no reason to think that early humans didn’t do the same.

“I think the search for a single, tightly confined homeland of African Homo sapiens, within narrow environmental parameters, is a bit out of touch with the combined genomic, fossil, and paleoenvironmental data we now have,” Richard Potts, director of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s Human Origins program, told Popular Science in an email interview.

But the intent of the study isn’t so bold, Timmermann told PopSci. “The message of our paper is that about 200,000 years ago the ancestors of the current L0 haplogroup emerged and lived in a vast wetland region northern Botswana,” he wrote. The study does not, however, “provide any information about where this group originally came from or what happened before 200,000 years ago.” This, Timmermann explained, is why the team used the word “homeland” and not “cradle.”

Beyond that, he writes, the fossil record tells us that many hominids closely related to Homo sapiens lived in Africa during the period they studied. Early humans could have met and cohabitated and mated with many of them. Although genetic traces of this history have yet to be found in modern human DNA, it’s possible they will be. There’s a lot more to say about our origins, but Hayes, Timmermann, and their fellow study authors are confident they’ve found at least one clear story. Many of their colleagues are less so.

While the interpretation of the data may leave room for debate, the new study still offers some value, says Hawks. “I think what it tells us is that we have to explore more parts of Africa for fossils and archaeology,” he says. Archaeologists have yet to find fossils of early modern humans in the areas this paper says they should be. Beyond that, he says, the work adds 200 new samples of mitochondrial DNA from a historically understudied group of people to the scientific record, which is valuable in and of itself. Today, only around 100,000 KhoeSan remain, and like many Indigenous peoples around the world, their language and way of life is threatened by racism and colonialism. Putting the KhoeSan on the genetic map might help raise their profile, and will certainly improve our understanding of the human genome. Most of the work focused on identifying genes and mutations both dangerous and beneficial has focused on caucasion people of European descent.

“We’re talking about people who, among the modern humans of the world, have been neglected in genetic samples,” he says. “Let’s make those communities a bigger part of understanding our past—and benefiting from genetic research.”

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New research shows that humans might have been blazing it even earlier than we thought. A study published today in Science Advances analyzed chemical residue from 2,500 year-old wooden bowls in Central Asia and found what they believe is the oldest evidence of psychoactive cannabis smoking to date.

Cannabis sativa has been used for millennia, first cultivated in Taiwan around 8000 BCE. Archaeologists have well-documented evidence of people in East Asia using cannabis seeds for oil and hemp fibers for textiles and clothing. But when humans caught on to the plant’s psychoactive effects have largely remained a mystery.

Robert Spengler, the laboratory director at the Max Planck Institute and an author of the new study, said in a press conference that how humans encountered mind-altering cannabis remains a hotly contested debate among archaeologists. Now, thanks to this team’s work, we have strong evidence to suggest this discovery likely occurred as early as 500 BCE, and it may have been an integral part of Central Asian cultures.

Archaeologists excavated 10 wooden braziers (bowls that held hot coals) from the Jirzankal Cemetery at the western edge of China. The cemetery sits on the Pamir Plateau, a cultural center connecting India, China, and Persia that would later become a crucial stop on the Silk Road. Previous excavations in the area had already found remnants of cannabis. Knowing this, the study’s researchers performed an analysis on the burnt traces of cannabinoids left on the braziers and found high concentrations of CBN, the chemical signature left behind by the burning of THC, on all but one of them. That provided what Spengler called “unequivocal evidence” of psychoactive cannabis smoking in this cemetery.

“Humans have always sought out plants with secondary metabolites that have effects on the human body,” Spengler said in the conference. “So the results of the study in many ways should not be surprising to anybody, but they really do help us understand the development of human cultural practices through time.”

It’s believed that cannabis was used by Central Asian cultures in funerary rituals. Herodotus, a Greek scholar who traveled to Central Asia in the 5th Century BCE, wrote in The Histories about people he observed burning and inhaling cannabis fumes in tents there, as a way to cleanse themselves after burying the dead. A burial shroud discovered in 2016, where whole cannabis plants were placed around the body, also points to the plant’s uses in mortuary rites beyond smoking.

Spengler pointed to a 1930s excavation in the nearby Atlai Mountains, which found a leather pouch containing cannabis seeds, along with the traditional tents they were burned in, as one of the first corroborations of Herodotus’ accounts. Today’s study provides the first evidence that those plants were actually burned, and that they contained high levels of THC.

Scientists are still trying to pin down how humans first came across these high-THC cannabis plants. The wild cannabis varieties present in antiquity tended to contain low levels of the psychoactive compound tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the chemical that makes this weed “wacky.” This meant that humans either actively cultivated the plants to produce more THC or that they came across a less common variety that naturally contained high levels of the compound.

Spengler theorized that plants growing under stressful conditions at high altitudes, like wild Afghan varieties that do in fact contain more THC, may have had the phenotypic plasticity to adapt in specific areas, or that humans rapidly domesticated and cross-breeded the plants to produce hybrids with greater amounts of THC. Either way, this study suggests that the modern use of cannabis for its mind-altering properties was developed in Central Asia—and not East Asia, where the plants were first cultivated for oil and textile production.

As scientists discover more about humanity’s relationship to mind-altering substances, one thing is certain: Mary Jane has been roaming the Earth for thousands of years and its best years are ahead of it.

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Imagine you’re a sixteen-year-old girl living in New York City. One day, your mother decides that it’s time for you to leave the nest. You’re going to meet your new husband for the first time, she says. But to get to your new home, you have to walk all the way to Richmond, Virginia. That’s 342 miles away.

Similar treks may have sustained a small community in southern Germany for nearly seven centuries, according to a new study in Science examining the 4,000-year-old group’s DNA. By uniting cutting-edge genetic techniques and traditional archeology, researchers reconstructed family trees and traced migration patterns across Europe to reveal a depth of social complexity and inequality that had previously been lost to time.

The study focuses on 104 individuals who lived during the early Bronze Age, when humanity was beginning to swap stone tools for more sophisticated instruments crafted from metal. The pyramids had just been built, the mighty Babylonian empire was in its infancy, and the Code of Hammurabi was soon to be written. “People in the past were very mobile and very much interconnected,” says archeologist and lead researcher Philipp Stockhammer. “It’s a myth that people were very isolated and simple.”

“We know there’s social inequality [today],” says Simon Underdown, an anthropologist from Oxford Brookes University who was not involved in the recent study. “What this is allowing us to do is shine a light 4,000 years back, and see that the way societies organized themselves… it was pretty similar to how we are now.”

Stockhammer and his colleagues studied skeletons hailing from the Lech River valley—an unassuming rural community that spanned just around six square miles, and maintained a surprisingly stable chain of family farmsteads from 2500-1700 BCE. What made the area a perfect place to study, according to Stockhammer, was that each farm had its own graveyard. “We could really see who lived in a farmstead, because the family was buried beside it,” he says.

How each person was buried—and what they were buried with—provides a lot of potential information about their social standing. For men, typical grave goods included weapons (daggers, axes, chisels, and arrow heads). For women, elaborate body adornments (like large headdresses and massive leg rings) were the things to bring into the afterlife. Pins, apparently agender, were buried with both sexes. And in general, more important people had more stuff surrounding their remains.

With dozens of study subjects neatly signaling their social rank, the next step was to try and pull DNA from their skeletons. Usually, ancient DNA is very fragmented and small, weathered down over time due to exposure to heat or moisture or bacteria. So the team was surprised and excited to find that the gravelly, south German soil kept genetic material relatively well-preserved.

“I thought, ‘Oh my god, this preservation is amazing,’” Stockhammer says. Then: “Oh my god, we could do all the methods. Oh my god, we could integrate it all!”

Indeed, the viability of the skeletons’ DNA meant that Stockhammer’s team could connect more traditional archaeological insights—using bones and burial practices and artifacts to piece together an idea of how people lived and died—with genetic information about how those people were related and where their lives had taken them. Researchers pulled one tooth from each subject, extracting DNA from the dental pulp inside to reveal each individual’s genetic sex, their maternal lineage, and how they were related to others in the community. The teeth had another use as well: Archeogeneticists checked dental enamel for strontium and oxygen isotopes. We ingest these elements in our food and water, so it’s possible to match the signatures of such deposits to particular locations. This signals where a person grew up, and where they spent their childhood.

The researchers noticed a few intriguing irregularities in the results. For starters, none of the family cemeteries contained any adult daughters. There were also several females buried in richly-furnished graves who had apparently grown up far away, while some local males showed up in sparse graves on the farmsteads of wealthy families they had no relation to.

After combining this new genetic evidence with previous theories and data gathered from larger genetic surveys, the team observed a level of social complexity that went “beyond what we have always assumed what household life was,” according to Stockhammer. They were looking at evidence of socially stratified society within a singular household.

At most sites, geneticists were able to map four or five generations of fathers and sons, so they believe that the male lineage inherited the farmsteads. The wealthy foreign women were probably their wives, who came from distant communities to marry them—while the missing adult daughters left to marry into other communities in a sort of bridal exchange. Based on their dental enamel, it appears the incoming brides travelled from as far away as the pre-Alpine lowlands (modern-day Italy and Switzerland) and areas inhabited by Únětice culture (much of Central and Eastern Europe)—regions more than 260 miles away.

What about the low-status locals left in humble graves? These people were not biologically related to the core families of the studied farmsteads, but they were buried alongside them. The most likely explanation is that these powerful families took on servants or slaves from less fortunate lineages in the area. While there is clear evidence that Classical Roman and Greek households featured servants and slaves, this new evidence indicates that the practice may have existed in this particular region nearly 1,500 years earlier than previously thought.

While it’s impossible to know how the household workers and migrant women were treated, Stockhammer says the system did have its benefits. “I’m absolutely certain that these women from afar were absolutely crucial for the transfer of knowledge,” he says. “They were really bringing society forward.”

Archaeological studies tend to examine prehistoric populations on a continental scale, looking for big changes and tracing massive genetic shifts. Because most of Europe had no written documentation prior to the Iron Age (around 1000-900 BCE), it’s generally been impossible to investigate the individuals within those studied societies. The ability to extract genetic information using aDNA is allowing scientists to learn directly from the people in the graves, not just from the objects they left behind.

Moving forward, both Stockhammer and Underdown say, this sort of collaboration between archeologists and geneticists will likely become the norm. In order to really understand the past, they say, we have to integrate all available methods. As each generation of aDNA technology becomes more advanced (and, by extension, more accessible and affordable), such techniques will offer a new level of insight into the lives and relationships of prehistoric people.

“Rather than just being a pile of gold from a grave or a load of fragmentary bones, [this study] allows you to step into that household 4,000 years ago,” says Underdown. “This is a taste of how archeology will be done in the future.”

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Popular Science’s new series, The Builders, takes you behind the construction tape to reveal the individuals responsible for history’s greatest architectural works.

Glance at an Incan brick, and you’ll notice there’s very little that’s conventionally bricklike about it. There are no right angles, no proper corners. And it’s not a rectangle at all, but a trapezoid: one side wider and squatter than the other. Look at another. Then another. Then another. No two are exactly the same, each a polygonal version of the unique rock it started as.

Carefully stacked together like a 15th-century game of Tetris, these seemingly haphazard blocks have withstood 500 years of disasters, both natural and human. The signature style of the pre-Columbian empire, these stones marked the Inca expansion some 2,500 miles down the backbone of South America. The sprawl took just a few decades, propelled by the strength of a man named Pachacuti, the ninth Sapa Inca (the indigenous Quechua term for “king”). His most impressive building project was Machu Picchu, a 200-building, mountain-hugging summer resort for the ruler and his extended family. But this wonder of the world is just one place where Pachacuti carefully recorded his legacy—and building concepts that continue to help us create more-resilient cities—stone by stone.

Born in 1438 as Cusi Yupanqui, Pachacuti didn’t plan his rise to power. When the Chankas, an enemy ethnic group invaded, his father, then king, and his brother, the future ruler, retreated. Cusi Yupanqui had to defend the Inca’s fertile Peruvian valley alone. The puma-shaped crown city of Cusco occupied a sacred spot in between two forking rivers, and the Chankas wanted to call the prestigious place their own.

As the Chankas made their way toward the gold-plated Temple of the Sun, part fortress and part temple, Cusi Yupanqui led his men into a battle so ferocious that the stones beneath the warriors’ feet rose up to fight alongside them—or so the story goes. In the aftermath, the victorious Inca rechristened their leader Pachacuti, or “Earth Shaker.” After his brother’s eventual murder and his father’s death, Pachacuti ascended the throne as the sole king of Cusco.

Unsatisfied with this one little valley, he set about conquering swaths of the Andes, knitting together lands in the vast quilt of the expanding Inca Empire, which at its zenith stretched from Quito, Ecuador, in the north, down a long coastal strip to Talca, Chile in the south. The Inca laid roads and raised cities among diverse natural ecosystems, from the Atacama—the only desert drier than the poles—to the rainforests of Cusco to the flood zones of Machu Picchu. Everything they built, they built to last, with the aid of Pachacuti’s soldiers, engineers, and stones.

In colonizing the land outside Cusco, Pachacuti used architecture to “mark their presence on the landscape,” says Stella Nair, an art historian at the University of California at, Los Angeles, and an expert in indigenous art and architecture in the Americas. Absent a written language, he used construction to put his stamp on every conquered village, reminding potential enemies of his power. “The [Inca] are a really small population, and within 100 years, they conquer the western rim of South America,” Nair says. “You have to convey the idea that you’re there.”

The hallmark of their stonework is the trapezoid, a form that lends the structures extraordinary strength. Without modern earthmovers to dig foundations into bedrock or advanced metallurgy to imbue strength, the Incas wisely focused on shaping their buildings to their environment, instead of taking risks on the assumption their materials would hold up against earthquakes and other disasters. Each element, from an individual block to an entire building, is bigger at the bottom than the top, which forms sturdier foundations. Most structures were single-story: The squatter the building, the more likely it was to hold up. It’s also why most builders eschewed mortar: The paste holds bricks together, but in a seismic event, a bit of glue is meaningless. These clever strategies prevented earthquake damage, a pressing concern on the Pacific’s tectonic Ring of Fire.

Inca structures were surprisingly easy to assemble. With polygonal stones, there’s no reason to strive for individually perfect cubes. “When you’re working a stone, your most fragile part is your corners,” Nair says. “If you’re trying to make a rectangular block [and you break a corner], you just ruined your block.” Instead, a head wall-maker would direct a team of masons in matching the slopes of each new stone to the one that preceded it.

The Inca way of carving stone blurs the boundary between the natural and the man-made. “When they carve a stone, they’ll leave enough of the cortex to give some sense of its original shape,” Nair says. Experts attribute this both to the culture’s reverence for the landscape, and their desire to distort time and history to make it appear the Inca had ruled for longer than they had. Today, many indigenous people continue to build in the style of their ancestors. It’s at once an homage to this great legacy and out of necessity: Many descendants—modern-day Peruvians—live in poverty and make their homes of local stone and homemade adobe (the Spanish word for “mudbrick”).

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Builders in the region continue to cap their stout structures with carefully woven reed roofs, though they’re considerably thinner than their ancestors. Thatching eclipsed two-thirds of each building, according to Nair. Some roofs were gabled, with opposing slopes, while others were hipped, in which all sides slope downward. Every one was like a three-dimensional textile, secured to the building with clever knotting (the Inca did not have nails).

Designs also followed a profound philosophical or spiritual principle. Builders selected sites based on their orientation to the natural world. “The Incas paid a lot of attention to where you can see sacred features from different spots,” Nair says. Mountain peaks, rushing springs, and spiritually significant rivers were not just premium views, but elements that defined the shape of entire complexes, even entire cities.

Pachacuti chose the location for Machu Picchu, a sprawling summer resort for his family and entourage, with great intention. It rises out of the Sacred Valley, where Inca culture originated, and overlooks the Urubamba River, which irrigated agricultural lands all the way to Cusco. But opting for this special location brought his builders new challenges. In addition to regular seismic activity, a constant flow of meltwater marks the Andes mountains; it pours downhill from its glacial origins, instigating landslides along the way. Machu Picchu’s wet season lasts roughly half the year, unleashing twice the annual average rainfall of the continental United States. “It’s just horrible if you want to think about stable landscapes to build on,” Nair says. But the hallowed nature of the site, combined with the temperate relief it provided in summer, was likely enough to convince Pachacuti to invest in such a perilous project.

To cope, the Inca rigorously surveyed the potential building sites, and developed tricks for stabilization. Machu Picchu’s structural stability comes from a series of 700 terraces, which still meet contemporary geotechnical standards for retaining walls. Like a set of stacked window boxes, they corralled water as it came rushing down the hills. The sturdy barriers prevented soil erosion, trapping dirt inside. The structures also provided flat arable land for growing crops, such as corn, squash, and beans—all essential for feeding the king’s 1,200-person entourage. Water still found its way into the heart of the complex, so engineers built 130 drainage holes into the walls of the royal city.

But preventing floods was only one of the architect’s goals. Residences cluster around drinking wells. At the top of the mountain, near a rushing spring, engineers dug a canal that stored freshwater, which then trickled down through the Stairway of Fountains. Pachacuti’s palace was at the topmost well and therefore received the freshest water, civil engineer Ken Wright told Nova. The municipal tap flowed down from there, always separate from the drainage system. The system could handle 25 gallons of water each minute to accommodate the spring’s peak flow—something Wright estimates the Inca likely calculated as part of a yearlong research and development phase before they began construction.

It’s that type of careful planning and rigorous technique that allowed Pachacuti and his people to thrive, wherever his empire expanded. That’s why architects, engineers, and enthusiasts still revere Inca designs to this day. We see their influence in the words we use: In 2010, meteorologists in alpine Europe named a method for measuring rainfall in mountainous areas the Integrated Nowcasting through Comprehensive Analysis, or INCA.

It’s also increasingly in the way we think. As drought wrinkles many parts of the Andean desert and climate change brings still-harsher weather to the region, researchers are reexamining Inca water-storage practices for insight into how we might survive our desolate future. In contemporary Cusco, where Pachacuti’s journey began, archaeologists are helping locals restore water-retaining terraces, which remain damp deep into summer. Smaller Inca strategies work too. By reintroducing gravel into the soil, farmers can prevent landslides without inhibiting growth. And by switching to local crops, which are already adapted to the regional climate, they can ensure a better harvest than less-hardy imported varieties.

Despite their long and revered history, the indigenous people of the Andes—the direct descendants of this ancient civilization—get short shrift. They’re displaced by new airports and growing hotel chains and other hidden costs of tourism. Many live in poverty. And, Nair says, among many Westerners with cable TV and YouTube access, wild theories about Machu Picchu’s alien origins are more popular than the very real Inca men and women who built these lasting monuments to their empire’s strength. Pachacuti’s legacy may be written in stone, but conspiracies zipping around the internet threaten to erase him.

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