The Protein Gap Bone chemistry from 12,000 Europeans traces a 10,000-year pattern of unequal access to meat—and finds women consistently on the losing end

New research applies an economics-based inequality metric to isotope data from 12,281 European skeletons—finding persistent male dominance in high-protein consumption across 10,000 years of prehistory and history. #Bioarchaeology #StableIsotopes #FoodInequality www.anthropology.net/p/the-protei...

The Stone Seekers of Jojosi A site in South Africa's grasslands reveals that Homo sapiens were making dedicated quarrying expeditions 220,000 years ago — far earlier than the field assumed possible

220,000 years ago, early humans in South Africa were making dedicated quarrying trips — not just picking up stone on the way to something else. The Jojosi site rewrites the timeline of deliberate resource planning. #Paleoanthropology #MiddleStoneAge #HumanEvolution

A 1.8-Million-Year-Old Elephant Butchery Site in Tanzania Rewrites the Timeline of Human Megafaunal Exploitation New spatial and taphonomic evidence from Olduvai Gorge suggests our ancestors were processing giant elephants far earlier — and more systematically — than the fossil record had indicated.

1.78 million years ago, hominins at Olduvai Gorge were breaking open elephant long bones for marrow — the oldest such evidence in East Africa. New spatial and taphonomic analysis makes the case. #Paleoanthropology #Olduvai #HumanEvolution www.anthropology.net/p/a-18-milli...

An Island Built from Dinner A small shell-dense island off northern Fiji may be the first midden island documented in the South Pacific east of Papua New Guinea — if it is what researchers think it is

A small island off northern Fiji is made almost entirely of ancient shellfish remains — possibly built by centuries of human refuse, meal by discarded meal. New research asks: midden or tsunami deposit? #Archaeology #PacificIslands #Zooarchaeology www.anthropology.net/p/an-island-...

The Oldest Dice in the World Were Made in Ice Age America Bone fragments from Folsom campsites in Wyoming and Colorado are rewriting the history of randomness

New study in American Antiquity: the oldest dice in the world were made by Folsom hunter-gatherers on the Great Plains 12,000 years ago — more than 6,000 years before any Old World examples. #Paleoindian #NativeAmerican #Archaeology www.anthropology.net/p/the-oldest...

Eight Centuries at the Furnace: A West African Iron Workshop That Refused to Change New excavations at a 2,400-year-old smelting site in Senegal reveal a metallurgical tradition that held steady for nearly eight hundred years.

A 2,400-year-old iron smelting workshop in Senegal ran for nearly 800 years and barely changed its technique throughout. New research reveals what that kind of continuity looks like in the ground. #Archaeology #AfricanHistory #Archaeometallurgy

Painted Into the Dreaming: New Thylacine and Tasmanian Devil Rock Art From Arnhem Land Freshly documented paintings at two Northern Territory sites raise questions about when these animals last walked the mainland — and why one mattered so much more than the other.

New rock art from Arnhem Land adds 16 depictions of thylacines and Tasmanian devils — some possibly under 1,000 years old. What the gap between 160 vs. 25 images tells us about extinction and memory. #Anthropology #Archaeology #RockArt #Thylacine www.anthropology.net/p/painted-in...

What Local Adaptation Actually Requires Herman Pontzer's new book uses the Sama divers' enlarged spleens to make a precise case for human adaptability — and a precise case against its misuse.

The Sama people of the Philippines evolved larger spleens for diving. That’s real local adaptation. Claims about IQ or heart disease? They don’t survive the same logic. New essay on Herman Pontzer’s Adaptable. #Anthropology #HumanEvolution #Paleoanthropology www.anthropology.net/p/what-local...

Culture Did What Biology Couldn't: Quantifying the Engine Behind Human Planetary Dominance A new study puts a number on how much cultural evolution accelerated our species' spread — and the answer is almost absurd.

One species. 300,000 years. 51 million square miles. A new study quantifies just how much cultural evolution accelerated human expansion — the answer is 88 million years’ worth. #Anthropology #HumanEvolution #CulturalEvolution www.anthropology.net/p/culture-di...

Scandinavia’s Largest Mound Has No Burial. Now We May Know Why. A new LiDAR study argues that Raknehaugen was built in response to a catastrophic sixth-century landslide, not to honor a king.

Scandinavia’s largest prehistoric mound has never yielded a burial. New LiDAR analysis suggests it wasn’t built for one — but as a ritual response to a sixth-century landslide triggered by volcanic climate collapse. #Archaeology #IronAge #Paleolandscape www.anthropology.net/p/scandinavi...

Beneath the Mud at Buto: Satellite Radar and Electrical Tomography Locate a Saite-Period Structure in the Nile Delta A geophysics team working at one of Egypt’s oldest sites finds mudbrick walls and a cache of religious objects buried under meters of later debris

Radar satellites and underground electrical scans just pulled Saite-period mudbrick walls and a cache of religious amulets from beneath the Nile Delta mud at ancient Buto, a site abandoned for 1,500 years before someone rebuilt it. #Egyptology #ArchaeologicalScience #NileDelta

The Lehringen Spear, Revisited New analysis of a 125,000-year-old Neanderthal site in Germany settles old doubts about elephant hunting and reveals a far more versatile predator than the record suggested

New zooarchaeological analysis of the 125,000-year-old Lehringen site confirms Neanderthals hunted a straight-tusked elephant with a wooden spear and butchered bear, beaver, and aurochs at the same lakeshore. #Neanderthals #Paleoanthropology #Zooarchaeology www.anthropology.net/p/the-lehrin...

Rujm el-Hiri Was Never Alone: Satellite Imagery and the Hidden Stone Circles of the Golan A massive, enigmatic monument in the Golan Heights has been called Israel's Stonehenge for decades. It turns out it may be the best-preserved example of a regional tradition that nobody noticed.

Rujm el-Hiri, the “Israeli Stonehenge,” was never an isolated monument. Satellite imagery just revealed 28 more large stone circles within 25 km, rewriting the site’s archaeology entirely. #Archaeology #SouthernLevant #RemoteSensing www.anthropology.net/p/rujm-el-hi...

A Machine Learns to Read Bowls: Deep Learning and the Shape of Japanese Eating Habits A new approach to classifying ancient Sue ware pottery reveals not just what the model sees, but what the ambiguity itself might mean

A deep learning model trained on 917 Sue ware pieces doesn’t just classify pottery, it maps the fuzzy morphological boundary where dish-type and bowl-type vessels blurred during Japan’s shift to chopstick-based dining. #Archaeology #JapaneseArchaeology #DeepLearning

Coral Walls, Uranium Clocks, and the Homes Europeans Never Wrote Down A new dating method is recovering the construction history of Polynesian households that colonial records chose to ignore.

New research applies uranium-thorium dating to 19th-century coral cottages in French Polynesia, revealing construction timelines for Polynesian homes that colonial records largely ignored. #Archaeology #PacificHistory #Geochronology @antiquity.ac.uk www.anthropology.net/p/coral-wall...

The Cemetery at the Edge of the Islamic World Thirteen medieval burials on Ibiza hold the genetic record of a conquered island, trans-Saharan networks, and a case of leprosy hidden in plain sight.

New ancient DNA from 10th–12th century Islamic Ibiza reveals Sub-Saharan African individuals from Chad and Senegambia, rapid post-conquest admixture, and the first genetically confirmed leprosy case from medieval Islamic Iberia. #Archaeogenomics #AncientDNA #MedievalHistory

One Species, Barely Holding Together Two new genomic studies reveal Neanderthals as a patchwork of tiny, isolated populations — more genetically divided than any humans alive today

Two new genomic studies reveal Neanderthals as a patchwork of tiny, isolated groups — more genetically fractured than any living human populations. A single bottleneck nearly ended them 65,000 years ago. #Neanderthals #AncientDNA #HumanEvolution #Anthropology #Paleoanthropology

Before the First Harvest: Ancient DNA and the Paleolithic Dogs of Europe Two companion studies push the genetic record of domestic dogs back nearly 5,000 years, revealing a population that spread across genetically distinct human cultures before farming existed

Ancient DNA from Britain & Turkey confirms dogs were widespread across Ice Age Europe by 15,800 years ago — genetically similar across three distinct human cultures long before farming existed. What do we actually know about the first dogs? #Palaeogenomics #Zooarchaeology #HumanEvolution #Dogs

What Sumerian Teeth Reveal About the People History Ignored A new isotopic method unlocks diet and daily life at a third-millennium BCE Iraqi site where conventional analysis has long been impossible.

Cuneiform tablets say Sumerians ate fish. Their teeth say otherwise. New zinc isotope analysis of dental enamel from 4,500-year-old Abu Tbeirah reconstructs diet where collagen has long since vanished. #Bioarchaeology #AncientMesopotamia #IsotopeArchaeology www.anthropology.net/p/what-sumer...

Shaped Around the Fossil: Acheulean Handaxes and the Strange Stones of Sakhnin Valley A new site in northern Israel reveals Lower Palaeolithic handaxes crafted around fossils—a find that reopens the debate over how early humans perceived stone.

A valley in northern Israel has produced 10 handaxes deliberately shaped around fossils and geodes, unprecedented for a single Acheulean site. What did early humans see in strange stone? #Palaeolithic #Acheulean #HumanEvolution www.anthropology.net/p/shaped-aro...

One Lineage to Rule Them All: The Last Neanderthals Were Descended from a Single Refugium Population New DNA confirms Europe's last Neanderthals descended from a single population that survived the MIS 4 glacial in southwest France.

New mtDNA from 6 Neanderthal sites shows nearly all Late Neanderthals descended from one refugium population in SW France ~65,000 years ago — then collapsed again ~42,000 years ago. #Neanderthals #AncientDNA #Paleoanthropology www.anthropology.net/p/one-lineag...

One Kind of Stone: What 60 Butchered Bison Reveal About Middle Pleistocene Planning The site where hominins don’t behave the way they’re supposed to

At Gran Dolina ~400 ka, hominins butchered 60+ bison using tools made almost exclusively from one type of stone. New research links this rare pattern to some of the earliest evidence of communal hunting. #Paleoanthropology #Atapuerca #MiddlePleistocene www.anthropology.net/p/one-kind-o...

Congenital Syphilis Was Supposed to Be a Reliable Marker. Three Children in Neolithic Vietnam Complicate That. A diagnostic assumption decades in the making may not hold outside western clinical contexts

Three children in Neolithic Vietnam show classic signs of congenital treponematosis — but the evidence points to yaws, not syphilis. A new study challenges a foundational assumption in ancient disease research. #Paleopathology #Treponematosis #Bioarchaeology www.anthropology.net/p/congenital...

What the Basement Kept How archaeologists are reading the material residue of a 2022 war crime in Ukraine

An archaeological study of the ‘22 Yahidne war crime documents children’s wall drawings, adult death calendars & propaganda newspapers left in a basement where 368 Ukrainians were held for 27 days — asking what it means when atrocity becomes heritage. #ConflictArchaeology #Ukraine @antiquity.ac.uk

Sky Metal in the Sacrifice Pit An axe-like tool recovered from Sanxingdui's Pit No. 7 turns out to be made from a fallen star — and it may not have been a weapon at all.

A Sanxingdui sacrificial pit just yielded China’s largest Bronze Age meteoritic iron artifact — an axe-like object likely treated as sacred rather than used as a tool. Sky metal, ritual context, and an unresolved meteorite type. #Archaeology #BronzeAge #Sanxingdui

Phylogenetic analysis of 100 primate taxa finds lethal and mild aggression are evolutionarily decoupled. Killing frequency doesn't track bickering frequency. Socio-ecological models need rethinking. #Primatology #ComparativeBehavior #SocialEvolution

What Elephant Teeth Tell Us About Neanderthal Hunters Strontium isotopes in 125,000-year-old molars reveal the surprisingly distant origins of the giant prey Neanderthals hunted at a German lakeside site

New research reads 125,000-year-old elephant molars like travel diaries—strontium isotopes show some Neanderthal-hunted giants roamed up to 300 km before arriving at a German lake site. #Neanderthals #Paleoanthropology #Pleistocene www.anthropology.net/p/what-eleph...

Palau’s First Settlers Were Already a Mixed Population Before They Arrived New ancient DNA research overturns assumptions about when Pacific peoples began mixing — and reveals nearly 3,000 years of unbroken genetic continuity in the western Pacific.

Palau’s first settlers arrived ~3,200 years ago already carrying 40% Papuan ancestry — centuries before similar mixing happened elsewhere in the Pacific. New ancient DNA research rewrites the archipelago’s founding story. #Paleoanthropology #AncientDNA #PacificPrehistory

They Didn't Come With the Farmers Ancient DNA from Argentina's Uspallata Valley shows that local hunter-gatherers became farmers themselves — and that the migrants who arrived later were already in crisis.

Ancient DNA from Argentina’s Uspallata Valley shows local hunter-gatherers became farmers themselves — no replacement. Then migrants arrived, sick and declining, just before the Inka. A striking case of resilience under crisis. #Archaeogenomics #Paleoanthropology #SouthAmericanArchaeology

Seven Wagons in a Ditch: The Melsonby Iron Age Hoards Two Late Iron Age metalwork deposits from North Yorkshire offer the first evidence for four-wheeled wagons in Britain, and raise harder questions about why they were destroyed.

First-century AD deposits in North Yorkshire have yielded the first evidence for four-wheeled wagons in Iron Age Britain, along with a fish-decorated cauldron and hard questions about elite funerary practice near Stanwick. #IronAge #Archaeology #BritishPrehistory @antiquity.ac.uk