King Sargon II was a big fan of seeing his name around town—at least, that’s what one expert believes after reviewing a series of repeating mystery images that have confounded researchers for well over a century.

Ruler of the Neo-Assyrian empire from 721-704 BCE, Sargon II oversaw huge portions of ancient Mesopotamia, and is considered one of the era’s greatest military strategists. By the time of his death in 705 BCE, the king had either conquered or neutralized all his major political threats, a feat celebrated by his establishment of a new Assyrian capital in present day Khorsabad, Iraq, called Dūr-Šarrukīn, or “Fort Sargon,” in 706 BCE.

Excavations of the city during the late-nineteenth century revealed a sequence of five symbols repeated across multiple temples throughout Dūr-Šarrukīn—a lion, an eagle, a bull, a fig tree, and a plow. In some cases, however, there is similar art using just the lion, tree, and plough. Although the images appear similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Assyrian empire during Sargon II’s reign had long utilized their non-pictorial cuneiform for written communication. Because of this, researchers have spent years theorizing about what the five total images might represent. Given Sargon II’s regal ego, historians have previously surmised the art could potentially represent his name in some form, but weren’t clear how that could be the case.

“The study of ancient languages and cultures is full of puzzles of all shapes and sizes, but it’s not often in the Ancient Near East that one faces mystery symbols on a temple wall,” Martin Worthington, a Trinity University professor specializing in ancient Mesopotamian languages and civilizations, said in a recent statement.

But according to Worthington, the answer is relatively simple and characteristic of the time. In his new paper published in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Worthington argues the five images, when sounded out in ancient Assyrian, approximate “šargīnu,” or Sargon. Even when just the trio of pictures appears, their combination phonetically still resembles a shortened form of “Sargon.” Combined with the religious undertones of Assyrian constellations, Worthington contends the king was intent on making sure everyone knew just how great and powerful he was. 

“The effect of the symbols was to assert that Sargon’s name was written in the heavens, for all eternity, and also to associate him with the gods Anu and Enlil, to whom the constellations in question were linked,” he writes in his new paper’s abstract. “It is further suggested that Sargon’s name was elsewhere symbolized by a lion passant (pacing lion), through a bilingual pun.”

[Related: How cryptographers finally cracked one of the Zodiac Killer’s hardest codes.]

“[It was] a clever way to make the king’s name immortal,” Worthingon added through Trinity University’s announcement. “And, of course, the idea of bombastic individuals writing their name on buildings is not unique to ancient Assyria.”

Of course, given these are millennia-old metaphors sans concrete language reference points, it’s arguably impossible to state without a doubt these were Sargon’s regal brag banners. Cuneiform used at the time didn’t rely on literal pictures, and no codex is available to match the temple art with any translation. That said, Worthington believes the underlying logic, combined with Assyrian cultural reference points, makes a pretty convincing argument.

“I can’t prove my theory, but the fact it works for both the five-symbol sequence and the three-symbol sequence, and that the symbols can also be understood as culturally appropriate constellations, strikes me as highly suggestive,” Worthington said. “The odds against it all being happenstance are—forgive the pun—astronomical.”

The post Ancient mystery code was probably Sargon II’s name appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

With a hollow center, 12 sides, and no known uses, Roman dodecahedrons remain one of the great enigmas in archeology. They don’t appear to be used for grooming or personal pleasure  and only 33 of these objects have been uncovered in Great Britain’s Roman ruins. A recent discovery in eastern England is now making a splash in the Roman dodecahedron stud world. The Norton Disney Dodecahedron is of the largest and newest Gallo Roman Dodecahedrons ever found and is currently on display at the National Civil War Centre, Newark Museum in Newark, England. It will also be featured in an exhibit beginning on Saturday May 4 at the Lincoln Museum in Lincoln, England. 

The strange object was discovered by a group of amateur archeologists in June 2023 in the village of Norton Disney in the Midlands of eastern England. The mysterious object was sitting among the ruins of a Roman pit and was likely placed there about 1,700 years ago. It was found “in situ,” or deliberately placed among 4th Century CE Roman pottery in some sort of hole or quarry. More archeological excavation is needed to clarify exactly what this pit was used for. 

[Related: This ancient Roman villa was equipped with wine fountains.]

The cast bronze object is hollow at its middle and is about the size of a clenched fist. It has 12 flat faces that are shaped like pentagons. Each face has a hole in various sizes and all 20 corners have a knob. At about three inches tall and half a pound, it is one of the largest of these mysterious Roman objects ever discovered. 

According to the Norton Disney History and Archaeology Group, it is considered a copper alloy object that is made up of 75 percent copper, seven percent tin, and 18 percent lead. It is also the only example of one of these objects found in England’s Midlands and is an example of very fine craftsmanship.

Lorena Hitchens, an archaeologist specializing in Roman dodecahedrons, told The Washington Post, that “it’s a really good dodecahedron,” after examining the object. Preliminary dating estimates believe that it was crafted sometime between 43 and 410 CE, during the later Roman period. 

Even with such a solid find, historians and archeologists are still not sure exactly what these unique objects were used for.

“The imagination races when thinking about what the Romans may have used it for. Magic, rituals or religion–we perhaps may never know,” Norton Disney History and Archaeology Group  secretary Richard Parker told the BBC.

Known Roman literature does not have any descriptions or drawings of dodecahedra. The objects were not of a standard size, so the Norton Disney group does not believe they were used to take measurements. They also do not have signs of wear and tear the way blades do, so they were not tools.

“A huge amount of time, energy and skill was taken to create our dodecahedron, so it was not used for mundane purposes, especially when alternative materials are available that would achieve the same purpose,” the Norton Disney History and Archaeology Group wrote in a statement. 

[Related: The Roman Britons cared a lot about hair removal, and it shows in artifacts.]

There are 130 known examples of these objects that have been uncovered from the rest of the vast Roman world. Most have been found in north and western Roman provinces near the Alps of modern day France and Germany. There are 33 known examples of Roman dodecahedrons that have been excavated in Britain. This particular example was found near the where a statue of a mounted horseman deity was found in 1989

“Roman society was full of superstition, something experienced on a daily basis,” wrote Norton Disney History and Archaeology Group. “A potential link with local religious practice is our current working theory. More investigation is required though.”

The group will return to the trench the dodecahedron was found in sometime this year to resume excavations.

The post Ancient, mysterious 12-sided object still baffles archeologists appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Archeologists have found evidence that ancient Mayans may have made ceremonial offerings during the construction of the ballcourts they used for sporting events. An international team of researchers used advances in environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis to detect evidence of several plants known for both medicinal and religious purposes. The microscopic fragments of ancient plants were found beneath the floor of a Mayan ballcourt in present day Mexico and are described in a study published April 26 in the journal PLOS One. 

The research was a collaboration of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History in collaboration with researchers from the University of Cincinnati in the United States, the University of Calgary, in Canada, Mexico’s Autonomous University of Campeche and the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Play ball

From 2016 to 2022, the team excavated ruins of the ancient city of Yaxnohcah–formerly major city is in the present day Mexican state of Campeche, near the border of Guatemala. The structure in the study was originally constructed sometime between 1000 and 400 BCE. It was subsequently remodeled around 400 BCE-200 CE, when a ballcourt was added.  

According to the team, the ancient Maya participated in several ball games. One included pok-a-tok, a mix of soccer and basketball that is undergoing a revival. Players likely tried to get a ball through a ring in a hoop affixed to a wall. Ballcourts were considered significant places within cities and even built near some of the biggest temples, including in ancient Maya cities like Tikal in Guatemala. 

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

“Ballcourts occupied prime real estate in the ceremonial center. They were a fundamental part of the city,” study co-author and University of Cincinnati paleobotanist and paleoecologist David Lentz said in a statement. “But not all of the ballcourts had hoops. We think of ballcourts today as a place of entertainment. It wasn’t that way for the ancient Maya.”

The construction of new projects were subject to ceremony, similar to how a new ship is christened by breaking a bottle of champagne on the bow or a ribbon is cut at the opening of a new building today.

“When they erected a new building, they asked the goodwill of the gods to protect the people inhabiting it,” said Lentz. “Some people call it an ‘ensouling ritual,’ to get a blessing from and appease the gods.”

e-DNA tells a more complete story 

Offerings and blessings were also made when buildings like the ballcourt were expanded or repurposed. While ceramics or jewelry can be found alongside with plants that are culturally significant, plant remains are much more difficult to find in tropical locations. The humid air can cause them to decompose quickly, so archeologists have relied on trapped pollen samples to get a sense of what plant species were around. 

Studying the environmental DNA (eDNA) offers a way to tell what plants were present. eDNA is material from an organism that can be found from a surrounding environment. It originates from cellular material shed by organisms, such as skin or excrement. It can be used to track what plant, animal and fungi species are around. Unlike fossilized bones or physical anthropological evidence like tools, eDNA can only be sampled by using new molecular methods.

[Related: Scientists are tracking down deep sea creatures with free-floating DNA.]

To pinpoint several types of plants known for use in significant rituals from the eDNA left behind, the team used a product called RNAlater. It preserves the samples during transit back to the lab at the University of Cincinnati. Special genetic probes that are sensitive to plant species found in that region helped them single out the fragmented DNA of several species. They then assembled DNA sequences from these fragments and compared them with sequences stored with the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database called GenBank.

The team detected evidence of four different plants associated with ancient Maya medicine and divination rituals.

The first is a type of morning glory called xtabentun. It is known for its hallucinogenic properties and mead is brewed from the honey of bees that feed on the pollen from xtabentun flowers.

Traces of chili peppers were also detected. This spice that is still popular today was used to treat a variety of illnesses for the ancient Maya. An offering of chili peppers might have been intended to ward off disease since it was a healing plant used in many ceremonies. 

The eDNA analysis also identified the tree Hampea trilobata or jool. Leaves from this tree were used to wrap bodies for Maya ceremonies, and the bark was used to make baskets and twine and treat snake bites. 

The plant Oxandra lanceolatal or lancewood was also present at this site. Its oily leaves are a known anesthetic and antibiotic. 

“I think the fact that these four plants, which have a known cultural importance to the Maya, were found in a concentrated sample tells us it was an intentional and purposeful collection under this platform,” study co-author and University of Cincinnati botanist Eric Tepe said in a statement.

Studying eDNA this way holds the promise of helping researchers learn even more about ancient civilizations, as it can help cross reference with written and oral sources. 

“We have known for years from ethnohistorical sources that the Maya also used perishable materials in these offerings, “study co-author and University of Cincinnati environmental biologist Nicholas Dunning said in a statement. “But it is almost impossible to find them archaeologically, which is what makes this discovery using eDNA so extraordinary.”

The post Plants detected in ancient Mayan ‘ballcourts’ point to a sacred spot appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

A research team’s “bionic eye” deciphered thousands of new words hidden within an ancient scroll carbonized during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius—and the new text points to the long-lost, potential final resting place of the philosopher Plato.

The 1,800-scroll collection, located in the estate now known as the “Villa of the Papyri,” was almost instantaneously incinerated during the historic Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79 CE, before being buried in layers of pumice and ash. The latest discovery is part of ongoing global efforts focused on the ancient Greek library believed to belong to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law.

Although rediscovered in 1792, the trove of text remained almost entirely inaccessible due to the carbonized parchment’s fragility and blackened writing. In recent years, however, contributors to projects like the Vesuvius Challenge have worked to finally reveal the charred artifacts’ potentially invaluable information. In February, the project’s organizers announced that a team successfully translated 2,000 characters within a scroll through a combination of machine learning software and computer vision programming. Now, a separate group’s “bionic eye” has uncovered even more.

[Related: 2,000 new characters from burnt-up ancient Greek scroll deciphered with AI.]

According to Italian news outlet, ANSA, experts utilized infrared hyperspectral imaging alongside a relatively new approach known as optical coherence tomography (OCT) to see through the carbonized material. OCT employs cross-sectional, high-resolution imagery most often used by optometrists to photograph the back of the eye. In this case, however, combining the two tools allowed researchers to bypass the layers of carbon to read a major portion of the scroll by detecting faint evidence of handwriting that human eyes can no longer see.

Now, it appears the team helped solve a major mystery within the history of philosophy—the location of Plato’s grave. After translating the section, it appears Plato was finally buried in a garden near a shrine to the Muses at the Platonic Academy in Athens. What’s more, the text details the pivotal philosopher’s last night before reportedly succumbing to illness. Plato, suffering from a high fever, unfortunately wasn’t a fan of a nearby musician’s attempt to comfort him by playing “sweet notes” on flute. According to the scroll, he even went so far as to criticize their “scant sense of rhythm.”

The section also offers a revised timeline of Plato’s life by stating that the philosopher was sold into slavery in either 404 or 399 BCE. Before the new discovery, historians believed he was enslaved in 387 BCE.

Researchers aren’t stopping here, either. As Interesting Engineering notes, the team will use their “bionic eye” for further scans through 2026, while the Vesuvius Challenge will pursue its own methods to discover even more insights into the scrolls.

The post A ‘bionic eye’ scan of an ancient, scorched scroll points to Plato’s long-lost gravesite appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Letters written by famous British mountaineer and Mount Everest explorer George Mallory are now digitized and freely available to the public for the first time. The University of Cambridge’s Magdalene College has digitized its collection of the mountaineer’s correspondence. The letters can be downloaded here in honor of the upcoming 100th anniversary of Mallory’s final attempt to climb Mount Everest. 

Mallory is best known for replying with “because it’s there” when asked why he wanted to risk death and climb Mount Everest. He took part in a reconnaissance expedition to produce the first European maps of the mountain in 1921. His first serious attempt at climbing the mountain was in 1922, with two subsequent attempts at climbing the mountain following. Most of the correspondence is between Mallory and his wife Ruth and was housed at his alma mater Magdalene College following his death on Mount Everest in 1924. 

In his final letter to his wife Ruth before his doomed last attempt to climb the mountain, George wrote: “Darling I wish you the best I can–that your anxiety will be at an end before you get this–with the best news. Which will also be the quickest. It is 50 to 1 against us but we’ll have a whack yet & do ourselves proud. Great love to you. Ever your loving, George.”

Who was George Mallory?

George Mallory (1886-1924) was one of the leading members of the early European teams to explore Mount Everest. At 29,032 feet, Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world. It rises from the Great Himalayas of southern Asia on the border of Nepal and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. It was previously referred to as Peak XV and was renamed for British explorer Sir George Everest in 1865.

[Related: The increase in Everest deaths may have nothing to do with crowds or waiting.]

In May 1924, Raymond J. Brown from Popular Science magazine chronicled Mallory’s upcoming expedition which would be his last. Brown wondered, “Nature controls the situation through the physical capacities with which she has invested in man. Can a man at a height of 27,000 feet develop the energy to walk or drag himself higher?”

On June 6, 1924, Mallory and a newer climber named Andrew Irvine began an attempt to reach the summit. The last time the pair was spotted alive was June 8, and the debate as to whether or not Mallory reached the summit continues to this day, as he could have reached the summit and died on the way down. 

During the 1930’s, Irvine’s ax was discovered at roughly 27,700 feet. In 1975, a Chinese climber named Wang Hongbao found a body. He said that the body was an old “English dead” due to the vintage clothes. At the time, no other English climber was known to have died at that elevation on the mountain, so it was presumed that the body could be George Mallory or Andrew Irvine. In addition, an oxygen canister from the 1920s was later unearthed in 1991. 

With these clues in tow, an expedition set out in 1999 to search for both Mallory and Irvine. The team found Mallory’s body at 26,760 feet and it’s believed that he died after a bad fall. Irvine’s remains have never been found. 

What is in this collection of letters?

Most of the letters in this collection are corespondence between Mallory and his wife Ruth. They date from the time of their engagement in 1914 until his death. The last letter that he wrote and sent in May 1924 before his final Everest attempt is in the collection. 

In addition, three letters that were retrieved from his body in 1999 are included in this new collection. The letters survived 75 years in his jacket pocket before his body was discovered and are included in the collection with his other letters.

The collection covers several topics including his first mission to Everest in 1921 to see if it was even possible to get to the base of the mountain. It also includes an account of his second mission that ended in disaster when eight Sherpas were swept off the mountain and killed in an avalanche. In the letters, Mallory often blamed himself for the tragedy. 

Mallory also details his service in World War I in the letters, including a detailed account of the deadly Battle of the Somme in 1916. Mallory’s letters even detail a visit to the United States during Prohibition in 1922. He describes visiting speakeasies, asking to be served milk, and getting whiskey through a secret hatch.

[Related: The rocky history of a missing 26,000-foot Himalayan peak.]

According to the team from Magdalene College, the letters from his wife Ruth are a major source of women’s social history, as they detail a wide variety of topics about her life as a woman living through World War I.

In the only surviving letter from the Everest period in the archive, Ruth wrote: “I am keeping quite cheerful and happy but I do miss you a lot. I think I want your companionship even more than I used to. I know I have rather often been cross and not nice and I am very sorry but the bottom reason has nearly always been because I was unhappy at getting so little of you. I know it is pretty stupid to spoil the times I do have you for those when I don’t.”

“It has been a real pleasure to work with these letters,” archivist Katy Green said in a statement. “Whether it’s George’s wife Ruth writing about how she was posting him plum cakes and a grapefruit to the trenches (he said the grapefruit wasn’t ripe enough), or whether it’s his poignant last letter where he says the chances of scaling Everest are ‘50 to1 against us,’ they offer a fascinating insight into the life of this famous Magdalene alumnus.”

The post Read the last letters by George Mallory, who died exploring Mt. Everest in 1924 appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Another day in science, another massive, ancient snake discovery. Paleontologists in India have unearthed fossilized vertebrae from a snake that slithered around the sub-continent about 47 million years ago and may have grown as long as nearly 50 feet. The newly discovered, extinct species is named Vasuki inidicus, after the mythical serpent coiled around the neck of the Hindu god Shiva, and is described for the first time in a study published April 18 in the journal Scientific Reports. 

“Vasuki is an important piece of an ancient puzzle. It contributes to our understanding of this extinct group, and also to our understanding of large, apex, top-of-the-foodchain snakes in general,” says John Jacisin III, a paleontologist at the University of Texas at Austin who researches reptiles but was uninvolved in the new study. Beyond reptiles, the fossil find carries broader clues to India’s climate tens of millions of years ago. “It’s also just a cool snake because it was so big,” he says, comparing its length to longer than that of a yellow school bus. 

Sunil Bajpai, co-author of the study and a vertebrate paleontologist at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, first discovered the fossilized snake remains in 2005 at a coal mine in western India. Over the course of a slow and careful excavation, 27 vertebrates–all likely to be from the same individual–were uncovered. By analyzing the size ratios of various parts of the vertebrae and the fossils unique shapes and protrusions, Bajpai and his co-researcher established the remains were that of a new species in the extinct family of Madtsoiidae, which were primitive snakes similar to boas and pythons. 

The fist-sized fossils are second only in girth and width to those of Tintanoboa, another giant snake estimated to have lived about 58 million years ago in what is now present-day Colombia. Based on the age of the rock the newly described vertebrae were found in, the researchers date Vasuki to about 47 million years ago, just a few million years after the Indian tectonic plate began colliding with Eurasia. According to the new study, the timing supports the idea that Madtsoiids originated in India, and later moved to North Africa and southern Eurasia, where other, later fossil specimens have been found. 

It’s a challenge to accurately deduce total species body size from a single individual’s incomplete skeleton. But using model equations incorporating data on current, living snakes and the known fossil record, Bajpai and his colleague, Debajit Datta–another vertebrate paleontologist at the same institution, estimate that V. indicus was somewhere between about 36 and and 49.9 feet (10.9 and 15.2 meters) long. The only known snake of comparable size was Titanoboa, currently the record-holder for the largest snake to have ever lived. Titanoboa clocked in at an estimated 35 to 50 feet long, with the mean estimate around 42 feet in length. The relative vertebrate sizes indicate that Titanoboa was a heavier, thicker-bodied snake than V. indicus, yet it’s impossible to know exactly which snake species would’ve won the measuring contest. 

“Based on the data at hand Vasuki was only slightly smaller in length than Titanoboa,” Bajpai and Datta write in a joint email to PopSci. “However, we cannot entirely rule out the possibility of Vasuki being slightly larger than Titanoboa, because the fossil vertebrae in our collection may not have come from the largest individual of Vasuki. The same, however, can also be said for Titanoboa. Since neither of these snakes are known from complete skeletons, we cannot say with certainty whether one was longer or wider than the other.”

Exact size estimates are liable to change as more fossils are found and more analysis is done. “Everything shrinks when the tape measure comes out,” says Alexandra Howard, a paleobiologist and herpetologist at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the new research. “It’s a running joke [in paleontology], everyone always finds the biggest thing,” she adds–and with more discovery and scrutiny the biggest size estimates tend to scale down. Nonetheless, Howard says the new discovery includes some very well-preserved fossils and is an interesting addition to our knowledge of ancient reptiles. “The past was full of giant snakes. That’s really cool,” she says.

And, either way, second place in size isn’t so bad, especially when you’re separated from your closest competitor by about 10 million years. Vasuki was probably a slow-slithering ambush predator that constricted its prey like a python, according to Bajpai and Datta. Based on morphology and the location it was found in, the researchers believe the monstrous snake was either terrestrial or semi-aquatic–living in marsh or coastal swamp. It was found in rock that also contains fossils of rays, sharks, bony fish, turtles, crocodiles, and primitive whales, Bajpai and Datta note–though what it ate is unclear. 

Beyond its massive size, the new paleontological discovery is notable for what it can tell us about our planet 47-50 million years ago. “It’s an important discovery because it shows us another example of extreme gigantism in snakes… and because you can use snakes as a thermometer to reconstruct climates of the past,” says Jason Head, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Cambridge in England who was one of the primary researchers involved in discovering Titanoboa. 

We know from geological and paleontological research that the time period, part of the Eocene Epoch, was warm, but Vasuki offers another data point indicating exactly what the climate may have been like where it was found. Snakes are ectotherms (commonly known as “cold-blooded”), so their body temperature and size is closely linked with the ambient temperature. The larger a snake is, the slower its metabolic rate, and so the warmer the climate must be for it to survive, Head explains. Estimates from modeling equations indicate that Vasuki’s habitat averaged around 28 degrees Celsius (82.4 degrees Fahrenheit), which is slightly warmer than the average annual temperature in the same region today. 

The ancient climate data can aid in understanding the present and where we’re headed under current climate change, says Head. “Those are the hottest latitudes and the hottest intervals, that’s going to tell us a lot about what those places might be like in the future.”

As paleontologists continue to dig into the past, predictions of the future may become clearer. And also, massive, ancient snakes are liable to keep appearing. “We understand so little about the past diversity of life on Earth,” Head notes. “I think there are probably more giant snakes to come.”

The post Enormous snake in ancient India was longer than a school bus appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Human-made currency such as coins and paper bills have certainly evolved over time. Small pieces of precious metals or paper with no metal backing have changed into invisible cryptocurrencies stored on servers. For decades, numismatists–or currency experts–have puzzled over where the silver present inside some coins uncovered in England came from. The coins date back to between 660 and 750 CE, when the Anglo-Saxon world began to see a large revival of trade using silver coins. This shift broke the reliance on gold and archaeologists have uncovered about 7,000 of these silver pieces.

Now, a new noninvasive way of peering into the past may have revealed where the silver from the coins came from. It offers clues into how political changes and the rule of Charlemagne–the Holy Roman Emperor and King of the Franks–fueled currency changes in early medieval Europe. The findings are described in a new study published April 8in the journal Antiquity and could deepen modern understanding of the continent’s economic and political development at the time.

[Related: Benjamin Franklin used science to protect his money from counterfeiters.]

“There has been speculation that the silver came from Melle in France, or from an unknown mine, or that it could have been melted down church silver,” study co-author and University of Cambridge early medieval English historian Rory Naismith said in a statement. “But there wasn’t any hard evidence to tell us one way or the other, so we set out to find it.”

A little help from lasers

Earlier research tested other coins from a silver mine at Melle, but this new study looked at less-studied Fitzwilliam’s coins. These 49 silver pieces were minted in England, the Netherlands, Belgium, and northern France and date from 660 to 820 CE. They are housed by The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Jason Day from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences traced what elements were present in the coins in a lab. Day then used a technique called portable laser ablation. During this process, microscopic samples were collected onto Teflon filters to analyze the lead isotopes presented. This new technique pioneered by the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, combines a minimally invasive sampling with a laser and the high precision results of the more traditional methods that take samples of metals.

While the coins primarily continued silver, the amount of gold, another metal called bismuth, and other elements guided the researchers towards the silver’s previously unknown origins. The various ratios of lead isotopes in the silver coins also provided further clues to where the metals originated from. 

Byzantine silver for the masses

Twenty-nine of the coins in the study date back to 660 to 750 CE. They were minted in present-day England, France, and a cross-border cultural region in Northwestern Europe called Frisia. However, the lasers revealed very clear chemical and isotopic signatures that matched 3rd to early 7th century silver that came from the Byzantine Empire in the eastern Mediterranean.

This Byzantine silver was homogenous across the coins. No known source of European ore matches the elemental and isotopic characteristics of these early silver coins. According to the team, there is also no meaningful overlap with late Western Roman silver coins or other objects made from the metal, meaning that it was not simply recycled late Roman silver.

“These coins are among the first signs of a resurgence in the northern European economy since the end of the Roman Empire,” study co-author and University of Oxford archaeologist Jane Kershaw said in a statement. “They show deep international trade connections between what is now France, the Netherlands and England.”

The study proposes that the Byzantine silver must have made its way into Western Europe decades before it was melted down, as the late 7th century is considered part of the Dark Ages, or more accurately termed Migration Period. This was a low point in trade and diplomatic contacts as the Roman Empire ended. 

[Related: Divers recovered a treasure trove of more than 30,000 ancient, bronze coins off the Italian coast.]

“These beautiful prestige objects would only have been melted down when a king or lord urgently needed lots of cash. Something big would have been happening, a big social change,” said Kershaw. “Elites were liquidating resources and pouring more and more money into circulation. It would have had a big impact on people’s lives. There would have been more thinking about money and more activity with money involving a far larger portion of society than before.”

The team hopes to look further into how and why so much silver moved from the Byzantine Empire into Western Europe. It was potentially a mixture of trade and payments to Anglo-Saxon mercenaries serving in the Byzantine army. 

The rise of Frankish silver

The study also pinpointed a shift away from Byzantine silver to a new source of metal. They analyzed 20 coins from 750  to 820 CE and found that the silver was quite different by this time. It had lower levels of gold, which is characteristic of the silver that is mined at Melle in western France. Mining here was particularly intense during the 8th and 9th centuries.

The team believes that Melle silver permeated regional silver stocks after 750 CE and was mixed with older, higher-gold stocks, including Byzantine silver. While it was already known that Melle was an important mine at this time, what was not clear was just how quickly the site became a major silver producer. 

The study argues that this widespread suge in Melle silver was driven by Charlemagne. He is best known for uniting Western Europe by force and he took more control over how and where the coins of his kingdoms were made. The management of silver supply likely went alongside the other changes introduced by Charlemagne, his son, and grandson. These monetary changes include altering the size and thickness of coins and marking their name or image on the coins.

“I strongly suspect that Charlemagne did something similar with Melle silver,” Naismith said. “We can now say more about the circumstances under which those coins were made and how the silver was being distributed within Charlemagne’s Empire and beyond.”

The post Lasers provide clues to an early medieval money mystery appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The mystery of what came first, the chicken or the egg has generally been solved–it was the egg. However, some questions remain about how well chickens were dispersed in the ancient world, as some wild bird bones have been misidentified as domesticated chicken bones. 

With the help of new technology, a recent analysis of eggshell fragments from Central Asia suggests that raising chickens for egg production was likely common in the region from about 400 BCE to 1000 CE. The domestic chicken’s ability to lay eggs outside of a traditional breeding season was potentially the primary driver for the dispersal of these birds across Eurasia and northeast Africa. The findings are described in a study published April 2 in the journal Nature Communications and helps explain how they became such a critical economic and agricultural resource.

An international team of archaeologists, historians, and biomolecular scientists studied eggshell fragments from 12 different archaeological sites in Central Asia spanning about 1,500 years. They were likely dispersed along the central corridor of the ancient Silk Road, a vast Eurasian trade network spanning from present day China to the Mediterranean Sea. The network was used from the second century BCE through the mid-15th century and facilitated religious, cultural, economic, and political interactions between Asian and European countries. 

[Related: Humans have been eating hazelnuts for at least 6,000 years.]

To identify the source of the egg fragments, they used a biomolecular analysis method called ZooMS. It can identify a particular species from animal remains, including bone, skin, and shells. ZooMS also relies on protein signals instead of DNA, which makes it a quicker and more cost-effective option than genetic analysis, according to the team.  

“This study showcases the potential of ZooMS to shed light on human-animal interactions in the past,” Carli Peters, a study co-author and archaeologist at Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany, said in a statement.

The technique identified the shell fragments as pieces of domestic chicken egg, which is a key finding. The team believes that the amount of chicken egg shells present throughout the layers of sediment at each archeological site means that the birds must have been laying eggs more frequently than their wild ancestor–the red jungle fowl. These colorful tropical birds are still found throughout Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia, and only nest once per year, laying about six eggs per clutch. Domestic chickens lay eggs much more frequently, with some hens able to lay one egg per day, so ancient peoples must have taken advantage of this egg laying ability that was not beholden to a specific season. 

The abundance of the eggshells suggests that the birds were laying eggs out of season. Having this access to eggs that were not dependent on a particular season likely made the domestic chicken a particularly useful animal.

[Related: Finally, a smart home for chickens.]

“This is the earliest evidence for the loss of seasonal egg laying yet identified in the archaeological record,” study co-author and Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology paleoecologist and paleoeconomist Robert Spengler said in a statement. “This is an important clue for better understanding the mutualistic relationships between humans and animals that resulted in domestication.”

The study suggests that at least in Central Asia, the domestic chicken’s ability to lay several eggs made it the important agricultural species that it is today. The team hopes that work like this demonstrates how using new cost-effective analysis methods like ZooMS and interdisciplinary collaboration can be used to address long-standing questions about our past. 

The post Why chickens probably crossed the Silk Road appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

As dairy alternatives such as almond, oat, and soy milk continue to grow in popularity, an centuries old question regarding cow’s milk still remains. How does today’s dairy differ from what previous generations consumed? 

Some clues are now emerging in the form of some 117-year-old whole milk powder that was transported on Sir Ernest Shackleton’s British Antarctic Expedition in the early 20th Century. A study published in the March 2024 issue of the Journal of Dairy Science found that despite advancement in selective cow breeding and changes to farm practices, milk from the present and past have more similarities than differences. 

The Nimrod expedition

The powdered milk in the study was made by New Zealand’s Defiance brand in 1907. On New Year’s Day in 1908, Shackleton and his crew aboard the ship Nimrod set sail on a quest to be the first to set foot on the South Pole. The Nimrod was well stocked with dairy, including 1,000 pounds of dried whole milk powder, 192 pounds of butter, and two cases of cheese. The crew would make it farther south than any known human had been before and made it within 100 nautical miles of the South Pole and left their base camp and its supplies behind. 

About a century later, one remaining container of Defiance whole milk powder was uncovered during a restoration project by the Antarctic Heritage Trust restoration project. The milk powder had been frozen in time and ice at Shackelton’s base camp for 100 years.

“The Shackleton dried milk is possibly the best-preserved sample manufactured during the pioneering years of commercial milk powder production, and its discovery gives us a once-in-a-lifetime chance to understand the similarities and differences between a roller-dried milk powder manufactured over 100 years ago with modern spray-dried counterparts,” Skelte G. Anema, a study co-author and chemist at Fonterra Research and Development Centre in New Zealand, said in a statement. 

[Related: Ancient milk-drinkers were just fine with their lactose intolerance–until famine struck.]

According to Anema, before vacuum-assisted evaporation, milk powders were made by a roller-drying process. Boiling-hot milk was poured between two steam-heated revolving cylinders so that the water evaporated. A thin sheet of dried milk was left behind that was then milled and sieved. While scientists knew that these early milk powders were not as sophisticated as those available today, they were not sure what other differences existed. 

Analyzing milk powders

In the study, the team analyzed a few hundred grams of the 100 plus year-old Defiance milk. They set out to compare it with two modern-day commercial, non-instantized and spray-dried whole milk powder samples. They compared the composition of the milk’s major and trace components, proteins, fatty acids, and phospholipids. They also looked at the microstructural properties, color, and volatile components in the different whole milk powder samples.

“Despite more than a century between the samples, the composition of bulk components and detailed protein, fat, and minor components have not changed drastically in the intervening years,” said Anema.

The fatty acid composition, phospholipid composition, and protein composition of the samples were generally similar. The major mineral components between the samples were also relatively alike, except for higher levels of lead, tin, iron, and other trace minerals found in the Shackleton whole milk powder. These minerals likely came from the tin-plated can the powder was stored in and the equipment and water supply used during that time period. Using stainless steel and better water has eliminated that issue from modern milk powders, according to the team.

Another notable difference in the Shackleton milk samples was the presence of oxidation-related volatile aroma compounds.

[Related: Tending Sir Ernest’s Legacy: An Interview with Alexandra Shackleton.]

“Perhaps from less-than-ideal collection and storage of the raw milk before drying, but it’s much more likely that—even in frozen conditions—being stored in an open tin for a century is going to result in continued oxidation,” said Anema.

Despite the remarkable similarities between the milk samples, the team points out that modern spray-dried whole milk powders are substantially superior in terms of the powder quality. They look better and dissolve in water more easily. 

This unique Antarctic time capsule still provides a glimpse into dairy food production methods of the past and its evolution over time. 

“The Shackleton samples are a testament to the importance of dairy products—which are rich in protein and energy as well as flexible enough to be powdered for easy transport, preparation, and consumption,” said Anema. 

The post Cracking open a 117-year-old Antarctic milk time capsule appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

A team in China used ancient DNA to reconstruct the face of an emperor who reigned 1,500 years ago. Emperor Wu was the ruler of the Northern Zhou dynasty from 560 to 578 CE. The facial reconstruction is detailed in a study published March 28 in the journal Current Biology. The study sheds light on Emperor Wu’s potential cause of death and the migration pattern of a nomadic empire that once ruled parts of northeastern Asia.

As a ruler, Emperor Wu is known for building a strong military and unifying a northern part of China after defeating the Northern Qi dynasty. Emperor Wu’s tomb was discovered in northwestern China in 1996. Archaeologists found several bones, including a nearly complete skull. 

Since then, ancient DNA research techniques have advanced and the team from this new study was able to recover over 1 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on his DNA. Each SNP–or snip–represents a difference in a single building block of DNA. SNPs occur normally throughout DNA and each human genome has about four to five million of them. To be classified as an SNP, the variant must be found in at least one percent of the population. There are more than 600 million SNPs in populations from all over the world.

[Related: This 7th-century teen was buried with serious bling—and we now know what she may have looked like.]

The team found SNPs that contained information about Emperor Wu’s hair and skin color. Historians believe he was ethnically Xianbei–an ancient nomadic group primarily found in present day Mongolia and northern and northeastern China.

“Some scholars said the Xianbei had ‘exotic’ looks, such as thick beard, high nose bridge, and yellow hair,” study co-author and Fudan University bioarchaeologist Shaoqing Wen said in a statement. “Our analysis shows Emperor Wu had typical East or Northeast Asian facial characteristics,” he adds.

With the SNP data and Emperor Wu’s skull, the team reconstructed his face as a 3D rendering using open-source Blender software. The program is based on the soft tissue depth average of modern Chinese persons. They also used the HIrisPlex-S system, which “predicts externally visible human traits using 41 SNPs.” 

The genetic data revealed that he has brown eyes, black hair, and “dark to intermediate skin.” His facial features were also similar to those from parts of Northern and Eastern Asia today.

“Our work brought historical figures to life,” study co-author and Fudan University paleoanthropologist Pianpian Wei said in a statement. “Previously, people had to rely on historical records or murals to picture what ancient people looked like. We are able to reveal the appearance of the Xianbei people directly.”

Emperor Wu died in 578 at the age of 36. Some archaeologists believe that he died of an illness, while others say the emperor was poisoned by his rivals. Analysis of his DNA using a genetic database called Promethease, reveals that he was at an increased risk for stroke, which could have contributed to his death. According to the team, finding aligns with historical records that describe Emperor Wu as having potential symptoms of a stroke–aphasia, drooping eyelids, and an abnormal gait. 

[Related: Ceramic pipes kept this town from flooding during monsoons 4,000 years ago.]

The genetic analysis also shows that the Xianbei people procreated with ethnically Han Chinese individuals when they migrated into northern China. 

“This is an important piece of information for understanding how ancient people spread in Eurasia and how they integrated with local people,” said Wen.

In future studies, the team plans to study the DNA from people who lived in ancient Chang’an city in northwestern China. Chang’an was the capital city of many Chinese empires for thousands of years and was the eastern over thousands of years. It was also located on the eastern end of the famed Silk Road–a critical Eurasian trade network from the second century BCE until the 15th Century. The team hopes that the DNA analysis will reveal more data on how migration and cultural exchange unfolded in ancient China.

The post Scientists recreate the face of an ancient Chinese emperor appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Keeping our teeth clean has been a pain for thousands of years, with some particularly painful methods historically used to take care of our chompers. Two 4,000-year-old human teeth unearthed in a limestone cave in Ireland were recently found to contain an “unprecedented quantity” of the bacteria that cause tooth decay and gum disease. The genetic analysis of these well-preserved microbiomes reveal how changes in diet shaped our oral health from the Bronze Age to today. The findings are described in a study published March 27 in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Fossilized dental plaques have been one of the best studied parts of the ancient human body. However, very few full genomes from oral bacteria in teeth prior to the medieval era have been uncovered. This means that scientists have limited data on how the human mouth’s microbiome was affected by changes in diet and from events like the spread of farming about 10,000 years ago.

Sugar-munching, acid producing bacteria

Both of the teeth belonged to the same male individual who lived in present day Ireland during the Bronze Age. The teeth contained the bacteria that cause gum diseases and the first 

high quality ancient genome from Streptococcus mutans (S. mutans). This oral bacterium is one of the major causes of tooth decay.

S. mutans is very common in modern human mouths, but is very rare in the ancient genomic record. One potential reason why it’s so sparse may be how the bacterium produces acid. The acid decays the tooth, but also destroys DNA and stops the dental plaque from fossilizing and hardening over time. Most ancient oral microbiomes are found inside these fossilized plaques, but this new study looked directly at the tooth. 

[Related: Vikings filed their teeth to cope with pain.]

Another reason why S. mutans may not have been present in ancient mouths may be due to a lack of sugary mouths for it to thrive in. S. mutans loves sugar and an increase of dental cavities can be seen in the archaeological record after humans began to grow and farm grains. However, the more dramatic increase occurred over the past few centuries when sugary foods became significantly more prevalent.  

The disappearing microbiota hypothesis

The sampled teeth were part of a larger skeleton found in Killuragh Cave, County Limerick, by the late Peter Woodman of University College Cork. Other teeth in the cave show advanced dental decay, but there wasn’t any evidence of any caries–or early cavities. A single tooth turned out to have a ton of mutans sequences. 

“We were very surprised to see such a large abundance of S. mutans in this 4,000 year old tooth,” study co-author and Trinity College Dublin geneticist Lara Cassidy said in a statement. “It is a remarkably rare find and suggests this man was at high risk of developing cavities right before his death.”

The cool, dry, and alkaline conditions of the cave may have contributed to the preservation of S. mutans DNA. While the S. mutans DNA was plentiful, other streptococcal species were mostly absent from the tooth sample. This indicates that the natural balance or the oral biofilm had been altered–mutans outcompeted the other bacteria species.

According to the team, the study adds more support behind the disappearing microbiota hypothesis. This idea proposes that our ancestors’ microbiomes were actually more diverse than our own today. More evidence that supports this hypothesis came from the two genomes for Tannerella forsythia (T. forsythia) that the team built from the tooth. T. forsythia still exists and causes gum disease. 

“The two sampled teeth contained quite divergent strains of T. forsythia,” study co-author and Trinity College Dublin PhD candidate Iseult Jackson said in a statement. “These strains from a single ancient mouth were more genetically different from one another than any pair of modern strains in our dataset, despite these modern samples deriving from Europe, Japan, and the USA. This is interesting because a loss of biodiversity can have negative impacts on the oral environment and human health.”

Shifting genes and mouths

Both reconstructed genomes revealed  dramatic changes in the oral microenvironment over the last 750 years. One lineage of T. forsythia has become dominant in global populations in recent years, which is a sign of an event geneticists call a selective episode. This is when one bacteria strain quickly rises in frequency due to a particular genetic advantage. The T. forsythia genomes that arose particularly after the Industrial Revolution acquired genes that helped it colonize the mouth and cause disease.

[Related: Bronze Age cauldrons show we’ve always loved meat, dairy, and fancy cookware.]

S. mutans also had evidence of recent lineage expansions and changes in gene content that both coincide with the popularization of sugar. However, modern S. mutans populations have remained even more diverse than T. forsythia, including some deep splits in the S. mutans evolutionary tree that pre-date the genomes uncovered in Ireland. The team believes that this is driven by differences in the evolutionary behind genome diversity in these bacteria species.

“S. mutans is very adept at swapping genetic material across strains,” said Cassidy “This allows an advantageous innovation to be spread across S. mutans lineages, rather than one lineage becoming dominant and replacing all others.”

Both of these disease-causing bacteria have essentially changed dramatically from the Bronze Age to today. However, it’s the very recent cultural transitions like more sugar consumption that appear to have had an outsized impact.

The post Rare traces of tooth decay and gum disease found in Bronze Age teeth appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

It was once a small and seemingly cozy late Bronze Age village. A settlement of five circular dwellings was built on stilts about 6.5 feet above a rambling river in eastern England. The homes were full of domestic knick knacks that paint a picture of daily life about 3,000 years ago. By all available evidence, Must Farm was a peaceful settlement constructed by skilled builders. That is, until a catastrophic fire engulfed  “Britain’s Pompeii” and its buildings and materials plunged into a muddy river below. 

Now, the first of two reports published March 19 by the University of Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU) delves into the details of the Must Farm settlement. This prehistoric stilted village dates back to about 850 BCE and was built in a swampy wetland locals call The Fens or Fenlands. The settlement was excavated in 2015 and 2016 after it was discovered on the edge of the town of Whittlesey, northwest of Cambridge.

According to the team, the site provides them with a unique blueprint for the circular architecture, home interiors, and overall domesticity of the prehistoric “fenlanders” who lived in England’s east.

“These people were confident and accomplished home-builders. They had a design that worked beautifully for an increasingly drowned landscape,” report co-author CAU archaeologist Mark Knight said in a statement. “While excavating the site there was a sense that its Bronze Age residents had only just left. You could almost see and smell their world, from the glint of metal tools hanging on wattled walls to the sharp milkiness of brewed porridge.”

An archeological mirror

The Must Farm dig site currently contains five total structures with walkways that connect them, surrounded by a fence about 6.5 feet high made from sharpened posts. However, the original settlement was likely twice as big. During the 20th Century, half the remains were removed when the area was quarried. The team believes that the site may have been home to at least 60 people living in family units. 

[Related: Details of life in Bronze Age Mycenae could lie at the bottom of a well.]

The river that previously ran underneath this community on stilts likely would have been shallow and ran slowly with thick vegetation. The boggy ground below cushioned the burned remains of the buildings when they fell from the fire. This created an archaeological “mirror” of what had stood above, so the team could map the layout of the structures.  

One of the main roundhouses had almost 538 square feet of space–about the size of many New York City apartments–that may have had distinct areas for specific activities the way modern homes do. 

“Conducting research on Must Farm is a bit like getting an estate agent’s tour of a Bronze Age stilt house,” report co-author and CAU archeologist David Gibson said in a statement.

In this main house, the team found ceramic and wooden containers including cups, bowls, and large storage jars. Some of the cooking pots were even designed so that they stack inside of one another to save space. They also found metal tools along the building’s eastern side and an empty spot in the northwestern side that they believe was likely used for sleeping. 

Lambs were also likely kept indoors here. While the team has yet to recover any evidence of humans dying in the fire, several young sheep were trapped and burnt alive based on skeletal remains. The lambs were about three to six months old, which suggests that Must Farm was probably destroyed in the late summer or early fall, based on when the animals typically breed and give birth. 

[Related: Horned helmets came from Bronze Age artists, not Vikings.]

Each of the roundhouse roofs also had three layers. Insulating stray was topped by turf from the ground and sealed in with clay. 

“In a freezing winter, with winds cutting across the Fens, these roundhouses would have been pretty cozy,” co-author and CAU archaeologist Chris Wakefield said in a statement.

An intact halfted ax was also found directly beneath the first structure. It may have been some sort of good luck token or an offering to a spirit after the site was constructed.

Bronze Age porridge

Despite being encased in mud for thousands of years, many of the artifacts still have signs of their daily use. A pottery bowl bearing the finger-marks by the individual who made it was found containing its final meal. It was a wheat-grain porridge mixed with animal fats–potentially goat or red deer–and a wooden spatula used for stirring was resting against the inside of the bowl.

“It appears the occupants saved their meat juices to use as toppings for porridge,” said Wakefield. “The site is providing us with hints of recipes for Bronze Age breakfasts and roast dinners. Chemical analyses of the bowls and jars showed traces of honey along with ruminant meats such as deer, suggesting these ingredients were combined to create a form of prehistoric honey-glazed venison.”

Multiple small dog skulls suggest that the canines were kept domestically as pets or also to help flush out prey while hunting. The residents likely used the local woodlands to hunt boar and deer, graze sheep, and harvest wheat and flax.

Waterways were also likely vital for transporting all of their material. The team found the remains of nine log-boats and canoes hollowed out from tree trunks. They date back from across the Bronze Age up into the Iron Age and some were contemporary to Must Farm. 

[Related: Cremated remains still hold clues to life and death in the Bronze Age.]

They also found items that would have held great value. Decorative beads were found right across the site. The majority of these beads came from as far away as Northern and Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

“Such items would gradually make their way across thousands of miles in a long series of small trades,” said Wakefield.   

Britain’s Pompeii

When the first that destroyed Must Farm broke out, a combination of the charring from the flames and the chemistry of the wet soil in the fenlands preserved the objects and structures from the site exceptionally well. It is reminiscent of the well-preserved bodies found in Pompeii, Italy after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE and how scientists in the mid 19th Century preserved the remains in plaster. 

Unlike with Mount Vesuvius’ records of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and suffocating toxic gasses, details of what caused the fire that destroyed Must Farm are likely lost to time.

“The cause of the fire that tore through the settlement will probably never be known,” said Gibson. “Some argue it may have come under attack, as the occupants never returned for their goods, which would have been fairly easy to retrieve from the shallow waters.”

Others think that the first may have simply been an accident. If a fire broke out inside one of the roundhouses, it would have quickly spread between the structures. 

“A settlement like this would have had a shelf-life of maybe a generation, and the people who built it had clearly constructed similar sites before. It may be that after the fire, they simply started again,” added Gibson. “There is every possibility that the remains of many more of these stilted settlements are buried across Fenland, waiting for us to find them.”

The post Bronze Age village was ‘pretty cozy’—until Britain’s Pompeii appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Life in the Stone Age was pretty tough for our ancestors. There were animals to fend off and track for food, new tools to make, and massive swings in climate to adapt to. Stone Age humans also faced off against potentially lethal microbes floating around just like we do today. Some dangerous microorganisms spread through kissing and eating contaminated food were found in remains of Stone Age individuals uncovered in present day Scandinavia. They offer some new clues into a major lifestyle transition in human history. The findings described in a study published March 7 in the journal Scientific Reports. 

There are six major types of microbes–bacteria, archaea, fungi (yeasts and molds), algae, protozoa, and viruses. Some microbes like probiotics help keep human bodies healthy, while others can make us sick. Bacteria and viruses are the most common microbes and their genetic material is organized in DNA. This is why microbial DNA can be found in the remains of infected humans and helps scientists detect evidence of illnesses caused by bacteria and viruses.

In the study, an international team of researchers examined the different types of microbial DNA present inside the teeth of 38 individual human remains uncovered at several Neolithic settlements in Norway and Sweden. The material collected from Hummerviksholmen in southern Norway is estimated to be about 9,500 years old. The specimens from Bergsgraven in Linköping, Sweden are about 4,500 years old. 

[Related: The deadliest viruses in human history, from COVID to smallpox.]

They identified 660 microbial species from these remains. Yersinia enterocolitica and Salmonella enterica were two of the most prolific bacteria found. They are both commonly associated with contracting food poisoning from undercooked meat or eating food contaminated with human feces. Even with modern medical care and food safety standards, food poisoning is still responsible for about 48 million illnesses and 3,000 deaths per year in the United States. Living during a time before life saving treatments may have made an already unpleasant human experience more deadly. 

“Especially the case of Salmonella enterica shows us how difficult it [food poisoning] could be. In a Battle Axe culture burial, Bergsgraven in Linköping, we find two infected individuals, and it is actually possible that we are witnessing their cause of death,” study co-author and Stockholm University PhD student Nora Bergfeldt said in a statement. “This, and other bacterial diseases we have found among the individuals, are easily treated with antibiotics today, but back then they could be lethal.”

They also uncovered Neisseria meningitidis, which is related to meningococcal disease. It spreads through close contact between infected individuals. It is spread through the droplets of saliva release through sneezing, coughing, and kissing. Evidence of Neisseria gonorrhoeae–the bacteria that causes the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea–was also found in the microbial DNA uncovered. These communal diseases found in microbial DNA date back to a long transition from a hunter-gatherer and nomadic lifestyle and settling down to a farming life. It’s believed that this transition began as early as 12,000 years ago. 

“We know when people turned to farming in Scandinavia, but we still do not know how this change in lifestyle affected the general health,” Helena Malmström, a study co-author and biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, said in a statement. 

[Related: Plague DNA was just found in 4,000-year-old teeth.]

This transition is possibly reflected in the presence of bacterial diseases, as they saw more infections from contaminated food and water and interactions with livestock and one another. Today, illnesses like norovirus and meningitis can quickly spread in schools, dormitories, and nursing homes, and other places where large groups of people are in smaller spaces. The study also found evidence of Yersinia pestis—the bacteria that causes the plague. 

“The more people interacted, [the] more possibilities to infect one another occurred,” study co-author and Stockholm University geneticist Anders Götherström, said in a statement. “But even if we do encounter bacteria with potential to impact societies such as Yersinia pestis, it is the infections that spread through food that is most prominent across the lifestyles in this study.”

The post Kissing and eating during the Stone Age ‘could be lethal’ appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In the ancient Mediterranean, Corinth was an economic powerhouse. Built on a narrow isthmus—a natural choke point between north and south—the city controlled trade between northern Greece and the Peloponnese peninsula. Bound on either side by naturally protected bays, Corinth was also a convenient bridge between the Aegean and Ionian Seas.

The city’s main harbor, located along the Gulf of Corinth, was the largest port in ancient Greece. In previous work, archaeologists examining gravesites and historical documents revealed that merchants sailed from the port, known as Lechaion, more than 2,600 years ago, in the 7th century BCE. They did so in ships likely loaded with pottery, perfume, food, and fabrics to trade across the region.

But a recent discovery—five lumps of brown coal and a helping of ancient lead pollution—has pushed the history of this pivotal port back by at least 500 years, making it one of the earliest active ports in Europe. The revised history stems from an international research effort that’s been surveying the ancient harbor since 2013.

Using hand augers and mechanical drills, French geoarchaeologist Antoine Chabrol of Sorbonne University in France and his colleagues carefully collected cylinders of sediment from the inner harbor, where boats would have pulled upriver to anchor. Analyzing the mud cores, they found a sudden spike in lead levels less than three meters deep. The shift is so sharp and sustained that it could only have been caused by human activity on the riverbanks, says Chabrol.

Lead pollution comes from smelting, mining, and metalwork, and the scientists dated the pollution in the port to as early as 1381 BCE—3,405 years ago—during the Bronze Age.

The five chunks of brown coal, each no bigger than a matchbox, add further evidence of the port’s antiquity. These fragments are a specific kind of coal called lignite, and the pieces collected from the harbor’s sediment date to as early as 1122 BCE. The nearest known source of lignite is more than 50 kilometers away, suggesting merchants were importing the fossil fuel nuggets to stoke their harborside furnaces by the 12th century BCE.

Bronze Age ships might have paddled from port carrying urns of olive oil, bulk bins of fruit, and narrow-necked jars of wine to Crete, Cyprus, and beyond. But so far, while the team has found convincing evidence of Bronze Age activity in Corinth’s port, they’ve yet to find pieces of the actual port from this era. The physical evidence found at the site so far—including stone piers, wooden pillars, and a possible lighthouse—dates to the first century CE or later, during the Roman period.

But even without physical Bronze Age structures, the findings show that Corinth’s port was used consistently for nearly 2,600 years. From the 13th century BCE to the 13th century CE, Mycenaean, Phoenician, Roman, and Byzantine ships would have sailed from this strategic location.

“You can detect their presence in one single site,” says Panagiotis Athanasopoulos, an archaeologist at Greece’s Danish Institute at Athens and a collaborator on the project. “It’s like the very essence of historical continuity.”

Incredibly, though, even this revised age might be an underestimate. Archaeologists have previously found evidence of people traveling through Corinth more than 8,000 years ago, as well as pots from a late Stone Age culture that lived to the northwest, along the Adriatic Sea. Bjørn Lovén, co-director of the Lechaion Harbour Project and coauthor of the new paper, says this suggests Corinth’s maritime trade network may extend even deeper into history.

Nafsika Andriopoulou, a geoarchaeologist at the Foundation for Research and Technology–Hellas’ Institute for Mediterranean Studies in Greece who was not involved in the study, says a broader analysis of what metals might be in the soil could help fill in even more details. For example, tracking other metals—such as copper, the main component of bronze—could tell geoarchaeologists even more about the port’s early uses. Similar sampling in nearby locations could even help reveal ancient trading routes, Andriopoulou adds.

The team will continue their work during the summer of 2024, looking for more clues of ancient commerce and bringing renewed activity to this long-bustling port.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

The post Ancient Greece’s biggest port is older than we thought appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The desert’s enormous star dunes are mysterious structures. These sand dunes are found in some of Earth’s largest modern deserts, but also on the planet Mars and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Star dunes are giant sand dunes that get their name from the arms of sand and rock that spread down from a central peak. When viewed from above, they can resemble stars. 

Scientists have now pinpointed the age of one of Earth’s oldest star dunes for the first time. The Lala Lallia star dune in southeastern Morocco is estimated to have formed 13,000 years ago, according to a study published March 4 in the journal Scientific Reports. 

[Related: The Sahara Desert used to be green and lush. Then humans showed up.]

Star dunes are found in sandy seas across Africa, Arabia, China, and North America. They are believed to be the tallest dunes on the planet, with a star dune in China’s Badain Jaran Desert climbing to 984 feet. 

Despite being very common today, evidence of star dunes have almost never been found in Earth’s geological record. The geologic record is like a time capsule made up of rock and sediment layers that allows geologists to get a glimpse of what the Earth looked like thousands of years ago. The absence of star dunes in rocks has puzzled scientists, since past deserts are a common part of Earth’s geological history, but not the types of dunes. Only one ancient star dune has been uncovered preserved in sandstone. It dates back about 250 million years and was found in present-day Scotland. 

“This research is really the case of the missing sand dune–it had been a mystery why we could not see them in the geological record,” Geoff Duller, a geologist and Earth Scientist at Aberystwyth University in Wales, said in a statement. “It’s only because of new technology that we can now start to uncover their secrets.”

This new study used ground penetrating radar to peer into the internal structure of Lala Lallia. Its name means ‘highest sacred point’ in the Berber language and the dune sits in the Erg Chebbi area of the Sahara Desert, near the border with Algeria. 

Researchers found that the sand pyramid reached its current 238 feet height and 2,296 feet width due to rapid growth over the past millennium as it slowly shifted towards the west. The oldest parts of the dune are 13,000 years old. 

According to the study, the star dune likely formed at the same time as the Younger Dryas event. This was a very abrupt period of global cooling around 12,900 and 11,600 years ago, and it returned some parts of the planet to Ice Age-like conditions, before a rapid warming period. 

The testing also revealed that the dune stopped growing for a period of 8,000 years. Some pottery found near the sites indicates that humans could live in the region that was not as dry as it is today. A period of additional rainfall or even an enlarged monsoon stabilized the dune before a large drought began. 

Why is Lala Lallia moving?

The ground-penetrating radar showed the structure of the dune’s layers and revealed how the natural changes in the environment like rainfall and wind built it over time. The wind coming from several directions likely helped form the giant dunes. Using this structural data, they also determined that the Lala Lallia dune is moving west at a speed of about 1.6 feet per year. Since the dune was formed by winds coming from two different directions, it’s a third wind blowing in from the east shifting the dune slowly towards the west.

To determine the star dune’s age, the team used luminescence dating techniques to pinpoint  the last time that minerals in the sand were exposed to sunlight. They did not look at when the sand itself was formed, but when it was deposited onto the dune.  

[Related: World’s oldest known wooden structure pre-dates our species.]

“The grains of quartz have a property like a mini rechargeable battery,” Duller told The Guardian. “It can store energy that it gets from naturally occurring radioactivity. When we bring it back to the laboratory, we can get it to release that energy. It comes out in the form of light. We can measure that and the brightness tells us the last time the sand grain saw daylight.”

By looking at the amount of energy in the grains of sand, researchers could determine that it took about 900 years for the Lala Lallia star dune to form. It accumulates roughly 6,400 metric tons of sand annually, as the wind blows sand in the desert. 

The techniques used in this study can be applied to other sand dunes to tell us more about Earth’s climatological history. Luminescence dating has already been used to discover the world’s oldest known wooden structure in 2023. 

According to study co-author and sedimentologist Charlie Bristow of University College London, “Using ground penetrating radar to look inside this star dune has allowed us to show how these immense dunes form, and to develop a new model so geologists know better what to look for in the rock record to identify these amazing desert features.”

The post The mysterious ‘star dune’ in the Sahara is on the move appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Humans’ early ancestors in Europe may not have spent their days eating Nutella on toasted bread, but hazelnuts were a valuable resource thousands of years ago. The way this vital source of energy was cultivated and harvested evolved as the landscape changed as giant glaciers retreated. Isotope analysis of the carbon in archaeological traces of hazelnuts in southern Sweden show that the nuts were harvested in progressively more open environments, according to a study published February 29 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. The findings paint a more detailed picture of what the landscape looked like as hunter-gathering gave way to farming. 

[Related: Neanderthals and modern humans intermingled in Europe 45,000 years ago.]

A shifting forest landscape

Around 14,000 BCE slowly melting glaciers allowed for more vegetation to grow and created open woodlands with pine and birch trees in the area for the first time. By the Mesolithic era (about 8,000 BCE) hazel trees started to become one of the dominant woodland species throughout the southern part of Sweden. Along with pine trees, the hazel forests formed a unique woodland that does not have any known comparison today, according to the study. More broadleaved trees such as oak and linden began to fill in, but hazel remained important as farming began in the Neolithic era around 4,000 BCE. 

“Farming started in southern Sweden and marked a transition to more open areas with grasslands,” Karl Ljung, a study co-author paleoecologist at Lund University in Sweden, tells PopSci. “Hazel continued to be an important species in this progressively more open landscape and was likely favored by people.”

The hazel trees provided a source for both raw materials and food, similar to seaweed. The nuts are a good source of protein and energy and have a long shelf life. Hazelnut shells can also be used as fuel in fires.

‘Plants act as time capsules’

Hazel trees and all plants contain carbon, which exists on Earth in various forms known as isotopes. Conducting stable isotope analysis of what isotopes are present at archaeological sites can give scientists valuable data on long gone environments.

“Plants act as time capsules of the environmental conditions that they experience when they grow,” Amy Styring, a study co-author and archaeological chemist at the University of Oxford in England, tells PopSci. “When we recover the remains of plants on archaeological sites, the chemistry of these plant remains can tell us about the water availability, soil fertility, and light intensity at the site where the plant grew. Given that hazelnuts are so frequently found on archaeological sites, we thought they were the perfect candidate to test whether they record environmental information in their chemistry.”

The proportions of different carbon isotopes is changed by the ratio of how much carbon dioxide is concentrated between leaf cells and their surrounding environment. For hazel and other plants, the ratio is affected by the amount of sunlight and water available to them. Regions near the poles like Sweden see nearly 24 hours of light during the summer months and almost no sunlight in the winter. This means that the sunlight affects the isotope ratio more than water, since water is not quite as scarce. 

“This means that a hazelnut shell recovered on an archaeological site provides a record of how open the environment was in which it was collected,” Ljung said in a statement. “This in turn tells us more about the habitats in which people were foraging.”

Digging into shell fragments

In the study, the team gathered hazelnuts from trees growing in various light levels at three locations in southern Sweden. They analyzed the variation in their carbon isotope values and the relationship between those values and how much light they were exposed to. 

[Related: Archery may have helped humans gain leverage over Neanderthals.]

Next, they looked at the carbon isotope values of hazelnut shells unearthed from archaeological sites in southern Sweden. The shell fragments came from four Mesolithic hunter-gatherer sites and 11 sites ranging from the Neolithic up to the Iron Age. Some of these sites had also been occupied during more than one period.

They combined the archeological and modern data and ran a model to assign the hazelnut samples to one of three categories based on where they grew–closed, open, and semi-open. 

They found that the nuts from the Mesolithic had been collected from more closed environments with more tree cover. 

“The biggest surprise was probably that light levels have such a strong effect on the carbon isotopes in hazelnut shells! Biology can be so noisy that the effect of a single factor is not always so clear,” says Styring.

By the Iron Age, most of the hazelnuts appear to have been gathered in an open area and not a woodland like the ones that existed as the glaciers retreated. Their microhabitats had entirely changed.

“Forests are dynamic places, shaped by the establishment of new species after the glacial period, diseases like the elm disease, that provided diverse environments for foraging,” say Ljung and Styring. “But people also modified the landscape, the most dramatic form being the clearing of trees to make way for fields of crops once farming became widespread.”

In future studies, the team would like to directly radiocarbon date and measure the carbon isotopes of hazelnut shells from other archeological sites and environments. These deeper looks could provide more detail into past woodlands and ecosystems and help us better understand how humans have shaped our environment over time. 

The post Humans have been eating hazelnuts for at least 6,000 years appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

In addition to hunting cave lions, creating art, cooking crabs, and potentially being the ultimate morning people, Neanderthals in what is now Europe also used their own kind of glue. A study published February 21 in the journal Science Advances finds that their stone tools were held together by a multi-component adhesive. This is the earliest evidence of a complex adhesive used by Neanderthals on the European continent. It also adds more evidence to the theory that these extinct human predecessors had a higher level of cognition and cultural development than scientists previously thought. 

[Related: Sensitive to pain? It could be your Neanderthal gene variants.]

In the study, an international team of researchers re-examined tools that were first discovered in the early 20th century at the Le Moustier archaeological site in France. The tools date back about 120,000 and 40,000 years ago, during the Middle Palaeolithic era or Old Stone Age. 

“These astonishingly well-preserved tools showcase a technical solution broadly similar to examples of tools made by early modern humans in Africa, but the exact recipe reflects a Neanderthal ‘spin,’ which is the production of grips for handheld tools,” study co-author and New York University anthropologist Radu Iovita, said in a statement. 

The tools were individually wrapped in the 1960s, preserving the organic substances in the very old glue. Researchers found traces of a mixture of ochre and bitumen on several scrapers, flakes, and blades. Ochre is a naturally occurring earth pigment that can be pale yellow, red, brown, and violet. Bitumen naturally occurs in soil and is a component of asphalt that can be made from crude oil. In the Le Moustier region, bitumen, and ochre would have had to be collected from distant locations. According to the authors, this would have meant a lot of time, effort, planning, and a targeted approach. 

“We were surprised that the ochre content was more than 50 percent,” Patrick Schmidt, a study co-author and archaeologist and geologist from the University of Tübingen in Germany, said in a statement. “This is because air-dried bitumen can be used unaltered as an adhesive, but loses its adhesive properties when such large proportions of ochre are added.” 

After figuring out which compounds were used, the researchers tested the strength of the adhesive material in the lab. When they used liquid bitumen, the substance was not really suitable for gluing. However, if 55 percent ochre was added, a malleable mass formed. The eventual mixture was sticky enough for a stone tool to remain stuck in it, but didn’t adhere to the skin on the hands after it dried. This makes it a suitable material for a tool’s handle. A microscopic examination of traces of how the tools were used and worn down revealed that the adhesives were, in fact, used to connect the tool to a handle. 

[Related: Europe’s oldest human-made megastructure may be at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.]

“The tools showed two kinds of microscopic wear: one is the typical polish on the sharp edges that is generally caused by working other materials,” said Iovita. “The other is a bright polish distributed all over the presumed hand-held part, but not elsewhere, which we interpreted as the results of abrasion from the ochre due to movement of the tool within the grip.”

Previously, using adhesive made from components including tree resin and ochre, was known from early humans (Homo sapiens) in Africa, but not from earlier Neanderthals living in Europe. The development of these adhesives and their use in building tools is considered to be some solid material evidence of the cultural evolution and cognitive abilities of early humans.  

“Compound adhesives are considered to be among the first expressions of the modern cognitive processes that are still active today,” said Schmidt. “What our study shows is that early Homo sapiens in Africa and Neanderthals in Europe had similar thought patterns. Their adhesive technologies have the same significance for our understanding of human evolution.”

The post Neanderthals likely used glue to make tools appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Archaeologists and anthropologists often find ancient humans buried alongside dogs, cats, and even horses. We are still piecing together the mystery of why co-burials were common. An archeological site in northern Italy points to some potential reasons. The co-burials could have been meant to provide a meal and companionship in the afterlife. They could even have served as complex funeral rites in the Iron Age. The archeological findings and theories are described in a study published February 14 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. 

[Related: Over 6,000 sacrificed animal bones tell a story of Iron Age Spain.]

In the study, a team of researchers from Italy and Switzerland looked at skeletons from the Seminario Vescovile archaeological site in Verona, Italy. The remains date back from Third to First Century BCE, long before the fictitious Romeo and Juliet would have lived, loved, and died there. The people who lived here were linked to Celtic cultural groups who crossed the Alps around the Fourth Century BCE.

Of the 161 people buried at Seminario Vescovile, only 16 were buried alongside animals. The lack of animal representation intrigued the team from the start. Some of the gravesites included pigs, chicken, and part of a cow. These likely would have represented food offering for the dead, since these animals were commonly eaten by people. 

However, four of the people at this site were buried alongside the remains of dogs and/or horses. These animals were not commonly eaten and the presence of horses and dogs was significant to the team. Other Iron Age findings in France and Switzerland indicate that horses and dogs were symbolic at the time. These animals are often present in what appears to be sacrificial rituals, funeral rites, and are frequently associated with specific deities from the time. For the team, the characteristics of a plot called Burial 46 were particularly interesting. 

“It includes the complete skeleton of a horse positioned above a woman, along with the cranium of a dog and the remains of additional horses,” Marco Milella, a co-author of the new study and anthropologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, tells PopSci. “This discovery provides a glimpse into a remarkably complex funerary ritual.”

According to Milella, what is equally compelling about this site is that both of the individuals who are accompanied by entire animals are female. The individual with a complete horse was an older woman, while the person buried with a complete dog was a baby. A young man buried with part of a horse and a middle-aged male buried with a small dog are also present, but only females have complete animals buried with them.

“While drawing scientifically robust conclusions from just two cases is challenging, we are prompted to consider whether this occurrence is merely coincidental or indicative of a deeper pattern,” says Milella.

[Related: Early humans carved old skeletal remains from burial caves into tools.]

To search for patterns that might further explain animal burials, the team analyzed the demographics, diets, genetics, and burial conditions of the humans and animals. While they did not see any notable correlations here, they did find that those who were buried alongside animals did not seem to be closely related to each other. Had they been related, it could have suggested that this was a practice of a certain family. 

The lack of patterns in these graves means that there are likely multiple interpretations about human-animal co-burials from the Late Iron Age. While dogs and horses often had religious symbolism in ancient cultures, specific individuals also may have been buried with a beloved companion. These human-animal burial practices may have also been individual traits and societal customs, which holds true for us today 

“We often tend to overlook the extent to which animals—or more accurately, other animals—are integral to human society and cultures worldwide,” says Milella. “Simply taking a walk and observing, or watching a documentary or photo essay, reveals the omnipresence of other animal species in human societies. Whether for economic, dietary, psychological, or religious reasons, humans and other animals are deeply intertwined, although in many cases, unfortunately, to the detriment of the latter.”

The post Iron Age humans found mysteriously buried with dogs and horses appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

A stone wall underneath the Baltic Sea may be the oldest known megastructure built by humans in Europe. It dates back about 11,000 years to the Stone Age, and was first discovered in 2021 about six miles off of Germany’s Baltic coast. The findings are described in a study published February 12 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

[Related: Neanderthals and modern humans intermingled in Europe 45,000 years ago.]

The Blinkerwall is about half a mile long along the Bay of Mecklenburg. It was initially spotted by accident when a team of scientists from Kiel University in Germany were using a multibeam sonar system from a research vessel to study the crust of the seafloor.

The team believes that Stone Age hunter-gatherers likely built it about 11,000 years ago to hunt reindeer. Hunting walls like this would catch herds of animals that are more likely to run parallel alongside obstacles instead of jumping over them. 

The roughly 1,500 stones connected to nearly 300 bigger boulders that make up the Blinkerwall are aligned so regularly that the possibility that the arrangement of stones formed naturally along the seafloor seems unlikely. 

Scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW), Kiel University, the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology, the German Aerospace Center, the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research and created a detailed 3D model of the wall. They also used modern geophysical models to reconstruct what the landscape would have looked like thousands of years ago. Sediment samples from the basin just to the south of the wall helps them narrow down the possible time period when the wall was built. It is the first known discovery of a Stone Age hunting structure in the Baltic Sea region.

“Our investigations indicate that a natural origin of the underwater stone wall as well as a construction in modern times, for instance, in connection with submarine cable laying or stone harvesting are not very likely. The methodical arrangement of the many small stones that connect the large, non-moveable boulders speaks against this,” study co-author and IOW geophysicist Jacob Geersen said in a statement.

Located just on the southwestern flank of a ridge on the seafloor, the wall stands where a former lake or bog would have been. While the Baltic Sea is currently about 68 feet deep in this location, the Blinkerwall was likely built before the sea level rose about 8,500 years ago, towards the end of the last Ice Age. Huge swaths of this previously accessible landscape were buried under the melting glacier water that formed the Baltic. 

Excluding the unlikely possibility that a natural process built the wall or a modern origin, it only could have been built when the landscape was still not flooded by the Baltic Sea. 

“At this time, the entire population across northern Europe was likely below 5,000 people. One of their main food sources were herds of reindeer, which migrated seasonally through the sparsely vegetated post-glacial landscape,” study co-author and University of Rostock archaeologist Marcel Bradtmöller said in a statement. “The wall was probably used to guide the reindeer into a bottleneck between the adjacent lakeshore and the wall, or even into the lake, where the Stone Age hunters could kill them more easily with their weapons.”

[Related: Blueprints engraved in stone from Saudi Arabia and Jordan could be the world’s oldest.]

A 2014 study described a 9,000 year-old structure at the bottom of Lake Huron in Michigan that was likely for hunting Caribou. Low-walled hunting structures called desert kites have also been discovered in parts of the Middle East and Africa.

The last reindeer herds disappeared from what is now the Baltic Sea 11,000 years ago, as the climate warmed and forests spread. The team believes that it was unlikely that the wall was built after reindeer left the area and would make it the oldest human structure found in the Baltic.

Future investigations into the area are planned, with side-scan sonar, sediment echo sounder, and multibeam echo sounder devices. Using luminescence dating to determine when it last was exposed to sunlight may also help hone in on a more accurate date of construction. The team also plans to reconstruct the ancient surrounding landscape in greater detail.

The post Europe’s oldest human-made megastructure may be at the bottom of the Baltic Sea appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

A team of shipwreck hunters have found the wreckage of a merchant ship that sank in the icy waters of Lake Superior in 1940. The 244-foot bulk carrier Arlington was discovered 600 feet deep, roughly 35 miles north of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. 

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

For the past decade, shipwreck researcher Dan Fountain has been analyzing remote sensing data in search for shipwrecks in Lake Superior. At 20,287,963 acres, Lake Superior is the largest of the five Great Lakes and the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area. It’s estimated that there have been 500 to 600 shipwrecks in the lake since the 1850s, including the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975.

Fountain reached out to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society (GLSHS) in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan for help in identifying the potential Arlington wreck. In 2023, Fountain, GLSHS Director of Marine Operations Darryl Ertel, and the crew of the R/V David Boyd towed side-scan sonar over an anomaly on the bottom of the lake. The sonar detected that this shipwreck and subsequent dives with a remote operating vehicle positively identified the sunken Arlington. 

“One of the most important aspects of everything we do as an organization involves the concept of teamwork,” GLSHS Executive Director Bruce Lynn said in a statement. “This goes for our operations at Whitefish Point, as well as on the water aboard the David Boyd. We are lucky to have so many dedicated shipwreck historians and researchers as friends of GLSHS.”

What happened to the Arlington?

According to the GLSHS, the Arlington left Port Arthur, Ontario on April 30, 1940. It was fully loaded with wheat and headed east towards Owen Sound, Ontario. The ship was under the command of an experienced Great Lakes sailor, Captain Frederick “Tatey Bug” Burke. 

[Related: Storm erosion brings 200-year-old shipwreck to the surface of a Florida beach.]

As the Arlington and another large freighter named the Collingwood began to make their way across Lake Superior, they encountered a dense fog and storm. The Arlington began to take on water after nightfall and the ship’s first mate changed the course so that the ship hugged the Canadian shoreline. This would have given the vessel some cover from the waves and the winds. However, Captain Burke ordered his ship back onto track across the open lake. The ship began to sink early in the morning on May 1, 1940 and Chief Engineer Fred Gilbert, sounded the alarm when the Arlington began to sink. 

“Out of fear for their lives, and without orders from Captain Burke, the crew began to abandon ship on their own,” GLSHS wrote in a statement. “Luckily, everyone safely got off the Arlington and made it to the safety of the Collingwood…everyone but Captain ‘Tatey Bug’ Burke.”

After the sinking, an investigation and speculation into Captain Burke’s behavior, particularly why he decided to go down with the ship. An answer to those questions of why was never uncovered, but finding the wreckage provides a new chapter in this story.  

“It’s exciting to solve just one more of Lake Superior’s many mysteries finding Arlington so far out in the lake,” said Fountain. “I hope this final chapter in her story can provide some measure of closure to the family of Captain Burke.”

The post Shipwreck hunters find WWII-era ship in Lake Superior appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Damaged ancient papyrus scrolls dating back to the 1st century CE are finally being deciphered by the Vesuvius Challenge contest winners using computer vision and AI machine learning programs. The scrolls were carbonized during the eruption of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE and have been all-but-inaccessible using normal restoration methods, as they have been reduced to a fragile, charred log. Three winners–Luke Farritor (US), Youssef Nader (Egypt), and Julian Schilliger (Switzerland)–will split the $700,000 grand prize after deciphering roughly 2,000 characters making up 15 columns of never-before-seen Greek texts.

[Related: AI revealed the colorful first word of an ancient scroll torched by Mount Vesuvius.]

In October 2023, Farritor, a 21-year-old Nebraska native and former SpaceX intern won the challenge’s “First Word” contest after developing a machine learning model to parse out the first few characters and form the word Πορφύραc—or porphyras, ancient Greek for “purple.” He then teamed up with Nader and Schlinder to tackle the remaining fragments using their own innovative AI programs. The newly revealed text is an ancient philosopher’s meditation on life’s pleasures—and a dig on people who don’t appreciate them.  

A 1,700 year journey

The scrolls once resided within a villa library believed to belong to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, south of Pompeii in the town of Herculaneum. Upon its eruption, Mount Vesuvius’ historic volcanic blast near-instantly torched the library before subsequently burying it in ash and pumice. The carbonized scrolls remained lost for centuries until rediscovered by a farmer in 1752. Over the next few decades, a Vatican scholar utilized an original, ingenious weighted string method to carefully “unroll” much of the collection. Even then, the monk’s process produced thousands of small, crumbled fragments which he then needed to laboriously piece back together.

Fast forward to 2019, and around 270 “Villa of the Papyri” scrolls still remained inaccessible—a lingering mystery prompting a team at the University of Kentucky to 3D scan the archive and launch the Vesuvius Challenge in 2023. After releasing open-source software alongside thousands of 3D X-ray scans made from three papyrus fragments and two scrolls, challenge sponsors offered over $1 million in various prizes to help develop new, high-tech methods for accessing the unknown contents.

What do the scrolls say?

According to a February 5 post on X from competition sponsor Nat Friedman, the first scroll’s final 15 columns were likely penned by Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, and discuss “music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures.”

According to the Vesuvius Challenge announcement, two columns of the scroll, for example, center on whether or not the amount of available food influences the level of pleasure diners will feel from their meals. In this case, the scroll’s author argues it doesn’t: “[A]s too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.”

“In the closing section, he throws shade at unnamed ideological adversaries—perhaps the stoics?—who ‘have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular,'” Friedman also said on X.

Although much more remains to be uncovered, challenge organizers have previously hypothesized the scrolls could include long-lost works including the poems of Sappho.

But despite the grand prize announcement, the Vesuvius Challenge is far from finished—the newly translated text makes up just 5 percent of a single scroll, after all. In the same X announcement, Friedman revealed the competition’s next phase: a new, $100,000 prize to the first team to retrieve at least 90 percent of the four currently scanned scrolls.

At this point, learning the ancient scrolls’ contents is more a “when” than an “if” for researchers. Once that’s done, well, huge sections of the Villa of the Papyri remain unexcavated. And within those ruins? According to experts, potentially thousands more scrolls await eager eyes.

The post 2,000 new characters from burnt-up ancient Greek scroll deciphered with AI appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

About a decade ago, the theory that Neanderthals had bred with Homo sapiens outside of Africa rocked the anthropological, archeological, and genetics worlds. Some scientists looked down on these now extinct human cousins, but quickly learned that they themselves could share as much as four percent of their DNA with Neanderthals. The question of how long ago and where this interbreeding occurred is still being debated. Now, some new analysis is further filling in the timeline of Neanderthal and modern human interactions and the two may have intermingled for quite some time.  

[Related: Neanderthals were likely creating art 57,000 years ago.]

A new genetic analysis of bone fragments from an archaeological site in central Germany shows that modern humans had reached northern Europe 45,000 years ago. This means that their arrival overlapped with the Neanderthals who had been living there for several thousand years before going extinct. The evidence also adds to the suspicion that the movement of modern humans into Europe and Asia about 50,000 years ago helped drive Neanderthals into extinction. The findings are described in three new papers published January 31 in journals Nature and Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Evidence from Stone Age tools

Neanderthals were living in northern Europe for more than 500,000 years by the time that modern humans began to arrive. A multidisciplinary team of researchers studied bone fragments and stone tool blades from a site near Ranis, Germany. It was first explored in the 1930s, but a team from institutions in Austria, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States re-excavated the area from 2016 to 2022.

This site is best known for some finely flaked, leaf-shaped stone tool blades called leaf points. The leaf points found there were dated to the final years of the Middle Paleolithic period— between 300,000 and 30,000 years ago—or the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, which starts around 50,000 years ago. The tools are among the oldest confirmed sites of modern human Stone Age culture in north central and northwestern Europe.

The leaf points are similar to stone tools that have been uncovered at several sites in the United Kingdom, Poland, Moravia, and elsewhere in Germany. Archaeologists believe that they were all produced by the same culture known as the Lincombian–Ranisian–Jerzmanowician (LRJ) culture.

Previous dating of the Ranis site estimated that it was 40,000 years old or older. However, without recognizable bones to indicate who crafted the tools found there, it was not clear if Neanderthals or Homo sapiens made them. In order to know if a Neanderthal or Homo sapien crafted the tools, it would take some DNA.

The DNA evidence

During the re-excavation, the team was able to get to some rocks that 20th Century scientists couldn’t get to, to look for LRJ culture bones or more tools. 

“After removing that rock by hand, we finally uncovered the LRJ layers and even found human fossils. This came as a huge surprise, as no human fossils were known from the LRJ before, and was a reward for the hard work at the site,” Marcel Weiss, a study co-author neurophysicist at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said in a statement.

[Related: Neanderthals may have been early risers.]

These human remains meant that they could perform genetic analysis to see who could have made the stone tools. The extracted DNA in the ancient bones was highly fragmented. Study co-author and University of California, Berkeley research fellow Elena Zavala isolated and sequenced the basic DNA and all of the mitochondrial DNA that was inherited from the mother.  

“We confirmed that the skeletal fragments belonged to Homo sapiens. Interestingly, several fragments shared the same mitochondrial DNA sequences—even fragments from different excavations,” Zavala said in a statement. “This indicates that the fragments belonged to the same individual or their maternal relatives, linking these new finds with the ones from decades ago.”

These bone fragments were initially identified as human through analysis of bone proteins by study co-author Dorothea Mylopotamitaki, a doctoral student at the Collège de France. The team compared the Ranis mitochondrial DNA sequences with other mitochondrial DNA sequences from human remains at other paleolithic sites in Europe. 

They used this data to construct a family tree of early Homo sapiens across Europe. They found that all but 13 fragments from the Ranis cave were similar to one another. They also resembled mitochondrial DNA from a 43,000-year-old skull of a woman found in a cave in the Czech Republic. The only standout in the sample was an individual from Italy.

“That raises some questions: Was this a single population? What could be the relationship here?” Zavala said. “But with mitochondrial DNA, that’s only one side of the history. It’s only the maternal side. We would need to have nuclear DNA to be able to start looking into this.”

The DNA revealed that Homo sapiens were present at least in this part of Germany, not just Neanderthals.

Insights into human diet

The cave excavation also found traces of DNA from multiple mammals. There were traces of horses, cave bears, woolly rhinoceroses, and reindeer, which indicates that the area had a colder climate similar to the tundra of Siberia and northern Scandinavia today. 

It also indicates that the human diet at the time was based on these large land animals. 

[Related: Neanderthals caught and cooked crabs 90,000 years ago.]

“Zooarchaeological analysis shows that the Ranis cave was used intermittently by denning hyaenas, hibernating cave bears, and small groups of humans,” Geoff Smith, a study co-author and zooarchaeologist from the University of Kent and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said in a statement.  “While these humans only used the cave for short periods of time, they consumed meat from a range of animals. Although the bones were broken into smaller pieces, they were exceptionally well preserved and allowed us to apply the latest cutting-edge methods from archaeological science, proteomics and genetics.”

It also indicates that earlier groups of Homo sapiens dispersing across Eurasia could adapt to harsh changes in climate conditions. 

“Until recently, it was thought that resilience to cold-climate conditions did not appear until several thousand years later, so this is a fascinating and surprising result,” study co-author and University of La Laguna in Spain paleoclimatologist Sarah Pederzani said in a statement. 

Revising the timeline

Radiocarbon dating of human and animal bones from different layers of the site was used to build a timeline of the cave. Many of the bones had traces of human modifications on their surfaces, which links their dates to the presence of humans from the LRJ culture in the area.

“We found very good agreement between the radiocarbon dates from the Homo sapiens bones from both excavation collections and with modified animal bones from the LRJ layers of the new excavation, making a very strong link between the human remains and LRJ,” study co-author and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Francis Crick Institute Helen Fewlass said in a statement. “The evidence suggests that Homo sapiens were sporadically occupying the site from as early as 47,500 years ago.”

The post Neanderthals and modern humans intermingled in Europe 45,000 years ago appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Usually, fossilized animal remains result from bits of bone or impressions of a creature long-passed. But sometimes a specific place has just the right conditions to preserve even more. From Richards Spur, a long filled-in cave network and active quarry in southern Oklahoma, a group of paleontologists say they’ve identified and described the oldest fossilized reptile skin ever found. The soft tissue fossil is a rare find–enabled through a series of chance events. It offers a glimpse into a distant evolutionary past that pre-dates both mammals and the oldest dinosaurs.

The skin sample, about the size of a fingernail and literally paper thin, is described in a study published on January 10 in the journal Current Biology, along with other fossil findings. The ancient, reptilian skin flake is an estimated 286-289 million years old. That’s at least 21 million years older than the next oldest example and more than 130 million years older than the vast majority of comparable samples, which come from mummified dinosaurs that lived in the late Jurassic, says lead study author Ethan Mooney, a biology master’s student at the University of Toronto studying paleontology. 

The fossils’ estimated age is based on the site where they were found. Once, Richards Spur was an open limestone cave, but between 286 and 289 million years ago, it filled in with clay and mud deposits, according to Mooney. During that in-filling process, the cave stopped forming, so the youngest stalagmite rings present in the cave represent the approximate age of the sediments and the fossils they contain, according to previous research using Uranium-Lead radioisotope dating.

Roger Benson, a paleontologist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History who was not involved in the study, agrees these methods and assumptions are sound. “All the evidence, especially what sorts of fossil groups are present, is consistent with an early Permian age (around 300 to 273 million years ago),” he wrote in an email. 

In addition to the fossilized piece of “skin proper,” the researchers also documented multiple preserved impressions of skin– a much more common type of fossil to find. But unlike with the impressions, which are essentially the outline of an animal pressed into stone, the researchers were able to assess the cross section of their most notable fossil and identify layers and detail that would’ve otherwise been unknowable. 

“At first we thought they were broken pieces of bone,” says Tea Maho, a study co-author and a pHD student at the University of Toronto, of all the epidermal fossils. The skin, she says, “could have just been so easily disregarded until we looked under a microscope.” Then it became clear that they were seeing preserved soft tissue, an exceptionally rare thing among samples that old. 

Usually, soft tissue breaks down quickly before it can fossilize. But Richards Spur is a hotbed of paleontological discovery. The study suggests that oxygen-poor sediments and the presence of oil seeps in the cave system helped to preserve the prehistoric animals and carcasses  that happened to fall in. In this environment, the skin was mummified–the technical term in paleontology for when organic matter dries out before decaying. Because the site is also an actively mined quarry, new layers of fossils are constantly being uncovered.

“The sheer chance for a soft tissue structure to be preserved, to survive until now–through the mining process–to have been found…and then described by us is quite an incredible story,” Mooney says. Especially given how fragile the preserved epidermis is. “If you were to have pressed it a little too hard, it would have just cracked,” says Maho. Thankfully, for our understanding of vertebrate history, the scientists were careful enough to keep the skin sample from becoming dust. 

Though they can’t say for certain what animal the skin specimen was from, Maho and Mooney have an idea. Captorhinus aguti was a lizard-like animal known to have been common in the region during the Permian Period. It had four legs, a tail, was about 10 inches long, and had an omnivorous diet–eating insects, small vertebrates, and occasionally plants. Fossilized skeletal remains of C. aguti have been found at the same site, and aspects of the skin sample are similar to features of those larger fossils. 

On top of being the oldest reptile skin ever discovered, Mooney notes the newly described specimen is also the oldest amniote skin ever found. Amniotes are the subcategory of animals that encompasses reptiles, birds, and mammals, and the finding offers insight into a key moment in animal biology. “It comes from a pivotal time in the evolution of life as we know it. It represents the first chapter of higher vertebrate evolution,” from fish and amphibians to creatures not reliant on aquatic habitats to survive or breed. Skin is the body’s largest organ and plays a major role in moisture regulation. Paleontologists have long assumed that good skin was a big deal for early terrestrial animals, now there’s additional fossil evidence for that view, he adds. 

Incredibly, the ~289 million-year-old specimen closely resembles present-day crocodile skin, according to the study. Both living crocodiles and the ancient bit of preserved epidermis have a pebble-like texture and a non-overlapping scale pattern. This similarity, Mooney says, is further proof of skin’s outsized role in adapting to life on land. “The fact that we have an example from one of these earliest reptiles and it’s quite consistent with what we see in modern reptiles underscores how important that structure was and how successful it was in doing its job.” 

Nearly 300 million years ago, “life would have looked very different,” Mooney says. But reptile skin might not have.

The post Oldest known fossilized reptile skin was dug up in an Oklahoma quarry appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

No one likes having a dental cavity. They hurt and can be very expensive to take care of. Our species has been trying to fix our teeth for at least 14,000 years and painful dental problems even plagued Swedish vikings. More than 2,300 juvenile and adult teeth found near a church in Sweden dating back to the 10th through 12th Century CE had evidence of dental problems. They had evidence of tooth decay called caries and even oral diseases that some tried to treat. The findings are described in a study published December 13 in PLOS ONE.

[Related: This new synthetic tooth enamel is even harder than the real thing.]

“I think both dental caries and other dental diseases are very relatable,” Carolina Bertilsson, a study co-author and dentist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, tells PopSci. “It is awful to imagine the suffering some of these individuals with decay, tooth extractions, and infections must have gone through, without any of the methods we use today in modern dentistry.”

The teeth were uncovered during a 2005 excavation of the remains of a Christian church in present-day Skara, Sweden. The nearby cemetery contained thousands of Viking graves and a team from University of Gothenburg examined teeth belonging to 171 individuals. The team used radiography to take detailed images of the teeth that were also physically examined by a team of dentists and osteoarchaeologists.

While none of the juveniles had evidence of dental caries, 60 percent of the adult remains showed signs of tooth decay. The team also saw traces of tooth infection and signs that some teeth had been lost before death. Many of the individuals likely had tooth decay that would have been severe enough to cause pain and there were signs of attempted dental treatments. One individual also showed signs of filed front teeth similar to those seen in other Swedish Viking remains. 

“It seems like the Vikings tried to file their teeth to ease the pain from infected teeth,” says Bertilsson.

Caries are caused by a buildup of bacteria near the teeth from not cleaning them often and consuming food high in starches and sugar. The diet during the late Viking Age primarily consisted of local produce, meat, fish, dairy, porridge, and breads made from rye, wheat, and barley. They drank beer, mead, and milk since water sources were likely not safe to drink. 

“Sweet taste came from honey, malt, and fruits and berries naturally grown in Scandinavia,” says Bertilsson.

The coarseness of the food and high intake of starch combined with the lack of dental care partially explain the tooth decay. Other factors including individual differences in saliva, genetics, and physiology also may have had an impact on the caries. Personal hygiene and habits also likely played a role in dental health the way consistent brushing and flossing does today. 

“In many individuals, we could also see wear from the usage of toothpicks which indicates that some of the Vikings were very keen to try and keep their teeth clean,” says Bertilsson.

There was also evidence of other attempts to treat dental infections like tooth extractions. It is unclear who would have performed these treatments, some type of professional or the individual with the teeth issues themselves. 

The prevalence of the dental caries in this population is also similar to what has been noted in other European populations from the time. However, nearly a quarter of these individuals appear to have lost teeth before death, which likely skews this analysis. The prevalence of tooth decay appeared to decrease with age, and this unexpected result likely reflects more tooth loss in older Vikings, so the most decayed teeth were not present in the remains. 

[Related: Plague DNA was just found in 4,000-year-old teeth.]

In future studies, the team plans to study other remains for evidence of the types of bacteria present in the body and what effect that may have had on the dental health of the Vikings. 

“It makes me appreciate the time I live in, with the possibility to help my patients with local anesthetics during dental treatments, and antibiotics when needed,” says Bertilsson.

The post Vikings filed their teeth to cope with pain appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

From roughly the 9th Century BC to the 4th Century BCE, ancient Egyptians mummified a wide variety of animal species for religious purposes. These include local crocodiles for the god Sobek, bulls to honor the war god Bouchis, and cats for the goddess Bastet. It also includes some animals that were brought into the area from afar. Some roughly 2,500- to 2,800-year-old baboon remains show signs that the animals were raised in captivity before being turned into mummies. The analysis of at least 36 individual baboons is detailed in a study published December 6 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. 

[Related: This is the best look yet into ancient Egyptians’ mummy-making chemicals.]

“The baboons were revered as representations of Thoth, the god of the moon and wisdom, and adviser to the sun god Ra,” Bea De Cupere, study co-author and an archaeozoologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, tells PopSci. “Of all the animals revered by the ancient Egyptians, baboons were the only ones that are not native to Egypt. As such, they had to be imported and were kept in captivity.”

In this study, the team examined a collection of baboon mummies uncovered in 1905 and 1906 from the ancient Egyptian site Gabbanat el-Qurud. Also called the Valley of the Monkeys for these primate remains, the site is on the east bank of the Nile River in southern Egypt near Luxor. The remains belonged to monkeys of various ages and that date back to between 800 to 500 BCE.

The bones had lesions, deformations, and other abnormalities to the skeleton which indicate most of the animals suffered from a lack of sunlight and poor nutrition. These were likely due to being born and raised in captivity. De Cupre says that similar conditions have been seen in baboon remains uncovered from Saqqara and Tuna el-Gebe, two other sites of similar age as Gabbanat el-Qurud.

“The deformities that we observed are typical for rickets, a disease that is caused by chronic lack of vitamin D caused by a lack of sunlight and inadequate food,” says De Cupere. “Baboons are good climbers and they were therefore probably kept in buildings or enclosures with high walls (and roofs) to prevent them from escaping but thus taking away direct sunlight.”

[ Related: This Renaissance-era baby died from living in darkness for a year ]

Studying the mummified remains provides insights into how these imported baboons were treated and kept in Ancient Egypt before their mummification, but there is still more to explore. The authors are beginning to perform microwear analysis on the remains of the baboon’s teeth in an effort to get a better understanding of the types of foods they ate. 

If they can extract DNA from the remains, genetic data may also reveal where the animals were caught in the wild and the breeding practices that keepers used. A study of baboons from Egypt’s Gabbanat el-Qurud site published in September found that the remains had some genetic similarities with present-day populations south of Egypt, in the countries of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan.

According to DeCupere, “We think that the intentions of the ancient Egyptians were good. They most probably tried to take good care of the baboons, but this must not have been easy.”

The post Ancient Egyptians likely kept baboons in captivity—and mummified them appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Archaeologists have uncovered rare evidence of ritualized animal sacrifice at the Casas del Turuñuelo archaeological site in southwestern Spain. The site dates back to the 5th century BCE and offers a glimpse into the Tartessian culture of the Iberian Peninsula. The discovery is described in a study published November 22 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

[Related: Early humans carved old skeletal remains from burial caves into tools.]

The Tartessos were a historical civilization settled in the southern Iberian Peninsula from the 9th to 5th centuries BCE during the Iron Age. Archaeologists believed that their culture had a mixture of traits from local Iberian populations and Phoenicians arriving from countries in the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. It had a writing system called Tartessian, that had roughly 97 inscriptions in a Tartessian language. 

In the western Mediterranean region where the Tartessos lived, archaeological evidence of animal sacrifice is difficult to come by. However, written sources including Homer’s The Odyssey chronicle animal sacrifice in the Mediterranean at this time. The gap between the written record and archaeological evidence has made it difficult for archaeologists to establish a clear understanding of what protocols and patterns were behind the practice here. 

Mª Pilar Iborra Eres, a study co-author and archaeologist Spain’s Instituto Valenciano de Conservación, Restauración e Investigación, tells PopSci that the Casas del Turuñuelo site is special due to the “excellent conservation of the building and its contents. In this case, the accumulation of bone remains that testify to ritual activities.”

In this new study, Eres and her team studied an example of animal sacrifice from an Iron Age building that dates back towards the end of the 5th Century BCE. The excavation began in 2015 and they examined and dated 6,770 bones that belonged to 52 animals. The animals were predominantly adult horses, but also included cattle, pigs, and one dog. The remains show signs of intentional burial, which is one clue that they were sacrificed. 

They found that the animals had been buried in three sequential phases. In the first two phases, the skeletons were found to be mostly complete and unaltered. In the third phase, all of the skeletons except the horses show signs of having been processed for food. This suggests that a meal likely accompanied this ritual. 

A case study like this one allowed the team to establish some key details about ritual protocols at Casas del Turuñuelo in order to determine what was behind them. The bones indicate that adult animals were selected for sacrifice rather than young. The presence of burned plant and animal remains also shows that fires played a role in these rituals. 

[Related: Pompeii’s archaeological puzzles can be solved with a little help from chemistry.]

Casas del Turuñuelo also shows some unique features compared to other Mediterranean sites, including the large number of sacrificed horses. 

“The equine remains were discovered as a result of a methodical excavation of one of the areas of this building, the courtyard,” says Eres. “This is where animal sacrifices were made during the use of the building by Iron Age societies. 

The space was also likely used repeatedly over several years for a variety of sacrificial rituals.

The team was surprised that they were able to verify that the deposit here was so perfectly preserved and portrayed what they believe to be an accurate picture of the rituals that took place there. They hope to complete this study by applying new methods to study the samples. 

“Archaeology allows us to learn about many aspects of the life of past societies,” says Eres. “By applying innovative methodologies such as computed tomography, paleoparasitology, isotope analysis for the study of diet and mobility or ancient DNA, the aim is to carry out a complete study of this group of equids.”

The post Over 6,000 sacrificed animal bones tell a story of Iron Age Spain appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Reviled the world over for making our scalps itch and rapidly spreading in schools, lice have hitched their destiny to our hair follicles. They are the oldest known parasites that feed on the blood of humans, so learning more about lice can tell us quite a bit about our own species and migratory patterns. 

[Related: Ancient ivory comb shows that self-care is as old as time.]

A study published November 8 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE found that lice likely came into North America in two waves of migration. First when some humans potentially crossed a land bridge that connected Asia with present day Alaska roughly 16,000 years ago during the end of the last ice age and then again during European colonization. 

“In some ways, lice are like living fossils we carry around on our own heads,” study co-author Marina Ascunce, an evolutionary biologist with the United States Department of Agriculture, tells PopSci.  

Lice are wingless parasites that live their entire lives on their host and there are three known species that infest humans. Humans and lice have coevolved for thousands of years. The oldest louse specimen known to scientists is 10,000 years old and was found in Brazil in 2000. Since lice and humans have a very intertwined relationship, studying lice can offer clues into human migratory patterns.

“They went on this ride across the world with us. Yet, they are their own organism with some ability to move around on their own (e.g., from one head to another). It provides insight into what happened during our time together,” study co-author and mammal geneticist from the University of Florida David L. Reed tells PopSci. 

In this new study, a team of scientists from the United States, Mexico, and Argentina analyzed the genetic variation in 274 human lice uncovered from 25 geographic sites around the world. The analysis showed distinct clusters of lice that rarely interbreed and were found in different locations. Cluster I was found all over the world, while Cluster II was found in Europe and the Americas. The only lice that had ancestry from both clusters are found in the Americas. This distinct group of lice appears to be the result of a mixture between lice that were descended from populations that arrived with the people who crossed the Bering Land Bridge into North America and those descended from European lice. 

Researchers found genetic evidence that head lice mirrored both the movement of people into the Americas from Asia and European colonization after Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the late 1400’s.

“Central American head lice harbored the Asian background associated with the foundation of the Americas, while South American lice had marks of the European arrival,” Ariel Toloza, a study co-author and insect toxicologist at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnica (CONICET) in Argentina, tells PopSci. “We also detected a recent human migration from Europe to the Americas after WWII.” 

[Related: Rare parasites found in 200 million-year-old reptile poop.]

The evidence in this study supports the theory that the first people living in the Americas came from Asia between 14,000 and 16,000 years ago and moved south into Central and South America. However, other archaeological evidence like the 23,000 to 21,000 year-old White Sands footprints and Native American tradition suggests that humans were already living in the Americas before and during the last ice age. Some potentially 30,000-year-old stone tools were discovered in a cave in Central Mexico in 2020, which also questions the land bridge theory. 

The study also fills in some of lice’s evolutionary gaps and the team sequenced the louse full genome for future research. 

“The same louse DNA used for this first study was used to analyze their whole genomes and also more lice were collected, so in the next year or so, there will be new studies trying to answer our ongoing questions,” says Ascunce. 

Technological improvements can also now help scientists study include ancient DNA from lice that has been found in mummies or even from louse DNA recovered from ancient combs. The study also offers some lessons in studying animals that we may generally experience as a nuisance.

“The world is full of a lot of plants and animals that are reviled or despised,” says Reed. “You never fully [know] what role they play in the environment or what their true value might be. So, be curious and see what stories the lowliest of animals might have to tell.”

The post What head lice can tell us about human migration appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

A tiny glimmer spotted amid seagrass by a diver off the Italian coast has yielded one of the largest historical treasure troves in over a decade. According to a November 4 announcement by Italy’s culture ministry, an archeological recovery team has recovered somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 near-pristine ancient coins from the Mediterranean Sea dating back to the fourth century Roman empire. 

[Related: These ‘fake’ ancient Roman coins might actually be real.]

Authorities described the large, bronze coins (known as follis) found near the town of Arzachena “in an exceptional and rare state of conservation,” with only four appearing slightly damaged. Upon further inspection, experts determined the currency originated across the Roman empire between 324 and 340 CE—roughly during Constantine the Great’s reign—with nearly every active mint known from the time, apart from Antioch, Alexandria, and Carthage.

Roman follis coinage entered circulation circa 294 CE during monetary reforms instituted by the emperor Diocletian. Even without a final official coin count, the Arzachena find is already confirmed to be larger than the last major follis discovery made a decade ago in the UK. In 2013, a local metal detector enthusiast uncovered 22,888 follis near Seaton Down a few hundred feet away from the site of a Roman military fort and villa circa the second-to-third centuries.

“The treasure found in the waters of Arzachena represents one of the most important discoveries of numismatic finds in recent years and highlights once again the richness and importance of the archaeological heritage that the depths of our seas… still guards and conserves,” Luigi La Rocca, regional director general of archaeology, fine arts and landscape, said via the Italian government’s recent announcement. La Rocca went on to describe such artifacts as “an extraordinary but also very fragile heritage” that is now constantly threatened by climate change and other human ecological impacts.

[Related: AI revealed the colorful first word of an ancient scroll torched by Mount Vesuvius.]

The tens of thousands of coins may not be the end of discoveries off the Sardianian coast, either. While recovering the follis, divers also found fragments of tall, two-handled, narrow neck jugs known as amphorae. Combined with the coins’ location across “two macro-areas of dispersion” in a large, sandy area between the beach and seabed, experts believe the region could hide the remains of a yet-to-be-uncovered shipwreck. Conservationists are now moving forward with follis restoration efforts.

The post Divers recovered a treasure trove of more than 30,000 ancient, bronze coins off the Italian coast appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

In parts of Brazil, water levels are so low due to severe drought that previously submerged ancient rock carvings are visible for the first time since 2010. The petroglyphs including depictions of animals and other natural objects are located on the shores of Rio Negro, at an archeological site known as the Ponto das Lajes–Place of Slabs– near where the Rio Negro and the Solimões river flow into the Amazon River.

These carvings were previously seen during a drought 13 years ago, when the Rio Negro’s water levels dropped to what was then an all-time known low of 44.7 feet. As of October 23, the water levels in the Rio Negro are at 42.2 feet. Some experts predict that the drought could last until early 2024. 

[Related: The Amazon is on the brink of a climate change tipping point.]

According to the BBC, archaeologist Jaime Oliveira told local media that the markings were carved by people who lived in the area in pre-Columbian times. “This region is a pre-colonial site which has evidence of occupation dating back some 1,000 to 2,000 years. What we’re seeing here are representations of anthropomorphic figures.”

In addition to the faces and animals, grooves in one of the rocks were potentially used by Indigenous people in the area as a whetstone to sharpen their arrows. Carlos Augusto da Silva of the Federal University of Amazonas identified 25 groups of these carvings on a single rock.

Pieces of ceramics that archaeologists believe are thousands of years old have also been found at the site. The area was home to large Indigenous villages before European colonists arrived in the Seventeenth Century. 

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

The carvings re-emerged earlier in October amid this unusually dry season. A similar situation arose in Europe in the summer of 2022, when one of the worst droughts in 500 years revealed “hunger stones,” in rivers across the continent. These stones covered in engraved markings show the water levels from previous dry times and some come with grim warnings. Near the town of Děčín in the northern Czech Republic, one haunting stone read “If you see me, then weep,” or “Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine.”

Scientists attribute this drought in South America to an El Niño weather pattern and warming in the North Atlantic linked to human-made climate change. 

Due to the low water levels, endangered pink river dolphins in Lake Tefé, Brazil are at risk of suffocation and a major hydropower plant near Porto Velho has also been shut down. Tens of thousands living in remote communities who can only travel by boat are also being isolated from the rest of the world.

These dry conditions are also accelerating the destruction of the most biodiverse rainforest on Earth. Parts of the Amazon rainforest have already begun to change from humid ecosystems that store large amounts of heat-trapping gasses into more dry forests that release these gasses into the atmosphere. Climate change, deforestation and fires have made it harder for the Amazon region as a whole to recover from severe droughts.

“This is a catastrophe of lasting consequences,” Luciana Vanni Gatti, a scientist at Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research, told The New York Times. “The more forest loss we have, the less resilience it has.”

The post Drought reveals ancient rock carvings of human faces in Brazil appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Is human society becoming more violent? It’s hard to imagine a point in time containing an event as destructive as an atomic bombing. Even the most brutal acts committed by our ancient ancestors pale in comparison to the organized assaults countries have executed in the last century alone. Ongoing wars and human right violations suggest that we are living in one of the most vicious times in history. But the evidence, according to archaeologists who study historical violence, says there is no black-and-white answer.

To conclude that humans are more violent than ever, you’d need a timeline of all the aggressive actions in human history. Archaeologists have found some artifacts that weave a story of humanity’s violent past from a skeleton that could have been the first murder victim about 430,000 years ago to the ancient Mesopotamian death pits that likely held war casualties or human sacrifices. These pieces of history, though, are still not enough to paint a complete picture. 

The further we go back in time, the harder it is to assess violence and killings, explains Linda Fibiger, an archaeologist at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, who researches conflict in early human history. 

Remains alone don’t tell complete stories. Finding enough evidence to know whether humans at a certain time period were violent, or if someone’s violent death was an isolated event, is tricky. Even if an autopsy of an ancient human implies a brutal death, it can’t reveal a killer’s motive. Some ceremonial acts, for example, were interlaced with violence as people were sacrificed as tributes to the gods.

[Related: Grisly medieval murders detailed in new interactive maps]

“I don’t think prehistory was in an eternal state of warfare and conflict. But with the skeletal evidence and the percentage of individuals with violent trauma, I’m sure most people would have been aware of violence or known somebody who encountered it,” says Fibiger. She also notes whether people in the past considered an act a crime could change the perception of whether they were living in a violent time.

If perception is a factor, it’s possible we could be living in the most peaceful era to date. In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker theorized that small hunter-gatherer groups were the most violent, back in the day, with the highest percentage of people dying from warfare. As communities settled into more organized states, they were better able to become more “civilized” and develop skills of empathy, reasoning, and self-control.

“We would like to believe that we’re so much more smart, reasonable, and more civilized”, says Dean Falk, an evolutionary anthropologist from Florida State University. “But I don’t think everything’s peachy now.” Falk, in her previous analysis of the evidence Pinker presented, found that he failed to consider the population sizes of the different communities in his calculations. This could have inflated the rate of war deaths in hunter-gatherer communities when comparing them to state-based societies. And although a larger percentage of a small society may have died in a conflict, Falk argues that says more about the attacks they suffered than their own violent behavior.

When Falk included the absolute number of deaths (the number of deaths for a given population scaled to their size) into the calculations, she found it was the population size, not the type of civilization structure, that determined whether a society lost their residents to warfare. And while the percentage of annual war deaths was lower among state societies, Falk says the number of annual war deaths has gone up in bigger populations. “This might have to do with big brains and having technology to invent more effective weapons to kill each other.”

There’s also no rule that states we’re on a linear path toward a more or less violent society. New research published this month in the journal Nature Human Behaviour suggests human violence has waxed and waned throughout history. Giacomo Benati, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona in Spain and coauthor of the new study says analyzing violent trends across history often falls victim to bias, focusing on historical battle records or polarized narratives of the ancient world. 

[Related: A group of humpback whales is choosing violence]

His new work, one of the largest archaeological studies on early human violence, tries to avoid that prejudice, by examining  a large set of bones. Benati and his team analyzed any sign of cranial trauma or weapon-related wounds in 3,539 skeletons belonging to people who lived in seven Middle Eastern countries between 12,000 to 400 BCE. 

This study was particularly interesting because it tries to contextualize what’s happening, says Fibiger, who was not involved in the research. The large dataset of human skeletal remains allowed them to link traumatic deaths to ongoing conflicts, economics, and the unequal distribution of resources and wealth caused by climate. “Bringing these things together gives a better concept of people’s lives,” Fibiger says, “and what might have escalated conflict and broken down relationships.”

Interpersonal violence—murder, torture, slavery, and other cruel punishments—peaked around 4,500 to 3,300 BCE during the Chalocolithic period, Benati and his co-authors concluded. The high rates of violence could have to do with the formation of political units vying for control, which may have escalated local quarrels to larger and more organized conflicts.

Benati says the most surprising finding was the steady drop in violence across the Early and Middle Bronze period, which he suspects has to do with better living standards. “After going through thousands of photos of excavated skeletons, life before modern medicine [did] not look pretty,” he says. “It was short, and they had to live with constant ailments and pains.”

Violence rates appeared to pick up again through the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. People may have become more violent due to a drier climate. The Iron Age ushered in a 300-year drought which contributed to crop shortages and widespread famine. This lack of water would have stressed out communities, leading to competition over resources. This possessiveness for limited resources—whether land or food—are universal motivators for violence that is still seen today, Fibiger points out. Additionally, given the worsening climate situation right now, Benati says how people reacted to extreme climate events in the past could tell us how people will react to instability in the future. Climate change, for example, may once again herald a longer period of violence. 

Given our bloody record for handling conflict, archaeologists remain divided on whether humans will ever live in a violent-free society. Fibiger believes people are not inherently violent, but may be pushed into situations where they are required to defend themselves or their livelihood. By learning from violence in the past, she believes humans can do better. Falk is less optimistic. She says it’s possible we will wipe out our species, seeing that we are just as capable of violence as our ancient ancestors. The only difference now is our access to more lethal weapons and more organized warfare. “For proof of that, just turn on your TV to the evening news.”

The post Why societies experience cycles of violence and peace appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The ocean’s diverse seaweeds are full of nutrients and can be very tasty. While seaweed is common in many Asian dishes, it is not as popular in many traditionally European cuisines. However, this was not always the case. New archaeological evidence also shows that early Europeans ate seaweeds and freshwater plants 8,000 years ago. The findings are described in a study published October 17 in the journal Nature Communications and anchor the plants in the past.

[Related: Why seaweed is a natural fit for replacing certain plastics.]

In the study, researchers examined biomarkers that were taken from the calcified dental plaque of 74 individuals found at 28 archaeological sites from northern Scotland to southern Spain. The plaques revealed “direct evidence for widespread consumption of seaweed and submerged aquatic and freshwater plants.”

The samples where biomolecular evidence survived showed signs that red, green, or brown seaweed and freshwater aquatic plants were eaten. One sample from Scotland’s Orkney archipelago also had evidence of a type of sea kale. The researchers also found that seaweeds and freshwater plants were continually eaten in Europe into the Early Middle Ages. 

“Not only does this new evidence show that seaweed was being consumed in Europe during the Mesolithic Period around 8,000 years ago when marine resources were known to have been exploited, but that it continued into the Neolithic when it is usually assumed that the introduction of farming led to the abandonment of marine dietary resources,” study co-author and University of York bioarchaeologist Stephen Buckley said in a statement.

The nutritional benefits from eating seaweed were likely very well understood by ancient European populations. Some historical accounts report laws related to collection of seaweed in Iceland, France, and Ireland dating back to the 10th Century. Sea kale is also mentioned by Roman naturalist and writer Pliny as an anti-scurvy remedy for sailors on long sea voyages. Through the 18th century, seaweed was considered a famine food and is featured in a popular Irish-language folk song. 

[Related: Why seaweed farming could be the next big thing in sustainability.]

Currently, there are roughly 10,000 different species of seaweeds around the world, but only 145 species are regularly consumed. Depending on the type of seaweed, the plants are a great source of fiber, iron, and potassium among other vitamins and minerals. Cultivating seaweed can also be very environmentally friendly, as the seaweed produces oxygen while absorbing excess nitrogen in the water.

“Our study also highlights the potential for rediscovery of alternative, local, sustainable food resources that may contribute to addressing the negative health and environmental effects of over-dependence on a small number of mass-produced agricultural products that is a dominant feature of much of today’s western diet, and indeed the global long-distance food supply more generally,”  study co-author and University of Glasgow archaeologist Karen Hardy said in a statement. “It is very exciting to be able to show definitively that seaweeds and other local freshwater plants were eaten across a long period in our European past.”

The post Europeans ate a lot more seaweed 8,000 years ago appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE is one of the most dramatic natural disasters in recorded history, yet so many of the actual records from that moment in time are inaccessible. Papyrus scrolls located in nearby Pompeii and Herculaneum, for example, were almost instantly scorched by the volcanic blast, then promptly buried under pumice and ash. In 1752, excavators uncovered around 800 such carbonized scrolls, but researchers have since largely been unable to read any of them due to their fragile conditions.

On October 12, however, organizers behind the Vesuvius Challenge—an ongoing machine learning project to decode the physically inaccessible library—offered a major announcement: an AI program uncovered the first word in one of the relics after analyzing and identifying its incredibly tiny residual ink elements. That word? Πορφύραc, or porphyras… or “purple,” for those who can’t speak Greek.

[Related: A fresco discovered in Pompeii looks like ancient pizza—but it’s likely focaccia.]

Identifying the word for an everyday color may not sound groundbreaking, but the uncovery of “purple” already has experts intrigued. Speaking to The Guardian on Thursday, University of Kentucky computer scientist and Vesuvius Challenge co-founder Brent Seales explained that the particular word isn’t terribly common to find in such documents.

“This word is our first dive into an unopened ancient book, evocative of royalty, wealth, and even mockery,” said Seales. “Pliny the Elder explores ‘purple’ in his ‘natural history’ as a production process for Tyrian purple from shellfish. The Gospel of Mark describes how Jesus was mocked as he was clothed in purple robes before crucifixion. What this particular scroll is discussing is still unknown, but I believe it will soon be revealed. An old, new story that starts for us with ‘purple’ is an incredible place to be.”

The visualization of porphyras is thanks in large part to a 21-year-old computer student named Luke Farritor, who subsequently won $40,000 as part of the Vesuvius Challenge after identifying an additional 10 letters on the same scroll. Meanwhile, Seales believes that the entire scroll should be recoverable, even though scans indicate certain areas may be missing words due to its nearly 2,000 year interment.

As The New York Times notes, the AI-assisted analysis could also soon be applied to the hundreds of remaining carbonized scrolls. Given that these scrolls appear to have been part of a larger library amassed by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher, it stands to reason that a wealth of new information may emerge alongside long-lost titles, such as the poems of Sappho.

“Recovering such a library would transform our knowledge of the ancient world in ways we can hardly imagine,” one papyrus expert told The New York Times. “The impact could be as great as the rediscovery of manuscripts during the Renaissance.”

The post AI revealed the colorful first word of an ancient scroll torched by Mount Vesuvius appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Neanderthals cooked crab and created art, but they also could have haunted cave lions and used their skins. Some 48,000 year-old puncture wounds on a cave lion’s ribcage suggest that the big cat was killed by a Neanderthal’s wooden spear. The findings are described in a study published October 12 in the journal Scientific Reports and may be the earliest known example of lion hunting and butchering by these extinct humans.

[Related: Sensitive to pain? It could be your Neanderthal gene variants.]

For about 20,000 years, cave lions were the most dangerous animals in Eurasia, with a shoulder height of about 4.2 feet high. They lived in multiple environments and hunted large herbivores including mammoth, bison, hose, and cave bear. They get the name cave lions due to the fact that most of their bones have been found in Ice Age caves. The fearsome creatures went extinct at the end of the last Ice Age, but live on through their bones and the 34,000 rock art panels at Grotte Chauvet in France. 

In 1985, an almost complete cave lion skeleton was uncovered in Siegsdorf, Germany. The bones are believed to be from an old, medium-sized cave lion. There are cut marks across bones including two ribs, some vertebrae, and the left femur, which lead scientists to believe that ancient humans butchered the big cat after it died.  

However, the authors in this new study took another look at the remains. They describe a partial puncture wound located on the inside of the lion’s third rib. The wound appears to match the impact mark left by a wooden-tipped spear. The puncture is angled, which suggests that the spear entered the left of the lion’s abdomen and penetrated its vital organs before impacting the third rib on its right side. 

“The rib lesion clearly differs from bite marks of carnivores and shows the typical breakage pattern of a lesion caused by a hunting weapon,” Gabriele Russo, a study co-author and zooarchaeology PhD student at Universität Tübingen in Germany, said in a statement. 

The characteristics of the puncture wound also resemble the wounds found on deer vertebrae which are known to have been made by Neanderthal spears. The new findings could represent the earliest evidence of Neanderthals purposely hunting cave lions.

“The lion was probably killed by a spear that was thrust into the lion’s abdomen when it was already lying on the ground.” study co-author and University of Reading paleolithic archaeologist Annemieke Milks said in a statement. 

[Related: How many ancient humans does it take to fight off a giant hyena?]

The team also analyzed the findings from a 2019 excavation at the Unicorn Cave–or Einhornhöhle–in the Harz Mountains in Germany. The remains of several animals dating back to the last Ice Age or about 55,000 to 45,000 years ago were found, including some cave lion bones. They looked at bones from the toes and lower limbs of three cave lion specimens. These bones also had cut marks that are consistent with the markings generated when an animal is skinned.

The cut marks suggest that great care was taken while skinning the lion to ensure that the claws remained preserved within the fur. This finding could be the earliest evidence of Neanderthals using a lion pelt, potentially for cultural purposes.

“The interest of humans to gain respect and power from a lion trophy is rooted in Neanderthal behavior and until modern times the lion is a powerful symbol of rulers!” Thomas Terberger, a study co-author and archaeologist at the Universität Göttingen in Germany said in a statement. 

Future studies of cave lion bones could reveal more details of more complex Neanderthal behaviors and how the animal may have laid the basis for cultural development by our own species—Homo sapiens. 

The post Neanderthals may have hunted mighty cave lions appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The world of mummified poop, or coprolites, offers a fascinating look into the parasites and snacks that pass through people and animals’s digestive systems. Seeing what foods were around can give archeologists an idea of the landscape hundreds of years ago. A new DNA analysis of mummified poop from two pre-Columbian Caribbean cultures reveals that they ate a wide variety of plants, tobacco, and even cotton. The findings are described in a study published October 11 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

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

The study looked at the coprolites from two pre-Columbian cultures called the Huecoid and Saladoid. An earlier study of centuries old fecal matter supports a hypothesis that the Huecoid likely originated in the Andes Mountains in present-day Bolivia and Peru before migrating among different islands in the Caribbean around the third century CE. The Saladoid people likely originated in modern day Venezuela and traveled to the Puerto Rican island of Vieques by the sixth century CE.

“Archeologists at the University of Puerto Rico dedicated over 30 years to digs on the Island of Vieques, finding the coprolites along with many other priceless artifacts,” Gary A. Toranzos, study co-author and environmental microbiologist/paleo microbiologist at the University of Puerto Rico, tells PopSci. “One would consider finding coprolites easy [since] they are deposited every day. However, most people will not recognize them and the conditions for coprolite formation need to be very specific.”

Coprolites need dryness to preserve the DNA and it was believed that this preservation was impossible due to the Carribbean’s humid climate.  

“Narganes and Chanlate proved them wrong,” Toranzos says. 

In the study, Toranzos and microbiologist Jelissa Reynoso-García carefully extracted and analyzed plant DNA from ten coprolite samples from the La Hueca archaeological site in Puerto Rico. They then compared the extracted plant DNA against a database of diverse coprolite samples and contemporary plant DNA sequences.

They found that the Huecoid and Saladoid peoples enjoyed a diverse and sophisticated food system, including sweet potato, wild and domesticated peanut, chili peppers, a domesticated strain of tomatoes, papaya, and maize. Their analysis also detected tobacco, potentially due to chewing tobacco, pulverized tobacco inhalation, or tobacco as a food additive for medicinal and/or hallucinogenic purposes. 

[Related: What prehistoric poop reveals about extinct giant animals.]

Surprisingly, cotton was also detected in the samples. This could have been from ground cotton seeds used in oil or because women wet the cotton strands with their saliva leaving strands in the mouth while weaving. 

Additionally, they did not not find evidence of cassava consumption. Cassava is a root vegetable also called yucca and manioc. The authors were surprised that there weren’t any traces of it in these samples, as this plant was often reported as a staple food in the pre-Columbian Caribbean in sources from the time. 

“Cassava DNA was not found, likely because of the extensive preparation of the cassava powder to get rid of toxins in the plant,” says Toranzos.

Different food preparation techniques means that each coprolite sample is only a snapshot of what one specific person had been recently eating. The authors were only able to identify plants that are in current DNA sequence databases and plants that are now-extinct, rare, and in non-commercial crops were not detected. While it’s likely that the Huecoid and Saladoid people ate other plants or fungi than the study notes. The authors hope this analysis gives further insight into the lives of pre-Columbian people of the Americas.

“Even poop is a great resource for agriculture, and many other things,” Toranzos says. “Now we see they are a great way of obtaining information from those who lived thousands of years before us.”

The post Mummified poop reveals a diverse ancient Caribbean diet appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

In the years since the Neanderthal genome was first sequenced, geneticists have been peering into the past to look for traces of this extinct group of humans within our genes. The presence of these ancient genes could make carriers more at risk for severe COVID-19, influence nose shape, and even make some people more sensitive to pain. 

[Related: Neanderthal genomes reveal family bonds from 54,000 years ago.]

A new study published October 10 in the journal Communications Biology found that those carrying three Neanderthal gene variants are actually more sensitive to pain from skin pricking after prior exposure to mustard oil. In this case, mustard oil acts as an agonist, or a substance that initiates a physiological response. Adding it to the skin causes a quick response by neurons called nociceptors that create a sense of pain. 

SCN9A is a key gene in the perception of pain that is located on chromosome 2. It is highly expressed nociceptors that are activated when a sharp point or something hot is applied to the body. The neurons encode proteins within the body’s sodium channel and alert the brain which leads to the perception of pain. Earlier research found three variations in the SCN9A gene–M932L, V991L, and D1908G–in sequenced Neanderthal genomes and reports of greater sensitivity to pain among the living humans who have all three of these variants. 

“It has been shown in previous studies that some rare mutations in this gene that stop the channel from working can cause insensitivity to pain,” study co-author and University of Oxford neuroscientist David Bennett tells PopSci. “We were, however, interested in these other mutations, which were shown to have an opposite effect of enhancing the activity of this channel, thus leading their carriers to be somewhat more sensitive than non-carriers.”

According to Andrés Ruiz-Linares, study co-author and University College London human geneticist, earlier studies show that the mutations are quite rare in the British populations, but they are very frequent in Latin American populations. 

“We thus realized that we had, in our hands, the perfect dataset to not only replicate their study but also go further and identify the pain modality that was at work here,” Ruiz-Linares tells PopSci. 

In the study, the team measured the pain thresholds of 1,963 individuals from Colombia in response to a range of stimuli. The D1908G variant was present in roughly 20 percent of chromosomes within this population. About 30 percent of chromosomes carrying this variant also carried the M932L and V991L variants. All three variants were associated with a lower pain threshold in response to skin pricking after the skin was exposed to mustard oil, but not in response to pressure or heat. Additionally, carrying all three of these variants was associated with greater pain sensitivity than carrying only one of them. 

[Related: Neanderthals were likely creating art 57,000 years ago.]

The team then analyzed the genomic region that houses SCN9A using genetic data from 5,971 individuals from Peru, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. They found that the three Neanderthal variants were more common in regions where the population had a higher proportion of Native American ancestry, such as the Peruvian population.

“They [the mutations] have a rather wide range in these countries, from 2 to 42 percent,” study co-author and University College London statistical geneticist Kaustubh Adhikari tells PopSci. “Up to 18 percent of their populations could carry two copies of the mutation. These are, however, gross estimations. We also know, from the previous study, that these mutations are pretty rare in European populations.”

The team believes that the Neanderthal variants may sensitize the sensory neurons by changing the threshold at which a nerve impulse is generated. The variants could also be more common in populations with higher proportions of Native American ancestry due to random chance as well as population bottlenecks that occurred during when the Americas were first colonized by Europeans. 

“Although Neanderthal intermixing with Europeans is now well-known in popular culture, their genetic contribution to other human groups, such as Native Americans in this case, is less talked about,” study co-author and population geneticist at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment in France Pierre Faux tells PopSci. “In this study, we saw how important and relevant it is to study genetic backgrounds that are under-represented in medical cohorts.”

Since acute pain can play a role in moderating behavior and preventing further injury, the team is planning additional research to determine if carrying these variants and having greater sensitivity to pain was advantageous during human evolution. Understanding how these variants work could also help physicians understand and treat chronic pain.

“Genes are just one of many factors, including environment, past experience, and psychological factors, which influence pain,” says Bennet. 

The post Sensitive to pain? It could be your Neanderthal gene variants. appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

In 2006, a cluster of mysterious dark spots on a lakebed of White Sands National Park in New Mexico caught the attention of archaeologists. The shapes stroked their curiosity until they eventually excavated the site three years later. Waiting for them was one of the rarest and soon-to-be controversial discoveries in history—a set of fossilized human footprints. 

The preserved markings were found on the shore of a lake that existed during the most recent ice age, and could be one of the earliest signs of biped migration to North America. Some experts claim they are the steps of the Clovis people, the continent’s first human inhabitants and the ancestors for most Native Americans. The Clovis are thought to have made the journey to North America 13,000 to 13,500 years ago using a land bridge that connected Asia to Alaska. From there, they continued to move as far down south as Central and South America. 

“This was groundbreaking to the archaeologic community, and it was also a tough pill to swallow,” says Kathleen Springer, a research geologist for the United States Geological Survey (USGS) who helped analyze the fossilized steps. “Having 23- to 21,000-year-old footprints is much earlier than the prevailing paradigm of Clovis or pre-Clovis that are known in this part of North America.”

The finding initially received some pushback. When the results were first revealed in 2021, concerned archaeologists wrote comments and papers challenging the results, citing the need for better evidence. More specifically, they criticized the study method and the decision to use radiocarbon dating on the seeds of an aquatic plant that was excavated from the same site. 

Part of the debate came down to an isotope that’s often used in archaeological work. Carbon-14 forms in the air and is introduced to photosynthetic plants and the animals that eat them. When flora and fauna are alive, they have the same amount of carbon-14 as the Earth’s atmosphere; when they die, it decays in their remains. Scientists can then measure how much of the isotope is left and use that metric to calculate an organism’s approximate age. But as some experts have pointed out, aquatic plants like the ones sampled at White Sands can get carbon from the water they live in, which can skew the measurements and make a specimen seem older than it really is.

“It’s called the hard water effect, and it’s a really well-known problem with radiocarbon dating,” explains Jeffrey Pigati, a USGS research geologist who co-authored both studies with Springer. He says the general argument with the first paper is that there were large hard-water effects that made them overestimate the age of the footsteps when they should have been around 15,000 or 17,000 years old.

The COVID pandemic delayed many of the follow-up experiments Pigati and Springer wanted to complete when investigating the site in 2020. Three years later, they finally did with two new methods that corroborate their original estimate of the footprints’ age: radiocarbon dating of pollen and luminescence dating.

To avoid heavy-water effects, the team extracted pollen grains from the same sediment as the White Sands footprints. According to Pigati, this is a time-consuming and laborious process because it involves breaking down rock into one cubic centimeter of material and separating pollen from other organic material before measuring carbon-14 levels. Additionally, pollen is extremely light—experts need to sample thousands of grains to meet the minimum mass requirement for a single radiocarbon measurement. In total, they successfully isolated 75,000 pollen grains. When the they compared the measurements to ones from the seeds of the aquatic plant, the ages matched.

The second technique was optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating. Unlike radiocarbon dating, OSL dating is based on the buildup of luminescence properties in quartz crystals over time; in some rare cases, it can date sediments as far back as 400,000 years ago. The USGS team dated three different mineral samples from the same area where the footprint was discovered and calculated ages that were similar to the ones measured in the seeds.

Still, this does not mean we have a complete picture of our species’ migration to North America. Paulette Steeves, an archaeologist and author of The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, who was not involved in the White Sands research, says there are archaeological sites in both North and South America that date to as early as 11,000 to 200,000 years ago. While she argues it’s not the oldest sign of human habitation in the Americas and may not be proof of the first Indigenous group, “the White Sands footprints site is a great addition to the record of early people in the Western Hemisphere.”

The footprints are just one piece of the puzzle. Archaeologists still don’t know exactly how people lived in the middle of an ice age and weathered harsh climate. Future projects at White Sands could include tracking the footprints to a campsite or further scouring the area for stone tools that could give some insight into their survival. “Every day we’re working out there is amazing because you never know what is going to be discovered,” Pigati says. “This is all a part of science in action.”

The post Do the ancient human footprints at White Sands date back to the last ice age? appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Fictional murderous barbers and real life serial killers are woven into London’s spooky history with legendary tales of their dastardly deeds. However, Sweeney Todd or Jack the Ripper may have paled in comparison to students from Oxford in the 14th century. A project mapping medieval England’s known murder cases found that Oxford’s student population was the most lethal of all social or professional groups, committing about 75 percent of all homicides.

[Related: How DNA evidence could help put the Long Island serial killer behind bars.]

First launched in 2018, Cambridge’s Medieval Murder Maps plots crime scenes based on translated investigations from 700-year-old coroners’ reports. These documents were recorded in Latinand are catalogs of sudden or suspicious deaths that were deduced by a jury of local residents. They also included names, events, locations, and even the value of murder weapons. The project recently added the cities of York and Oxford to its street plan of slayings during the 14th century. 

The team used these rolls and maps to construct the street atlas of 354 homicides across the three cities. It has also been updated to include accidents, sudden deaths, deaths in prison, and sanctuary church cases. 

They estimate that  the per capita homicide rate in Oxford was potentially 4 to 5 times higher than late medieval London or York. It also put the homicide rate at about 60 to 75 per 100,000—about 50 times higher than the murder rates in today’s English cities. The maps, however, don’t factor in the major advances in medicine, policing, and emergency response in the centuries since.

York’s murderous mayhem was likely driven by inter- knife fights among tannery workers (Tanners) to fatal violence between glove makers (Glovers) during the rare 14th century period of prosperity driven by trade and textile manufacturing as the Black Death subsided. But Oxford’s rambunctious youth made for a dangerous scene.

By the early 14th century, Oxford had a population of roughly 7,000 inhabitants, with about 1,500 students. Among perpetrators from Oxford, coroners referred to 75 percent of them as “clericus.” The term most likely refers to a student or a member of the early university. Additionally, 72 percent of all Oxford’s homicide victims also have the designation clericus in the coroner inquests.

“A medieval university city such as Oxford had a deadly mix of conditions,” lead murder map investigator and University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner said in a statement. “Oxford students were all male and typically aged between fourteen and twenty-one, the peak for violence and risk-taking. These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild, and thrust into an environment full of weapons, with ample access to alehouses and sex workers.”

Many of the students also belonged to regional fraternities known as “nations,” which could have added more tension within the student body.

One Thursday night in 1298, an argument among students in an Oxford High Street tavern resulted in a mass street fight complete with battle-axes and swords. According to the coroner’s report, a student named John Burel had, “a mortal wound on the crown of his head, six inches long and in depth reaching to the brain.”

Interactions with sex workers also could end tragically. One unknown scholar got away with murdering Margery de Hereford in the parish of St. Aldate in 1299. He fled the scene after stabbing her to death instead of paying what he owed. 

[Related: A lost ‘bawdy bard’ act reveals roots of naughty British comedy.]

Many of the cases in all three cities also involved intervention of bystanders, who were obligated to announce if a crime was being committed, or raise a “hue and cry.” Some of the bystanders summoned by hue ended up as victims or perpetrators.

“Before modern policing, victims or witnesses had a legal responsibility to alert the community to a crime by shouting and making noise. This was known as raising a hue and cry,” co-researchers and Cambridge crime historian Stephanie Brown said in a statement. “It was mostly women who raised hue and cry, usually reporting conflicts between men in order to keep the peace.”

Medieval street justice was also coupled with plentiful weapons in everyday life, which could  make even minor infractions lethal. London’s cases include altercations that started over littering and urination that led to homicide. 

“Knives were omnipresent in medieval society,” said Brown. “A thwytel was a small knife, often valued at one penny, and used as cutlery or for everyday tasks. Axes were commonplace in homes for cutting wood, and many men carried a staff.”

The team told The Guardian that they hope this project encourages people to reflect on the possible notices behind historic homicide and explore the parallels between these incidents and the altercations in the present. 

The post Grisly medieval murders detailed in new interactive maps appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Glaciers are melting faster than ever, and while that might spell disaster for the planet, it has opened up a new field of research called glacial archaeology. Artifacts, bodies, and viruses frozen deep in ice for millions of years are now thawing out and washing to the surface; the warmer climate is also allowing archaeologists to navigate areas that were once too dangerous to excavate.

The 1991 discovery of Ötzi—a prehistoric human who is estimated to have lived in the 4th millennium BCE—in a melting glacier in the Italian Alps currently remains the greatest discovery for glacial archaeology. But it’s not the only noteworthy find we’ve seen in the last two decades.

Treasure trove of arrows

Earlier in September, Pilø and his team were searching through the Jotunheimen mountains in eastern Norway and uncovered a wooden arrow with a quartzite arrowhead and three feathers. Ancient people used feathers to stabilize the arrow and guide it to its target. These accents usually decay over time, but the ice kept them intact. The arrow is estimated to be 3,000 years old and may have belonged to a reindeer hunter from the early Bronze Age. It’s one of several arrows that have been surfaced from Norway’s melting ice in recent years.

In 2014, Pilø and his colleagues uncovered a prehistoric ski in a melting ice patch in Norway. The ski is thought to be 1,300 years old, and had the bindings still intact. In 2021, they came across the second ski, making it one of the most well-preserved prehistoric skis to date. Because the skis were very well-preserved, Pilø says they were able to make replicas and race down slopes with iron-age skis. “That was a lot of fun.”

Prehistoric animals

In August 2010, a partially preserved carcass of a baby wooly mammoth was found in Siberia’s permafrost. Nicknamed Yuka, the frozen animal is estimated to be around 30,000 years old, which puts it back in the last ice age. Based on where the specimen was discovered, it’s likely that the mammoth wandered away from its herd in the grasslands and got stuck in mud. Given that the lower body was well-preserved in ice, it gave researchers an opportunity to analyze the extinct species in-depth and extract its frozen blood.

The melting snow in Antarctica has also led to some interesting evolutionary findings. During a 2016 research expedition, Steven Emslie uncovered the preserved remains of 800-year-old Adelie penguins, along with some less well-preserved remains of the aquatic birds estimated to be around 5,000 years old. According to a study he published in 2020, the penguins were likely moving because of changing sea-ice conditions and were covered up by increasing snowfall, which prevented their remains from decaying.

Organic artifacts

A muddy future

While the warming climate is paving the way to more discoveries of the ancient past, there are some hiccups. Ross MacPhee, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, says that though it’s easier to access places that were once inhospitable, melting snow can be a poor substrate for research. “Everything is a mudhole,” which makes it much more complicated to look for fossils, he explains.  

There is also the issue of ancient artifacts washing away: Pilø estimates 60 to 80 percent of mountain ice in Norway is in danger of melting by the end of this century. He describes it as a race against time. “If we are not ready to search for these finds, they will get lost, and so will the stories they could have told us.” 

A combination of resources from aerial photography of mountains, digital models of terrain, and satellite imagery has helped glacial archaeologists melting glaciers and any areas where  artifacts may have thawed out. However, their efforts can only go so far as ice around the poles continues to melt at unprecedented speeds. If temperatures continue to rise—July 2023, for example, was the hottest month ever recorded in human history—Pilø warns that 90 percent of mountain ice in Norway might disappear by 2100.

Still, archaeologists like Pilø are taking advantage of this fleeting opportunity to dig through the soft ice while they can. While the chances are tiny, he still holds out hope that the melting glaciers will help him find the next ice mummy.

The post ‘Dark’ archaeologists scour melting ice for ancient artifacts appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

One of the most enduring mysteries about our earliest ancestors and extinct human relatives is how they ate and procured enough food to sustain themselves millions of years ago. We believe that archery first arrived in Europe about 54,000 years ago and Neanderthals were cooking and eating crab about 90,000 years ago, but scavenging was likely necessary to get a truly hearty meal. A modeling study published September 28 in the journal Scientific Reports found that groups of hominins roughly 1.2 to 0.8 million years ago in southern Europe may have been able to compete with giant hyenas for carcasses of animals abandoned by larger predators like saber-toothed cats.

[Related: An ‘ancestral bottleneck’ took out nearly 99 percent of the human population 800,000 years ago.]

Earlier research has theorized that the number of carcasses abandoned by saber-toothed cats may have been enough to sustain some of southern Europe’s early hominin populations. However, it’s been unclear if competition from giant hyenas (Pachycrocuta brevirostris) would have limited hominin access to this food source. These extinct mongoose relatives were about 240 pounds–roughly the size of a lioness–and went extinct about 500,000 years ago. 

“There is a hot scientific debate about the role of scavenging as a relevant food procurement strategy for early humans,” paleontologist and study co-author Jesús Rodríguez from the National Research Center On Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Burgos, Spain tells PopSci. “Most of the debate is based on the interpretation of the scarce and fragmentary evidence provided by the archaeological record. Without denying that the archaeological evidence should be considered the strongest argument to solve the question, our intention was to provide elements to the debate from a different perspective.”

For this study, Rodríguez and co-author Ana Mateos looked at the Iberian Peninsula in the late-early Pleistocene era. They ran computer simulations to model competition for carrion–the flesh of dead animals–between hominins and giant hyenas in what is now Spain and Portugal. They simulated whether saber-toothed cats and the European jaguar could have left enough carrion behind to support both hyena and hominin populations—and how this may have been affected by the size of scavenging groups of hominins. 

They found that when hominins scavenged in groups of five or more, these groups could have been large enough to chase away giant hyenas. The hominin populations also exceeded giant hyena populations by the end of these simulations. However, when the hominins scavenged in very small groups, they could only survive to the end of the simulation when the predator density was high, which resulted in more carcasses to scavenge.  

[Related: Mysterious skull points to a possible new branch on human family tree.]

According to their simulations, the potential optimum group size for scavenging hominins was just over 10 individuals. This size was large enough to chase away saber-toothed cats and jaguars. However, groups of more than 13 individuals would have likely required more carcasses to sustain their energy expenditure. The authors caution that their simulations couldn’t specify this exact “just right” group size, since the numbers of hominins needed to chase away hyenas, saber-toothed cats, and jaguars were pre-determined and arbitrarily assigned.

“The simulations may not determine the exact value of the optimum, but show that it exists and depends on the number of hominins necessary to chase away the hyenas and of the size of the carcasses,” says Rodríguez.

Scavenged remains may have been an important source of meat and fat for hominins, especially in winter when plant resources were scarce. This team is working on simulating the opportunities hominins had for scavenging in different ecological scenarios in an effort to change a view that scavenging is marginal and that hunting is a more “advanced” and more “human” behavior than scavenging. 

“The word for scavenger in Spanish is ‘carroñero.’ It has a negative connotation, and is frequently used as an insult. We do not share that view,” says Rodríguez. “Scavengers play a very important role in ecosystems, as evidenced by the ecological literature in the last decades. We view scavenging as a product of the behavioral flexibility and cooperative abilities of the early hominins.”

The post How many ancient humans does it take to fight off a giant hyena? appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

There’s a recurring mystery surrounding early human migration: Exactly when did Homo sapiens make their way from Africa into Europe and Asia? It’s possible that a period of warmer temperatures could have contributed to this flow of people into Eurasia, according to a study published September 22 in the journal Science Advances. Warmer temperatures and more humidity may have helped the forests in the region grow and expand north into present-day Siberia. The theory hinges on the presence of pollen in the region’s sediment record. The scourge of modern day spring allergy sufferers could have laid the groundwork for our very distant ancestors’ migration into Eurasia.  

[Related: Humans and Neanderthals could have lived together even earlier than we thought.]

This movement could have begun in three waves into Eurasia about 54,000 years ago. It is also likely that both warm and cold climates would have played a role in this travel. The Pleistocene Epoch is known for huge climatic shifts, including the formation of the massive ice sheets and glaciers that would eventually forge and shape many of the landforms we see on Earth today. 

To piece together what the climate could have looked like during a possible warm period about 45,000 to 50,000 years ago, researchers working on the study created a record of the vegetation and pollen from the Pleistocene found around Lake Baikal in present-day Siberian region of Russia with the oldest archeological traces of Homo sapiens in the area. 

Sediment cores were used to extract data for a pollen timeline, and the study suggests that the dispersal of humans occurred during some of the highest temperatures and highest humidity of the late Pleistocene. The presence of more ancient pollen, and thus plant life, in the record shows evidence that coniferous forests and grasslands may have spread further throughout the region and could support foraging for food and hunting by humans. According to study author and University of Kansas anthropologist Ted Goebel, the environmental data combined with archeological evidence tell a new story of the area. 

“This contradicts some recent archaeological perspectives in Europe. The key factor here is accurate dating, not just of human fossils and animal bones associated with the archaeology of these people, but also of environmental records, including from pollen,” Goebel said in a statement. “What we have presented is a robust chronology of environmental changes in Lake Baikal during this time period, complemented by a well-dated archaeological record of Homo sapiens’ presence in the region.”

Goebel worked with teams from three institutions in Japan, including Masami Izuho of Tokyo Metropolitan University. During the pollen analysis, the team found some potential connections between the pollen data and the archeological record of early human migration into the region. The early modern humans of this period were making stone tools on slender blands and using bones, antlers, and even ivory to craft the tools. 

“There is one human fossil from Siberia, although not from Lake Baikal but farther west, at a place called Ust’-Ishim,” Goebel said. “Morphologically, it is human, but more importantly, it’s exceptionally well-preserved. It has been directly radiocarbon-dated and has yielded ancient DNA, confirming it as a representative of modern Homo sapiens, distinct from Neanderthals or Denisovans, or other pre-modern archaic humans.”

[Related: World’s oldest known wooden structure pre-dates our species.]

It’s possible that the earliest humans in the area likely would have lived in extended nuclear families, but it is difficult to say with certainty since so much archeological evidence has degraded over time. Ust’-Ishim in Siberia provides the earliest known evidence of fully modern humans coexisting with other extinct human species in the area, but the find was an “isolated discovery,” according to the team.

“We lack information about its archaeological context, whether it was part of a settlement or simply a solitary bone washed downstream,” said Goebel. “Consequently, linking that single individual to the archaeological sites in the Baikal region is tenuous—do they represent the same population? We think so, but definitely need more evidence.”

The post Pollen could hold clues to mysteries of early human migration appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The values and lifestyles of past societies are often revealed to anthropologists and archaeologists through their relationship with death and the burial of their dead. It’s an essential hallmark of human cultural systems and part of this relationship involves manipulations, retrieval, and reburial of human remains after an individual had died. Now, some new evidence from a cave in Spain shows that early humans may have returned to the burial site to craft tools from the bones and possibly extract marrow, potentially as food. The findings are detailed in a study published September 20 in the open-access journal PLOS One.

[Related: Cremated remains still hold clues to life and death in the Bronze Age.]

Caves along the Iberian Peninsula were not only Neanderthal crab cooking hotspots, but also as places to bury the dead and modify human remains for thousands of years. Using caves for burials was a common practice in multiple present-day countries, and it began to become more common in Portugal and Spain around the 4,000 BCE. The archaeological sites in this region show evidence that human remains were later manipulated for other uses, but the cultural meaning behind these changes is still largely unclear. 

University of Bern bioarchaeologist Zita Laffranchi, anthropologist Marco Milella, and  Universidad de Córdoba archaeologist Rafael M. Martínez Sánchez co-wrote the study, and  believe that the underground and dark features of the caves likely provided ancient humans with a well-suited place to house remains. 

“Such traits are shared by ancient Neolithic farming societies in Iberia, Europe, and other parts of the world, as part of a system of transcultural responses towards death. As if it were a ‘device of making ancestors,’ the community remains grouped together after death, in a subterranean space interpreted as a perpetual projection of an eternal nocturnal environment,” the study authors wrote in an interview accompanying the paper.

In the new study, the team examined human remains from the Cueva de los Marmoles cave in southern Spain. They looked at the bones of at least 12 people. Radiocarbon dating pegged the burials between the fifth and second millennium BCE, roughly from this area’s Neolithic period to its Bronze Age. Most of the items from this study were excavated between 1998 and 2018. These include a diligently carved human skull cup, a tibia that appears to have been modified for use as a tool, and dozens of other bone fragments found in the almost 27,000 square-foot cave. 

New evidence suggests that some remains may have been intentionally broken and scraped for marrow for up to a year after the Marmoles individuals had died. The team noted the intentional post-mortem modifications made to the remains, which include some fractures and scrapes to the bones. These cuts could have resulted from efforts to get marrow and other tissues from the bones for dietary or practical uses. 

They were initially surprised by the extended time frame that the cave was used for funerary practices.

“This suggests that Marmoles was a symbolic landmark for human communities living in the area, and was likely to be the presence of specific funerary traditions,” wrote the authors. “Secondly, the most interesting aspect of our findings was the complex treatment of the remains, often difficult to interpret, but which unequivocally points to rather homogenous actions, and well-defined traditions and beliefs systems.”

[Related: Extinct human cousins may have beaten us to inventing burial rituals.]

These results match other cave sites in the region, and show that burying human remains in caves and later modifying and using them as food and tools was daily widespread. While there could also be further symbolic purposes for these body modifications, those are still unclear and need further study. 

The authors say that the next steps will include continued archaeological study of the save and apply more radiocarbon, anthropological, and zooarchaeological analyses to the skeletal remains that may emerge in future digs at Marmoles and other burial caves in the area. 

The post Early humans carved old skeletal remains from burial caves into tools appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Archaeologists in Zambia have uncovered a wooden structure dating back about 476,000 years to the Early Stone Age or Pleistocene Epoch. It represents the earliest known use of wood in construction by human ancestors. The discovery at Kalambo Falls expands scientists’ understanding of the technical abilities early hominins must have had in order to shape tree trunks into large combined structures. The findings are detailed in a study published September 20 in the journal Nature. The structure itself predates the evolution of our own species (Homo sapiens) by potentially over 120,000 years. 

[Related: Mysterious skull points to a possible new branch on human family tree.]

Kalambo Falls is a 772-foot-tall waterfall that sits on the border of Zambia and Tanzania and is the second highest uninterrupted waterfall on the African continent. The wooden structure found there in 2019 includes two preserved interlocking logs joined side-to-side by an intentionally cut notch. The upper log appears to have been purposefully shaped and tool marks were found on both logs and a collection of wooden tools was also found.

The find is the earliest known evidence of humans deliberately shaping two logs to fit together. The authors believe that the logs may have been used to build a raised platform, walkway, or the foundation for dwellings constructed in the region’s periodically wet floodplain. Previous research has shown evidence that wood use at this time was limited to its use for digging, as spears, and in making fire. The other earliest example of a clearly modified wood object was collected in South Africa in 1952 and dates back to the Middle Stone Age. 

“This find has changed how I think about our early ancestors. Forget the label ‘Stone Age,’ look at what these people were doing: they made something new, and large, from wood,” study co-author and University of Liverpool archaeologist Larry Barham said in a statement. “They used their intelligence, imagination, and skills to create something they’d never seen before, something that had never previously existed.”

Additionally, the authors say that this discovery challenges the view that Stone Age humans were nomadic. Kalambo Falls would have provided them with a constant source of water, and the forest around them would have supplied enough wood to help them make more permanent or semi-permanent structures. 

“They transformed their surroundings to make life easier, even if it was only by making a platform to sit on by the river to do their daily chores. These folks were more like us than we thought,” said Barham.

The team used new luminescence dating techniques to reveal an object’s age. It can estimate the last time that minerals in the sand surrounding the wood were exposed to sunlight. The analysis estimates that the artifact is close to half a million years old. 

“At this great age, putting a date on finds is very challenging and we used luminescence dating to do this,” study co-author and Aberystwyth University geographer and luminescence dating scientist Geoff Duller said in a statement. “These new dating methods have far reaching implications – allowing us to date much further back in time, to piece together sites that give us a glimpse into human evolution.”

[Related: Humans and Neanderthals could have lived together even earlier than we thought.]

The archaeological site Kalambo Falls was first excavated in the 1950s and 1960s, long before dating techniques could allow archaeologists to understand the significance of the findings. The area is currently on a tentative list to become a UNESCO World Heritage site due to its archaeological significance.   

This research is part of the Deep Roots of Humanity project, an interdisciplinary international team of researchers investigating how human technology developed in the Stone Age. 

“Kalambo Falls is an extraordinary site and a major heritage asset for Zambia. The Deep Roots team is looking forward to more exciting discoveries emerging from its waterlogged sands,” said Barham.

The post World’s oldest known wooden structure pre-dates our species appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Cave paintings and rock art date back at least more than 57,000 years. They detail everything from an early form of writing to more recent dark stories of conflict. They also appear to have been an important animal tracking tool. In present-day Namibia, prehistoric peoples from the Late Stone Age put so much detail into their engravings of human and animal prints, that modern day Indigenous trackers were able to identify exactly which animal prints they were depicting, but also the animals general age and sex. The findings are detailed in a study published September 13 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

[Related: Cave drawings from 20,000 years ago may feature an early form of writing.]

While engravings of human footprints and animal tracks appear in various traditions of prehistoric rock art around the world, Namibia is especially rich in well-executed rock art made by hunter-gatherers in the Late Stone Age. 

In the new study, a team of researchers from Germany and Namibia worked with Indigenous tracking experts from the Kalahari desert to analyze animal and human footprints found in rock art in the Doro! Nawas Mountains in central Western Namibia. The tracking experts were able to define the species, sex, age group, and even the exact leg of the animal or human print in more than 90 percent of the 513 engravings they examined. The rock art had significantly more diversity in the animals represented by the tracks than the ones of animals themselves. The prehistoric engravers also showed a clear preference for certain species of animals, were more likely to depict adult animals than juveniles, and male footprints outnumbered female footprints.

According to the team, the new findings reveal some patterns that likely arise from culturally determined preferences, but the meaning of these cultural preference patterns is still unknown. The team believes that consulting with present-day Indigenous experts may help determine more of the meaning behind the drawings. However, they point out that while Indigenous knowledge is critical for advancing archaeological research, the precise meaning and context of this rock art will likely remain elusive.

[Related: A discovery found in Germany’s ‘Unicorn Cave’ hints at Neanderthal art.]

“Namibia’s rock faces contain numerous Stone Age depictions of animals and humans, as well as human footprints and animal tracks. Until now, the latter have received little attention because researchers lacked the knowledge to interpret them,” the authors added.

The post Stone Age animal engravings in Namibian caves guided Indigenous trackers over time appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

A team of archaeologists have unearthed a roughly 1,000 year-old mummy with well-preserved brown hair in Peru’s capital city of Lima. The mummified remains were found alongside preserved textiles, ceramic vessels, and other objects at the Huaca Pucllana monument, a 82-foot tall clay pyramid with  an archaeological site hidden inside of a ceremonial grave. 

[Related: Machu Picchu was home to ancient people from all over South America.]

“This is an adult individual in a sitting position with bent legs,” head archaeologist Mirella Ganoza told Reuters. Ganoza noted that the mummy’s long hair and jaw were both nearly completely intact, but the sex of the individual is still unknown. 

Archaeologists have found other mummies and ancient offerings at the Huaca Pucllana site before. But there is still more to be uncovered, according to the team. Lima itself is home to about 400 sacred sites, with numerous archaeological ruins and mummies. Years of finds have been used to analyze the cultural, health, and social conditions of Indigenous Peruvians. In April, another 1,000 year old mummy was found about 15 miles from Lima at the Cajamarquilla archaeological site. Those remains were believed to be from an adolescent and some of the corpse’s skin was still distinguishable. It was found burried with at least 20 other individuals who are thought to be victims of human sacrifice.

Long before the Incas built their mountaintop royal retreat Machu Picchu or Spanish colonizers first arrived around 1527, Peru was home to multiple thriving pre-Hispanic cultures, including the Ychsma people. Huaca Pucllana was built by the Ychsma around 500 CE and is the heart of present-day Lima’s Miraflores district. It’s believed that the Ychsma used it as a cemetery. The Ychsma people are credited with building at least 16 pyramids, some of which are older than Egypt’s pyramids by about 4,000 years. The irrigation experts dominated the central coast of Peru until it was absorbed by the Inca empire around roughly 1468. The mummified remains themselves can be traced back about 1000 CE. 

[Related: Scientists use AI to help uncover elusive Nazca lines.]

“I find it quite interesting that right in the heart of Miraflores, in the middle of the city, surrounded by modern buildings and constructions, an important site is still preserved, the Huaca Pucllana ceremonial center,” Ganoza told Reuters.

Earlier this year, researchers discovered a similar mummy believed to be close to 3,000 years old in Lima. This mummy’s skull also had intact hair that was found inside of a cotton bundle before the rest of the remains were uncovered.  That mummy is believed to be from the Manchay culture, which developed between 1500 and 1000 BC in Lima’s valleys. The Manchay are associated with the construction of temples built in a U-shape that pointed toward the sunrise, according to Reuters. 

The post 1,000-year-old mummy with full head of hair and intact jaw found in Peru appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

A team of scientists from the United States, Italy, and China may have finally explained a large gap in the African and Eurasian fossil record. According to a model in a study published August 31 in the journal Science, the population of human ancestors crashed between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago. They estimate that there were only 1,280 breeding individuals alive during this transition between the early and middle Pleistocene. About 98.7 percent of the ancestral population was lost at the beginning of this ancestral bottleneck that lasted for roughly 117,000 years, according to the study.

[Related: Want more eye-opening science stories? Sign up for a PopSci newsletter.]

During the Late Pleistocene, modern humans spread outside of the African continents and other human species like Neanderthals began to go extinct. The Australian continent and the Americas also saw humans for the first time and the climate was generally cold. This era is best known for its massive ice sheets and glaciers that shifted around the planet and shaped many of the landforms we see on Earth today.. 

In this study, the team used a new method called fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal), as a way to determine ancient demographic inferences with modern-day human genomic sequences from 3,154 people. 

“The fact that FitCoal can detect the ancient severe bottleneck with even a few sequences represents a breakthrough,” study co-author and University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston theoretical population geneticist Yun-Xin FU said in a statement.   

FitCoal helped the team calculate what this ancient loss of life and genetic diversity looked like utilizing present-day genome sequences from 10 African and 40 non-African populations.

“The gap in the African and Eurasian fossil records can be explained by this bottleneck in the Early Stone Age chronologically,” study co-author and Sapienza University anthropologist Giorgio Manzi said in a statement.  “It coincides with this proposed time period of significant loss of fossil evidence.”

Some of the potential reasons behind this population drop are mostly related to extremes in climate. Temperatures changed, severe droughts persisted, and food sources may have dwindled as animals like mammoths, mastodons, and giant sloths went extinct. According to the study, an estimated 65.85 percent of current genetic diversity may have been lost due to this bottleneck. The loss in genetic diversity prolonged a period of minimal numbers of humans who could successfully breed and was a major threat to the species. 

However, this bottleneck also may have contributed to a speciation event, which happens when two or more species are created from a single lineage. During this speciation event, two ancestral chromosomes may have converged to form what is now chromosome 2 in modern humans. Chromosome 2 is the second largest human chromosome, and spans about 243 million building blocks of DNA base pairs. Understanding this split helped the team pinpoint what could be the last common ancestor for the Denisovans, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens (modern humans). 

[Related: Why you should sleep naked tonight, according to science]

“The novel finding opens a new field in human evolution because it evokes many questions, such as the places where these individuals lived, how they overcame the catastrophic climate changes, and whether natural selection during the bottleneck has accelerated the evolution of human brain,” co-author and East China Normal University evolutionary and functional genomics expert Yi-Hsuan PAN said in a statement.

In future studies, researchers could continue to find answers to how such a small population persisted in the face of climate adversity. It’s possible that learning to control fire and a climate that began to shift to be more hospitable to human life may have contributed to the rapid human population increase about 813,000 years ago.      

“These findings are just the start,” study co-author and Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health theoretical population geneticist and computational biologist LI Haipeng said in a statement. “Future goals with this knowledge aim to paint a more complete picture of human evolution during this Early to Middle Pleistocene transition period, which will in turn continue to unravel the mystery that is early human ancestry and evolution.”

The post An ‘ancestral bottleneck’ took out nearly 99 percent of the human population 800,000 years ago appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

While Ancient Egyptians believed in life after death for everyone, mummification was a process typically reserved for royalty—and their friends. Egyptian pharaohs wanted to make sure their close companions joined them in the next world, so they extended the courtesy of mummification to their inner circle. This discovery came to light more than a century ago, when archaeologists inspected the items used to preserve the body of a noblewoman called Senetnay.

And though her life may have ended, her story lives on. Senetnay’s remains continue to spill secrets of ancient Egyptian funeral practices: Two now-empty jars that once held her lungs and liver had been sitting untouched, until recently, in the Museum August Kestner in Germany. An international team of archaeologists analyzed the residue of balm remaining in the containers. From this ointment, the authors of a study published today in Scientific Reports extracted new details on Senetnay’s past life and Egyptian trading relations.

Senetnay lived in Egypt around 1,450 BCE and was the wet nurse for the son of Pharaoh Thutmose III, the future Pharaoh Amenhotep II. Yet her mummifications reflect an almost pharaonic-like status, describes Barbara Huber, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany and lead study author. 

[Related: This is the best look yet into ancient Egyptians’ mummy-making chemicals]

In 1900, famed Egyptologist Howard Carter—who also found King Tut’s tomb two decades later—uncovered Senetnay’s remains in the Valley of the Kings. While there was not a complete body, he noticed four jars used to preserve her organs. In mummification, the body is dried out and organs placed in jars filled with antibacterial balms to slow down decomposition. Huber and her colleagues scraped six samples from the leftover balm found in the inner wall and base of the two containers. 

Using several chemical techniques to separate and study the chemical composition of each sample, the authors found remnants of beeswax, plant oils, animal fats, bitumen (a petroleum-based substance), and resins. “The study uses sophisticated scientific methods to analyze the material of the balm in the jars,” says Sahar Saleem, a mummy expert and radiology professor at Cairo University who was not involved in the study. She adds that the archeological methods  used in the research helps go beyond generalizations and Egyptian myths to provide unique knowledge of the royal mummification process.

Both jars also showed hints of the compounds coumarin and benzoic acid. Sweet, vanilla-scented coumarin is found in cinnamon. Benzoic acid, a derivative from tree bark, has a faint but fragrant smell.

“Because there were so many aromatic materials used in embalming, we assumed the smell was used to mask the stench of decomposing bodies. It must have been a very interesting olfactory experience,” Huber says.

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

Senetnay likely held a high social standing. Some of the substances were not commonly used for embalming in Egypt at the time. Their presence suggests her mummification was handled with extra-special care; these ingredients must have been imported from all over the world. One of the resins used to store her lungs, for example, could have been dammar, obtained from trees that grow exclusively in the tropical rainforests of southeast Asia. “This means in the mid-second millennium there would have already been far-away trade connections from ancient Egypt to other parts of the world,” Huber says.

It’s also possible this resin could have belonged to the Pistacia trees that are normally found in the Mediterranean coastal region. Additionally, there was evidence of larch resin, based on the presence of the medicinal ingredient larixol in the embalming jar. This substance, used in  ancient Rome, comes from a plant species native to an area north of Egypt, across the Mediterranean. Archeologists haven’t fully explored this region for trade connections, Huber notes, which could give more evidence into the relationship between ancient Egypt and Central Europe.

The post Ancient Egyptian mummy balm probably smelled delicious appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Burial rites and other forms of grieving the dead possibly date back to the Neanderthals or even an extinct hominid species named Homo naledi. The ancient origins of these important social and emotional rituals for those left behind are still quite a mystery, and anthropologists are still piecing together how these practices have evolved over the course of humanity. With the help of some cutting edge technology, a team from Slovakia, Czech Republic, Belgium, and Austria was able to reconstruct the funerary process of two individuals whose burned remains were uncovered in urns dating back to late in the Bronze Age. The findings were published August 30 in the journal PLoS ONE.

[Related: Composting a human body, explained.]

Scientists studying these processes typically look at two different types of burials—traditional inhumation burials where the deceased is buried and urn burials in which the deceased’s remains are burned and stored in an urn. In many European countries, urn burials from prehistoric times are excavated by archaeologists before heading into the lab for further study. 

“For inhumation burials, if you have a complete human skeleton, it is possible to reconstruct a so-called osteobiography—a biography of the deceased individuals based on information obtained from the bones—pretty well,” study co-author and forensic anthropologist Lukas Waltenberger tells PopSci. Waltenberger is currently working at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

According to Waltenberger, scientists can use the pelvis and features from the skull to determine the sex of the deceased, determine the age of death from bone and teeth development, and even theorize a cause of death from evidence of trauma. While the characteristic bone features needed for these kinds of analyses are often destroyed by the fire or during an excavation, scientists are not always completely out of luck.

“It is a modern myth that if a body is cremated, it will turn into ash,” says Waltenberger. “Bone fragments of up to 20 cm [7 inches] in length remain, which contain various information about the life of a person. By reading this information it is possible to tell an individual’s life history even after millenia.”

[Related: This 7th-century teen was buried with serious bling—and we now know what she may have looked like.]

For this study, Waltenberger received complete urn burials from Late Bronze Age Austria (roughly 1400-1300 BCE) that were first uncovered in 2021 and recorded and analyzed all of the material left behind in these urn burial. The interdisciplinary team combined traditional archaeological techniques with anthropology, computed tomography, archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, geochemistry, and isotopic approaches.

The team first used CT scans to virtually excavate the urns without tampering with them. Eventually, some of the large bone fragments were still recognizable and then started to crumble smaller pieces during the micro-excavation. They then performed osteological (bone) and strontium isotope analysis which revealed details about the individuals whose remains were inside of the urns.

“One urn contained the remains of a young adult female, who died in her twenties, the other one the remains of a 9 to 15 year-old child,” says Waltenberger. “The child showed signs for vitamin deficiencies (Vitamin C and D). So, it was not healthy.”

The isotope analysis revealed that both individuals were born in the present-day St. Pölten area of northeastern Austria area and likely lived there when they died. They also found evidence that both people had been cremated on a pyre with food offerings (meat from sheep or goat and red deer) and bronze jewelry. The female individual was also buried with the tooth fragments of a wild boar, which Waltenberger suspects probably would have been worn as a wristband or necklace. The urn also had traces of eight wild and five crop plant species from the region that were offered up as funeral offerings and used as fire accelerants. According to the team, this is the first known evidence for plant residues in a prehistoric cremation burial.

[Related: Details of life in Bronze Age Mycenae could lie at the bottom of a well.]

In future studies, similar interdisciplinary techniques could be to other urn burials to learn more about their prehistoric inhabitants. The team from this study has started to apply these techniques to a large sample of 1,000 cremation burials. 

“First results are very promising and already point towards local variation of funerary rites,” says Waltenberger. “It is possible to receive a comprehensive impression of the Late Bronze Age, if only researchers consider state-of-the-art techniques and look for this tiny traces of information like a detective.”

The post Cremated remains still hold clues to life and death in the Bronze Age appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

For the first time in almost a century, a team of archaeologists have discovered stone walls dating back to the Roman Empire in Zug, Switzerland. The Alpine state in the central portion of the country is known for hockey, beautiful scenery, and some exciting archaeological finds. In a translated press release, the Office for the Preservation of Monuments and Archeology called the finding an “archaeological sensation” for the region that could offer more insight into Roman activity in central Switzerland.

[Related: Bronze Age cauldrons show we’ve always loved meat, dairy, and fancy cookware.]

While excavating a gravel pit in the city of Äbnetwald, a team uncovered the 2,000-year-old Roman walls that possibly once protected a building complex. They have also found some iron nails, pieces of plaster wall, gold fragments possibly from jewelry, millstones, glassware, crockery, bowls, and ceramic jugs called amphorae.

Archaeologists also found evidence that some elite people lived at the site, including imported Roman tableware called terra sigillata and some detailed glass vessels. During this time, amphorae jars typically held fish sauce, wine, or olive oil and provide some evidence that the Romans in the region traded with Mediterranean countries. 

According to the team, it is not surprising that this elevated position near the city of Äbnetwald was selected as the location for their buildings. It offered an excellent overview of the surrounding landscape. A gravel hill nearby was already inhabited several thousand years before the Romans came, indicating that it was already prime real estate.  

The walls extended to at least 5,300 square feet and it is still unclear how the site was used. According to Christa Ebnöther, a professor of archeology of the Roman provinces at the University of Bern, it could have been a villa that had a view of a temple building.

[Related: Pompeii’s archaeological puzzles can be solved with a little help from chemistry.]

“We were also amazed that the top bricks were even visible above ground. Only a few structural relics of this kind from the Roman period are known in the pre-Alpine region—in contrast to other regions. What is also astounding is the relatively good preservation of the remains,” said Ebnöther.

The team also found multiple bronze and copper coins. A silver denarius minted by Julius Caesar from around the First Century BCE with an elephant trampling on either a snake or a dragon etched into it was found amongst them. 

Previously, archaeologists have uncovered other valuable finds in this area, such as a number of coins from the ancient Celts, the remains of a settlement dating to the middle of the Bronze age, and evidence of burials from the late Bronze age. 

On Saturday, September 2nd, the general public is invited to tour the excavation and learn more about the Romans who lived in pre-Alpine Central Switzerland.  

The post Remnants of an ancient Roman society found buried in the Alps appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The Gua Sireh Cave on the island of Borneo in the Malaysian state of Sarawak is known for hundreds of charcoal drawings lining the walls of its main chambers. Now, a team of researchers from Australia’s Griffith University, the Sarawak Museum Department, and the Bidayuh people have officially dated some of the drawings in the cave which tell a sad and true story.  The findings are detailed in a study published August 23 in the journal PLOS One.

[Related: Neanderthals were likely creating art 57,000 years ago.]

The team dates the drawings to between 1670 to 1830 CE, which corresponds with a time of increasing conflict in the region. By the early 19th century, Sarawak was a loosely governed territory under the Brunei Sultanate. The Bruneian Empire only had authority along the coastal regions of Sarawak. These regions were held by semi-independent Malay leaders. The ruling Malay people controlling the area exacted heavy tolls on the area’s indigenous hill tribes, including the Bidayuh. 

“The Bidayuh recall Gua Sireh’s use as a refuge during territorial violence in the early 1800s when a very harsh Malay Chief had demanded they hand over their children,” Mohammad Sherman Sauffi William, a Bidayuh descendent, Sarawak Museum curator, and co-author of the study said in a statement. “They refused and retreated to Gua Sireh, where they initially held off a force of 300 armed men trying to enter the cave from the valley about 60 meters [196 feet] below.

After two Bidayuh were shot and seven were taken as prisoners and/or enslaved, most of the tribe escaped through a passageway at the back of the largest entrance chamber to the cave, which leads through the Gunung Nambi limestone hill, according to Sauffi William. 

“The figures were drawn holding distinctive weapons such as a Pandat which was used exclusively for fighting or protection, as well two short-bladed Parang Ilang, the main weapons used during warfare that marked the first decades of white rule in Borneo,” Sauffi Wiliam said.

The art in Gua Sireh is just one part of a wider distribution of drawings found from the Philippines through Southeast Asia, across Borneo and Sulawesi to Peninsular Malaysia. They are believed to be associated with the diaspora of Austronesian speaking peoples. Previous dating work established that similar drawings in the Philippines were made as early as 3500 and 1500 BCE in southern Sulawesi.

[Related: Cave drawings from 20,000 years ago may feature an early form of writing.]

To the best of their knowledge, the latest radiocarbon dates are the first chronometric age determinations for Malaysian rock art. Their first step in this process was establishing what substance was used to create the cave drawings. 

“Black drawings in the region have been made for thousands of years,” study co-author and Griffith University archaeological scientist Jillian Huntley said in a statement.  “We wanted to confirm the images were drawn with charcoal, as there are a limited number of substances you can actually radiocarbon date.”

To do this, the team looked at the decay of carbon isotopes, which meant that the material had to be organic or contain carbon. The analysis determined that charcoal made from different species of bamboo had been used to make them and they are well preserved partially due to the cave’s limestone walls. 

The dating has also been informed by Bidayuh oral histories and was used to record the experience of territorial violence and colonization in the region. The team knew from earlier studies that the rock art in northwestern Borneo is dominated by drawings of animals, people, ships, and abstract geometric/linear design.

“At Gua Sireh, people are drawn wearing headdresses—some armed with shields, knives and spears, in scenes showing activities such as hunting, butchering, fishing, fighting and dancing,” study co-author and Griffith University anthropologist and archaeologist Paul Taçon said in a statement. “We had clues about their age based on subjects such as introduced animals, but we really didn’t know how old they were, so it was difficult to interpret what they might mean.”

Future studies could apply similar techniques to other drawings and reveal more insight into the Austronesian and Maylay diasporas and the region’s complex human history. 

The post Newly dated cave art tells a dark story in Borneo’s history appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The ruins of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii are full of morbid mystery. In 79 CE, a volcanic eruption wiped out the city of between 10,000 and 20,000 inhabitants. Massive plumes of volcanic ash and pumice shot out of Mount Vesuvius, covering and suffocating Pompeii’s doomed residents. Archaeologists have found the remains of over 1,300 victims in the site southeast of the city of Naples over the last 250 years.

[Related: ‘Violent’ earthquakes accompanied the infamous volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii.]

Some of the bodies of Pompeii were also preserved in plaster, but not from Mount Vesuvius and not in 79 CE. In the 1860s and 1870s, archaeologists led by Giuseppe Fiorelli poured plaster into the voids left behind by the bodies that had decomposed. These casts typically have the skeletal remains embedded in the plaster that retain the body shape and give a realistic image of victims of the eruption. 

“Pompeii is one of the most important places from an archaeological point of view,” Gianni Gallello, an archeological scientist at the University of Valencia in Spain tells PopSci.  “All of Roman society is imprinted at the moment after the eruption, all stuck in time.”

However, the plaster may have contaminated the chemical composition of the bones, according to a study published August 23 in the journal PLOS One. While the plaster may have altered the chemical makeup of the bones, bioarchaeological analysis still supports the theory that these specific victims died from asphyxiation and not from blunt force trauma from rocks or burning.

Gallello is one of the co-authors of the study who specializes in applying analytical chemistry to archeological finds. He brought a technique called portable X-ray fluorescence as a way to noninvasively examine the elemental composition of the bones and plaster for the first time. 

“It’s a portable device that takes the material profile invisibly,” Gallello explains. “Everything was in contact with the plaster, so you can get contamination. Plaster also has high levels of compounds similar to the bones.”

In this study, Gallello and his colleagues looked at six plaster casts from the Porta Nola (gate) area of Pompeii and one cast from the city’s Terme Surbane (or frescoed bath house) for anthropological and multielemental analysis. They also compared these bones to cremated bones from a Roman necropolis and ones found in a Spanish Islamic necropolis.

[Related: Mount Vesuvius murdered its victims in more brutal ways than we thought.]

“Cross referencing is important for volcanologists and anthropologists. It provides complimentary data [for the] reconstruction of the evidence. Anthropological work can say that the position of the bones of the people who died while they were escaping is telling that they probably died from asphyxiation, while archaeological data can say if it was during the second part of the eruption,” says Gallello.

Using portable X-ray fluorescence, they found that the plaster from Pompeii was completely different from the burned and unburned bones from the collection. Testing out this method for the first time on the Pompeii casts also helped add to the prevailing theories of what killed these specific residents of Pompeii during the eruption. While the plaster contamination makes it more difficult to study, the chemical analysis supports the theory that the victims suffocated from the volcanic ash. 

“We don’t pretend to say how they died. What we do is provide more evidence and data to complement and allow the volcanologists who are very active in Pompeii to study,” says Gallello. 

The team hopes that using noninvasive techniques like this on other archeological finds and cast skeletons will help find better evidence to draw stronger conclusions on the causes of death. 

“It’s an honor to work in Pompeii,” says Gallello. “We do work that we love, and for us, it’s not work.”

The post Pompeii’s archaeological puzzles can be solved with a little help from chemistry appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Ancient bones can give scientists crucial information about what human bodies of the past looked like, but finding evidence of what nourished those prehistoric bodies is a bit more challenging. Archeologists typically need to use context clues to draw conclusions on what people used to eat—or get lucky and find some poop. 

[Related: Neanderthals caught and cooked crabs 90,000 years ago.]

However, sometimes protein and fat residues can stand the test of time on ancient pottery or in teeth. A study published on August 18 in the journal iScience found that residents of the Caucuses ate sheep, deer, goats, and members of the cow family during the Maykop period (about 3700–2900 BCE) of the Bronze Age. Some millennia old cauldrons from archaeological sites in Eurasia were crucial in deciphering this ancient menu.

“It’s really exciting to get an idea of what people were making in these cauldrons so long ago,” study co-author and University of Zurich biological anthropologist Shevan Wilkin said in a statement. “This is the first evidence we have of preserved proteins of a feast—it’s a big cauldron. They were obviously making large meals, not just for individual families.”

The study combines protein analysis and archaeology to explore the details of what was cooked in ancient cauldrons recovered from burial sites in Eurasia’s Caucasus region. This region lies between the Caspian and Black Seas, and spans Southwestern Russia to Turkey. 

“We have already established that people at the time most likely drank a soupy beer, but we did not know what was included on the main menu,” study co-author and Institute for the History of Material Culture archaeologist Viktor Trifonov said in a statement.

Many metal alloys have antimicrobial properties that help preserve proteins on cauldrons. Microbes in the dirt that would normally degrade the proteins left behind on surfaces made of stone or ceramic are stopped on metal alloys.

The team collected eight residue samples from seven metal cauldrons and successfully retrieved proteins from milk, muscle tissue, and blood. The presence of a protein called heat shock protein beta-1 (HSPB-1), indicates that the metal cauldrons were used to cook tissues of deer or bovine animals (cows, yaks, or water buffalo). They also recovered milk proteins from either goats or sheep, so these people likely also prepared dairy. 

Using radiocarbon dating, the team believes that the cauldrons could have been used between 3520–3350 BCE. 

[Related: Details of life in Bronze Age Mycenae could lie at the bottom of a well.]

The cauldrons show signs of wear and tear from use, but also signs of extensive repair. Taking the time to repair the kitchen tools suggests that they were a valuable object that required skill to make. Such a cooking vessel could be an important symbol of social position or wealth. 

“It was a tiny sample of soot from the surface of the cauldron,” said Trifonov. “Maykop bronze cauldrons of the fourth millennium BC[E] are a rare and expensive item, a hereditary symbol belonging to the social elite.”

In future studies, the team would like to explore the differences and similarities between a wider range of vessel types. This could help them get a better idea of what people in the region were doing and how food preparation differed regionally at this time. Cuisine is an important part of culture, so studies like these can help archaeologists better understand the cultural connections between different regions.

“If proteins are preserved on these vessels, there is a good chance they are preserved on a wide range of other prehistoric metal artifacts,” said Wilkin. “We still have a lot to learn, but this opens up the field in a really dramatic way.”

The post Bronze Age cauldrons show we’ve always loved meat, dairy, and fancy cookware appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Modifying our bodies, from external expressions like piercings and tattoos to more internal changes like drilling holes into skulls or foot binding, is quintessentially human. Now, a team of biological anthropologists and archaeologists from Kyushu University in Japan and the University of Montana are learning more about how Japan’s Hirota people partook in a millennia old practice of intentional cranial modification. Their findings,published August 16 in the journal PLOS ONE, also found that there were no significant differences in cranial modification between males and females, indicating that both sexes partook in the process.

[Related: Mysterious skull points to a possible new branch on human family tree.]

Humans are born with fairly soft and pliable skulls to help push our large braincases through the birth canal. During cranial modification, a person’s head is pressed or bound to permanently deform the skull. This is primarily done at an early age, and the practice even predates written history. 

There is evidence that Neanderthals living 45,000 years ago were shaping their infants’ skulls, possibly because it was believed to be better for survival. In Mexico, the Maya may have intended it as a way to protect the souls of its young people. A form of artificial cranial deformation in which a baby’s head was tightly bound and padded to protect the skull from impact was still common among peasantry in Western France as recently as the early 1900s. Scientists theorize the practice was generally performed to signify group affiliation or demonstrate social status.

Now, scientists are gaining a better understanding on how the process occurred in in Japan’s Hirota people, who lived on the island of Tanegashima in southern Japan during the end of the Yayoi Period (roughly the 3rd century CE) to the Kofun Period (between the 5th and 7th century CE). 

“This site was excavated from 1957 to 1959 and again from 2005 to 2006. From the initial excavation, we found remains with cranial deformations characterized by a short head and a flattened back of the skull, specifically the occipital bone and posterior parts of the parietal bones,” study co-author and  Kyushu University biological anthropologist Noriko Seguchi said in a statement. 

While this particular dig gave the team an ideal spot to study cranial modification, it was not clear if these changes to the skull had been truly intentional or not. In the study, the team used a hybrid of 2D images to analyze the shape of the skulls’ outlines and 3D scans of their surface. They also compared data from skulls from other archeological sites in Japan, including the Doigahama Yayoi people in Western Yamaguchi and the Kyushu Island Jomon people, who were the hunter-gatherer predecessors to the Yayoi people. 

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

“Our results revealed distinct cranial morphology and significant statistical variability between the Hirota individuals with the Kyushu Island Jomon and Doigahama Yayoi samples,” said Seguchi. “The presence of a flattened back of the skull characterized by changes in the occipital bone, along with depressions in parts of the skull that connects the bones together, specifically the sagittal and lambdoidal sutures, strongly suggested intentional cranial modification.”

While the team is still not sure what motivated the Hirota people to do this, they hypothesize that it was to preserve group identity and possibly facilitate a long-distance trade of shellfish, as supported by archaeological evidence found at the site.

“Our findings significantly contribute to our understanding of the practice of intentional cranial modification in ancient societies,” said Seguchi. “We hope that further investigations in the region will offer additional insights into the social and cultural significance of this practice in East Asia and the world.”

The post Japan’s Hirota people intentionally reshaped their skulls more than 1,000 years ago appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Hammocks normally invoke an image of sipping tropical drinks or relaxing in a backyard, not necessarily archaeological discoveries. However, while installing a hammock this summer at Michigan State University, workers found a hard, impenetrable, surface just under the ground. Campus archaeologists looked at old maps and determined that the object was not a rock, but the 140-plus year-old foundation of the first observatory on MSU’s campus.

[Related: Ceramic pipes kept this town from flooding during monsoons 4,000 years ago.]

The observatory was built in 1881, but was demolished in the 1920s and was buried under ground over the course of the last century, according to The Washington Post. Another observatory was built in 1969 and is still up and running on campus.

“It gives us a sense of what early campus looked like in the late 19th century,” MSU campus archaeologist and anthropology doctoral student Ben Akey said in a statement. “The original campus observatory was built and used at a time when Michigan Agricultural College—what would become MSU—was a radically different institution with only a handful of professors and a relatively small student body.”

Akey will continue to collaborate with the university’s Infrastructure Planning and Facilities (IPF) department to keep up with campus construction projects and research any discoveries that are found. Students will also work to preserve any artifacts that the site might hold and coordinate with IPF to ensure anything detected during construction is properly researched and preserved.

Using the MSU archives, Akey conducted most of the research that confirmed the discovery of the building’s former foundation. The book “Stars Over the Red Cedar’, written” by  professor emeritus in the MSU Department of Physics and Astronomy Horace A. Smith, also helped confirm this unique find. 

The old observatory is located just behind what is now Wills House and was built by Professor Rolla Carpenter. An 1873 graduate of Michigan State Agricultural College, Carpenter returned as a professor and taught courses in mathematics, astronomy, French, and civil engineering.

[Related: Newly discovered ‘Stonehenge of the Netherlands’ is 4,000 years old.]

“In the early days of MSU’s astronomy program, Carpenter would take students to the roof of College Hall and have them observe from there, but he didn’t find it a sufficient solution for getting students experience in astronomical observation,” Akey said. “When MSU acquired a telescope, Carpenter successfully argued for funding for a place to mount it: the first campus observatory.”

MSU’s present day observatory is located just south of campus and boasts a 24-inch telescope. The space is used for both education, research, and free public observation nights.

“It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come from a little 16-foot circular building to a large building with a high-quality telescope and an electric dome,” MSU astrophysics and anthropology major Levi Webb said in a statement. “Seeing the difference between how observing used to be versus how it is now is very interesting to me and makes me appreciative of the observatory we have now.”

Correction (August 23, 2023, 3:37pm): An early version of this story spelled “Wills House” as “Willis House.” PopSci regrets the error.

The post Michigan State students help unearth a 19th-century space observatory on campus appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

China’s Longshan period which lasted from about 2600 to 2000 BCE is best known for its sophisticated pottery shapes, but their sophisticated plumbing is getting some well-deserved attention. A team of archaeologists found the oldest known ceramic water pipes in China, demonstrating that locals were capable of major feats of engineering without a centralized state government. The findings are described in a study published August 14 in the journal Nature Water. 

[Related from PopSci+: Inside the project to bring ‘self-healing’ Roman concrete to American shorelines.]

The newly unearthed network of ceramic water pipes and drainage ditches were found at the ancient walled city of Pingliangtai, located in what is now the Huaiyang District of Zhoukou City in central China. The town was home to roughly 500 people during neolithic times and had protective walls and a surrounding moat. It sits on the Upper Huai River Plain on the vast Huanghuaihai Plain, and the climate 4,000 years ago saw large seasonal climate shifts. Summer monsoons could dump a foot and a half of rain on the region every month. 

With all this rain, it was critical for the region to manage floodwaters. The people of Pingliangtai appear to have built and operated a two-tier drainage system to help mitigate the rainy season’s excessive rainfall. Simple but coordinated lines of drainage ditches ran parallel to the rows of houses to divert water from the residential area to a series of ceramic water pipes that carried the water into the surrounding moat, and away from the village.

The team says that this network of pipes shows that the community cooperated with one another to build and maintain this drainage system. 

“The discovery of this ceramic water pipe network is remarkable because the people of Pingliangtai were able to build and maintain this advanced water management system with stone age tools and without the organization of a central power structure,” study co-author and University College London archaeologist Yijie Zhuang said in a statement. “This system would have required a significant level of community-wide planning and coordination, and it was all done communally.”

The network is made of interconnecting individual segments which run along roads and walls that divert rainwater. According to the team, it shows an advanced level of central planning and is the oldest complete system discovered in China to date. 

The team was also surprised by this find because the Pingliangtai settlement shows little evidence of a social hierarchy. The homes within it were uniformly small and there aren’t any signs of social stratification or significant inequality amongst the population. Digs at the town’s cemetery also didn’t reveal any evidence of a social hierarchy in burials the way excavations at other nearby towns have. 

[Related: Mysterious skull points to a possible new branch on human family tree.]

The level of complexity that these pipes demonstrate also undermines some earlier understanding of archaeological finds that believe only a centralized state power could organize and provide the resources for such a complex water management system. Other ancient societies that used advanced water systems tended to have a stronger, more centralized government, but Pingliangtai shows that that centralized power was possibly not always needed.

“Pingliangtai is an extraordinary site. The network of water pipes shows an advanced understanding of engineering and hydrology that was previously only thought possible in more hierarchical societies,” study co-author and Peking University archaeologist Hai Zhang said in a statement. 

The ceramic water pipes also show an advanced level of technology for this period in time. Like with Longshan pottery, there was some variety of decoration and styles, but each pipe segment was about 7.8 and 11.8 inches in diameter and about 11.8 to 15.7 inches long. Multiple segments were slotted into one another to transport the water over long distances. 

According to the study, the team can’t say specifically how the labor to build this infrastructure was organized and divided. A similar level of communal coordination would also have been necessary to build the earthen walls and moat that surround Pingliangtai.

The post Ceramic pipes kept this town from flooding during monsoons 4,000 years ago appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

A 300,000 year-old fossilized skull discovered in China is proving to be an evolutionary puzzle. The specimen dating back to the late middle Pleistocene doesn’t look like other skulls that have been found from this time period, and could possibly point to a previously unknown human species. The findings were published late last month in the Journal of Human Evolution.

[Related: Leftovers of a 2,000-year-old curry discovered on stone cooking tools.]

A team of scientists from institutions in Spain, the United Kingdom, and China found the lower jaw–or mandible–and 15 other separate specimens in eastern China’s Hualongdong region in 2015. The mandible in question is named HLD 6 and dates back to an important period in hominin evolution, just before some of the traits that are still seen in modern humans began to evolve in East Asia. 

The study noted that HLD 6 was “unexpected” since it doesn’t currently fit into any known taxonomic groups. The skull has similar facial features to those of early modern humans. The skull could potentially belong to a direct human ancestor called Homo erectus sometime between 550,000 and 750,000 years ago. 

However, it also shares some of the characteristics of the Denisovans, who belong on a different branch on the human family tree than Homo Erectus. HLD 6 does not appear to have a chin, just like previously discovered Denisovan specimens. Denisovans are now extinct and split from Neanderthals about 400,000 years ago.

Given that the specimen has a mixture of Homo erectus and Denisovan characteristics, they believe this was potentially a hybrid of modern human and ancient hominid. The team notes that this combination of facial features hasn’t been observed in East Asia hominids, which suggests that some of the traits found in modern humans began to appear as far back as 300,000 years ago.

[Related: A javelin-like stick shows early humans may have been keen woodworkers.]

They believe that the fossils belonged to a 12- to 13-year-old child. The team did not have an adult skull belonging to this same species to compare it with, but they used Middle and Late Pleistocene hominin skulls of similar and adult age. They noticed that the shape patterns remained the same regardless of age, which they say supports the theory that this could be a different human species. 

The history of the human family tree is constantly changing, as scientists develop better techniques for finding and analyzing specimens. A study published in June proposed that humans entered the forests of Asia about 400,000 years earlier than they previously believed. Humans and Neanderthals also could have been interbreeding earlier and in three separate waves that eventually led to the extinction of Neanderthals. 
If this new theory proves to be correct, a new “pre-sapiens specimen” branch could be added to this complex family tree and bring more insight into human evolution.

The post Mysterious skull points to a possible new branch on human family tree appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

In the Late Bronze Age, humans learned to smelt iron, and things haven’t been the same since. Between 1200 and 1000 BCE, the movement of information stemming possibly from ancient Anatolia on how to utilize the metal and turn it into tools both led to more permanent settlements and put sturdy weapons in the hands of lots of people for the first time in history. 

But even before the Iron Age, which ended around 600 BCE, iron could still be turned into tools since the material can be found naturally—mostly off of the planet, however. One example of such extraterrestrial iron, which was typically found in meteorites in conjunction with nickel or silicate minerals, in tools was recently rediscovered in the depths of Switzerland’s Bern History Museum. There, a team of archaeologists spotted an arrowhead made with what they believe to be iron from a meteor. They published their findings recently in the Journal of Archeological Sciences.

[Related: A meteorite-hunting AI will scout for space rocks buried in polar ice.]

The 1.5-inch long, 2.9 gram arrowhead was originally discovered in the 19th century in a late Bronze Age lake dwelling community called Mörigen on Lake Biel about an hour drive from Bern. Archeological finds made from meteoritic iron are quite rare, the Bern History Museum wrote in a release—there are only 55 objects in all of Europe, Asia, and Africa, including King Tut’s ‘space dagger’, and these all come from 22 sites. 

The settlement of Mörigen is located a mere five miles from the location where the Twannberg meteorite struck earth around 150,000 years ago. Strangely enough, the meteorite, which was discovered only in 1984, couldn’t have been the original source for this particular tool. After some analysis, the authors found that the arrowhead itself was made up of 8.3 percent nickel, twice as much as the Twannberg meteorite holds. The tiny tool also is made up of a high content of geranium and a low concentration of aluminum-26. This hints that the meteorite was likely a IAB type and originally had a mass of at least two tons. 

Three such meteorites have hit Europe—one in the Czech Republic, one in Spain, and one in Estonia. The authors estimate that the meteorite that could’ve sourced this rare find is the Kaalijarv meteorite, which formed a giant crater on the Estonian island of Saaremaa around 1,500 BCE. This impact site, a 864-mile-journey through modern day Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, also suggests a complex trade and transport system could have been in place during this era. Now, it’s just a matter of finding the rest of the ancient gadgets and tools that could’ve been made from space rocks long before anyone knew what they were. 

The post This archaic arrowhead might be made from iron that fell from space appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Humans have had a love for shiny accessories and adornments for thousands of years. Now, a newly discovered ornate necklace discovered in a child’s grave in ancient Jordan is giving archaeologists insights into the complex social structure of Neolithic cultures. The necklace is described in a study published August 2 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

[Related: Scientists build intricate Neolithic family tree from 7,000-year-old DNA.]

The Neolithic Age began in roughly 10,000 BCE and is considered the later part of the Stone Age. This period was known for polished stone tools, more permanent settlements and villages instead of hunter-gathering societies, domesticated plants and animals, and some pretty strong women. Body adornments were (and still are) powerful symbols that visually communicate cultural values and personal identities. Scientists studying ancient cultures can learn a lot from the valuable objects people were buried with, from the amulets left with a teenage mummy in ancient Egypt to the ivory tusks buried with a very important Copper Age woman.

In this study, a team analyzed the materials that were found adorning the body of an eight-year-old child who was buried in a grave at the 9,000 year-old Neolithic village of Ba’ja in Jordan. Estimates say he likely died somewhere between 7400 and 6800 BCE. They found more than 2,500 colorful stones and shells, two large amber beads that are currently the oldest known in the Levant, a large stone pendant, and a delicately engraved mother-of-pearl ring buried with the unidentified child. 

After analyzing the craftsmanship, composition, and the spatial layout of these items, the team believes that they likely belonged to a single composite multi-row necklace that has fallen apart over time. They created a physical reconstruction of the necklace as part of the study and it is currently on display in the Petra Museum in Wadi Musa, Jordan.

According to the team, this multi-row necklace is one of the oldest and most impressive Neolithic ornaments found to date. It appears to have taken meticulous work and required the importation of materials from other regions outside of Jordan. It offers new insights into funerary practices at the time, since burial techniques are often an indicator of relationships in a community and shared values of a culture. 

[Related: This teen mummy was buried with dozens of gold amulets.]

This necklace also shows a complex social dynamics between the Ba’ja community members at the time who would have had to come together to make this necklace, including artisans, traders, and the high-status authorities who would commission such pieces. Future studies could look into this aspect of Neolithic culture and recent advances in spectroscopy techniques could potentially reveal where the various beads and gemstones came from. 

The post Ancient child’s grave holds intricate necklace with more than 2,000 stones appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

For thousands of years, gemstones have been valued and traded around the world. Along with their beauty, these strong and rare minerals carry with them a unique elemental composition and atomic orientation. These traits act as fingerprints that can show researchers a gem’s past—including where they originated and traveled.

[Related: A rare diamond is offering a glimpse into a possibly watery world inside the Earth.]

In a study published August 1 in the journal AIP Advances, a team of scientists used spectroscopic techniques to compare sets of gems and pinpoint where they originated and how they passed through trade routes. They looked at gems found in the Arabian-Nubian Shield—an exposure of mineral deposits near the Red Sea in present day Egypt and Saudi Arabia. 

Spectroscopy helped the team identify specific elements inside the gems, including their chemical makeup and structure. These traits influence the gems’ color, differentiated the stones found outside of the Arabian-Nubian Shield, and show which gems are natural versus synthetic. 

“We showed the main spectroscopic characteristics of gemstones from these Middle East localities to distinguish them from their counterparts in other world localities,” Adel Surour, co-author and meteorologist and geologist at Galala University in Egypt, said in a statement. “This includes a variety of silicate gems such as emerald from the ancient Cleopatra’s mines in Egypt, in addition to amethyst, peridot, and amazonite from other historical sites, which mostly date to the Roman times.”

A technique called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) can quickly characterize the gem’s chemical composition, while another called fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) determines the functional groups connected to the gem’s structure and detects the presence of water and other hydrocarbons. Raman spectroscopy shows the unique crystalline structure of the gems’ atoms, even for chemically identical materials.

[Related: Space diamonds sparkle from the wreckage of a crushed dwarf planet.]

The team found that iron content likely correlates to the signature purple hue in amethysts and elements including chromium, vanadium, and copper also impact a gem’s color. Synthetic gems that are less expensive and used in lab experiments are exposed by a signature water peak. 

The unique crystalline structure of the gems differentiated amazonite beads from Mexico, Jordan, and Egypt, making it possible to follow where they traveled.

“Gemstones such as emerald and peridot have been mined since antiquity,” Surour said. “Sometimes, some gemstones were brought by sailors and traders to their homelands. For example, royal crowns in Europe are decorated with peculiar gemstones that originate from either Africa or Asia. We need to have precise methods to distinguish the source of a gemstone and trace ancient trade routes in order to have correct information about the original place from which it was mined.”

The post Gemstones carry the tale of their geographic origins appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Terms like “cultural heritage” and “archaeology” might conjure Indiana Jones-lie scenes of old and ancient things buried under the sands of time. But even now, each one of us is producing material that could interest future humans trying to record and study our own era.

For those who believe that space exploration and astronauts’ first departures from Earth are culturally significant, then there is a wealth of objects that spacefarers—crewed and uncrewed, past and present—have left in the realms beyond our atmosphere.

“This stuff is an extension of our species’ migration, beginning in Africa and extending to the solar system,” says Justin Holcomb, an archaeologist with the Kansas Geological Survey. “I argue that a piece of a lander is the exact same thing as a piece of a stone tool in Africa.”

This idea is the heart of what Holcomb and his colleagues call “planetary geoarchaeology.” In a paper published in the journal Geoarchaeology on July 21, these “space archaeologists” detail how they want to study the interactions between the items we’ve left around the solar system and the  hostile environments they now occupy. This research, the authors believe, will only become more important as human activity on the moon is set to blossom in the decades to come.

The idea of documenting and preserving what we leave behind in space isn’t a completely new concept. In the early 2000s, New Mexico State University anthropologist Beth O’Leary (who co-authored the paper with Holcomb) cataloged objects scattered around Tranquility Base, Apollo 11’s landing site on the moon. O’Leary later helped get some of those artifacts registered in California and New Mexico as culturally significant properties.

“I would argue that Tranquility Base could easily be considered the most important archaeological site that exists,” says Justin St. P. Walsh, an archaeologist at Chapman University in California who was not involved with the new paper. The base’s lunar soil can’t be declared a cultural heritage site because that would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prevents any country from claiming the soil of the moon or another world. But scholars can still list objects found there as heritage.

Naturally, O’Leary’s catalog includes the remnants of Apollo 11’s lunar module and its famed US flag, along with empty food bags, utensils, hygiene equipment, and wires. What is space junk to some is precious culture to space archaeologists. Even long-festering astronaut poop has its value—“that’s human DNA,” Holcomb says.

Archaeological sites on Earth are deeply impacted by the processes of the world around them, both natural and artificial. Likewise, Tranquility Base doesn’t just sit in tranquility. The moon’s surface is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays and micrometeoroids; even faraway human landings can kick up regolith showers.

[Related: Want to learn something about space? Crash into it.]

Holcomb and his colleagues want to study the various states objects are left in to learn how sites on the moon and other worlds change over time—and how to preserve them for our distant descendants. “We think in deep time scales,” says Holcomb. “We’re not thinking in just the next five years. We’re thinking in a thousand years.”

That sort of research, the authors say, is still quite new. Holcomb, for instance, wants to study what happens to NASA’s Spirit rover on Mars as a sand dune washes over it. Other planetary geoarchaeology projects might focus on what the moon’s environment has wrought upon artificial materials we’ve left on the lunar surface.

“We can find out more about what happened to [castoffs] in the length of time they’ve been there,” says Alice Gorman, an archaeologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, who also wasn’t a co-author. 

On Earth, Gorman and colleagues plan to replicate Apollo astronauts’ boot prints in simulated lunar soil and subject them to forces like rocket exhaust. Gorman believes even engineers with no interest in archaeology may want to take interest in work like this. “These same processes will be happening to any new habitats built on the surface,” she says. “With the archaeological sites, we get a bit of a longer-term perspective.”

The moon is the immediate focus for both this paper’s authors and other space archaeologists, and it’s easy to see why. After several decades of occasional uncrewed missions and flybys, NASA’s Artemis program promises to spearhead a mass return to the satellite’s surface. The Artemis program is slated to land on the moon’s south pole, far away from existing Apollo landing sites. But a flurry of private companies have emerged with the goal of not just touching the moon as Apollo did, but extracting its resources.

Space archaeologists fear that all this future activity will place past sites at risk. “We barely know how to operate on the moon,” says Walsh.

There are some indications that the broader space community is thinking about the problem. The Artemis Accords (a US-initiated document that aims to outline the ethical guidelines for the Artemis era) and the Vancouver Recommendations on Space Mining (a 2020 white paper by primarily Canadian academics that proposes a framework for sustainable space mining) express a desire to protect space heritage sites.

Of course, these are only words on nonbinding paper, and space archaeologists do not think they go far enough. Holcomb and colleagues want experts in their field to be involved in planning—for instance, steering scientific and commercial space missions away from spots where they might interfere with existing cultural heritage. There is earthbound precedent for such a role: In many countries, archaeologists already assist infrastructure projects.

“We know we’re going to go there someday, so let’s make sure that we have the protections in place before we go and ruin things,” says Walsh.

[Related: What an extraterrestrial archaeological dig could tell us about space culture]

Moves like this can’t protect lunar heritage from every possible harm: A future satellite could very well crash-land on Tranquility Base and wreck the last remnants of Apollo 11 there. But space archaeologists say that it is valuable to take any steps we can.

“I think the paper is a really fantastic demonstration of how any mission to the moon has to be about more than just engineering, and it has to be interdisciplinary,” Gorman notes. “It’s very timely that it’s been published now, while there’s still time to incorporate its recommendations into actual lunar missions.”

The post Space junk is a precious treasure trove to some archaeologists appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Despite being a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most well-known archaeological locations in the world, Machu Picchu’s history is still being uncovered. This former royal estate from the vast Inca Empire located in present day Cusco, Peru was once home to a mixture of royalty and the workers who served them. DNA is offering up new clues as to who once lived and worked there.

[Related: The king behind Machu Picchu built his legacy in stone.]

In a study published July 26 in the journal Science Advances, scientists analyzed DNA from 34 people and uncovered a diverse genetic ancestry. This supports a theory that the people believed to have been servants were brought from distant and varied populations across the Inca Empire and further into South America.

“There were no slaves in the Andean world. Nonetheless, individuals were removed from their ethnic homelands and assigned to serve the Inca royal families for life in different capacities, including that of retainers at country palaces such as Machu Picchu,” study co-author and Yale University archaeologist Lucy Salazar tells PopSci. “Ancient DNA provides the most powerful tool in determining the genetic background of these individuals.”

In the study, the team compared the DNA of 34 individuals buried at Machu Picchu over 500 years ago with DNA of other people from around the Inca Empire, as well as some modern genomes from South America. They found that the individuals had come from as far away as Amazonia (which includes parts of present-day Brazil, Bolivia, and Colombia), but only a few shared DNA with each other. This indicates that they had been brought to Peru as individuals rather than as part of a family unit or community group.

Salazar says it was surprising that only a few came from the heartlands of the Inca Empire. The majority came from the Pacific coast, the Amazonian lowlands, Ecuador and Chile. However,  over a third of the sample had some Amazonian genetic background. 

“Another surprise was the number of individuals with genetic admixtures from geographically unrelated sources (45 percent of our sample),” Salazar says. “The sheer genetic diversity at Machu Picchu was remarkable and unprecedented, and it suggests that the cultural diversity at Machu Picchu was more similar to a cosmopolitan center than a modern agricultural village.

The study also found that the genetic composition of the Inca capital of Cusco was also diverse, but very different from the samples excavated at Machu Picchu. The team plans to study genetic samples from Inca Cusco to better understand the differences in the genetic composition of these two sites. Salazar is currently excavating an Inca cemetery to learn more. 

[Related: Ancient Maya masons had a smart way to make plaster stronger.]

Work like this study is part of a trend in archaeology that combines traditional archaeological techniques with new technologies and scientific analyses. It can lead to a more complete understanding of ancient civilizations not possible without these advances. Breakthroughs in the analysis of ancient DNA led to the collaboration of Salazar and fellow Yale archaeologist Richard Burger, geneticist Lars Fehren-Schmitz from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and archaeologists from Cusco.

“The role of the Amazon in the Inca empire has been more important than previously recognized and the complexity of the Inca society is only beginning to be understood,” she says. “Applying new scientific techniques such as ancient DNA analysis allows archaeologists to explore questions that were previously out of reach.”

The study was also part of an agreement to return artifacts native to Machu Picchu, currently being stored at Yale University to the University San Antonio de Abad of Cusco, back to the historic site.

The post Machu Picchu was home to ancient people from all over South America appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Around 12,000 years ago, humans shifted away from a hunter gatherer lifestyle and into a neolithic society based around farming. This change still has a massive impact on our lives, but it is difficult to assess how these communities migrated and what their social networks may have looked like. 

[Related: Neolithic surgeons might have practiced their skull-drilling techniques on cows.]

In a study published July 26 in the journal Nature, a team of scientists used roughly 7,000 year-old DNA to reconstruct two massive family trees. Their findings suggest that some females left their home community to join another. It also provides evidence of stable health conditions and a supportive social network within one prehistoric community in Europe. 

One way scientists determine relationships are through burials, inferring who may have been related through inferences of funeral practices of the time. But actual genetic analysis is tricky. The Paris Basin region in northern France has several monumental funerary sites that archaeologists believe were built for the more “elite” members of prehistoric society. 

However, the nearby site of Gurgy ‘Les Noisats’ is one of the largest Neolithic funerary sites that does not have a monument. This sparked questions about the different burial practices of the time. 

In this new study, the team used ancient genome-wide data excavated from Les Noisats between 2004 and 2007. The remains of 94 individuals buried in Gurgy are dated to approximately 4,850 to 4,500 BCE. The team combined this ancient genome data with strontium isotope analysis, mitochondrial DNA to show maternal lineages, and Y-chromosome data for patrilineal lineages, age-at-death, and genetic sex to build two family trees. 

The first tree connects 64 individuals over seven generations, and is the largest pedigree reconstructed from ancient DNA to date. The second family tree connects 12 individuals over five generations.

“Since the beginning of the excavation, we found evidence of a complete control of the funerary space and only very few overlapping burials, which felt like the site was managed by a group of closely related individuals, or at least by people who knew who was buried where,” study co-author and University of Bordeaux archaeo-anthropologist Stéphane Rottier said in a statement. 

The team also found a positive correlation between spatial and genetic distances of the remains, which indicates that the deceased were likely to be buried close to a relative. When examining the pedigrees further, they also saw a strong pattern along paternal lines. Each generation, it seems, is almost exclusively linked to the generation before through the biological father. The entire Gurgy group can be connected through the paternal line.  

[Related: Neanderthal genomes reveal family bonds from 54,000 years ago.]

On the other side of the family trees, evidence from mitochondrial lineages and the strontium stable isotopes show a non-local origin of most of the women. This suggests Gurgy had a practice called patrilocality, where sons stayed where they were born and then had children with women from outside of the community. By contrast, most of the lineage of adult daughters are missing, suggesting there might have been a reciprocal exchange system with other communities. The newer female individuals were only very distantly related to each other, which shows that they likely came from a network of communities nearby instead of just one group. There could have been a relatively large exchange network of many groups in the region. 

“We observe a large number of full siblings who have reached reproductive age. Combined with the expected equal number of females and significant number of deceased infants, this indicates large family sizes, a high fertility rate and generally stable conditions of health and nutrition, which is quite striking for such ancient times,” study co-author and Ghent University paleogeneticist Maïté Rivollat said in a statement. 

Additionally, the team could point to one male individual from which everyone in the largest family tree was descended. This “founding father” of the cemetery has a unique burial, with skeletal remains buried as a secondary deposit inside the grave pit of a woman. This indicates that his bones must have been brought from where he originally died to be reburied at Gurgy. 

“He must have represented a person of great significance for the founders of the Gurgy site to be brought there after a primary burial somewhere else,” co-author and University of Bordeaux paleogeneticist Marie-France Deguilloux said in a statement. 

While the main pedigree spans seven generations, the demographic profile suggests that a Gurgy itself was probably only used for three to four generations, or approximately one century. Nevertheless, these lengthy pedigrees represent a step forward in our understanding of the social organization of past societies. 

“Only with the major advances in our field in very recent years and the full integration of context data it was possible to carry out such an extraordinary study,” study co-author and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology molecular anthropologist Wolfgang Haak said in a statement. “It is a dream come true for every anthropologist and archaeologist and opens up a new avenue for the study of the ancient human past.”

The post Scientists build intricate Neolithic family tree from 7,000-year-old DNA appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The global spice trade has been linking global economies and shaping the world for at least 4,000 years. Seasonings and herbs we completely take for granted today were once so valuable that a long held theory believes that Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt, even giving rise to the word “salary.”

[Related: For decades, turmeric’s ultra-golden glow had a deadly secret.]

Now, scientists have uncovered the remnants of Southeast Asia’s earliest evidence of curry–a dish of meat or vegetables seasoned with a mixture of spices– in Vietnam dating back almost 2,000 years. The findings are detailed in a study published July 21 in the journal Science Advances. 

The team from Australian National University analyzed the micro-remains from the surface of stone grinding tools recovered at the Oc Eo archaeological site in southern Vietnam. South Asia has played a vital role in the spice trade since the Bronze Age. Southeast Asia especially played a vital role due to its tropical climate and geographical location between the Indian subcontinent and China—perfect for growing and transporting the seeds, fruits, and other crops used to make spices.

Most of the tools studied for this paper were excavated between 2017 and 2019, while others had been stored at a local museum. The team initially set out to understand and learn more about the function of a set of stone grinding tools called “pesani,” that people of the ancient Funan kingdom possibly used to powder their spices. What they found, however, was delicious clues about ancient curry. 

The tools bore the remains of a wide range of spices still stored in cabinets today, including sand ginger, galangal, clove, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, fingerroot, and tumeric. 

“Our study suggests that curries were most likely introduced to Southeast Asia by migrants during the period of early trade contact via the Indian Ocean,” study co-author and Australian National University PhD candidate Weiwei Wang said in a statement. “Given these spices originated from various different locations, it’s clear people were undertaking long-distance journeys for trade purposes. 

The study also shows that the port city of Oc Eo played an important role in a trade that linked the economies and cultures of Asia, Africa, and Europe and sheds more light on how significant and coveted spices were as commodities in ancient civilizations. 

In addition to the microscopic remains on the stone tools at the site, the team also excavated some well-preserved seeds. 

“The preservation of plant remains in Oc Eo is exceptional – the seeds were so fresh it was hard to believe they were 2,000 years old,” co-author and Australian National University archeologist Hsiao-chun Hung said in a statement. “We believe further analysis could identify more spices and possibly even uncover unique plant species, adding to our understanding of the history of the region.”  

[Related: What would possess someone to eat a Carolina Reaper pepper? This writer tried to find out.]

Despite today’s curry powder being readily available stored in plastic containers at a local grocery store, the key ingredients haven’t really changed since ancient times. 

“The spices used today have not deviated significantly from the Oc Eo period,” co-author and archaeologist at Vietnam’s Southern Institute for Social Sciences Khanh Trung Kien Nguyen, said in a statement. “The key components are all still there, such as turmeric, cloves and cinnamon.” 

The team hopes to analyze the seeds found at the site in future studies and could identify more spices or even some unique plant species that will add to the understanding of this region’s history. Completing more dating at the site could also fill in some gaps on when and how each type or plant or spice was traded around the world. 

The post Leftovers of a 2,000-year-old curry discovered on stone cooking tools appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Our early human ancestors were a pretty busy bunch, cooking up brown crabs in caves in Portugal, mastering archery, and even taking on weaving. They may have been master woodworkers. According to a study published July 19 in the journal PLOS ONE, a 300,000-year-old wooden hunting weapon was scraped, seasoned, and sanded before it was used to kill animals. This new finding indicates that early human woodworking techniques were more sophisticated and developed than scientists once believed. Creating lightweight weapons may have enabled group hunts of smaller and medium sized animals. 

[Related: Women have been skillful, purposeful hunters in most foraging societies.]

The two-and-a-half foot long stick was first discovered in Schöningen, Germany in 1994 alongside other tools including throwing spears, thrusting spears, and a second throwing stick that was similarly sized. This new study used some of the advances in imaging techniques that have emerged in the almost three decades since the stick’s discovery—micro-CT scanning, 3D models, and 3D microscopy—to take a closer look.

“Our study confirms that this tool is the earliest known ‘throwing stick’, which is a weapon that was thrown rotationally, similar to a boomerang,” co-author and University of Reading palaeolithic archaeologist Annemieke Milks tells PopSci. “The slight curve of the tool, as well as how it was shaped to have more mass towards one half, rather than in the middle, would have helped it to rotate. We think that it might have been thrown at distances as far as 30 meters [98 feet].”

The stick was most likely used to hunt medium sized game such as red and roe deer, and potentially quicker and smaller prey including birds and hare. It likely would have been thrown like a modern day javelin. While it is lightweight, the high velocities at which these weapons can be launched could have resulted in some deadly high-energy impacts.

The carefully shaped points, fine surface, and polish from handling also suggested that it was part of a personal kit that was repeatedly used, instead of a quickly made tool that was thrown away. The 3D microscopy and micro-CT scanning helped the team identify all of the building steps, including how the bark was removed, how the two points were shaped, and how the wood was worked away to force a more aerodynamic weapon.

“We were really excited to see just how many steps and how detailed the woodworking is on this tool. We could also see that they sanded the surface to make it finely finished, and that some polish shows they used this tool for a really long time. This was a tool that was beautifully crafted and used for some time,” says Milks.

[Related: Archery may have helped humans gain leverage over Neanderthals.]

These early hunting weapons can also be thought of as tools that whole communities would use. Footprints belonging to both adults and children have been discovered at Schöningen, indicating that children were present at this site. At this time, hunting was key to survival, some children as young as three or four would learn to throw and use weapons and girls and women likely weren’t excluded from learning these crucial skills.

“In some societies, they start hunting in groups of kids, without any adults at all, and then in their teenage years they start hunting larger animals,” says Milks. “Although we don’t know for sure who threw this weapon, smaller tools like this throwing stick may have been particularly well-suited for kids to learn with.”

The stick is currently on display at the Forschungsmuseum Schöningen.

The post A javelin-like stick shows early humans may have been keen woodworkers appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Decoding the gender inequalities and misconceptions of the past is having a moment. In the past few weeks, studies have debunked the men as hunters women as gatherers myth, and we’re continuing to learn about the powerful people (and teens) that lived centuries ago. 

The Copper Age, between 3,200 and 2,200 years ago, was known for the widespread use of copper, but also gendered burials. According to a new study published July 6 in the journal Scientific Reports, the highest status individual of a Copper Age society on the Iberian peninsula was actually a woman, and not a man as originally believed. 

“This study was undertaken as part of a broader research looking at the interplay between early social complexity and gender inequalities,” study co-author and University of Seville prehistorian Leonardo García Sanjuán tells PopSci. “As part of this research, it became obvious that there is a serious problem in the identification of biological sex in prehistoric skeletons, which are often found in a poor state of preservation.”

Now redubbed the “Ivory Lady,” this woman’s tomb was first discovered in 2008 in Valencia on Spain’s southeastern coast. The find dates back to the Copper Age, when the metal was used for construction, agriculture, and even creating engravings of owls that may have been toys. The grave is also a rare example of single occupancy burial at the time and the tomb was filled with the largest collection of valuable and rare items in the region. These treasures include high-quality flint, ostrich eggshell amber, a rock crystal dagger, and ivory tusks.

All of these trinkets and single tomb initially indicated that the remains must belong to a prominent male, but peptides and DNA don’t lie. 

In the study, the team used peptide analysis to test for the presence of a protein called amelogenin in the teeth of the specimen. This protein is on the AMELX gene in the X chromosome and on the AMELY gene on the Y chromosome, which males have. Analysis of a molar and an incisor detected the presence of the AMELX gene, indicating that the remains belonged to a female rather than a male. 

“When we compare the Ivory Lady with other Iberian Copper Age burials (and we did a systematic comparison based on a compilation of data for more than 2,000 burials) she stands out as the most prominent person ever to have lived in that period,” says García Sanjuán.

Additionally, due to the lack of grave goods in infant burials, it’s likely that individuals at this time were not granted high status by their birth rite. The team believes that the Ivory Lady made it to the top through her merit and achievements in life.

[Related: Lucy, our ancient human ancestor, was super buff.]

According to García Sanjuán, the remains of a similarly high status male have not been found. The only similarly lavish Copper Age tomb in the region contained at least 15 women and was found next to the Ivory Lady’s grave. This tomb is presumed to have been built by those who claimed to be her descendants, which suggests that women held positions of leadership in Iberian society during this time. 

“In the ethnographic literature, the leaders of the pre-state societies are, in most cases, male individuals and concepts such as ‘big man’, ‘chiefdoms’ or ‘aggrandizers’ are used to describe these societies. Our study shows that this was not necessarily the case in prehistory,” says García Sanjuán. “In our view, this implies that we need not only to rethink what has been said for Copper Age Iberia, but for the processes that led to social complexity worldwide.”

This study was part of the broader project WOMAM: Women, Men and Mobility, Understanding Gender Inequality Through Prehistory which is funded by the European Commission.

The post Treasures from the ‘Ivory Lady’ tomb reveal a Copper Age woman’s extraordinary power appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

It can be tough to find archaeological evidence of woven baskets, ropes, and other goods made from plants, particularly in the world’s tropical regions, where warm and humid air breaks down green matter easier than stone or bone fragments. But some microscopic plant bits can stand up to the ravages of time, as shown by rare scraps stuck to three stone tools recently studied in the Philippines. These tiny traces of archaic plant technology are described in a study published June 30 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, offering indirect evidence of the earliest known tools made for working with the region’s tough vegetation.

[Related: People in China have been harvesting rice for more than 10,000 years.]

A team of researchers found these tools in Tabon Cave, located in the Palawan Province in the western Philippines. The scientists’ radiocarbon dating found these tools were as old as 39,000 years, pushing back the timeline of Southeast Asia’s fiber technology. Previously, the oldest evidence of plant goods in the area were roughly 8,000 year old fragments of mats found in southern China. 

Compared to the toolkits found from prehistoric groups in Africa or Europe, stone tools in Southeast Asia were not very standardized, using  diverse sizes and shapes. According to study co-author Hermine Xhauflair, a prehistorian and ethnoarchaeologist at the University of the Philippines Diliman, some scientists believe that this difference was due to adaptations to the environment that spurred an “Age of Bamboo.” Similar to the Stone Age or Bronze Age, which heavily relied on their namesake materials, tools at this time were likely mostly made of plentiful bamboo. This organic material doesn’t preserve well, so scientists must look for micro-traces for evidence of this critical chapter in human history.

“Mastering fiber technology was a very important step in human development,” Xhauflair tells PopSci. “It means that people had the potential and the capacity to make objects from multiple parts, bound by fiber; they could build complex houses and structures, make baskets and traps, string bows to hunt, rig sails to boats, and even build the boats.”

The stone tools that Xhauflair and her team found in Tabon Cave show  microscopic evidence of the wear and tear associated with fiber technology. They looked at the plant processing techniques still used by the region’s Indigenous communities, including the Tagbanua, Palaw’an, Tao’t Bato, Molbog, Batak, Agutaynen, and Cuyonon. Rough and rugged plants such as palm and bamboo are stripped and their stems are turned into supple fibers for weaving or tying. 

[Related: ‘Fingerprints’ confirm the seafaring stories of adventurous Polynesian navigators.]

Building from these contemporary practices, the team conducted multiple surveys and fieldwork in the rainforest near the cave to find the signature of the different plants and fiber technologies. From that, they could build a database. They then used optical, digital, and scanning electron microscopes on the stone tools from Tabon Cave and found consistent patterns of damage to the stone tools and the ones used today. 

Further study will shed light on how the ancient residents of Tabon Cave made baskets, traps, ropes for houses, bows for hunting, and more. This discovery also raises the question of whether plant-based techniques have persisted, uninterrupted, for hundreds of generations. “The technique used nowadays to process plant fibers in the region was already known 39,000 years ago. Are we in [the] presence of a very long-lasting tradition?” Xhauflair asks. “Or was this technique discovered at several points in time and abandoned?” 

The post Damage on 39,000-year-old tools may reveal a prehistoric ‘Age of Bamboo’ appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The doomed city of Pompeii is more known for the massive volcanic eruption and earthquakes that destroyed the city in 79 CE than its culinary offerings. However, people in the ancient city near present-day Naples, Italy still ate—and their art offers us a window into what they enjoyed. To the untrained eye, a still-life fresco that was recently uncovered looks like present-day pizza, but the experts at the Pompeii archaeological site say it’s not your usual slice.  

[Related: The best way to reheat pizza (and some things you should never do).]

Tomatoes and mozzarella are two of the key ingredients that make up the beloved dish, but sadly they were not available in Italy 2,000 years ago when the fresco was painted. Tomatoes were only introduced to Europe from North and South America in the 1500s.  Some historians believe that the discovery of gooey, stretchy mozzarella cheese led directly to the invention of pizza in the 1700s in Naples. 

The archeologists believe that the tasty-looking fresco is focaccia covered in fruits, such as pomegranate and possibly dates, and is finished with spices or a type of pesto. The focaccia is served on a silver plate and is paired with wine in a chalice. 

The fresco also shows a contrast between what we may see as a frugal meal served dished up on a luxurious on a silvery tray. Pizza has experienced quite a transformation over the years.  “[Pizza was] born as a poor-man’s dish in southern Italy, which has won over the world and is served even in starred restaurants,” director of the Pompeii archaeological site Gabriel Zuchtriegel said in a statement. 

UNESCO listed the art of making Neapolitan pizza, or Pizzaiuolo, on its cultural heritage list in 2017, recognizing its four phases of dough preparation and for being baked exclusively in a wood oven at 905 degrees Fahrenheit. These days, pizza represents about one-third of the food budget of foreign visitors to Italy and generates roughly $16.4 billion in revenue for the country. 

The fresco was uncovered during new excavations in a central location of Pompeii called Regio IX. The painting was on the remains of a wall of an ancient Pompeian house. This house was connected to a bakery that was partially explored between 1888 and 1891 and researchers reopened investigations into the house last January.

[Related: ‘Violent’ earthquakes accompanied the infamous volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii.]

The tasty visual belongs to a genre of images, known as Xenia in antiquity. The pictures took inspiration from the “gifts of hospitality” that were offered to guests based on a Greek tradition from the Hellenistic period (Third to First Centuries BCE). About 300 of these representations have been found in Vesuvian cities. 

“Pompeii never ceases to amaze; it is a chest that always reveals new treasures,” Italian Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano said in a statement. “The conservation and development of the heritage as stated by Article 9 of the Constitution, are an absolute priority.”

Pompeii was destroyed in a cataclysmic volcanic eruption from nearby Mount Vesuvius around 79 CE. The explosion’s sudden and deadly nature preserved most of the ancient Roman city intact and embalmed in volcanic ash. Archaeologists have found the remains of over 1,300 victims in the site over the last 250 years.

The post A fresco discovered in Pompeii looks like ancient pizza—but it’s likely focaccia appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

From the doomed real-life crewmembers of the Nineteenth Century whaleship Essex to the fictional yet grisly soccer-player on soccer-player crime in season 2 of the hit-series Yellowjackets, cannibalism grips our minds in both fiction and the real world.

[Related: Dinosaur cannibalism was real, and Colorado paleontologists have the bones to prove it.]

In a study published June 26 in the journal Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from the Smithsonian describe what could be the oldest decisive evidence of our close evolutionary relatives butchering—and likely eating—one another.

The team examined a 1.45-million-year-old left shin bone from an unknown Homo sapien relative that was found in northern Kenya. The bone has nine cut marks, and analysis of 3D models of the fossil showed that they are very close to the damage that is inflicted by stone tools. According to the team, this is the oldest instance of this behavior known with a high degree of confidence and specificity.

“The information we have tells us that hominins were likely eating other hominins at least 1.45 million years ago,” study co-author and National Museum of Natural History paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner said in a statement.  “There are numerous other examples of species from the human evolutionary tree consuming each other for nutrition, but this fossil suggests that our species’ relatives were eating each other to survive further into the past than we recognized.”

The fossilized tibia was housed in the National Museums of Kenya’s Nairobi National Museum collections. Pobiner encountered them while searching for clues on which prehistoric predators could have hunted and eaten our ancient relatives and she noticed the evidence of butchery while checking the bone for bite marks.

Pobiner sent molds of these cuts to co-author Michael Pante of Colorado State University to try to figure out if these were actually cut marks. Pante created 3D scans of the molds and then compared the shape of the marks with a database of 898 individual tooth, butchery, and trample marks that were created through controlled experiments.

According to the analysis, nine of the 11 total marks were positively identified as clear matches for the type of damage inflicted by stone tools. The remaining two marks were likely a big cat’s bite marks, with a lion being the closest match. The bite marks also could have come from one of the three different types of saber-tooth cats that prowled the landscape at this time. 

The cut marks alone do nor prove that whomever butchered the owner of this leg made a meal out of them, but Pobiner believes that this seems to be the most likely scenario. The markings are located where the calf muscle would have attached to the bone, which is a good place to cut if the assailant’s goal was to remove a chunk of flesh. Additionally, the cut marks are all oriented the same way, suggesting that a hand wielding a stone tool may have made the marks in succession without changing their grip or adjusting the angle. 

[Related: Lucy, our ancient human ancestor, was super buff.]

“These cut marks look very similar to what I’ve seen on animal fossils that were being processed for consumption,” Pobiner said. “It seems most likely that the meat from this leg was eaten and that it was eaten for nutrition as opposed to for a ritual.”

On the surface, it looks like this could be an example of prehistoric cannibalism, but cannibalism requires the eater and the eaten to be of the same species. Initially, the shin bone was identified as Australopithecus boisei and then as Homo erectus in 1990. Today, experts agree that there is not enough conclusive information to know what species of hominin the bone belongs to. The use of stone tools also doesn’t narrow down which species might have been the butcher. 

This fossil could be a trace of prehistoric cannibalism, but also may have been a case of one species making a meal out of its evolutionary cousin.

Since none of the stone-tool cut markings overlap with two bite marks, it makes it even harder for scientists to infer anything about the order of events that took place when this hominin lost its leg. It’s possible that a big cat may have scavenged the remains after other hominins removed most of the meat from the leg bone, or that a big cat killed this unlucky prehistoric human and was chased off by other hominins that wanted to take over the kill. 

[Related: 2.9 million-year-old tools found in Kenya stir up a ‘fascinating whodunnit.’]

A fossilized skull first discovered in South Africa in 1976 previously sparked debate about the earliest known case of human relatives butchering each other. This skull was roughly 1.5 to 2.6 million years old. Studies on the skull from 2000 and 2018 disagreed about the origin of the marks left on the skull’s right cheek bone. One proposes that the marks were the result from stone tools used by hominid relatives, while the other study asserts that the marks were formed through contact with sharp-edged stone blocks that were found lying against the skull. If ancient hominins actually did use tools to put marks on the skill, it still isn’t clear if they were butchering each other for food, due to a lack of large muscle groups on the skull.

In future tests to determine once and for all that the fossilized tibia in this new study is actually the oldest cut-marked hominin fossil, Pobiner said she would love to reexamine the skull from South Africa, since it potentially has cut marks that were made using similar techniques observed in her new study. 

The findings are also another example of the treasures that could be lurking in museum drawers and cupboards around the world just waiting to be uncovered. 

“You can make some pretty amazing discoveries by going back into museum collections and taking a second look at fossils,” Pobiner said. “Not everyone sees everything the first time around. It takes a community of scientists coming in with different questions and techniques to keep expanding our knowledge of the world.”

The post Cut-up prehistoric bone raises questions about early human cannibalism appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Just in time for this year’s summer solstice and six months ahead of the winter solstice, a team of archeologists announced the discovery of a 4,000-year-old sanctuary composed of burial mounds and ditches in the central Netherlands. The sanctuary is about 45 miles east of Rotterdam, in the town of Tiel. 

[Related: Extinct human cousins may have beaten us to inventing burial rituals.] 

The team believes it may have been built to align with the sun on the solstices, similar to southern England’s most famous stone circle, Stonehenge. The main burial mound is roughly 65 feet in diameter, and its passages are lined up to serve as a solar calendar. The calendar was to determine events such as religious festivals and harvest days, according to the discovery team.

Human skulls, valuables such as a bronze spearhead, and offerings—including animal skeletons—have been found at various locations where the sun shone through the openings during the longest and shortest days of the year, according to the municipality. The burial mound contained the remains of roughly 60 men, women, and children. The burial sites were likely used for 800 years, according to the team. 

“What a spectacular archaeological discovery! Archaeologists have found a 4,000-year-old religious sanctuary on an industrial site,” officials from the town of Tiel wrote on their Facebook page. “This is the first time a site like this has been discovered in the Netherlands.”

[Related: The Aztecs’ solar calendar helped grow food for millions of people.]

Digging and excavations began in this “open-air sanctuary” in 2017, and the team found items dating to the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Roman Empire, and the Middle Ages over the past six years. 

By examining the differences in the color and composition of the clay around it, scientists located three burial mounds a few miles from the Waal River. Within one of the graves, the team found a woman buried with a glass bead from present-day Iraq (Mesopotamia). This bead is the oldest ever found in the Netherlands, and the team says it proves people from this time were in contact with people who lived over 3,000 miles away. 

“Glass was not made here, so the bead must have been a spectacular item as for people then it was an unknown material,” University of Groningen archaeology professor Stijn Arnoldussen said in a statement to the AFP. “Things were already being exchanged in those times. The bead may have been above ground for hundreds of years before it reached Tiel, but of course, it didn’t have to be.”

Some of these discoveries will be featured in a local museum in Tiel and in the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities at a later date.

The post Newly discovered ‘Stonehenge of the Netherlands’ is 4,000 years old appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Cave paintings and markings uncovered by anthropologists and archaeologists can be categorized as art—some may even count as early forms of writing. Despite finding drawings in caves across Europe and as far as Indonesia from thousands of years ago, relatively little is still known about the artistic expressions made by both primitive Homo sapiens and extinct Neanderthals.

[Related: How Neanderthal genetic material could influence nose shapes to this day.]

According to a study published June 21 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, some markings on a cave wall in France date back more than 57,000 years ago, making them the oldest known engravings made by Neanderthals to date. 

“Fifteen years after the resumption of excavations at the La Roche-Cotard site, the engravings have been dated to over 57,000 years ago and, thanks to stratigraphy, probably to around 75,000 years ago, making this the oldest decorated cave in France, if not Europe!” the authors wrote in a statement. 

Neanderthals are slowly shaking their reputation as our more “primitive” cousins. A 2021 find from a “Unicorn Cave” in Germany found early hints of Neanderthal art dating back 51,000 years. Neanderthals also could have lived in tight family bonds and possibly even cooked crab 90,000 years ago. 

Only a few artistic productions like the ones from Germany are attributed to Neanderthals, and their meaning is still subject to debate. The newly-found drawings, spotted in a cave called La Roche-Cotard in central France’s Loire Valley, could give scientists more insight. 

The team interprets this series of non-figurative markings on the wall as finger-flutings– or marks made by human hands. They made a plotting analysis and used photogrammetry to build 3D models of the markings and compared them with known and experimental human markings. Based on the arrangement, spacing, and shape of the engravings, the team believes that they are deliberate, intentional, and organized shapes that human hands created. 

The sediments within the cave were dated using a process called optically-stimulated luminescence dating. According to the researchers, this particular cave was closed up by sediment about 57,000 years ago—roughly 3,000 years before Homo sapiens became established in Europe. 

The age of the sediments, combined with the fact that stone tools in the cave are associated with a Neanderthal-specific technology called Mousterian, is strong evidence that these engravings are the work of Neanderthals, according to the team.

[Related: Sex, not violence, could’ve sealed the fate of the Neanderthals.]

These nonfigurative, and still indecipherable, creations are a similar age with cave engravings that Homo sapiens made in other parts of the world, adding more evidence to the idea that Neanderthals were as complex and diverse as our own human ancestors. 

The post Neanderthals were likely creating art 57,000 years ago appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Skull analysis is helping archaeologists in the United Kingdom reconstruct the face of a 7th century CE 16 year-old-woman. The woman was buried near Cambridge, England with the Trumpington Cross, an extremely rare gold and garnet cross.  

[Related: The Roman Britons cared a lot about hair removal, and it shows in artifacts.]

The artifacts were first discovered in 2012 by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit at Trumpington Meadows. A forensic artist created this teenager’s likeness using measurements of her skull, as well as data on the tissue depth of Caucasian females. Precise hair and eye color couldn’t be determined without DNA analysis.

“It was interesting to see her face developing. Her left eye was slightly lower, about half a centimeter, than her right eye. This would have been quite noticeable in life,” Hew Morrison, a forensic artist from Inverness, Scotland, said in a statement.

Bioarcheologists conducted isotopic analysis of her bones and teeth, which revealed that she moved to England from somewhere in Central Europe after she turned seven. They deciphered that the proportion of protein in her diet decreased by a small amount, but it was enough to make a difference towards the end of her short life. 

“She was quite a young girl when she moved, likely from part of southern Germany, close to the Alps, to a very flat part of England. She was probably quite unwell and she traveled a long way to somewhere completely unfamiliar – even the food was different. It must have been scary,” bioarchaeologist Sam Leggett from the University of Edinburgh said in a statement. 

Earlier analysis of her remains indicate that she suffered from illness, but could not reveal the exact cause of her death. According to the team, her burial itself is remarkable. She was laid to rest on a carved wooden bed, wearing the ornate Trumpington Cross, fine clothing, and gold pins. 

Only 18 bed burials have been uncovered in the UK, and this ornate cross made with gold and garnets is one of only five of its kind that have ever been uncovered in Britain. The best known example of this kind of cross was found in the coffin of St. Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral. It likely identified the teen as an aristocrat or royal and one of England’s earliest converts to Christianity. 

In 597 CE, Pope Gregory sent St. Augustine of Canterbury to England on a mission to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxon kings. This process continued for many decades and even included a mass baptism on Christmas Day 597. 

[Related: A lost ‘bawdy bard’ act reveals roots of naughty British comedy.]

“She must have known that she was important and she had to carry that on her shoulders. Her isotopic results match those of two other women who were similarly buried on beds in this period in Cambridgeshire,” said Legget. “So it seems that she was part of an elite group of women who probably traveled from mainland Europe, most likely Germany, in the 7th century, but they remain a bit of a mystery. Were they political brides or perhaps brides of Christ? The fact that her diet changed once she arrived in England suggests that her lifestyle may have changed quite significantly.”

The Trumpington Cross will be displayed with the delicate gold and garnet pins connected by a gold chain at a new exhibition in  Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology starting this week, alongside the forensic image of what this young lady may have looked like.

The post This 7th-century teen was buried with serious bling—and we now know what she may have looked like appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The history of religion in ancient Egypt is full of fascinating details and mysteries. While some of the Egyptian gods, take Osiri or Isis, are relatively well known, there are certainly some that are far from common knowledge. For example, Bes, the deity of music, merriment, and childbirth. This god was depicted as a long armed, imperfect, “dwarf-like” being, according to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. Worship of the god was brought by Phoenicians as far as Spain’s Balearic islands, notably to Ibiza or the “Island of Bes.”

[Related: Ancient Egyptians had a unique way of mummifying crocodiles.]

Many cups and vessels were fashioned in the shape of Bes’s head, with the hope that the liquid inside would contain healing properties.According to a preprint study published to Research Square, traces of hallucinogenic plants were found in sampled residues of a Bes vessel dated back to second century BCE, also known as the Ptolemaic dynasty (if that sounds familiar, it’s likely because Cleopatra was the last queen of the iconic empire). 

Researchers from Florida and Italy started their journey by analyzing the DNA inside of a vase housed in the Tampa Museum of Art. This vase had come into the museum’s possession in 1984 from a private collection. Records show it was purchased in Cairo in 1960 and found in the Fayum district, a region appropriately known for its fertile land for farming. 

In the vase, the researchers found traces of two intriguing plants—first the Syrian rue, which causes stimulating and hallucinogenic effects in humans at low doses. The second, the blue water lily, which has psychoactive properties and has been used throughout history in traditional medicine to help with woes like sleep deprivation and anxiety. 

[Related: Tomb of a forgotten queen is one of several new stunning Egyptian discoveries.]

Beyond just mind-bending plants, the Bes-shaped jug had traces of fermentation yeast, sesame seeds, wheat, fruit, honey and “human proteins.” Sometimes, these human proteins come from skin, and are classified as contaminants, according to the paper. But these were a “deliberate addition”, the authors write, considering the proteins likely came from breast milk, oral or vaginal fluids, and blood. 

The odd mix led the authors to believe this was likely a ceremonial drink linked to the “Myth of the Solar Eye” where Bes fielded off the wrath of bloodthirsty Hathor with an alcoholic drink disguised as blood.

The post This ancient Egyptian vessel once held a hallucinogenic brew appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

In late November 1974, the world of archeology changed when scientists discovered Lucy (a nod to a famous Beatles track played over and over at the dig site), a 40-percent complete fossil of a young female Australopithecus afarensis in Ethiopia. This species of ancient hominid was living and walking around on two feet in East Africa 3.7 to 3 million years ago, long before the earliest stone tools were made. While Lucy and her relatives were shorter, more ape-like, and had smaller brains than Homo sapiens, they showed just how long human-like creatures were evolving and strolling about on Earth.

Just recently, scientists uncovered that Lucy, whose remains are housed in a specially constructed safe in the National Museum of Ethiopia, may have been even more like us than we thought—and considerably more muscular in the legs department. According to a new paper published on June 13 in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Lucy could walk around upright just as well as a person.

[Related: The ‘granddaddy’ of all early hominins walked on Earth a lot longer than we thought.]

Previously, paleoanthropologists disagreed on Lucy’s bipedal stance. Some thought she likely waddled around with her back hunched over, not unlike today’s chimpanzees. However, Ashleigh Wiseman, a paleoanthropology research associate at the University of Cambridge, created 3D models of the leg and pelvis muscles of the 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis. After recreating 36 muscles in each of the ancient hominids’ legs, she found that Lucy’s stance was quite similar to humans. 

A 3D polygonal model, guided by imaging scan data and muscle scarring, reconstructing the lower limb muscles of the Australopithecus afarensis fossil AL 288-1, known as ‘Lucy’. Credit: Dr Ashleigh Wiseman

Not only could she walk like a Homo sapien, but she was considerably more muscular than us—her calves and thighs were more than twice the size of those of modern humans. Her thighs in particular were made up of 74 percent muscle, compared to the average 50 percent split between fat and muscle in our species today. 

This shouldn’t be too surprising, however, given the world ancient hominids lived in. To manage life in East Africa 3 million years ago, Lucy and her cousins would’ve had to roam wooded grasslands, while swiftly switching to climbing forest canopies, Wiseman said in a statement. 

“We are now the only animal that can stand upright with straight knees. Lucy’s muscles suggest that she was as proficient at bipedalism as we are, while possibly also being at home in the trees,” Wiseman added. “Lucy likely walked and moved in a way that we do not see in any living species today.”

[Related: 2.9 million-year-old tools found in Kenya stir up a ‘fascinating whodunnit’.]

3D models have previously been used to reconstruct the muscles of other lost species. In fact, Wiseman mentions that the method has helped paleontologists figure out the shockingly slow running speeds of T. rexes. But recreating the builds of our ancestors lets us see how far we’ve come—and how much muscle we’ve lost as our lifestyles have shifted. 

“Of course, in the fossil record we are left looking at the bare bones,” Wiseman told CNN. “But muscles animate the body—they allow you to walk, run, jump and even dance. So, if we want to understand how our ancestors moved, we first need to reconstruct their soft tissues.”

The post Lucy, our ancient human ancestor, was super buff appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Humans can be found pretty much everywhere on the planet, but this wasn’t always the case. After Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago, it was the beginning of a long journey as our species spread to distant corners of the world. 

Previously, evidence largely supported that the early voyage from Africa to Southeast Asia and eventually Australia was by the seaside: Our ancestors stuck to coastal and island locations, moving through today’s Sumatra, Philippines, and Borneo. But new findings show that island-hopping may have been just one method of travel for the humans who  became Australia’s First People. A paper published June 13 in Nature Communications outlines how modern humans passed by a cave in Northern Laos on their way through Asia, around 40,000 years earlier than anthropologists had thought. 

[Related: Neanderthals caught and cooked crabs 90,000 years ago.]

The findings from the Tam Pà Ling cave demonstrate two crucial discoveries—that modern humans moved through Arabia and Asia much earlier than previously known, and that these humans weren’t afraid to travel through woods and forests to get there. 

“Tam Pà Ling plays a key role in the story of modern human migration through Asia but its significance and value is only just being recognised,” Fabrice Demeter, a University of Copenhagen palaeoanthropologist and one of the paper’s lead authors, said in a news release. 

The story begins back in 2009 with the discovery of a skull and mandible in the cave located 186 miles from the shore. But, Laotion law doesn’t permit direct dating of fossils found at its World Heritage sites, which includes Tam Pà Ling. At the time, using a form of luminescence dating on nearby sediments, scientists placed the fossils at a minimum age of 46,000 years, which is in line with prior research investigating when humans showed up in the region.

[Related: Ancient Mesopotamian texts show when and why humans first kissed.]

But, in the following years, more fossils have been found—including pieces of human skeletons beneath around 15 feet of sediment. To figure out the age of these skeletal remains, the researchers used uranium-series dating on a stalactite tip buried in sentiment, as well as uranium-series and electron-spin-resonance on two pairs of animal teeth found about 6 feet deeper. This chronology reveals a human presence in the region for at least 56,000 years, according to the new research: A fragment of human bone buried below around 23 feet of sediment suggests humans arrived between 68,000 and 86,000 years ago.

Strangely enough, this cave is not too far from Laos’ Cobra Cave, where an ancient Denisovan tooth discovery placed the mysterious human cousin in the region as far as 164,000 years ago. There may be more buried secrets of early humans waiting to be uncovered, as author and Macquarie University geochronologist Kira Westaway said in a statement: “We have much to learn from the caves and forests of Southeast Asia.”

The post Humans ventured through Asia’s forests much earlier than we thought appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

If you were able to view the southern coast of Peru from a bird’s-eye view, you’d be able to make out dozens of strange drawings of creatures: a giant spider, whale, hummingbird, and condor. These are the Nazca lines, Peru’s own archaeological enigma. First discovered in the early 20th century, these lines were supposedly made from around 400 BCE to 650 CE, but how people created the desert pictures, tens to hundreds of feet long, is still somewhat shrouded in mystery.

While hundreds of these strange drawings have already been found, there are still more that elude even the most careful observer. Which is why new searches rely on nonhuman helpers. An artificial intelligence method was able to recently scope out four new lines, according to a report in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Researchers, including lead author Masato Sakai, a professor of anthropology and archaeology at Yamagata University in Japan, have been looking for hidden Nazca lines for years—and as of December 2022, his team had found 168 new geoglyphs across the Nazca Pampa using satellite imagery, aerial photography, LIDAR scanning, and other methods. In 2016, after capturing a few especially high-resolution photos of the lines, Sakai and his team took things a step further, according to Live Science. 

[Related: What the longest-lasting Mesoamerican cities all had in common.]

Teaming up with IBM Japan and IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in the United States, the researchers used 21 known Nazca geoglyphs to train the deep learning system on what to look for, or elements commonly found in the drawings. Then they set their program to work combing through aerial photos. The first AI-captured Nazca line, an odd-looking humanoid, was found back in 2019, and just recently the software has uncovered three more, which include a 250-foot-long pair of legs and a 62-foot-long fish. 

The deep learning system, according to the report, is about 21 times faster than a human when it comes to analyzing aerial photographs. Poring over the entire Nazca Pampa to identify figurative drawings (not including the many geometric or linear ones) would take around 68 days straight for a human archeologist, according to the paper. With the help of the AI, that could take only 78 hours. 

Much like other culturally or ecologically important sites, the Nazca lines face threats from climate change, human activity, and more. Time is of the essence to find and preserve these eccentric pieces of human history—and Sakai and team write that the pairing of field research and AI could lead to “more efficient and effective investigations.”

The post Scientists use AI to help uncover elusive Nazca lines appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Since its initial discovery was announced in 2015, an extinct hominid species named Homo naledi (H. naledi) has been making anthropological waves. Now, three new preprint studies published June 5 in the journal eLife and presented at the Richard Leakey Memorial Conference suggest that these human cousins may have buried their dead and carved symbols into cave walls, showing that they were capable of complex behavior despite their smaller brains. 

[Related: New Species On Human Family Tree Discovered In Ancient Mass Grave.]

While the research hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, some outside scientists believe that more evidence is needed to challenge what is already known about how complex thinking evolved in humans. If these new findings are true, it would overthrow the current belief that humans are the only species to bury their dead.

H. naledi’s brain is roughly one-third the size of the human brain. Previously, most scientists believed that the mental capacity behind burial, making marks, and other more complex cultural behaviors required a bigger brain, like those of the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. 

“It’s not how big your brain is, it’s how you use it and what it’s structured for,” study co-author and University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks said in a statement. Hawks has helped lead the H. naledi  team since its beginning.

The fossil remains of the species were first uncovered about 10 years ago in the Rising Star cave system northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. Since then, team members have descended into the tight underground caves that they say show this species in a new light. 

One study describes the potential intentional burial sites that held fossilized remains of children and adults in the fetal position and buried in shallow holes in the ground. One of the other studies describes a series of marks carved into the cave’s limestone walls that include cross-hatched lines, squares, and triangles. 

Additionally,  H. naledi  had a smaller frame based on the skeletons that have been excavated. Archaeologists estimate that the average  individual weighed less than 90 pounds and was under five feet tall. This small stature would have helped them navigate the extremely narrow and cramped passageways in this cave system. Some of the cave system’s labyrinth of passages are as narrow as seven inches and are located 300 feet underground. 

The bones found in the cave are between 236,000 and 335,000 years old, which is older than the graves at Qafzeh cave in Israel. These 92,000-year-old graves are commonly cited as the earliest known examples of human burial.

[Related: Humans and Neanderthals could have lived together even earlier than we thought.]

“This is a great moment in human history,” Lee Berger, the South African paleontologist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence who co-wrote all three papers, told The Washington Post. Berger said people have wondered, “‘What will we do when we meet another culture as complex as us?’ Well, you just did.”

Berger has drawn criticism in his three-decades-long career for announcing or publishing research before gathering sufficient supporting evidence. He, in turn, has criticized the practice of waiting years to share discoveries with the public, calling it “elitist,” according to The Washington Post. 

These new findings show that the caves still have more to offer scientists working to understand human evolution, according to Hawks. The team hopes to have more trained eyes and experts into the caves to search for more evidence. 

“We have to approach it like an escape room. We have to study every hidden detail now,” Hawks says. “This whole cave system might be part of some kind of cultural space.”

The post Extinct human cousins may have beaten us to inventing burial rituals appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Ancient Romans were apparently staunch believers that “pain is beauty,” especially when body hair removal is involved. A collection of tweezers once used to remove armpit hair are amidst over 400 new artifacts on display at a Wroxeter Roman City in Shropshire, England. 

[Related: This ancient Roman villa was equipped with wine fountains.]

Some of the objects related to both cleanliness and beauty in Roman times include a skin scraper called a strigil, bottles of perfume, jewelry made from jet and bone, amulets to ward off evil, and make-up applicators. 

“At Wroxeter alone we have discovered over 50 pairs of tweezers, one of the largest collections of this item in Britain, indicating that it was a popular accessory! The advantage of the tweezer was that it was safe, simple and cheap, but unfortunately not pain free,” site curator Cameron Moffett said in a statement. 

Wroxeter Roman City was once known as Viroconium Cornoviorum, which was a thriving urban spot that was once about the size of the ill-fated Pompeii, Italy during the Flavian dynasty. It was once the fourth largest town in Roman Britain and was founded as a legionary fortress in the mid-first century. It was officially established as a town in the 90s CE and was inhabited until the fifth century.

Various excavations of the site have uncovered a forum where laws were made, market, a multipurpose office, community center, and shopping center, and a bath house. In the bath house, Roman Britons would have bathed and socialized, as Romans generally cared a great deal about cleanliness and public image. 

Roman cities throughout their empire had toilets in addition to these communal baths, and many Romans owned personal cleaning kits. These kits included an ear scoop for wax removal, a nail cleaner, and tweezers. Roman tweezers were used for way more than crafting the perfect eyebrow arch. They were used on all unwanted body hair, which sounds a bit like its own form of torture, and was usually performed by slaves, according to English Heritage, a charitable organization that oversees over 400 historic sites in England.

“It may come as a surprise to some that in Roman Britain the removal of body hair was as common with men as it was with women. Particularly for sports like wrestling, there was a social expectation that men engaging in exercise that required minimal clothing would have prepared themselves by removing all their visible body hair,” said Moffett. “It’s interesting to see this vogue for the removal of body hair around again after millennia, for everyone, although luckily modern methods are slightly less excruciating!”

[Related: Scientists think they found a 2,000-year-old dildo in ancient Roman ruins.]

To help set them apart from “barbarians,” Roman Britons preferred a cleanly shaved face on men. Hair plucking was so painful that Roman author and politician Seneca once wrote a letter complaining about the noise coming from from the public baths, noting “the skinny armpit hair-plucker whose cries are shrill, so as to draw people’s attention, and never stop, except when he is doing his job and making someone else shriek for him.”

For women, removing hair was often the perception of beauty. “There are many, many written sources including Pliny and Ovid,” Moffett told The Guardian. “They are all writing about how you will need to keep on top of the body hair and you know, gosh, no man is going to be interested in you if you’ve got armpit hair.”

A reconstructed Roman town house stands among the city’s surviving ruins, and many of the objects discovered at Wroxeter depict the daily lives of those who once lived there. 

The post The Roman Britons cared a lot about hair removal, and it shows in artifacts appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

It’s been a little over four years since a major fire ravaged France’s iconic Notre Dame de Paris cathedral, causing an estimated $865 million of damage to the majority of its roof and recognizable spire. Since then, the French government, engineers, and a cadre of other dedicated restoration experts have been hard at work rebuilding the architectural wonder, which is currently slated to reopen to the public by the end of 2024.

It’s a tight turnaround, and one that would be much easier to meet if carpenters used modern technology and techniques to repair the iconic building. But as AP News explained earlier this week, it’s far more important to use the same approaches that helped first construct Notre Dame—well over 800 years ago. According to the recent dispatch, rebuilders are consciously employing medieval era tools such as hand axes, mallets, and chisels to reforge the cathedral’s hundreds of tons’ worth of oak wood roofing beams.

Although it would progress faster with the use of modern equipment and materials, that’s not the point. Instead, it’s ethically and artistically far more imperative to stay true to “this cathedral as it was built in the Middle Ages,” explained Jean-Louis Georgelin, a retired general for the French overseeing the project.

[Related: The Notre Dame fire revealed a long-lost architectural marvel.]

Thankfully, everything appears to be on track for the December 2024 reopening. Last month, overseers successfully conducted a “dry run” to assemble and erect large sections of the timber frame at a workshop in western France’s Loire Valley. The next time the pieces are put together will be atop the actual Notre Dame cathedral.

As rudimentary as some of these construction techniques may seem now, at the time they were considered extremely advanced. Earlier this year, in fact, researchers discovered Notre Dame was likely the first Gothic-style cathedral to utilize iron for binding sections of stonework together.

It’s not all old-school handiwork, however. The team behind Notre Dame’s rebuilt roofing plans to transport the massive components to Paris via trucks, and then lifted into place with help from a large mechanical crane. Over this entire process, detailed computer analysis was utilized to make absolutely sure carpenters’ measurements and handhewn work were on the right track. Still, the melding of bygone and modern technology appears to perfectly complement one another, ensuring that when Notre Dame finally literally and figuratively rises from the ashes, it will be as stunning as ever.

The post Workers rely on medieval era tech to reconstruct the Notre Dame appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Libraries are full of unique and missing oddities from long lost letters to famous forgeries. A newly discovered record of live comedy performance in medieval England is yet another example of how deep the roots of British theater run. In a study published May 30 in The Review of English Studies, researchers describe a 15th century manuscript with slapstick, lively text mocking everyone from kings and priests down to lower classes. If that’s not enough, the naughty narrative encourages drunkenness and features a killer rabbit.

[Related: Codebreakers have finally deciphered the lost letters of Mary, Queen of Scots.]

These new texts also contain the earliest recorded use of a ‘red herring’ in the English language, which is a misleading statement, question, or argument that is meant to redirect the conversation or text conversation away from its original subject. Additionally, it fills in some knowledge gaps regarding comic culture in England between Geoffrey Chaucer and the Renaissance’s William Shakespeare.

In the Middle Ages, minstrels often traveled from taverns and fairs to entertain people. Fictional minstrels such as Robin Hood’s Allan-a-Dale, are common in literature, but historical references to actual performers are more rare. When the minstrel was performing these newly found works, the Wars of the Roses were still raging. Life was very difficult for the majority of English people. However, study author James Wade, an early English literature specialist from Cambridge University, says this text shows that fun entertainment was still flourishing as social mobility increased.

Wade found the text when researching in the National Library of Scotland. Wade saw that a scribe had written: “By me, Richard Heege, because I was at that feast and did not have a drink.”

“It was an intriguing display of humor and it’s rare for medieval scribes to share that much of their character,” Wade said. This little joke encouraged him to look into why, how, and where Heege had copied these texts.

This new study focuses on the first of nine booklets that make up the larger Heege Manuscript. The booklet contains three texts that Wade concludes were copied down in 1480 from a memory-aid written by an unknown minstrel that likely performed them near the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border in central England. The three texts are a mock sermon written in prose, a tail-rhyme burlesque romance titled “The Hunting of the Hare,” and an alliterative nonsense verse called “The Battle of Brackonwet.” 

“Most medieval poetry, song and storytelling has been lost,” Wade said in a statement. “Manuscripts often preserve relics of high art. This is something else. It’s mad and offensive, but just as valuable. Stand-up comedy has always involved taking risks and these texts are risky! They poke fun at everyone, high and low.”

[Related: Medieval knights rode tiny horses into battle.]

All three texts are comedic and designed for live performance, since the narrator tells the audience to pay attention and even to pass him a drink. The texts also feature regional humor and inside jokes for a local audience.

Wade believes that this minstrel wrote part of his act down since the many nonsensical sequences would have been very difficult to recall solely by memory. 

“He didn’t give himself the kind of repetition or story trajectory which would have made things simpler to remember,” he said “Here we have a self-made entertainer with very little education creating really original, ironic material. To get an insight into someone like that from this period is incredibly rare and exciting.”

Like many present day comedians and actors, medieval minstrels are believed to have had day jobs as peddlers and plowmen, but performed their theatrical gigs at night. Some also may have even gone on tour by traveling the county, while others stuck to local venues. Wade believes the minstrel in these new texts was more of a local performer. 

“You can find echoes of this minstrel’s humor in shows like Mock the Week, situational comedies and slapstick,” said Wade.“The self-irony and making audiences the butt of the joke are still very characteristic of British stand-up comedy.

The post A lost ‘bawdy bard’ act reveals roots of naughty British comedy appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The persistent pathogen known as the plague was circulating around Europe and Asia centuries before it wiped out about 25 million people. A team of scientists have just recently found 4,000 year-old DNA belonging to Yersinia pestis, or the bacteria that causes the plague. That’s about 3,000 years before the plague before the Black Death began. The findings were detailed in a study published May 30 in the journal Nature Communications and represent the oldest evidence of the plague in Britain found to date. 

[Related: Scientists tracked the plague’s journey through Denmark using really old teeth.]

The team identified two cases of Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis) from human remains found uncovered in a mass burial site in southwest England near Somerset and another in a ring cairn monument in Cumbria in northwest England. After taking small skeletal samples from 34 individuals at both sites, they screened for plague bacteria in the teeth. Dental pulp can trap the DNA remnants of infectious diseases and has helped scientists find evidence of the plague before. 

After extracting dental pulp, they analyzed the DNA inside and identified three cases of Y. pestis in two children that are estimated to be about 10 to 12 years-old when they died, as well as one case in a woman who was between 35 and 45 years-old. It is likely that these people lived at roughly the same time, according to radiocarbon dating.  

“The ability to detect ancient pathogens from degraded samples, from thousands of years ago, is incredible. These genomes can inform us of the spread and evolutionary changes of pathogens in the past, and hopefully help us understand which genes may be important in the spread of infectious diseases,” study co-author and PhD student from the Francis Crick Institute Pooja Swali said in a statement. “We see that this Yersinia pestis lineage, including genomes from this study, loses genes over time, a pattern that has emerged with later epidemics caused by the same pathogen.”

Plague has been identified in multiple individuals who lived in Eurasia between 5,000 and 2,500 years ago during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age (LNBA). Evidence of the plague, however, hadn’t been seen in Britain at this point in time. This LNBA strain was likely brought into Central and Western Europe about 4,800 years ago as humans expanded into Eurasia, and this study suggests it extended even further west into Britain. The LNBA strain’s wide geographic range suggests that it could have been easily transmitted.

Genome sequencing found that the strain of Y. pestis found in these sites looks very similar to the strain identified further east into Eurasia at the same time and not later strains of the disease. It lacked the yapC and ymt genes, which are both seen in later strains of plague. The ymt gene is also known to play an important role in plague transmission via fleas. It is likely that the LNBA strain was not transmitted on fleas, unlike later strains of the plague, such as the one that caused the Black Death in the Fourteenth Century. 

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

The team is not fully certain that the individuals at these old burial sites were infected with the exact same strain of plague, since pathogenic DNA that causes disease degrades very quickly in samples that could be incomplete or eroded. 

The Somerset site is also rare since it doesn’t match other funeral sites dating back to this time period. The individuals buried there appear to have died from trauma. The team believes that the mass burial here was not due to an outbreak of plague, but the individuals studied may have been infected when they died.  

“We understand the huge impact of many historical plague outbreaks, such as the Black Death, on human societies and health, but ancient DNA can document infectious disease much further into the past,” co-author and geneticist at the Francis Crick Institute Pontus Skoglund said in a statement. “Future research will do more to understand how our genomes responded to such diseases in the past, and the evolutionary arms race with the pathogens themselves, which can help us to understand the impact of diseases in the present or in the future.”

The post Plague DNA was just found in 4,000-year-old teeth appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Humans are born with instincts for crying and smiling, but not for kissing. Sometime in the past, our ancestors had the idea to smack their mouths together and call it romantic. And though we may not know who gave the first smooch, ancient records of these steamy sessions are helping us piece together when people started locking lips. 

The generally accepted earliest evidence we have of making out is religious text written in India in 1500 BCE. And while there was no official word for kissing back then, sentences like “young lord of the house repeatedly licks the young woman” and lovers “setting mouth to mouth” implied more than platonic relationships. But whether this was when kissing all began is still up for debate. In fact, an overlooked collection of written texts from ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq and Syria) suggests people were kissing further in the past. 

Citing those texts, authors of a new perspective article published today in the journal Science argue romantic kissing occurred 1,000 years earlier than historians first predicted. And as kissing became more of the norm, old medical records reveal the widespread transmission of viruses that spread through lip-to-lip contact.

“Given what we know about the history of kissing in humans and the myriad of similar kissing-like behaviors observed around the animal kingdom, I’m not surprised by these findings,” says Sheril Kirshenbaum, the author of The Science of Kissing, who was not involved in the study. “Whether romantic or not, kissing influences our bodies and brains in so many meaningful ways by guiding our emotions and decisions.”

[Related: Scientists think they found a 2,000-year-old dildo in ancient Roman ruins]

Clay tablets left behind by ancient Mesopotamians in 2500 BCE describe two types of kissing. The first was the friendly-parental kiss. People kissed the feet of their elders or the ground as a sign of respect or submission. 

The second was the lip kiss with a more erotic and intimate overtone. However, there were a few cultural expectations when it came to this type of kissing. Romantic kissing was an action reserved for married couples, as people frowned upon any PDA in Mesopotamia. Kissing among unmarried folks was taboo, considered to be giving in to sexual temptation. People not meant to be sexually active, such as priestesses, were thought to lose their ability to speak if they kissed someone. “The need for such norms indicates that romantic kissing must have been practiced in society at large,” explains lead author Troels Pank Arbøll, an assyriologist (a person studying the language and civilization of ancient Mesopotamia) at the University of Copenhagen.

As more people adopted the practice of kissing on the lips, ancient medical texts described illnesses whose symptoms resemble viral infections spread through mouth-to-mouth contact. The authors note this aligns with DNA analysis from ancient human remains detecting viruses such as herpes simplex virus 1, Epstein-Barr virus, and human parvovirus. All three viruses transmit through saliva.

One example is a disease that the ancient Mesopotamians labeled bu’šānu. The infection involved boils in or around the mouth area. Its name also implies that the infected person might have stunk. While Arbøll says bu’šānu shares several symptoms with herpes, he warns people not to make any assumptions. “As with all ancient disease concepts, they do not match any modern diseases 1:1, and one should be very careful when applying these modern identifications. A disease concept like bu’šānu likely incorporated several modern diseases.”

Mesopotamians likely did not think infectious diseases were spread through kissing, since it is not listed anywhere in the medical texts. However, they had some religiously influenced ideas of contamination, which spurred some measures to avoid spreading the disease. For example, a letter from around 1775 BCE describes a woman in a palace harem with lesions all over her body. Assuming it was contagious, people avoided drinking from any cups she drank, sleeping in her bed, or sitting on her chair.

[Related: When you give octopus MDMA they hug it out]

The findings show that this form of kissing did not originate in a single place. Mesopotamia, India, and other societies separately learned to associate pecks on the lips as romantic. Arbøll says it’s possible other areas also learned about kissing but didn’t have the writing tools to record this behavior. This opens the question of how widely sexual kissing was practiced in the ancient world. 

Some experts are less convinced that kissing was a universal behavior. William Jankowiak, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved in the study, points out that written records of kissing often occurred in complex societies and less so in people living in smaller foraging groups. It’s also difficult to know if romantic kissing was practiced in more than one class or reserved for elite groups in ancient civilizations. Additionally, other factors, such as living in tropical versus colder regions, could influence whether people wanted to lock lips. 

There’s still a long way to go in understanding the ancient history of kissing. But the study does clear up one thing—all the smooching our ancestors did is probably why oral herpes and other kiss-transmitted diseases are a global problem today.

The post Ancient Mesopotamian texts show when and why humans first kissed appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

An international team of archaeologists digging in Saudi Arabia and Jordan reportedly found the world’s oldest architectural plans. The findings were published in a study May 17 in the journal PLOS ONE and includes precise engravings that date back between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago.

[Related: Details of life in Bronze Age Mycenae could lie at the bottom of a well.]

These ancient blueprints depict large structures used to trap and funnel animals for slaughter into enclosures called kites. First spotted by aviators in the 1920s, the contraptions are called “kites” because of the shape they form. The converging walls range from hundreds of feet up to 3.1 miles long and drive the animals towards a corral surrounded by pits up to 13.1 feet deep. 

According to the authors, plans like these for kites represent a milestone in human development because intelligent behavior is needed to transpose the plans for such a large space onto a small two dimensional surface. A kite would have also helped people hunt a larger group of animals in a shorter period of time. 

“Although human constructions have modified natural spaces for millennia, few plans or maps predate the period of the literate civilizations of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt,” the authors wrote in a statement. “The ability to transpose large space onto a small, two dimensional surface represents a milestone in intelligent behavior. Such structures are visible as a whole only from the air, yet this calls for the representation of space in a way not seen at this time.”

In this new study, the team reports two new engravings first unearthed in 2015 that represent the ruins of kites in present-day Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The Jibal al-Khasabiyeh area in Jordan has eight kite areas. The stone found with a representation of how to build them that was carved with stone tools measures two feet long and one foot wide and is about 7,000 years old. 

In Saudi Arabia, Zebel az-Zilliyat has two pairs of visible kites that are about two miles apart.  A massive to-scale engraving of the plans was excavated nearby. The 10 feet long by seven feet wide blueprint dated to about 8,000 years ago. In this engraving, it was reportedly pecked instead of carved into the stone, possibly with hand picks. It was created at a scale of roughly 1:175, so actual kites were 175 times larger than the engraving itself.

The study also found that the proportions, layout, and shape of the engravings were consistent with the actual remains of the ancient kites. They are also in keeping with the four cardinal directions (north, south, east, and west).

[Related: Cave drawings from 20,000 years ago may feature an early form of writing.]

Over 6,000 kite structures have been found across central Asia and the Middle East, with the majority in present-day Saudi Arabia, eastern Jordan, and southern Syria. There are other  ancient engravings in Europe that are believed to portray maps, but scientists have yet to discover depictions of hunting kites on the continent.

Little is known about the people who made the kites thousands of years ago and a project like this likely would have been a large group undertaking, according to the authors. 

The post Blueprints engraved in stone from Saudi Arabia and Jordan could be the world’s oldest appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The preserved ancient Roman city of Pompeii is best known for the catastrophic volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed the city in 79 CE. But the discovery of two skeletons at Italy’s Pompeii Archaeological Park adds to growing evidence that earthquakes  accompanied the fateful eruption. The details of the excavation were published by the Pompeii Archaeological Park on May 16 in the E-Journal of Pompeii Excavations.

[Related: This ancient Roman villa was equipped with wine fountains.]

As the ground shook, massive plumes of volcanic ash and pumice and boiling hot gasses shot out of the volcano which covered and suffocated its residents. The bodies of those caught in the eruption were well preserved by the ash, offering scientists a unique window into the event. Archaeologists have found the remains of over 1,300 victims in the site southeast of Naples over the last 250 years

According to Pompeii Archaeological Park, the skeletons were discovered during a recent excavation of the Casti Amanti, or the House of the Chaste Lovers. 

“In recent years, we have realized there were violent, powerful seismic events that were happening at the time of the eruption,″ Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park told the Associated Press. 

Zuchtriegel added that advances in archaeological techniques and methodology, “allow us to understand better the inferno that in two days completely destroyed the city of Pompeii, killing many inhabitants.” These technological advances are making it possible to figure out the dynamic of the deaths right down to the final seconds. 

The remains were found in a utility room where the pair had possibly sought shelter beneath a collapsed wall. The skeletons are believed to belong to two men that were at least 55 years old at the time of the eruption. 

The team also believes that the house was likely undergoing reconstruction when the eruption and earthquake struck due to a stone kitchen counter covered in powdered lime.

[Related: As Rome digs its first new metro route in decades, an archaeologist safeguards the city’s buried treasures.]

Part of the southern facing wall collapsed and crushed one of the men and the skeleton’s raised arm, “offers a tragic image of his vain attempt to protect himself from the falling masonry.” At the western wall, the entire upper section detached and fell into the room and crushed and buried the other man. 

The team also found some organic matter that they believe is a bundle of fabric, vessels, bowls, jugs, six coins, and a glass paste that possibly used to be the beads of a necklace.

“The discovery of the remains of these two Pompeians in the context of the construction site in the Insula of the Chaste Lovers shows how much there is still to discover about the terrible eruption of AD 79 and confirms the necessity of continuing scientific investigation and excavations. Pompeii is an immense archaeological laboratory that has regained vigor in recent years, astonishing the world with the continuous discoveries brought to light and demonstrating Italian excellence in this sector,” Italy’s Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano said in a statement.

The post ‘Violent’ earthquakes accompanied the infamous volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

A broken molar and some sophisticated stone pointed tools suggest that Europe’s first known humans may have been living on the continent 54,000 years ago. The findings are detailed in a study published May 3 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE and suggests that the first modern humans spread across the European continent during three waves in the Paleolithic Era. 

[Related: Sex, not violence, could’ve sealed the fate of the Neanderthals.]

Homo sapiens arose in Africa over 300,000 years ago and anatomically modern humans are thought to have emerged about 195,000 years ago. Previously, it was believed that modern humans moved into Europe from Africa roughly 42,000 years ago, leaving the archaeological record of Paleolithic Europe withs many open questions about how modern humans arrived in the region and how they interacted with the resident Neanderthal populations. The 2022 discovery of a tooth in France’s Grotte Mandrin cave in the Rhône Valley suggested that modern humans were there about 54,000 years ago, about 10,000 years earlier than scientists previously believed. 

“Until 2022, it was believed that Homo sapiens had reached Europe between the 42nd and 45th millennium. The study shows that this first Sapiens migration would actually be the last of three major migratory waves to the continent, profoundly rewriting what was thought to be known about the origin of Sapiens in Europe,” study co-author Ludovic Slimak, an archeologist at and University of Toulouse in France, said in a statement. 

The newly analyzed stone tools from this study have further upended that timeline. They suggest that the three waves of migration occurred between 54,000 and 42,000 years ago. The team of researchers compared records of stone tool technology across western Eurasia to document the order of early human activity across the continents. It focused on tens of thousands of stone tools from Ksar Akil in Lebanon and France’s Grotte Mandrin (where the tooth was found) and analyzed their precise technical connections with the earliest modern technologies in the continent. 

The technology of the tools went through three similar phases in each region, Slimak said, so they may have spread from the Near East to Europe during these three distinct waves of migration. The study suggests Neanderthals only began to fade into extinction in the third wave–about 45,000 to 42,000 years ago. 

[Related: Archery may have helped humans gain leverage over Neanderthals.]

The team also looked at a group of stone artifacts that were previously found in the eastern Mediterranean region called the Levant, or what includes today’s Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Slimak compared the tools from Grotte Mandrin to the ones from Ksar Akil in Lebanon, noting similarities between them. The artifacts from a group of stone tools known as the Châtelperronian resemble the modern human artifacts seen in the Early Upper Paleolithic of the Levant. The Châtelperronian items date to about 45,000 years ago and scientists had often thought Châtelperronians were Neanderthals.

“Châtelperronian culture, one of the first modern traditions in western Europe and since then attributed to Neanderthals, should in fact signal the second wave of Homo sapiens migration in Europe, impacting deeply our understanding of the cultural organization of the last Neanderthals,” said Slimak.

The moving of these technologies allow for a provocative new reinterpretation of human arrival into Europe and how it is related to the Levant region. Future studies of these phases of human migration will help paint a clearer picture of the sequence of events when Homo sapiens spread,   and gradually replaced Neanderthals.

The post Humans and Neanderthals could have lived together even earlier than we thought appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Archaeologists in Rome have unearthed a treasure trove of Renaissance-era medical supplies inside the Forum of Caesar. Among the “golden” finds are 500 year-old medicine bottles and urine flasks. In a study published April 11 in the journal Antiquity, the authors believe that the containers were used to collect pee for medical analysis and diagnosis. 

According to the researchers, the pathogens that could have been present in these bottles helps uncover how urban waste was managed.

[Related: Pee makes for great fertilizer. But is it safe?]

The current excavation initially began in 2021 and is part of an international collaboration called the Caesar’s Forum Excavation Project. The 16th century medical dump was found inside Caesar’s Forum, which was built centuries prior in 46 BCE. About 1,500 years later, a guild of bakers used this space to build the Ospedale dei Fornari or Bakers’ Hospital. According to the authors, the waste dump was then created by the hospital’s workers. 

The archaeologists also found rosary beads, broken glass jars, coins, a ceramic camel, and a Renaissance-era cistern full of ceramic vessels. The team of researchers from institutions in Italy and Denmark believes that the objects were likely related to patient care in the hospital. Each patient at the hospital may have been given a basket with a bowl, drinking glass, jug, and a plate for hygiene purposes. 

The glass urine flasks are called “matula” in medieval Latin medical texts and were likely used for the practice of uroscopy. This was a diagnostic tool for physicians during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Urine was also once believed to be a cure for motion sickness. 

The authors believe that doctors would use the flasks to observe urine’s sedimentation, smell, color, and even taste. This would help the physicians diagnose ailments like kidney disease, jaundice, and diabetes. The excess glucose in diabetic urine gives it a saccharine quality. English physician Thomas Willis was credited with discovering this during the 17th Century and described the pee as “wonderfully sweet as if it were imbued with honey or sugar.”

[Related from PopSci+: What’s in a packrat’s petrified pee? Just a few thousand years of secrets.]

Also included in the cistern were lead clamps that were associated with wood treated with fire. According to the study, this may be evidence of burning objects brought into the hospital from houses with known plague cases. Italian physician Quinto Tiberio Angelerio wrote this in a series of rules for preventing the spread of the contagious disease in 1588, which included burning objects touched by plague patients. Plague killed roughly 25 million people throughout the 14th century alone as it spread across Eurasia, North Africa, and eventually the Americas for 500 years.

Once the cistern was full, it was likely capped with clay While landfills existed at this time outside the city walls of Rome, “the deposition of waste in cellars, courtyards, and cisterns, although prohibited, was a common practice,” study lead author Cristina Boschetti told Live Science. 

The unique find sheds more light on how hygiene practices and controls in European medical settings progressed during the early modern era. 

The post Renaissance-era doctors used to taste their patients’ pee appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

BUMS. HEINIES. FANNIES. DERRIERES. Few muscles in the human body carry as much cultural clout as the gluteus maximus. “Butts are a bellwether,” writes journalist Heather Radke in her 2022 book Butts: A Backstory. Radke goes on to explain that our feelings about our hindquarters often have more to do with race, gender, and sex than with the actual meat of them. Unlike with a knee or an elbow, Radke argues, when it comes to the tuchus, we’re far more likely to think about form than function—even though it features the largest muscle in the human body. 

For all the scrutiny we spare them (outside of when we’re trying on new jeans) our butts aren’t mere aesthetic flourishes. A booty is, in fact, a unique feat of evolution: Out of any species, humans have the most junk in their trunks. Many other creatures have muscle and fat padding their backsides, and some even have butt cheeks. But none pack anything close to the same proportions as us.

So why did our ancestors develop such a unique cushion? Evolutionary biologists’ best guess is that our shapely rears help us walk upright. The curved pelvic bone that gives the butt its prominence likely developed as our weight moved upward and our muscular needs shifted. Research increasingly suggests that more massive muscles in the vicinity of the buttocks make for faster sprinting and better running endurance too. “The butt is an essential adaptation for the human ability to run steadily, for long distances, and without injury,” Radke writes. 

That said, the gluteus maximus does more than just keep us on our feet. The fat that sits atop it affects how we feel whenever we sit or lie down. The organs nestled behind those cheeks also have a massive influence on our health and wellbeing. Here are a few of the ways our bums factor into scientific understanding, lifesaving medicine, and the future of engineering. 

Digging deep for ancient backsides 

For as long as humans have been making art, they’ve been thinking about bodacious butts. The 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf is a famous pocket-size figurine carved by a Western European civilization during the Upper Paleolithic. The statuette, which some archaeologists suspect served as a fertility charm, immortalizes a body too thick to quit.

Scientists also love peeping at the actual posteriors of our early ancestors, which hold a broader archaeological significance in telling the stories of ancient people and their lifestyles. Differences in the pelvis and other sat-upon bones have long been used to determine the sex of unearthed skeletal remains, though we know now there isn’t as clear-cut a binary as researchers long assumed. In 1972, anthropologist Kenneth Weiss flagged that experts were 12 percent more likely to classify skeletons found at dig sites as men versus women, which he blamed on a bias for marking indeterminate skeletons as male. Recent research bears that out, with anthropologists now designating many more remains as having a mix of pelvic characteristics (or simply being inconclusive) than they did historically. Still, while the distinction isn’t completely black and white, the signs of a body primed for or changed by childbirth are useful in figuring out the age and sex of ancient remains. Butt bones can also tell us about how people lived: This March, archaeologists published the oldest known evidence for human horseback riding in the journal Science Advances. They identified their 5,000-year-old equestrians—members of the Yamnaya culture, which spread from Eurasia throughout much of Europe around that same time—with the help of signs of wear and tear to hip sockets, thigh bones, and pelvises. 

Supporting heinies of all shapes and sizes

As Sharon Sonenblum, a principal research scientist at the School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, puts it, “What could be better than studying butts?” The Rehabilitation Engineering and Applied Research Lab that she’s part of is perhaps more aptly referred to by its acronym: REAR. 

Stephen Sprigle, a Georgia Tech professor in industrial design, bioengineering, and physiology, started REARLab with better solutions for wheelchair users in mind. A decade ago, he and Sonenblum saw the potential for an engineering-minded solution to the serious clinical problem of injuries from sitting or lying down for extended periods. Pressure sores and ulcers are a risk whenever soft tissue presses against a surface for a prolonged time, and they become more dangerous in hospital settings—where antibiotic-resistant bacteria often lurk—and in people with conditions that hinder wound healing, like diabetes. 

Sonenblum recalls that they set out to answer a deceptively simple question: What makes one backside different from another? To answer it, they had to put a whole lot of booties into an MRI scanner. Those imaging studies and others (including some done on supine patients) have provided an unprecedented amount of data about butt cheeks and the stuff inside them. 

The big headline, Sprigle says, is that “we’re big bags of water. What the skeleton does in that big bag of goo is totally fascinating.” 

The work proved particularly humbling for Sonenblum, who’d intended to spend her career studying how the gluteus maximus affects seating. Instead, she and her colleagues figured out that humans don’t rest on muscle at all—the fat is what really counts. Sonenblum and the rest of the REARLab team are investigating how the natural padding in our rears changes over time, particularly in people who spend a lot of time sitting or supine.

Today, REARLab creates more precise computer models and “phantoms” to help cushion testing—mainly for wheelchair seats, but also for ergonomic chairs of all stripes—better account for real-world bums. Phantoms aren’t quite faux butts; they’re simple and scalable geometric shapes, almost like the convex version of a seat cushion designed for your tuchus to nestle into. They don’t account for bodies’ individual differences either. 

“Phantoms are always a tricky balance between time and representation,” Sonenblum says. “You want to represent the population well, but you can’t have too many or you’ll spend your entire life running tests.”

REARLab’s current approach is to use two shapes—elliptical and trigonometric—to represent a fuller backside and one more likely to pose biomechanical problems when seated, respectively. It would be reasonable to assume the trigonometric butt is the bonier of the two, Sonenblum says, but the reality isn’t so simple. Large individuals with lots of adipose tissue can still lose the round cushioning when they sit. 

“I’ve seen scans of butts that look like this, and when I do, I think, Wow, that’s a high-risk butt,” Sonenblum explains. It comes down to the quality of the tissue, she adds. “If you touch a lot of butts, you’ll find that the tissue changes for people who are at risk [of pressure injuries]. It feels different.”

Sonenblum and Sprigle hope that continued work on backside modeling, cushion-testing standards, and adipose analysis will help wheelchair users and patients confined to their beds for long stretches stay safer and more comfortable. But their work has implications for absolutely anyone who sits down. When asked what folks should take away from their studies, they’re both quick to answer: Move. People with limited mobility may not be able to avoid the loss of structural integrity in their butt tissue, but anyone with the ability to get up often and flex their muscles can keep that natural padding in prime health. 

Finding better bellwethers for bowel cancer

When it comes to protecting your posterior, it’s not just the bodacious bits of the outside that count. One of the biggest backside-related issues scientists are tackling today is the sharp rise in colorectal cancer, which starts with abnormal cell growth in the colon or rectum. It’s already the third most common cancer and second leading cause of cancer death, but it represents a mounting threat, especially for millennials. New cases of young-onset colorectal cancer (yoCRC)—defined as a diagnosis before age 50—have gone up by around 50 percent since the mid-1990s. 

Blake Buchalter, a postdoctoral fellow at Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute focused on cancer epidemiology, says that the most troubling thing about this recent uptick in cases is how little we know about what’s causing it. He and his colleagues suspect that 35- to 49-year-olds who die from colorectal cancer may share many of the same demographics and risk factors—higher body weight, lower activity levels, smoking, alcohol use, and diets high in processed and red meats—seen in patients aged 50 and older. But those under the age of 35 don’t follow those patterns as closely as expected. 

“This indicated to us that mortality among the youngest colorectal cancer patients may have different drivers than among older populations,” Buchalter says. “Our future work in this space aims to identify underlying factors that might be driving higher incidence and mortality among certain age groups in particular geographic regions.” 

Buchalter hopes that more granular data will encourage more granular screening guidelines too. While he was heartened to see the US Preventative Services Task Force shift the recommended colon cancer screening age down from 50 to 45 in 2021, it’s clear that some populations are at risk for the disease earlier, he says. Buchalter and his colleagues hope to zero in on who should be getting screened in their 20s and 30s. 

But colonoscopies, the most commonly recommended form of detection, present a major hurdle in themselves. A 2019 study found that only 60 percent of age-eligible US adults were up to date on their colorectal cancer screenings, with others citing fear, embarrassment, and logistical challenges such as transportation to explain their delayed colonoscopies. At-home fecal tests offer a less invasive alternative, but research shows that fear of a bad diagnosis and disgust with the idea of collecting and mailing samples still keep many folks from using them. Blood tests and colon capsule endoscopy (CCE), in which patients swallow a pill-size camera to allow doctors to examine the gastrointestinal tract, both show promise in supplementing, and perhaps someday replacing, the oft-dreaded colonoscopy.

For now, it’s worth going in for the physical screening if you can manage it. While blood and stool tests can accurately detect signs of the cancer, colonoscopies can actually help prevent it. During a standard colonoscopy, gastro­enterologists are able to identify and remove potentially precancerous polyps known as adenomas on the spot. No DIY kit can manage that.  

Tracking microbiomes with futuristic commodes

Meanwhile, other researchers are uncovering health secrets from long-ago water closets. In 2022, archaeologists uncovered what they believe to be the oldest flush toilet ever found, in Xi’an, China. The 2,400-year-old lavatory features a pipe leading to an outdoor pit. Researchers believe the commode, which was located inside a palace, allowed servants to wash waste out of sight with buckets of water. Flush toilets wouldn’t appear in Europe until the 1500s, and wouldn’t become commonplace until the late 19th century. Up until that point, major US cities employed fleets of “night soil men” to dig up and dispose of the contents of household privies and public loos.

As far as we’ve come from the days of night soil, the future of the humble toilet looks even brighter. Sonia Grego, an associate research professor in the Duke University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, says she’s “super-excited” to see commodes enter the 21st century. 

“Smart” toilets boast everything from app-controlled heated seats to detailed water-usage trackers, and could grow into a $13.5 billion industry by the end of the decade. But Grego’s team—the Duke Smart Toilet Lab at the Pratt School of Engineering—is focused on turning waste flushed down porcelain bowls into a noninvasive health tool. She envisions a future in which your toilet can warn you of impending flare-ups of gut conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, flag dietary deficiencies, and even screen for signs of cancer. 

“When we first started to work on the smart toilet for stool analysis, laboratory scientists were skeptical that accurate analytical results could be obtained from specimens that had been dropped in a toilet instead of a sterile collection container,” Grego recalls. “The perspective is very different now.”

Drawing inspiration from wild butts 

Humans may be unusually blessed in the butt-cheek department, but that doesn’t mean other animals’ rears hold less scientific appeal. From modeling the evolution of the anus to cracking the code on climate-friendly gut microbes, scientists are keeping close tabs on all sorts of animal bottoms. Some researchers are even hoping to harness the power of butt breathing—yes, actually breathing through your butt—for future applications in human medicine. 

We’ll circle back to backside breathing in a moment. First, let’s consider the wombat. While it’s true enough that everybody poops, these marsupials are the only animals known to drop cubes. For years, no one was quite sure how they managed to get a square peg out of a round hole. Some even assumed the wombat must have an anus designed for squeezing out blocks instead of cylinders. In 2020, mechanical engineers and wildlife ecologists at Georgia Tech teamed up to publish a surprising new explanation for the shape in the aptly named journal Soft Matter. They’d borrowed roadkill from Australia to do the first-ever close examination of a wombat’s intestines. By inflating the digestive tract and comparing it to more familiar pig intestines, they were able to show that the marsupial’s innards have more variation in elasticity: Instead of being fairly uniform throughout, the organs have some inflexible zones. The team’s findings suggest that a few nooks within the digestive system—some stretchy, others stiff—provide a means to shape the refuse into a square. 

Wombat butts themselves, by the by, are veritable buns of steel. Their rumps contain four fused bony plates surrounded by cartilage and fat and can be used to effectively plug up the entrance to a burrow when potential predators come sniffing around. While this has yet to be caught happening live, some scientists think wombats can even use their powerful bums to crush the skulls of intruders like foxes and dingoes who manage to make it inside. 

So now we have more clarity on how wombats poop cubes, but the question of why remains unanswered. Experts have posited that wombats communicate with one another by sniffing out the location of poop cubes, making it advantageous to produce turds less likely to roll out of place. Others argue that the unusual shape is a happy accident: Wombats can spend as long as a week digesting a single meal, with their intestines painstakingly squeezing out every possible drop of moisture to help them survive the arid conditions Down Under. Their entrails, when unwound, stretch some 33 feet—10 feet more than typical human guts—to help facilitate the frugal squeezing. When the species is raised in captivity with loads of food and water, their poops come out moister and rounder. 

Elsewhere in the world of scat science, folks are working to understand the secrets of nonhuman gut microbiomes. Earlier this year, biotechnologists at Washington State University showed that baby kangaroo feces could help make beef more eco-friendly. Joey guts contain microbes that produce acetic acid instead of methane, which cows burp out in such abundance that it significantly worsens climate change. By reseeding a simulated cow stomach with poop from a newborn kangaroo, researchers say they successfully converted the gut to a factory of acetic acid, which doesn’t trap heat in the atmosphere. They hope to try the transfer out in a real bovine sometime soon. 

Going back to the butt breathing, scientists are hoping to suss out how to give humans a superpower already exhibited by catfish and sea cucumbers. In 2021, Japanese researchers reported in the journal Med that they’d been able to keep rodents alive in oxygen-poor conditions by ventilating them through their anuses. Inspired by loaches—freshwater fish that can take in oxygen through their intestines—the scientists are trying to find new ways to help patients who can’t get enough air on their own. They’ve moved on to study pigs, which they say do wonderfully with a shot of perfluorodecalin (a liquid chemical that can carry large amounts of oxygen) up the bum. 

From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s not all that surprising that our outbox can handle the same duties as our inbox. Though it’s still not clear which came first, it’s well established that the anus and the mouth develop out of the same rudimentary cell structures wherever they appear. Some of the most basic animals still use a single opening for all their digestive needs. And one creature—just one, as far as we know—has a “transient anus.”

In 2019, Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, demonstrated that the warty comb jelly creates new anuses as needed. Whenever sufficient waste builds up—which happens as often as every 10 minutes in young jellies—the gut bulges out enough to fuse with the creature’s epidermis, creating an opening for defecation. Then it closes right back up. It’s possible that the world’s first anuses followed the same on-demand model, proving yet again that the butt and its contents are worthy of our awe, curiosity, and respect.  

Read more PopSci+ stories.

The post A scientific exploration of big juicy butts appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Archaeologists in western Scotland have found the foundations of a Roman fortlet dating back to the Second Century CE. According to the government-run historic preservation commission Historic Environment Scotland, this fort was one of 41 defensive structures that was built near the Antonine Wall, one of Scotland’s six UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

[Related from PopSci+: How Scotland forged a rare alliance between amateur treasure hunters and archaeologists.]

This fortified wall made of mostly wood ran for roughly 40 miles across Scotland as part of the Roman Empire’s unsuccessful attempt to extend its control throughout Britain from roughly 410 to 43 CE. The Antonine Wall was defended as the northernmost frontier of the Roman Empire. Emperor Antoninus Pius ordered the building of the wall in 142 CE as a one-up to his predecessor Hadrian. The famed Hadrian’s Wall was built in the 120s CE about 100 miles south of the Antonine Wall.

The Romans called the people living in Scotland “Caledonians”, and later named them  the Picts after a Latin word meaning “painted people,” in reference to their body paintings or tattoos. The Romans retreated to the Hadrian Wall in 162 CE after 20 years of trying to hold a new northern line at the Antonine Wall.

In 1707, antiquarian Robbert Sibbald said he saw the fortlet in the area around Carleith Farm in West Dunbartonshire. During the 1970s and 1980s, excavation teams looked for it but were unsuccessful.

New technology allowed Historic Environment Scotland’s archaeological survey team to find the buried remains. The team used a geophysical surveying technique called gradiometry to peer under the soil without excavating. Gradiometry measures small changes in Earth’s magnetic field to detect buried archaeological features that can’t be seen from the surface. It identified the base of the fortlet, which remains buried under the ground. Turf would have been laid on top of this base. The team found the fortlet in a field near Carleith Primary School.

The fortlet would have been occupied by 10 to 12 Roman soldiers who were likely stationed at Duntocher, a larger fort nearby. The fortlet would have been made up of two small wooden buildings.

[Related: Slàinte mhath! The oldest piece of Scottish tartan fabric has been identified.]

“It is great to see how our knowledge of history is growing as new methods give us fresh insights in the past,” Riona McMorrow, deputy head of world heritage at Historic Environment Scotland, said in a statement. “Archaeology is often partly detective work, and the discovery at Carleith is a nice example of how an observation made 300 years ago and new technology can come together to add to our understanding.”

While up to 41 fortlets may have once lined the Wall, only nine have been found thus far. This new discovery marks the 10th known forlet, and Historic Environment Scotland is currently reviewing the site’s designation to ensure that it is protected and recognized as part of the Antonine Wall. 

The post Archaeologists found a lost Roman fortlet in Scotland appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The 2016 animated family film Moana brought the long-told story of Polynesian seafarers (along with some incredibly catchy tunes) to a much wider worldwide audience. Now, geochemical analysis is confirming the oral history of ancient Polynesia’s incredible sailors in a new study published April 21 in the journal Science Advances. 

[Related from PopSci+: Voyagers made it to Hawaiʻi thousands of years ago with no compasses. Here’s how.]

Long before Europeans arrived, Polynesian wayfinders sailed to islands across the central Pacific in canoes, and the stories of their adventures have survived largely through oral history. There has been limited material evidence supporting these accounts of Polynesian societies from distant islands interacting with one another. 

“Pacific islanders were able to travel over very long distances and did so in every region of the Pacific. Polynesian peoples settled hundreds of islands from Papua New Guinea to Easter Island (Rapa Nui),” study co-author and French National Centre for Scientific Research archaeologist Aymeric Hermann tells PopSci. “The extent of long distance voyages in an Ocean as vast as the Pacific, and several centuries before any other society could really master seafaring, is pretty amazing.”

Details of the westward expansions to a group of islands west of Polynesia called the Polynesian Outliers have been even more unclear. Indigenous cultures vary across the Pacific’s islands, but oral traditions and shared cultural items indicate that there could have been contact and exchanging of goods across long distances. 

In this new study, an international team of scientists analyzed stone artifacts from the Polynesian Outliers where communities are considered more culturally isolated. In seeking to discover how these communities are connected with their Oceanic neighbors, the team’s analysis suggests that the items were carried there from over 1,000 miles away from their source regions in Samoa.

These findings support prevailing theories that societies in western Polynesian societies were incredibly mobile over the last millennium, possibly colonizing the Outliers as a result of their voyages. 

To do so, Hermann and colleagues grabbed geochemical fingerprints from stone tools found on the Polynesian Outliers. According to Hermann, most geochemical sourcing studies in the Pacific have been conducted on the Oceanic islands which have different geochemical signatures from the Outliers. This presented the team with a huge challenge of many possible sources from southeast Asia to the eastern Pacific that have many overlapping geochemical characteristics.

[Related: On board the canoe that proved ancient Polynesians could cross the Pacific.]

To look closer and try to pick apart these characteristics, they took isotopic and geochemical analyses of 14 artifacts on three Outlier Islands (Emae, Taumako, and Kapingamarangi) that were dated to as early as 1258 CE. The team combined these analyses with earlier studies and used a large database of geological signatures from sites across Oceania. They were able to source the artifacts to distant islands and volcanic arcs over 1,000 miles further east of the Outliers. 

“Among all possible sources in the Pacific, all the artifacts that can be distinctively associated with West Polynesian traditions were sourced to the exact same quarry in Samoa, which is also the source of other artifacts found in the eastern Pacific,” said Hermann.

The evidence from the materials supports earlier studies and oral histories of this travel across vast distances in the Pacific. 

According to Hermann, it’s important to remember that remembered that “global history is always local history first.” The team sought permission from the communities of Makatea, Tongamea, Finongi, and Sangava on Emae Island, as well as from  chiefs Ti Makata mata, Ma Ti Tonga, D. Maribu, Sasamake, Ti Nambua mata, Ti Nambua roto, and Ti Makura mata before undertaking the field research needed for this study. 

“It is necessary to use new lenses to look at human history: people always moved around, and societies always changed in contact with neighbors and sometimes through very long distances, long before Christopher Columbus reached the Americas,” said Hermann. 

The post ‘Fingerprints’ confirm the seafaring stories of adventurous Polynesian navigators appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s inside a miniature, 2,500-year-old coffin? Well, now researchers at the British Museum know. A team of scientists used a noninvasive technique called neutron tomography to peer inside six Egyptian animal coffins that have been sealed for over two millennia. The contents are described in a study published on April 20 in the journal Scientific Reports.

[Related: A gold-laced mummy could be the ‘oldest and most complete’ specimen found in Egypt.]

Neutron tomography allows researchers to peer inside without disturbing the coffins. It creates images based on the way that the neurons emitted by a source pass through it. Neutron tomography is more effective than x-rays at seeing through metal.  The team developed this technique after other noninvasive methods of looking into the coffins, such as traditional X-rays, didn’t work on the coffins.

The coffins in the study range from approximately two to 12 inches long and date back to sometime between 664 BCE and 250 BCE, during Egypt’s late period . The decorative coffins were built with copper compounds and are covered with images of eels, cobras, and lizards. Three were found in the ancient city of Naukratis and two were in Tell el-Yehudiya in 1885, but the other two have mysterious, currently unknown origins. 

Within three of the coffins, the authors identified bones including an intact skull that has similar dimensions to a group of lizards endemic to northern Africa. Two of the coffins have evidence of more broken down bones. 

“In the first millennium BC, lizards were commonly mummified in ancient Egypt, as were other

reptiles, cats, dogs, falcons, ibises, shrews, fishes… Lizards, like snakes and eels, were particularly associated with ancient Egyptian solar and creator gods such as Atum and perhaps, in the case of Naukratis, with Amun-Ra Shena,” co-author and project curator at the British Museum Aurélia Masson-Berghoff said in a statement. “With the help of neutron imaging, we have the potential to learn more about the ritual and votive practices surrounding these once impenetrable animal coffins, the ways they were made, used and displayed.”

They also found textile fragments that may be made of linen, which was a common fabric used in Ancient Egypt for mummification. The team believes that the linen in these coffins may have been wrapped around the animals before they were laid to rest in the coffins. 

The lead found in three of the coffins also may have been a way to aid in the weight distribution of two coffins, as well as fix up a hole in the other. Lead may have been the metal of choice due to its status as a “magical material.” Earlier studies found that lead was used in both love charms and curses.  They did not identify any additional lead in three of the coffins secured by two suspension loops. 

[Related: This teen mummy was buried with dozens of gold amulets.]

The loops may have been there to suspend these lighter coffins from the walls of a shrine or temple. Additionally, the miniature coffins could hang from boats, or even from statues used in religious processions. 

The study offers more insight into how animal coffins were built and used in ancient Egypt. Animal mummification was widespread, and some mummified animals were believed to be physical incarnations of gods. Others may have represented offerings to these deities or were used in ritual performances.  

“Neutron imaging has many important applications in 21st-century science,” co-author and research fellow at the Science and Technology Facilities Council Anna Fedrigo said in a statement. “This study shows that it can also shed light on the inner structure of complex archaeological objects, including their manufacturing techniques and contents.”

The post Ancient Egyptians mummified animals and put them in beautiful tiny coffins appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

An ancient Maya city might seem an unlikely place for people to be experimenting with proprietary chemicals. But scientists think that’s exactly what happened at Copán, an archaeological complex nestled in a valley in the mountainous rainforests of what is now western Honduras.

By historians’ reckoning, Copán’s golden age began in 427 CE, when a king named Yax Kʼukʼ Moʼ came to the valley from the northwest. His dynasty built one of the jewels of the Maya world, but abandoned it by the 10th century, leaving its courts and plazas to the mercy of the jungle. More than 1,000 years later, Copán’s buildings have kept remarkably well, despite baking in the tropical sun and humidity for so long. 

The secret may lie in the plaster the Maya used to coat Copán’s walls and ceilings. New research suggests that sap from the bark of local trees, which Maya craftspeople mixed into their plaster, helped reinforce its structures. Whether by accident or by purpose, those Maya builders created a material not unlike mother-of-pearl, a natural element of mollusc shells.

“We finally unveiled the secret of ancient Maya masons,” says Carlos Rodríguez Navarro, a mineralogist at the University of Granada in Spain and the paper’s first author. Rodríguez Navarro and his colleagues published their work in the journal Science Advances today.

[Related: Scientists may have solved an old Puebloan mystery by strapping giant logs to their foreheads]

Plaster makers followed a fairly straightforward recipe. Start with carbonate rock, such as limestone; bake it at over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit; mix in water with the resulting quicklime; then, set the concoction out to react with carbon dioxide from the air. The final product is what builders call lime plaster or lime mortar. 

Civilizations across the world discovered this process, often independently. For example, Mesoamericans in Mexico and Central America learned how to do it by around 1,100 BCE. While ancient people found it useful for covering surfaces or holding together bricks, this basic lime plaster isn’t especially durable by modern standards.

But, just as a dish might differ from town to town, lime plaster recipes varied from place to place. “Some of them perform better than others,” says Admir Masic, a materials scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who wasn’t part of the study. Maya lime plaster, experts agree, is one of the best.

Rodríguez Navarro and his colleagues wanted to learn why. They found their first clue when they examined brick-sized plaster chunks from Copán’s walls and floors with X-rays and electron microscopes. Inside some pieces, they found traces of organic materials like carbohydrates. 

That made them curious, Rodríguez Navarro says, because it seemed to confirm past archaeological and written records suggesting that ancient Maya masons mixed plant matter into their plaster. The other standard ingredients (lime and water) wouldn’t account for complex carbon chains.

To follow this lead, the authors decided to make the historic plaster themselves. They consulted living masons and Maya descendants near Copán. The locals referred them to the chukum and jiote trees that grow in the surrounding forests—specifically, the sap that came from the trees’ bark.

The authors tested the sap’s reaction when mixed into the plaster. Not only did it toughen the material, it also made the plaster insoluble in water, which partly explains how Copán survived the local climate so well.

The microscopic structure of the plant-enhanced plaster is similar to nacre or mother-of-pearl: the iridescent substance that some molluscs create to coat their shells. We don’t fully understand how molluscs make nacre, but we know that it consists of crystal plates sandwiching elastic proteins. The combination toughens the sea creatures’ exteriors and reinforces them against weathering from waves.

A close study of the ancient plaster samples and the modern analog revealed that they also had layers of rocky calcite plates and organic sappy material, giving the materials the same kind of resilience as nacre. “They were able to reproduce what living organisms do,” says Rodríguez Navarro. 

“This is really exciting,” says Masic. “It looks like it is improving properties [of regular plaster].”

Now, Rodríguez Navarro and his colleagues are trying to answer another question: Could other civilizations that depended on masonry—from Iberia to Persia to China—have stumbled upon the same secret? We know, for instance, that Chinese lime-plaster-makers mixed in a sticky rice soup for added strength.

Plaster isn’t the only age-old material that scientists have reconstructed. Masic and his colleagues found that ancient Roman concrete has the ability to “self-heal.” More than two millennia ago, builders in the empire may have added quicklime to a rocky aggregate, creating microscopic structures within the material that help fill in pores and cracks when it’s hit by seawater.

[Related: Ancient architecture might be key to creating climate-resilient buildings]

If that property sounds useful, modern engineers think so too. There exists a blossoming field devoted to studying—and recreating—materials of the past. Standing structures from archaeological sites already prove they can withstand the test of time. As a bonus, ancient people tended to work with more sustainable methods and use less fuel than their industrial counterparts.

“The Maya paper…is another great example of this [scientific] approach,” Masic says.

Not that Maya plaster will replace the concrete that’s ubiquitous in the modern world—but scientists say it could have its uses in preserving and upgrading the masonry found in pre-industrial buildings. A touch of plant sap could add centuries to a structure’s lifespan.

The post Ancient Maya masons had a smart way to make plaster stronger appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

A team of archaeologists have uncovered a unique ancient Roman winery within the luxurious Villa of the Quintilii. The remains of this opulent villa are just to the south of Rome, Italy. The findings, published on April 17 in the journal Antiquity, detail the winery in the mid-third-century CE building that lies along the ancient Appian Way–a critical supply line for the Roman military. 

The large villa was owned by the wealthy Quintilii brothers who served as consuls, one of the most powerful elected positions in the Roman Republic  in 151 CE. Around 182 or 183 CE, Roman emperor Commodus had them killed and took possession of their properties, including this particular villa.

[Related: As Rome digs its first new metro route in decades, an archaeologist safeguards the city’s buried treasures.]

Archaeologists had previously documented the villa’s luxuries, including a giant bathing complex, statues, and colored marble tiling. One of the lesser known parts of the villa was a circus for chariot racing that was added during Commodus’ reign. During a 2017 and 2018 expedition to find the circus’ starting gates, the first hints of the hidden winery were discovered. 

According to the study, the name Gordian is stamped into a wine-collection vat, which means that emperor Gordian III may have either built the winery or renovated it roughly around CE 238 to 244. The winery is located just beyond Rome’s city limits during antiquity, amidst orchards, farms, monumental tombs, and the villas of the super rich like the Quintilii brothers. It has standard winery features for this time, including two wine presses, a grape trading area, two presses, and a cellar sunk into the ground to store and ferment the wine in large clay jars. 

“However, the decoration and arrangement of these features is almost completely unparalleled in the ancient world,” Emlyn Dodd, study co-author and archaeologist and assistant director at the British School at Rome, wrote in The Conversation. “Nearly all the production areas are clad in marble veneer tiling. Even the treading area, normally coated in waterproof cocciopesto plaster, is covered in red breccia marble. This luxurious material, combined with its impracticalities (it is very slippery when wet, unlike plaster), conveys the extreme sense of luxury.”

The facility also included multiple luxurious dining rooms with a view of wine-filled fountains. Within the marble-lined trading areas, enslaved workers would stamp down the harvested grapes. The crushed grapes were then taken to the two mechanical presses, and the resulting grape must was then sent into the three wine fountains. The wine must have gushed out of semicircular niches built into a courtyard wall.

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

It is likely that this and other villas were built with both wine making and spectacle in mind. Letters from earlier emperor Marcus Aurelius describe him having eaten rich meals while watching wine being made, likely at a luxury winemaking facility at the Villa Magna. This villa, about 30 miles from Villa of the Quintilii, is currently the only known parallel.

With only one dining room currently excavated, Dodd and the team are looking for funding to uncover all of the villa’s lavish rooms. 

The post This ancient Roman villa was equipped with wine fountains appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

New research suggests that a piece of fabric tartan found in a peat bog in the Scottish Highlands may be the oldest traditional tartan ever found. The roughly 22 by 17 inch piece of Scottish history could be up to 500 years old and is on display at the V&A Dundee design museum in Dundee, Scotland. 

The cloth was found in the early 1980s in Scotland’s Glen Affric valley, about 15 miles west of Loch Ness.

[Related: Codebreakers have finally deciphered the lost letters of Mary, Queen of Scots.]

The Scottish Tartans Authority (STA) commissioned dye analysis and radiocarbon testing of the textile to prove its age. Four initial colors–green, brown, and possibly red and yellow–were identified. The dye analysis confirmed that indigo or woad in the green fabric were both used. The analysis of the other colors was inconclusive. Since there wasn’t any evidence of artificial or semi-synthetic dyestuffs, the STA believes that it predates the 1750s and is believed to have been made between 1513 and 1625, during the reigns of King James V, Mary Queen of Scots, or King James VI/I.

Tartan experts believe that this tartan was likely an “outdoor working garment” and wouldn’t have been worn by nobility. Tartan itself is a specific type of textile made using colored wool and yarn that is woven into crisscrossing vertical and horizontal bands. The diagonal bands and color blocks repeat to form a pattern of squares and lines and different tartan patterns have been associated with specific Scottish clans for centuries. 

“The tartan has several colors with multiple stripes of different sizes, and so it corresponds to what people would think of as a true tartan. The potential presence of red, a color that Gaels considered a status symbol, is interesting because of the more rustic nature of the cloth,” said STA head of research and collections Peter MacDonald, in reference to a Gaelic-speaking ethnic group from Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man.

MacDonald added that the resting process took almost six months and that the team is thrilled with the results. “In Scotland, surviving examples of old textiles are rare as the soil is not conducive to their survival. The piece was buried in peat, meaning it had no exposure to air and it was therefore preserved,” MacDonald said in a statement.

[Related: A ship from the 16th century was just dredged up in England.]

Scientists believe it survived centuries of weather and war due to the lack of air. The cool and waterlogged conditions in the bog create a highly acidic and low-oxygen environment that helps preserve objects for millennia. In 2009, archaeologists found 3,000-year-old butter in a bog in Ireland and another team found the remains of a 4,000-year-old man with intact skin in 2013.

Some earlier possible examples of tartans have been found in England, including the Falkirk tartan which dates back to the third century. However, since the pattern is a simple checkered design and there is no evidence that the yarn was dyed, it is not considered a “true tartan.”

The post Slàinte mhath! The oldest piece of Scottish tartan fabric has been identified. appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

In the 10th century, or so the story goes, seven Persian princes fled their homeland and traveled on seven ships, eventually landing on the shores of East Africa. Each prince founded a town across this stretch of land known as the Swahili Coast. Today, people who identify as Swahili view this legend as an origin story that explains their diverse heritage. 

But there’s also debate over how real this legend is. Now, a team of scientists argue that this challenged history has caused us to overlook a critical cultural connection between two continents. 

A new analysis of ancient DNA reveals this connection between Africa and Asia is very real. In a study published today in the journal Nature, scientists show that people living more than 800 years ago on the Swahili coast had an intertwined African and Asian ancestry. This suggests a multiracial identity shaped early Swahili culture and brings a new understanding of the past to the people who are Swahili today.

In regards to understanding exactly how Swahili culture was formed, “they are a people without a history,” says Chapurukha Kusimba, a professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida and senior author of the study. “We have partially resolved the issue of who were the ancestors of the Swahili people and who built this great African civilization.”

One reason why this Africa-Asia connection was originally doubted is that the tale of the seven Persian princes was not recorded until the early 1500s. There are various versions of the story, and research suggests it’s possible that these contain the storytellers’ biases. Additionally, some Eurocentric archaeologists doubted Africans transformed the Swahili coast into vibrant port cities, and their prejudice caused them to venture that the cities were built by Europeans. Lastly, other African natives have accused wealthier Africans of exaggerating or lying about their connections to Asia to elevate their social status, says Kusimba.

[Related: Crystals and eggshells tell a 105,000-year-old story of humans in the Kalahari Desert]

To come to this conclusion, the study team received permission from local Swahili people to excavate cemeteries along the coast of East Africa where the first Swahilis lived. The team took DNA samples from the skeletal remains of 80 individuals estimated to have lived between 1250 and 1800 CE. They then compared the DNA sequences to the DNA of present-day coastal Swahili speakers and to a database containing the genetics of other Eurasian and Eastern African  groups. The bodies were then reburied in their respective burial sites.

The genetic analysis of the ancient DNA revealed a mixture of both African and Asian populations. About 80 to 90 percent of Asian DNA could be linked to Persia. The remaining 10 percent came from Indian ancestors. This suggests that intermarrying was happening by at least 1,000 CE, long after Africans first built the port towns where merchant trades took place. 

At this point in history, intermingling with other cultures was not an isolated event—it was happening in multiple locations across Eastern Africa. The study team also analyzed the DNA of modern people living in Kenya and Tanzania, and found that they also showed evidence of both African and Asian ancestry. This discovery made sense to the researchers, who expected that people of mixed Indian and Persian ancestry traveled beyond the coast and formed relationships with other local African groups. 

“We could see that there was this mixture between Africans and Asians happening at least two locations along the coast and possibly even more,” says lead author Esther Brielle, a postdoctoral fellow in the genetics and genomics department at Harvard University. 

Brielle says they had ample DNA samples to compare the genetics of people living in present-day Kenya and Tanzania. The genetic findings showed similar results of Asians having relations with local African groups. 

Overall, most of the DNA coming from Asian ancestry was inherited from men, while the African ancestry stemmed primarily from women. Brielle says the findings make sense because Swahili society was heavily involved in the Indian Ocean trading network, causing them to have a constant foreign presence on the coastline. Back in those days, traveling merchants were predominately male.

The study authors note that while in other parts of the world, similar genetic signatures suggest that men forcibly married local women, they don’t think this is what happened here. A hallmark of Swahili culture is following a matriarchal society and Persian men likely married into local trading families and adopted their customs. Kusimba thinks women had some choice over who they married, and it was appealing to marry these wealthy men from abroad. 

“While archaeologists, historians, and linguists have long suspected such intermarriages took place, this is the first time well-dated data, in the form of ancient DNA signatures, have been assembled the necessary empirical support for these suppositions,” says Paul Lane, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge who was not affiliated with the study.

[Related: Eastern Africa’s oldest human fossils are more ancient than we realized]

However, interactions with foreigners may have differed depending on an ancient person’s social status. Matthew Pawlowicz, an archaeologist at Virginia Commonwealth University who was not a part of the study, points out that most of the samples of ancient DNA came from elite Muslim cemeteries. A broader socioeconomic sample would have helped with understanding the diversity of medieval Swahili people who may have lived outside of stone houses or who did not directly engage with merchants in the Indian Ocean trade network. 

Kusimba tells PopSci he plans to excavate other burial sites to provide a more diverse genetic picture of ancient Swahili people and understand why most of these cities collapsed around the 16th century. Ultimately, this work shows us the value of immigration and how refugees can contribute to the cultural diversity of a country.

“You have African communities welcoming people who are in need, giving them a place to live, and intermarrying with no problems,” says Kusimba. “These people are African people, but can trace their ancestry to many parts of the world.”

The post Ancient DNA confirms Swahilis’ blended African and Asian ancestry appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

On April 15, 2019, eyes around the world were glued to the news as a massive fire ripped through The Notre-Dame de Paris. The disaster damaged most of the metal and wood in the cathedral’s roof and famous spire, spurring an estimated $865 million restoration. The French landmark is set to open back up to visitors in December 2024. 

Investigations into the cathedral’s construction during its renovation found that the 860-year-old building is the first known cathedral of Gothic-style architecture that used iron to bind the stones together when it was initially constructed. The use of iron in this manner was a huge technological advancement for the time and the discovery is detailed in a study published March 15 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

[Related: Get a high-tech tour of the long-lost Ironton shipwreck discovered in the Great Lakes.]

When it was built in the middle of the 12th century, Notre Dame was one of the tallest buildings ever built, towering about 104 feet over Paris. Earlier studies suggested that it was able to soar to these heights by combining a number of architectural innovations such as ribbed crossing and thin vaults, but the role that iron played in the cathedral’s initial construction was unclear. 

The restoration of the cathedral after the 2019 fire allowed a team to study previously hidden parts of Notre Dame, where they obtained samples of material from 12 iron staples that were used to bind stone together. The staples were in different parts of the building, including the nave aisles, upper walls, and tribunes. 

The team studied the samples using radiocarbon dating to estimate how old they were. Microscopic, chemical, and architectural analyses suggest that the iron staples were used during the earliest phases of the cathedral’s construction in the 1160s. This makes it the first building of its type to rely on these iron staples throughout its structure. 

Reinforcement of the building’s stones with iron was key to creating the cathedral’s Gothic style, the authors add. Compared with stone architecture used in Roman times, such as the Roman Colosseum, Gothic architecture, which dates back to around the 12th to 16th centuries in Europe, used innovations in ironwork to build structures with more detail and that appear lighter. 

“Radiocarbon dating reveals that Notre-Dame de Paris is indisputably the first Gothic cathedral where iron was thought of as a real building material to create a new form of architecture. The medieval builders used several thousand of iron staples throughout its construction,” the authors wrote in a statement.

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

These new findings, when paired with other historical and archaeological knowledge from the same time period, could also help deepen the understanding of how iron was traded, circulated, and forged in Paris during the 12th and 13th centuries. Many of the staples in this study appear to have been made by welding pieces of iron from different supply sources.

Further study of these samples could help researchers create a comprehensive database of historical iron producers in the region to confirm these new findings about the iron market in medieval Paris. 

The post The Notre Dame fire revealed a long-lost architectural marvel appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

A 191-foot-long sunken ship missing beneath the waves of Lake Huron for almost 130 years has been discovered nearly intact with the help of self-driving boats and high powered sonar imaging. 

At around 12:30 AM on September 24, 1894, a three-masted schooner barge called the Ironton collided head-on with the wooden freighter, Ohio, after being cut loose from a tow line in the face of inclement weather. Both vessels quickly sank beneath the waves, and although all of the Ohio’s crew escaped aboard a lifeboat, only two of Ironton’s crew survived the ordeal. For decades, both pieces of history rested somewhere along the bottom of Lake Huron, although their exact locations remained unknown.

[Related: Watch never-before-seen footage of the Titanic shipwreck from the 1980s.]

In 2017, however, researchers at Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary collaborated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Office of Ocean Exploration and Research to begin search efforts for the roughly 100 ships known to have sunk within the 100-square-miles of unmapped lakebed. Using state-of-the-art equipment including multibeam sonar systems aboard the Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab’s 50-foot-long research vessel, RV Storm, the team scoured the sanctuary’s waters for evidence of long-lost barges, schooners, and other boats.

In May 2017, the teams finally located Ohio’s remnants, although Ironton eluded rediscovery. Two years later, Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary set out on another expedition, this time partnered with Ocean Exploration Trust, the organization founded by Robert Ballard, famous for his discoveries of the Titanic, Bismarck, and USS Yorktown. For their new trip, researchers also brought along BEN (Bathymetric Explorer and Navigator), a 12-foot-long, diesel-fueled, self-driving boat built and run by University of New Hampshire’s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping. 

By triangulating the Ohio’s now-known location, alongside wind and weather condition records for the day of the ship’s demise, RV Storm got to work with BEN’s high-resolution multibeam sonar sensor to map Lake Huron’s floors for evidence of the Ironton. With only a few days’ left to their trip, researchers finally were rewarded with 3D sonar scans of a clear, inarguable shipwreck featuring three masts.

[Related: For this deep-sea archaeologist, finding the Titanic at the bottom of the sea was just the start.]

Video footage provided by an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV) the following month confirmed their suspicions—there lay the Ironton, almost perfectly preserved thanks to Lake Huron’s extremely cold, clear waters. “Ironton is yet another piece of the puzzle of [the region’s] fascinating place in America’s history of trade,” Ballard said in a statement, adding that they “look forward to continuing to explore sanctuaries and with our partners reveal the history found in the underwater world to inspire future generations.”

Future research expeditions and divers searching for the Ironton’s exact resting place will have no trouble going forward—Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary plans to deploy one of its deep-water mooring buoys meant to mark the spot, as well as warn nearby travelers to avoid dropping anchors atop the fragile remains. The Ironton’s made it this far in nearly pristine condition, after all.

The post Get a high-tech tour of the long-lost Ironton shipwreck discovered in the Great Lakes appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

The idea of a “lost city” may feel like an ancient legend or the plot of a movie, but some of the world’s abandoned cities were bustling not too long ago. In France, the town of Oradour-Sur-Glane has been mostly untouched since 1944, when a military branch of the Nazi Party’s SS organization killed most of its population. Italian city Craco’s population dwindled after landslides in the 1960s and was completely deserted after an earthquake in 1980. The landscape of the western United States is full of the boom and bust towns that cropped up during the 19th Century.

It’s obvious that cities rise and fall, but there often aren’t clear records of why—especially when studying urban areas from thousands of years ago. Archaeologists face the challenge of putting together a puzzle from the remains of cities long gone to form theories of why some places retained their importance longer than others. 

[Related: The Aztecs’ solar calendar helped grow food for millions of people.]

A study published on March 3 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution analyzed the remains of 24 ancient cities in present-day Mexico and found that collective governance, investments in infrastructure, and cooperation between households were consistent in the cities that lasted the longest. 

“For years, my colleagues and I have investigated why and how certain cities maintain their importance or collapse,” said study co-author Gary Feinman, the MacArthur Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago, in a statement. 

Previously, the team surveyed a wide range of Mesoamerican cities over thousands of years. They  found a broad pattern of societies with government structures that promoted the well-being of its people that lasted longer than the ones with large wealth gaps and autocratic leaders. 

Their new study focuses more on cities from a smaller time and geographical scale. The 24 cities in the western half of Mesoamerica and were founded between 1000 and 300 BCE, centuries before Spanish colonization dramatically changed the region in the 16th century. 

Clues were found in the remains of the buildings, ground plans, monuments, and plazas. “We looked at public architecture, we looked at the nature of the economy and what sustained the cities. We looked at the signs of rulership, whether they seem to be heavily personalized or not,” said Feinman. 

If remnants contain art and architecture that celebrates larger-than-life rulers, it’s a sign that the society was more autocratic or despotic. By contrast, depictions of leaders in groups, often wearing masks, is more indicative of shared governance. 

Among the 24 ancient cities in the study, the cities that had more collective forms of governance tended to remain in power longer, sometimes by thousands of years more than the more autocratic ones. 

[Related: The ancient Mexican city of Monte Albán thrived with public works, not kings.]

However, even among the cities that were likely governed well, some cities were still outliers.  To understand why, they looked at infrastructure and household interdependence.

“We looked for evidence of path dependence, which basically means the actions or investments that people make that later end up constraining or fostering how they respond to subsequent hazards or challenges,” Feinman said.

They found that efforts to build dense and interconnected homes and large, central open plazas were two factors that contributed to sustainability and regional importance of these cities. 

As a way to measure sustainability in the past, most research looks for correlations between environmental or climatic events like hurricanes and earthquakes and the human response to them. However, it’s difficult to know whether the timing is reliable, and these studies typically emphasize a correlation between environmental crisis and collapse without considering how some cities successfully navigated those major challenges.  

In this study, the team took a different approach. The residents of these cities faced everything from drought and earthquakes to periodic hurricanes and heavy rains, in addition to challenges from competing cities and groups. They used this lens to examine the durational history of the 24 centers and the factors that promoted their sustainability. The team found that it was governance that had an important role in sustainability. According to study co-author Linda Nicholas, this shows that, “responses to crises and disasters are to a degree political”. Nicholas is an adjunct curator at the Field Museum.

While these cities and their inhabitants have been gone for thousands of years old, the lessons learned from their peaks and downfalls are incredibly relevant today. 

“You cannot evaluate responses to catastrophes like earthquakes, or threats like climatic change, without considering governance,” said Feinman. “The past is an incredible resource to understand how to address contemporary issues.”

The post What the longest-lasting Mesoamerican cities all had in common appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Who was the first human to ride a horse? That first rider’s distant descendents might have crossed continents and built empires on horseback. But when and where horsemanship began is not a straightforward question to answer. Horse-riding began in a time from which few equine remains survive.

As it happens, we don’t need to find the horse to find signs of people riding it. We could uncover clues from the remains of the human rider instead. A life on horseback warps human bones, and thanks to such skeletal signs, archaeologists might have found the earliest evidence of human horse-riding yet—dating from as early as 3000 BCE, as they report in a study published in the journal Science Advances today.

“You have not only the horse as a mount, but you have also the rider,” says Volker Heyd, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland and one of the study authors. “And we were looking into the human beings.”

The skeletons in question were once people of the Yamnaya culture, living in what is now southeastern Europe, some 5,000 years ago. But because they died long before written history, there aren’t many signs of “culture” as most of us would imagine it—they might have been one ethnic group, or many. Instead, archaeologists have found evidence that the Yamnaya built similar objects and practiced similar ways of life: These people roamed the steppes, herded cattle, and drove wheeled wagons. Some scholars believe they spoke a distant antecedent of today’s Indo-European languages. Perhaps most impressively, they buried the dead beneath towering mounds that we call kurgans.

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

We know that the Yamnaya had horses, but we don’t know if they merely herded them for milk and meat, or if they actually rode them. Any riding equipment—bridles and saddles—would have been fashioned from organic materials that probably long decomposed.

But horses are only one half of horse-riding. Archaeologists, perhaps, could find the other half within Yamnaya kurgans—in human bones that can tell their own stories. 

That’s because “primates like us humans are not made for sitting on horseback,” says Birgit Bühler, an archaeologist at the University of Vienna in Austria. “The horse is not made to carry us.” Without a saddle or stirrups—which the earliest riders probably didn’t have—staying balanced requires repeatedly moving the lower body and thighs. With all that biological material in motion, horse-riding, just like any other mechanical movement, would leave a mark on human bones.

Over decades of repeated stress on horseback, the human skeleton changes in response. Bone tissue in the pelvis and femurs might thicken and densify. Hip bones might chafe against each other and build up calcium. Vertebrae in the spine might warp and deform. And horses might bite, kick, step on, or throw off their riders—all of which can break bones.

[Related: Ancient climate change may have dragged the wild horses away]

Researchers have dubbed these as symptoms of “horsemanship syndrome” or “horse-riding syndrome.” Other activities might cause individual changes, but the combination of these markers may be a telltale sign of a horseback life. Bühler, for instance, has used this method to study the Avars: horse-riding nomads from the Asian steppes who rode west to rule swathes of central and eastern Europe in the early Middle Ages. 

Studying bones from 1,500 years ago is already difficult; studying bones that are three times older is even more so. But this study’s authors came across multiple markers of horseback riding in one 4,500-year-old skeleton from Strejnicu, Romania.

“It was kind of surprising to all of us to find that,” says Martin Trautmann, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, and another of the study authors.

To further confirm whether the Yamnaya rode horses, the authors examined every bone from this group that they could get their hands on, dug up from sites across Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, and Romania. Some remains had been excavated decades ago. 

Just because they had bones doesn’t mean they had every bone. “On average, about half of the skeleton is preserved, and the half we have is sometimes heavily eroded,” says Trautmann. The authors evaluated skeletons from 24 ancient people against a list of six criteria that matched the first Strejnicu skeleton. They diagnosed four additional sets of bones—dating between 3021 and 2501 BCE—that fit at least four of horsemanship syndrome’s criteria.

We know that humans first domesticated the horse around 4000 BCE; we also know that the first chariots arose around 2000 BCE. If these skeletons are evidence of horse-riders, then they could provide a key “missing link” between the two.

“It doesn’t come that unexpected if you see the wider context of Yamnaya,” says Heyd. Archaeologists believe that the Yamnaya culture spread rapidly across the European steppe within just a few decades—in archaeologists’ time, virtually an instant. “You wonder how this is possible without horseback riding,” he says.

It isn’t definitive proof. Time’s ravages, by erasing bones, have made this certain. Bühler, who wasn’t involved with the work but called it a “fantastic paper,” points out that the authors missed one of the key criteria of other horsemanship syndrome research—the hip socket stretching, vertically, into an oval—because they just didn’t have the hip sockets to properly measure.

“It’s not their fault, because the material is not there,” says Bühler. Future finds may give archaeologists the full skeletons they need, she says. Until then, she says she is “cautious” about interpretations that these people rode horses.

The authors may just yet find those bones—their research into the Yamnaya is far from over. 

The post People may have been riding horses as early as 5,000 years ago appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

From the 15th to the 12th Century BCE, Greece’s Mycenaean civilization played a major role in developing classical Greek culture. The two major cities, Mycenae and Tiryns, are even featured in Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. These stories have influenced literature and art in Europe for more than 3,000 years, but scientists are still finding new clues to how these people lived. 

A large debris deposit in the remains of Mycenae that dates back to the Late Bronze Age (about 1200 to 1150 BCE) is helping a team of researchers from the University of North Florida, the University of California, Berkeley, an archaeology research firm SEARCH, Inc better understand the history of animal resources in the ancient city. Their most recent findings, published March 1 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, describe animal remains inside a well within Petsas House–a household in Mycenae that also had a ceramics workshop that local artisans used.

[Related: Horned helmets came from Bronze Age artists, not Vikings.]

From well preserved agricultural records and architecture like the entrance to the Mycenae citadel called the Lion Gate, researchers believe that animals provided an important source of both sustenance and also symbolism. However, more research is needed to fully understand the role that animals played.

In the study, excavations into Petsas’ well recovered multiple animal remains among stone, metal, and ceramic material. The most common remains were from sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, and dogs. The team believes that most of this material was likely thrown into the well from other parts of the house after a destructive earthquake, and additional evidence showed that the animals were used as food. 

The team found that the dog remains were more intact than the farm animals and were deposited into the well at a different time. They believe that this is tentative evidence that the canines may have been treated differently in death than the other animals like pigs or sheep. 

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

“This study presents new insights about ancient animals recovered from the renowned archaeological site of Mycenae in Greece—a major political center in the Late Bronze Age, famous for references in Homer’s Iliad,” the authors wrote in a statement. “Research at Petsas House, a domestic building in Mycenae’s settlement used in large part as a ceramics workshop, revealed how the remains of meaty meals and pet dogs were cleaned and disposed of in a house well following a major destructive earthquake. Study of the archaeologically recovered bones, teeth, and shells from the well yielded a more nuanced picture of the diverse and resilient dietary strategies of residents than previously available at Mycenae.”

More deep dives into this well and the rest of the archeological site will potentially reveal patterns of how this civilization stored food, traded food and other goods, and how they responded to natural disasters. 

The post Details of life in Bronze Age Mycenae could lie at the bottom of a well appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Centuries before COVID-19 brought the world to a screeching halt in March 2020, a tiny bacteria called Yersinia pestis–AKA the plague–killed roughly 25 million people throughout the Fourteenth Century alone as it spread across Eurasia, North Africa, and eventually the Americas for 500 years. Plague still exists today, particularly in the American west, and parts of Africa and Asia, but it can be treated with antibiotics. 

Now, a team of scientists studying the origins and evolution of the plague are using human teeth from Denmark to help them answer burning questions on how it arrived, persisted, and spread in Scandinavia.

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

Their study, published February 24 in the journal Current Biology, focused on a timeline of 800 years (1000 to 1800 AD) and used almost 300 samples collected at 13 archeological sites around Denmark. They used the samples from the teeth to reconstruct Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis) genomes that were present at the time. Teeth can preserve traces of blood-borne infection for centuries and proved to be a valuable resource for this kind of genetic detective work. 

What they found is that the plague was reintroduced to the Danes in multiple ways over that time period via human movement. 

“We know that plague outbreaks across Europe continued in waves for approximately 500 years, but very little about its spread throughout Denmark is documented in historical archives,” said study co-author Ravneet Sidhu, a graduate student at McMaster University’s Ancient DNA Centre, in a statement.  

The analysis was conducted at McMaster and the team worked with historians and bioarchaeologists in Denmark and Manitoba, Canada to examine how the different strains of the plague that were present in Denmark during this period of time were related.

After reconstructing the genomes, the team then compared these older specimens with each other and their modern-day Y. pestis relatives. They found samples positive for plague in samples from 13 individuals who lived over a period of 300 years. From this pool, nine samples had enough genetic information to make evolutionary conclusions about how the plague persisted in Denmark, showing how urban and rural populations alike faced constant waves of the disease.

“The high frequency of Y. pestis reintroduction to Danish communities is consistent with the assumption that most deaths in the period were due to newly introduced pathogens. This association between pathogen introduction and mortality illuminates essential aspects of the demographic evolution, not only in Denmark but across the whole European continent,” said Jesper L. Boldsen, the skeletal collection curator and paleodemographer at the University of Southern Denmark, in a statement.

[Related: These skeletons might be evidence of the oldest known mercury poisonings.]

The analysis also showed that Y. pestis sequences from Denmark were interspersed with medieval and early modern strains that originated in other European countries, including the Baltics and Russia, instead of coming from a single Denmark specific cluster that reemerged from natural virus reservoirs over time.  

“The evidence for plague in Denmark, both historical and archaeological, has been far more sparse than in some other regions, such as England and Italy. This study identified plague for the first time from medieval Denmark, therefore enabling us to connect the experience in Denmark to disease patterns elsewhere,” said co-author and University of Manitoba anthropologist Julia Gamble, in a statement.

The study proposes that the earliest known appearance of Y. pestis in Denmark dates back to 1333 in the southwestern town of Ribe around the time of the Black Death. It appeared in rural areas like Tirup and disappeared by 1649. Most of the places hit in Denmark were port cities, but one of the final outbreaks hit smaller rural sites in the central portion of the country that did not have access to water for transportation. The team believes that this suggests that humans were moving the pathogens around via rodents or lice.

“The results reveal new connections between past and present experiences of plague, and add to our understanding of the distribution, patterns and virulence of re-emerging diseases,” said Hendrik Poinar, a study co-author and director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre and an investigator with the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, in a statement. “We can use this study and the methods we employed for the study of future pandemics.”

The post Scientists tracked the plague’s journey through Denmark using really old teeth appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

A team of scientists have found what could be the earliest evidence of modern human archery in Europe, dating back 54,000 years–about 10,000 years earlier than previously believed. The findings, published February 22 in the journal Science Advances, suggest that projectile weaponry like the bow and arrow could have been mastered during the modern humans incursion into Neanderthal territory and not after it. This weapon mastery gave humans an advantage over Neanderthals. 

These tools were found in Grotte Mandrin, a rock shelter in southern France near the Rhône River valley known for revealing 12 archaeological layers with animal remains and pointed objects since the 1990s. 

[Related: 2.9 million-year-old tools found in Kenya stir up a ‘fascinating whodunnit’.]

Projectile weapons like throwable spears and bows and arrows were believed to have appeared very suddenly among modern humans living in Eurasia 45,000 years ago–during the Upper Paleolithic period. However, a 2022 study co-authored by some of this same team uncovered 54,000-year-old dental remains from modern humans at this same site, suggesting that they were in the area about 10,000 years earlier than scientists previously believed.

Now, it appears that bows and arrows were with them. 

In this study, the team recovered 852 artifacts with well-defined points, blades, and flakes. Of these samples 383 had wear patterns that indicated they were either thrusted, thrown, or used to saw or cut. 196 items showed signs of being thrown.

The team used microscopic and macroscopic wear analysis to assess them and then used replicas of the artifacts with the same flints and technologies used by early humans to test how well they’d work on a hunt. The points could pierce animal hides and the team studied how they fractured.

The team believes that these findings show that Neanderthals did not develop weapons that could be mechanically propelled. Instead, they continued to use traditional weapons–huge stone-tipped spears that were thrusted or thrown by hand and required close contact with their game. 

“Bows are used in all environments, open or closed, and are effective for all prey sizes,” study author Laure Metz, an archaeologist and anthropologist from Aix-Marseille Universite in France and the University of Connecticut, tells PopSci. “Arrows can be shot quickly, with more precision, and many arrows can be carried in a quiver during a hunting foray. These technologies then allowed an uncomparable efficiency in all hunting activities when Neanderthals had to hunt in close or direct contact with their prey, a process that may have been much more complex, more hazardous and even much more dangerous when hunting large game like bison.”

[Related: Neanderthals caught and cooked crabs 90,000 years ago.]

According to Metz, the weapon transitions show that tradition is a deeply human characteristic “Even more than 50,000 years ago, traditions were anchored and important. They [early humans] preferred to keep their weapons than to adopt more effective weapons [that were] totally new to them.”

A team of over 40 scientists will continue to explore Grotte Mandrin, since scientists are still constantly learning more about our early ancestors within its rock layers. 

“It is important to understand where we come from and sometimes, something that seems obvious or natural to us, was not so for our ancestors or Neanderthal cousins,” says Metz.

The post Archery may have helped humans gain leverage over Neanderthals appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Sex toys can provide pleasure, deeper intimacy, and can even help those with pelvic floor pain, erectile dysfunction, and the effects of menopause. People have also probably used them for much longer in history than we think.

A study published February 20 in the journal Antiquity believes that a nearly 2,000 year-old penis-shaped wooden object might have been a sex toy used by ancient Romans in Britain. It could be the “first known example of a non-miniaturized disembodied phallus made of wood in the Roman world,” according to the study. 

Archaeologists found the almost seven-inch-long artifact over 20 years ago in a ditch near Vindolanda, the remains of a Roman Fort near Hadrian’s Wall. The 73-mile-long wall in northern England once once marked the northwest frontier of the Roman Empire. 

[Related from PopSci+: These sex toys are designed to heal, one orgasm at a time.]

According to the study, the tool was initially believed to be a darning tool, likely because it was found alongside dozens of shoes, dress accessories, and small tools and craft waste products. It was also suspected that the object may have been used as a pestle or as a charm to “ward off evil,” as phalli were used across the Roman Empire as a way to protect against bad luck. They were usually depicted in paintings and mosaics, and small phalli made from metal or bone were commonly worn as pendants around the neck.

A new analysis from Newcastle University and University College Dublin found that this is the first known example of a disembodied wooden phallus recovered in the Roman world. 

“Wooden objects would have been commonplace in the ancient world, but only survive in very particular conditions – in northern Europe normally in dark, damp, and oxygen free deposits,” said Rob Sands, a study co-author and archaeologist from University College Dublin, in a statement. “So, the Vindolanda phallus is an extremely rare survival. It survived for nearly 2000 years to be recovered by the Vindolanda Trust because preservation conditions have so far remained stable. However, climate change and altering water tables mean that the survival of objects like this are under ever increasing threat.”

The team believes that it was more likely used to stimulate the clitoris and not necessarily used for penetration. It could have been used as a pestle to grind cooking ingredients or medicine. The phallus could have been slotted into a statue for passers-by to touch for good luck or to absorb its protection from back luck. This practice was common throughout the Empire and the statue it belonged to may have been located near the entrance to an important government or military building.

“The size of the phallus and the fact that it was carved from wood raises a number of questions to its use in antiquity. We cannot be certain of its intended use, in contrast to most other phallic objects that make symbolic use of that shape for a clear function, like a good luck charm,” said Rob Collins, a study co-author and archaeologist from Newcastle University, in a statement. “We know that the ancient Romans and Greeks used sexual implements – this object from Vindolanda could be an example of one.”

[Related: Ancient athletes did something truly shocking with their genitals.]

The phallus is currently on display at the Vindolanda museum and the team hopes that the findings encourage more analysis of previously found objects to better understand their purposes.

“This rediscovery shows the real legacy value of having such an incredible collection of material from one site and being able to reassess that material,” said Barbara Birley, Curator at the Vindolanda Trust, in a statement. “The wooden phallus may well be currently unique in its survival from this time, but it is unlikely to have been the only one of its kind used at the site, along the frontier, or indeed in Roman Britain.”

The post Scientists think they found a 2,000-year-old dildo in ancient Roman ruins appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.