Sudan Memory1 is the first mass digitization project ever attempted in Sudan. Its roots go back to January 2013, when Dr. Badreldin Elhag Musa, executive director of the Sudanese Association for Archiving Knowledge, contacted archival institutions in the UK about Sudanese cultural heritage he considered at risk, not from war, since there wasn’t one yet, but from the ordinary decay that threatens any uncatalogued archive: paper rotting, negatives degrading, tape demagnetizing. That inquiry eventually reached Professor Marilyn Deegan at King’s College London, who would go on to lead the project as its managing director. By December 2017, with an initial £800,000 from the British Council’s Cultural Emergency Fund, later topped up to £1,170,000, and from 2019 a further $655,000 from the Aliph Foundation, formal digitization work had begun across institutions in Khartoum and beyond.

By 2022, the project’s team, spread across partner institutions in Sudan and collaborators in the UK, had digitized roughly 148,000 items drawn from forty-three public and private collections: photographs, manuscripts, museum objects, film and audio recordings, oral histories, and a 3D interactive reconstruction of what the historic port of Suakin might have looked like around 1900. Sixty thousand of those items, described in both English and Arabic, went up on a public website. The rest existed only in the project’s own storage, subject to agreements that varied collection by collection.

Nobody involved in 2013 was digitizing against a war that hadn’t happened yet. That war arrived in April 2023, when fighting broke out across Sudan and cultural institutions including the National Museum and the Khalifa House Museum were looted and damaged. But the years in between, the ordinary years of scanning manuscripts and cataloguing photographs under a government that fell in 2019, then a pandemic, then a fragile transition, turned out to matter more than anyone planning the project in 2013 could have known. A new history of the project, compiled by researchers at King’s College London from fourteen interviews conducted between January and May 2025 with the people who built it, keeps circling back to a single, under-examined idea: that digitizing something is not the same as de-materializing it. The digital copy still has to live somewhere. It still has to move through customs, survive a bad internet connection, and get carried, sometimes literally, from one place to another.

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Twenty centimeters is a shallow plough, and it accounts for a good deal about the site. It lifts sherds, brick fragments and the occasional inscribed piece into the plough zone and shifts them a short distance sideways, and it comes nowhere near the tops of buried walls. Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, was never intensively reoccupied after the Assyrian empire fell in 612 BC. The survey recorded material running from the third millennium BC through to the Islamic period, roughly the mid-seventh century AD onward, but nothing later ever settled on the site with the weight of the Assyrian town, so the houses and streets of the ninth to seventh centuries BC sit under farmland rather than under a medieval quarter, which is not the case at Nineveh, where modern Mosul has spread across a substantial part of the ancient city.

The lower town covers 340 hectares inside nearly eight kilometers of fortification wall.

In the 180 years since Austen Henry Layard opened his first trenches there in 1845, three buildings in all of that area have been dug at any scale: Fort Shalmaneser at the south-east corner, the Town Wall Palace, and the palace in the sector known as PD5. Everything Nimrud is famous for came off the acropolis, and it came off in quantity. Max Mallowan’s excavations in the 1950s recovered a stele on which Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BC), who made Kalhu his capital in 879 BC, records ten days of feasting for 69,574 people at the city’s inauguration, a figure given to the last digit. There is no comparable number for how many people actually lived in the lower town during any Assyrian decade; the estimates in circulation come from assumed densities multiplied by the walled area rather than from excavated houses. The Nimrud Lower Town Archaeological Project, run by Daniele Morandi Bonacossi and Francesca Simi1 of the Department of Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Udine, is an attempt to recover the street plan, the neighborhoods, the workshops and the water supply of an imperial capital using methods that mostly do not involve digging. The question underneath the fieldwork is whether a city of this size can be read from its surface, from sherd counts, a terrain model and the magnetic contrast between buried fill and the soil around it, well enough to say where a trench should go and, past that, well enough to say how the place was organized.

The starting point was photographs taken to look at something else. Declassified imagery from U-2 flights and the CORONA and HEXAGON satellite programs, dated between 1967 and 1974, covers northern Iraq at usable resolution, and its value now lies partly in its age, since it predates most of the land leveling, canal cutting and village expansion of the last fifty years. Jason Ur, an archaeologist at Harvard who works on Mesopotamian settlement, drew on this class of imagery in a 2013 paper on the morphology of Neo-Assyrian cities, and at Nimrud it showed the fortification circuit, the gates, a street system and blocks of denser and sparser occupation inside the walls. But a line on a photograph is only a proposal about a line in the ground. Before the 2025 survey could test any of it, the team needed a modern map, which they built with differential GPS and a drone: new benchmarks, an orthophoto, a digital terrain model, a site plan.

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That tomb is a small version of a larger problem, and both of them sit inside a new study of 149 ancient genomes from Gansu published in Cell1 on September 3. The work was led by Qiaomei Fu at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, with archaeologists from the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in Gansu Province and collaborators elsewhere. The team generated 186 sequences from 185 samples, obtained 62 direct radiocarbon dates, and after quality filtering ended up with 149 usable individuals from eleven sites, spanning roughly 4,700 to 3,000 years before present. Ninety-five of those individuals come from Mogou alone.

Gansu is the obvious place to ask the question they were asking. The province sits at a junction: the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor to the west, the Loess Plateau to the east, the Mongolian Plateau north, the Tibetan Plateau south. By about 4,000 years ago, crops and animals first domesticated in southwest Asia were showing up there. Wheat. Barley. Cattle. Sheep and goats. Some of the earliest copper and bronze objects recovered anywhere in China turn up in the same region, and a few cultural features at these sites recall the early Bronze Age Andronovo horizon far to the west. Nine of the eleven newly sampled sites show western-derived crops or livestock in use.

So the genomes should show western Eurasian ancestry. They don’t.

Principal component analysis places every one of the newly reported Gansu individuals inside the range of East Asian variation, with no drift toward western Eurasian or Central Asian populations. ADMIXTURE finds no meaningful western component. D-statistics comparing the Gansu groups against four reference ancestries used as western Eurasian anchors, Anatolian Farmer, Iranian Farmer, Eastern Hunter-Gatherer and Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer, return affinities no different from what any other East Asian population produces. Three independent approaches, one answer.

This is not how it went in Europe. There, the arrival of farming came bundled with people: the Neolithic expansion of Anatolian farmers, then the Bronze Age expansion of Yamnaya agropastoralists, both leaving genetic signatures visible thousands of years later. Central Asia shows something similar. Gansu shows the opposite. The domesticates crossed the continent and the people who domesticated them apparently did not, or at least not in numbers that left a trace.

The authors are careful about how far that goes. Absence of evidence at the population level is not proof that no individual with western Eurasian ancestry ever set foot in Gansu. What the data rule out is a demographic event large enough to register. Whoever carried the wheat east, they were not founding populations. The plausible mechanisms are cultural transmission along the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor, or exchange through intermediary groups on the Mongolian Steppe, and the study notes that direct archaeological evidence for a steppe route remains thin.

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The furnace was in the Rooiberg valley in what is now South Africa’s Limpopo province, roughly 360 kilometres to the south-southeast. Somebody looked at this piece of industrial waste, decided it was interesting, and carried it that entire distance.

We can say that with some confidence because tin carries a geological signature. The sheet has a tin isotope ratio (δ124Sn of 1.4 per mil) that is distinctively characteristic of Rooiberg cassiterite, and a lead model age of about 2050 million years, matching the Bushveld Large Igneous Province that hosts the Rooiberg deposits. The object is a curiosity in the literal sense. Someone found it curious.

That sheet is one of the odder finds in a new study by Jay Stephens, Carla Klehm, Phillip Segadika and David Killick, published in Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa,1 which works out where the copper and tin at three Iron Age sites in east-central Botswana actually came from. The three sites are Bosutswe, a three-hectare hilltop settlement that began as a cattle post in the seventh century AD and was abandoned by the seventeenth; Khubu la Dintša, a much smaller settlement about 14 kilometres away, occupied roughly cal AD 1220 to 1445; and Lose, a hilltop site about 100 kilometres south, occupied from around AD 900 to 1500. They are the only three sites anywhere that have produced Lose pottery, a locally made ware with incised triangular motifs borrowed from Mapungubwe styles. Lose is therefore a site, a pottery type and a period name (c. AD 1200 to 1650) all at once, which is worth holding in mind for what follows.

Bosutswe was well connected long before any of this. Glass beads from the Indian Ocean trade, cowrie shells from the coast, a single gold spiral, chickens (Gallus gallus) and black rats (Rattus rattus) all turn up in its deposits. What has been much harder to see is what these communities traded with each other, inside the African interior, rather than with the Swahili coast.

Metals are the way in, but only two of them. Iron makes up about 7.1 percent of the earth’s crust, which means fingerprinting all its possible sources is not a research programme, it is a fantasy. Gold is the opposite problem: rare, but scattered across an enormous number of tiny deposits, and endlessly recyclable. Summers counted 1119 pre-colonial gold mines in what is now Zimbabwe and Botswana against 143 copper mines, and that figure excludes alluvial gold. Copper, at 75 parts per million of the crust, and tin, at 2.5 ppm, sit in the sweet spot. They are common in archaeological assemblages and scarce in the ground, and since 2014 the team behind this study has been building a reference database of lead isotope ratios for southern African ore deposits, now over 800 entries.

The Bosutswe metals sort into four groups: 14 unalloyed copper objects, two pieces of “dirty copper” with trace tin, 25 bronzes, and the lead-tin sheet. Nearly all of it is jewellery or the debris of making jewellery. Beads, clips, wound-wire helices, bangles.

The copper in those objects comes from almost everywhere. Cobalt-bearing deposits on the Central African Copperbelt and the Kipushi deposit on the Congo-Kinshasa and Zambia border, more than 950 kilometres away. Copper Queen in northwestern Zimbabwe, over 500 kilometres. Musina and Phalaborwa in South Africa, 380 and 515 kilometres. Rooiberg copper, from small deposits in the same valley as the tin. Selebi Phikwe and Dukwe in Botswana, 150 and 140 kilometres. And an unidentified vein-type deposit somewhere in the Transvaal Supergroup rocks of northern South Africa.

There is no dominant source. That is the finding. Contemporary Mapungubwe, 350 kilometres east, drew its copper almost exclusively from Phalaborwa; Bosutswe has exactly one unambiguous piece of Phalaborwa copper in the whole sample.

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All the skulls faced east. Each came with its own articulated fore- and hindlimbs, the feet still in anatomical order, which is what archaeologists mean by a “head-and-hoof” deposit and which usually indicates the hide was still attached when the animal went into the ground.

Directly east, about five metres away, stood a small timber building.

This is the site at Land East of Kings Warren, Red Lodge, in the chalk country of west Suffolk, excavated by Archaeology South-East in 2016 ahead of a housing development and published this year in Britannia1 by Angus Forshaw. The excavation turned up material from the Early Neolithic through to the Middle Ages. The Roman-period parts are the ones worth sitting with, because they are built on something much older.

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That is a small result from a small prototype. The larger claim behind it is that the instrument doing the looking cost roughly a twentieth of the hyperspectral rigs previously brought onto excavations, runs on a Raspberry Pi 4, and can be powered off a cordless drill battery.

The problem it addresses is old and specific. Excavation is the identification of stratigraphic units followed by their removal in sequence, which means the whole enterprise depends on an archaeologist being able to see where one unit stops and the next begins. Usually that works. In dark earths it does not. Where organic content is high, everything in the profile is black, and the contrasts that define stratigraphic events are either faint or absent in visible light. The units get sorted out later, in post-excavation analysis, which is a poor consolation given that the deposits themselves are gone by then.

Sorte Muld, on Bornholm, is the case where this bites hardest. The name means black earth, and the site earned it: more than a meter of cultural deposits accumulated during occupation running from roughly AD 0 to AD 1000, laid down by a settlement that was a power center in the Baltic and is best known for more than 3,400 gold foil figures dating to the sixth and seventh centuries. Buildings there were rebuilt repeatedly. The busier a given part of the complex was, the messier its sedimentology. Some of the resulting layers are a few millimeters thick. Whether a given one was even visible on a given day could depend on how wet the soil happened to be.

The profile the team worked1 on was reopened during a 2019 excavation, catalogued as Margrethe Watts, BMR1191, to supply material for dating and environmental analyses. The imaging happened there.

The video shows the LEDMSI flash illuminating the soil at different wavelengths. Credit: David Stott, Moesgaard

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The tomb belongs to King Kaolie of Chu, who died in 238 BC. It is the first properly excavated royal Chu tomb of the Warring States period, and AMS radiocarbon dating of plant material from the bundles themselves returned an age of roughly 2200 cal BP, consistent with the king’s death date rather than with any later intrusion. Fan Yang, Yong Ge and colleagues took1 twelve bundles at random, cleaned them in the lab, and unwrapped them.

The wrapping leaves came out identifiable. Oblong to obovate, short acute tip, wavy-toothed margins, pinnate venation with the tertiary veins running perpendicular to the secondaries: that is Quercus dentata, the daimyo oak, and the team backed the leaf-shape match with a comparison of epidermal cell patterns against modern specimens. The cords were harder. There were no diagnostic hemp fibres, which rules out Cannabis sativa, the obvious candidate. What the cords did yield was phytoliths, silica bodies that form inside plant cells and survive after the tissue rots. Bilobate and saddle forms dominated, the signature of the grass subfamilies Panicoideae and Arundinoideae. In two cord samples a good share of those phytoliths were still articulated, meaning they sat in their original cellular arrangement rather than washing in from surrounding sediment. The cordage was made from grass, probably from more than one kind.

Inside: 456 seeds from ten of the bundles. Rice, Oryza sativa, made up 43.6 percent. Foxtail millet, Setaria italica, 28.5 percent. Broomcorn millet, Panicum miliaceum, 26.1 percent. Also present were a single seed of Zanthoxylum bungeanum and one of Malva sp., both aromatics used as spice, and six seeds of Scirpus juncoides, a weed of flooded rice fields that probably came along with the harvest.

So far this reads like lunch. A leaf packet of rice and millet, tied with grass rope, put in a tomb. Anyone who has eaten zongzi at the Dragon Boat Festival knows the object.

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Windmill Way is a 29-metre rockshelter on a sandstone ridge in southeast Cape York Peninsula, and the alcove at its northern end is a miserable place to live. The ceiling is under a metre high. You would have to crawl. What that alcove contained, though, was thousands of fragmented animal bones, many of them spirally fractured, many of them gnawed, some still carrying dried flesh. The obvious reading was carnivore accumulation. Dingoes drag carcasses into low sheltered spaces and chew them there. The excavators reasonably concluded that most of the faunal assemblage was not the product of human hands at all.

Then someone noticed a blackish-brown ball stuck to the root end of a single macropod incisor. Small, neat, deliberately shaped. Not the kind of thing that happens to a tooth by accident.

That observation, plus the identification of an unambiguous bone point, forced a reassessment. Every tooth and jaw fragment from the excavation went back under inspection. Ten teeth showed clear macroscopic resin. Two more were flagged as possible. Twelve in total, and Lynley Wallis and her colleagues have now published the analysis in Australian Archaeology.1

All twelve are mandibular incisors. Six come from agile wallabies (Notamacropus agilis), three from spectacled hare wallabies (Lagorchestes conspicillatus), two from northern nail-tail wallabies (Onychogalea unguifera), and one is too broken to identify with confidence, though its width points to N. agilis as well. All three species live in the country around the shelter today. All three are represented in the gnawed bone assemblage. The most economical explanation is that whoever made these objects picked the teeth out of the debris already lying on the shelter floor, which is a strange and rather intimate image: someone sorting through the leavings of dingo meals for the right sort of tooth.

Radiocarbon dating went directly to the resin on two specimens, returning ages of roughly 1,170 to 1,290 calibrated years before present. That detail is worth pausing on. Nearly every comparable ornament from Australia comes from a burial and is dated by proxy, from the age of the human remains rather than the object. These two resin balls were dated as themselves.

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Fly a laser scanner over that forest and you find a city underneath.

That part is no longer surprising. Airborne lidar has been reshaping Maya archaeology since the Caracol survey in 2011, and by now the pattern is familiar. Pulses of laser light go down, most bounce off leaves, a fraction slip through gaps and hit the ground, and enough of those ground returns come back to build a digital terrain model at half-meter resolution. Strip away the vegetation digitally and the buried landscape appears: plazas, causeways, canals, house mounds, low walls running for kilometers through what looks from the ground like undifferentiated jungle.

What Sara Eshleman and colleagues did in a new paper in Scientific Reports1 is look at the part everyone throws away.

The vegetation returns. All those pulses that hit the canopy and never made it to the ground are, for archaeological purposes, noise to be filtered out. But they encode the three-dimensional structure of the forest in considerable detail: how tall it is, how the leaf mass is distributed vertically, how bumpy the upper surface is, how much light gets through. Foresters and ecologists have been using exactly this data for years to estimate carbon and biomass. Nobody had systematically correlated it with the archaeology sitting directly beneath.

The team ran that correlation across a 47 square kilometer study area covering two large Maya centers, Wari Camp and Gran Cacao, plus the Central Rio Bravo wetland field complex, an 8 square kilometer expanse of rectilinear canals cut into the floodplain next to Wari Camp. Occupation ran from about 2900 to 1000 BP, with the population peak during the Classic Period, 1400 to 1000 BP. The wetland complex itself was in use from roughly 2030 to 840 BP. The canals, in other words, went out of service more than eight centuries ago.

Three categories of ancient feature were mapped: settlement structures, wetland field systems, and upland wall features. Rather than trusting a single archaeologist’s eye, two researchers independently digitized every human modification they could identify and assigned confidence levels to each call. Those judgments were combined into continuous indices, so what enters the statistical models is not “there is a house mound here” but “here is how much confident evidence of settlement exists in this grid cell.” Topographic variables went in alongside: slope, curvature, aspect, elevation, local and regional topographic position. Topography has long been understood as the dominant control on vegetation in this region, so it needed to be held accountable before anything could be attributed to the Maya. Spatial error models handled the autocorrelation that inevitably shows up when you sample a landscape comprehensively.

The result is that each of the three feature types leaves a different mark on the forest above it.

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Another, ARJB V0522, from the Saint Eusebius church cemetery in Arnhem, was around ten years old. One facet joint on T5 already shows the pitting and contour change that pathologists associate with cartilage failure.

These two are among 143 individuals, aged from four to twenty-five at death, analysed by Alex Tutwiler and Rachel Schats of Leiden University in a paper published in the International Journal of Paleopathology.1 The question they set out to answer is one that Dutch historical records, for all their bureaucratic thoroughness, cannot touch. The archives tell us how many children worked, at what age they started, how many hours they put in and what they were paid. They say almost nothing about what the work did to the bodies doing it.

Three cemetery assemblages, three different lives. Keyserkerk in Middenbeemster is rural and low-to-middling in status, its economy built on dairy cattle and cheese; the burials there date from 1829 to 1866, and 51 individuals from the site met the study’s criteria. Eusebiuskerk in Arnhem is urban and poor, drawn from the outer northern portion of the churchyard where the lower social strata were interred; it dates from 1626 to 1829 and contributed 49 individuals. Nieuwe Kerk in Delft is the control of sorts: 43 individuals from graves in the church choir, dating from 1624 to 1814, belonging to families wealthy enough to be buried inside the church and almost certainly exempt from work. Arnhem had tobacco processing, textile manufacture, brick-making and paper mills. Delft had trade, and children who studied.

What Tutwiler and Schats looked for were three kinds of change, all of them things that clinicians normally see in middle-aged and older patients. Facet joint osteoarthritis is degeneration of the small paired synovial joints at the back of each vertebra, the ones that let the spine bend and twist while bearing up to a third of the load passing through a spinal segment. Schmorl’s nodes are the disc-through-endplate herniations described above, linked clinically to compressive and shearing force. Vertebral body margin modifications are new bone forming as a lipped rim around the edge of the vertebral body, most often in response to disc degeneration. None of these is caused by labor alone. All three have genetic, developmental and traumatic contributions. What makes them interpretable here is age. In a fifty-year-old the signal is drowned out by ordinary senescence. In a nine-year-old there is much less noise.

Middenbeemster came out worst on every measure the study applied. Overall lesion prevalence there reached 62.6 percent in the upper thoracic vertebrae and 68.4% in the lower thoracic, higher than any spinal region at either of the other sites. The gap held across every age category, from the youngest children through the early young adults, and it held for Schmorl’s nodes and for margin modifications assessed separately.

The upper thoracic figure is the strange one. That stretch of spine, T1 through T6, is the least mobile part of the column, splinted by the ribcage and comparatively protected from the flexion and rotation that wreck the lumbar region. Children in a dairy village were wearing it out anyway. Tutwiler and Schats attribute this to the muscles that anchor there rather than to the vertebrae themselves. The rhomboids and trapezius originate on the spinous processes of the upper thoracic spine and stabilize the shoulder girdle, and they are exactly the muscles a small body recruits when it lifts something heavier than it should. Beemster children were milking cows and taking part in cheese-making by the age of nine, according to an agricultural survey from 1800. Cheese-making meant hauling milk basins, churning, and lifting and pressing moulds, done in a hunched posture, repeatedly, by people who did not yet have the body mass to do it without strain.

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It is the largest of 29 Rainbow Serpent paintings that Paul Taçon, Sally May, Andrea Jalandoni and Charlie Mungulda recorded across 21 sites at Awunbarna, also known as Mount Borradaile, in northwest Arnhem Land. Their study appeared in Australian Archaeology1 in August 2026. Awunbarna sits in Amurdak Country, south of the Cobourg Peninsula, and its shelters hold paintings made over at least the past 15,000 years. Since 2018 the team has recorded and analysed 165 sites there, with a deliberate focus on what was painted after outsiders arrived.

The density is the first strange thing. Rainbow Serpents turn up at 12.6 percent of the 167 known Awunbarna sites. At Namunidjbuk to the northeast, two paintings across 352 sites. At Injalak Hill to the south, two across 232 sites, and one of those depicts Yingarna in human form rather than as a serpent. Outside Awunbarna, the region’s Rainbow Serpent paintings are scattered across seven separate zones of roughly 1,000 square kilometres each. At Awunbarna they are packed into an area of about 27 square kilometres, four and a half kilometres by six. Counting everything now known from western Arnhem Land, Awunbarna holds a fifth of all Rainbow Serpent rock paintings and 38.5 percent of the ones classed as recent.

The dating is where the argument has to do its work, and it is worth being clear about what kind of dating this is. Almost none of these paintings can be radiocarbon dated. The team’s case for a post-contact age rests on three things stacked together. The serpents belong to the most recent Arnhem Land painting style. They sit in the uppermost layers at sites with superimposed art. And seven of them were made mainly with white pipe clay, or kaolin, which sits on the rock surface instead of penetrating and staining it the way red ochre does. Kaolin paintings usually survive a few hundred years and sometimes erode away within decades. Add the colour combinations and infill types, which match the sequence tracked with radiocarbon dates at Nawarla Gabarnmang in central-western Arnhem Land between about 1640 and 1930, and the team concludes that 20 of the 29 Awunbarna serpents postdate contact. The paper treats roughly 1640 as the threshold for post-contact art in the region, drawing on earlier chronological work, though the cultural upheaval the study invokes belongs to the 1800s and early 1900s. This is relative dating carrying an argument about a fairly specific historical moment, and the paper is upfront that the window is wide.

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Those are seed storage proteins. They are what a seed packs away to feed an embryo before it can photosynthesize. They have no obvious business being in a paint layer on a coffin, and as far as the authors can tell, nobody has found them in one before.

The coffin fragment is catalogued MM 13944 at the Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm, and it dates loosely to the Greco-Roman period, somewhere between 332 BCE and 395 CE. It is one of fourteen painted objects that Clara Granzotto and colleagues sampled for a study published in Science Advances.1 Twenty-eight microsamples in total, drawn from the Egyptian collections of the Medelhavsmuseet, the British Museum in London, and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. The objects span roughly eighteen centuries, from 1425 BCE to 400 CE, and include painted wooden coffins, wall painting fragments on mud and plaster, cartonnage and a plaster mummy bust, and painted limestone architectural pieces.

The reason nobody found sesame in Egyptian paint before is partly a matter of what the older methods were built to look for.

Chemists have been characterizing Egyptian binding media for decades, mostly with gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry, or with high-performance liquid chromatography. These techniques work by hydrolyzing a sample down to its constituent amino acids and reconstructing what was probably there from the relative proportions, plus a few diagnostic markers such as hydroxyproline for collagen. That approach is very good at answering a specific question: is this animal glue, egg, or casein? It is much worse at answering the open version of the question, which is simply what proteins are in here. If the answer is something that was never in the reference set, the method returns a shrug. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy has the same limitation from the other direction. It will tell you confidently that a protein is present and tell you nothing about which one.

Untargeted proteomics does not start with a list. Peptides are sequenced and then matched against databases, and if the match is a plant seed protein rather than collagen, that is what comes out. Granzotto and colleagues searched their spectra first against a curated set of the usual artistic proteins, then against the full SwissProt database, and then, once plant sequences began appearing, against a database restricted to land plants. The searches got narrower as the answers got stranger.

Dr. Clara Granzotto describes the research goals and impact of the study of paint binders in artworks from ancient Egypt by proteomics. The video shows Dr. Clara Granzotto and conservator Inger Jonsson carefully examining the objects’ surface to select the best area for sampling. Micro-samples are taken by using surgical blades and needles. Credit: Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm. Photographer Johan Jeppsson

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The sherds were washed, stored in paper bags, moved to shoeboxes, moved again to plastic bags, and eventually housed at the University of Georgia’s Laboratory of Archaeology. In 2013 someone took a burr to their interior surfaces and scraped off powder. In a Paris clean lab that powder yielded fragments of Theobroma cacao DNA.

Cacao does not grow in Georgia. It does not grow anywhere near Georgia. It is a tropical understory tree, and its presence in an 11th-century deposit in the southern Appalachian piedmont means somebody carried it there, or carried something made from it, across a distance nobody has yet been able to map.

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A Hadza forager, wearing the same model of device, logs 24 minutes of movement in an average nighttime hour.

That gap is the core of a paper by David Samson of the University of Toronto Mississauga, published in the Journal of Human Evolution,1 which asks whether the standard classification of Homo sapiens as a diurnal primate survives contact with field data. His answer is a qualified no, and the qualification matters as much as the no.

Samson calls the idea the Human Diel Flexibility hypothesis. “Diel” just means the full 24-hour cycle, day plus night. The proposal is that humans retain thoroughly diurnal circadian physiology, the internal clock documented since Jürgen Aschoff’s isolation experiments in the 1960s, while expressing an activity pattern much less day-bound than that physiology would predict. Aschoff concluded from those experiments that humans belong to the light-active organisms. Samson is not disputing the clock. He is disputing what we do with it.

The comparison runs on actigraphy, and its strength is that all of it came off the same instrument. The dataset pulls together three sources: seven lemur species recorded at the Duke Lemur Center, two gibbon species (Hylobates pileatus and Hylobates moloch) at the Gibbon Conservation Center in Santa Clarita, and 33 Hadza adults recorded in bush camps near Lake Eyasi in northern Tanzania during 2016. Everyone wore a MotionWatch 8, sampling motion at 50 Hz and binning it into minute-by-minute counts. Ten species, six genera, 1,227 individual 24-hour periods, 193 individuals. The Hadza were the obvious human sample precisely because they sleep in the open or under grass and branch shelters without electric light, which removes the biggest confound in any comparison of this kind.

The summary statistic is a ratio Samson calls the DNTR, day-to-night time ratio: mean active minutes per daytime hour divided by mean active minutes per nighttime hour. A value of 1 means equal measured activity in both periods. Higher values mean a day-biased animal.

Gibbons came in at 35.60. The lemur genera clustered between 2.42 and 2.93. Humans landed at 2.36, the lowest value in the sample.

Two things about that number deserve care before anyone runs with it. First, humans were not merely more active at night; they were the most active genus overall, logging 52.31 active minutes per daytime hour against the gibbons’ 35.56. Part of what the ratio captures is simply that foragers move a lot. Second, epochs falling within civil twilight were coded as day, so the human nighttime figure is not dusk activity smuggled in under a different name. It is movement in the dark.

The captivity problem cuts the other way and Samson flags it himself. The lemurs and gibbons were living under husbandry schedules, with feeding times, enrichment, visitors, and ambient lighting shaping when they moved. The Hadza were living their lives. Comparing a wild forager to a captive gibbon and concluding something about the human lineage requires holding the result loosely, which is why the paper frames study 1 as an evidence-of-similarity test rather than a reclassification.

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That clipping now appears in the reference list of a scientific paper about those engravings. It is one of the few surviving traces of how much sulfur the Dampier industrial area was putting into the air half a century ago, and it turns out to matter quite a lot.

Murujuga, the cultural landscape spanning the Burrup Peninsula and the Dampier Archipelago, holds something between one and two million petroglyphs. The engravings record the relationship between Ngarda-Ngarli Traditional Owners and this land and sea Country across a span of at least 50,000 years, including images of animals that no longer exist in the region. In July 2025 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, one of Australia’s first Indigenous-led nominations. It is also, and has been since the 1960s, the site of liquefied natural gas processing, fertiliser production, salt works, and a major iron ore port.

For more than two decades the dominant explanation for observed changes to the rock surfaces has been acid deposition. The logic was clean. Industry emits nitrogen and sulfur oxides. Those gases form nitric and sulfuric acid. The engravings are visible only because of a dark surface layer, a few tens to a few hundred microns thick, coloured by iron and manganese oxides, which contrasts against the paler clay-bearing layer underneath. Iron and manganese oxides dissolve more readily as pH falls. And when researchers put a probe to those rock surfaces, they got readings between about 4.5 and 6. Acidic. Case closed, or close enough that it shaped two decades of argument about industrial approvals.

A team led by K.A. Evans at Curtin University, working with the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation as part of the government-funded Murujuga Rock Art Monitoring Program, has now published an analysis that takes that chain of reasoning apart link by link. The paper appeared as a preprint in February 2026 and in Scientific Reports1 the following month. Its central claim is not that the rock art is fine. It is that the field has been reading the wrong instrument.

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Dental calculus is mineralized plaque, the hardened biofilm that accumulates on teeth during a person’s lifetime. As the plaque mineralizes, it traps fragments of whatever passes through the mouth. Proteins from food get locked into the calcified matrix and, under the right conditions, survive for centuries. The method for extracting and identifying them involves dissolving the calculus, running the resulting peptides through a mass spectrometer, and matching the sequences against a reference database. It’s called paleoproteomics, and its applications to diet reconstruction have so far concentrated heavily on European and Central Asian populations, with dairy consumption as the main focus. A 2020 study1 by Sawafuji and colleagues used a related technique, ancient DNA metabarcoding, on dental calculus from Edo-period commoners in Tokyo, and identified plant-based foods along with traces of a Southeast Asian plant imported as medicine. But DNA methods are better suited to plant material; proteins are more comprehensive, particularly for animal-derived foods like fish.

This study,2 led by Yoko Uchida-Fukuhara and Takumi Tsutaya of SOKENDAI (the Graduate University for Advanced Studies), applies proteomic analysis to Edo-period Japan, to eight people buried in a commoner cemetery in what is now the heart of central Osaka.

Their remains came from the Ofuka-cho site, more commonly known as the Umeda Cemetery, which sits beneath the area near Umeda Station. During the Edo period (1603-1868), this was one of seven designated cemeteries for the common people of Osaka. Premodern Osaka cremated most of its dead; inhumation was the minority practice, but thousands of inhumation burials were recovered during excavations in 2016-2017 and 2019. The eight individuals analyzed here came from densely clustered burial areas, excavated in 2019, and appear to have been interred within a relatively short span of time based on their stratigraphic positions. All date to the Edo period.

The team first ran carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis on bone collagen, which is the standard starting point for dietary reconstruction. Seven individuals yielded usable results; one was excluded due to poor collagen preservation. Their isotope ratios fell within the expected range for urban premodern Japanese commoners: a diet based on C3 terrestrial plants and marine resources. Useful framing, but not much more. Isotope ratios can tell you that someone ate marine fish; they cannot tell you which fish, or how it was obtained, or whether specific taxa were accessible across social groups. That’s where the dental calculus comes in.

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Tar kilns are how people pulled tar, pitch, and resin out of pine before the petrochemical era. From the eighteenth century into the early twentieth, workers stacked pine staves inside a circular earthen mound, packed soil over them from a surrounding trench, and burned the wood in a slow, low-oxygen fire. The tar drained through a buried pipe into a collection pit nearby. What survives in the ground today is usually a ring-shaped ditch around a slightly raised interior, sometimes with that collection pit still legible just outside the ring.

The Louisiana structures had the circle and the adjacent pit. The relief was backwards, though. A standard southeastern tar kiln reads as a raised center sitting inside a ditch. These read as a sunken center inside a raised berm. Same footprint, opposite topography. That inversion is a small detail with an annoying consequence, because it breaks the usual way archaeologists would go looking for more of them.

The usual way, increasingly, is a neural network. You show a model many labeled examples of a shape and it learns to flag that shape in new terrain. The approach has found Maya buildings, Dutch burial mounds, Samoan agricultural terraces, New England charcoal hearths. The catch never changes: you need the examples first, hundreds or thousands of them, each one traced by hand. For a common feature that is merely tedious. For a feature you have seen exactly twelve times, it is impossible. Twelve examples will teach a model to recognize those twelve and nothing else, a failure with a name, overfitting. And you cannot borrow a model trained on ordinary tar kilns, because these are not shaped like ordinary tar kilns.

So the team behind the study,1 Katherine Peck, Claudine Gravel-Miguel, Grant Snitker, and Matthew Helmer, tried the obvious inversion of the problem. If you do not have enough real examples, invent some.

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That decision is a good way into what this paper actually is.

The post hole belongs to the Dolmen de la Font dels Coms, a site at the head of a valley about six kilometers outside the Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici National Park, in the northwest corner of Catalonia. The park covers close to 40,000 hectares of the central Pyrenees, granite country where the peaks run to 3,000 meters and even the valley floors sit above 1,500. For most of the twentieth century, archaeologists treated terrain like this as somewhere people went only when they had to, a refuge in wartime or a spot for some narrow seasonal task. Nobody, the thinking went, lived up here in any sustained way.

Ermengol Gassiot, Guillem Salvador-Baiges, and Laura Obea-Gómez, of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, have spent two decades assembling the record that undoes that assumption. Their High Mountain Archaeology Group has surveyed the park since 2004 and logged roughly 380 archaeological sites inside it: huts, enclosures, rock shelters, stone circles, charcoal kilns. In a new paper in ArcheoLogica Data1 they publish the chronological backbone for all of it, an open database of 124 radiocarbon dates from 45 sites in and around the park, with the lab reports, sample details, and analysis code included. They describe it as the first openly published systematic series of absolute dates for a high-mountain area of the Pyrenees.

The headline is easy to state. People have been coming up here for more than ten thousand years, and they kept returning to the same places.

Three shelters carry the deep sequences. The Obagues de Ratera rock shelter, at 2,312 meters, has its first occupation in the early Holocene, around 8092 to 7660 cal BC, and then reappears again and again: through the Mesolithic, the shift into the Neolithic, the full Neolithic, the Chalcolithic, the Early and Middle Bronze Age, the start of the Iron Age, the Visigothic centuries of the early Middle Ages, and finally the nineteenth and twentieth. Cova del Sardo, lower down at 1,780 meters, runs back about 7,500 years. The Portarró shelter, at 2,280 meters, goes back roughly 7,300 years and holds something the team flags as a first: stone footings combined with timber, built around 5,000 years ago, in the late Neolithic, which they identify as the oldest stone architecture known in the Pyrenees.

None of these is a village with the lights left on for ten millennia. What the shelters record is return. Groups came up, used an overhang, left, and others came back centuries or millennia later to the same rock, often building on top of what was already there. Read across the whole park, that pattern of reoccupation is what lets the team call the presence continuous, even though the raw evidence is a scatter of separate visits.

That presence was not steady. Some windows were busier than others, and one of the busiest opens around 3300 cal BC, at the end of the Neolithic, and runs to about 2500 cal BC. That is roughly 5,300 years ago, the same few centuries in which, several hundred kilometers to the east in the Ötztal Alps, the man we call Ötzi died on a high pass. Two different ranges, one broad pulse of mountain use. It is a coincidence of timing rather than evidence of a shared cause, but it is the kind of coincidence that tells you the high country was on people’s minds across Europe at once.

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