Göbeklitepe (the older two-word spelling, Göbekli Tepe, is still the more common one in English) lies 15 kilometers northeast of the city of Şanlıurfa in southeastern Türkiye, and for the first two decades after excavation began in 1995 it was described as a sanctuary: a place where hunter-gatherers came together to raise T-shaped pillars carved with wild animals, and where hardly anyone lived. Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), who led the excavation from its first season, called his 2006 book on the site Sie bauten die ersten Tempel, “They Built the First Temples.” In that picture, the human bone that kept turning up in the fill of the great pillared rooms was read, reasonably enough, as part of the ritual.

The count now stands at 928 fragments, not including the two graves, recovered from inside those rooms (the current team calls them special buildings) and from the ground between them. They come from men and women of every age, and some bear marks of deliberate handling. In June 2017, Julia Gresky, an osteologist at the DAI’s Division of Natural Sciences in Berlin and Georg-August University Göttingen who has run the analysis of the site’s human remains since 2009, published three skulls with deep grooves cut along the midline in Science Advances, reading them as evidence of a previously unknown form of Neolithic skull cult; human burials, that paper noted, were “still absent from the site.” Now she is lead author on a paper, published September 22 in PLOS One,1 arguing that much of the scattered bone reached the special buildings by accident. Gresky and her co-author, Lee Clare of the DAI’s Istanbul Department, propose that people living on the higher parts of the mound buried their dead beneath their own floors, as households did across Neolithic Anatolia and the Levant, and that the slopes later gave way and carried floors, rubble and bones down into the hollow where the special buildings stand.

Human bone was one of the few places where Göbeklitepe’s imagery, which includes a headless human figure on Pillar 43 in Special Building D, touched actual bodies. If most of the scatter is landslide debris, the physical case for ritual treatment of the dead shrinks toward a handful of carved skulls, and the settlement around the monuments starts to look like what recent seasons have suggested on other grounds, a place where people lived, died and were put under the floor. Telling a ritual deposit from a slide depends on taphonomy, the study of what happens to a body after death, and taphonomy needs a baseline. Until 2017 there was not a single excavated grave at the site to provide one.

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The assumption most readers bring to Bronze Age Greece is that an age of palaces, of exchange networks reaching across the Aegean and beyond, of newcomers carrying steppe-related ancestry into the region from around 2200 BCE, must also have been an age when large numbers of people left home and settled among strangers. Pottery and metal certainly moved along those networks, but whether many people moved with them and stayed is a separate question, one that a study published September 23 in PLOS One1 tried to settle by counting. Among 199 individuals from six sites in central and southern Greece, tested through tooth enamel or skull bone, the researchers found 17 whose chemistry says they grew up somewhere else.

The six sites span about 2,300 years. The oldest is Kalyvia in Elis, a cemetery of rock-cut chamber tombs dated to roughly 3400 to 2800 BCE, straddling the end of the Neolithic and the start of the Early Bronze Age. Next are the rock shelters at Kavos on the Cycladic island of Keros, about 2500 to 2200 BCE, where most bones were systematically carried off after the bodies decomposed, leaving small bones and teeth behind, and the teeth are what this kind of analysis needs. The three graves on Mount Kynortion, filed in the study under the site name Apollo Maleatas, follow in the 19th century BCE. Kirrha, a low mound near the Corinthian Gulf by modern Itea, and the North Cemetery at Ayios Vasileios, 12 kilometers south of Sparta beside a recently identified Mycenaean palace, both cover the passage from the Middle to the Late Bronze Age around 1700 BCE. The youngest is Voudeni, a Mycenaean cemetery of more than 80 chamber tombs northeast of Patras, used from about 1450 to 1050 BCE, and at 102 individuals it supplies half the dataset.

The count matters because archaeology, left to itself, cannot tell a traveler from a settler: an imported pot in a Mycenaean tomb could have come with a trader who sailed home the next week or with someone who married into the village and was buried beside it forty years later. The ratio of strontium-87 to strontium-86 in soil and water depends on the age and type of the underlying rock, passes into crops and then into the people who eat them without meaningful change, and is locked into tooth enamel as the enamel forms. A first molar begins at about birth and is finished by about age three; the petrous bone, the dense wedge of the skull around the inner ear, stops remodeling after about age two. The team led by Anja Frank, who did the work at the National Museum of Denmark and has since moved to Germany’s Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources in Hannover, sampled one or the other from each person (107 enamel samples, 92 petrous bones) and compared each result with two expected ranges: a surrounding-area range, built from published measurements within 25 kilometers of the site, and a burial-population range, built from the site’s own dead once obvious outliers were set aside.

Seventeen of 199 is about 8.5 percent, roughly one person in twelve. Broken out by period and pooled with earlier strontium studies from other Greek cemeteries, the share barely moves: between 5.9 and 8.2 percent for the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, 5.4 percent across the Middle-to-Late Bronze Age transition, 9.8 percent for the Late Bronze Age, the era of the Mycenaean palaces. Single sites swing wildly when the samples are tiny (two of the three people on Mount Kynortion were non-local, a rate of 66.7 percent that means very little), but the larger samples sit close together, with Voudeni at 7.8 percent, Kirrha at 9.4, and Ayios Vasileios at 5.9. The authors point out that strontium studies of Bronze Age Italy and Denmark have found larger shares of outsiders, while conceding that overlapping ranges within Greece may explain part of the gap.

Nor did the newcomers come from one direction. At Voudeni and Ayios Vasileios some fall above the burial-population range and some below it, so each site drew on at least two source regions, and every one of the 17 could have grown up elsewhere in Greece, though their values would also fit parts of Italy, Cyprus, Turkey, and Spain.

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The colored version of the face shows a man with brown skin, a heavy brow, a full dark beard and hair to his shoulders, and most people who see it will take it for an estimate of how one individual looked some 315,000 years ago, although no single individual lies under it. The Leipzig skull is a composite, and the new paper lists its parts: the braincase and upper face of Irhoud 1, the fossil a mine worker turned up at the site in 1961; the lower jaw of Irhoud 11, a different adult; the upper tooth row, possibly, from a specimen catalogued as Irhoud 10; and two dental fragments, Irhoud 21 and Irhoud 22. By the paper’s account all of them come from one deposit, Layer 7, which fire-heated flint tools date to about 315,000 years ago, give or take 34,000.

Irhoud 1 was first identified as an African variant of the Neanderthals, about 40,000 years old, and its estimated age climbed for decades, to between 100,000 and 200,000 years in 1991 and about 160,000 in 2007, until two papers in Nature in June 2017 reclassified the Jebel Irhoud fossils as Homo sapiens and put them at roughly 315,000 years. One, led by Jean-Jacques Hublin, then director of the Leipzig institute’s Department of Human Evolution, described the fossils; the other, led by Daniel Richter, a geochronologist also at the institute, supplied the flint dates along with a recalculated age of about 286,000 years for a tooth from Irhoud 3, a juvenile’s jaw that is not part of the composite.

Facial approximation of this kind begins with somebody else’s head. The team took a CT scan of an anonymous modern adult, collected, the paper notes, with the donor’s written consent, and deformed that skull in the free 3D program Blender until its outer surface and its inner cavity matched the Jebel Irhoud composite, carrying the donor’s soft tissue along with the bone. Soft-tissue thickness values came from reference data on modern people of African ancestry, compiled in the forensic artist Karen T. Taylor’s 2000 textbook Forensic Art and Illustration and chosen, the authors write, for their geographic and evolutionary closeness to the site. Skin color, lighting and hair are, by the authors’ own description, artistic conventions without grounding in the fossil. A second set of renderings, in grayscale and without hair, strips those away and leaves only the relation of face to bone.

Hublin’s team had described the Jebel Irhoud fossils as a mosaic. The face, jaw and teeth fell in line with modern humans while the braincase and the shape of the brain cavity stayed more primitive, and those modern features were the core of the case for placing a 315,000-year-old population in our species, a placement the 2017 paper framed with some care, as documenting early stages of the Homo sapiens clade. A reconstruction lays flesh over exactly that part of the head, and the flesh has no direct evidence behind it, because no soft tissue of any kind is known from hominins of the Middle Pleistocene (roughly 774,000 to 129,000 years ago) and every millimeter of skin on this model is borrowed from people alive today. The result in the new paper that holds up best against outside measurement concerns a part of the head that no one looking at the portrait will ever see, the empty space where the brain was.

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The explanation most of us carry for failing joints is mechanical, and it is old. Wilton Krogman, a physical anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, gave it its most durable name in a 1951 Scientific American essay, “The Scars of Human Evolution,” whose summary line noted that although man stands on two legs, “his skeleton was originally designed for four.” In the popular version, hips, knees and lower backs carry weight that four limbs once shared, they wear down under it, and osteoarthritis is the bill that comes due late in life. The cartilage from her hands and from the 48 other bodies fits that story poorly. Human cartilage held roughly a third as much of the water-binding sugar chains called glycosaminoglycans, or GAGs, as ape cartilage did, and the shortfall was plain in the elbow, a joint that carries less weight in a person than in a chimpanzee walking on its knuckles.

Earlier measurements cited in the paper put the GAG loss in osteoarthritic human cartilage at 25 to 38 percent below healthy human cartilage, and the gap the team found between human and ape cartilage is about twice that. The authors suggest the shift may have pushed human cartilage “towards a threshold of vulnerability,” such that “all humans carry a baseline GAG deficit that primes the joint for degeneration.”

A joint whose chemistry tracked only its workload would not look like that elbow, and the likelier culprit is heredity, in particular the stretches of DNA that set how strongly genes are switched on. Those switches are what the study’s leaders, Fumitaka Inoue, an associate professor at Kyoto University’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Biology (WPI-ASHBi), and David Gokhman, a principal investigator at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, had set out to map across the human skeleton. Their strongest pathway signal pointed at the machinery for making GAGs. The paper cannot close the question an anthropologist asks first: why a lineage would turn down its supply of the molecules that keep joints hydrated and springy, and whether that was a price paid for something else or a loss that selection simply stopped guarding against.

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At Oreškovica-Selište, a fortified Vinča settlement elsewhere in Serbia, the enclosing ditch measured seven meters across and 3.6 deep. Faced with one half again as wide and nearly a meter deeper, most of us would assume a chain of command behind it, someone with the standing to put a few hundred people to work, and we tend to assume more broadly that a village which grows past a couple of hundred people starts sorting itself into ranks. The archaeologist Gregory Johnson gave that intuition a mechanism in 1982, arguing that decision-making comes under what he called scalar stress as groups grow, and that hierarchy is one of the usual ways the strain gets relieved. A new study of Opovo, published this year in Archaeologia Austriaca,1 describes a village far larger than anyone had thought, enclosed by five ditches, whose houses show little sign that any household rose far above the rest.

The earlier picture came mostly out of one trench, sixteen meters by twenty, dug between 1983 and 1989 by teams from the universities of Novi Sad and Berkeley and the National Museum in Pančevo, on a site that a local priest and amateur archaeologist named Andreas Majer had found in 1965. Ruth Tringham, the University of California, Berkeley, archaeologist who led that project, put the settlement at about five hectares with no more than ten households standing at any one time, and in 1992 called it a “small hamlet.” The population estimate that went with that picture was about 200. It was an odd hamlet. Between 62 and 71 percent of the animal bones from the old excavation came from wild animals, red deer above all, a higher share than at other Vinča sites and closer to the pattern at sites of the Tisza culture, its Late Neolithic neighbor on the Great Hungarian Plain, and the hill stood in marsh ringed by old loops of the Timiș River, ground Tringham later called agriculturally marginal. One early idea had Opovo as a seasonal camp for hunting and gathering expeditions, until Nerissa Russell, working through the bones for her 1993 doctoral dissertation at Berkeley, ruled out seasonal use and made it a permanent village with a mixed economy that leaned hard on wild animals.

Tringham is the last of eleven authors on the new paper, whose lead author, Fynn Wilkes, is a postdoctoral researcher in the ROOTS Cluster of Excellence at Kiel University, and it takes her hamlet apart with her name on the byline. The new team could not even say exactly where her trench lay; of two blank patches near the middle of their magnetic map, which they read as possible open plazas, one may be the old excavation.

Opovo matters to people who will never visit the Banat because the Vinča culture belongs to the centuries when people in southeastern Europe first lived in large settlements for generations at a stretch, and whether inequality came bundled with that way of living is an old argument that has not been settled. The village sits near the start of the Eurasian story that Timothy Kohler of Washington State University and his colleagues told in a 2017 paper in Nature, which compared house sizes from sites on several continents and found that wealth disparities after the Neolithic grew larger in Eurasia than in North America or Mesoamerica.

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Cucuteni-Trypillia (Cucuteni in Romanian usage, Trypillia in Ukrainian) is a Copper Age farming culture, the Chalcolithic in technical terms, that spread across what is now eastern Romania, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine. Its best-known settlements are the megasites of central Ukraine, among them Maidanetske, Talianki and Nebelivka, each covering well over a hundred hectares and ranking among the largest settlements in Europe in the early fourth millennium BCE. The intuitive assumption is that production scales with population, so the biggest kilns ought to turn up in the biggest towns. Where published estimates exist, kilns at those megasites had working surfaces of 2 to 4 square meters, and the largest reported before now, at Stolniceni I, a megasite in Moldova, reached 4.6 to 4.8. Ursoaia covers almost 8 hectares, and its kiln is more than half again the size of the one at Stolniceni I.

The kiln was excavated in 2025 and published this year in Antiquity1 by eleven researchers from Iași, with Diana Măriuca Vornicu of the Romanian Academy’s Institute of Archaeology as first author. One of her coauthors, Felix-Adrian Tencariu of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, wrote the 2015 monograph (in Romanian) on prehistoric and protohistoric pottery-firing installations across Romania, so the verdict that this one is exceptional comes partly from someone who knows the ordinary ones well.

A household firing its own cooking pots and storage jars would have little obvious use for an upper chamber of around 12 cubic meters, and less reason to keep patching such a structure through firing after firing. The size bears on an old argument in archaeology about craft specialization, the point at which making a thing becomes a particular person’s or group’s job, and about whether that shift waits on cities and states or can begin among village farmers. The authors conclude that production at Ursoaia “likely moved beyond domestic requirements” toward a more intensive model. They stop there, and say plainly that calling the site a community-level workshop would take evidence they do not yet have.

A magnetometer survey in 2024 traced a ditch enclosing almost 8 hectares and, inside it, about 60 burnt houses in small clusters, numerous pits and at least eight kilns. Fired clay carries a magnetic signal the instrument can read from the surface, so the figure counts houses that burned, which may not be every house that stood, and the map on its own cannot say how many houses or kilns were in use at the same time. One reading, a dipolar anomaly of up to 22 nanotesla right against the ditch, looked like a firing installation. A trench cut to test it exposed a well-preserved two-chamber updraft kiln (bicameral, in the specialist term), and the decorated pottery around it, together with radiocarbon dates, places the settlement in the phase Romanian archaeologists call Cucuteni B1.

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Anyone who has seen the leather-wrapped bundles of Gran Canaria’s pre-Hispanic dead is likely to carry two assumptions about the caves they came from: that a burial cave in the Canary Islands was made for burial, and that the bodies inside had been dried before anyone carried them up the rock. The second assumption was recently given a specific form. In a 2025 chapter on the first human settlement of Gran Canaria, the archaeologist J. Velasco-Vázquez, working from historical accounts and from museum insect specimens with no record of where in a grave they had been found, proposed that corpses were left in the sun before burial. A study published this year in Antiquity,1 led by Pedro Henríquez-Valido of the University of Alcalá with colleagues in Bordeaux and Las Palmas, uses the insects of this one cave to argue that its dead went in soon after death, onto a platform built over what was left of somebody’s grain.

The name Cruz de la Esquina belongs both to that burial cave and to the complex of about twenty artificial caves around it, and the bones alone could not settle how the dead were handled. When a survey found the cave in 2001, most of the skeletal remains lay loose on the floor, apart from a few vertebrae and ribs from one person that disease had fused, so that they held together after everything around them had come apart. Archaeothanatology, which reconstructs a funeral from the order in which a body’s joints give way, had very little still joined to work with. Scraps of rope, rush fabric and hide survived, and better-preserved burials elsewhere on the island suggest the dead were wrapped in bundles. But the time between death and wrapping decides something basic about how these people treated a corpse, whether it was dried first or put into the rock while still decaying. Study of the skeletons is still under way; the paper gives no count of the dead, though three individuals have been radiocarbon dated.

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Anyone who learned human origins through Lucy probably holds a tidy picture of her genus. In that picture, Australopithecus walked upright on the ground, and its apelike shoulders, curved fingers and long arms were inheritance from tree-dwelling ancestors, no longer doing much. Lucy is the 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton from Hadar, Ethiopia, catalogued as A.L. 288-1. She complicated that picture in 2016,1 when computed tomography (CT) scans suggested her arms had borne a good deal of her weight. But she was tiny, and among living primates the small ones tend to climb more. A study published September 16 in Science Advances 2removes that excuse.

Little Foot was a larger animal, and relative to its thigh, it loaded its upper arm like a gorilla that spends about a quarter of its time in trees. Kristian Carlson, a professor of clinical medical education at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, and 15 co-authors compared thigh-shaft strength with upper-arm-shaft strength in more than 1,400 modern humans and apes. They fit a line through each group and measured each fossil’s distance from each line in standardized units. The number that matters is small enough to pass for a rounding error. StW 573 sat 3.2 units below the human line and 0.057 units from the line for female western lowland and Grauer’s gorillas, practically on it.

Researchers have argued for decades over how much australopiths (the informal name for members of Australopithecus) climbed. Zeresenay Alemseged, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Chicago, called the debate deadlocked in a 2023 review in Nature.3 A long arm or a curved finger bone could be climbing gear or a leftover that selection never cleared away. Limb shafts are harder to wave off, because they keep remodeling through life, partly in response to the loads they carry.

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The older thing was a grape seed from Valencia, recovered below the water table in the moat of the city’s Islamic wall and dated by its deposits to the tenth century CE. Ancient DNA in grape seeds comes mostly from the seed coat, which is maternal tissue, so what the team sequenced was in effect the genome of the vine that bore the seed. According to the study, published in Current Biology1 by Guillem Pérez-Jordà of the University of Valencia, Carolina Royo of the ICVV and eleven colleagues, that vine was a child of Heben and a full sibling of Viura, the main white grape of Rioja, known elsewhere in Spain as Macabeo. Most people picture a wine grape the way they would picture a strain of wheat, as the latest in a long line of parents and offspring, so that three thousand years of Spanish winemaking would mean something like three thousand years of vine generations. Heben fits that picture badly. It was setting seed before the tenth-century vine sprouted, and it is alive in Logroño now, one genetic individual kept going by cuttings for at least 1,100 years.

The Valencia seed is one of 28 the team managed to sequence, out of 164 waterlogged seeds put through DNA extraction, from six sites in Spain and one in Sardinia dated between the ninth century BCE and the fourteenth century CE.

Grapevines (Vitis vinifera) were first domesticated in the South Caucasus and the Near East, and how they reached the far western Mediterranean has mostly been argued from the genomes of living vines, which keep traces of ancestry but no dates, whereas seeds from dated layers carry both. Testing the seeds for kinship, against each other and against 140 modern vines, also let the team count how many times Iberia’s cultivated grapes have reproduced sexually since they arrived, and for some lineages the count is two or three.

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Surveys through the early 1970s turned up hundreds of Paleolithic sites in Lebanon, then the civil war that began in 1975 ended plans for further work, and instability has limited fieldwork since. In the southern Levant, meanwhile, a century of digging at Tabun, Skhul, Qafzeh, Amud, Misliya, Nesher Ramla and Qesem built the reference record, and its patterns have often been read as the whole region’s. So the corridor most readers picture, the land bridge that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals crossed between Africa and Eurasia, is a southern one, fringed by steppe and desert and hostage to every swing of the ice ages. The two studies, both in Communications Earth & Environment, argue that the central Lebanese coast was more wooded than that picture allows, and that it changed far less.

Zumoffen’s Ras el-Kelb material is the oldest of the three collections studied. He also gathered bones inside the cave at Nahr Ibrahim, farther up the coast, and a tooth from that lot dates to about 245,000 years, plus or minus 23,000, near the shift from the Lower to the Middle Paleolithic. The third collection comes from Naame, south of Beirut, which another Jesuit, Henri Fleisch, excavated in 1967; its main layers fall within Stage 5, and one tooth dates to 107,000 years, plus or minus 13,000. The three sites lie 15 to 30 kilometers apart, each near a river, on a coast that until now had no high-resolution climate record tied to human occupation.

Gabriele Russo, of the paleoanthropology group at the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, led both studies; Sireen El Zaatari, a professor in that group who conceived the broader project, supervised. If one stretch of the corridor stayed livable while the rest swung with the ice ages, it would have been open when the south was not, and the southern record would be a poor stand-in for it.

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Mizyn, which older literature often spells Mezin, has yielded 18 of these figurines, the largest group of female figures from Eastern Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum, the coldest stretch of the last Ice Age. Thirteen have a figure engraved on the front, narrow cuts sketching a neck, shoulders, arms, and a triangle long read as pubic, and 11 carry meanders and rows of parallel zigzags on the back and sides. Anyone familiar with Paleolithic art would sort those two kinds of marking without much thought: the front is a picture of a person, and the back is the abstract part, pattern for its own sake or a lost symbol. Simon Radchenko of the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Stavanger in Norway, the study’s first author, and five colleagues argue that the back is the more literal of the two, because its zigzags and meanders copy structures inside the tusk.

Owen’s lines are the tusk’s growth layers, visible on a crosswise cut as concentric rings around the central nerve channel, much like the rings of a tree. Schreger lines cross those rings at an angle and form a crosshatch that ivory specialists also call engine turning or stacked chevrons. Both show best on a clean break or a polished face, and both run through the tusks of the woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, as they do through elephant tusks.

Schreger lines differ enough between species to matter for wildlife enforcement. Near a tusk’s outer surface they meet at acute angles, under 90 degrees, in mammoth ivory, and at obtuse angles, over 115 degrees, in modern elephant ivory, a difference used to police the elephant ivory trade. The U.S. National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon, whose research underpins the method, warns against judging from a single angle, so an inspector checking a carved bangle today measures several, reading the same crosshatch the Mizyn carvers chose to reproduce.

European figurines of women, made over more than 30,000 years, mark two thresholds for archaeologists: the first pictures of human bodies, and the later turn toward schematic ones reduced to an outline and a few cuts. That second turn is usually told as a western story ending in the pared-down Gönnersdorf style, which spread through central Europe between about 17,000 and 13,000 years ago. Dmytro Kiosak of the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie in Mainz, a coauthor, has said the results undercut the old idea that Paleolithic art developed along a single track, simple first and elaborate later. If these are among the first schematic figurines made after the Last Glacial Maximum, and their most abstract-looking marks came out of the ivory, then an early step toward abstraction in Europe was taken by people looking hard at a tusk, on surfaces they had polished smooth.

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For that low point to exist at all, the number that has shaped public understanding of Aboriginal Australia in 1788 has to be wrong. The standard figure for close to a century was about 300,000, published in 1930 in the Commonwealth’s official year book by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, a British social anthropologist who then held the first chair of anthropology at the University of Sydney (some accounts give 250,000, which he treated as a floor). A few hundred thousand foragers spread across 7.7 million square kilometers made the continent look barely occupied. That image sat comfortably beside the legal fiction of terra nullius, land belonging to no one, which the High Court of Australia did not reject until the Mabo decision of 1992. Radcliffe-Brown acknowledged limits in his sources. The observations behind his estimate were gathered after smallpox, dispossession and frontier killing had already hollowed out much of the southeast. Until the 1971 census, the first to attempt a full count, colonial tallies recorded whoever came to blanket distributions and ration depots, lived on missions and reserves, or worked on pastoral stations, while administrators left many people of mixed descent uncounted.

The study, published on September 15 in Nature Human Behaviour,12 puts the median population at 2.22 million, with a likely range of between one million and four million, or about one person per three and a half square kilometers. Its fifteen authors are led jointly by Alan Williams, an archaeologist at the University of New South Wales and James Cook University, and Corey Bradshaw, the Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology at Flinders University in Adelaide. They include Shane Ingrey, a member of the La Perouse Aboriginal Community now at the University of New South Wales. They also include Kirsty Beller of the Gujaga Foundation, a community organization in La Perouse, on the shore of Botany Bay where the First Fleet anchored in January 1788.

Everything after 1788 is subtraction, so the starting number decides the scale of what followed. A population of 300,000 falling below 200,000 by 1861 describes a hard century. A population of 2.22 million falling to the same place describes the loss of more than nine people in ten within one long lifetime. The larger figure changes the history of the land as well: two million people burning and tending it would have run a far larger system of management than the old figure allowed. Michael Bird of James Cook University, another co-author, has traced deliberate burning in Australia’s tropical north back into the last ice age. The team had to count a population whose counting began only after most of it was gone. Their answer was three methods that bypass colonial counts entirely: genetics, models of what the land could support, and radiocarbon dates.

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The Latvian woman’s kin sit on either side of a line that Finnish archaeology has long drawn through the southwest. The coastal zone, today’s regions of Varsinais-Suomi and Satakunta, already had the strongest material ties to Scandinavia in the Viking Age, while inland Häme had a mixed profile, with objects and customs from both west and east. Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority, the Finlandssvenskar, is concentrated on the coast today. Add the name this era long carried in Finnish history, the Crusade Period, and most readers assemble the same picture: a coast that was always the more Scandinavian place, made more so when Swedish expeditions crossed the Baltic to convert and conquer the Finns.

A study published on September 15, 2026, in Genome Biology1 argues that the picture gets the timing wrong. In the Early Medieval period, which in Finland runs from 1050 to 1250 CE, people on the coast and people in Häme were genetically one population, and the extra Scandinavian ancestry that sets the coast apart today arrived mostly after 1250, through migration from Sweden that largely stopped short of the interior. The team, led by Ronan James O’Sullivan of the University of Turku’s Department of Biology, with Sanni Peltola and Päivi Onkamo as shared senior authors, generated genome-wide data for 38 people from 17 archaeological sites and set aside four whose contamination could not be reliably measured. Of the remaining 34, 32 date to the Early Medieval period and 2 to the Late Iron Age, 800 to 1050 CE. Only 26 ancient genomes of comparable quality had been published from Finland before, against thousands from elsewhere in northern Europe; the country’s acidic soil breaks down unburnt bone fast.

The authors avoid the Crusade Period label. Most modern scholars regard the three Swedish crusades to Finland as literary constructions of the later Middle Ages, and whatever papally sanctioned fighting took place was probably small and aimed at consolidating Swedish rule; no account written from inside Early Medieval Finland survives, and the sources that do exist, such as the Novgorod Chronicles and the legend of Saint Erik, were written by outsiders.

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The paper carried a title built for headlines: “Monkeys Have Rhythm.” It is a good story to want to be true. Macaques are intelligent, trainable, and close enough to us on the primate family tree that comparative psychologists often treat them as a stand-in for the kind of brain our own ancestors carried around tens of millions of years ago. If that brain could be coaxed into keeping a beat, it would suggest the raw hardware for musical timing was already present in a common ancestor, waiting for one branch of the family to refine it into something like music. A rebuttal2 circulated in 2026, reanalyzing the same tapping data, argued that the study never actually showed the harder half of that claim.

Tempo matching means adjusting the rate of a repeated action to the rate of a repeated sound, faster or slower as needed. Synchronizing to a beat is a different and stricter thing: it means predicting when the next beat will land and placing an action right on top of it, or deliberately half a cycle off, and holding that relationship as the pattern continues. According to the rebuttal, neither of the two macaques in the original study ever produced the tapping phase, close to 0 degrees, that real synchronization would require, and neither showed the shift in phase that should appear when the beat is displaced by 180 degrees in a control condition. The original paper’s own figure caption claimed that the monkeys “synchronize,” a word its own phase numbers, according to the rebuttal, do not support.

None of this is really a dispute about two monkeys. Henkjan Honing, of the University of Amsterdam, and Gábor Háden, of the HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences in Budapest, laid out the stakes in a critical review of the whole field published this year. Honing is also a co-author of the rebuttal against3 the original tapping study, which means the review is less a neutral referee’s summary than one side of an active dispute describing that dispute in its own terms. That does not make the phase data wrong, but it is a detail a careful reader should have. If beat synchronization evolved gradually, piece by piece, across the primate line, you would expect exactly this kind of graded picture, a little more than nothing in a macaque, more still in an ape, most of all in us. That is the premise behind what Honing and his collaborator Merchant have called the gradual audiomotor evolution hypothesis, or GAE, which the new review extends into a version called GAER, adding an explicit role for reward. The alternative is that something in the human lineage crossed an actual threshold rather than extending a shared trait a little further. Two disputed tapping curves cannot settle which of those is true. They mostly show how much weight one ambiguous data set has been asked to carry.

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That fact runs against most people’s sense of where the species belongs. Tasmanian devils survive today only on the island whose name they carry, and even in the deeper fossil record, where their range once stretched across the mainland, the map has always had a hole in its northwest corner. More than 120 Quaternary sites across New South Wales, South Australia, Queensland, the Northern Territory, and southern, central, and tropical northern Western Australia have produced devil bones. The Pilbara itself, one of the hottest and driest stretches of the continent, had produced none, despite petroglyphs at Nganjarli, on the coast in Murujuga, that include figures researchers have read as devil-like among the thylacines and quolls carved into the same rock. A single tooth fragment from Barrow Island had been floated as a possible devil specimen in 2017, but nobody had confirmed it. Two specimens from Juukan Gorge, the Pleistocene premolar and a second, younger jaw fragment, close that gap.

The younger specimen is a piece of right lower jaw, recovered in a different part of the shelter, still holding its first and second molars. Charcoal from a hearth just above it and another just below bracket its age to somewhere between about 6,900 and 7,300 years, well into the Holocene. Both molars are ground down, their forward cusp worn away entirely, wear consistent with a long adult life rather than any damage after burial. Telling a devil’s tooth from a dingo’s, a quoll’s, or a thylacine’s is not obvious from a fragment like this. Devils and their dasyuromorphian relatives carry two similarly sized, multi-cusped molars in a row, where a dingo’s lower jaw carries one long shearing blade of a tooth behind a small, reduced second molar. Within that group, species of Sarcophilus can be told apart from thylacines and quolls by details as fine as which side of a molar cusp sits toward the cheek rather than the tongue, and, in the premolars, by a backward-curved root that no other Australian carnivore shares. The premolar was also about a quarter smaller than a typical adult devil’s, a discrepancy the research team1 attributes to enamel flaking, possibly from heat, rather than to a different or smaller species. Working from these features, and from a body-mass estimate of roughly seven to fourteen kilograms drawn from molar length, the team assigned both fragments to the living species rather than to either of the larger, extinct Pleistocene devils, Sarcophilus laniarius or Sarcophilus moornaensis.

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In a limestone cave in the karst lowlands of South Sulawesi, a forager died sometime between 25,000 and 16,000 years ago, leaving behind only a fragment of upper jaw and three molars. What survived of those teeth is strange enough that when Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, first examined1 them, he could not immediately account for what he was looking at. Each molar carried a smooth, rounded groove running around it, as if something had been clenched in the mouth and worked against the tooth, year after year, until the enamel gave way.

The site is Leang Bulu Bettue, a cave complex in the Maros-Pangkep karst. The jaw fragment is catalogued as Maros-LBB-1a, and it is, at present, the only human skeletal element ever recovered from the Pleistocene of Sulawesi, an island of some 174,000 square kilometers. There was almost nothing to compare it to.

Until now, the working assumption in archaeology has been that people started using mind-altering plants in earnest only after they settled down to farm, somewhere around 12,500 years ago, when barley beer, coca, and psilocybin mushrooms begin turning up in the record. Betel nut, the seed chewed by roughly one in ten people alive today for its buzz, was thought to be younger still: the earliest solid chemical evidence for its use came from a Bronze Age site in Thailand, about 3,500 years old. The wear on the Sulawesi jaw undoes both timelines. Whatever this forager was doing with their mouth, they were doing it before agriculture reached the region at all.

Almost nothing is actually known about how people first found psychoactive plants, or why. Betel nut’s active compound, a muscarinic agonist called arecoline, is generally assumed to need slaked lime, a caustic paste of pulverized shells or limestone, to become bioavailable enough to feel anything from it. Modern users still prepare their quid this way: a sliced areca seed, a smear of lime, wrapped in a leaf of the betel vine, Piper betle. Without the lime, conventional wisdom held, there wasn’t much of a drug there at all.

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That should have ended the story. Since 2010, when a sliver of DNA from a finger bone in a Siberian cave revealed an entirely new kind of ancient human, genome sequencing has been the default way to confirm a Denisovan identity, the kind of evidence that settles an argument. What settled this one instead was protein: the two skull fragments and the forearm piece were confirmed as Denisovan through molecules built from the same genetic code as DNA but far more stubborn about surviving, and in this cave, they had outlasted DNA completely.

The stakes reach beyond one cave. Denisovans are known mostly through their genes: people living today across Southeast Asia and Oceania, in Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and Australia among other places, carry some of the highest percentages of Denisovan ancestry found anywhere. But the physical evidence of that population, actual bone and tooth, has been almost entirely missing from the region where the genetic signal runs strongest. Southwestern China has sat inside that gap since Denisovans were first identified. Bianfu Cave closes part of it, with more confirmed Denisovan material than any site outside Siberia.

Of the sixty thousand-odd fragments screened, twenty-two looked, by eye, like they might be hominin. Three were.

How Do You Identify a Fossil Without DNA?

Screening tens of thousands of unidentifiable bone splinters for the rare one or two that might be human is normally done with a technique called ZooMS, zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry, which reads short fragments of collagen protein well enough to sort a bone by animal family without a full genetic workup. It is fast and cheap compared with genome sequencing, but even ZooMS has limits: at Denisova Cave and at Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau, running it blind across the whole assemblage turned up hominin bone at a rate of about one fragment in a thousand. Running that same approach across all 60,000 Bianfu Cave fragments would have meant processing thousands of bones for a chance at one or two hominin fragments, a slow, expensive proposition no lab budget was built for.

So the team looked first, by hand, at bone size, cortical thickness, and surface texture, the kind of read a trained osteologist does before any lab work begins, and narrowed 60,000 fragments down to 22 candidates worth testing. Of those 22, three came back with collagen markers specific to the genus Homo: two curved pieces of parietal bone, the plates that form the side and roof of the skull, one from a layer dated to roughly 148,000 to 134,000 years ago and cataloged as BFD767, the other from an older layer near 167,000 to 150,000 years ago and cataloged as BFD769; and a partial radius, one of the two forearm bones, cataloged as BFD771 and pulled from the same younger layer as BFD767. Two teeth from that younger layer, a lower premolar and a lower molar, went through the same analysis and came back Denisovan as well.

DNA is a fragile molecule, two strands loosely paired and easy to break apart with heat, water, and time. Collagen, the structural protein that makes up most of bone, is built differently: three long chains wound into a tight triple helix, chemically tough enough to survive well past the point where DNA has fallen apart into unreadable fragments. That toughness is why protein has become the main way of confirming Denisovan identity outside the cold, dry conditions of Siberia. The mandible from Xiahe on the Tibetan Plateau, the mandible dredged from the Taiwan Strait near Penghu, and now the bones from Bianfu Cave were all identified this way, with no DNA recovered from any of them. Even the most complete Denisovan skull ever found, the cranium from Harbin in northeastern China, gave up its species identity through protein first; a trace of Denisovan DNA eventually turned up, but only in the calculus built up on its teeth, not in the bone itself.

Proteins carry genetic information too, just written a step removed from DNA. A change in a single DNA letter can change a single amino acid in the protein that DNA codes for, and researchers can read that change directly in a protein sequence even after the DNA that produced it is long gone. In the Bianfu Cave specimens, that readout came from a collagen chain called COL1A2, at one specific position out of more than a thousand. More than 99.999 percent of a large modern human reference database carries the amino acid arginine there. Every confirmed Denisovan tested so far, from Siberia to Tibet to Taiwan, carries lysine instead.

Every one of the five Bianfu Cave specimens carries it too.

A few other variants added detail rather than proof. Peptides from the enamel of both teeth carried an abundance of a protein called amelogenin Y, present only in male individuals, so at least two of the Bianfu Cave Denisovans were men. Another enamel variant, in a protein called ameloblastin, is shared with East Asian Homo erectus, with the Harbin and Penghu fossils, and with a scatter of living people who carry the derived form today, most of them from Southeast Asia and Oceania, the same populations whose genomes point back toward exactly this part of the map.

Dating the bones directly turned out to be its own small puzzle. Uranium-series measurements on the three hominin bones and the carbonate crusted onto them gave minimum ages of around 102,000 years for the two specimens from the younger layer and about 143,000 years for the parietal from the older one, younger in both cases than the layer they came from. Bone keeps absorbing uranium from groundwater long after an animal dies, so a bone’s own uranium clock only ever proves a minimum age, never the true one. The more reliable numbers come from the sediment around the bones, dated by luminescence, and from the layered mineral crusts nearby, dated independently by the same uranium method applied to a substance that behaves as a closed system. Those put the younger layer at roughly 148,000 to 134,000 years old and the older one at 167,000 to 150,000, the figures the excavation team treats as accurate. The radius raises a different kind of question, less about when than about what kind of arm it was attached to.

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That primate-only model is one of three versions of a genomic language model called GPN-Star, short for genomic pretrained network with species tree and alignment representations, published this week in Nature1 by a team at UC Berkeley led by Yun Song. The assumption behind PhyloP and PhastCons, and behind most of the field before them, is that more evolutionary distance means more signal: compare a piece of human DNA against hundreds of species reaching back hundreds of millions of years, and whatever never changed is whatever evolution refused to let change. GPN-Star was built to test that assumption directly, training separate copies of the same model on three different slices of the tree of life, one spanning roughly 600 million years of vertebrate evolution, one spanning about 100 million years of mammals, and one confined to other primates. For a surprising amount of human biology, the shortest of those three windows carried the most information, not the longest.

Primates share a common ancestor with humans a little under 65 million years back, roughly a tenth as deep as the vertebrate alignment GPN-Star’s broadest version was trained on.

The human genome was fully sequenced more than twenty years ago, three billion base pairs read end to end, and most of what those letters mean is still unclear. An estimated one to two percent of the sequence codes for protein. The rest is a mix of evolutionary debris, sequence that no longer does anything, and regulatory elements, the switches that decide when a gene turns on, in which tissue, and how strongly. Sorting the debris from the switches, one base pair at a time, is the problem that determines whether a clinician can tell a patient what a mutation in their own DNA actually means, and it is the problem GPN-Star was built to attack.

Song, a professor of computer science and statistics at Berkeley and an investigator at the Innovative Genomics Institute, framed the goal in practical terms. Laboratories have built increasingly creative ways to test what a given mutation does, he said, but they still “cannot experimentally test every single variant in the genome,” so the model’s job is to tell biologists which of the millions of candidates are worth testing first. GPN-Star approaches that goal by training on data that has already been through a phylogenetic sorting process, a whole-genome alignment mapped onto a species tree, rather than on raw, unaligned sequence. Competing models trained the harder way include Evo 2, built on more than 100,000 species spanning every domain of life using 2,000 NVIDIA H100 processors running for months, and Nucleotide Transformer, a 2.5-billion-parameter model trained on 128 processors for a month. GPN-Star, at 200 million parameters, trains in days on eight NVIDIA A100 GPUs.

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Ancient DNA researchers use a specific kind of damage to judge whether a sample is genuinely old. Cytosine bases near the broken ends of a DNA fragment convert into a form the sequencer reads as thymine, an error called deamination that accumulates the longer a molecule sits in the ground. More deamination is supposed to mean more time has passed. It is one of the field’s basic yardsticks, the reason a headline can credibly claim a genome is fifty thousand years old rather than five. Crawford Lake breaks that yardstick.

The finding comes from a paper in Molecular Ecology1 led by Tyler Murchie, of the Hakai Institute, and Matthew Emery, an assistant professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, with Hendrik Poinar, a professor of anthropology at McMaster University, as co-senior author. The team was not chasing a methods curiosity. They wanted a full ecological history of Crawford Lake, recovered not from pollen grains, beetle wings, or charcoal flecks, the proxies lake scientists have relied on for decades, but from environmental DNA shed by every organism that lived, died, or defecated near the water: plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria, all mixed into the sediment and sequenced together. Sedimentary ancient DNA, or sedaDNA, can do something those older proxies cannot: put a name, sometimes a species-level name, on organisms that left no visible trace at all.

The averages make the pattern clear. Reads assigned to Canada goose, Branta canadensis, showed a mean cytosine-to-thymine deamination rate of 32.4 percent. Permafrost-preserved mammoth bone from Alaska’s Tanana Valley, roughly fourteen thousand years old, averaged 18.8 percent. Permafrost sediment from the Klondike in Yukon, twenty to thirty thousand years old, averaged 11.9 percent. Only the oldest ancient DNA on record, bone and coprolites pushing past seven hundred thousand years, reached comparable numbers, around 40 to 45 percent, and a few individual Crawford Lake goose samples, pulled from sediment as young as five hundred years, hit 52 percent on their own. The lake’s DNA fragments were shorter too: goose DNA averaged fifty-one base pairs against fifty-four for the permafrost bone, and Crawford Lake’s plant DNA, corn, sunflower, and pine, averaged in the low forties.

Murchie, Emery, and their colleagues point to chemistry rather than time. Permafrost preserves DNA the way a freezer preserves food, by halting the reactions that break it down, while lake mud runs on a different chemistry entirely. Crawford Lake’s water column has measured between pH 5.8 and 8.5, acidic enough at its lower end to speed up the hydrolysis that strips bases off a DNA strand, though the team is careful to note that pH alone cannot explain damage this severe. Water content, temperature, mineral absorption, and microbial activity probably all played a part. So, they suspect, did a goose’s digestive system: much of this DNA did not fall into the lake so much as pass through a bird first.

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Isotope chemists can read this because different tissues in the body stop recording diet at different points in a life. A tooth crown mineralizes in childhood and then goes chemically silent, a small frozen archive of what a kid ate. Bone keeps remodeling for decades, so its isotope signature is a rolling average of a person’s more recent years. Panicum miliaceum, broomcorn millet, uses a different, more efficient photosynthetic pathway than wheat or barley (C4 rather than C3), one that leaves a distinctly heavier carbon isotope signature in the tissue of whoever eats it regularly. Comparing tooth against bone lets researchers catch a dietary shift that happened somewhere in the gap between them, even without knowing exactly when.

This woman, cataloged in the new study as MIL1_234, is one of 192 individuals from more than a dozen Bronze Age cemeteries in southern Poland whose remains were analyzed for the project, published in the journal Science Advances,1 which combined freshly generated isotope data with everything previously published on these sites. Her case matters because of the date attached to it. Her bone collagen carbon value, -16.03 per mil, sits well above the -18.0 per mil threshold Polish researchers use to flag millet in the diet, and her radiocarbon date centers on roughly 1588 BCE, plus or minus 48 years. The previous benchmark for the earliest substantial millet consumption in this part of Europe, established in 2021 from carbon isotope work at these same sites, stood at 1460 BCE, give or take 40 years. MIL1_234 pushes that back by more than a century, past even the oldest millet grains yet dug out of Polish soil, found at Lipnik and dated to around 1303 BCE. Her date also lands close to the earliest millet remains found anywhere in Europe, a set of charred grains from Vinogradnyi Sad in southern Ukraine dated to roughly 1546 BCE, hinting that the crop reached Central Europe from the east earlier than the physical seeds alone had suggested.

She isn’t alone in this pattern. A man buried in a separate grave at the same site, feature 631, cataloged as MIL1_233 and radiocarbon dated to about 1468 BCE, shows the same signature: a childhood on wheat and barley, with the shift to millet occurring sometime in his adult life, at the latest within five years of his death. His case comes with its own small complication. A protein test on his tooth enamel, run for this study to determine biological sex, failed to detect the male-specific peptide researchers normally look for, which would technically classify him as female. Earlier DNA analysis and the shape of his bones both say male. The team kept the DNA-based call, and noted, almost in passing, that this is not the first time protein-based sex testing has disagreed with genetic testing on the same skeleton.

The same pattern, a childhood on wheat and barley followed by millet later in life, turns up in at least one person at nearly every cemetery in the study with isotopic evidence of the crop. The lone exception is Kraków Nowa Huta Mogiła, where only two people were tested, too few to say either way.

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