The trench cuts through 20 separate sediment horizons that carry human footprints, spread across roughly 1,800 years, between 23,500 and 21,700 years ago. The obvious reading, the one most educated readers would reach for, is that twenty layers means a place people returned to and lived beside, and that the gaps between layers mean the people had gone. Two papers published this year, one in Science Advances1 led by Kathleen Springer of the US Geological Survey and one in Fossil Studies2 by Matthew Bennett of the University of Reading and Sally Reynolds of Bournemouth University, complicate that reading considerably.

The excavation behind the first paper was physical work. In January 2020 and again in January 2022 the team cut the trench to a final length of 25 meters, exposing about 2.7 meters of stratigraphy, using a dirt-rated chainsaw to score the lateral edges and a pry bar to lever up blocks of sediment along their natural bedding planes. Those planes often carried footprints on their upper faces. Outlines show up as faint color shifts and changes in grain size, and in many places the tracks sat on hard gypsum-rich layers and appeared once the overlying silt was removed. The loose sediment was sieved in both seasons, and no artifacts were recovered.

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“It’s so round, it’s like, what is it?”

That was Emma Pomeroy’s first thought, she told Science News.1 Pomeroy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, is lead author of a study published October 15 in Scientific Reports2 that describes these bones, dug up in 2019 and 2022, and the person they belonged to, a Neanderthal the team calls Shanidar A. Anyone raised on the phrase Stone Age pictures a killing in this period done with stone, a flake of flint knapped to a point and bound to a shaft. Neanderthals did use weapons like that, but a hafted stone point leaves a different mark. When archaeologists drive replica stone points into carcasses, the wounds come out oval or lozenge-shaped, sometimes a narrow slot, following the flattened section of the blade, whereas a sharpened wooden shaft, round in section, leaves a circle.

Shanidar has encouraged the stone picture before. A man excavated there in the 1950s, known as Shanidar 3, has a narrow puncture in his left ninth rib, and in 2009 Steven Churchill, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, and his colleagues tried to reproduce it by driving replica Mousterian and Levallois points into the chests of pig carcasses, using a calibrated crossbow to control the energy of each strike. They judged the wound most consistent with a light, stone-tipped projectile and, because early modern humans were in western Asia at around that time and may already have had throwing weapons, raised the possibility that one of them threw it. The rib had started to heal, so Shanidar 3, who died roughly 50,000 years ago, some 25,000 years after Shanidar A, seems to have lived for weeks after he was hit. The older bone points to a different weapon. The University of Cambridge’s announcement presents the new hole as possibly the first evidence that sharpened wooden spears were used anywhere in the prehistoric Middle East, and possibly the earliest example in the hominin fossil record of lethal violence between individuals with a wooden spear, a second claim the paper itself stops short of.

On October 7, in Science Advances, Palmira Saladié and colleagues at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution described 597 pieces of wood from Abric Romaní,3 a rock shelter near Barcelona that Neanderthals used between about 62,000 and 40,000 years ago. Much of that wood survives only as the shape of where it was: water heavy with calcium carbonate wrapped the pieces in travertine as they rotted, and the excavators recorded the molds. Thirteen had been worked or used, among them two spears, the better preserved 2.45 meters long. Josep Vallverdú, an archaeologist at the institute, told Gizmodo4 that the simplest lesson of the site was that the Paleolithic was “not a world made only of stone,” a strange thing to need to say about a period whose name means Old Stone Age. It needs saying because stone is what lasts, so stone is what archaeologists mostly have; wooden shafts, handles and spears turn up only where some accident of chemistry has kept them.

Shanidar has no travertine and no waterlogged mud. Apart from pollen and charred wood, the paper notes, the cave has kept almost nothing organic, so the spear that went through Shanidar A is gone, and the only record of it is the space it took up on its way out of the body. That is why the hole has been worth the trouble the Cambridge team has taken over it. Read closely enough, it is a cast of a weapon nobody will ever hold, and perhaps a little more than that, a record of the direction the weapon came from, which is as close as the evidence gets to whoever was at the other end of it.

A root can bore through buried bone, and so can a burrowing insect or a careless trowel. Because the scapula came out with the sand beneath it still in place, the team could scan the whole block by micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) and look down through the hole into the sediment, where there was no root channel and no burrow of the right width. The rim carries the same crust of manganese oxide as the rest of the bone, so the hole is old, and its edges show no remodeling and none of the disorganized woven bone a living body lays down when it starts to repair a wound. The cracks running from it, the kind that form when fresh bone gives way under a sudden load, put it at the time of death; perimortem, in the paper’s term.

A video of a 3D rendering of the hole in the scapula and fragments embedded in the sediment underneath the scapula in situ prior to conservation. Credit: Dr. Emma Pomeroy

Then the scans showed something better than an absence. In the sand directly under the hole lay at least four slivers of bone, each at least 4 millimeters long. One of them can be fitted back into the edge of the hole with confidence, because a faint ridge on the inner face of the scapula, a linea muscularis, where muscle once anchored, runs from the blade across the break and onto the fragment, the way a road lines up again across the two halves of a torn map. The others probably came from the hole as well, but they are small and brittle, and some broke further during recovery and conservation, so where each belongs in the rim can no longer be worked out. Whatever went through the bone punched them out and carried them a short way into the soft tissue on the back of the shoulder blade, and there they stopped. As the body decayed, the fine sand it lay in probably trickled into the spaces the flesh left behind and held them in place, and when floodwater later tore through and carried off most of the skeleton, the slivers stayed where they were, sheltered by the ridge of the scapular spine, which lay upstream of them.

On the back of the blade the rim of the hole flares outward in a shallow bevel. Bone fails rather like glass struck by a pellet, chipping away in a cone on the side the force leaves by, so a bevel marks an exit, and this one says the weapon came through the chest from the front and left through the shoulder blade. The slivers add the angle. They were pushed slightly outward, toward the arm, and slightly down, toward the feet, and they lie tilted away from the center of the hole, from which the authors infer that the weapon entered from above and from nearer the midline of the body, heading down and outward to the left shoulder blade; if it was then pulled back out through the front, that could have dragged them farther. On that path it would have gone through the left lung and perhaps major blood vessels, and death would most likely have come fast.

Holes very like this one turn up fairly often in the shoulder blades of hunted animals, though almost never in human ones. Archaeologists have described round and lozenge-shaped perforations with radiating cracks and an exit bevel in animal scapulae from Paleolithic and Mesolithic sites, among them a red deer shoulder blade from Mesolithic Denmark described in 1974, and the reading that often goes with them is the heart shot, a blow aimed through the shoulder at the organs that bring an animal down fastest. The phrase has followed Shanidar A into the university’s announcement, in which Pomeroy reads the position of the wound, and the force it would take to push a spear clean through a chest, as the marks of a deliberate strike at the heart. The identification of the weapon rests on experiments, among them a 2018 study in which Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and her colleagues reproduced, with a wooden thrusting spear driven in at low speed, one of the lesions on two extinct fallow deer (Dama dama geiselana) killed about 120,000 years ago at Neumark-Nord, near Halle in Germany. Against that work, and against experiments with stone- and bone-tipped weapons, a 15-millimeter circle fits a sharpened wooden shaft better than a flat point of any material; the first Neanderthal bone spear point to be identified, reported from Abric Romaní in 2024,5 is closer in cross-section to a stone point than to a round shaft.

Bruno Maureille, an anthropologist at the University of Bordeaux who was not involved in the study, told Science News6 he had no doubt that a wooden spear made the wound, though Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an archaeologist and the author of Kindred, a book on Neanderthal life, told Live Science7 she would like to see the hole compared with the damage a wild goat’s horn can do, since wild goat, she noted, was the animal hunted most intensely at Shanidar. Graeme Barker of the University of Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, who leads the Shanidar excavations and is the paper’s senior author, put the limits of the evidence to Gizmodo8 in a sentence:

“The science gets us to the point of showing death by spear thrust.”

Past that point, Barker said, all is speculation, and he listed what he could not exclude: someone tripping over a spear, a spearing by a member of the same group or of a neighboring one, a fight with Homo sapiens. Even the word “thrust” runs a little ahead of the paper, whose authors describe experiments still under way to test whether the hole’s features could be produced by a high-energy impact as opposed to a low-energy one, the distinction Churchill’s group used in 2009 to tell a spear driven by hand from a weapon that was thrown. Nor does the paper choose between an accident and a killing. Most injuries on Neanderthal skeletons, the authors note, look like the accidents of hunting big animals at close quarters, and Pomeroy, in the university’s statement, allows that this death could have been one, though the same statement calls violence between Neanderthals the most straightforward interpretation, which is further than the paper goes; it says only that which it was cannot be known, and that either way the spear went into the left side of a person who was facing it.

Accident or not, the wound is rare. Libby Cowgill, a biological anthropologist at the University of Missouri, reminded Science News9 that many ways of dying leave no mark on a skeleton at all, which is one reason the list of Paleolithic deaths by violence is so short. The oldest is Cranium 17, a skull about 430,000 years old from the Sima de los Huesos in northern Spain, broken by two blows from the same object; Nohemi Sala, a taphonomist now at Spain’s National Research Center on Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Burgos, described it in 2015,10 and she is one of the Shanidar A authors.

The Schöningen spears, and a monkey tooth beneath them

At Schöningen, an open-cast lignite mine in Lower Saxony some 3,000 kilometers northwest of Shanidar, the wood survived. In the 1990s, excavators led by the archaeologist Hartmut Thieme of Lower Saxony’s state heritage office took about ten spears out of the mud of an ancient lakeshore there, most of them carved from slow-grown spruce and one from pine, some more than two meters long and, the Cambridge statement notes, balanced for throwing like a javelin. They lay among the remains of nearly 50 wild horses. Older still is a sharpened tip of yew that the collector Samuel Hazzledine Warren took from the foreshore at Clacton-on-Sea, on the Essex coast of England, in 1911, now put at roughly 400,000 years old. Both are round in section, and both are the kind of weapon Pomeroy has in mind when she says, in the university’s statement, that replicas of spears from this period leave holes that fit Shanidar A’s very well.

No bone of the people who made the Schöningen spears has ever been found at the site.

On June 6, 2004, in the Lower Berm area of the mine, in a layer cataloged as Schöningen 13 II-3b2 that lies a little below the Spear Horizon, 13 II-4, the excavators recovered a milk tooth 7.47 millimeters long. It is the upper fourth deciduous premolar of a Barbary macaque, or of something close enough that Thijs van Kolfschoten of Leiden University, Ivo Verheijen of the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage and Jordi Serangeli of the University of Tübingen, who described it in September in Quaternary Environments and Humans,11 call it Macaca cf. sylvanus, the “cf.” marking caution over the last step of the identification, and it is the first primate the site has produced. Its crown is barely worn, which in a macaque, whose last milk premolar comes in at six or seven months and which is weaned at about a year, puts the animal at around a year old. It is also the only macaque tooth among more than 40,000 vertebrate remains collected at Schöningen since 1992, and at 52.08 degrees north it is the northernmost fossil of its genus on the European mainland; only English finds, at Hoxne in Suffolk and West Runton in Norfolk, lie farther north.

The layer formed in open woodland where birch and pine took turns as the commoner tree, at a time when summers were much like today’s and winters at least a degree Celsius colder, a cold that Barbary macaques, which have been reported to sit out January temperatures as low as minus 22 degrees, could probably bear. The harder limit, the authors suggest, drawing on a 2014 model by Sarah Elton of Durham University and Hannah O’Regan of the University of Nottingham, may have been daylight: at that latitude the short winter days squeeze the hours a macaque has for feeding, foraging, moving, resting and socializing, and the monkeys of northern Germany and Britain may have been living at the edge of what the light allowed.

The monkey paper also dates its layer, on the excavators’ long-standing chronology, to between 310,000 and 315,000 years ago, which takes a side in a dispute over how old the spears above it are. They were called 400,000 years old when they were found, and later about 300,000. In May 2025 a team led by Jarod Hutson of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, working with Kirsty Penkman’s amino acid group at the University of York, measured how far the amino acids in the shell lids of freshwater snails of the genus Bithynia, taken from the Spear Horizon itself, had turned from their living form into its mirror image, and with a reassessment of the regional sequence put the spears at about 200,000 years, in the time of the early Neanderthals. Thomas Terberger of the University of Göttingen told the Associated Press he found the arguments “interesting, but not absolutely convincing.” In June, Charles Turner of the University of Cambridge, Brigitte Urban of Leuphana University Lüneburg and van Kolfschoten argued in Quaternary International12 that the fossil mammals support an age of about 300,000 years for the spears, and the monkey paper keeps to that chronology, while the Cambridge paper on Shanidar A, published a month after it, uses 200,000.

Neanderthal burial at Shanidar Cave

Six of Shanidar A’s lower front teeth survived, loosened from a jaw that did not and jammed by moving water against the ribs. They are worn down far enough to put their owner at around 45, old by Neanderthal standards, and in a pattern odd even for Neanderthals; the bones cannot say whether this was a man or a woman. One of the six, the left lateral incisor, had been split lengthwise, and the half nearer the midline is gone. Calculus, the mineral crust better known as tartar, coats the broken faces of what remains down to the tip of the root, so the broken tooth stayed in the mouth long enough for tartar to build up over every surface the break exposed, and a polish from continued wear cuts through the thin calculus on its biting edge, so it was still in use. Micro-CT scans show the calculus in layers. The broken tooth and the central incisor beside it had probably been twisted in their sockets, and the canine pressed against it is worn unusually as a result. A heavy blow to the front of the mouth is the likeliest explanation, the authors write, whether from a fall onto a hard surface or from another person; a sharp edge cannot be ruled out, though nothing on the teeth points to one. Pomeroy estimates, in the university’s statement, that Shanidar A lived with the injury for at least a year.

The paper suggests that for some of that time Shanidar A may have needed help from others with eating, with speaking and with the pain, and Pomeroy has floated the idea that they were given soft food; earlier work at the cave by members of the same team found charred plant food that had been soaked and pounded before cooking. Survival is the evidence for the care, and nothing more direct, and the authors concede that how far back such care goes in the human lineage is still argued over.

The body lay at the bottom of a cluster of Neanderthals, all dated to between about 70,000 and 75,000 years ago, packed into a space about 1.5 meters long, a meter wide and a meter deep, directly behind a large boulder that had fallen from a fault in the cave roof and would have stood above the cave floor of the time. In 1960 the American archaeologist Ralph Solecki, whose excavations here between 1951 and 1960 recovered ten Neanderthals in all, removed four individuals from this spot in a single block of earth: the adults Shanidar 4, 6 and 8 and an infant, Shanidar 9. The Cambridge excavations that began in 2015 have found at least three more adults directly beside them, Shanidar Z in 2018, then A and B, and because Shanidar 4, Z, A and B each preserve the same piece of the left shoulder blade, the acromion at the point of the shoulder, the new paper puts the minimum count for the cluster, with the infant, at five. Whether Z, A or B could be parts of the people Solecki called Shanidar 6 and 8 is something the team hopes to check against the 1960 bones, which are in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Solecki’s own reading of the spot, that Shanidar 4 had been buried with flowers, has not lasted; in 2023 Chris Hunt of Liverpool John Moores University and colleagues, Pomeroy and Barker among them, argued that at least some of the clumps of pollen found with that skeleton were probably left by solitary bees nesting in the cave floor.

The bodies were not laid there at once, as a group sheltering from the cold behind the rock might have died together. Thin layers of sediment separate them, the later ones disturbed the earlier, and the pollen and sediments point to mild conditions when they were put there. And they came close together in time, since in most cases a new body went in before the last had finished decomposing, which the authors take to mean that the dead were placed within living memory of one another, and they read the choice of so small a space, again and again, as deliberate.

Shanidar A came first. The body lay about 15 centimeters below the chest of Shanidar Z, on its back with the head to the east, as Z’s is, in a shallow channel that water had cut into the cave floor and that was dry when the body was set down; for Z someone had scraped out a hollow, but there is no sign that anyone dug for Shanidar A. The team reads the placing of a body that had just been run through with a spear, in a spot that others would keep returning to, as care of a kind, extended past death. Sand washed over the body soon afterward and partly covered it, and it decayed there. Later, once the flesh was gone and the sediment had dried, the flash flood came through the channel, thick with stones, and carried off most of the skeleton, leaving the ribs, the shoulder blade with its slivers, the teeth caught against the ribs, and the right hand. The hand’s position, south of the left ribs, means the right arm had been lying across the chest, and the hand itself had come to rest against the boulder, bent at the knuckles, with its back to the stone.

There was one more tooth in the sand under the shoulder blade, an upper third molar with the taurodont roots that are more common in Neanderthals than in Homo sapiens, and with so much less wear than the six front teeth that the team thinks it came from someone else. The paper does not say whose.

Further Reading

• Hutson, J. M., et al. (2025). Revised age for Schöningen hunting spears indicates intensification of Neanderthal cooperative behavior around 200,000 years ago. Science Advances 11, eadv0752. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adv0752

• Thieme, H. (1997). Lower Palaeolithic hunting spears from Germany. Nature 385, 807-810. https://doi.org/10.1038/385807a0

• Allington-Jones, L. (2015). The Clacton spear: The last one hundred years. Archaeological Journal 172, 273-296. https://doi.org/10.1080/00665983.2015.1008839

• Churchill, S. E., Franciscus, R. G., McKean-Peraza, H. A., Daniel, J. A., Warren, B. R. (2009). Shanidar 3 Neandertal rib puncture wound and paleolithic weaponry. Journal of Human Evolution 57, 163-178. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.05.010

• Gaudzinski-Windheuser, S., et al. (2018). Evidence for close-range hunting by last interglacial Neanderthals. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2, 1087-1092. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0596-1

• Noe-Nygaard, N. (1974). Mesolithic hunting in Denmark illustrated by bone injuries caused by human weapons. Journal of Archaeological Science 1, 217-248. https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-4403(74)90024-7

• Pomeroy, E., et al. (2020). New Neanderthal remains associated with the ‘Flower Burial’ at Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan. Antiquity 94, 11-26. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.207

• Hunt, C. O., Pomeroy, E., Reynolds, T., Tilby, E., Barker, G. (2023). Shanidar et ses fleurs? Reflections on the palynology of the Neanderthal ‘Flower Burial’ hypothesis. Journal of Archaeological Science 159, 105822. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2023.105822

• Kabukcu, C., Hunt, C., Hill, E., Pomeroy, E., Reynolds, T., Barker, G., Asouti, E. (2023). Cooking in caves: Palaeolithic carbonised plant food remains from Franchthi and Shanidar. Antiquity 97, 12-28. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2022.143

• Elton, S., O’Regan, H. J. (2014). Macaques at the margins: the biogeography and extinction of Macaca sylvanus in Europe. Quaternary Science Reviews 96, 117-130.

• University of Cambridge (2026, October 15). Fatal Neanderthal wound may be earliest evidence of a wooden spear attack on a human ancestor. https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/neanderthal-spear-wound-shanidar-cave

• Ramakrishnan, A. (2025, May 9). Ancient wooden spears found in Germany may have been wielded by Neanderthals, a new study suggests. Associated Press.

The standard assumption runs the other way. Linguists and speech engineers have long treated the pitch and timbre peculiar to one speaker as noise, something to be normalized out before the real signal of the language is read, and the authors point to the view, expressed in Labov’s Principles of Linguistic Change,2 that biology finished its work when the language faculty arrived and that everything since is cultural transmission. On that account the anatomy of the speaker is a nuisance, and the differences between English and Hindi have nothing to do with the differences between two English speakers’ jaws.

The data do not support so clean a separation, though the study’s reach is narrow, and I will come to its limits.

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The picture of the Bering Land Bridge that most educated readers carry is a corridor: a cold steppe crossed by small parties of hunters following mammoth and bison, who left little behind because they did not stay. Kelly Graf, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, and fifteen co-authors argue in Science Advances1 that the people who left F21.04 did stay, and that the site is better described as a base camp than a hunting stop. The corridor picture has an excuse, since the paper itself opens by calling Beringia’s archaeological record poorly understood, but the excuse thins when one counts what has accumulated on this one bluff, which includes more than 80,000 specimens from a block of ground only 25 square meters across.

The question behind the paper comes from genetics. Geneticists predict that between 16,000 and 13,000 years ago Beringia held at least three populations (the ancestral Native Americans and two labeled UPopA1 and UPopA2) and possibly a fourth, Population Y, all of which gave rise to the ancestors of Indigenous Americans south of the Canadian ice sheets, along with a fifth, the Ancient Beringians, who appear to have stayed in northwest North America. Archaeologists, the authors say, are struggling to match those populations to the variation in the ground, and the Tanana basin offers the most to work with: nineteen of the 28 Beringian occupations dated to before or during the Clovis era (13,200 to 12,750 years ago, the span of fluted-point technology in temperate North America) lie in an area slightly larger than Maryland, and none of them contains a fluted point.

The site sits on a bluff about 35 meters high, 55 kilometers south-southeast of Fairbanks, with a bedrock knob rising 434 meters behind it that sheltered the inhabitants from northwesterly winds. Its name, which means “they were there” in Alaska Native Athabascan, was given by the elders of Healy Lake Village; a cultural resources survey found the site in 2010, when it was known as McDonald Creek. Roughly 320 centimeters of windblown sediment bury four archaeological components, labeled C1 (the lowest), C2a, C2b and C3, and C1 supplies most of what follows.

Fifty of the site’s 66 radiocarbon dates come from C1, and a Bayesian model places that component between 13,850 and 13,500 years ago. C2a and C2b are brief later visits at 13,080 to 12,840 and 12,820 to 12,640 years ago, and C3 is a diffuse scatter from the middle Holocene. The C1 model took three runs, with four dates that disagreed with the rest removed along the way, and the authors caution that the result narrows the component considerably and may be flattening several separate occupations that began as early as 14,050 years ago and ended as late as 13,120. The modeled duration of C1 is 284 years, plus or minus 34.

Rhyolite dominates the stone at 70 percent, and 64 of the 71 rhyolite pieces sourced by x-ray fluorescence trace to a quarry nobody has located, though its frequent appearance in early Nenana Valley assemblages points to that district. All 25 obsidian artifacts came from Batza Téna, 370 kilometers west-northwest, and none from Wiki Peak, the other major interior source, 400 kilometers southeast.

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Those figures, together with 0.62 at the Shigu site, sit above the 0.52 the authors report as the average for the agricultural units in their sample. The study, published in Science Advances1 by Dongdong Li and Xingcan Chen of the Institute of Archaeology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and Suwei Guo of the School of History at Renmin University of China, runs against a belief most educated readers hold without having examined it: that inequality is what grain did to people, that stored surplus produced owners and heirs, and that a society of foragers is by default a society of rough equals.

The comparison has limits the authors state themselves. Median Gini coefficients for hunter-gatherer units fall below those of agricultural units, but the confidence intervals overlap broadly, and the paper reports no statistically significant difference between the two. Jiahu and Shigu are a few cases within a sample of eleven hunter-gatherer units, fifteen agricultural and eighteen agropastoral.

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That last detail carries the assumption this essay is about: that a working animal’s skeleton keeps a record of the work, so that a dog which pulled a sled should show it in the spine and joints, and that the way to find sled dogs in the archaeological record is to look for wear. Spondylosis deformans, the technical name for those spinal spurs, was proposed as evidence of sled use in 1979 (Arnold), and a systematic evaluation by Kathryn Latham and Robert Losey in 2019 questioned its diagnostic value. The one other attempt the authors know of to identify habitual sled pulling without relying on pathology, a 2025 study of entheses (the attachment sites of muscle and ligament) by Sick and colleagues, offers no quantitative framework for diagnosis.

A team led by Mitya Kletzerman at the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures, University of Haifa, argues in iScience1 that the whole approach starts from the wrong end. Pathology, in their reading, marks a mismatch between the load imposed on an animal and what its skeleton could bear. A population bred for traction over many generations would have lost the dogs that broke down and kept the ones that did not, which leaves the evidence in inherited proportions, in the shape of the animal, and in much less of it on any one individual’s bones.

The stakes are practical. Sled parts rarely survive in the ground, so the question of when dog sledding began and how it spread has rested on a thin run of finds: sled parts alongside dog remains on Zhokhov Island about 9,000 years ago, then a long gap, then the same pairing at Ust’-Polui in northwestern Siberia about 2,000 to 1,500 years ago. Inuit culture was taking shape in what remained of Beringia at roughly that time, and its eastward expansion across the Bering Strait region around 1,000 to 800 years ago replaced the Paleo-Inuit traditions of the Eastern Arctic; the arrival of the Inuit is marked by more dog remains and more sled equipment. Morey and Aaris-Sørensen suggested in 2002 that the rise in dog remains reflects the emergence or intensification of sledding. The Haifa team states that the claim has never been tested empirically.

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The straight-tusked elephant, Palaeoloxodon antiquus, has a settled reputation as an animal of warm interglacial Europe. Its bones turn up as far north as Britain, Denmark and western Russia. At Neumark Nord in Germany, around 125,000 years ago, Neanderthals worked elephant carcasses, and carbon isotopes in the teeth from that site place the animals under a forest canopy. The Levant, meanwhile, is usually described as a corridor, a strip of Mediterranean habitat between Africa and Eurasia that swung between conduit and barrier as glacial cycles turned. Hold both pictures at once and a straight-tusked elephant in Israel looks like a forest animal at the dry edge of its range, passing through a gap. The NBA tooth points to an animal that stayed near water, ate a steady diet, and drank something quite unlike local rain.

The question the tooth can answer is what grew and flowed along this stretch of the corridor at a resolution of years. Hannah Farrell of the University of Haifa and her colleagues note1 that regional reconstructions lean on distant sea cores and climate simulations, which are imprecise for a narrow Mediterranean zone. An elephant tooth found in direct association with handaxes records conditions over a span they compare to hominin lifetimes.

CT scans taken in the radiology lab at Rambam Hospital in Haifa, and 3D models built from them, identified the tooth as the left lower third molar of an adult P. antiquus. Eleven enamel plates survive, an undercount because the front of the tooth broke away before burial, and the plate frequency is 5.37 per ten centimeters.

The hypsodonty index, crown height over crown width, was 2.574, where values above 2.0 are common in Palaeoloxodon antiquus and rare in most Mammuthus species.

The age needs some care. The NBA horizon sits above a basalt flow that argon-argon dating placed at 658 ± 15 thousand years ago in 2010 (Sharon and colleagues). New dating of the same flow gave 696.8 ± 6.7 thousand years, a result the paper cites only as a personal communication from Gonen Sharon of Tel-Hai University, so it has not yet appeared in a publication of its own. The two figures differ by nearly 40,000 years. The authors describe the elephant-bearing unit as slightly younger than 700,000 years and assign it to Marine Isotope Stage 17, an interglacial during the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, when glacial rhythms were lengthening toward the 100,000-year cycle.

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Most of what we picture when we picture Neanderthals was built from what archaeologists dig up, and what archaeologists dig up is stone: flakes, scrapers, cores. The era carries the material in its name. Wood, bark, hide and fiber rot, so a Paleolithic toolkit reconstructed from the ground is a toolkit with its perishable portion deleted, and a reader who assumes Neanderthal technology was knapped flint plus perhaps a sharpened stick at the margins is mistaking an artifact of preservation for a fact about people. At Abric Romaní, where flooding and travertine sealed wood in place, the deleted portion can be counted.

The count is 597 wooden specimens from 16 of the shelter’s lettered levels, dated to roughly 62,000 to 40,000 years ago. Most are trunks, branches, twigs, roots and firewood, whether natural or carried in by people. The team of Palmira Saladié, M. Gema Chacón, Josep Vallverdú and colleagues, working from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA), singles out 13 as worked or used: four bark trays, two structural pieces, four pointed implements of differing size, two spears, and the club. Each survives in one of three forms. A wood imprint is the travertine mold alone, a charred wood imprint is a mold with charcoal adhering to it or filling part of it, and charred wood is charcoal larger than five centimeters.

The trays, from levels H and O, are charred slabs of bark 30 to 55 centimeters long with a shallow concave profile, and the authors concede that bark which fell off a tree is hard to tell from bark someone shaped; they lean on the size, the regularity, the nearness of hearths, and the use of juniper (Juniperus) where pine dominates nearly everything else.

A pole from level N, 510 centimeters long and stripped of its branches, lay beside five hearths in an 18 square meter patch with few other finds, between two dripping domes and the back wall of the shelter. The authors read it as the third side of a lean-to or windbreak, then add that current debate about Middle Paleolithic architecture, which turns on how to separate a built feature from the planned use of space, calls for caution about exactly this sort of reading.

The spears carry more weight. One from level Ra is 245 centimeters long and 3.66 centimeters across at its thickest, and that thickest point falls 121.5 centimeters from one end, at 49.5 percent of the preserved length. A second, in Rinf, is 199 centimeters, smooth-shafted with the knots of cut branches, and tapers over its last 13 centimeters to a point 0.6 centimeters wide. Level Ra held the remains of at least four red deer, the only ungulate there, including three adult male skulls with antlers still attached, which the team takes to mean autumn or winter kills. They compare the spear to those from Schöningen in Germany, where wooden spears and throwing sticks about 300,000 years old were recovered, and call it consistent with a thrusting spear while warning that several of the comparison objects are incomplete or deformed. No cut marks on the deer bones record a spear being used, which the authors note is typical.

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Most readers, and a fair number of archaeologists, carry a working assumption that a more complex society makes a more varied material world: more specialists, more occasions to mark, more kinds of pot. Bigger towns should mean more styles. A paper published on 7 October in PLOS One1 by Aleksandr Diachenko (Institute of Archaeology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv) and Detlef Gronenborn (LEIZA, Mainz, and Johannes Gutenberg University) sets out to explain why societies on similar trajectories can leave opposite signatures in their ceramics, and why the same curve on a graph can mean quite different things.

The contrast they draw is with Gronenborn’s earlier work on the Linear Pottery culture (Linearbandkeramik, or LBK) of southwestern Germany, 5400 to 5000 BCE, where decoration was read as a code for identity. In that sequence the diversity of the primary decoration, the band types running around the vessel, climbed alongside the population proxy and then began to fall before the population itself did, while the diversity of secondary motifs went on rising. The authors take this as a shift in emphasis from a broad regional identity toward the self-identification of sub-groups, and the figurines typical of the early phases drop out of the record along the way. In LBK, in other words, a rise in pottery diversity tracked a rise in social complexity, which is the intuitive reading.

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Most readers who picture Maya maize farming picture a hillside, a plot cut and burned out of upland forest, and many assume that growing maize and settling into villages arrived as a package. The team that dug RB14-02, led by Keith Prufer, professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico, and Megan Walsh, professor of geography at Central Washington University, reports in Communications Earth & Environment1 that the first extensive maize farming in this valley took place on wet ground beside the river and a nearby swamp, by about 6,000 years ago (all dates here are calibrated years before present), and that it remained the dominant way of growing food for roughly 4,000 years. Farming reached the slopes around Uxbenká, the founding political center of the region, only after about 4,000 years ago, and for roughly 1,800 years the two systems overlapped.

Moving a farm uphill in a country that receives more than 4,000 millimeters of rain a year is not an obvious decision, and the authors treat it as one that needed a reason. Floodplain soil stays moist through the dry months and is topped up with silt by every flood, which is why the earliest farming across Belize, Guatemala and southern Mexico turns up along lake, river and swamp margins. The reason they propose is a dry spell that shows up in a single cave record as a shift of 0.5 per mil in oxygen isotopes.

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Anyone who thinks about the gut microbiome at all tends to treat it as a reflection of diet and place, a community rebuilt in each generation from local food, soil, water and neighbors. On that view the Tsimane, who are forager-horticulturalists in the Amazon, and the Hadza, who are hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, should carry quite different bacteria, since their ancestors separated tens of thousands of years ago. The paper, published in Nature1 on 7 October 2026 and led by Stanford University groups that include Justin Sonnenburg of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and Benjamin Good of the Department of Applied Physics, reports that 1,231 of the 1,408 microbial species recovered from the Tsimane (87.4%) also occur in the Hadza, whose samples were sequenced in an earlier study published in Cell in 2023.

Sharing a species proves little by itself, and the authors say so: a bacterium found on two continents could have been carried by ancestors or picked up last century from the environment or from other people. Some of the shared species are found everywhere. Ruminococcus bromii is one. But 848 of the 1,231 (60.2%) are rare in or absent from the gut microbiomes of industrialized populations, which makes them the candidates for something older. To separate inheritance from recent exchange, the team narrowed to the 636 shared species for which each cohort yielded at least four metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs, bacterial genomes reconstructed from sequenced stool), then asked how closely related the strains were within each population compared with between them. They also flag a limit of their own: differences in sequencing depth or in strain-level heterogeneity between the two cohorts may have affected the recovery of some rare MAGs.

The first test looked at the last few thousand years. Pairs of MAGs sharing more than 10% identical genes were treated as clonally related, and by the team’s calibration that means a common ancestor within roughly the past 5,000 years. Of 78,746 such pairs across the 636 species (7.8% of all comparisons), 93.8% came from within a single population.

Of the 636 species, 545 (85.6%) showed no recent strain sharing between the Tsimane and the Hadza.

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Most people who know the aurochs know how it ended: the last cow died in a Polish forest in the 17th century, and people did it. The authors accept that for Poland. They do not accept that it explains Scandinavia, where the species was gone thousands of years before, and where the usual suspect, the Mesolithic hunter with a spear, turns out to have been busy at the wrong time and in the wrong places to carry the whole blame. A second belief sits underneath the first, namely that the animals were cut off from the continent by about 10,000 years ago and began their slow decline in isolation. The genomes do not quite say that either.

Start with the isolation, since the genetics speak most plainly there. All 11 sampled Scandinavian aurochs belong to the P1 mitochondrial haplogroup, and their common maternal ancestor lies somewhere between 18,200 and 12,500 years ago (cal BP, 95% highest posterior density). They cluster with western European sequences, which fits a colonization out of a Franco-Iberian refugium after the ice, across a land bridge that low seas and rebounding land had opened in the western Baltic. For a long time the working assumption was that a river and lake system draining across present-day Denmark cut the Scandinavian population off as early as 10,000 cal BP. The nuclear genomes agree that the animals had drifted apart from the mainland; in a multidimensional scaling of allele sharing, the Scanian, Zealand and south-central Swedish samples sit in a tight group far from the western European one, with the Zealand and Swedish animals the most drifted. But the mitochondrial tree, built from 34 mitogenomes of which 11 are Scandinavian, shows lineages that still join up with continental ones as recently as 10,300 to 8,500 cal BP, and the pattern suggests some contact with the mainland lasted until the Danish-Swedish straits finally flooded around 8500 to 8000 cal BP. The Jutland animal, Hjo1, diverges from the Scanian and Zealand sequences at 9,900 to 8,500 cal BP.

The cost of arriving was already written in the genomes by then. The long runs of homozygosity that mark recent matings between close relatives are almost absent in Ska1 and Ska3, and what fills their profiles instead is a heavy load of short and medium runs, which the authors read as the signature of a population that had been small for a long time, a bottleneck during colonization, rather than of parents who were cousins. Hjo1, the more recent animal from North Jutland, has the larger fraction of long runs, so inbreeding in the strict sense does show up, but later and farther north. The authors keep saying how thin this evidence is: the demographic inference rests on two individuals, and each genome, they note, carries the genealogies of hundreds of ancestors, which helps without settling anything. They also decline to say that inbreeding killed the species. The woolly mammoth went through a severe bottleneck and still lasted roughly 6,000 years on Wrangel Island (Dehasque and colleagues, 2024), so a poor genome can be a very long sentence.

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The usual picture of an Inka coca ritual comes from Spanish chroniclers, who described leaves being burned or bundled as offerings to spirits and deities. Most readers who know anything about the Inka carry that picture without noticing its source. The Inka left no writing, so every account of what they did with coca in a ceremony was set down by someone else, in Spanish, after the fact, and the leaves in the llama wool are the first direct evidence of coca in ritual at Tambo Viejo. Lidio Valdez of the University of Calgary and his co-authors Katrina Bettcher (Trent University) and M. Soledad Gutiérrez report the find in Ñawpa Pacha,1 where it appeared online on September 7, 2026. Their abstract is blunt about the mismatch: the written sources say the coca was burned, and the archaeological evidence consists of the actual leaves.

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Most readers who follow the field carry a tidy story about it. Clovis First, the idea that hunters of the Clovis culture, around 13,500 years ago, were the original colonists, collapsed when older sites turned up, and the story since has seemed to be one of dates sliding steadily backward: White Sands at about 23,000 years, Chiquihuite Cave at about 32,000, the Cerutti Mastodon site in southern California at 130,000. Genetics, in this version, is the slow discipline waiting to be persuaded. The review describes the relationship differently. The genomes that helped finish off Clovis First also put a limit on how far back the ancestors of living Native Americans can be pushed, because the diversification of their lineages, the pattern expected when a founding group first spreads into a new region, appears in the genomic record no earlier than about 21,000 years ago.

The authors make a point about the Americas that sets them apart from the rest of the Homo sapiens story, in which our species repeatedly moved into continents already held by Neanderthals, Denisovans and other so-called archaic hominins. Here the genomic data imply that a small group of people entered two continents with no other humans on them. That predicts a sparse early archaeological record, with few sites, made sparser by the extra thousands of years in which weather, rivers and soil could destroy what was left. The authors argue that the post-glacial record of both continents looks exactly like this.

The Cerutti claim runs into the sharpest version of the problem. If DNA were ever recovered from a site that old, the authors write, it should belong to Neanderthals, Denisovans or some unknown lineage, since Homo sapiens did not begin its persistent expansion beyond Africa until 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. The oldest Native American genomes, from Upward Sun River in Alaska and from Anzick, carry patterns of archaic admixture that do not match that scenario. Even a much later arrival shortly before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, about 25,000 to 20,000 years ago) fits the genetic evidence poorly, though the authors treat arrivals at 40,000 years or later as more feasible than the 130,000-year claim.

The Siberian background is better documented than most of what follows it. Humans were living in the Arctic of East Siberia by 32,000 years ago, at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn sites, and genomes from two people there define a group called the Ancient North Siberians. The Yana people did not contribute directly to the ancestry of the First Peoples, the review’s term for the direct ancestors of Native Americans, but a group largely descended from related ancestry did, and it is represented by a 24,000-year-old individual from Mal’ta in south-central Siberia. That Ancestral North Eurasian ancestry makes up as much as 40 percent of the First Peoples lineage. Between 25,000 and 20,000 years ago, a group carrying it met ancient East Asians, and the resulting metapopulation then sat in isolation through the cold and dry peak of the LGM, a span called the Beringian Standstill. Where it sat is unresolved; researchers have proposed a refugium east of Lake Baikal, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, and central Beringia.

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That figure sits almost exactly on top of what clinicians report today. Studies of infants seven to twelve weeks old put modern prevalence between 37.8%and 46.6%. The comparison is imperfect, since the Matelica sample is adults and the clinical figures are babies, and I will come back to why that matters, but the coincidence is hard to ignore.

The belief it disturbs is a tidy one. In 1992 the American Academy of Pediatrics began advising parents to lay infants on their backs to reduce sudden infant death syndrome, and in the years that followed, pediatric clinics saw more flattened heads. The sequence is easy to read as cause and effect, and a good deal of popular and some clinical writing treats flat head syndrome as the price of a lifesaving policy, or more broadly as a problem of strollers, car seats and bouncers. The paper’s own introduction is more careful than that: the post-campaign rise coincided with growing clinical attention, and the pre-campaign estimates, drawn mostly from British clinical observation with varying case definitions, ran from 0.3% to 48%. Nobody had a clean baseline.

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The usual telling of this period treats Homo erectus as the species that arrived with the bigger brain and the smaller molars and simply took over, an ancestor with an obvious future. Drimolen gives a different count. Martin says that 2 million years ago Paranthropus robustus outnumbered Homo erectus at the site by more than 10 to 1, and that our ancestors “looked like long shots to survive.” That ten-to-one figure comes from the university’s summary of the study. The paper itself reports fourteen P. robustus to one H. erectus within its batch of eighteen fossils, and calls that ratio broadly compatible with Swartkrans (Brain, 1993) and with earlier dental samples from Drimolen.

The paper, in Annals of Human Biology1 (Martin, A. B. Leece, Stephanie Baker, Andy I. R. Herries and David S. Strait, 2026), describes eighteen cranial and mandibular specimens excavated between 1992 and 2019, most of them dug by Andre Keyser’s team in the 1990s. Fourteen went to Paranthropus robustus, one to Homo erectus sensu lato, and three could not be placed beyond Hominini. The Paranthropus material also supports the authors’ argument that the Drimolen population, named the subspecies P. robustus ukusa, differs from the later Swartkrans and Kromdraai B samples through gradual change over time, with less bite force at Drimolen. They reject the older alternative, that Drimolen simply held mostly females and Swartkrans mostly males.

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Most people who have met Meretneith at all have met her as a woman standing next to a man. Flinders Petrie, digging tomb Y at Abydos, first took her for a king, “Merneit,” and noted that the name on her stela lacked the customary serekh; once other inscriptions turned up with a feminine ending on the name, she became a queen consort, and later a regent holding the throne for her young son Den. In every version she keeps the seat warm for someone else. A serekh is the frame, modelled on a palace façade and topped by a god, inside which a ruler’s name was written, and it belongs to the person who actually rules. If the second and third impressions at Saqqara name Meretneith, then a woman wore it at the very start of the dynasty, and the regent is the wrong category for at least part of her career.

The trouble is that nobody can pick the stopper up. Sue Kelly (Czech Institute of Egyptology, Charles University) and Crystal Miller (University of Bucharest) write in Prague Egyptological Studies1 that neither the sealing nor Emery’s glass plate has been located, so the only surviving evidence is a black-and-white photograph in the excavation archive plus his published line drawing. That was enough for some scholars to accept Emery’s reading and for Peter Kaplony, in 1963, to call the publication unconvincing. Rudolf Anthes doubted that the two repeated signs in the name compartment were the hoe sign at all, and Silke Roth rejected the identification in 1997 on the grounds that Meretneith’s name is spelled differently elsewhere.

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Two assumptions sit underneath how most readers picture religious education in the ancient world, and a study of first-millennium BCE Babylonian schools by Shana Zaia of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, published this year in Iraq,1 cuts against both. The first is that teaching children about the gods requires a religion class, with a scripture at the center and clergy running the school. Babylonia had no separate unit on religion or theology, no text functioning as holy scripture, and no seminary equivalent, and even the schools located in temple complexes were not primarily religious institutions. The second assumption is that ancient religion, being ancient, was handed down intact. Zaia agrees that Mesopotamian religious conventions were by and large conservative, but her cases show trained scribes and priests breaking from them whenever the break could be presented as a continuation of something older.

The schooling was private and household-based, with adult professionals as instructors, often the father of one or more of the boys in the class, and pupils drawn from elite or upwardly mobile families (Zaia notes that evidence for women’s scribal education is limited). Elementary students began with basic signs, lexical lists, proverbs and a few literary works; the second stage added harder lists, bilingual incantations, prayers, hymns and, in the north, a text called Tintir that catalogs the names, shrines, gates and streets of Babylon. Those headed for exorcism, divination, cultic singing or healing then entered a specialist phase resembling an apprenticeship.

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There is a common intuition about newcomers and old hands, and most of us would apply it here without thinking. People arriving in a rich place spend freely, because they have not yet learned what things cost, and their descendants, taught by generations of experience, learn to waste nothing. Under that sits a second intuition, that people are thrifty with a material because the material is scarce. A study of 489 fluted spear points from the valley, published online on August 27 in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory,1 runs against both. Its authors, Jesse Tune, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Mississippi who directs its Center for Archaeological Research, and D. Shane Miller, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama, found that Clovis hunters resharpened their points close to the practical limit before letting them go, while the Cumberland people who followed them threw away broken points with plenty of working edge still on them.

Clovis points are broad, with a concave base and a long channel flake, the flute, removed from the base partway up each face. They are found across much of North America, and the best current dating places their manufacture between about 13,050 and 12,750 years ago. Cumberland points came after them and stayed closer to home in the Midsouth. They are narrower and thicker, and their flutes run much further toward the tip. Their age is less secure: Tune’s earlier work puts them somewhere between roughly 12,800 and 12,000 years ago, so on paper the two ranges overlap slightly at the edge. No site older than Clovis is known anywhere in the valley, and the authors treat Clovis groups as the first people to walk it and Cumberland groups as their successors, several centuries on, who inherited a country already mapped in memory.

What the pair set out to test is whether knowledge leaves a mark in stone. The paper leans on a 2003 framework by the archaeologist M. Rockman, which splits what colonists must learn into three kinds. Locational knowledge, that an outcrop exists and where, can be had in a single encounter. Limitational knowledge, how the stone’s quality varies across the outcrop, how far the source extends, whether it can be reached in every season and how it compares with others in the region, builds up through repeated use. Social knowledge, the version passed between generations and folded into how a group moves and makes its tools, takes longest of all. The valley’s abundance is what makes it a fair test, because where stone lies in nearly every creek, a difference in how carefully people used it is hard to put down to the stone supply, and knowledge is what remains.

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That insistence had respectable sources. Joyce Marcus, in her 1992 survey of Mesoamerican writing systems, and Esther Pasztory, in her 1997 book on the city, both characterised Teotihuacan as a state without a true script, and the vocabulary that grew up around its signs did the same work more quietly. James Langley, who catalogued the signs in the 1980s, spoke of a “notational system” and of “emblematic glyphs,” terms that placed Teotihuacan a rung below the Classic Maya and the Aztecs, whose hieroglyphs everyone agreed recorded language. The German epigrapher Thomas Barthel saw the danger in 1987, warning that a purely visual reading tempts scholars to treat the signs like airport pictograms. The suspicion was not unreasonable, because Teotihuacan texts are short, usually a single glyphic compound, and the city left no long carved narratives of kings and wars of the kind that made Maya decipherment possible.

The new paper on Cave 19, published in Antiquity1 by Christophe Helmke and Jesper Nielsen of the Institute of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen, with Carolina Meza Rodríguez and Mario Córdova Tello of Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), takes the opposite position as settled. Drawing on a run of papers by the authors and by Karl Taube, they describe a logo-phonetic script comparable to Maya and Aztec writing, with a repertoire they now estimate at almost 120 signs, in which researchers have identified calendar notations, place names, personal names, titles and even verbs.

Which is why a painting not much bigger than a dinner plate, on a cliff far from the city, matters more than its size suggests. A script shows itself in the way its signs behave: the same compound should mean the same thing wherever it turns up, whether on an apartment-compound wall in the city or in a shelter on a hill in Morelos. Terse texts give the skeptics little to test, so every example found outside the metropolis is a chance to check whether the signs travel with their meanings intact. Cave 19 offers something close to that test, because one of its glyphs appears to name a place that is also named in a mural inside Teotihuacan.

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