The belief this tests is one many of us hold without much scrutiny, that cannabis in an ancient grave means someone was getting high. People have often suggested as much, but the evidence is awkward. Cannabis also supplied oil and fiber, so seeds in a burial don’t prove intoxication, and residues on vessels and heated stones from later Central Asian sites point to inhalation while recording an object rather than a person. Hair could close that gap because it comes from a body.

The study’s lead author is Dr. Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeological Sciences of the University of Bern and the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. He and eight coauthors, including Timur Sadykov and Daria Fomicheva, conclude that cannabis consumption dates back at least 2,800 years. In the press release issued with the paper, Caspari takes the next step: “The molecular traces in the hair and the cannabis seeds come from the same grave and suggest that cannabis was used for its intoxicating properties.”

I should say exactly what I read. The full text is behind Science‘s paywall, and for this post I worked from the abstract, the editor’s summary, and the release, without the methods or the supplement and its eight figures and seven tables. When I call a detail missing below, I mean missing from those documents. On that evidence, I think the case that people in this tomb used cannabis in some form is good, and the case that they used it to get high is weaker.

How do you find cannabis in 2,800-year-old hair?

The date comes from the seeds. Radiocarbon dating measures the decay of carbon-14 in once-living material, and six seeds were dated directly. I consider this the firmest part of the study because the date belongs to the cannabis itself and not to something found near it. Together with other dating results, those measurements put the seeds in the grave in the early eighth century B.C., which matches the 2,800 years in the paper’s title. The error ranges, and what the other dates were taken on, are missing from what I read.

The chemistry comes from the hair, and it is easier to follow once you know the two compounds involved. Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, is the main intoxicating compound in cannabis. Cannabinol, or CBN, is one of the things THC becomes when it oxidizes, which makes it a sensible target in very old material. The team used high-resolution mass spectrometry, among other methods; the technique sorts molecules by mass precisely enough to match a signal to a candidate compound. Several samples gave clear signals consistent with CBN, and the team also saw weak signals whose mass is consistent with THC. I can’t tell you how many samples were tested, how many people they came from, or those people’s ages and sex.

Does cannabis in ancient hair prove people got high?

The step I’d slow down on runs from the hair to the word “psychoactive,” because “direct evidence” fits the presence of a compound better than it fits anyone’s state of mind. I also trust the CBN more than the THC. The CBN signal is described as clear, although the release says THC oxidation is only one way CBN forms. The THC signal is described as weak and rests on mass, and a mass match says a molecule of the right weight was present without settling which molecule of that weight it was. The editor’s summary, which says the team identified psychoactive compounds in the hair, is firmer than the release’s own language.

Quantity is the larger problem, because intoxication depends on how much a person took in, and the release says the hair can’t give a reliable amount. These seeds likely came from wild plants, and people had other uses for cannabis, so I can’t rule out from what I read that a person with no interest in an altered state could carry a similar trace. Caspari’s word, “suggest,” seems right to me, and it is more careful than the paper’s title.

The ritual reading has a similar gap. An earlier paper by the team described 18 horses arranged on the burial mound, and several dozen more horse sacrifices have turned up since, along with scattered human bones. Caspari says the burials were accompanied by “most likely, human sacrifices as well.” I accept that the seeds belong to that funerary setting. Hair records a person’s body, though, and nothing I read says whether the cannabis signal reflects a funeral or the years before death, so the editor’s summary’s “ritualistic psychoactive use” joins two findings that may describe different moments.

What the Scythian tomb study can’t tell us

The gap I’d most like closed is contamination, which the materials I read don’t address. The release says the team can’t determine how the compounds entered the body, which assumes they did enter it. This hair lay for about 2,800 years in a tomb containing cannabis offerings, and if anything was burned at the funeral, smoke could have settled on it too. A test separating compounds taken up by the body from compounds sitting on the hair is the first thing I’d look for in the supplement, along with control samples from the surrounding sediment.

The date and the chemistry also attach to different objects. The release calls this the oldest directly dated evidence of intoxicating use, but the direct dates it describes are on seeds, and it gives no separate date for the hair. The two are linked by coming from one grave, and in a tomb with more than one burial and scattered human bones, I’d want that association spelled out.

On potency and reach, the abstract says more than the release does. It floats the idea that specific wild populations might have had naturally higher levels of active compounds, while the release says the findings allow no conclusions about the plants’ THC content. The abstract also says the findings suggest use across Eurasia and that they anchor current debates over cannabis in law, public health, and other fields. On the evidence I could see, one tomb in Tyva can’t carry those last two claims, and I would have cut them. The release’s headline has its own problems. It says flatly that cannabis “was used as an intoxicant,” where the abstract says the findings “suggest” psychoactive use. It also says “as early as 2,800 years ago” where the abstract says “at least 2800 years”; the first reads like a starting point, and the second leaves room for an older practice.

What would settle the question of ancient cannabis use?

My verdict is that the study is partly convincing. It adds a human body to evidence that, in the documents I read, otherwise comes from plants and objects, and the direct dates tie the seeds themselves to the early eighth century B.C. If the supplement deals properly with contamination, I’d accept that people in this tomb had taken in cannabis by about the early eighth century B.C. Intoxication seems to me the likeliest explanation, given the funerary setting and the later evidence of inhalation, but it remains an inference from context, so my confidence there is moderate at best.

Sequencing is the next result to watch. Caspari says, “We have already begun sequencing some of the plant samples,” and adds that “DNA preservation is excellent in this case.” He expects the work to speak to domestication and spread. I’d want it to answer a narrower question as well, which is whether these plants differ from other cannabis in any way that bears on THC production, since that is what the abstract’s idea about wild populations predicts.

The test I most want to see is hair from a steppe burial of the same period with no cannabis in the grave, if such hair has survived, run through the same instruments. A CBN signal there could not have come from offerings lying beside the body, and it would be much harder to explain without people taking in cannabis during life. A clean result could mean contamination in the first tomb or simply people in the second who didn’t use cannabis, so the comparison is worth running only with enough individuals to make an absence mean something.

Anyone who knows Iberian cave art knows the map has a hole in it. Cantabria and the Basque Country in the north and Andalusia in the south are dense with decorated caves, while Catalonia had produced two wall images attributed to the Upper Paleolithic. One, a black-painted bovid from the Cova del Tendo, was stolen shortly after its discovery and survives only in photographs and a tracing. The other, a possible deer in the Cova de la Taverna, may not be human work at all. The usual explanation tied the missing art to missing people, on the view that the region had few pre-Magdalenian occupations. Pre-Magdalenian is the paper’s label for the part of the Upper Paleolithic before the Magdalenian culture, running from 43,000 or 40,000 to 19,000 cal BP (calibrated radiocarbon years before present).

In a 22-page paper in Antiquity, Josep Maria Vergès Bosch and Míriam Salas-Altès describe 280 engraved graphics in those galleries. Fifty-five are animals, and non-figurative marks make up most of the rest: parallel lines in groups of two to four, longer rows of 15 to 40, and less common circular and quadrangular shapes. The animals carry the headline claim. From the Pyrenees to Gibraltar, about 75 percent of known assemblages on Iberia’s Mediterranean side hold five animal figures or fewer and more than 90 percent hold 20 or fewer, and only Ardales and La Pileta, at the peninsula’s southern end, have more animals than Font Major. I think that count redraws the map, while the age of the art is much less settled than the press release suggests.

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Readers who have followed this story probably hold a simple version of it. H.H. Thomas assigned the stone to West Wales in 1923, that view stood for over 90 years, and then mineral dating moved it to northeast Scotland. The new paper keeps the correction about Wales and puts the Scottish answer in doubt, without offering a replacement.

The study, by Duncan Pirrie, an emeritus professor at the University of South Wales, and 12 coauthors, appears in the Journal of the Geological Society,1 and its conclusion is negative. No examined outcrop of the UK’s Old Red Sandstone shares the Altar Stone’s full set of features, and many outcrops in the Orcadian Basin (the Old Red Sandstone basin that takes in Caithness, Orkney and the Moray Firth) could not have supplied it. “So far, none of the locations examined have the same set of characteristics as the Altar Stone,” Pirrie said in a statement released with the study.

The authorship gives me more confidence in the critique. Richard Bevins, an honorary professor in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University, signed the 2024 Nature paper by Clarke and colleagues, as did coauthors Rob Ixer and Nick Pearce, so part of this team is testing a conclusion it helped publish.

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The usual picture has Viking Age Danes and Swedes descending from people settled in southern Scandinavia since the Bronze Age, speaking a language that developed in place. Earlier genetic studies detected southern ancestry arriving but, the authors note, generally assumed local continuity. The new work says that continuity broke in Denmark and southern Sweden during the Migration Period (1575 to 1375 BP), when Old Norse, the language of the Vikings, took shape.

Both papers appear in Nature.1 2 Hugh McColl is first author on both, sharing that position with the linguist Guus Kroonen on the Celtic paper, and Eske Willerslev is last author. The team sequenced 712 new ancient genomes and combined them with published data into a working set of 4,587 individuals spanning roughly 5,000 years. The Germanic paper proposes that a population it calls Eastern Scandinavian, linked to the northeastern Baltic, reached Sweden by about 4000 BP and carried the earliest form of Germanic. That is some 800 years after the Corded Ware groups traditionally credited with bringing it. The paper also traces most of the Scandinavian-related ancestry of the Anglo-Saxons, Frisians and Langobards to Jutland and northern Germany.

The companion paper tests four competing models for how Celtic reached an Iron Age range that ran from Iberia to the Balkans. It detects three large movements of people between 4400 and 2800 BP. It judges the last of them to be the most parsimonious vector for Celtic, meaning the one that needs the fewest extra assumptions: a westward spread from eastern central Europe between 3200 and 2800 BP, associated with the cremation-dominated Urnfield Culture. That puts the paper behind the longstanding Celtic-from-the-East model. In both papers the most important conclusion sits beside the largest gap in the sampling, and that shapes how far I would trust each one.

How does ancient DNA trace the spread of a language?

DNA cannot show what anyone spoke, as both papers acknowledge, but it does show who descended from whom. The method uses identity-by-descent (IBD) segments, which are stretches of chromosome that two people share because they inherited them from a common ancestor. Recombination shortens these stretches every generation, so long segments mark recent relatives and short ones deeper links. Many genomes here are thin, down to 0.1× coverage, meaning only about one position in ten was read even once. The team filled in the missing genotypes by imputation from a reference panel of present-day genomes.

In IBD mixture modelling, each individual gets a palette recording how much DNA they share with each of 386 genetic clusters. A target’s palette is then fitted as a blend of the palettes of chosen source groups. Because every palette draws on the whole dataset, a Viking Age Dane can be linked to an Iron Age source population even when the two share few segments directly.

Applied to Scandinavians older than 2800 BP, the method finds three clusters. The Eastern Scandinavian one carries extra hunter-gatherer ancestry best matched by hunter-gatherers from Latvia and Lithuania. The authors attribute it to an unsampled population between Finland and northeastern Sweden; no genomes yet exist from that region and period. Between about 3200 and 2450 BP, early Germanic took loanwords from Celtic to the south and lent words to Finno-Saamic languages to the east. Neither of the other clusters reached both contact zones, so the authors call Eastern Scandinavian ancestry the most parsimonious vector.

Tracking later movements is harder, because everyone who postdates the arrival of Steppe ancestry in Europe is so closely related. The Celtic paper’s solution, which I think is the smartest move in either study, is to follow which regional variety of older Neolithic farmer ancestry people carried. Bell Beaker groups absorbed different local farmers in different places, so a source of confusion becomes a regional tag. In England, ancestry tied to Neolithic farmers of Iberia and France overtakes local farmer ancestry between 3800 and 3200 BP. That matches an earlier report of large-scale migration into Britain (Patterson and colleagues, 2022). Between 3200 and 2800 BP, ancestry tied to Bronze Age Hungary and Serbia rises in England, becoming widespread by at least 2600 BP.

Iberian individuals from Urnfield contexts carry that eastern ancestry by 3150 BP. The authors use ancestry related to the Knovíz Culture of the Czech Republic as a stand-in for Urnfield populations generally. By 2800 BP it is common across former Urnfield regions, though its effect weakens westward and the older Bell Beaker-related ancestry still dominates in Iron Age England. The authors then checked each movement against published linguistic dates. These covered the formation of Proto-Celtic, the undocumented ancestor of all Celtic languages, and the later split between its Brittonic branch (including Welsh) and Goidelic branch (including Irish). Only the third movement fit most estimates on every count.

Why does cremation leave gaps in the ancient DNA record?

What I most want readers to notice is where the missing genomes fall. Both papers place their most consequential change in centuries when most people were cremated, and cremation destroys DNA. For the Celtic paper this is the Urnfield period of 3200 to 2800 BP. The authors say the timing of the transition in France cannot be measured directly for lack of Late Bronze Age samples, so they infer it from Britain and Iberia.

For the Germanic paper, the gap runs from 1575 to 1200 BP, when Old Norse formed. I counted the individuals in the paper’s ancestry plot for Denmark and Sweden (Extended Data Fig. 13). The panel for 1575 to 1230 BP holds 15 people, against roughly 200 on each side, and only four are Danish genomes older than 1250 BP. Because hundreds of genomes anchor each end, I accept that the population of the Danish islands changed, but the genomes cannot say when within the window. The paper’s date, probably 1550 to 1450 BP, comes from non-genetic evidence, including tree rings from 654 Danish oak samples.

Norway is the result I think historical linguists should weigh most. Old Norse took shape there too, yet the paper finds genetic continuity in Norway from the Iron Age to the Viking Age. The authors conclude that demographic and cultural mechanisms combined to drive the language. They also observe that the later boundary between East Norse and West Norse dialects roughly follows the boundary between the newcomers’ ancestry and Norwegian Iron Age ancestry, even in Viking areas of Britain. That is a firmer link between genes and language, because it concerns a split inside a language rather than its birth. The authors also suggest the expansion through Denmark may partly explain why Old Norse speakers called their language dǫnsk tunga, the Danish tongue.

A similar tension sits in the Celtic paper’s ranking table. Under the favored Celtic-from-the-East model, Celtic reached Britain and Iberia with only a small genetic contribution compared with the Hallstatt and La Tène regions. Yet every surviving Celtic language is spoken on the Atlantic fringe. The rival Celtic-from-the-West model places Celtic’s formation in the maritime networks of the Atlantic Bronze Age. It needs Celtic to reach central Europe with little movement of people and then persist in the west through the arrival of Knovíz-related ancestry. One model asks language and ancestry to part ways once, the other twice. I think the count is fair, though it is a judgment, and the authors themselves describe parsimony as a heuristic for comparing models.

Where the press release goes further than the papers

The press release simplifies the Germanic paper in several places. It names northern Germany as the newcomers’ origin. The paper’s source is northern Germany or southern Jutland, and with no samples between northern Jutland and northern Germany, the authors cannot rule out southern Jutland. The release dates the migration to around 1,500 years ago without noting that this figure is the paper’s non-genetic estimate. It singles out Zealand, where the paper’s main text treats the Danish islands together. Its mention of shared Viking and Anglo-Saxon artistic traditions has no counterpart in the paper’s main text. And it presents the migration as unpredicted, although the paper credits earlier genetic studies (Margaryan and colleagues, 2020; Rodríguez-Varela and colleagues, 2023) with detecting southern ancestry entering Scandinavia. What the new paper adds is the scale of the change and its source.

For Celtic, the release calls the eastern movement the simplest explanation and says it challenges the theory of an Atlantic origin. The paper ranks the eastern model as the most parsimonious of four predefined scenarios, given current sampling and linguistic dates. On the demographic test alone, the Bell Beaker model does as well; it ties Celtic to the first spread of Steppe ancestry across western Europe between 4400 and 4000 BP. The paper’s abstract even calls the Bronze Age movement into Britain consistent with Celtic forming along the Atlantic façade. The Celtic paper’s final paragraph says its findings do not definitively establish the homeland of the Celtic languages.

How confident should we be about Viking and Celtic origins?

I am convinced by the demographic finding and less so by the linguistic links. The turnover on the Danish islands and in southern Sweden is the best-supported result in either study, because hundreds of genomes sit on each side of it. It should change what we assume about who the Viking Age Danes were. Its date and exact source are inferences, and Norway weakens its tie to the birth of Old Norse.

On Celtic, the companion paper narrows the field without settling it. Any model now has to accommodate the Bronze Age movement into Britain and the later eastern movement, which reached every region where Celtic is known to have been spoken. The preference for an eastern origin leans on linguistic date estimates. I would want to know how many of the qualitative ones were anchored to the Urnfield or Hallstatt horizons, because any that were would make the agreement partly circular.

Both questions now come down to particular graves. For Old Norse, the test is Iron Age inhumations from southern Jutland dated between about 1550 and 1450 BP, an area where the authors have no samples. If those people already carry the ancestry that dominates Viking Age Denmark, the source could lie within Jutland. If burials on the Danish islands from the same decades still look local, the proposed date is too early. For Celtic, the samples that would do the most work are Late Bronze Age genomes from France between 3200 and 2800 BP. They would show when Knovíz-related ancestry reached the country where Gaulish was later spoken.

Further Reading

• Margaryan, A. et al. Population genomics of the Viking world. Nature 585, 390–396 (2020).

• Rodríguez-Varela, R. et al. The genetic history of Scandinavia from the Roman Iron Age to the present. Cell 186, 32–46.e19 (2023).

• Patterson, N. et al. Large-scale migration into Britain during the Middle to Late Bronze Age. Nature 601, 588–594 (2022).

I start with that gap because the press release starts with a much simpler claim: “In all likelihood, the Neanderthals had flat feet.” The older picture has Neanderthal feet built almost like ours, with sturdier bones and larger joint surfaces. The new paper, in the Journal of Human Evolution,1 argues that the heel also differs in shape, and that the difference points to a foot that stood and took load in another way. I think it makes a good case for that much, but the authors treat flat feet as a hypothesis, and so should we.

Rita Sorrentino of the Universities of Palermo and Bologna is the paper’s first author, and Maria Giovanna Belcastro, professor at the Department of Biological, Geological, and Environmental Sciences of the University of Bologna, coordinated the study. The team compared the calcaneus, or heel bone, of 7 Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) with that of 64 Homo sapiens. Neanderthal heels came out shorter from front to back, wider from side to side and taller from top to bottom, even though their overall size falls within the range of H. sapiens. From the joint surfaces the authors infer a foot that habitually rolled inward, a posture called pronation. More cautiously, they suggest a lower lateral longitudinal arch, the lengthwise arch along the outer side of the foot.

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Anyone who follows this fossil probably carries that number around. The usual picture of its setting is familiar too: grasslands when lake levels were high, and arid ground with brackish pools in dry phases, like the pools and wetlands at the site today.

A new paper in Communications Earth & Environment,1 with Michaela Ecker of Kiel University and Michael B. Toffolo of Archéosciences Bordeaux as corresponding authors, revises the first belief and complicates the second. New luminescence ages on the sediments below and above the fossil give a range of 212 ka to 154 ka. Plant waxes from the same sequence show that most of the Pleistocene record does not match South Africa’s modern biomes, which is what the authors mean by non-analog environments, the settings they say supported early Homo sapiens.

The authors also reread older stone tool and animal bone reports against this record and propose that shifts in ecosystem productivity may have shaped how people used tools. I think the date is the most consequential result, because it changes a number other researchers rely on. The press release never says the fossil’s age has changed.

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It also reached them with DNA in it, which goes against what a reader of the ancient DNA literature would expect. Old skin is supposed to keep its genome in permafrost or at high altitude, and warm climates usually destroy it. Most of the new paper’s comparisons fit that rule: the leather of the Tyrolean Iceman, dated to ~5,300 BP (years before present), gave up its mitochondrial DNA in a glacial setting. This cave sits at 450 m, just 7 km from the Mediterranean, and the authors credit desiccation for what survived.

The study, by Jolijn A. M. Erven, Zoé Robinet Guyet and colleagues in PLOS One,1 identifies the hide, which they call Murciélagos1, as a female domestic goat (Capra hircus) radiocarbon dated to 7,246 to 7,008 cal BP, meaning calibrated years before present. The team describes this as the first nuclear genetic data from domestic goats in Iberia, nuclear DNA being the main genome of the cell. Among the modern breeds tested, the hide sits closest to the Bermeya of northern Spain, and it shows no lean toward African goats. I think the identification is secure and the population history built on it is much less so, because all of that history rests on one animal sequenced very thinly.

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The study depends on how many separate winters those shells can vouch for, and its target is a familiar belief: that the spread of farming in Europe stalled in Greece from about 6600 to 6000 cal BCE because bitter, unpredictable winters made new settlements too risky.

Niklas Hausmann and Danai Theodoraki of the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA) in Mainz report in PNAS1 that they can’t find those winters at Franchthi. Across 121 limpet shells (Patella sp.), Early Neolithic winters show no cooling of the proposed size, and sea temperature has no significant statistical link to the animals people were eating, layer by layer. I think the first result is sturdier than the second, and neither reaches as far as the paper’s title, which says the Neolithic expansion is decoupled from climate instability.

The stall ended fast. Between 6000 and 5600 cal BCE, farmers settled coasts from Greece to southern Spain, part of an expansion the paper clocks at over 400 km per generation. Two climate episodes have been offered as the brake: the Rapid Climate Change (RCC) interval, 6600 to 6000 cal BCE, and the colder, drier 8.2 BP event at its end (8200 to 8000 cal BP, or 6200 to 6000 cal BCE). A model by Rohling and colleagues (2019) estimates three to five extreme cold events a year during the RCC, and pollen records put winter cooling during the 8.2 BP event at 2 °C in Aegean marine cores (Kotthoff et al. 2008) and more than 4 °C in an eastern Macedonian lake core (Pross et al. 2009). None of those records comes from an archaeological site, which is the gap this study tries to close.

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Around him was the kind of assemblage that makes Fallward one of the better-documented Migration Period sites in central Europe. Outside the boat stood a block chair cut from an alder (Alnus) trunk, notched with carvings and presumably once painted, the sort of object excavation reports call a throne. At his feet was a maple (Acer) stool worked with a hunting scene. He had a game table, a bronze basin, a ceramic vessel, several fish bones scattered inside the boat, and a late Roman military belt. Most readers carry leprosy in their heads as a medieval European disease, a matter of leprosaria and the big hospital cemeteries of the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, diagnosed from the skeleton by the eroded nasal aperture and the resorbed bones of hands and feet that osteologists have used for a century to identify it. This man has none of that damage and had the infection anyway.

Daniel Anton Myburgh, Ben Krause-Kyora and colleagues at the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology at Kiel University, working with Hauke Jöns of the Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research, report the result in iScience1 in November 2026. They took 12 skeletal samples from 11 individuals buried near the Fallward dwelling mound, shotgun sequenced them, and screened the reads for pathogens. M. leprae appeared in two samples from a single man, the occupant of grave 265, called G265 in the paper. The genome they recovered covers more than 99 percent of the M. leprae reference at fourfold depth or better, with a mean depth of 58.3. On a maximum likelihood tree built from 3,124 informative SNP positions across 44 ancient and 185 modern strains, G265 sits at the base of branch 4, one of the main lineages of the species, ancestral to all the branch-4 diversity sequenced so far with one exception: a strain from an Egyptian mummy dated 342 to 117 BCE, published by Neukamm and colleagues in 2020.

The same 11 skeletons also produced a small human dataset, and that is where the study’s second claim comes from. Three individuals yielded enough DNA for population genetics. Two of them fall where you would expect for fifth-century northwestern Germany. The third is G265, and he does not.

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Where the rest went is the question behind the paper, and the answer pushes against a common picture of early Egypt: that specialized production of everyday goods arrived with the state, once there were rulers demanding surplus.

Writing in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology,1 Francesca Manclossi, Giulio Lucarini and three co-authors argue that a small group of expert knappers (flint workers) ran a blade workshop at Heliopolis at the end of the fourth millennium BCE, shortly before the Egyptian state emerged, and supplied their neighbors. These were communities of the Lower Egyptian Culture, the Predynastic groups of the Nile Delta and Memphite region. The authors think the experts probably farmed too, that no authority controlled them, and that users retouched (trimmed the edges of) and resharpened their own tools. They call this arbitrary craft specialization, a term from Perlès (2012) for a community in which some members take on a specialist role without exclusive control of raw material or know-how.

The larger claim follows from that. When standardized blades began arriving from desert mine workshops such as Wadi Sannur in the Protodynastic period (Naqada IIIA–B), Lower Egyptian communities could adopt them quickly because the split between people who made blades and people who used them was already in place. I think the paper carries the first half of this argument better than the second, and the reasons are in the count of those missing blades.

How do flint cores reveal a Predynastic workshop?

The first job was showing that a collection dug more than a century ago could be trusted. The Museo Egizio in Turin held about 4,000 stone artifacts loose in 40 wooden boxes, mixed with material from other sites and market purchases. Labels and inventory numbers, checked against archives, tied 2,869 pieces to Heliopolis, and field notes place most of them in the lowest layer of the so-called Prehistoric Village, a dark deposit about a meter thick sitting directly on sand with no human traces. Cores, flakes under 20 mm and burnt fragments all survive, which is what you expect when workers kept what they found instead of the handsome pieces.

The control comes from Area 251, about 500 meters south, excavated in 2019 by the Egyptian-German Heliopolis Project beside an installation interpreted as a brewery. It produced the same sequence, along with 2,546 chipped-stone pieces. Pottery places both deposits in the late Lower Egyptian Culture (Buto IIB) and a transitional phase (Buto IIIA/IIC). The paper reports no radiocarbon dates for either one and describes the pottery analysis as preliminary. I accept the phase assignment for this comparison, because two excavations a century apart found matching layers with matching pottery, but a phase is not a date range.

The analysis itself is a chaîne opératoire, a reconstruction of the whole sequence of choices from selecting a pebble through striking blades, using them and throwing them away. It can address how work was organized because each step is a learned habit that leaves marks in the stone, showing how skilled a knapper was and which steps happened where.

The workshop argument comes from setting the two areas side by side. Schiaparelli’s area has one core for every 2.9 blades, while Area 251 has 14 blade cores and 284 blades, one for every 20.3. Most Area 251 cores also carry at least one hinged removal (a blow that curled out and stopped short), and the edges above their working faces often preserve repeated failed blows. The authors read this as experts at one spot striking more blades than they kept, while less practiced people elsewhere made a few of their own and probably got most of their blades from the workshop.

The link to farming runs through sickle elements, blade segments with a visible gloss from use. Their retouch varies widely in Schiaparelli’s collection, which the authors take to mean that users maintained their own. A few carry fine, evenly spaced serrations attributed to pressure retouch (pressing off tiny flakes with a pointed tool instead of striking them), probably with metal tools, and those, they suggest, may be sickles that expert knappers made and used themselves.

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The result comes from new drug testing on Inca mummies, and it complicates a picture many readers carry of the capacocha, the rite in which the Incas sacrificed children and young women to serve as messengers to the gods. The colonial chronicles read almost like a recipe, with chicha (maize beer) to calm the child and crushed coca placed in the mouth before the killing. From there it is easy to assume one state ritual with one drug routine. This paper supports part of that picture and raises doubts about the rest, though less firmly than its press release suggests.

What drugs were found in the Inca mummies?

Dagmara Socha of the University of Warsaw, Marzena Sykutera of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and six colleagues report in Antiquity1 that coca markers turned up in all six hair samples they tested and the alcohol marker in four of those six. Harmine, an alkaloid linked to ayahuasca, appeared in one nail from one person. They searched for ten compounds in eight individuals from five volcanoes in Peru and Argentina. None of the eight showed harmaline, mescaline (from San Pedro cactus), N,N-DMT or bufotenine (from Anadenanthera and Virola), or scopolamine or atropine (from Brugmansia and Datura).

Two of the eight came from Ampato in Peru: Ampato #1, a girl of 14 known as the Ampato Maiden (the press release calls her the Lady of Ampato, or Juanita), and Ampato #4, a girl of about 10. Sara Sara, also in Peru, gave a girl of about 14. In Argentina, Chuscha gave the girl of about eight, Quehuar a girl of about 10, and Llullaillaco three children: the Doncella, about 14; the Younger Girl, about six; and the Boy, seven. The main text gives no date for any of them, only the span of the Inca Empire, from the late thirteenth century to 1572 CE.

The method depends on keratin, the protein in hair and nails, which traps compounds circulating in the body. Hair grows outward from the scalp, with each centimeter standing for about a month, so a strand can be read as a rough timeline. Nails can’t, because compounds enter them by more than one route. The team washed each sample, then ran an extract through liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, which separates the compounds in a sample and identifies each by its mass and the fragments it breaks into. Results come in picograms per milligram (pg/mg), or trillionths of a gram in each thousandth of a gram of sample.

The results span about four orders of magnitude. Cocaine measured 16,740 pg/mg in the Doncella, who was also found with a coca quid (a ball of dried leaves) in her mouth, 1,410 in the Boy and 960 in the Younger Girl. It measured 31 in the last centimeter of the Chuscha hair, 2.5 in Ampato #4 and 1.5 in Sara Sara. Benzoylecgonine, the main product of the body’s breakdown of cocaine, accompanied it each time. Cocaethylene appeared only in the Llullaillaco children and Chuscha. The two nails gave harmine at 0.6 pg/mg in Ampato #1 and no target compound in Quehuar.

I find the coca result the strongest in this paper, because the drug and its breakdown product appear together in every hair sample, and quids and cheek-bulged figurines agree. It also reverses earlier negative tests on Chuscha and Sara Sara. The authors credit improved sensitivity, which seems likeliest, although Sara Sara’s 1.5 pg/mg is a small number to carry a reversal.

Chuscha is the only sample read segment by segment, across six 10 mm sections covering about six months. Cocaine ranged from 135 to 342 pg/mg in the five older segments, then fell to 31 nearest the scalp, where cocaethylene appeared at 57. The authors estimate cocaethylene at about 166 percent of cocaine in the blood and suggest the shift marks entry into the final stage of the ritual. They concede that the variation could be an artifact of preservation and metabolism. I trust the appearance of cocaethylene more than the fall in cocaine, because the cocaine series already jumps from 135 to 342 between neighboring months, while cocaethylene is absent from five segments and then present. This is still one strand from one child, and grave robbers took her body in the 1920s and sold it into private collections before it reached the museum in Salta. The paper doesn’t discuss what that history may have done to the hair.

Did Inca children take ayahuasca before sacrifice?

The ayahuasca claim is the one most likely to travel, and it rests on the smallest number in the paper. Ayahuasca refers to the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and to drinks made from it, often combined with a second plant that supplies N,N-DMT. Harmine blocks the breakdown of psychedelic compounds, so it can prolong the effects of that second plant. The authors argue that Banisteriopsis or a related Amazonian plant is the most probable source of the Ampato #1 harmine, which would imply long-distance trade. They dismiss Passiflora as a source but don’t separately rule out tobacco.

I don’t think this measurement can yet carry an argument about one mountain’s ceremonies, because the comparison between mountains is confounded by tissue. Harmine appeared in no hair sample from anyone, only two nails were tested, and Chuscha, Sara Sara and Llullaillaco contributed none. The authors report contamination in the nails, probably environmental, that made results hard to interpret, and they raise the possibility that nails and hair take up these compounds differently. Then they read the absence of harmine in the hair of Ampato #4 as a possible sign of different treatment or a separate ceremony. CT scans do suggest she was a secondary burial (Socha et al. 2026), but her hair can’t say much about harmine when no hair tested positive.

What keeps me from dismissing the finding is earlier work by the same group, which reported harmine and harmaline in two other children from the mountain, Ampato #2 and #3 (Socha et al. 2022b). That makes three individuals from one mountain across two studies, though this paper doesn’t say which tissue the earlier results came from. Dr Dagmara Socha, lead author of the research, from the University of Warsaw, said in a statement from Antiquity that the harmine,

“may indicate that a harmine-containing beverage had a specific role in ceremonies connected with this particular sacred mountain.”

The authors’ next step is where I part with them. They suggest the vine may have been taken alone for its medicinal value, possibly to calm the children, and say the absence of other hallucinogens supports this. The same discussion warns that tryptamines such as N,N-DMT enter keratin poorly, so a negative test for them is weak evidence that they were absent. A modern study of ayahuasca (Osório et al. 2015) also can’t show what Inca ritual specialists intended for a 14-year-old, and a 0.6 pg/mg trace with no timeline says nothing about dose.

Was the capacocha one standardized ritual?

The paper’s largest claim is that the differences may reflect distinct mountain deities and local variation, and the design can’t separate that from simpler explanations. The mountains differ in tissue tested, length of hair analyzed and burial history. The Llullaillaco and Chuscha figures cover only the 10 mm nearest the scalp, while Ampato #4 and Sara Sara were analyzed whole, and Chuscha’s own cocaine values run from 31 to 342 depending on which centimeter is tested. The authors note that burial conditions can substantially reduce drug levels, but they don’t apply that caution when comparing mountains, so the gap between the Doncella and Sara Sara could reflect dose, survival or both. Three mountains are represented by one person each, and the absence of cocaethylene in the two Peruvian hair samples is hard to interpret when cocaine itself sits below 3 pg/mg in both.

The press release goes further than the data in several places. It says “All eight were found to have consumed coca leaves,” but the paper reports cocaine in all hair samples, and its Table 1 shows none in the nails of Ampato #1 or Quehuar. Those two can’t be scored as negative either, which is why the authors call for testing their hair. The release also says the findings show differences in “the substances given to each sacrificed individual,” whereas the paper says everyone originally buried on Ampato and on Llullaillaco received the same substances. And it keeps prophecy near the top of the story, while the paper’s discussion and conclusion move divination toward later practice at the sanctuaries.

Socha sums up the broader claim in the same statement:

“What we are seeing is that the capacocha was not a single standardized ritual, but rather, the Incas appear to have adapted it to different cults and local religious traditions.”

I think that is a reasonable hypothesis, and the Llullaillaco children, who share a mountain and a chemical profile, fit it, but the paper’s own wording, that differences may derive from deities and local practice, is more careful than the quote.

What tests could settle the capacocha question?

My verdict is that this paper is partly convincing. Its firmest contribution concerns old negative results: two mummies once reported clean now test positive for coca, so the Aconcagua negative, reported alongside them, should no longer count as evidence of absence, and that mummy deserves a retest. I’m confident about coca in the six hair samples and fairly confident about alcohol at Chuscha and Llullaillaco, where a compound that requires both substances was measured directly.

I’m much less sure about the two claims most likely to make headlines, that harmine marks an Ampato-specific rite and that the chemical differences track different deities, because both depend on comparing unlike samples.

Two samples would do most of the work. The authors already call for hair from Ampato #1, and that hair should carry coca as every other hair sample here did; if it also holds harmine, the result moves out of a nail and gains a timeline. The second is a nail from the Llullaillaco Doncella, who had the highest coca values. If her nail shows harmine at a similar level, the Ampato pattern is probably an effect of testing nails, and if it stays clean under the same method, the mountain hypothesis has its first direct comparison.

Further Reading

• Osório, F. de L. et al. 2015. Antidepressant effects of a single dose of ayahuasca in patients with recurrent depression: a preliminary report. Revista Brasileira de Psiquiatria 37. https://doi.org/10.1590/1516-4446-2014-1496

• Socha, D.M. et al. 2022b. Ritual drug use during Inca human sacrifices on Ampato mountain (Peru): results of a toxicological analysis. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103415

• Socha, D.M. et al. 2026. Paleoradiology opens new insights into frozen mummified children from Ampato and Sara Sara volcanoes, Peru. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2026.105610

That emptiness runs against a standard expectation. Models of early human dispersal through Arabia lean on climate and treat freshwater as the variable that decided where populations could settle, and models built on reconstructed lake and river networks flag the interior basins of the Rub’ al Khali as likely places for Middle Paleolithic and Middle Stone Age (MP/MSA) occupation (for example Breeze and colleagues, 2016). The authors use MP/MSA because Arabian assemblages resemble the prepared-core industries of both western Eurasia and Africa.

In Nature,1 Rudolf Dellmour of the University of Vienna, Jeffrey Rose of the Universidade do Algarve and eight co-authors report that the interior fails this prediction. Knappable stone, meaning rock that breaks with the sharp, curved fracture of chert or quartzite, is missing across the basin, and a model of 363 known MP/MSA sites on the Arabian Peninsula finds that sites cluster where water and knappable stone both occur. Of the Peninsula’s water-accessible terrain, 57% lies on geological formations with no knappable stone. The authors conclude that stone acted as a second, independent constraint on settlement, and that dispersal models built on water alone may overestimate the habitable range of people who depended on stone tools.

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The account most of us carry for Late Bronze Age copper in western and northern Europe runs through the Austrian Alps, Wales and the Italian Alps, mines with long excavation histories and plenty of dates. Southern Iberia sits on one of the largest copper concentrations in Europe, and its importance as a supplier has long been suspected but hard to prove, because so few of its mines had reliable dates. Until now only 11 radiocarbon dates from five Iberian mines supported Late Bronze Age mining, and six of those, from Chinflón, are flagged in the paper as old, poor-quality measurements with large uncertainties.

Juan Latorre-Ruiz of Durham University, Mark A. Hunt Ortiz of the University of Seville, Zofia Anna Stos-Gale of the University of Gothenburg and seven co-authors report 17 new radiocarbon dates from Las Minillas in Antiquity (2026).1 Nine come from the mining trench and its drill core, eight from a habitation area, and together they span roughly 1350 to 750 BC. The team also documented 892 stone tools, including 735 grooved hammers, and found that 11 of more than 300 Scandinavian Late Bronze Age bronzes are isotopically and chemically consistent with Las Minillas ores, slags and metal droplets. The question this post asks is how much a single well-dated mine can support when the claim being made is about a whole region.

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The oddity is a good way into a paper whose main subject is less exotic. Neanderthal campsites are usually read through bones and stone tools: bones show where carcasses were processed, and knapping debris marks where tools were made. Charcoal tends to be treated as a record of which trees grew nearby. The reader’s working assumption is that Neanderthals at Abric Romaní already organized the shelter into hearth areas and work areas, and that the evidence for it comes from fauna and lithics. This study asks what the position of 640 charcoal fragments adds to that picture, and my reading is that it adds detail rather than revising anything.

What did the Level Ra charcoal show?

The paper is by Tomás Fernández-Iriarte (IPHES-CERCA, Tarragona) with Bàrbara Mas, M. Gema Chacón, Palmira Saladié, Josep Vallverdú and Ethel Allué, published in 2026 in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology.1 Abric Romaní has a sequence the paper gives as 70 ky long (110–40 BP, dated by U-series), and sediment built up in level Ra at up to 80 centimetres per thousand years, which is why the record is so fine-grained. The abstract places Ra at the beginning of MIS 3. The text gives no age for Ra itself.

Of the 640 fragments, 484 (75.63%) are Pinus sylvestris type, 17 (2.66%) are Prunus, 86 are undetermined conifer and 53 are undetermined. “P. sylvestris type” is a lumped category, because three mountain pines (P. nigra ssp. salzmannii, P. sylvestris and P. uncinata) have wood anatomy too similar to separate under the microscope.

Mapped across the excavated surface, the charcoal falls into two patterns. In the northern section it forms a broad concentration overlapping the hearths, and in the southern section it occurs as smaller, isolated clusters, often away from hearths. The authors read the north as consistent with primary refuse, meaning burnt fuel left where it burned. They read the south as possibly secondary refuse, meaning combustion residue moved elsewhere, perhaps when hearths were cleaned. Whether that southern reading holds is the question the paper cannot settle, and it says so.

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The effort matters because of a long-running expectation about territory. The Economic Defendability Model predicts that foragers living on dense, predictable resources will defend territories, while foragers on sparse or unpredictable ones range widely and leave the land open. The archaeological tests so far come from aquatic settings; Marean (2016) applied the model to marine foragers on the southern South African coast about 110 ka, and the earliest evidence of intergroup conflict the authors cite also comes from sites that relied on aquatic food. The belief I would expect most readers to carry is that boundary-making arrived with rich shorelines and that inland foragers stayed open and mobile. Hora 1 tests that belief away from the water.

What did the Hora 1 animal bones show?

Alex Bertacchi (Yale University), Potiphar Kaliba (Department of Museums and Monuments, Malawi) and Jessica C. Thompson (Yale University and Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins) report in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology1 that the fauna fits the model’s Scenario B: a home range with limited mobility and limited contact with other groups, whether friendly or hostile. They read the foragers as not strongly territorial. The assemblage does not fit Scenario A (defended territory on dense, predictable food) or Scenario D (undefended territory with frequent intergroup contact).

I class this as added detail rather than a reversal. The study extends the model to an inland woodland and finds a result the model has a slot for. This post is about how much social inference those bones can carry, and my answer is less than the abstract implies.

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The assumption she is working against is a familiar one. Early foragers are usually pictured as organized around large game, with plants and small animals as supplements, and insects as a famine food or an accident of storage. Shillito argues that this picture was built from the evidence that survives best and gets looked for most.

What does the review claim about insects in the past?

Shillito, a professor in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University, published “Edible insects as heritage foods: towards an archaeology of alternative proteins for food sustainability” online in World Archaeology on 27 October 2026.1 It is a synthesis, and I think readers should know that up front: it reports no new excavation, sample or measurement. It makes two arguments. The first is that insects’ marginal place in archaeological syntheses reflects taphonomic filters (what preserves), methodological priorities and interpretive habits, and does not reflect absence in the past. The second is that archaeology is well placed to reframe insects as heritage foods in current sustainability debates, because it can show that Western disgust is historically contingent.

The one number that carries the most weight is a meta-analysis of over 9,000 human coprolites from 52 sites across the Americas, covering the late Pleistocene to the recent precontact period. It suggests that roughly a third of assemblages contain evidence for intentional insect consumption (Julison and Haas 2024).

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The glow turned up in a study aimed at something less dramatic, which is finding the thin film of calcite that has grown over the drawings. Most of us picture cave art as pigment on bare rock, and we think of calcite as a threat, either a crust that hides the art (at the Grande Grotte of Arcy-sur-Cure an opaque layer completely masked Paleolithic paintings until restorers abraded it) or a complication for dating. The Chauvet team asks whether a translucent veil might behave like varnish instead, and whether you can find it without touching the wall.

Yohan Boulard, Philippe Walter and colleagues report in ACS Omega (2026, 11, 60980−60990)2 that ultraviolet fluorescence spectroscopy can tell speleothem calcite (calcite deposited by dripping or flowing water) from the limestone bedrock, even though both are chemically calcite. They collected 60 spectra in the cave, each from a spot of about 1 mm², with the operator standing up to 2.5 m from the wall. Their reading is that a translucent calcite veil covers the drawings on the Horses panel, that the veil varies a lot in the Alcove of the Lions, and that the orange glow may be a trace of hot charcoal. The first claim is the method’s main result, the second is a useful mapping result, and the third is a guess.

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That infant is one of four people in the first ancient genomes from Ecuador, reported in PNAS Nexus1 by John Lindo (University of California, Berkeley), Richard Lunniss (Universidad Técnica de Manabí) and colleagues. Salango’s history gives a reason to expect turnover in its population: a volcanic eruption at Pululahua around 330 BCE that the paper says ended the Formative tradition, then elite burial complexes, chiefdoms and, by the Manteño period, a maritime exchange network centered on Spondylus shell. I suspect most of us assume that upheaval on that scale, in one stretch of coast, brought in new people at some point. The paper sets out to test that assumption.

The four genomes come from two Very Early Guangala individuals, one Early Guangala individual (about 1,900 BP) and one Early Manteño individual (about 740 BP), with mean coverage between 0.54x and 2.31x. They cluster together and near ancient and present-day people from Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, and the authors conclude that Salango’s cultural changes happened largely within a stable local population rather than through large-scale replacement. A demographic model dates the split of the Ecuadorian coastal lineage from other Southern Native American lineages to about 9,800 years ago (95% CI: 9.6 to 10.1 ka). I think the continuity result is plausible but less secure than the abstract suggests, and that the divergence date is the weakest number in the paper.

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I suspect most readers assume that genetic relatedness in the Pacific should decay with distance, so that the two most remote islands would look the most different. The data point the other way. The authors also describe cumulative founder effects an order of magnitude stronger than those documented in European-descent groups such as the Finnish and Amish.

What did the Science paper find?

The paper is “Message in a bottleneck: Nested founder effects from French Polynesia to Rapa Nui and Hawaiʻi,” by Cole Shanks, Edward C. Huang, Christophe Thomassin and colleagues, with Alexander Ioannidis of Stanford University as co-senior author (Science 394, pp. 216–221, 8 October 2026).1 Using whole-genome sequences from across Polynesia, they report that Hawaiʻi and Rapa Nui are two of the most bottlenecked populations, that the two are the most closely related pair, and that both were likely settled by the same ultravoyagers with earlier ancestral roots in Mangareva. The editor’s summary adds that the intensity of the effect rose with each successive migration, which fits the idea of nested events in the title.

The paper also reports a loss-of-function mutation in the gene FAN1 (a change that knocks out the gene’s working product) at a frequency above 1% in Eastern Polynesia. The variant is entirely absent from gnomAD, a large public aggregate of human genomes and exomes.

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Most readers carry a picture in which Neanderthal meat means large hoofed animals, and the authors open by saying the field has long reconstructed it that way. They also note that rabbits and tortoises at Bolomor Cave in Spain already showed small prey predating the Upper Paleolithic (Blasco and Fernández Peris 2012), and that cut-marked beavers and marmots are known from other European sites. Valdegoba adds one more case to an existing list, and I think the paper is better read that way than as a challenge to the old picture.

The preprint, posted on Research Square on 15 October 2026 and not yet peer reviewed, is by Ona Redon and J. Carlos Díez (Universidad de Burgos) and César Laplana (Universidad de Alcalá). They examined every specimen of Castor fiber (Eurasian beaver) and Marmota marmota (alpine marmot) from the excavations of 1987 to 1991 and 2006: 171 beaver specimens from at least 12 individuals and 60 marmot specimens from at least nine. Four of the 231 carry cut marks the authors consider confidently human, three on beaver and one on marmot. Carnivore tooth marks appear on 22. The authors infer a palimpsest, a deposit written over by several agents, with carnivores and natural deaths as the main inputs and Neanderthals as an occasional contributor. They call the exploitation occasional and not systematic, and I find that well supported, because the paper reports no recurrent butchery pattern, no burning and no strong age selection.

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