Then the same ramus started showing up in males. Shanidar. Amud. La Ferrassie. Krapina. Long, slender, flat. It showed up in Neanderthal juveniles too.

That should have been the moment the obstetric explanation ran into trouble. Instead it got more elaborate. Some researchers argued Neanderthal newborns had unusually large heads and the mothers needed the room. Erik Trinkaus proposed a gestation period longer than ours. A 2004 doctoral dissertation by Mary Black went in a different direction entirely and attributed the long ramus to heavy trunk twisting during hunting. Every one of these hypotheses shared a premise that nobody bothered to state: the Neanderthal pelvis was the strange thing requiring explanation, and the modern male pelvis was the plain, generalized default it should be measured against.

The new paper in Scientific Reports,1 from Yoel Rak, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Assaf Marom, Eli Geffen, Alon Barash, and Ella Been, argues that this premise had the polarity exactly backwards.

Their comparative material is thin, because it has to be. Two nearly complete male pelvises exist for the Neanderthal lineage. Kebara 2, excavated on Mount Carmel in 1983, is a roughly 55,000-year-old male skeleton missing its skull but preserving the pelvis well enough that Rak and Baruch Arensburg could describe a complete pelvic inlet in 1987. The second is Pelvis 1 from Sima de los Huesos at Atapuerca in Spain, published in Nature by Arsuaga and colleagues in 1999, some 430,000 years old, found disarticulated and sexed male on the basis of its robusticity and a very confined greater sciatic notch. Against these two, plus fragments from La Ferrassie 1, the team measured 63 modern male and 28 modern female pelvises.

Nine variables, all scaled to the diameter of the hip socket so that Neanderthal bulk wouldn’t swamp the comparison. Then a principal component analysis, then a discriminant function with the two Neanderthals entered as unknowns.

Both were classified as modern human females with probability above 0.99. Their distance to the female centroid came out about half their distance to the male one.

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The people in this study are the Jomon, hunter-gatherers who lived across the Japanese islands from roughly 16,000 to 3,000 years ago, known best for some of the world’s earliest pottery. But the genomes recovered from their remains carry a signal from much earlier. Researchers sequenced1 25 new individuals and combined them with 17 previously published genomes, then used that dataset to reconstruct what happened to a population of Homo sapiens that got cut off from the rest of Eurasia right around the coldest point in the last glaciation.

The story starts with geography. During the Last Glacial Maximum, sea levels sat about 100 meters lower than today, and the modern Japanese islands didn’t exist as separate landmasses. Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu were fused into one island the researchers call Paleo-Honshu, nearly touching the Korean peninsula. Hokkaido was welded to Sakhalin and the Kuril chain, forming a corridor straight into the Eurasian mainland. People had reached Paleo-Honshu with flake-based stone tools by around 38,000 years ago. Then, as the ice age deepened and seas rose at its end, those land bridges drowned. Paleo-Honshu split into the modern southern islands, and Hokkaido separated from the continent.

Genetically, something similar happened around the same time. The team estimates that the ancestors of the Jomon split off from mainland East Eurasian populations somewhere between 27,000 and 19,000 years ago, deep in the Upper Paleolithic. Their population size dropped sharply during this period of isolation, then rebounded once the Jomon culture took hold in the warmer post-glacial world. That decline and recovery lines up with what archaeologists have already pieced together from tool assemblages and site density, which makes the genetic and material records feel less like two separate stories and more like one.

Where those ancestors actually came from is where things get more interesting. Two competing routes have long been proposed for how people first reached eastern Eurasia: a northern path through Siberia, and a southern path through the Indian subcontinent into Southeast Asia. Stone tool evidence from Japan, dated to between 36,000 and 24,000 years ago, has shown blade technology that resembles northern traditions. But earlier genetic work hadn’t found much to back that up, leaving archaeologists and geneticists somewhat talking past each other.

This study finds a middle ground. The Jomon carry a strong southern signal overall, comparable to what’s seen in other East and Southeast Asians, consistent with descent from populations related to Southeast Asian Hòabìnhian foragers. But the researchers also detected a subtle, consistent northern contribution, one not reported before, that looks like limited gene flow from Upper Paleolithic Siberian groups. The signal shows up a bit more strongly in the small number of Hokkaido individuals in the sample, which tracks with archaeological evidence that the Ice Age toolmakers in that region had closer technological ties to Siberia than to communities further south.

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That gap has now closed, and it closed by nearly 600 years at once.

A team led by Hongyan Xiao of Peking University, publishing in Antiquity,1 has identified three crucibles from a metalworking site beneath Guangzhou’s old royal palace that were used to make brass in the 9th to 10th centuries. They are the earliest physical evidence of brass production anywhere in East Asia, and the story they tell doesn’t run through the Silk Road at all.

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Two leg bones pulled from the seafloor west of Taiwan are starting to change that, and what they suggest is strange enough to sit with for a while. According to a new analysis, currently posted as a bioRxiv1 preprint2 and not yet peer reviewed, at least some Denisovans were enormous. One individual may have stood close to 1.9 meters and weighed around 91 kilograms. A second stood a bit shorter, around 1.8 meters, at roughly 83 kilograms. Both were almost certainly male, though the researchers, led by Yousuke Kaifu and Chun-Hsiang Chang, could not confirm sex genetically and inferred it from the sheer size of the bones.

To put that in context: a Homo sapiens individual from Tianyuan, China, dated to about 40,000 years ago, stood roughly 1.7 meters and weighed about 73 kilograms. The Denisovans from Taiwan would have towered over him.

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That timing matters, because it collapses an assumption a lot of Pacific archaeology has quietly rested on. The initial settlement of these islands, by seafaring populations associated with the Lapita culture, was fast. Within two centuries of reaching Vanuatu around 3,000 years ago, related groups had pushed on to Fiji and then to Tonga, carrying pottery styles and a shared Southeast Asian-related genetic signature the whole way. If you stopped the story there, Remote Oceania would look like a single clean expansion event, its people descended in a straight line from that first pulse of colonists.

They aren’t. A new ancient DNA study,1 led by Michal Feldman and Cosimo Posth’s team at the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, sequenced genomes from 72 individuals spanning the last three millennia across Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, and the eastern Solomon Islands, filling in a region that had never had ancient genomic data from Fiji at all. What emerges is a second, much slower migration running underneath the first one, plus a third, later pulse from Polynesia moving back in the opposite direction. The genetic diversity that makes today’s Remote Oceania one of the most linguistically fragmented parts of the planet, over two hundred languages packed into a few island chains, traces back to these layered arrivals colliding with people already there.

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What’s strange about Huashan isn’t the imagery. It’s that any of it is still there.

Guangxi is subtropical monsoon country. Chongzuo City, which contains most of the rock art belt, gets over 1,200 millimeters of rain a year, summer temperatures past 40°C, and two or three typhoons annually. The paintings sit on open cliff faces, dozens of meters above the ground or the river, with no overhang, no shelter, nothing but exposed rock. Paint on stone in that kind of climate should have washed away or flaked off centuries ago. Instead, much of it is still firmly attached to the cliff face, and a team of researchers led by Meng Wu and Pengcheng Hu wanted to know why.

Their answer, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science,1 involves a substance nobody had previously identified as a component of the paint: blood.

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That’s the find.1 What makes it worth writing about is where it sits.

Koskarlı Cave was first noted in 2019 and only systematically excavated starting in 2024, under the joint direction of the Trabzon Museum and Karadeniz Technical University. A single season of digging opened 16 square meters in the cave’s main chamber, plus a lateral trench and a runoff deposit outside that had already been picked over by looters. That’s a modest footprint for a site the excavators are calling, without much hedging, the first systematic investigation of this time period anywhere on the eastern Black Sea coast.

The claim holds up because of where Epipalaeolithic research in Anatolia has actually happened, which is almost entirely in the south. Öküzini Cave near Antalya has functioned for decades as the reference sequence for the period. Sites like Direkli Cave and Pınarbaşı B have filled out the picture of how people organized space during this stretch of the Late Pleistocene. All of that evidence clusters south of the Anatolian plateau. The northern coast, the strip of mountainous terrain running along the Black Sea, has been essentially blank on the Epipalaeolithic map. Not because nobody thought people were there. Because nobody had found a stratified, dated site to check.

Koskarlı is that site now, and the stratigraphy tells its own small story of disturbance and survival. The upper deposit in the main trench is a mess in the literal, technical sense: stony debris, dung, modern refuse, and a scramble of stone tools spanning two entirely different eras, from Epipalaeolithic pieces down to material consistent with the Middle Palaeolithic, roughly 200,000 to 45,000 years old. That mixing is almost certainly the product of later disturbance, not evidence that people occupied the cave continuously across 150,000 years. It’s the layer beneath it, undisturbed and internally consistent, that gives the site its date and its argument.

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Given how much rides on centromeres working correctly, it’s strange how little anyone actually knew about them until recently. They’re built from long stretches of a repeating DNA unit called alpha-satellite, arranged in nearly identical tandem copies. Genome sequencing technology has spent decades getting very good at reading unique sequence and very bad at reading a region that looks, to a machine, like the same paragraph typed out ten thousand times in a row. Centromeres were the genome’s blind spot, not because they didn’t matter, but because nobody could actually see them clearly enough to ask questions.

A team led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with the Human Genome Structural Variation Consortium and the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium, has now assembled1 2,110 complete centromeres from 65 people spanning 28 population groups on five continents, then checked those results against 5,747 more centromeres from a separate reference panel. The accuracy of the assemblies runs above 99.9999%, verified independently with several computational tools built for this purpose, including one called AssemblyRepairer that patches errors in one sequencing method’s output using a second, independently generated assembly of the same region. The result is the largest and most complete map of centromere diversity in humans yet built, and it overturns a few assumptions that had gone unquestioned simply because nobody had the data to test them.

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A new study in PNAS,1 led by Jade Whitlam of Oxford with colleagues from Oxford and Kiel, tests the middle part of that chain and finds it doesn’t hold. The bigger grains were there. The genetic selection wasn’t, not yet.

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That gap was strange, because it wasn’t for lack of Neanderthal sites. Abri 122/1200, a cave tucked into the Vârghiș Gorges, has been known and excavated for years, including a 2014 dig led by Marian Cosac and George Murătoreanu of Valahia University of Târgoviște. Luminescence dating places the site’s Middle Paleolithic occupation across an enormous span, from roughly 230,000 years ago (Marine Isotope Stage 7) down to around 60,000 years ago (Marine Isotope Stage 3). The people who lived there made stone tools. They hunted woolly rhinos and bison, animals that do not go down easy. And yet nobody had ever pulled a definitive bone tool out of that cave.

A team led by Monica Mărgărit, with Ștefan Vasile of the University of Bucharest among the co-authors, went looking for an answer. Their study, published in the Journal of Quaternary Science,1 suggests the tools were there all along. Nobody had been looking at the right bones.

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A new study in Communications Sustainability,1 led by Jasmine Vieri at Cambridge’s McDonald Institute, working with the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History and the University of Santiago de Compostela, took that assumption and actually tried to test it. Not argue it, test it. They picked a 500-hectare piece of the system near San Marcos, in Sucre, mapped every ridge and every housing platform on it in high resolution, and then did something nobody had done before: they calculated how long it would actually take to build.

The answer surprised them. A working community of 800 people could have built the entire 500-hectare study system in something like three to six weeks. Not generations. Not decades. Weeks.

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The shells belong to Crassadoma gigantea, the giant rock scallop, a species that lives below the tideline in the Santa Barbara Channel and nowhere else that matters to this story. It has a thick, unyielding shell that resists shaping and drilling, which is exactly why people wanted it. Difficulty was the point. Among the Chumash and neighboring coastal groups, giant rock scallop ornaments carried the kind of status that comes from an object being hard to make and harder to get.

The two beads at the center of this study came out of excavations at the Turkey Flat and Lichtenstein sites, conducted between 2012 and 2020 in advance of the California Flats Solar Project, a 280-megawatt installation that required archaeological survey before construction could proceed. Archaeologists worked alongside representatives of the Salinan, Chumash, and Yokuts tribes, who granted permission for direct dating of the beads, a step that doesn’t happen automatically and that shaped how the research team approached the material from the start.

One bead, a disc-shaped ornament from the Lichtenstein site, dated to 3,674 years old. That’s a respectable age on its own. The other, a globular bead from Turkey Flat, dated to 8,508 years old. That number makes it the oldest giant rock scallop bead ever recorded, older than any previously known example from the Channel Islands themselves, where the species actually lives.

Both sites sit more than 68 kilometers from the nearest coastline. That distance is the second half of what makes this discovery strange. It isn’t just that someone was making these beads earlier than expected. It’s that someone was moving them a serious distance inland, apparently as a matter of routine, during the Early Holocene.

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That’s the detail sitting at the center of a new PNAS1 study led by Koji Ishiya and colleagues at Kanazawa University, and it complicates a story that’s usually told as a clean before-and-after: hunter-gatherers eating meat and shellfish, farmers arriving with rice and the genetic tools to digest starch that came with it. The amylase gene in question, AMY1, encodes salivary amylase, the enzyme that starts breaking down starch the moment it hits your mouth. More copies generally mean more enzyme, which generally means a body better equipped to handle a starch-heavy diet. The assumption that its copy number tracks the arrival of farming has shaped how researchers think about diet and genetics across Eurasia. This Jomon woman’s genome doesn’t fit that assumption.

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That’s the premise behind a new modeling study published in Science1 by Jennie Brand-Miller, Karen Hardy, Les Copeland, and colleagues from the University of Sydney and the University of Glasgow, and it’s a premise that quietly sidesteps one of the longest-running arguments in human evolution.

The argument, for anyone who’s spent time in this literature, usually goes like this: meat did it. Animal fat and protein, unlocked by tool use and cooperative hunting, supplied the calories and nutrients that let hominin brains balloon past anything else in the primate lineage. It’s a compelling story, well-supported, and it’s dominated diet reconstruction for decades. What this new paper points out is that it’s answering the wrong question, or at least an incomplete one. Brains don’t run on protein or fat, not primarily. They run on glucose. And glucose, for most of the time period in question, wasn’t coming from a haunch of antelope.

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The team, led by Philipp Kanis and Hugo Zeberg, went looking for this because Neanderthals have always presented a puzzle of description without mechanism. We know what they looked like: heavier bones, bigger muscles, a barrel-shaped ribcage, browridges you could hang a hat on, and famously short-rooted teeth, a trait so recognizable that early anatomists coined the term taurodontism just to describe it. What nobody had was a genetic account of why. Robust build is easy to observe and hard to trace to a specific molecular cause, because so many things regulate growth at once.

So the researchers picked a specific, plausible culprit: the hypothalamic-pituitary-somatotropic axis, the signaling chain that runs from the brain to the pituitary gland to growth hormone itself, and asked whether Neanderthals carried any distinctive changes in the genes that build this system. They scanned eight genes across three high-coverage Neanderthal genomes, covering hormones like growth hormone and ghrelin as well as their receptors. Most of the axis came back unremarkable. But the growth hormone receptor, or GHR, stood out. All three Neanderthal genomes carried two amino acid substitutions absent from sub-Saharan African genomes, plus a large deletion removing an entire exon, a mutation earlier work had already flagged as ancient. Denisovans, the Neanderthals’ sister lineage, shared the deletion but not the two substitutions, suggesting the substitutions arose specifically along the Neanderthal branch.

Finding a variant is one thing. Showing it does something is another, and this is where the paper gets interesting: it doesn’t stop at genomics. The researchers pushed the Neanderthal receptor gene into a mouse cell line called Ba/F3, cells that are normally kept alive with a cytokine but can be switched over to depend entirely on growth hormone once they’re engineered to express a GHR. With the Neanderthal receptor installed, the cells didn’t bind growth hormone any more tightly than cells carrying the modern human version. What changed was what happened after binding. Cells with the Neanderthal receptor proliferated faster, ending up 39% more numerous after five days, and showed 22% higher levels of phosphorylated STAT5, the signaling protein that growth hormone receptors activate downstream. By systematically testing every possible combination of the two substitutions and the exon deletion, the team traced the entire effect to one single change: the proline-to-threonine swap. The other substitution and the deletion did nothing measurable on their own.

That’s a strange result if you think about it for a second. The intracellular region carrying this mutation is intrinsically disordered, meaning it doesn’t have a stable three-dimensional shape to begin with, and NMR analysis confirmed the mutation barely alters the local structure. The best lead the researchers have is a nearby tyrosine that gets phosphorylated more slowly in the Neanderthal version, which they suggest could mean the receptor stays “on” longer during its phosphorylation-dephosphorylation cycling, adding up to more signaling over time even without a structural change driving it. It’s a reasonable hypothesis, not a settled mechanism.

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That’s the premise behind a new paper in the Journal of Human Evolution,1 describing three previously unstudied parietal fragments from Gran Dolina, the cave site in Spain’s Sierra de Atapuerca where Homo antecessor was first defined back in 1997. The fragments carry the unglamorous names ATD6-115, ATD6-128, and ATD6-401, and until now nobody had measured what’s going on inside them, layer by layer, in an adult individual of this species.

That gap mattered. The only prior quantitative look at H. antecessor parietal anatomy came from a 2017 study of a juvenile specimen. Juvenile skulls are still growing, still thin in places that will thicken with age, so they’re a shaky basis for comparing a species against adult Neanderthals or adult Homo erectus. Adult data was the missing piece, and now there’s some.

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That’s the setup described in a new paper in Childhood in the Past1 by Caroline Partiot and Lilli Zabrana of the Austrian Archaeological Institute. What makes it worth sitting with isn’t just the unlikely address. It’s what the burial seems to be arguing, quietly, against a set of assumptions many people carry about how the ancient and medieval world treated its smallest dead.

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A grain of foxtail millet that burned in a hearth five thousand years ago doesn’t look like a grain of foxtail millet. Charring shrinks it, cracks it, sometimes blows out its surface texture entirely. Long burial does its own damage, warping shapes that were already distorted by fire. So when an archaeobotanist sits down at a microscope with a tray of carbonized specimens from a flotation sample, they’re not matching what they see to a clean reference image. They’re matching it to a mental library of everything charring and time can do to Setaria italica, and everything it can do to Panicum miliaceum, and then working out which set of damage patterns is more plausible.

That takes years to learn. Literally years, according to researchers at Shandong University and Lingnan University, who point out that specialists need extensive training before they can identify charred seeds independently, and even then they’re stuck examining specimens one at a time under magnification. It’s precise work, but it doesn’t scale. A large-scale excavation can produce far more flotation samples than any lab has hands to process, and that bottleneck has quietly shaped what archaeobotanical research is possible to do.

A team led by Rui Xing and Runmin Cong decided to see whether a machine could learn the same trick. The result, published in npj Heritage Science,1 is a dataset and a neural network that together represent the first serious attempt at automating ancient seed identification in China. The dataset is called APS, for Ancient Plant Seed. The network is APSNet. And the way APSNet actually works turns out to say something interesting about what expertise is.

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The basic problem researchers have wrestled with for over a decade is this: you can only find archaic DNA in living people if you have something to compare it to. Neanderthal ancestry was detectable because scientists sequenced actual Neanderthal genomes, pulled from actual Neanderthal bones. Same for Denisovans, though there we’ve only ever had one high-quality genome, from a finger bone in a Siberian cave. Without a reference genome sitting there for comparison, an unknown ancestor’s genetic contribution is essentially invisible. It just looks like ordinary human variation.

That’s a real limitation, because the fossil record and the genetic record have been quietly disagreeing with each other for years. Geneticists studying African populations kept noticing haplotypes, stretches of DNA inherited as a block, that didn’t fit any known demographic story. They looked old. Too old. But with no archaic African genome to check them against (the oldest African genome we have is under 20,000 years, and DNA doesn’t survive well outside permafrost), there was no way to confirm what these signals actually were.

A team at UC Berkeley, led by Priya Moorjani along with graduate student Yulin Zhang and Johns Hopkins postdoc Arjun Biddanda, built a workaround.1 Instead of needing an ancient genome to compare against, their method, called TRACE, reconstructs the genealogical relationships buried inside modern genomes themselves. It reads what’s known as an ancestral recombination graph, essentially a map of how every stretch of DNA in a population traces back through shared ancestors over time. When a segment of DNA came from a deeply diverged, long-extinct lineage, it leaves a specific signature in that graph: branches that reach unusually far back in time, and haplotypes that stayed intact for longer than you’d expect from ordinary population history.

Applying TRACE to whole genomes from the 1000 Genomes Project, the team found two lineages nobody had a name for.

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