Archaeology

Research Roundup: 7 cool science stories we almost missed

Archaeology, Physics, Science / Tim Belzer / February 1, 2025

Peruvian mummy tattoos, the wobbly physics of spears and darts, quantum “cat states,” and more.

Lasers revealed tattoos on the hand of a 1200-year-old Peruvian mummy. Credit: Michael Pittman and Thomas G Kaye

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we missed. This year, we’re experimenting with a monthly collection. January’s list includes papers on using lasers to reveal Peruvian mummy tattoos; the physics of wobbly spears and darts; how a black hole changes over time; and quantum “cat states” for error correction in quantum computers, among other fascinating research.

Tracking changes in a black hole over time

Left: EHT images of M87from the 2018 and 2017 observation campaigns. Middle: Example images from a general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulation at two different times. Right: Same simulation snapshots, blurred to match the EHT’s observational resolution. Credit: EHT collaboration

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope announced the first direct image ever taken of a black hole at the center of an elliptical galaxy, Messier 87 (M87), located in the constellation of Virgo some 55 million light-years away. Astronomers have now combined earlier observational data to learn more about the turbulent dynamics of plasma near M87*’s event horizon over time, according to a paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Co-author Luciano Rezzolla of Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany likened the new analysis to comparing two photographs of Mount Everest, one year apart. While the mountain’s basic structure is unlikely to change much in that time, one could observe changes in clouds near the peak and deduce from that properties like wind direction. For instance, in the case of M87*, the new analysis confirmed the presence of a luminous ring that is brightest at the bottom, which in turn confirmed that the rotational axis points away from Earth. “More of these observations will be made in the coming years and with increasing precision, with the ultimate goal of producing a movie of what happens near M87*,” said Rezolla.

Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2025. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202451296 (About DOIs).

Lasers reveal Peruvian mummy tattoos

A tattooed forearm of a Chancay mummy. Credit: Michael Pittman and Thomas G Kaye

Humans across the globe have been getting tattoos for more than 5,000 years, judging by traces found on mummified remains from Europe to Asia and South America. But it can be challenging to decipher details of those tattoos, given how much the ink tends to “bleed” over time, along with the usual bodily decay. Infrared imaging can help, but in an innovative twist, scientists decided to use lasers that make skin glow ever so faintly, revealing many fine hidden details of tattoos found on 1,200-year-old Peruvian mummies, according to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It’s the first time the laser-stimulated fluorescence (LSF) technique has been used on mummified human remains. The skin’s fluorescence essentially backlights any tattoos, and after post-processing, the long-exposure photographs showed white skin behind black outlines of the tattoo art—images so detailed it’s possible to measure density differences in the ink and eliminate any bleed effects. The authors determined that the tattoos on four mummies—geometric patterns with triangles and diamonds—were made with carbon-based black ink skillfully applied with a pointed object finer than a standard modern tattoo needle, possibly a cactus needle or sharpened bone.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2421517122 (About DOIs).

Sforza Castle’s hidden passages

Ground-penetrating radar reveals new secrets under Milan's Sforza Castle — Ground-penetrating radar reveals new secrets under Milan’s Sforza Castle Credit: Politecnico di Milano

Among the many glories of Milan is the 15th-century Sforza Castle, built by Francesco Sforza on the remnants of an earlier fortification as his primary residence. Legends about the castle abound, most notably the existence of secret underground chambers and passages. For instance, Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan from 1494–1499, was so heartbroken over the loss of his wife in childbirth that he used an underground passageway to visit her tomb in the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie—a passageway that appears in the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, who was employed at the court for a time.

Those underground cavities and passages are now confirmed, thanks to a geophysical survey using ground-penetrating radar and laser scanning, performed as part of a PhD thesis. Various underground cavities and buried passageways were found within the castle’s outer walls, including Ludovico’s passageway and what have may have been secret military passages. Those involved in the project plan to create a “digital twin” of Sforza Castle based on the data collected, one that incorporates both its current appearance and its past. Perhaps it will also be possible to integrate that data with augmented reality to provide an immersive digital experience.

Physics of wobbly spears and darts

Image sequence of a 100-mm long projectile during a typical ejection in experiments. — Image sequence of a 100-mm-long projectile during a typical ejection in experiments. Credit: G. Giombini et al., 2025

Among the things that make humans unique among primates is our ability to throw various objects with speed and precision (with some practice)—spears or darts, for example. That’s because the human shoulder is anatomically conducive to storing and releasing the necessary elastic energy, a quality that has been mimicked in robotics to improve motor efficiency. According to the authors of a paper published in the journal Physical Review E, the use of soft elastic projectiles can improve the efficiency of throws, particularly those whose tips are weighted with a mass like a spearhead.

Guillaume Giombini of the Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, and co-authors wanted to explore this “superpropulsion” effect more deeply, using a combination of experimental data, numerical simulation, and theoretical analysis. The projectiles they used in their experiments were inspired by archery bows and consisted of two flat steel cantilevers connected by a string, essentially serving as springs to give the projectile the necessary elasticity. They placed a flat piece of rigid plastic in the middle of the string as a platform. Some of the projectiles were tested alone, while others were weighted with end masses. A fork held each projectile in place before launch, and the scientists measured speed and deformation during flight. They found that the wobble produced by the weighted tip projectiles yielded a kinetic energy gain of 160 percent over more rigid, unweighted projectiles.

Physical Review E, 2025. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.00.005500 (About DOIs).

Quantum “cat states” for error detection

Left to right: UNSW researchers Benjamin Wilhelm, Xi Yu, Andrea Morello, and Danielle Holmes, all seated and each holding a cat on their lap — Left to right: UNSW researchers Benjamin Wilhelm, Xi Yu, Andrea Morello, and Danielle Holmes. Credit: UNSW Sydney/CC BY-NC

The Schrödinger’s cat paradox in physics is an excellent metaphor for the superposition of quantum states in atoms. Over the last 20 years, physicists have managed to build various versions of Schrödinger’s cat in the laboratory whereby two or more particles manage to be in two different states at the same time—so-called “cat states,” such as six atoms in simultaneous “spin up” and “spin down” states, rather like spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Such states are fragile, however, and quickly decohere. Physicists at the University of New South Wales came up with a fresh twist on a cat-state that is more robust, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Physics.

They used an antimony atom embedded within a silicon quantum chip. The atom is quite heavy and has a large nuclear spin that can go in eight directions rather than just two (spin up and spin down). This could help enormously with quantum error correction, one of the biggest obstacles in quantum computing, because there is more room for error in the binary code. “As the proverb goes, a cat has nine lives,” said co-author Xi Yu of UNSW. “One little scratch is not enough to kill it. Our metaphorical ‘cat’ has seven lives: it would take seven consecutive errors to turn the ‘0’ into a ‘1.’” And embedding the atom in a silicon chip makes it scalable.

Nature Physics, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41567-024-02745-0 (About DOIs).

New twist on chain mail armor

how polycatenated architected materials look in their fluid or granular state, conforming to the shape of the vessel in which it is held. — Credit: Wenjie Zhou

Scientists have developed a new material that is like “chain mail on steroids,” capable of responding as both a fluid or a solid, depending on the kind of stress applied, according to a paper published in the journal Science. That makes it ideal for manufacturing helmets or other protective gear, as well as biomedical devices and robotics components. The technical term is polycatenated architected materials (PAMs). Much like how chain mail is built from small metal rings linked together into a mesh, PAMs are composed of various interlocking shapes that can form a wide range of different 3D patterns.

The authors were partly inspired by the lattice structure of crystals; they just replaced fixed particles with rings or cage-like shapes made out of different materials—such as acrylic polymers, nylon, or metals—to make small 3D-printed structures small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand. They then subjected these materials to various stressors in the laboratory: compression, a lateral shearing force, and twisting. Some of the materials felt like hard solids, others were squishier, but they all exhibited the same kind of telltale transition, behaving more like a fluid or a solid depending on the stressor applied. PAMs at the microscale can also expand or contract in response to electrical charges. This makes them a useful hybrid material, spanning the gap between granular materials and elastic deformable ones.

W. Zhou et al., Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adr9713 (About DOIs).

Kitty robot mimics headbutts

Any cat lover will tell you that cats show humans affection by rubbing their heads against the body (usually shins or hands). It’s called “bunting,” often accompanied by purring, and it’s one of the factors that make companion animal therapy so effective, per the authors of a paper published in ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interactions. That’s why they built a small robot designed to mimic bunting behavior, conducting various experiments to assess whether human participants found their interactions with the kitty-bot therapeutic. The robot prototypes were small enough to fit on a human lap, featuring a 3D-printed frame and a head covered with furry polyester fabric.

The neck needed to be flexible to mimic the bunting behavior, so the authors incorporated a mechanism that could adjust the stiffness of the neck via wire tension. They then tested various prototypes with university students, setting the neck stiffness to low, high, and variable. The students said they felt less tense after interacting with the robots. There was no significant difference between the settings, although participants slightly preferred the variable setting. We know what you’re thinking: Why not just get an actual cat or visit your local cat cafe? The authors note that many people are allergic to cats, and there is also a risk of bites, scratches, or disease transmission—hence the interest in developing animal-like robots for therapeutic applications.

ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interactions, 2025. DOI: 10.1145/3700600 (About DOIs).

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Research Roundup: 7 cool science stories we almost missed Read More »

A telltale toilet reveals “lost” site shown in Bayeux Tapestry

Archaeology, Science / Kris Guyer / January 28, 2025

Seats of power

The Bayeux Tapestry, showing King Harold riding to Bosham, where he attends church and feasts in a hall, before departing for France. The Society of Antiquaries of London

According to Creighton and his co-authors, there has been quite a lot of research on castles, which dominated aristocratic sites in England after the Norman Conquest. That event “persists as a deep schism that continues to be seen as the watershed moment after which elites finally tapped into the European mainstream of castle construction,” they wrote. The study of residences (or “lordly enclaves”) has been more peripheral, yet the authors argue that up until 1066, aristocrats and rulers like King Harold invested heavily in residences, often co-located with churches and chapels.

The “Where Power Lies” project employed a wide range of research methodology—including perusing old maps and records, a re-analysis of past excavations, geophysics, ground-penetrating radar (GPR), and photogrammatic modeling—to define the signatures of such enclaves and map them into a single geographic information database (GIS). The project has identified seven such “lordly centers,” two of which are discussed in the current paper: an early medieval enclosure at Hornby in North Yorkshire and Bosham in West Sussex.

It has long been suspected that one particular manor house in Bosham (now a private residence) stands on the site of what was once King Harold’s residence. Per the authors, the original residence was clearly connected with Holy Trinity Church just to the south, parts of which date back to the 11th century, as evidenced by the posthole remains of what was once a bridge or causeway. More evidence can be found in a structure known as the “garden ruin,” little of which survives above ground—and even that was heavily overgrown. GPR data showed buried features that would have been the eastern wall of King Harold’s lordly enclave.

The biggest clue was the discovery in 2006 of a latrine within the remains of a large timber building. Its significance was not recognized at the time, but archaeologists have since determined that high-status homes began integrating latrines in the 10th century, so the structure was most likely part of King Harold’s residence. Co-author Duncan Wright of Newcastle University believes this “Anglo-Saxon en suite,” along with all the other evidence, proves “beyond all reasonable doubt that we have here the location of Harold Godwinson’s private power center, the one famously depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry.”

DOI: The Antiquaries Journal, 2025. 10.1017/S0003581524000350 (About DOIs).

A telltale toilet reveals “lost” site shown in Bayeux Tapestry Read More »

Skull long thought to be Cleopatra’s sister’s was actually a young boy

ancient DNA, ancient egypt, anthropology, Archaeology, cleopatra, forensic archaeology, Science / Kris Guyer / January 13, 2025

Scientists have demonstrated that an ancient human skull excavated from a tomb at Ephesos was not that of Arsinoë IV, half-sister to Cleopatra VII. Rather, it’s the skull of a young male between the ages of 11 and 14 from Italy or Sardinia, who may have suffered from one or more developmental disorders, according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. Arsinoë IV’s remains are thus still missing.

Arsinoë IV led quite an adventurous short life. She was either the third or fourth daughter of Ptolemy XII, who left the throne to Cleopatra and his son, Ptolemy XIII, to rule together. Ptolemy XIII didn’t care for this decision and dethroned Cleopatra in a civil war—until Julius Caesar intervened to enforce their father’s original plan of co-rulership. As for Arsinoë, Caesar returned Cyprus to Egyptian rule and named her and her youngest brother (Ptolemy XIV) co-rulers. This time, it was Arsinoë who rebelled, taking command of the Egyptian army and declaring herself queen.

She was fairly successful at first in battling the Romans, conducting a siege against Alexandria and Cleopatra, until her disillusioned officers decided they’d had enough and secretly negotiated with Caesar to turn her over to him. Caesar agreed, and after a bit of public humiliation, he granted Arsinoë sanctuary in the temple of Artemis in Ephesus. She lived in relative peace for a few years, until Cleopatra and Mark Antony ordered her execution on the steps of the temple—a scandalous violation of the temple as a place of sanctuary. Historians disagree about Arsinoë’s age when she died: Estimates range from 22 to 27.

Archaeologists have been excavating the ancient city of Ephesus for more than a century. The Octagon was uncovered in 1904, and the burial chamber was opened in 1929. That’s where Joseph Keil found a skeleton in a sarcophagus filled with water, but for some reason, Keil only removed the cranium from the tomb before sealing it back up. He took the skull with him to Germany and declared it belonged to a likely female around 20 years old, although he provided no hard data to support that conclusion.

It was Hilke Thur of the Austrian Academy of Sciences who first speculated that the skull may have belonged to Arsinoë IV, despite the lack of an inscription (or even any grave goods) on the tomb where it was found. Old notes and photographs, as well as craniometry, served as the only evidence. The skull accompanied Keil to his new position at the University of Vienna, and there was one 1953 paper reporting on craniometric measurements, but after that, the skull languished in relative obscurity. Archaeologists at the University of Graz rediscovered the skull in Vienna in 2022. The rest of the skeleton remained buried until the chamber was reopened and explored further in the 1980s and 1990s, but it was no longer in the sarcophagus.

Skull long thought to be Cleopatra’s sister’s was actually a young boy Read More »

Studies pin down exactly when humans and Neanderthals swapped DNA

ancient DNA, ancient genomics, ancient people did stuff, anthropology, Archaeology, Neanderthals, out of africa, Science / Tim Belzer / December 12, 2024

We may owe our tiny sliver of Neanderthal DNA to just a couple of hundred Neanderthals.

The artist’s illustration shows what the six people buried at the Ranis site, who lived between 49, 500 and 41,000 years ago, may have looked like. Two of these people are mother and daughter, and the mother is a distant cousin (or perhaps a great-great-grandparent or great-great-grandchild) to a woman whose skull was found 130 kilometers away in what’s now Czechia. Credit: Sumer et al. 2024

Two recent studies suggest that the gene flow (as the young people call it these days) between Neanderthals and our species happened during a short period sometime between 50,000 and 43,500 years ago. The studies, which share several co-authors, suggest that our torrid history with Neanderthals may have been shorter than we thought.

Pinpointing exactly when Neanderthals met H. sapiens

Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology scientist Leonardo Iasi and his colleagues examined the genomes of 59 people who lived in Europe between 45,000 and 2,200 years ago, plus those of 275 modern people whose ancestors hailed from all over the world. The researchers cataloged the segments of Neanderthal DNA in each person’s genome, then compared them to see where those segments appeared and how that changed over time and distance. This revealed how Neanderthal ancestry got passed around as people spread around the world and provided an estimate of when it all started.

“We tried to compare where in the genomes these [Neanderthal segments] occur and if the positions are shared among individuals or if there are many unique segments that you find [in people from different places],” said University of California Berkeley geneticist Priya Moorjani in a recent press conference. “We find the majority of the segments are shared, and that would be consistent with the fact that there was a single gene flow event.”

That event wasn’t quite a one-night stand; in this case, a “gene flow event” is a period of centuries or millennia when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens must have been in close contact (obviously very close, in some cases). Iasi and his colleagues’ results suggest that happened between 50,500 and 43,000 years ago. But it’s quite different from our history with another closely related hominin species, the now-extinct Denisovans, with whom different Homo sapiens groups met and mingled at least twice on our way to taking over the world.

In a second study, Arev Sümer (also of the Max Planck Institute) and her colleagues found something very similar in the genomes of people who lived 49,500 to 41,000 years ago in what’s now the area around Ranis, Germany. The Ranis population, based on how their genomes compare to other ancient and modern people, seem to have been part of one of the first groups to split off from the wave of humans who migrated out of Africa, through the Levant, and into Eurasia sometime around 50,000 years ago. They carried with them traces of what their ancestors had gotten up to during that journey: about 2.9 percent of their genomes were made up of segments of Neanderthal ancestry.

Based on how long the Ranis people’s segments of Neanderthal DNA were (longer chunks of Neanderthal ancestry tend to point to more recent mixing), the interspecies mingling happened about 80 generations, or about 2,300 years, before the Ranis people lived and died. That’s about 49,000 to 45,000 years ago. The dates from both studies line up well with each other and with archaeological evidence that points to when Neanderthal and Homo sapiens cultures overlapped in parts of Europe and Asia.

What’s still not clear is whether that period of contact lasted the full 5,000 to 7,000 years, or if, as Johannes Krause (also of the Max Planck Institute) suggests, it was only a few centuries—1,500 years at the most—that fell somewhere within that range of dates.

Natural selection worked fast on our borrowed Neanderthal DNA

Once those first Homo sapiens in Eurasia had acquired their souvenir Neanderthal genes (forget stealing a partner’s hoodie; just take some useful segments of their genome), natural selection got to work on them very quickly, discarding some and passing along others, so that by about 100 generations after the “event,” the pattern of Neanderthal DNA segments in people’s genomes looked a lot like it does today.

Iasi and his colleagues looked through their catalog of genomes for sections that contained more (or less) Neanderthal ancestry than you’d expect to find by random chance—a pattern that suggests that natural selection has been at work on those segments. Some of the segments that tended to include more Neanderthal gene variants included areas related to skin pigmentation, the immune response, and metabolism. And that makes perfect sense, according to Iasi.

“Neanderthals had lived in Europe, or outside of Africa, for thousands of years already, so they were probably adapted to their environment, climate, and pathogens,” said Iasi during the press conference. Homo sapiens were facing selective pressure to adapt to the same challenges, so genes that gave them an advantage would have been more likely to get passed along, while unhelpful ones would have been quick to get weeded out.

The most interesting questions remain unanswered

The Neanderthal DNA that many people carry today, the researchers argue, is a legacy from just 100 or 200 Neanderthals.

“The effective population size of modern humans outside Africa was about 5,000,” said Krause in the press conference. “And we have a ratio of about 50 to 1 in terms of admixture [meaning that Neanderthal segments account for about 2 percent of modern genomes in people who aren’t of African ancestry], so we have to say it was about 100 to maybe 200 Neanderthals roughly that mixed into the population.” Assuming Krause is right about that and about how long the two species stayed in contact, a Homo sapiens/Neanderthal pairing would have happened every few years.

So we know that Neanderthals and members of our species lived in close proximity and occasionally produced children for at least several centuries, but no artifacts, bones, or ancient DNA have yet revealed much of what that time, or that relationship, was actually like for either group of people.

The snippets of Neanderthal ancestry left in many modern genomes, and those of people who lived tens of thousands of years ago, don’t offer any hints about whether that handful of Neanderthal ancestors were mostly male or mostly female, which is something that could shed light on the cultural rules around such pairings. And nothing archaeologists have unearthed so far can tell us whether those pairings were consensual, whether they were long-term relationships or hasty flings, or whether they involved social relationships recognized by one (or both) groups. We may never have answers to those questions.

And where did it all happen? Archaeologists haven’t yet found a cave wall inscribed with “Og heart Grag,” but based on the timing, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens probably met and lived alongside each other for at least a few centuries, somewhere in “the Near East,” which includes parts of North Africa, the Levant, what’s now Turkey, and what was once Mesopotamia. That’s one of the key routes that people would have followed as they migrated from Africa into Europe and Asia, and the timing lines up with when we know that both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were in the area.

“This [same] genetic admixture also appears in East Asia and Australia and the Americas and Europe,” said Krause. “If it would have happened in Europe or somewhere else, then the distribution would probably look different than what we see.”

Science, 2023 DOI: 10.1126/science.adq3010;

Nature, 2023 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08420-x;

(About DOIs ).

Kiona is a freelance science journalist and resident archaeology nerd at Ars Technica.

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Paleolithic deep-cave compound likely used for rituals

acoustics, anthropology, Archaeology, Science / Paul Patrick / December 9, 2024

Archaeologists excavating a paleolithic cave site in Galilee, Israel, have found evidence that a deep-cave compound at the site may have been used for ritualistic gatherings, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). That evidence includes the presence of a symbolically carved boulder in a prominent placement, and well as the remains of what may have been torches used to light the interior. And the acoustics would have been conducive to communal gatherings.

Dating back to the Early Upper Paleolithic period, Manot Cave was found accidentally when a bulldozer broke open its roof during construction in 2008. Archaeologists soon swooped in and recovered such artifacts as stone tools, bits of charcoal, remains of various animals, and a nearly complete human skull.

The latter proved to be especially significant, as subsequent analysis showed that the skull (dubbed Manot 1) had both Neanderthal and modern features and was estimated to be about 54,700 years old. That lent support to the hypothesis that modern humans co-existed and possibly interbred with Neanderthals during a crucial transition period in the region, further bolstered by genome sequencing.

The Manot Cave features an 80-meter-long hall connecting to two lower chambers from the north and south. The living section is near the entrance and was a hub for activities like flint-knapping, butchering animals, eating, and other aspects of daily life. But about eight stories below, there is a large cavern consisting of a high gallery and an adjoining smaller “hidden” chamber separated from the main area by a cluster of mineral deposits called speleothems.

That’s the area that is the subject of the new PNAS paper. Unlike the main living section, the authors found no evidence of daily human activities in this compound, suggesting it served another purpose—most likely ritual gatherings.

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Dog domestication happened many times, but most didn’t pan out

Archaeology, dog domestication, Dogs, indigenous North America, isotope analysis, nitrogen isotopes, Science / Mike M. / December 4, 2024

The story that data reveals is complicated—but somehow very human.

Until about 13,600 years ago, any wolf living in what is now Alaska would have lived on the usual wolf diet: rabbits, moose, and a whole range of other land animals. But starting around 13,600 years ago, the nitrogen isotopes locked in ancient wolves’ bones suggest that something changed. Some wolves still made their living solely by hunting wild game, but others started living almost entirely on fish. Since it’s unlikely that Alaskan wolves had suddenly taken up fly fishing, the sudden change probably suggests that some wolves had started getting food from people.

They’re good dogs, Brent

The fact that we kept trying to befriend wolves is starkly clear at a site called Hollembaek Hill, where archaeologists unearthed the 8,100-year-old remains of four canines. Their diets (according to the nitrogen isotopes locked in their bones) consisted mostly of salmon, so it’s tempting to assume these were domesticated dogs. But their DNA reveals that all four—including a newborn puppy—are most closely related to modern wolves.

On the other hand, the Hollembaek Hill canines didn’t all look like wild wolves. At least one of them had the large stature of a modern wolf, but others were smaller, like early dogs. And some of their DNA suggests that they may be at least part dog but not actually related to modern dogs. Lanoë and his colleagues suggest that people at Hollembaek Hill 8,000 years ago were living alongside a mix of pet wolves (do not try this at home) and wolf-dog hybrids.

All modern dogs trace their roots to a single group of wolves (now extinct) that lived in Siberia around 23,000 years ago. But sometime between 11,300 and 12,800 years ago, the canines from Hollembaek Hill and another Alaskan site called Swan Point had dog DNA that doesn’t seem related to modern dogs at all. That may suggest that dog domestication was a process that happened several times in different places, creating several branches of a dog family tree, but only one stuck around in the long run.

In other words, long after humans “invented” dogs, it seems that people just kept repeating the process, doing the things that created dogs in the first place: allowing the friendliest, least aggressive wild canids to live near their villages and maybe adopting and feeding them.

Dog domestication happened many times, but most didn’t pan out Read More »

Ancient fish-trapping network supported the rise of Maya civilization

aerial archaeology, ancient people did stuff, Archaeology, fisheries, indigenous americans, Maya, Pre-Columbian civilizations, Science / Tim Belzer / November 22, 2024

Harrison-Buck and her colleagues calculated that at its peak, the system could have produced enough fish each year to feed around 15,000 people. That’s based on modern estimates of how many kilograms of fish people eat every year, combined with measurements of how many kilograms of fish people in Zambia harvest with similar traps. Of course, people at Crooked Tree would have needed to preserve the fish somehow, probably by salting, drying, or smoking them.

“Fisheries were more than capable of supporting year-round sedentarism and the emergence of complex society characteristic of Pre-Columbian Maya civilization in this area,” write Harrison-Buck and her colleagues.

When we think about the Maya economy, we think of canal networks and ditched or terraced fields. In just one patch of what’s now Guatemala, a lidar survey revealed that Maya farmers drained thousands of acres of swampy wetland and built raised fields for maize, crossed by a grid of irrigation canals. To feed the ancient city of Holmul, the Maya turned a swamp into a breadbasket. But at least some of their precursors may have made it big on fish, not grain. The common feature, though, is an absolute lack of any chill whatsoever when it came to re-engineering whole landscapes to produce food.

This Google Earth image shows the area containing the ancient fishery.

Infrastructure built to last and last

From the ground, the channels that funneled fish into nearby ponds are nearly invisible today. But from above, especially during the dry season, they stand in stark contrast to the land around them, because vegetation grows rich and green in the moist soil at the base of the channels, even while everything around it dries up. That made aerial photography the perfect way to map them.

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To invent the wheel, did people first have to invent the spindle?

ancient people did stuff, Archaeology, flywheel, Science, textiles / Mike M. / November 18, 2024

It’s not so much that the spindle whorl was the direct evolutionary ancestor of the wheel, the way wolves were the ancestors of modern dogs. Instead, it was one of the first ways that people got really familiar, in a hands-on way, with the idea that you can attach something round to a stick and use it to turn one kind of motion into another. Pottery wheels, which emerged a bit later, work on the same general principle.

“I don’t jump to saying, ‘Okay, spindle whorls are [cart] wheels,” Yashuv tells Ars. “In many studies of the invention of the wheel, they’re talking about sledges and all sorts of things that are focused on the function of transportation—which is correct. I’m just adding another layer: the foundation of the mechanical principle.”

Once that mechanical principle was firmly embedded in humanity’s collective stash of knowledge, it was a matter of time (a few thousand years) before people looked at animal-drawn sledges, then looked at their pottery wheels and spindles, and put two and two together and got a cart with wheels—or at least, that’s Yashuv’s hypothesis. She and Grosman aren’t the first to suggest something similar; early 20th-century archaeologist Gordon V. Childe suggested that most of the major inventions of the Industrial Revolution were just new applications of much older rotary devices.

on the left, a diagram of two hands using a drop spindle. On the right, a woman in a yellow shirt spins thread with a drop spindle. — Spinner Yonit Kristal tests a replica of a spindle from the 12,000-year-old village. Credit: Yashuv and Grosman 2024

A village of prehistoric innovators?

Exactly how long people have understood (and made use of) the whole circle-on-a-stick concept is still an open question. Nahal Ein-Gev II is the oldest site with evidence of drop spindles that archaeologists have found so far, but Yashuv says the villagers there probably weren’t the first to invent the concept. They just happened to make their spindle whorls out of rocks with holes drilled in them, leaving a clear trace in the archaeological record.

Modern spindle whorls are often made of wood—either a disc or an X-shaped pair of arms. The trouble with wood, especially in small pieces, is that it’s not very likely to survive thousands of years (although that’s not impossible), so wooden spindle whorls from a site as old as Nahal Ein-Gev II are invisible to archaeologists. In some cultures, spinners might even tie a rock (or even a potato—no joke) to the end of their fibers in lieu of a spindle. Those rocks lack the telltale drill holes that let Yashuv and Grosman recognize the stone spindle whorls at Nahal Ein-Gev II, so they’re also invisible to archaeologists; they just look like rocks. Nahal Ein-Gev II is just the oldest place that recognizable spindle whorls happen to have survived.

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DNA shows Pompeii’s dead aren’t who we thought they were

ancient DNA, Archaeology, forensic archaeology, Pompeii, Science / Tim Belzer / November 8, 2024

People have long been fascinated by the haunting plaster casts of the bodies of people who died in Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. Archaeologists have presented certain popular narratives about who these people might have been and how they might have been related. But ancient DNA analysis has revealed that those preferred narratives were not entirely accurate and may reflect certain cultural biases, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. The results also corroborate prior research suggesting that the people of ancient Pompeii were the descendants of immigrants from the Eastern Mediterranean.

As previously reported, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius released thermal energy roughly equivalent to 100,000 times the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, spewing molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in particular. The vast majority of people in Pompeii and Herculaneum—the cities hardest hit—perished from asphyxiation, choking on the thick clouds of noxious gas and ash. But at least some of the Vesuvian victims probably died instantaneously from the intense heat of fast-moving lava flows, with temperatures high enough to boil brains and explode skulls.

In the first phase, immediately after the eruption, a long column of ash and pumice blanketed the surrounding towns, most notably Pompeii and Herculaneum. By late night or early morning, pyroclastic flows (fast-moving hot ash, lava fragments, and gases) swept through and obliterated what remained, leaving the bodies of the victims frozen in seeming suspended action.

In the 19th century, an archaeologist named Giuseppe Fiorelli figured out how to make casts of those frozen bodies by pouring liquid plaster into the voids where the soft tissue had been. Some 1,000 bodies have been discovered in the ruins, and 104 plaster casts have been preserved. Restoration efforts of 86 of those casts began about 10 years ago, during which researchers took CT scans and X-rays to see if there were complete skeletons inside. Those images revealed that there had been a great deal of manipulation of the casts, depending on the aesthetics of the era in which they were made, including altering some features of the bodies’ shapes or adding metal rods to stabilize the cast, as well as frequently removing bones before casting.

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What this 500-year-old shipwreck can tell us about how we age

Archaeology, maritime archaeology, Mary Rose, Raman spectroscopy, Science, shipwrecks / Rejus Almole / November 4, 2024

Dem collarbones

A schematic to illustrate the approximate location from which the measurements were taken; an example right clavicle from each age group. Credit: S.I. Shalnkland et al., PLOS ONE 2024

Most of the recovered human remains were jumbled up, but over the years, preservationists have partially reconstructed some 98 individuals, all men between 10 and 40 years of age. The new study focused on 12 clavicle (collar) bones, which links the upper limb to the torso and is one of the most commonly fractured bones. Per the authors, it’s one of the first bones to start ossifying in utero, but the last to fully fuse, usually between 22 and 25 years old.

That was a boon for determining the age of the Mary Rose crew members, but the authors thought differences in bone mineral and protein chemistry could also shed light on bone changes related not just to aging, but also to lifestyle or disease, and even whether a crewman was right- or left-handed had an impact on those changes. They specifically looked at changes in phosphate, carbonate, and amine (the foundation of collagen), all major components of bone.

The results: mineral content of the bones of all 12 men increased with age, while the protein content decreased. Those changes were more significant in right clavicles rather than left ones, an intriguing result suggesting a preference for right-handed crew members. The authors note that this might be because, at the time, being left-handed was often associated with witchcraft. Perhaps those right-handed crew members put more stress on their right side while performing their duties, and this, in turn, asymmetrically altered their clavicle chemistry.

“Having grown up fascinated by the Mary Rose, it has been amazing to have the opportunity to work with these remains,” said co-author Sheona Shankland of Lancaster University. “The preservation of the bones and the non-destructive nature of the technique allows us to learn more about the lives of these sailors, but also furthers our understanding of the human skeleton, relevant to the modern world.”

PLoS ONE, 2024. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0311717 (About DOIs).

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Study: DNA corroborates “Well-man” tale from Norse saga

ancient DNA, Archaeology, forensic archaeology, Norse history, Norse mythology, Norse sagas, paleogenomics, Science / Mike M. / October 26, 2024

The results: The Well-man was indeed male, between 30 and 40, with blue eyes and blond or light-brown hair, and his ancestry was traced to southern Norway, most likely present-day Vest-Agder. This is interesting because King Sverre’s men were from central Norway, and it had long been assumed that the dead body thrown into the well was part of that army. It was the invading Baglers who hailed from southern Norway. The authors are careful to note that one cannot definitively conclude that therefore the Well-man was a Bagler, but it’s certainly possible that the Baglers tossed one of their own dead into the well.

As for whether the action was a form of 12th-century biological warfare intended to poison the well, the authors weren’t able to identify any pathogens in their analysis. But that might be because of the strict decontamination procedures that were used to prepare the tooth samples, which may have also removed traces of any pathogen DNA. So they could not conclude one way or another whether the Well-man had been infected with a deadly pathogen at the time of his death.

Seven well-man teeth recovered from excavation — Seven Well-man teeth recovered from the excavation. Credit: Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research

“It was a compromise between removing surface contamination of the people who have touched the tooth and then removing some of the possible pathogens. There are lots of ethical considerations,” said co-author Martin Ellegaard, also of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “We need to consider what kind of tests we’re doing now because it will limit what we can do in the future.”

The fact that the Well-man hailed from southern Norway indicates that the distinctive genetic drift observed in southern Norway populations already existed during King Sverre’s reign. “This has implications for our understanding of Norwegian populations, insofar as it implies that this region must have been relatively isolated not only since that time, but also at least for a few hundred years beforehand and perhaps longer,” the authors concluded. Future research sequencing more ancient Norwegian DNA would shed further light on this finding—perhaps even the remains of the Norwegian Saint Olaf, believed to be buried near Trondheim Cathedral.

iScience, 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.111076 (About DOIs).

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Scientists solved mysterious origin of Stonehenge’s Altar Stone: Scotland

Archaeology, Science, stonehenge / Rejus Almole / August 14, 2024

The Altar Stone at Stonehenge. — Enlarge / The Altar Stone at Stonehenge weighs roughly 6 tons and was probably transported by land—or possibly by sea.

English Heritage

The largest of the “bluestones” that comprise the inner circle at Stonehenge is known as the Altar Stone. Like its neighbors, scientists previously thought the stone had originated in western Wales and been transported some 125 miles to the famous monument that still stands on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England. But a new paper published in the journal Nature came to a different conclusion based on fresh analysis of its chemical composition: The Altar Stone actually hails from the very northeast corner of Scotland.

“Our analysis found specific mineral grains in the Altar Stone are mostly between 1,000 to 2,000 million years old, while other minerals are around 450 million years old,” said co-author Anthony Clarke, a graduate student at Curtin University in Australia, who grew up in Mynydd Preseli in Wales—origin of most of the bluestones—and first visited the monument when he was just a year old. “This provides a distinct chemical fingerprint suggesting the stone came from rocks in the Orcadian Basin, Scotland, at least 750 kilometers [450 miles] away from Stonehenge.”

As previously reported, Stonehenge consists of an outer circle of vertical sandstone slabs (sarsen stones), connected on top by horizontal lintel stones. There is also an inner ring of smaller bluestones and, within that ring, several free-standing trilithons (larger sarsens joined by one lintel). Radiocarbon dating indicates that the inner ring of bluestones was set in place between 2400 and 2200 BCE. But the standing arrangement of sarsen stones wasn’t erected until around 500 years after the bluestones.

No contemporary written records exist concerning the monument’s construction, and scholars have pondered its likely use and cultural significance for centuries. Stonehenge’s form (and maybe its purpose) changed several times over the centuries, and archaeologists are still trying to piece together the details of its story and the stories of the people who built it and gathered in its circles.

In 2019, Parker Pearson and several colleagues reported the results of their investigation into the quarry source for the bluestones. They found that the 42 bluestones came all the way from western Wales. Chemical analysis has even matched some of them to two particular quarries on the northern slopes of the Preseli Hills.

One quarry, an outcrop called Carn Goedog, seems to have supplied most of the bluish-gray, white-speckled dolerite at Stonehenge. And another outcrop in the valley below, Craig Rhos-y-felin, supplied most of the rhyolite. When another group of archaeologists studied the chemical isotope ratios in the cremated remains of people once buried beneath the bluestones, those researchers found that many of those people may have come from the same part of Wales between 3100 and 2400 BCE.

But the sarsen stones hail from much closer to home. Since the 1500s, most Stonehenge scholars have assumed the sarsen stones came from nearby Marlborough Downs, an area of round, grassy hills 25 to 30km (17 miles) north of Stonehenge, which has the largest concentration of sarsen in the UK. A 2020 study by University of Brighton archaeologist David Nash and colleagues confirmed that.

Enlarge / The arrangement of stones at Stonehenge, color-coded to show where they came from.

English Heritage/Curtin University

Fifty of the sarsens shared very similar chemical fingerprints, which means they probably all came from the same place, most likely one site in the southeastern Marlborough Downs: West Woods, about 25 km (16 miles) north of Stonehenge and just 3 km (2 miles) south of where most earlier studies had looked for Neolithic sarsen quarries. The other two surviving sarsens came from two different places, which archaeologists haven’t pinpointed yet.

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