Evolutionary Insights by Anthropology.net

In the Sakhnin Valley in Israel’s Lower Galilee, a survey recorded more than 200 handaxes from the Lower Paleolithic, the earliest part of the Old Stone Age. About ten of them were shaped from flint nodules with a fossil imprint or an odd geological feature inside, and in each the maker left the feature in the middle of the tool’s face, where it could be seen and touched. Such nodules are harder to work, and the valley’s other handaxe makers avoided them.These handaxes are part of a new case for Stone Age souvenirs, one that runs against a view most readers probably hold. Keeping an object for the memory it carries is usually treated as a late habit of modern humans, from the end of the Old Stone Age onward, and archaeologists have mostly read such objects socially, as carriers of shared meaning or markers of rank.The paper, a review in Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, is by Ran Barkai, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University; Yoav Ram of the university’s School of Zoology; and four colleagues. Its data statement says no new datasets were generated or analyzed. Its core examples come from the team’s earlier work in Israel, which they read as consistent with people keeping objects beyond practical need from about 500 kya (thousand years ago). They propose that these were personal keepsakes, or souvenirs, working as “portable external memory devices.” Once keeping them became routine, the habit may have changed the selection pressures on autobiographical memory, which they define as memory of one’s own experiences plus the family stories folded into one’s identity.What is the evidence for Stone Age souvenirs?The archaeological case rests on three groups of objects, all described in earlier papers by members of this team. At Qesem Cave, people deliberately carried in small, round pebbles of colorful flint from about 400 kya onward, through the roughly 200,000 years they used the cave. Ella Assaf, one of the authors, reported in 2018 that the pebbles show no sign of use; the review gives no count. The Sakhnin handaxes, published this year by Barkai and Shalata, carry fossils and formations that match outcrops in the valley, tying each tool to a particular spot. The authors grant these were probably working tools and ask why someone kept a feature that did nothing for the tool and made it harder to produce.In my reading the third group is the strongest, because the comparison that matters is built into the sites. At Revadim and Jaljulia, two Late Acheulean sites (the Acheulean is the Lower Paleolithic handaxe tradition), and at Qesem, which comes after it, people picked up flint tools made and thrown away long before. The giveaway is patina, a weathered skin that forms on discarded flint and takes its color from the conditions where it lay. On a Qesem scraper shown in the review, the old surfaces are whitish and the resharpened edges are brown, fresh flint. Reworking on such pieces was minimal, and magnified wear traces show their second use was generally light. Because fresh tools dominate the assemblage (the full set of recovered artifacts), Bar Efrati of the University of Oxford, a co-author, argues that the old faces were kept by choice rather than for lack of good stone.The memory half of the argument rests on what the team calls authentication. Psychologists use the term source monitoring for telling whether a memory came from something that happened or from one’s own thoughts. A keepsake adds sensory detail to that judgment; it can’t prove a memory true, the authors stress, only narrow down where it came from. Where alliances and claims to places depend on credible personal memory, people who are better at checking memories against objects should do better. That skill varies between people and is partly heritable, the paper notes, so selection would have had something to act on. Routine curation beyond practical need is what the authors call a “souvenir niche,” after niche construction theory, in which organisms alter their surroundings in ways that feed back on their own evolution.People had lived in the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean) for at least 1.5 million years before this behavior appears, so the review looks for a trigger and finds it in big game. Prey size there fell through the Pleistocene, the epoch of the ice ages, and the elephant disappeared around 400 kya, along with Homo erectus and the Acheulean. As hunting smaller, more evasive prey pushed people into new territory, the authors propose, portable pieces of places became worth keeping. Barkai said in the press release that objects taken from the new hunting grounds “may have helped them maintain a personal connection with the places that would henceforth provide their livelihood.” The review predicts that the practice should track the decline of large herbivores rather than come before it.Can archaeology tell a keepsake from a tool?The patina deserves a slower look, because the time it records works against part of the argument. The whitish skin on that Qesem scraper formed while the flake lay abandoned, and the authors acknowledge that the patinas imply the pieces were found again rather than handed down. So the long interval written on these objects is time when nobody had them. The abstract speaks of the “prolonged retention” of patinated tools, but nothing the review presents measures how long the second owner kept one. Light wear on a resharpened edge fits an object handled now and then for years, and it fits a tool used briefly and dropped; the team itself calls wear its weakest criterion.That gap matters because of the review’s own test for a souvenir: an individual keeps one object safe over a long period, neither discarding it nor trading it for food, and comes back to it from time to time. The authors use this standard to set aside animal cases, including captive chimpanzees that kept a large crystal in their sleeping quarters for two days before trading it back for food. They concede that such behavior could go unseen, because detecting it means following a known individual and a known object for months. No Paleolithic deposit offers that. A site preserves where objects ended up, and how long anyone kept them, or why, has to be inferred.I also think Barkai and Ram chose the hardest level of meaning to detect. They focus on personal rather than social meaning because it assumes the least, needing no shared convention and no audience. That is sound as theory, and it is also why a personal keepsake is nearly invisible to archaeology, since by the paper’s own account its meaning need not be legible to anyone but its keeper. The definition of the souvenir niche sidesteps the problem. It covers routine curation “regardless of motive,” while the memory argument depends entirely on the motive.How strong is the case that keepsakes shaped memory?I find the evolutionary step the weakest link, because its evidence comes from studies of living people and laboratory animals, such as experiments in which learning to make and use tools changed brain networks in macaques and humans. Such studies can make a mechanism plausible, but they can’t show selection at work in the Middle Pleistocene, when these stones were collected.The 500 kya figure is a round number for a period, not the age of any object in the review. It gives no dating method for any of the Israeli material and no stratigraphic context (the layer and setting that would date them) for the surveyed Sakhnin handaxes. Its only number for that evidence is the 400 kya start of the Qesem pebbles, and the authors allow that routine souvenir-keeping may have arrived “later than the earliest examples in the archaeological record.”Their test of failure is also forgiving. The hypothesis fails only when curated items are optimized for use, local and uniform… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

In a new plot of brain shape, the Taung child, a roughly 3-million-year-old skull found in 1924 at the Buxton Limeworks quarry in South Africa’s Northwest Province, sits almost on top of MLD 37/38, an adult from Makapansgat, 670 km to the northeast. The plot compares endocasts, casts of the inside of the braincase that record the brain’s outer shape, and Taung’s comes from a child whose first permanent molar had erupted while the second was still forming. In growth series of 101 chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and 84 gorillas (Gorilla gorilla), apes at that dental stage do not overlap their own adults in brain shape, yet Taung plots in the middle of the adult fossils from Sterkfontein. The authors call this peculiar, and I think it is the most important result in the paper, because it is where their case about species is both strongest and most exposed.That matters because Taung is the holotype of Australopithecus africanus, the specimen that anchors the species name. Most readers picture a well-stocked species behind it, with Sts 5, the Sterkfontein skull nicknamed “Mrs. Ples,” as its typical adult. The paper argues that Taung is, strictly speaking, the only fossil that belongs to A. africanus without dispute, and that several adults long filed under the name, MLD 37/38 among them, probably belong to other species.Gabriele Macho (Vrije Universiteit Brussel and University College London) and seven coauthors, including Simon Neubauer and Clement Zanolli, report the work in npj Palaeoecosystems. A flowstone lying above the fossil-bearing deposit gives a minimum age of 2.962 ± 0.059 million years (Ma) for the skull, and an earlier paleomagnetic estimate caps it at 3.03 Ma. Using tooth development, brain growth and molar shape, the team asks whether Taung could have grown into the adults assigned to its species, and concludes that the brain-growth results leave little doubt that the Sterkfontein fossils include more than one species. To explain that diversity, the authors propose that climate swings kept moving populations around, with interbreeding probably following where they met.How old is the Taung child?Southern African sites lack the volcanic ash layers that give eastern African fossils reliable dates, and Taung’s exact find spot was lost during mining. Published estimates have ranged from 942 thousand years (ka), by uranium-series dating, to 3.03 Ma, the start of the last normal-polarity interval of the Gauss magnetochron, a period identified from the magnetic direction recorded in rock.The flowstone, a sheet of calcite laid down by flowing water, was dated by the decay of its uranium to lead. The route previously advocated for South African flowstones, uranium-238 to lead-206, needs a correction for uranium isotopes that were out of balance when the calcite formed, and beyond 1.5 Ma the uncertainty in that correction can exceed the correction itself. The uranium-235 to lead-207 route is largely immune, and it gave 2.962 ± 0.059 Ma with little scatter (an MSWD, the standard measure of that scatter, of 0.7).I find the measurement convincing, because the method was chosen for a stated reason and the result is precise, but what it means for the fossil is less certain than the paper or the press release suggests. The two routes give ages for the same flowstone that do not overlap, a mismatch the authors tentatively blame on uranium moving after the rock formed, and they read both ages as minimums by assuming the rock only gained uranium; loss would make them too old, and the main text does not say why gain is likelier. No radiometric ceiling has been found despite further drilling, so the 3.03 Ma cap rests on paleomagnetic data from a 2013 chapter by A. I. R. Herries and colleagues.Does the Taung child share a species with the adult fossils?The adults in question are Sts 5, Sts 60, Sts 71 and StW 505 from Sterkfontein, in the Cradle of Humankind about 390 km northeast of Taung, plus MLD 37/38, all attributed to A. africanus. The weakest of the three comparisons is tooth development: scored for 11 Australopithecus and 16 Paranthropus fossils, it gives the A. africanus fossils a markedly different slope from every other taxon when first-molar development is set against first-incisor development, a possible sign that more than one species has been lumped together. One Makapansgat specimen, MLD 2, may be skewing that line, and the authors warn against over-interpreting such small samples, so I take the slopes as a hint.Brain size narrows the field only a little. The adults’ endocranial volumes range from 391 to 568 ml, a spread the authors find compatible with one species by chimpanzee and gorilla standards. Apes at Taung’s stage have reached about 92 percent (chimpanzees) and 87 percent (gorillas) of average adult volume, whereas Taung, at 402 to 410 ml, would have reached only 71 percent if it were going to grow into the large-brained StW 505.The argument gets its force from brain shape, measured with 935 landmarks and semilandmarks (matching anatomical points, plus points spread along curves and surfaces) on every endocast, fossil and ape, after the fragmentary fossils were rebuilt from CT scans. Projecting the direction and amount of change seen in growing apes forward from Taung, the team finds the child could have grown into a brain shaped like Sts 5 or Sts 60 but not like Sts 71, StW 505 or MLD 37/38, even allowing for differences in the timing and amount of growth. As I read the plot, MLD 37/38 drops out precisely because it sits where Taung sits: a child with a lot of shape change still ahead of it should end up somewhere else.I find this the strongest evidence in the paper for more than one species, because it uses dense shape data and large ape growth samples rather than a few scored teeth. Its weak point is the assumption underneath, which the authors state openly: that these brains kept changing shape after the first molar erupted, in the direction and roughly the amount seen in living apes. Chimpanzee, gorilla and human growth models all predict large changes from Taung’s stage onward, so the assumption is reasonable, but the paper has no australopith growth series to test it, and the plot covers only two shape axes, which carry 49.5 percent of the variation.The same kind of reasoning has already given a different answer. A 2006 simulation of Taung’s facial growth by K. P. McNulty, S. R. Frost and D. S. Strait found Taung closer to Sts 71 than to Sts 5, judging the gap from Sts 5 extreme by the standards of living African apes and humans. Two projections along growth paths borrowed from living species disagree about the same pair of adults, and until they are reconciled I treat the Sts 71 question as open.The molars pull Taung somewhere else again: on the dentino-enamel junction, the buried boundary between enamel and dentine that forms early and barely changes with wear, Taung’s lower first molars sit at the edge of the A. africanus cluster and inside the range of Paranthropus robustus on the main axis, though the first two axes explain less than 38 percent of the shape variation.What the Taung study can’t tell usThe authors are frank that no clear picture emerges, with no consistent clustering of specimens, which they put down to small samples and fossils scattered widely in time and space.The climate and hybridization proposal is the part the data support least, since the paper never tests hominin hybridization directly. Marine cores off the Limpopo record more variable climate between 4 and 2.5 Ma than from 2.5 to 1.6 Ma, and the authors suggest that hominins tracked shifting habitats and could have interbred where populations met along the Zambezian and Natal/Kalahari biogeographic boundary, which today runs through the Limpopo valley at Makapansgat. They raise the obvious problem themselves, that the Cradle of Humankind lies about 400 km south of the Limpopo and Taung farther still, and answer that hybrids c… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

Chornancap Burial 48 comes from the lower Lambayeque Valley on Peru’s north coast and dates to the Chimú period, around 1375 to 1490 CE. The left side of the forehead carries a fracture from a blunt blow, and its edges show no healing, which bioarchaeologists (specialists in human remains from archaeological sites) call perimortem: the injury happened at or near the time of death. A new study of violence in ancient Peru uses this skull to illustrate what its authors counted as interpersonal violence. Among 1,519 skeletons from the valley preserved well enough to examine, spanning more than 3,000 years, they found 25 with skull injuries of that kind.That is a low count for a coast best known in the press for ritual killing. At Huaca de la Luna, a Moche ceremonial center, up to 107 adult men were sacrificed in six closely timed events around 550 to 600 CE, amid evidence of mud and heavy rain from an exceptionally strong El Niño, the periodic warming of Pacific waters that drenches this desert coast. At Huanchaquito-Las Llamas in the Moche Valley, more than 140 children and over 200 young camelids (llamas and their relatives) were sacrificed around 1450 CE, associated with a mud layer that may record El Niño flooding. Neither site is in the new dataset. Finds like these invite a reasonable inference: when the floods came, these societies turned violent, and mass sacrifice was the visible peak of a wider rise in killing over scarce food.Dr. Thomas J. Snyder of New York University and Dr. Haagen D. Klaus of George Mason University test that inference in a paper published November 9, 2026, in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, using skeletal records from the Lambayeque Valley Biohistory Project, which Klaus founded in 2002. The Lambayeque Valley Complex (the Lambayeque Valley, for short) consists of five river drainages more than 700 kilometers north of Lima, joined into one water network by the late first millennium CE. The team compiled records for 1,659 people buried at 30 sites, from the Cupisnique period to the Spanish colonial era. Twenty-six were dropped because they couldn’t be placed securely in time, and 1,519 had bones preserved well enough to score. Of those, 25 (1.6 percent) had skull injuries consistent with interpersonal violence, and 77 (5.1 percent) had fractures below the skull of the kind usually attributed to accidents.Neither kind of injury showed a detectable relationship with the two climate measures tested, highland rainfall and El Niño frequency. The authors also propose, without testing it, that the coast’s mass sacrifices were political and religious acts rather than a product of food shortage. For scale, they note that average rates of skull injury in some regions and periods elsewhere in the Andes reach 30 to 45 percent (Snyder and Arkush 2024).How do archaeologists measure violence from skeletons?The method rests on a convention in bioarchaeology: skull injuries count as probable violence, and fractures below the skull as probable accidents. Snyder and Klaus say plainly that this proxy, or stand-in, errs both ways, since a beating that bruises without breaking bone leaves nothing behind and some skull fractures come from falls. Their defense is specific to their question: an undercount doesn’t distort the comparison unless it changes with climate, as it would if fights in drought years tended to stop short of breaking bone.Climate is harder to measure, because the north coast is a desert that gets a few millimeters of rain a year; the water in its rivers and canals falls in the highlands above about 1,500 meters. So the authors measured drought at the source, using CHELSA-TraCE21k, a global climate simulation that estimates past rainfall in 100-year steps, sampled at random points across the valley’s highland headwaters. Simulations can’t reconstruct how often El Niño struck, so the authors used a per-century frequency record from sediment cores at Laguna Pallcacocha, a lake the paper describes only as near the valley.The hypothesis is what the authors call a Malthusian pathway, where scarcity breeds violent competition: drought or frequent floods should shrink harvests and push people toward fighting over food, and toward longer hours of risky work that breaks more bones by accident. Each person was assigned to one of 12 cultural periods, and each period got one average for rainfall and one for El Niño frequency. A Bayesian model then estimated how the odds of each kind of injury shifted with those values, alongside age, sex, colonial rule, and burial site, reporting each effect as a credible interval, a range of plausible values. For both kinds of injury, the 89 percent intervals for both climate measures straddle zero: the data can’t tell whether either one raised the odds or lowered them.I find the skull count convincing and the climate test much weaker, and the weakness comes from that design. Everyone who died in the Late Sicán period, from 1100 to 1375 CE, carries the same rainfall value, so although the model holds 1,633 people, the climate effect rests on at most a dozen period averages. The paper’s own history section describes an event this can’t resolve: a powerful El Niño between 1050 and 1100 CE, followed by a 30-year drought. Folded into averages for the Middle Sicán period (900 to 1050/1100 CE) and the Late Sicán period, each 150 years or longer, that drought shrinks to a modest shift in one or two numbers, set against only 25 injured people. Snyder and Klaus concede that rarity limits their power, which is why the abstract reports no strong evidence for an association rather than evidence against one.What counts as everyday violence in ancient Peru?The choice that shapes the headline number most is one the methods section barely describes: which deaths count. The authors study what they call quotidian, or everyday, violence, so like the regional surveys they build on, they remove sacrifice and massacre victims. It matters here: the paper cites evidence that perhaps more than 1,200 people were buried as offerings atop six monumental huacas, or sacred mounds, at the Sicán capital within as little as 50 years at the start of the Middle Sicán period (Klaus and Shimada 2016). Later Muchik communities, the Indigenous people of this coast, carried out smaller sacrifices at the Chotuna-Chornancap complex and at Túcume, both on the study’s site list.I don’t object to the split itself. Elite-staged mass sacrifice and a fight between neighbors are different social acts, and pooling them would make Lambayeque incomparable with other regions. My objection is that the paper never says how many individuals were removed on these grounds, or how a burial was judged ritual. Burial 48 is a person struck on the head around the time of death at a site with documented sacrifices, and the authors present it as interpersonal violence; I’d want to know what settled that call. And with massacre victims removed too, the measure captures violence between individuals, which may not be where competition over food shows up.Colonial burials are where I think the measure’s limits show most clearly. After the Spanish conquest, Muchik people were forced into colonial towns and exploited for their labor, and the region lost about 40 percent of its population before a slow Indigenous recovery began around 1600 CE. Yet the authors describe skull injuries in their two large colonial samples, from Mórrope and Eten, as nearly absent. The… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

In the central burial chamber of a princely tomb in Tyva, in southern Siberia, human hair survived for roughly 2,800 years, and several samples give clear chemical signals consistent with cannabinol, a compound that can form when the main intoxicant in cannabis oxidizes. The tomb belonged to high-ranking members of Scythian society, the horse-riding culture of the Eurasian steppe, and it also held about 1,000 cannabis seeds. A new paper in Science presents these finds as the earliest direct evidence of ancient cannabis use.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 usThe 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 con… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

On the Danish islands, the local ancestry that had been widespread between about 2200 and 1600 BP had essentially disappeared by 1250 BP, roughly a century before the Viking Age. (BP means calibrated years before present, with the present fixed at 1950 CE.) In its place, the Scandinavian-related ancestry of most individuals is best modelled by an Iron Age source from northern Germany or southern Jutland. That is the central finding on Viking ancestry in a new ancient DNA study of how the Germanic languages spread. It was published with a companion paper that applies the same data to the origin of the Celtic languages.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. 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

The last centimeter of hair from a girl of about eight, buried on the volcano Chuscha in Argentina during the Inca Empire, holds a chemical missing from the five centimeters grown before it. That chemical is cocaethylene, which the liver makes when cocaine and alcohol are in the blood together. Its arrival suggests that in roughly the final month of her life this child was drinking heavily while taking coca. Earlier tests on the same mummy found no cocaine at all.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 Antiquity 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 Chu… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

At position 996 of a collagen chain called COL1A2, the protein extracted from a right parietal bone from Xujiayao, a Middle Pleistocene site in the Nihewan Basin of northern China, carries lysine in 57 distinct peptides and arginine in one. The second Xujiayao specimen sampled, a mandibular ramus, gives 61 lysine-bearing peptides against a single arginine one. Every Denisovan with protein or genome data carries lysine at that position, while Neanderthals and modern humans carry arginine, and those two bones are the main reason the Xujiayao hominins are now being called Denisovan.Since the fossils came out of the ground between 1976 and 1979, Xujiayao has been filed as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, as early H. sapiens, as archaic H. sapiens, and, to avoid the argument, as archaic Homo. Most recently it became the holotype of Homo juluensis, a species proposed partly on the 1,700 ml endocranial capacity of the Xujiayao 6 cranium (Wu et al., Journal of Human Evolution, 2022). If you follow East Asian Middle Pleistocene hominins, you probably carry a picture of Dali, Jinniushan and Hualongdong as archaic humans with unsettled names, and of Denisovans as a lineage known from a genome plus a few molecularly confirmed jaws and one cranium.The paper appeared in Nature on 21 October 2026. Song Xing, Zhongyou Wu, Qingfeng Shao and Junyi Ge are the equal-contribution first authors, and Qiaomei Fu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing is the corresponding author. The team sampled two of the 20 Xujiayao cranial, mandibular and dental fossils, recovered 18 endogenous ancient proteins, and concluded that the assemblage belongs to a late Middle Pleistocene East Asian Denisovan population. They then compared skull and jaw anatomy across East Asian archaic Homo and argued that most of those fossils, Dali, Jinniushan and Hualongdong included, are Denisovan as well, and that the size gap behind H. juluensis is variation within one population. This post is about how much of that sweeping reclassification two bones and one amino acid can carry.How do researchers know the proteins are ancient?The sampling was minimal. The team CT-scanned both specimens first (37.56 μm resolution), then drilled a small hole in each in a dedicated clean room, shielding the surrounding bone with aluminium foil. They dissolved the powder, split the proteins into fractions, and digested them with trypsin, an enzyme that cuts proteins into short peptides. A mass spectrometer then reads the mass of each peptide fragment, which allows the amino acid sequence to be inferred. The runs were done in two independent laboratories, one at Capital Medical University and one at Fudan University, and the data were searched with two software packages, PEAKS Online and MaxQuant. Extraction blanks were processed alongside the samples, and a modern camel bone served as a positive control.The hard part with any ancient protein is separating the real thing from modern contamination, and the authors lean on deamidation. Over long burial, the amino acids asparagine and glutamine slowly lose an amine group, so ancient proteins show high deamidation and fresh contaminants show little. In specimen PA1490 (the parietal), the main bone collagens had asparagine deamidation of 61.4 to 94.7% and glutamine deamidation of 44.9 to 92.6%, while keratins and trypsin, the usual contaminants, sat at 0.0 to 5.3% and 0.0 to 7.7%. PA1497 (the mandible) looks similar. After that filter, plus removal of peptides that could not be tied to a single gene, anything seen in the blanks, and anything MaxQuant could not confirm, 18 endogenous proteins remained: 13 for PA1490 and 15 for PA1497. Figure 2b gives the endogenous share of peptides as 91.4% for PA1490 and 94.1% for PA1497, and the extraction blank scores 0.0.The taxonomic call comes in two steps. Searches against a mammalian type I collagen database placed both samples in the genus Homo, and the team then looked at single amino acid polymorphisms (SAPs), positions where sequences differ between lineages. The informative one is COL1A2-996. The paper’s Figure 3 shows the supporting peptides, 207 peptide-spectrum matches (individual spectra assigned to a peptide) for PA1490 and 244 for PA1497. The lysine peptides also show elevated deamidation at nearby residues (Asn977 at 69.2% and 69.4%, Gln1002 at 100% in both), which argues that they are genuinely ancient. The authors also built a Bayesian tree from 2,074 amino acid positions in eight proteins, with Denisova3, the Altai and Vindija 33.19 Neanderthals, 50 present-day humans from the Human Genome Diversity Project, and a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) as outgroup. Xujiayao and the Denisovans form a clade with posterior probability above 99%.Within that clade the tree gives nothing: individuals fall into unstable arrangements with posterior probabilities below 50%, because no variant other than COL1A2-996K is shared. That is why the authors say only that Xujiayao is Denisovan in a general sense, without placing it relative to Xiahe, Penghu, Harbin or Denisova Cave. The dating, for what it is worth, is 199 to 138 ka from combined uranium-series and electron-spin-resonance methods (Shao et al., Quaternary Science Reviews, 2026), which makes Xujiayao about contemporary with the earliest confirmed Denisovans from northeastern China and southern Siberia.Does skull shape make Dali and Jinniushan Denisovan too?This is where I slow down, because the molecular result covers two bones and the morphological claim covers most of East Asia. With Xujiayao and Harbin both classed as Denisovan, the authors characterize a Denisovan skull. It has erectus-like traits (a low, wide neurocranium; a vault 7.7 mm thick at bregma and 12.0 mm at the parietal tubercle on Xujiayao 6), derived traits shared with later Homo (a strongly arched temporal squama), and a combination found in neither H. erectus nor modern humans: a low profile with near-parallel lateral walls, a nearly vertical but non-rounded occipital, and a mandible with a depression in the planum triangulare. They then check whether Dali, Jinniushan, Hualongdong and Xuchang show the same suite, and conclude that they do.I find the Xujiayao assignment far stronger than that extension, for a reason the paper concedes itself: the suite “does not appear simultaneously in individual specimens but manifests in different forms or combinations across various specimens.” A definition that tolerates different combinations in different fossils is hard to falsify, and the definition was built from Xujiayao an… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

Seven and a half meters down in Shanidar Cave, in the Zagros Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, the left shoulder blade, or scapula, of a Neanderthal had lain for some 75,000 years with a hole through it. The bone was too soft to pick up. The excavators soaked it where it lay with an acrylic consolidant, Paraloid B72 dissolved in acetone, backed it with cotton gauze, and cut it out of the ground inside a block of its own sediment; it had come through nearly whole, which is rare for a bone so thin in places that it is almost translucent. The hole sits low on the back of the blade, in the broad hollow anatomists call the infraspinous fossa. It is about 15 millimeters across and very nearly a perfect circle, and at least three hairline cracks run out from its rim.“It’s so round, it’s like, what is it?”That was Emma Pomeroy’s first thought, she told Science News. Pomeroy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, is lead author of a study published October 15 in Scientific Reports that describes these bones, dug up in 2019 and 2022, and the person they belonged to, a Neanderthal the team calls Shanidar A. Anyone raised on the phrase Stone Age pictures a killing in this period done with stone, a flake of flint knapped to a point and bound to a shaft. Neanderthals did use weapons like that, but a hafted stone point leaves a different mark. When archaeologists drive replica stone points into carcasses, the wounds come out oval or lozenge-shaped, sometimes a narrow slot, following the flattened section of the blade, whereas a sharpened wooden shaft, round in section, leaves a circle.Shanidar has encouraged the stone picture before. A man excavated there in the 1950s, known as Shanidar 3, has a narrow puncture in his left ninth rib, and in 2009 Steven Churchill, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, and his colleagues tried to reproduce it by driving replica Mousterian and Levallois points into the chests of pig carcasses, using a calibrated crossbow to control the energy of each strike. They judged the wound most consistent with a light, stone-tipped projectile and, because early modern humans were in western Asia at around that time and may already have had throwing weapons, raised the possibility that one of them threw it. The rib had started to heal, so Shanidar 3, who died roughly 50,000 years ago, some 25,000 years after Shanidar A, seems to have lived for weeks after he was hit. The older bone points to a different weapon. The University of Cambridge’s announcement presents the new hole as possibly the first evidence that sharpened wooden spears were used anywhere in the prehistoric Middle East, and possibly the earliest example in the hominin fossil record of lethal violence between individuals with a wooden spear, a second claim the paper itself stops short of.On October 7, in Science Advances, Palmira Saladié and colleagues at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution described 597 pieces of wood from Abric Romaní, a rock shelter near Barcelona that Neanderthals used between about 62,000 and 40,000 years ago. Much of that wood survives only as the shape of where it was: water heavy with calcium carbonate wrapped the pieces in travertine as they rotted, and the excavators recorded the molds. Thirteen had been worked or used, among them two spears, the better preserved 2.45 meters long. Josep Vallverdú, an archaeologist at the institute, told Gizmodo that the simplest lesson of the site was that the Paleolithic was “not a world made only of stone,” a strange thing to need to say about a period whose name means Old Stone Age. It needs saying because stone is what lasts, so stone is what archaeologists mostly have; wooden shafts, handles and spears turn up only where some accident of chemistry has kept them.Shanidar has no travertine and no waterlogged mud. Apart from pollen and charred wood, the paper notes, the cave has kept almost nothing organic, so the spear that went through Shanidar A is gone, and the only record of it is the space it took up on its way out of the body. That is why the hole has been worth the trouble the Cambridge team has taken over it. Read closely enough, it is a cast of a weapon nobody will ever hold, and perhaps a little more than that, a record of the direction the weapon came from, which is as close as the evidence gets to whoever was at the other end of it.A root can bore through buried bone, and so can a burrowing insect or a careless trowel. Because the scapula came out with the sand beneath it still in place, the team could scan the whole block by micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) and look down through the hole into the sediment, where there was no root channel and no burrow of the right width. The rim carries the same crust of manganese oxide as the rest of the bone, so the hole is old, and its edges show no remodeling and none of the disorganized woven bone a living body lays down when it starts to repair a wound. The cracks running from it, the kind that form when fresh bone gives way under a sudden load, put it at the time of death; perimortem, in the paper’s term.A video of a 3D rendering of the hole in the scapula and fragments embedded in the sediment underneath the scapula in situ prior to conservation. Credit: Dr. Emma PomeroyThen the scans showed something better than an absence. In the sand directly under the hole lay at least four slivers of bone, each at least 4 millimeters long. One of them can be fitted back into the edge of the hole with confidence, because a faint ridge on the inner face of the scapula, a linea muscularis, where muscle once anchored, runs from the blade across the break and onto the fragment, the way a road lines up again across the two halves of a torn map. The others probably came from the hole as well, but they are small and brittle, and some broke further during recovery and conservation, so where each belongs in the rim can no longer be worked out. Whatever went through the bone punched them out and carried them a short way into the soft tissue on the back of the shoulder blade, and there they stopped. As the body decayed, the fine sand it lay in probably trickled into the spaces the flesh left behind and held them in place, and when floodwater later tore through and carried off most of the skeleton, the slivers stayed where they were, sheltered by the ridge of the scapular spine, which lay upstream of them.On the back of the blade the rim of the hole flares outward in a shallow bevel. Bone fails rather like glass struck by a pellet, chipping away in a cone on the side the force leaves by, so a bevel marks an exit, and this one says the weapon came through the chest from the front and left through the shoulder blade. The slivers add the angle. They were pushed slightly outward, toward the arm, and slightly down, toward the feet, and they lie tilted away from the center of the hole, from which the authors infer that the weapon entered from above and from nearer the midline of the body, heading down and outward to the left shoulder blade; if it was then pulled back out through the front, tha… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

At the Ōzuka tomb, five horses parade across the stone gateway leading into the burial chamber. Their eyes are large and deliberate. Their harnesses are picked out in careful color. You can tell, from the way the artist rendered their bodies, which animals are male and which are female. Riding them are six human figures, and every one of them is a stick. No faces. No sex. One rider is drawn at roughly a quarter the size of his own horse.This wasn’t a failure of skill. The same hands that gave the horses anatomical precision chose, apparently on purpose, to leave the people blank. A new study by Claudia Zancan, published in Antiquity, argues that this wasn’t an isolated quirk of one tomb but a consistent regional pattern across the decorated tombs of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, and that the pattern tells us something specific about how these communities thought about death.A Regional Style That Refused to IndividualizeKyushu sits closest to the Korean Peninsula of any part of Japan, and during the sixth and seventh centuries it absorbed plenty of continental influence. Across the water, Koguryŏ tombs painted the dead as dominant, detailed figures towering over their servants and animals, exactly the kind of imagery you’d expect from an elite burial tradition that wanted to broadcast the status of the person inside. Kyushu had access to that visual vocabulary. It didn’t use it.Zancan’s study systematically catalogued anthropomorphic figures across 38 decorated tombs, 20 painted and 18 rock-cut, and found the same thing again and again: human figures rendered smaller than the objects around them, stripped of individualizing detail, and, in every single case in the sample, impossible to sex. Not one figure across the entire corpus shows primary or secondary sexual characteristics, even in tombs where the artists were clearly capable of that level of detail. Compare that to contemporary Kyushu funerary sculpture like sekijin stone figures or the haniwa of the Kanto region, both of which do occasionally mark sex and social role. The anonymity in the tomb paintings looks like a choice, not a limitation.This matters because the period itself was a moment of real transformation in Japanese mortuary practice. Older Kofun-period burials were sealed pits, built once and closed for good. The horizontal stone chambers that appear in the Late Kofun period could be reopened, over and over, for successive interments. A tomb stopped being a monument to one death and became a space for ongoing ritual. Zancan’s argument is that the imagery inside these chambers reflects that shift. If a tomb is going to be reopened for generations, its decoration doesn’t need to commemorate the specific person laid to rest last. It needs to do something else.Borrowing a classification system originally built for Iberian rock art, Zancan mapped where the human figures actually sit within the architecture of each tomb, and three locations kept recurring. On the exterior façades of rock-cut tombs, figures appear holding weapons, facing outward, and these are the only figures in the entire corpus with anything resembling faces. They read as guardians, warding off whatever might approach from outside. Inside, at the entrance to the burial chamber, a second set of figures marks the threshold itself, the physical and symbolic boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. This is architecturally and mythologically loaded ground in Japanese tradition. It’s the same threshold where the god Izanagi, in the origin myth, searches for his dead wife Izanami and finds her transformed by the underworld. And at the very back of the chamber, on the rear wall closest to where the body would be laid, the human figures shrink to their smallest scale of all.None of these three positions functions as a portrait spot. Read together, they sketch a route: guarded threshold, liminal crossing, final resting place. The figures aren’t depicting who died. They’re depicting the passage every dead person takes to become an ancestor.What the Human Figure Was Actually ForThere’s a reflex, when looking at a burial, to go looking for the individual. Sex, rank, personal effects, some marker of who this specific person was in life. Zancan’s study is essentially an argument against applying that reflex here. The tombs of Kyushu weren’t organized around commemorating a particular Homo sapiens life. They were organized around a process, a transition from person to ancestor, and the human figures in the paintings were symbolic participants in that process rather than likenesses of anyone in particular.That reframes what the small size and blank faces are actually doing. They aren’t evidence of an underdeveloped visual tradition sitting in the shadow of more sophisticated continental art. They’re evidence of a community using abstraction on purpose, choosing anonymity as a way of expressing something collective rather than personal. Scale, in these tombs, seems to track ritual importance rather than realism. The horses at Ōzuka are large because horses carried real symbolic weight in the funerary procession being depicted. The riders are small because whoever they represent doesn’t matter as an individual. What matters is that someone is making the journey.Zancan notes that this pattern has never been systematically tested outside Kyushu, and much of the physical evidence needed to test it is disappearing. Pigment degrades. Stone erodes. Some of these tombs have already lost the imagery that would let anyone verify whether the same rules of anonymity and placement hold elsewhere in Japan. Whatever answer that question eventually gets, it’s going to depend on how much of this material survives long enough to be looked at again. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

A drained lakebed in the mountains of Jotunheimen doesn’t look like much: gray silt, exposed stone, the odd meltwater channel cutting through it. But in 2022, when the water level at Lake Tesse dropped for its usual spring maintenance, someone walking the exposed mud spotted wood poking out of the ground. Not driftwood. Poles. Dozens of them, still standing upright where they’d been driven into the lakebed, arranged in a tight circular chamber with a fence of angled supports leading into it. A fish trap.That alone wouldn’t be remarkable. People have been building lattice-wall fish traps in Scandinavia for millennia, and the type is well documented from wetland sites across northwestern Europe going back to around 4000 BC. What made this one strange was the radiocarbon date.The trap was closer to 4950 BC. And it sat in a lake that, by every reconstruction of the region’s glacial and hydrological history, should not have had fish in it at all.A landscape with a locked doorLake Tesse sits at 854 meters above sea level in the central Norwegian mountains, fed and drained by a river system that eventually reaches the Oslofjord. The ice sheet that covered this terrain for most of the last glacial period didn’t finish retreating from the area until around 8400 BC. Once it did, the landscape opened up fast, both to colonizing plants and animals and to the hunter-fisher-gatherer groups moving in from the coasts. Fish followed too, but only where they could. In the lowlands, trout, pike, and a couple dozen other species swam upstream from the sea and from the shrinking freshwater and brackish remnants of the Baltic as relative sea levels dropped through the Early Holocene.Above a certain elevation, that migration hit a wall. Literally: waterfalls and steep gradients along the Tessa River made it physically impossible for fish to swim up into Lake Tesse from the watercourses below. Historically, the lower stretches of that same river system supported around twenty-five species. The upper stretches, cut off by the falls, supported exactly one: brown trout. Not because brown trout were better adapted to alpine conditions than everything else. Because brown trout were the only species that ever got up there, and they didn’t get up there on their own.That’s the setup the new paper, published in Antiquity by Axel Mjærum and colleagues at the University of Oslo, is working with. If fish couldn’t climb the falls, and Lake Tesse had fish anyway, something else put them there. The obvious candidate, in a lake that’s been renowned since the twentieth century as one of Norway’s most productive trout fisheries (it once yielded close to nine tonnes of fish a year before it was dammed for hydro-power in the 1940s), is people. The trap dating just pushes back how far that “something else” goes. Considerably.What the poles actually showThe excavation recovered four traps in total, with 73 individual poles subjected to dendrological and radiocarbon analysis. The construction itself is unglamorous and entirely functional: small stems of Scots pine, with some birch and willow mixed in, averaging about 37 millimeters in diameter, driven vertically into the lakebed to form a circular chamber roughly 3.5 meters across, braced by poles set at 30 to 45 degree angles. Cut marks and traces of lashing show the wood was deliberately worked, not just accumulated debris. It’s the kind of trap ethnographically documented across the Nordic countries well into the twentieth century, built in spring, fished through summer, sometimes maintained and rebuilt over years.The dating is where it gets interesting. Trap 5 comes back at roughly 4950 BC via radiocarbon on its outer tree rings, placing it squarely in the Late Mesolithic. Trap 2 dates to around 5000 BC as well. Trap 1, dated both by radiocarbon and by cross-matching against a regional pine tree-ring chronology from Jämtland, Sweden, comes out at 3850 BC, with two of its posts felled about twelve years apart, suggesting the structure was periodically rebuilt rather than used once and abandoned. Trap 3 is later still, around 2700 BC. Altogether, the traps at Tesse span more than two thousand years of use, starting in the Mesolithic and continuing well into the Neolithic, long after farming had arrived in southern Scandinavia but before it had displaced hunting, fishing, and gathering as the dominant subsistence base in this particular region.The Tesse traps aren’t isolated evidence, either. Burned fish bone from nine other sites across the Jotunheimen and Hardangervidda mountains has produced radiocarbon dates that predate 1700 BC, five of them clustering in the fifth millennium BC, roughly contemporary with the earliest Tesse traps. Where the bones have been identified to species, they’re brown trout, and only brown trout. Given that lowland fishing assemblages from the same period are far more taxonomically diverse, that pattern is hard to explain as fish being caught elsewhere and hauled up into the mountains as preserved food. It looks instead like the same species being deliberately introduced, over and over, at multiple lakes.Ruling out the alternative explanation matters here, because there is one on the table: birds. Waterfowl are known to carry fish eggs on their feet or feathers over short distances, and it’s been proposed as a mechanism for colonizing isolated water bodies. But the case against it in the Norwegian mountains is fairly clean. If birds were doing the work, you’d expect a scatter of species turning up unpredictably across different lakes, not the same single species appearing again and again with what looks like reasonable synchrony across a two-thousand-year window. Genetic work on modern mountain trout populations backs this up too: their population structure points to repeated, stepwise upstream translocations within river systems rather than one-off natural colonization events.None of this is unprecedented for later periods. Fishing rights over mountain lakes show up in European texts from the fourteenth century onward, already assuming fish had been introduced. A twelfth-century Norwegian runestone references the practice explicitly. Sedimentary ancient DNA from a Spanish Pyrenean lake recently pushed the confirmed record of human fish introduction back to the seventh century AD. What the Tesse dates do is detonate that timeline. Not centuries. Millennia. And crucially, they place the origin of the practice not with farmers, but with people who had no farming at all.Why bother moving fish into the mountainsThere’s an economic logic buried in this that’s worth sitting with, because it isn’t really about fishing for its own sake. Norwegian Mesolithic hunter-fisher-gatherers, judging from rock art, faunal assemblages dominated by ungulates, and sites clustered along known elk and reindeer migration corridors, put serious cultural weight on big-game hunting. The Langfonne ice patch, just eleven kilometers from Lake Tesse, has produced evidence of reindeer hunting going back to at least the fifth millennium BC. But big-game hunting in mountain terrain is unpredictable and risky. Success rates are low, and a bad trip into the high country can mean a long stretch with nothing to show for it.Introducing a stable population of brown trout into a mountain lake changes that calculation. Trout are calorically dense, comparatively easy to catch relative to elk or reindeer, and once established, they don’t run away or migrate elsewhere. A fish population effectively domesticates the risk profile of the mountains, turning them into something closer to the resource-rich lowland environments these groups already knew how to exploit. That, in turn, makes it feas… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe