A new review article in the Annual Review of Anthropology,1 authored by Sean Tallman and colleagues at Boston University, examines why this gap between what skeletal biologists know and what they practice has proven so durable. The answer, they argue, is not primarily methodological. It is cultural, historical, and in some respects ideological.

The standard workflow in forensic osteology asks analysts to produce a biological profile from skeletonized remains: age at death, stature, ancestry or population affinity, and sex estimation. For the sex component, practitioners examine the pelvis, the skull, the long bones, and other features, then render a judgment: female or male. The methods are presented, and largely taught, as though the underlying biology were reliably dimorphic. It mostly is. But “mostly” is doing a lot of work in a field that feeds into medico-legal determinations about real people.

Sex in living humans is not a two-position switch. Hormonal profiles vary. Chromosomal patterns vary. External anatomy varies. So does internal anatomy, and so does the skeleton that develops under the influence of all of the above. Intersex conditions, transgender individuals whose bodies have been shaped by hormone therapies, and people who fall outside expected morphological ranges for their chromosomal sex all present complications that the binary framework handles poorly, or does not handle at all.

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If sleep science worked the way most public health messaging implies it does, that gap should show up in the data as a gap in wellbeing. Japan should look, on paper, like a nation quietly grinding itself down. It doesn’t. Diabetes rates, heart disease, obesity, life expectancy: none of it tracks with how long a country sleeps. In a separate analysis of 353 national sleep averages pulled from 14 different datasets covering 71 countries, the team found no relationship between a country’s average sleep duration and its rates of heart disease, diabetes, or life expectancy. Stranger still, countries where people slept longer had higher obesity rates, the opposite of the pattern researchers have repeatedly found when they study individuals within a single country.

This is the kind of result that should make you sit up. Not because it’s surprising in isolation. Findings about sleep and individuals are everywhere, and so are claims that whichever number a press release happens to favor is the one that will fix your life. What’s surprising is what happens when you zoom out from individuals to populations. The relationship between sleep and health doesn’t vanish at the national level. It gets reorganized.

What the Curve Actually Looks Like

Inside any given country, the study replicates the familiar shape: a curve, not a line. Sleep too little, your health composite score (built from depression, chronic conditions, subjective health, and overall wellbeing) drops. Sleep too much, it drops again. There’s a sweet spot in the middle, and it’s a real, statistically robust feature of the data within every single country in the sample.

But the position of that sweet spot moves. The researchers found a turning point, the amount of sleep associated with peak health, for each of the 20 countries individually, and those turning points differed significantly from one another. The optimal number isn’t one number. It’s twenty numbers, one per culture, and they don’t converge.

What did converge, across every country studied, was something else entirely: the gap between how much people actually slept and where their personal curve peaked. In every country, average sleep duration fell short of the turning point. Everyone, everywhere, is sleeping somewhat less than their own culture’s apparent optimum. The shortfall is universal. The optimum is not.

There’s a second result buried in here that’s arguably more interesting than the headline finding, and it has nothing to do with hours. The researchers asked each participant not just how long they’d slept, but what they believed their cultureconsidered an ideal amount of sleep. Then they measured the gap between a person’s actual sleep and their own estimate of that cultural ideal. People whose sleep was closer to what they believed their culture expected, regardless of whether that was six hours or eight, reported better health. The effect held up even after controlling for the raw number of hours slept.

In other words: it’s not just that six hours works for some places and eight works for others. It’s that matching the local norm, whatever that norm happens to be, carries its own independent health signal. The researchers floated a few explanations. Maybe people feel subjectively healthier when their habits feel normal. Maybe there’s friction, low-grade and cumulative, in being out of step with everyone around you (worrying about missing the early train, structuring your evening around a schedule nobody else keeps). Maybe it’s something more biological: people whose sleep architecture doesn’t fit their environment may be, for reasons unrelated to the hours themselves, less healthy to begin with, and the correlation runs the other direction. The data can’t distinguish between these, and the authors are upfront that it’s correlational throughout. But the fact that “fit” predicts health independently of “amount” is the kind of finding that quietly reframes the whole question.

The View From Three Million Years Back

None of this happens in a vacuum, obviously, and one of the more useful frames for thinking about why a six-hour average and an eight-hour average can both sit at the top of their respective curves comes from outside the PNAS paper entirely.

David Samson, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Toronto, has spent years studying sleep across the primate order, lemurs, orangutans, chimpanzees, and eventually humans themselves, including extended fieldwork living alongside the Hadza in Tanzania and the BaYaka in the Republic of the Congo. His phylogenetic models, built from sleep data across more than 30 primate species and controlling for body size, brain size, social structure, and terrestriality, generate a prediction for how much Homo sapiens “should” sleep given our biology: about 11.5 hours per 24-hour period.

We sleep, on average, about seven.

That’s not a small discrepancy. Owl monkeys sleep up to 17 hours. Tarsiers manage 15. Lemurs sit around 13 to 14. Great apes, our closest relatives, average somewhere between 9.5 and 10. Humans are the outlier of the entire order, the primates who sleep the least, by a wide margin, relative to what their biology would predict.

Samson’s argument, laid out in his book The Sleepless Ape,2 is that this isn’t a deficit. It’s the result of a real evolutionary shift, one he dates to roughly 1.8 million years ago, when Homo erectus began building shelters. Once you have a controlled sleeping environment, natural selection has room to start trimming non-REM sleep, gradually, over hundreds of thousands of years. At the same time, the advent of cooking with fire collapsed the daily chewing budget. Chimpanzees spend five to six hours a day chewing raw food. Gorillas spend up to eleven. Cooked food cut that down to roughly an hour for humans. Between the sleep reduction and the chewing reduction, Samson estimates our ancestors freed up something on the order of four extra hours a day, time that could go toward toolmaking, social bonding, teaching, and the kind of cumulative culture that no other primate manages at scale.

The “human sleep paradox” is that we’re the short-sleeping primate who also lives the longest and thinks the hardest. Samson’s framing is that the short sleep isn’t despite our cognitive advantages. It’s bound up with how we got them.

Where the Stories Meet, and Where They Don’t

Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting, because the two pictures, the PNAS cross-cultural data and Samson’s evolutionary one, line up in one place and pull apart in another.

They agree on the headline: humans sleep less than the textbooks have generally assumed they should, and it’s not a crisis. The widespread narrative of a modern “sleep deprivation epidemic,” driven by phones and stress and artificial light, gets undercut from two completely independent directions. The PNAS data shows no health penalty for nations that sleep less. And Samson’s fieldwork found something that should be more alarming to that narrative than it usually gets credit for: small-scale societies like the Hadza and the BaYaka sleep less than industrialized populations, not more, averaging around 6.4 hours, with sleep efficiency around 70%, well below the 85% the National Sleep Foundation considers high quality. If anyone should be sleeping “naturally,” free of screens and shift work and 11pm emails, it’s hunter-gatherers. And they’re sleeping worse, by the conventional metrics, than people in Tokyo or Toronto.

So why aren’t they falling apart? Samson’s answer points toward circadian alignment rather than duration: groups like the Himba, who he describes as averaging around four and a half hours of sleep a night, show solid cardiovascular and mental health markers, which he attributes to their internal biological clocks being tightly synchronized with their actual environment, light, temperature, activity, in a way that industrialized sleepers, insulated by climate control and artificial lighting, generally are not.

This is where the PNAS finding about “cultural fit” starts to look less like a soft psychological add-on and more like it might be pointing at the same underlying mechanism from a completely different angle. The PNAS researchers measured fit to a perceived social norm, what your culture expects. Samson’s framework is about fit to a physical environment, what your biology expects. These aren’t the same thing, and the paper doesn’t make this connection, doesn’t even gesture at Samson’s work at all. But it’s hard not to wonder whether “matching your culture’s sleep norm” and “matching your environment’s light and temperature cycle” are, in many traditional societies, simply the same variable measured twice. The social schedule and the solar schedule used to be the same schedule. In a lot of the modern world, they’ve come apart, and you’re free to match one without the other.

Where the two pictures genuinely diverge is on what counts as the unit of explanation. Samson’s framework is a species-level story: humans, as a species, evolved to need less sleep than the primate baseline would predict, full stop, and the explanation is fire and shelter and a few hundred thousand years of selection pressure. The PNAS data doesn’t dispute that humans sleep less than other primates, nobody’s claiming we should be at 11 hours, but it insists that even within the human range, “how much” isn’t settled by species-level biology alone. The turning points for the health curve differ by a measurable, statistically significant amount across 20 countries that share the same evolutionary history. Whatever Samson’s 1.8-million-year story explains, it doesn’t explain why Japan’s optimum and France’s optimum land somewhere different. That gap is being filled by something that operates on a much faster timescale than natural selection, something closer to culture, climate, light exposure, work schedules, the things that differ between Tokyo and Paris but not between Homo sapiens in Tokyo and Homo sapiens anywhere else.

Latitude turns out to be one of the few variables that predicts sleep duration with any consistency across both studies, longer sleep further from the equator, which the PNAS authors note replicates earlier work. But latitude alone doesn’t explain the turning points, and it doesn’t explain why “fit to your culture’s expectation” carries an independent health signal on top of the raw hours. There’s a gap here, between what the species-level evolutionary story explains and what the population-level cultural story describes, and as far as either piece of work goes, nobody’s filled it yet.

What both perspectives share, in the end, is a quiet correction to a piece of received wisdom: that there’s a number, and the number is the same for everyone, and falling short of it is a failure of modern life. The PNAS data says the number depends on where you live and what your neighbors expect. Samson’s evolutionary framing says the number depends on what your species did with the time it freed up by needing less of it in the first place. Neither one says seven hours is wrong. They just disagree, interestingly, about what “right” would even mean.

The team behind the study,1 led by Serena Tucci’s lab at Yale, found evidence for introgression from three genetically distinct Denisovan-like lineages into the ancestors of Near Oceanians. Not one Denisovan population contributing DNA at different points in time, but three separate groups, each with a measurably different genetic affinity to the only Denisovan genome ever sequenced from a fossil, the Altai individual from Siberia. East Asians, by comparison, carry signatures of just two such pulses. Whatever “Denisovan” actually denotes, in genetic terms, it now looks less like a single population and more like a loose federation of related but separate lineages, scattered across Asia, each leaving a different trace depending on who their descendants happened to meet and interbreed with.

This finding didn’t come cheap. Near Oceania has been one of the most persistently underrepresented regions in human genomics, despite harboring some of the deepest population history outside Africa. The region was settled around 42,000 years ago and then largely left alone, geographically and demographically, for tens of thousands of years. The new dataset, 177 high-coverage genomes sequenced to a median depth of over 31x and analyzed alongside 1,284 genomes from populations worldwide, gave the researchers enough resolution to detect signals that smaller, earlier studies simply couldn’t see.

What they recovered was a genuinely enormous amount of archaic sequence. Altogether, the team reconstructed 1.897 billion base pairs of introgressed DNA spanning over 70% of the parts of the genome where such sequence can reliably be detected. More than a quarter of that, some 505 million base pairs, had never been documented before. And of the Denisovan-derived sequence specifically, the total came to 831.9 million base pairs, nearly three times what had been catalogued previously, with most of it found in the newly sequenced Oceanic samples. Sepik individuals from New Guinea carried the most of any population sampled, with roughly 25 times more Denisovan sequence than is typical in East Asian genomes.

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Those plant remains just became the most informative objects in the burial.

A new study1 by Dominika Sieczkowska-Jacyna and colleagues took three short-lived botanical samples from the Maiden’s grave goods, coca leaves, manioc seeds, and maize, and ran them through radiocarbon dating alongside a battery of isotope measurements. The goal was straightforward: get a tighter date on when the capacocha ritual at Llullaillaco actually happened. The previous estimate, based on radiocarbon dating of the children’s hair back in 2007, had placed the event somewhere between 1430 and 1520 CE. That’s an 90-year window, which in practical terms means it covers almost the entire span of documented Inca presence in the region. You can’t build an argument about why something happened politically if your date for when spans three or four successive rulers.

The new analysis narrows that window to 1462–1507 CE, with a statistical center of gravity around 1499. And the way the researchers got there is, frankly, a more interesting story than the date itself.

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“It was obvious that this was not just any find, but a special one,” he later said. He told his field team something simpler in the moment: “Here we have an article.1”

What they’d found were chuño, freeze-dried potatoes, and they were roughly 500 years old. Only a handful of archaeological examples exist anywhere, and the last comparable discovery was made more than a century ago, at Pachacamac. The Tambo Viejo chuños are not just old food. They’re physical evidence of one of the Inca state’s most underappreciated logistical achievements: moving a fragile, high-altitude crop across hundreds of kilometers to a desert coastline, and keeping it edible for centuries afterward.

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That’s the thing you need to sit with for a moment. Not the writing question, not the calendar question, but the strangeness of the object itself. A human body, breasts and navel rendered with care, and then above the chest — nothing recognizable. Just a tab of clay, blank except for those eleven pressed marks.

More than 300 of these “tab” figurines have been found at La Blanca over decades of excavation. Julia Guernsey, Stephanie Strauss, and Michael Love, the team behind a new study published in Latin American Antiquity,1 have worked through the site’s figurine assemblage long enough to know that the tab form was deliberate, meaningful, and consistent. Tabs sometimes have earspools. Some have headbands. The absence of a face was not a failure of craft. It was the point. The projecting tab, devoid of prescribed features, may have functioned as a kind of blank slate — a head freed from fixed identity, open to other kinds of marking.

Only one La Blanca figurine, of the several thousand found, was ever marked with dots like these.

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Her brain was removed. The base of her skull shows a fracture pattern inconsistent with any known accident: not a fall, not a collapse, not a drop from a height. The break radiates across the right occipital bone in a way the researchers who reanalyzed her remains describe as most consistent with an intentional targeted impact. Whether that blow came at or just before death is unclear. What happened next is somewhat easier to read. The interior surface of her frontal bone carries straight, parallel striations — fine incisions running across the inside of her skull, made with a sharp implement while the bone was fresh. Brain removal, probably shortly after death.

Then her long bones were worked. Both humeri, the left ulna, the left femur: all present in the grave as fragments, roughly half their original length. They weren’t gnawed. The cut surfaces don’t match rodent activity. Instead, the cortical bone has been stripped back and the exposed inner material whittled to a sharp, pointed end. One femoral fragment shows something more: a flat, smoothed margin at the tip, as if the point had been pressed and worn against another surface. Use-wear, on a human thighbone.

After all of this, every modified bone was laid back into anatomically correct position within a low stone cairn on the Durness Peninsula, at the far north-western edge of the Scottish mainland. Reassembled. Deliberate.

The site is called Loch Borralie. The woman — Individual 1 in the published analysis by Laura Castells Navarro and colleagues at the University of York, published in Antiquity1 — was probably over thirty years old at death, most likely female based on ancient DNA. Beside her, slightly later in the stratigraphy, lay a juvenile of about fifteen. These are the only two bodies found in the cairn.

A body between worlds

One of the persistent puzzles of Iron Age Britain is that most people, archaeologically speaking, simply disappear. Formal cemeteries with tidy inhumations are rare; the period runs roughly from 800 BC to the Roman conquest in AD 43, and across most of that span and most of that geography, archaeologists struggle to find the dead at all. The favoured interpretation is that excarnation or exposure was common — bodies left to decompose, scatter, return to the landscape — leaving little trace.

What survives tends to be stranger. Human remains turn up under house floors, in grain storage pits, at settlement boundaries. Not buried so much as incorporated. The dead, in this reading, remained active within the world of the living: their bones kept, circulated, modified, deployed. North-west Scotland and the Northern and Western Isles preserve the clearest evidence for this, partly because the environmental conditions are good for bone survival. Mummification has been identified at Cladh Hallan on South Uist. Modified bones — perforated skull fragments, bones worked into objects — appear across Atlantic Scotland with enough regularity that they constitute a pattern.

Individual 1 at Loch Borralie fits somewhere in this tradition, though her treatment goes beyond most parallels. The closest single analog for her modified long bones comes from Wag of Forse in Caithness, where a human femur worked to a point — showing extensive wear, polish, and red staining — had been placed under the entrance of an Iron Age roundhouse. Another worked femoral fragment, polished through use, came from a ditch at Fairfield Park in Bedfordshire. The Loch Borralie bones predate the Caithness example by several centuries, but the practice appears consistent enough to suggest a tradition rather than an anomaly.

What the bones were used for is genuinely unknown. The team is careful not to overclaim. Brain removal could reflect cannibalism, but there’s no evidence of the long-bone processing for marrow extraction that typically accompanies it. It could reflect a practice of cleaning and preserving the skull for curation or display — something attested elsewhere in Iron Age contexts. The worked long bones may have functioned as implements of some kind; the femoral wear suggests actual use, but the other three modified bones show no comparable signs. And then, after whatever period of use or curation, the whole assemblage was laid out correctly, bones in their right places, and covered by stone.

The team’s interpretation, offered cautiously, is that this woman’s remains were held and processed for an interval before final deposition. The care of the reassembly, the anatomical precision of the arrangement, suggests reverence rather than disposal. The degree of handling implies sustained engagement, not a single perimortem event.

The juvenile beside her — Individual 2, male, around fifteen — shows none of this complexity. His skeleton is poorly preserved, only about a quarter surviving, and his skull had eroded out of the cairn entirely by the time excavators arrived in 2000. His bones carry signs of developmental disruption: enamel hypoplasia indicating periods of malnutrition in childhood, possible vitamin C deficiency, two fused cervical vertebrae likely congenital. He was not treated after death the way the woman was. His burial is, by comparison, ordinary.

Where they came from, and who they were

The two individuals are related. Their mitochondrial haplogroup — T2b30 — is otherwise unattested in any published ancient individual from Britain. Sharing it almost certainly means shared maternal ancestry. The team’s identity-by-descent analysis, which detects shared DNA fragments too small for standard relatedness algorithms to reliably identify, found four shared segments totaling over 43 centimorgans. The longest runs to about 12 cM, consistent with a fifth-degree or more distant relationship. Given their approximate ages at death, their matching radiocarbon dates placing both deaths between roughly 50 BC and AD 70, and that rare mitochondrial signature, the most probable relationship is second cousins through a shared pair of great-grandparents.

That’s a meaningful connection, but it’s not a parent-child pair, not siblings. They were kin in the way that members of a dispersed extended family are kin — connected, probably known to each other, but not necessarily cohabiting.

Neither of them grew up at Loch Borralie. The isotope signatures preserved in their tooth enamel — strontium, oxygen, sulphur — point consistently toward a coastal upbringing: high strontium concentrations comparable to Iron Age communities on Orkney and the Western Isles, sulphur values typical of coastal populations. The oxygen values narrow this further, excluding western Britain and northern Scotland, pointing instead to a stretch of the east Sutherland coast between roughly modern Helmsdale and Golspie, around 80 kilometers southeast of where they were buried. Individual 1’s enamel reflects her diet and environment between roughly 7.5 and 17.5 years of age; Individual 2’s goes back to toddlerhood. Both signals point the same direction.

The journey from that east coast to Loch Borralie is not trivial. Overland, across the Highlands, it takes several days on foot. By sea, it means navigating the Pentland Firth, one of the most challenging stretches of water in Britain. They likely traveled together, possibly as part of a larger group. They died within decades of each other. And they were buried in the same cairn, though probably not at the same time — the juvenile’s grave cut sits stratigraphically above the woman’s initial deposit.

The genetic picture extends considerably further than the two of them. Identity-by-descent analysis revealed that both individuals share DNA fragments with people buried in Orkney. Individual 1 is genetically related — distantly, perhaps eighth degree or beyond — to a man buried at the Atlantic roundhouse site of Bu, dated to between roughly 400 and 200 BC. That’s at least 150 years before the Loch Borralie woman’s death: possibly a direct ancestor, or the collateral relative of one. Individual 2 connects to a person from Knowe of Skea in Orkney, dated slightly later, broadly contemporary with the Loch Borralie burials.

Both Orcadian individuals, in turn, share distant genetic ties with a man buried in a rubble cairn on a storm beach at Applecross, on the west coast of Scotland, roughly 140 kilometers southwest of Loch Borralie. That site contained the remains of at least six adult males, deposited periodically from the second century BC to the third century AD. The Applecross man is roughly contemporary with the Loch Borralie individuals.

The network this traces runs approximately 265 kilometers, from Applecross in the south to Knowe of Skea in the north, with the Loch Borralie individuals positioned at a kind of geographic midpoint. The people connected by this web almost certainly did not know each other. Many of these biological links bridge generations, even centuries. But as the researchers point out, distant IBD relationships are less a window into personal kinship than a proxy for the movement of people across landscapes and seaways over time. The genetic signal persists long after direct knowledge of family connections would have faded.

What makes this coherent is the shared maritime geography. All of these sites sit on or near the sea. The broch towers that characterize the Iron Age archaeology of Atlantic Scotland — those distinctive drystone roundhouses rising sometimes to ten meters or more — show strikingly similar construction techniques and architectural forms from Shetland to the Western Isles. Shared material culture across a wide coastal arc has always implied connection; the genetic and isotopic data now supply some of its human content. People moved between these communities, carrying whatever they carried — biological ancestry, cultural practices, possibly the bodies of their dead.

The team suggests that the pattern of burial itself — individuals deposited in accumulating rubble cairns or within the ruins of earlier buildings, periodically, over generations — may represent a coherent funerary tradition that has previously gone unrecognized simply because its archaeological footprint is so modest. The cairn at Loch Borralie, the Applecross storm beach, the roundhouse rubble at Bu and Howe of Howe and Knowe of Skea: structurally similar, genetically linked, spread across the northern Scottish seaboard. Not random. A practice with a geography.

The woman at the center of it — reassembled, carefully arranged, her worked bones returned to their anatomical places — remains the hardest part to interpret. Whatever was done to her and with her before that final deposition, the ending looks like care. The people who placed her there knew where every bone belonged.

Further Reading

• Shapland, F. & Armit, I. 2012. The useful dead: bodies as objects in Iron Age and Norse Atlantic Scotland. European Journal of Archaeology 15: 98–116. https://doi.org/10.1179/1461957112Y.0000000004

• Parker Pearson, M. et al. 2021. Cladh Hallan: roundhouses and the dead in the Hebridean Bronze Age and Iron Age, part 1: stratigraphy, spatial organisation and chronology. Oxford: Oxbow.

• Evans, J.A. et al. 2012. A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain. Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry 27: 754–64. https://doi.org/10.1039/C2JA10362A

• Armit, I. & Büster, L. 2020. Darkness visible: the Sculptor’s Cave, Covesea, from the Bronze Age to the Picts. Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

On the other side of the crawl is a chamber roughly 20 meters long. Its west wall bears a panel of black geometric figures drawn in charcoal: triangles, trapezoids, lines. They are striking not because of any naturalistic detail but because of what they share with the nearby Sala de las Pinturas, a more famous and more accessible chamber that researchers have been studying for decades. The stylistic resemblance was noticed before anyone had a date for either site. What was missing, for Sala Keimada, was chronology. That changed with a study published in 2026 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports,1 led by Ana Isabel Ortega-Martínez of the Royal Burgos Academy of History and Fine Arts, presenting 18 new AMS radiocarbon dates for the chamber. The results confirmed what stylistic analysis had long suggested, and then pushed the story much further forward in time.

The oldest date in the dataset, sample SK-1, comes from a small piece of charcoal found on top of one of the finger-fluting engravings at the transition between the entrance crawl and the chamber. It calibrates to approximately 13,500 to 13,700 years before present, placing it squarely in the late Upper Paleolithic. A second sample, SK-2, taken from the charcoal paint forming one of the main black trapezoidal motifs in the chamber itself, calibrates to around 12,750 to 13,200 years before present. The two dates bracket the primary paintings in chronological terms, and they align closely with dates previously obtained for the geometric figures in the Sala de las Pinturas. The two chambers, separated in space and radically different in access difficulty, appear to have been created by the same cultural tradition at roughly the same moment.

This is the rock art tradition scholars classify as Style V, sometimes called Final Paleolithic or Late Paleolithic art, characterized by geometric and semi-abstract forms rather than the grand figurative animals more commonly associated with cave art in the public imagination. Its range spans multiple sites across the Iberian Peninsula and beyond, appearing at La Peña de Estebanvela, Fariseu, Molí del Salt, and Siega Verde, among others.

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But people kept coming back.

Not to live. The evidence doesn’t suggest that. What they left behind is too sparse, too episodic: a scatter of incense burner fragments near a broken stela, a small pile of stacked stone, offerings pressed close to monuments that had been standing (or leaning, or fallen) for centuries before anyone visited again. These aren’t the traces of inhabitants. They look like the traces of pilgrims.

A new study1 by Victoria Ingalls and Brett Houk, published in Latin American Antiquity, adds two more sites to the accumulating picture of this Postclassic ritual landscape. At Kaxil Uinik and Ayiin Winik in northwestern Belize, excavations have turned up Late Postclassic offerings associated with reset Classic-period stelae — and, at Ayiin Winik, something that hadn’t been documented in this region before: an actual altar, built from scavenged limestone blocks, still surrounded by the ceramic fragments left on and around it.

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What changed was the technology. In 2025, a team led by Kenichiro Tsukamoto of the University of California, Riverside, ran a high-resolution 3D scanner — an Artec Spider II, accurate to a tenth of a millimeter — glyph by glyph across the face of Stela 46.1 The device has its own lighting system, eliminating the shadows and flares that had made traditional raking-light photography so unreliable on badly eroded surfaces. Software then allowed the team to illuminate the resulting digital models from dozens of angles simultaneously, revealing the faint contours of carved numerals that centuries of weathering had nearly erased.

What emerged was a Long Count date: 8.7.1.0.0, corresponding to August 31, A.D. 180 in the Gregorian calendar.

That date is currently the earliest known Long Count in the Maya lowlands. It pushes the record back by more than 112 years from the previous holder, Stela 29 at Tikal, which dates to A.D. 292. But the bare chronological priority is almost the least interesting thing about it.

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The site is Vráble-Veľké Lehemby, in the Nitra District, and it belongs to the Linear Pottery culture — the Linearbandkeramik, or LBK — the earliest farming tradition to spread across central Europe. Researchers from Kiel University and the Slovak Academy of Sciences have been excavating it since 2012. The settlement itself is substantial: at least 313 houses, grouped into three spatially distinct neighbourhoods, occupied roughly between 5250 and 4950 BCE. One neighbourhood is enclosed by a double ditch 1.3 kilometres long with at least six entrances. The headless skeletons were found in that ditch, concentrated near one of its entrances, at the bottom of the outer earthwork.

What has accumulated since fieldwork expanded in 2022 is now the subject of a paper by Martin Furholt and colleagues published in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society.1 The find is extraordinary not just for the numbers — 77 headless individuals, with only a single child’s skeleton still possessing a skull — but for what it resists. The first instinct, understandably, is to reach for the massacre explanation. That instinct, the researchers argue, is probably wrong.

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A team led by researchers at Toho University and the University of Tokyo has now done exactly that for a substantial collection of skeletal remains drawn primarily from Edo-period Japan (1603–1868), comparing the results against modern Japanese dental calculus and previously published samples reaching back to the Final Jomon period, around 1000 BCE. The study, published in Scientific Reports,1 recovered oral microbial DNA from 118 ancient individuals excavated from sites across Tokyo, Saitama, Yamanashi, Fukuoka, and Okinawa. What they found complicates any simple narrative about the deep stability of human-associated microbes. The oral microbiome, it turns out, has been changing alongside us — shaped not only by diet and disease, but by the particular texture of historical circumstance, including practices we would not normally think of as biological at all.

The most striking of those practices involves an archaea called Methanobrevibacter oralis.

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The stone tools from GBY have been studied in detail. The basalt assemblage in particular, handaxes and cleavers shaped from large flakes struck off massive cores, tells a story of technical sophistication. The reduction sequence is not simple: a hominin had to identify a suitable basalt slab, work it into a giant core sometimes weighing more than 20 kilograms, detach a large flake, and then shape that flake into a finished biface. Earlier analyses of the GBY assemblage showed that most of this knapping didn’t happen at the site itself. The flake counts don’t add up. There are far too few debitage pieces relative to the number of finished tools, which means the initial reduction stages happened elsewhere, probably where the raw material was obtained, and the finished or near-finished tools were carried in.

But where, exactly, was the basalt coming from? That question turns out to be harder than it sounds.

The Jordan Valley is tectonically active. The Dead Sea Transform has been faulting, tilting, subsiding, and eroding the landscape for millions of years. Basalt flows that were exposed at the surface 780,000 years ago may be buried under tens of meters of sediment today. Flows that exist as outcrops now may represent only a fragment of what was once available. Reconstructing a Pleistocene raw material landscape from what you can see at the surface is a bit like trying to understand a library by examining the books that survived a flood.

A new study1 by Tzahi Golan, Yoav Ben Dor, and Naama Goren-Inbar addresses this problem directly by going underground.

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The Fetter family happened to know a graduate student in Kent State University’s anthropology department. By the next morning, archaeologists were on site. Within that same small patch of ground, excavation revealed two more bifaces buried roughly five centimeters below the first nine. Below them, in the sediment, were flecks of charred wood.

The final count: eleven stone bifaces, now known as the Joshua Cache, donated to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the subject of a study published in 2026 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports1 by Eren and colleagues.

What the team found when they looked closely at these tools is genuinely puzzling. And the puzzle has layers.

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Not metaphorically. When illuminated with a narrow-band blue light at 455 nanometers and viewed through a long-pass red filter, fossil bones that were exposed to fire emit a faint but distinct luminescence. Bones that were never heated do not. The physics is straightforward: thermal alteration changes the crystallographic structure of bone mineral, and those changes shift the wavelength at which the material re-emits absorbed light. The archaeological implication, if the method holds up, is less straightforward. It suggests that Homo erectus populations were bringing fire into the deepest accessible part of a South African cave nearly two million years ago.

The new study, published in PLOS One1 by Marin-Monfort and colleagues, does two things simultaneously: it extends Wonderwerk Cave’s already remarkable fire record further back in time, and it introduces a fast, non-destructive detection method that could reshape how paleoanthropologists search for burning evidence at other sites.

Wonderwerk has attracted attention for decades precisely because it is the kind of site that makes claims about early fire use hard to dismiss. Unlike open-air localities across Africa where burned sediment or lithics could plausibly be the work of seasonal wildfires, Wonderwerk is a cave. A deep one. By the time of the Early Acheulean deposits analyzed here, the excavation area would have sat roughly 30 meters from the cave entrance. Natural grassfires do not penetrate that far. Whatever was burning inside Wonderwerk, something carried it in.

The team’s earlier benchmark was Stratum 10, dated to around one million years ago, where micromorphological analysis by Berna and colleagues had previously documented wood ash, burned large mammal bone, scorched sediment, and heat-fractured stone tools all in association. That was the evidentiary package that established Wonderwerk as one of the world’s most credible early fire sites. The new study digs deeper, literally, into Stratum 11, the layer below, where rough early handaxes signal the onset of the Acheulean. The paleomagnetic signature of Stratum 11 places it within a reversed polarity zone between the Jaramillo and Olduvai subchrons, which gives the broad age range of 1.07 to 1.79 million years. The cosmogenic dating and the faunal biochronology both point toward the older end of that range.

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Fire does strange things to bone. It cracks it, shrinks it, destroys the biological gradients that osteologists normally use to reconstruct a life. Cranial sutures fuse, then fragment. The pubic symphysis warps beyond legibility. The diagnostically useful features of the skeleton disappear into white and cream calcined fragments that yield only broad, ambiguous age categories. A study published in Scientific Reports1 in 2026 — led by Agata Hałuszko of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, working with colleagues at the Medical University of Vienna — asked whether teeth might offer a way through this problem. Specifically, whether the microscopic growth lines preserved inside cremated tooth roots could provide reliable age estimates despite everything the pyre had done.

The answer was largely yes. But the more interesting finding was something the team had not set out to look for.

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A new paper published in the Journal of Quaternary Science1 by Clarke, Veness, Kirkland, and colleagues takes that already remarkable fact and complicates it further. The question they are trying to answer is not just where the stone came from, but how, exactly, it got there. The answer they arrive at is partial, qualified, and in some ways stranger than either of the two leading hypotheses it was designed to test.

Those two hypotheses have been in competition for a while. One holds that Neolithic people moved the stone deliberately, hauling it overland or ferrying it by sea. The other proposes that a glacier did the heavy lifting, carrying the stone southward as an erratic during the last ice age, depositing it somewhere in England where it was later collected and installed. The glacier hypothesis is appealing because it offloads the most logistically implausible part of the problem onto natural forces. The human transport hypothesis is appealing because there is extensive evidence that Neolithic communities across Britain were capable of organizing exactly these kinds of long-distance movements. Neither hypothesis has been fully satisfying. The new paper explains why.

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No cultural heritage impact assessment was conducted before any of it was built.

Ceramics, beads, and coins disturbed during construction were scooped into buckets and piled in a corner. According to one resident who worked on the project, a site manager who was himself an antiquities official directed workers to collect the materials and pile them for “further analysis.” The piles were eventually moved to an antiquities office. Whether they were ever analyzed is not recorded.

This is the picture that emerges from a new study published in Antiquity1 by archaeologists Elgidius B. Ichumbaki of the University of Dar es Salaam and Peter R. Schmidt of the University of Florida. Working across four sites — Kilwa Kisiwani, the Laetoli footprint site, the Kondoa rock art complex, and the Kaiija Early Iron Age shrine in Katuruka — they document a pattern of institutional failure so consistent and so severe that it amounts to a systemic crisis. The threat to Tanzania’s heritage, they argue, is not primarily climate change or looting or war. It is the government itself.

A Reorganization Without Expertise

The story of how this happened begins in 2018. Tanzania’s Department of Antiquities (DoA) had spent years failing to turn cultural heritage sites into the tourism engines the government imagined they could be. Natural parks were generating substantial income; why not ancient ruins and hominin trackways? The DoA could not build the infrastructure or demonstrate economic potential, so the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism reassigned management of dozens of sites to agencies that had no relevant expertise whatsoever. The Tanzania Wildlife Authority (TAWA) took over Kilwa Kisiwani. The Tanzania Forest Services Agency (TFS) was handed the Kondoa rock art sites. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority (NCAA) received Laetoli. The changes were formalized in Government Notice Number 632 of August 2020. The criteria used to decide which agency got which site were never disclosed.

TAWA manages wildlife. TFS manages forests. NCAA manages a conservation area. None of them employ cultural heritage specialists, none have budget lines to hire any, and none can be expected to understand the difference between developing a safari lodge and developing infrastructure within a stratified archaeological deposit. The DoA’s own mandate was preservation and management of antiquities; it had trained personnel, institutional memory, and legal authority. What it apparently lacked was the will to act. The reorganization was, as Ichumbaki and Schmidt read it, not genuine decentralization in any meaningful sense. It was a lateral transfer within the same ministry, a bureaucratic escape from accountability dressed up as reform.

TAWA’s performance at Kilwa Kisiwani illustrates the consequences precisely. The paved footpath running 600 meters through the site required excavating into undisturbed middens to lay concrete borders. An interpretation center was built 100 meters north of the fourteenth-century palace of Husuni Kubwa without any assessment of what lay underground. Every structure was constructed without the heritage impact studies that Tanzanian law and UNESCO protocols both require.

Footprints in Concrete

Laetoli complicates the picture slightly, because the incompetence there predates the 2018 reorganization and traces back to a presidential visit. In 2008, President Jakaya Kikwete traveled more than 200 kilometers to see the Laetoli hominin footprints — tracks pressed into volcanic sediment by Australopithecus afarensis individuals 3.66 million years ago, the oldest evidence of hominin bipedality on record. He was shown only a two-meter section of the trackway, with protective stones piled on top of the rest. Reportedly displeased, he directed that the tracks be uncovered and a proper museum built over them.

That directive set a project in motion. Unusually, a cultural heritage impact assessment was conducted before construction began, and it led to a remarkable discovery: in 2014 and 2015, a University of Dar es Salaam team working at Site S found a second trackway representing two individuals, later designated S1 and S2, moving in the same direction as the known tracks at Site G. Analysis of the new footprints added significantly to what we know about body size variation within Australopithecus afarensis. The project was paused.

Then, in 2023, it resumed. Without expert consultation.

The NCAA constructed a 47-by-12-meter rectangular building over Site G, with an interior foundation of 40 by 8 meters supporting a viewing platform roughly two meters high. A smaller structure at Site S was built directly over part of the trackway, including four footprints identified by local Maasai communities as belonging to Lakalanga, a figure of cultural importance to them. Between the two sites, a walkway of large pavers mimicking hominin footprints was laid after land leveling — an operation involving heavy earth-moving equipment crossing terrain that still contains documented animal tracks and hominin footprints. Ichumbaki and Schmidt’s site observations recorded a heavy excavator moving through that landscape during construction.

The NCAA’s characterization of these permanent structures as “semi-permanent” does not change what they are or what was destroyed to build them.

Cages, Concrete, and Communities Left Out

The Kondoa rock art sites in central Tanzania offer a different set of problems, though the underlying institutional failure is the same. Between 150 and 450 paintings decorate rock shelters, caves, and overhanging cliffs across the landscape. They are not merely ancient marks on stone; local communities continue to use these sites for rainmaking, healing, initiation, and divination. The living relationship between the paintings and the people who made them is, in heritage terms, part of the significance.

In 2016, the DoA and TFS responded to concerns about dust and water damage at the Kolo B1-B3 sites by pouring concrete floors across the shelter interiors. Ichumbaki and Schmidt consider this a straightforward act of site destruction. TFS also replaced a footpath to one hilltop painting site with a 900-meter gravel road, wide enough for vehicles, constructed without any heritage impact assessment and without monitoring. On-site observations from January 2020 documented disturbed lithic artefacts along its edges.

Earlier, the government had tried to protect the paintings from ritual activity by erecting cages around the art-bearing rock faces. Local communities dismantled them and repurposed the materials. Ichumbaki and Schmidt cite this as a lesson worth taking seriously: protective enclosures imposed without community buy-in tend to fail, and the appropriate response is collaborative stewardship, not enforcement. The government learned the opposite lesson.

The fourth case study, from Katuruka in northwestern Tanzania’s Kagera region, makes that failure most explicit. The Kaiija shrine is the site of an Early Iron Age forge dating to the late first millennium BC, one of the oldest iron-working sites in East Africa, embedded within the seventeenth-century capital of King Rugomora Mahe. For the Haya people, Kaiija — meaning “place of the forge” — represents the deep-time origin of an economy built on iron production and, through it, agricultural prosperity. Schmidt’s collaborative research with Haya elders beginning in the late 1960s documented the oral traditions tied to the site and excavated the forge itself.

After the Kaiija Tree, a monumental living part of the shrine, was killed in the mid-1990s by a neighboring landowner who complained it shaded his banana farm, the community mobilized. Katuruka villagers formed a representative committee and an NGO, reconstructed a royal spirit house, and built interpretive infrastructure to memorialize the site. The project worked. The community was doing precisely what Tanzania’s 2008 Cultural Heritage Policy nominally encouraged.

Then a collateral branch of the royal clan, which had no traditional ties to Kaiija, filed land claims against the NGO. Lawsuits and intimidation dragged on for four years. One of the plaintiffs built a competing “royal house” nearby and physically destroyed the reconstructed Buchwankwanzi ritual house, the site’s royal divination structure. The community appealed to regional authorities and to the Ministry responsible for Antiquities. Letters went unanswered. Two DoA staff members eventually visited, conducted interviews primarily with one plaintiff, and took no legal action. The Assistant Director of Antiquities later relayed, in a telephone call, unsubstantiated allegations against Schmidt himself — claims that he had removed a “pot of rupees” during the 1970 excavations and that he was conducting research without a permit. The message was clear enough: the DoA would not protect Kaiija, and it would prefer this go away.

The case is still unresolved. Both the High Court and the District Housing and Land Tribunal have declined jurisdiction. The residents of Katuruka continue to wait.

What the State Owes the Past

Ichumbaki and Schmidt are careful to situate Tanzania’s situation within a broader global pattern. Similar dynamics play out in China, where profit-driven local authorities frequently destroy historic fabric and ignore communities in the name of heritage tourism development. The contradiction at the heart of Tanzania’s approach is stark: genuine decentralization, in any meaningful sense, would require empowering local communities and independent experts. Instead, the DoA transferred authority to other central government agencies while simultaneously undermining the community-based initiatives that were actually working. The result is neither centralized competence nor genuine local management. It is a vacuum.

The researchers make a specific and actionable recommendation: Tanzania should fill the Advisory Council for Antiquities, a body established under the Antiquities Act in 1979 and mandated under Article 20 to include qualified, non-political representatives. That council has never been constituted. If it were, and if it were empowered to conduct a comprehensive review of heritage governance, there might be a path forward. That is a more modest demand than the situation would seem to warrant.

At Kilwa Kisiwani, medieval ceramics sit in an antiquities office, stripped of their provenance. At Laetoli, buildings now stand on trackways that preserved 3.66-million-year-old steps. At Kondoa, concrete covers the floors of painted rock shelters. At Katuruka, the Buchwankwanzi house is a pile of collapsed thatch and timber. In each case, the institution nominally responsible for protecting the site was directly or indirectly responsible for the damage. That is the finding. What Tanzania and the international community do with it remains to be seen.

Further Reading

• Masao, F.T. et al. 2016. New footprints from Laetoli (Tanzania) provide evidence for marked body size variation in early hominins. eLife 5. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.19568

• Leakey, M.D. & Hay, R.L. 1979. Pliocene footprints in the Laetoli beds at Laetoli, northern Tanzania. Nature 278: 317–23. https://doi.org/10.1038/278317a0

• Schmidt, P.R. & Ichumbaki, E.B. 2020. Is there hope for heritage in former British colonies in Eastern Africa? A view from Tanzania. Journal of African Cultural Heritage Studies 3(1): 26–51. https://doi.org/10.22599/jachs.69

• Ichumbaki, E.B. & Munisi, N.C. 2024. Kilwa and its environs, in T. Spear (ed.) Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. New York: Oxford Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1008

• Bwasiri, E.J. & Smith, B.W. 2015. The rock art of Kondoa District, Tanzania. Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 50(4): 437–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/0067270X.2015.1120436

Over the following weeks, a team from the Bavarian State Office for Monument Protection recovered more than seventy additional bones from the same deposit, most of them ribs and foot bones, a radius, fragments of vertebrae and skull, part of a pelvis. The long limb bones were almost entirely absent. Radiocarbon dates from the ribs placed the animal’s death between 26,900 and 25,300 years ago, during a period called Greenland Stadial 3, a climatically severe interval within the Last Glacial Maximum. The bones belonged to a single individual: a large but not yet fully grown Mammuthus primigenius, probably around three meters at the shoulder when it died.

That alone would make the site notable. Mammoth skeletal remains are rare in this part of central Europe, and detailed sedimentological and paleoenvironmental analyses at a mammoth site in the German Alpine Foreland had never previously been carried out. But the find became genuinely unusual during the initial examination of the bones in the lab, when researchers noticed something on the rib surfaces. Scratches.2 Some were single incisions. Others ran in sets of roughly parallel grooves. The edges were sharp. The color matched the surrounding bone surface, indicating age. They were not recent.

A sustained program of microscopy followed.

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What they found reframes what the mummy actually is. Not a preserved body. Not a static relic. A dynamic biological system, with layers of microbial community laid down across five millennia, some from before he died, some from the glacier that swallowed him, and some introduced in the decades since his discovery in 1991. Disentangling those layers is the project, and a new study published in Microbiome1 by Mohamed Sarhan, Marco Samadelli, Albert Zink, and Frank Maixner represents the most thorough attempt yet.

The team’s approach was comprehensive in a way that previous work on Ötzi’s microbiome hadn’t been. They collected external ice blocks from his body before defrosting, meltwater from inside the mummy, swabs from twelve anatomical sites, soft tissue fragments, and a soil sample collected and frozen at the original discovery site during the 1991 excavation. They ran amplicon sequencing, shotgun metagenomics, and cultured organisms from the samples directly. Crucially, they compared samples taken across different years, 1992, 2010, and 2019, to look for changes over time. The goal was not just to catalog what’s there, but to figure out when it arrived.

The first thing the analysis confirmed is that Ötzi’s interior and exterior harbor fundamentally different microbial worlds. External swabs and environmental samples cluster together statistically, dominated by genera like Pseudomonas, Staphylococcus, and Acinetobacter as well as a striking abundance of Methylobacterium, which the team traced directly to the UV-treated spray water used to keep the mummy humidified. That spray water, it turns out, is dominated almost entirely by Methylobacterium and Caulobacter. Since 2010, it has been quietly reshaping what lives on Ötzi’s skin. The external microbiome you see today is, in large part, a reflection of the museum’s own plumbing.

The video shows microbiologist Mohamed Sarhan cultivating and examining colonies of a yeast strain isolated from a sample of Ötzi's stomach. Credit: Eurac Research / Andrea De Giovanni

Internal tissues tell a different story.

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