Two individuals. Both children. One died at roughly 8 or 9 years old, the other at around 14. The radiocarbon dates that came back from the laboratory were stark. Individual 2, the older child, dated to between 10,798 and 10,302 calibrated years before present. Individual 1, the younger, to between 10,210 and 9,878 cal BP. That gap of roughly 400 years between the two burials meant the same spot had been used twice across generations. Someone returned.

Before this discovery, the earliest known burial on the Patagonian Atlantic coast was La Arcillosa 2 in northern Tierra del Fuego, at approximately 5,205 uncalibrated BP. The Camarones children predate that by nearly five millennia. Prior archaeological research in the immediate area had only pushed occupation back to between 6,000 and 600 BP. The Camarones burials don’t just revise the local sequence. They collapse it.

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Not the origins of wheat in general. The broad story of wheat domestication — wild einkorn gathered in the Fertile Crescent, cultivated, selected, gradually transformed — is reasonably well established. But T. aestivum is not that wheat. It is the product of a later event, a hybridization between an already domesticated free-threshing wheat and a wild grass called Aegilops tauschii, known as goatgrass. That crossing produced something with a larger, more complex genome and, eventually, the agronomic qualities that would make it the basis of modern agriculture. The question has always been: where exactly did that crossing happen, and when?

Genetic studies had been pointing toward the South Caucasus and the southwestern Caspian region for years. The distribution of A. tauschii in the wild, combined with analysis of modern wheat genomes, suggested this zone as the most plausible origin point. The proposed timeline placed the event around 8,000 years ago, roughly 6,000 to 6,500 BC. But genetic inference, however sophisticated, is not the same as physical evidence. No securely dated archaeological remains of early bread wheat had turned up to confirm it.

That has now changed.1

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That story has been eroding for decades. Now a study1 by Indiana University cognitive scientist P. Thomas Schoenemann and his colleagues has taken a direct measurement of its central premise — and the numbers don’t hold.

The specific target is a 2018 study2 that compared endocranial reconstructions from four Neanderthals and four early Homo sapiens, dividing the brain into 13 major regions and measuring their volumes. The authors of that study noted that despite having larger total cranial capacity overall, Neanderthals appeared to have smaller cerebellums than their contemporary sapiens. The cerebellum sits at the back of the brain and is involved in motor control, attention, and emotional regulation, among other things. The finding circulated widely. It seemed to put some neuroanatomical flesh on the old cognitive inferiority argument.

What the 2018 study didn’t do was ask how those differences compared to the variation that exists among living people. Schoenemann’s team did.

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The question of why is partly political, partly religious, partly the kind of contingent historical accident that resists clean explanation. But a study published this month in PNAS1 offers an answer that comes from below the surface, literally. A team led by geomorphologist Jan Peeters and archaeologist Geoff Emberling of the University of Michigan spent years drilling sediment cores across the Nile valley at Jebel Barkal — 26 boreholes reaching between five and thirteen meters down — to reconstruct what the river had been doing at this spot for the past 12,500 years. What they found was a remarkably stable landscape, and a set of geological reasons why it got that way.

The Nile everyone knows — slow, brown, annual floods, the engine of Egyptian agriculture — is not the Nile of northern Sudan. South of Aswan, the river hits a series of rocky interruptions: the cataracts, stretches where bedrock forces the water through rapids and around islands. These disrupt navigation, fragment the valley, and create conditions radically different from the broad floodplains of Egypt. “We might think we know all we need to know about the Nile because there’s been a fair amount of research in Egypt,” Emberling has said. “But in Sudan, the way the Nile works is different.”

It was not always different in the way it is now.

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That choice is the puzzle at the center of a new study by Dr. Briggs Buchanan and colleagues, published in Lithic Technology.1 Their analysis of 58 quartz crystal Clovis points asks a deceptively simple question: did the difficulty of the material actually matter?

The answer, apparently, is no. At least not in the ways you might expect.

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That phrase — lethargic — turns out to carry more explanatory weight than most economic theories of cooperation would predict.

A study published this month in Nature1 tracked nearly 7,000 borrowers across 1,589 groups at a microfinance institution in Sierra Leone over five years, analyzing 47,931 individual payments alongside 73 hours of in-depth interviews. The question the researchers — Nicholas Sabin, David Klinowski, and Felix Reed-Tsochas — set out to answer was deceptively simple: why does cooperation decline even when everyone stands to benefit from sustaining it? Their answer is not about rationality, strategy, or poverty. It is about something more mundane and, in some ways, more unsettling: motivation just runs out.

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So the question remains genuinely open: what combination of pressures pushed them over the edge during Marine Isotope Stage 3, roughly 60,000 to 34,000 years ago, when they had survived worse before?

A new study led by Ariane Burke at the Université de Montréal takes a different approach to this problem, one borrowed from conservation biology. Rather than asking what killed the Neanderthals, it asks what kind of landscape they were working with — how their optimal habitat was distributed, how persistent it was across warming and cooling cycles, and how well connected the best patches were to one another. The results, published in Quaternary Science Reviews,1 suggest that the issue wasn’t habitat loss. The habitat was largely there. The problem was the topology of the network it formed.

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That was one of the first surprises in a study that accumulated many. Published in Current Biology1, the research by Kim-Louise Krettek, Cosimo Posth, and colleagues presents genome-wide data from 52 ancient individuals spanning six millennia in what the team defines as the central Southern Cone — the territories of present-day Argentina and Uruguay, roughly between 25° and 40° south latitude. The findings don’t simplify the population history of this region. They complicate it, productively.

Before this study, the picture of the Middle Holocene Pampas was comparatively tidy. Previous ancient genomic work had established that the oldest individuals known from the central Pampas — dating to around 7,700 and 6,800 years ago — shared a broadly similar ancestry that seemed characteristic of the region. The implicit assumption was that the Pampas, during this period, was home to a relatively continuous population.

The new data reject this cleanly. The team identifies at least three genetically distinct ancestries present in the Pampas during the Middle Holocene, the period roughly between 8,200 and 4,200 years ago. One matches the older Pampas profile. A second, evident in the Tres Bonetes individuals, is more closely related to populations from the eastern part of southern Patagonia — specifically groups associated with terrestrial rather than marine subsistence, suggesting the ancestors of these individuals came from the interior of the southern cone rather than the coast. A third ancestry, arriving in the southern Pampas by around 5,500 years ago, is the most puzzling of all.

Krettek and colleagues call it “an ancestry of unknown geographic origin.” That phrasing isn’t evasion — it’s precision. The ancestry can be tracked through its allele frequencies, quantified in its proportion over time, and shown to increase through the Late Holocene. But its source population has no clear proxy in the current dataset. It doesn’t match any well-sampled ancient or modern population well enough to identify where it came from before it appeared in the Pampas.

What the team can say is this: the ancestry was already present in the southern Pampas at least 5,500 years ago, possibly earlier. By around 4,000 years ago its representation in the central and southern Pampas had grown substantially. It didn’t replace what was there before — the data don’t support a complete population turnover — but it became dominant, carrying through the entire Late Holocene. When European contact disrupted the region’s Indigenous populations, people still carrying this ancestry were living in the southern Pampas. A recent study of Middle- to Late-Holocene genomes from central Argentina identified an ancestral lineage that similarly had no known geographic source, detected in the central Pampas by around 3,300 years ago. The overlap with Krettek and colleagues’ findings hints that the mystery ancestry may have arrived in the southern Pampas from central Argentina as early as the Middle Holocene — but tracing it further back remains an open problem.

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The regions are called HAQERs, short for human ancestor quickly evolved regions. They are mostly noncoding. They don’t build proteins. What they do is regulate genes, and a study published this week in Science Advances1 by Lucas Casten, Tanner Koomar, and colleagues at the University of Iowa argues that the story of how they came to matter for language is stranger than anyone expected.

Stranger partly because of when they evolved. And stranger still because of what happened to them afterward.

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For decades, this has meant that the history of domestic chickens on the Korean Peninsula has been written in hedged language, qualified assessments, and contested identifications. Historical texts mention them. Founding myths from early Korean states describe rulers born from eggs, with chickens woven into the symbolism of divine kingship. Chinese records from the era note chickens kept in the southwestern Korean polity of Mahan. But the bones themselves kept their secrets.

A team led by Kyungcheol Choy at Hanyang University ERICA recently applied a different approach to fourteen Phasianidae remains from the Gungok-ri site in southwestern Korea. Their results, published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports,1 provide the first biomolecular confirmation of domestic Gallus gallus on the Korean Peninsula.

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That’s the core finding of a new Nature1 paper from the Indigenous American Genomic Diversity Project, and it means the standard account of how people came to populate South America is missing a chapter.

The study, led by Marcos Araújo Castro e Silva, Tábita Hünemeier, David Comas, and colleagues at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona and the University of São Paulo, presents 128 new high-coverage whole-genome sequences from Indigenous individuals across eight Latin American countries — Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru — spanning 45 populations and 28 linguistic families. Combined with existing published data, the final dataset covers 199 individuals from 53 populations and 31 linguistic families. Average sequencing depth was around 44 times, sufficient for high-confidence variant calling. Ancient DNA from the Allen Ancient DNA Resource and previously published Brazilian sambaqui genomes was incorporated to anchor population history across time.

The total variant count: 12.49 million single-nucleotide variants, of which 1.43 million — about 11.4% — weren’t recorded in any major public database, including gnomAD, the 1000 Genomes Project, or dbSNP. That’s roughly 11,100 novel variants per individual. The scale of what was missing from global genomic resources isn’t a minor data gap.

Part of the reason for that gap is methodological. Genomic studies of Indigenous Americans have often relied on a small number of well-characterized groups as stand-ins for broader diversity. The Karitiana and Suruí from the Brazilian Amazon have been especially common proxies for lowland South American populations. This study’s analyses show they’re poor ones. Both groups carry unusually high inbreeding coefficients — more long identical-by-descent segments than geographically nearby groups — and cluster in ways that separate them even from populations living close by. Using them as proxies for Amazonian diversity, the authors argue, systematically distorts inference. Their genetic distinctiveness isn’t ancient; it’s recent, driven by population collapse after European contact.

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Malaria.

A team led by Margherita Colucci at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, working with colleagues at Cambridge and several other institutions, has reconstructed the potential transmission risk of Plasmodium falciparum-induced malaria across sub-Saharan Africa from 74,000 to 5,000 years ago. When they compared that reconstruction against an independent estimate of where hunter-gatherer populations actually lived, based on the spatial distribution of archaeological sites, they found a consistent negative relationship. Areas with high malaria transmission potential were areas humans avoided, or failed to persist in, decade after decade and millennium after millennium. Low-risk zones tracked human occupation. High-risk zones did not.

That pattern held across the entire 69,000-year window they examined. It didn’t depend on which mosquito species were included in the models, or which threshold was used to define high malaria pressure. The signal was robust.

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A new study by Hugo Bal-García and colleagues, published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology,1 applies ZooMS to 114 previously unidentifiable bone fragments from the Mousterian and early Upper Paleolithic levels at Cova Eirós. The results shift the picture considerably. Cave bear drops. Horse rises. And the dietary range of both the Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans who occupied the site turns out to be wider than the morphological record suggested.

The site spans a long sequence. The Mousterian levels here date to somewhere between roughly 60 and 39 thousand years ago, followed by Aurignacian occupation around 36 to 35 thousand years ago, the initial arrival of anatomically modern humans in this part of Iberia. It is one of the few places in the northwest of the peninsula where this transition can be studied in a single stratigraphic sequence, making the faunal record here relevant not just locally but for broader questions about how different hominin groups used similar environments in overlapping time periods.

ZooMS works on the collagen that survives in bone long after any other molecular information has degraded. Type-I collagen produces a distinctive mass fingerprint when processed correctly: the protein is extracted from a small bone chip, digested enzymatically, and the resulting peptides are compared against a reference library by mass spectrometry. Different mammal groups produce different peptide mass patterns. The method can typically resolve identifications to genus or family level, sometimes to species, and it can be applied to fragments that are morphologically uninformative, the broken shaft of a long bone, a rib splinter, the kind of material that ends up in the indeterminate pile and stays there.

At Cova Eirós, somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of the faunal material typically fell into that pile.

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A new study1 of 52 ceramic vessels from Qaraçinar, a Kura-Araxes settlement in Azerbaijan dated to roughly 2800–2600 BCE, now offers something close to an answer. The short version: the Red-Black Burnished ware appears to have been reserved for consuming grape- and dairy-based beverages. Cooking happened in the plainer, more utilitarian Monochrome ware. The iconic pots weren’t kitchen workhorses. They were, in a functional sense, the good dishes.

That distinction matters beyond ceramic typology. It suggests that Kura-Araxes communities organized their material culture around specific consumptive practices — that certain vessels carried cultural weight, that drinking wine or eating raw dairy products warranted particular containers. This wasn’t purely pragmatic. It looks like codified behavior.

The research team, led by biomolecular archaeologist Maxime Rageot of the University of Bonn and prehistoric archaeologist Giulio Palumbi of the University of Bari and the CNRS, combined technological and morphological analysis of the ceramics with use-wear studies and biomolecular residue analysis. Organic chemistry preserved in vessel walls and bases yielded an unusually complete picture of what Qaraçinar’s inhabitants were producing, processing, and eating.

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Whitworth was honest about the contradiction. He noted the archaic features, noted the modern one, and didn’t resolve them into a clean interpretation. The fossil got filed away. It was described again in 19662 under the name Kabua 1, mentioned in subsequent surveys, and mostly left alone. Sixty years later, a team led by Abel Marinus Bosman3 has given it the quantitative analysis it never received, combined with new uranium-series dating. The picture that emerges is strange in an instructive way.

Kabua 1 is probably a Homo sapiens. But it is one that carries enough archaic-looking morphology to resist easy classification, and that difficulty, the team argues, is itself meaningful.

What the fragments preserve

The Kabua 1 material, held at the Natural History Museum in London, is fragmentary: pieces of the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal bones, along with maxillary and mandibular fragments and several teeth. Working from microCT scans, Bosman and colleagues produced4 six separate virtual reconstructions, each guided by a different reference cranium ranging from the Middle Pleistocene fossil Kabwe 1 (sometimes called Broken Hill) to recent Maasai individuals. The approach is deliberate. Because Kabua 1 is incomplete and taphonomically distorted, any single reconstruction encodes assumptions about the missing parts. Six different references give a distribution of possible morphologies rather than a single answer, which the team describes as analogous to priors in a Bayesian framework. It is a more epistemically honest way to handle fragmentary material.

The reconstructions were compared against a broad sample: Middle Pleistocene Africans and Eurasians, Neanderthals, Late Pleistocene H. sapiens, and 109 recent African H. sapiens crania from eastern and southern Africa. The analysis focused on the neurocranium, because neurocranial globularity, the roundedness and anteroposterior shortness of the braincase, is one of the most diagnostically useful markers distinguishing derived H. sapiens from more archaic hominins.

In the principal component analysis, the first axis captures the difference between elongated, low vaults and rounded, globular ones. Neanderthals and Middle Pleistocene hominins cluster toward the elongated end. Derived H. sapienscluster toward the globular end. All six Kabua 1 reconstructions fall within the H. sapiens range on this axis.

The second principal component complicates things. The Kabua reconstructions score low on it, overlapping with Middle Pleistocene hominins and Neanderthals as well as some H. sapiens. What this reflects, concretely, is a short nuchal plane, a less vertical frontal bone, and a mediolaterally narrow vault. The reconstruction based on the Ngaloba cranium sits closest to the Middle Pleistocene African group in morphospace, near where the fossil Saldanha overlaps with H. sapiens variation. The reconstruction based on Skhul 5 sits at the opposite extreme, exhibiting a markedly globular neurocranium.

The classification analyses add a further layer of nuance. Linear discriminant analysis classifies five of the six reconstructions as Middle Pleistocene African, and only the Skhul 5-based one as H. sapiens. The machine learning methods, which are more robust to the non-normal distribution of the data and less sensitive to sample size imbalances, are more mixed. As the H. sapiens reference sample grows, the reconstructions increasingly classify with that group, with the Ngaloba-based reconstruction the persistent holdout. The authors are appropriately cautious about the LDA result: LDA is designed to maximize between-group variance and can produce artificial separations, and the Middle Pleistocene African grouping lumps specimens with quite different degrees of relatedness to derived H. sapiens.

The overall picture is that Kabua 1 has a broadly H. sapiens neurocranium in terms of globularity but retains features that, taken together, pull it toward a more archaic morphological zone. It is not a Neanderthal. It is not Kabwe. But it is not a specimen that would dissolve without trace into a sample of recent Africans.

The date and what it means

Getting a reliable age for Kabua 1 has proved difficult, and the new uranium-series results don’t fully resolve that difficulty. They do establish a conservative minimum.

Uranium-series dating of fossil bone works because uranium migrates into bone from groundwater after burial. The ratio of uranium isotopes to decay products gives an indication of how long that process has been running. The complication is that uranium can also leach back out, or a second wave of uranium can overprint the first. Each of these events scrambles the signal. Three samples from Kabua 1 were dated: one from the biparietal-occipital fragment, one from a tooth in the mandible, and one from the temporal bone.

The tooth has undergone at least three distinct uranium mobilization events, including leaching, making any age derived from it unreliable. The temporal fragment gives an apparent minimum age of around 114,000 years, but there is evidence that a past leaching event may have affected this figure too. The biparietal-occipital sample gives a minimum age of 64.4 ± 5.4 ka. The team judges this the most conservative and defensible figure, because the pattern of uranium isotope ratios in that sample is most consistent with a simple accumulation history unaffected by leaching.

This is a minimum age. The actual date of death could be older, potentially considerably older. But at least 64,000 years old places Kabua 1 in the Late Pleistocene, broadly contemporaneous with the populations that would eventually spread beyond Africa.

What diversity looks like before the bottleneck

The reason Kabua 1 matters is not just that it is another Late Pleistocene African fossil. It is that it adds to a pattern.

Several other Late Pleistocene African fossils show a similar mismatch between what age would predict and what morphology delivers. Iwo Eleru from Nigeria, dated to around 14,000 years ago, has morphology that looks more archaic than it should given its age. Lukenya Hill in Kenya and Ishango in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, both around 20,000 to 25,000 years old, show comparable features. Hofmeyr from South Africa, dated to roughly 36,000 to 38,000 years ago, has a continuous supraorbital torus, a brow ridge, which is vanishingly rare in derived H. sapiens. Nazlet Khater 2 from Egypt, from around the same period, has a face and mandible with proportions that recall Middle Pleistocene hominins far more than they resemble recent Africans.

These fossils come from different times and different parts of the continent. They do not cluster into a single variant population. What they share is the preservation of morphological features that most straightforward models of H. sapiens origins would predict should have been largely gone by their respective dates. In each case, the overall assignment to H. sapiens is not seriously contested, but the details resist easy explanation.

Two broad frameworks exist for thinking about this. One holds that H. sapiens origins were pan-African: our species emerged as a continent-wide process of population fragmentation and coalescence, with derived traits arising in different regions and spreading through periodic gene flow. Under that model, morphological diversity across Late Pleistocene Africa is expected, because populations were partly isolated and some archaic-looking features represent survivals of deep population structure. The competing view holds that derived H. sapiens originated in a specific region and spread with varying degrees of replacement, and that individuals with more archaic morphology either belong to lineages that eventually went extinct without contributing to living people, or represent the tail ends of variation within a broadly modern species that our comparative frameworks don’t fully capture. Both positions currently have genetic and morphological evidence in their favor.

What Kabua 1 does, with its new date and new analysis, is take its place in the growing series of fossils that make the African Late Pleistocene look unexpectedly variable. The team places it alongside Hofmeyr and Nazlet Khater as examples of Late Pleistocene H. sapiens that combine a broadly modern neurocranial shape with features that, in isolation, would look considerably older.

There is a structural reason to expect this kind of diversity. Living populations outside Africa descend from a relatively small founding group, and multiple successive founder effects compress morphological variation. Living Africans are already more variable, craniometrically, than non-Africans. The Late Pleistocene fossil record suggests the full historical range was wider still. With a small fraction of that variation preserved in bone and most of it lost, we are probably only beginning to map what H. sapiens actually looked like during the period when the species was exclusively African.

How much of that variation is ancestral to anyone living today, and how much belongs to lineages that terminated without genetic descendants, is a question that morphology alone cannot answer. Ancient DNA from Kabua 1 would help, but extraction from a specimen of this age from an equatorial environment is unlikely to succeed. For now, Kabua 1 returns to the record with a more secure identity than it had before, which makes it more useful and, in some ways, more puzzling.

That kind of stratigraphy does not happen by accident. It takes a place that matters.

The Javakheti Plateau is a high-altitude grassland tucked into the southern Georgian highlands, between the Greater Caucasus range and the borders of Turkey and Armenia. It sits at elevations that make sustained agriculture difficult. It has been largely off the radar of systematic archaeological survey. Since 2017, a joint Georgian-Italian initiative called the Samtskhe-Javakheti Project has been changing that. Eight years of fieldwork, combining remote sensing, GPS mapping, and GIS-based analysis with targeted excavations, have produced1 a picture of the plateau as something quite different from the empty frontier it has usually been treated as. The team has documented more than 168 archaeological sites ranging from Bronze Age settlements to medieval monasteries.

The sheer number is striking. The more interesting question is what kind of occupation these sites actually represent.

Fortresses That May Not Have Been Fortresses

Much of the earlier scholarly attention on this region focused on the plateau’s most visible features: the “Cyclopean” fortifications, large-scale stone enclosures with walls built from blocks of almost absurd dimensions. The conventional assumption was that these were defensive citadels, military architecture serving the needs of settled populations under threat.

The SJP’s survey data complicates this. Several of the megalithic enclosures, when examined closely, appear to have operated not as permanent military installations but as temporary refuges. A 2022 study2 of the Abuli and Shaori complexes by Licheli and colleagues proposed that mobile pastoralist groups used such structures seasonally, as secure points during their movements through the highlands or during periods of instability. Cyclopean walls, on this reading, were less about holding territory than about having somewhere reliable to retreat to.

The difference matters. A landscape of defensive citadels implies a settled population defending fixed resources. A landscape of seasonal refuges implies something more fluid: herders moving between altitudes, their architecture a response to mobility rather than sedentism, the plateau functioning as an intermediate zone rather than a destination.

Sites like Abulis Gora and Saro-1 support a picture of long-term but episodic use. Occupation was not continuous; it was recurrent. People returned to the same ground across centuries, which implies deep familiarity with the landscape, knowledge of where to find water and shelter and stone, transmitted across generations. The necropolises near Bertakana and Lake Tabatskuri make this point in a different register. Funerary traditions do not persist at the same location for that long without a community that keeps returning.

What the Ash Preserves

At Baraleti Natsargora, the occupation sequence runs from the Early Bronze Age through the Iron Age, roughly 3500 to 500 BCE. The recurrent burning episodes are both literal and interpretively useful. Each marks a break. Each rebuilding marks a renewal. The defensive wall uncovered in excavation, along with traces of partition walls and clay installations consistent with domestic use, suggests the site functioned as a fortified settlement during its peak phases.

A bronze solar disk came from the vicinity of Baraleti during earlier surveys. It is a carefully made object: concentric bands of raised knobs, angular incised motifs, regularly spaced perforations around its rim. Objects like it have been found across southern Georgia, and the pattern of association is consistent. They appear in burials, and they appear disproportionately in female graves. The Baraleti disk now sits in the Akhalkalaki Museum, and while its precise findspot within the site remains uncertain, the weight of regional evidence suggests it accompanied someone into death.

What a solar disk meant to the people who made it and buried it is harder to say. The iconography connects to a wider tradition of solar imagery in the protohistoric South Caucasus and across the steppe. Whether it functioned as an identity marker, a symbol of status, a ritual object, or something that resists those categories is a question the object itself cannot answer. The pattern of female association is at least worth sitting with.

At Meghreki Fortress, a few kilometers to the east, the team found something more unexpected than bronze metalwork. Inside domestic structures provisionally dated to the Late Iron Age and Achaemenid horizon, roughly the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, were fired clay plaques carrying incised and painted geometric designs. Red, white, and dark blue pigments. The visual effect would have been striking in a room lit by firelight.

Painted clay plaques of this kind are not a standard feature of South Caucasian domestic assemblages. Parallels exist at Digasheni and Amiranis Gora, but the density and context at Meghreki stand apart. The interpretation being advanced is that decorated plaques marked ritualised or high-status domestic spaces. Not a temple. Not a public monument. A room in a house. The line between the symbolic and the everyday, at Meghreki, ran through the walls of ordinary buildings.

This is worth pausing on. Meghreki’s occupation runs from the Kura-Araxes culture in the Early Bronze Age through to the medieval period, a span of over four thousand years, with the Iron Age as its most intensive phase. Across that time, the architecture shifted, the material culture shifted, the political situation around the plateau shifted. But people kept building at the same spot, and at one particular moment they put painted clay panels on the walls. Whether that moment marked an intensification of ritual practice, a new form of social display, or an outside cultural influence that found local expression is open. The Achaemenid horizon connection is suggestive. Achaemenid influence reached the South Caucasus unevenly and was absorbed in different ways at different scales. A highland settlement in Georgia would not have taken it in straightforwardly.

What the SJP is building, across eight years and 168 sites, is a framework for a region that has been treated as peripheral for too long. The Javakheti Plateau turns out to have been a crossroads: a zone where highland and lowland traditions met and overlapped, where mobile groups and settled communities negotiated the same terrain, where symbolic objects traveled with people and sometimes outlasted them. The ash at Baraleti has been accumulating for five thousand years. There is still a lot to read in it.

Further Reading

• Gambashidze, I. 1999. Samtskhe in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC (according to archaeological materials from the Borjomi Gorge). Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Archaeological Research Center, Tbilisi.

• Orjonikidze, A. 1988. “The Early Bronze Age settlement of Digasheni I.” Dziebani 1(1): 15–22.

That identity is what opens this story, because it isn’t supposed to happen that way. Teeth from stratigraphically distant contexts should reflect distinct individuals from distinct periods. The fact that they don’t tells you something about the cave, and something about the people.

Stajnia is a narrow limestone cavity in southern Poland’s Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, excavated between 2007 and 2010. The deposit runs about 1.5 meters deep and contains fifteen lithostratigraphic layers, laid down during the Last Glacial. Post-depositional processes — frost action, partial sediment collapse, medieval disturbance of the uppermost levels — have moved things around considerably. When researchers first began recovering human teeth from different units, questions arose about whether they represented a single occupation or many, spanning different periods. Some teeth might predate the known Stajnia Neanderthal, specimen S5000. Some might postdate it.

The answer, according to a study just published in Current Biology1 by Andrea Picin and colleagues, is that the teeth represent a minimum of seven and possibly eight individuals, all assigned by molecular dating to Marine Isotope Stage 5 — somewhere between roughly 120,000 and 92,000 years ago. This is now the oldest multi-individual Neanderthal genetic assemblage characterized in Central Europe. And those three teeth with matching mitochondrial DNA? They are not evidence of different periods. They are evidence of mixing. The cave has been churned, and what the stratigraphy presents as sequence is, in part, a spatial shuffle of the same population.

The team sequenced complete or near-complete mitochondrial genomes from all eight specimens, including four that had never been genetically analyzed before. Radiocarbon dating was attempted on several, but the site poses problems. Two teeth yielded unreliable finite dates: residual consolidants applied during or after excavation contaminated the collagen, producing results that look finite but aren’t. One specimen returned an age beyond the detection limit, which is the more trustworthy result — it means the sample is older than radiocarbon can measure. In the absence of reliable direct dates, the team relied on molecular branch shortening, a method that uses the rate at which mutations accumulate along mtDNA lineages to infer when a lineage diverged. The estimates cluster the Stajnia individuals in MIS 5, consistent with the paleoenvironmental context. Ice sheet expansion during MIS 4 would have made southern Poland effectively uninhabitable, so the younger tails of the probability distributions, which extend slightly into that period, are archaeologically implausible.

The three teeth with identical mtDNA are worth pausing on. Two belong to juveniles — a child roughly 4.5 years old and another around 6.5 — and one to an adult. The morphological evidence suggests the two juveniles might be the same individual, their remains separated by post-depositional mixing, or closely related individuals who shared the same maternal line. The adult could represent a distinct but maternally related person. Whether this is one individual’s remains scattered across the site, or relatives who occupied the cave across generations, cannot be resolved from mitochondrial data alone. Mitochondria are inherited through the maternal line only. You can see that people were related through their mothers. You cannot see their fathers, their full siblings from different mothers, or the broader social structure they inhabited.

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Leder’s team interpreted the artifact as evidence of symbolic expression. Others have suggested it could have been utilitarian, a spool or a fishing sinker, which doesn’t actually rule out aesthetic intent — the same argument has been made about particularly fine Acheulean handaxes for decades. What nobody seriously argues is that the object is accidental or meaningless.

This kind of evidence has been accumulating for years. And a new paper by philosopher Anton Killin, published in Biological Theory,1 argues that it has now accumulated to the point where it breaks something: the concept of “behavioral modernity” itself.

The argument is worth taking seriously, because it isn’t just about Neanderthals. It’s about what happens when a scientific concept outlives its usefulness.

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Researchers at the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano took a tooth from what remained and ran it through shotgun metagenomic sequencing. Radiocarbon dating placed the man in the years between 1283 and 1383 CE. What they found1 inside the tooth was not what they set out to look for.

Among the bacterial DNA recovered from the pulp chamber — a sealed, vascularized space that tends to trap and preserve circulating pathogens — was a remarkably intact genome of Streptococcus pyogenes. Not just traces. A near-complete reconstruction, 99.98% complete by the standard quality metrics, assembled from hundreds of millions of fragmentary ancient DNA reads without using a modern reference genome as a template. The paper reporting this finding, published in Nature Communications by Guido Valverde, Mohamed Sarhan, and colleagues, represents the first confirmed ancient genome of this pathogen anywhere in the world, and the earliest documented presence of S. pyogenes in the Americas by several centuries.

The finding matters for reasons that extend well past its headline claim. The evolutionary history of S. pyogenes — the bacterium behind strep throat, scarlet fever, necrotizing fasciitis, and toxic shock syndrome — was, until now, a blank before the modern era. Every analysis of this pathogen had been built from contemporary clinical strains. There was no ancient baseline. The Bolivian strain provides one, and what it looks like is both reassuring and strange.

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The individual designated M234-2 was between 16 and 18 years old when he died, sometime during the Jiaqing era of the Qing dynasty, between 1796 and 1820 CE. He was buried in a brick-chambered tomb at the Wenchi cemetery in Shanxi Province, northern China, alongside an adult female and a modest collection of grave goods: ceramics, metal objects, coins. The kind of burial that marks a life as ordinary.

That ordinariness is the finding.

Macroscopic examination and CT imaging, carried out by Dr. Xiaofan Sun and colleagues and published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology,1 confirmed what the morphology suggested: M234-2 was born with unilateral cleft lip and bilateral cleft palate. The defect arises during fetal development, when the tissues forming the lip and palate fail to fuse properly. It is among the most common congenital craniofacial conditions in humans, but its archaeological record is sparse, and in China it was previously unattested entirely. This is the first identified case.

The condition would have announced itself at birth. Feeding an infant with an orofacial cleft is difficult under any circumstances. The mechanics of nursing depend on the palate creating suction, and with a cleft, that seal is compromised or absent. Without sustained, intensive effort from caregivers, infants with untreated clefts in pre-surgical eras faced a narrow path.

M234-2 made it to adolescence.

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