The oddity is a good way into a paper whose main subject is less exotic. Neanderthal campsites are usually read through bones and stone tools: bones show where carcasses were processed, and knapping debris marks where tools were made. Charcoal tends to be treated as a record of which trees grew nearby. The reader’s working assumption is that Neanderthals at Abric Romaní already organized the shelter into hearth areas and work areas, and that the evidence for it comes from fauna and lithics. This study asks what the position of 640 charcoal fragments adds to that picture, and my reading is that it adds detail rather than revising anything.

What did the Level Ra charcoal show?

The paper is by Tomás Fernández-Iriarte (IPHES-CERCA, Tarragona) with Bàrbara Mas, M. Gema Chacón, Palmira Saladié, Josep Vallverdú and Ethel Allué, published in 2026 in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology.1 Abric Romaní has a sequence the paper gives as 70 ky long (110–40 BP, dated by U-series), and sediment built up in level Ra at up to 80 centimetres per thousand years, which is why the record is so fine-grained. The abstract places Ra at the beginning of MIS 3. The text gives no age for Ra itself.

Of the 640 fragments, 484 (75.63%) are Pinus sylvestris type, 17 (2.66%) are Prunus, 86 are undetermined conifer and 53 are undetermined. “P. sylvestris type” is a lumped category, because three mountain pines (P. nigra ssp. salzmannii, P. sylvestris and P. uncinata) have wood anatomy too similar to separate under the microscope.

Mapped across the excavated surface, the charcoal falls into two patterns. In the northern section it forms a broad concentration overlapping the hearths, and in the southern section it occurs as smaller, isolated clusters, often away from hearths. The authors read the north as consistent with primary refuse, meaning burnt fuel left where it burned. They read the south as possibly secondary refuse, meaning combustion residue moved elsewhere, perhaps when hearths were cleaned. Whether that southern reading holds is the question the paper cannot settle, and it says so.

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The effort matters because of a long-running expectation about territory. The Economic Defendability Model predicts that foragers living on dense, predictable resources will defend territories, while foragers on sparse or unpredictable ones range widely and leave the land open. The archaeological tests so far come from aquatic settings; Marean (2016) applied the model to marine foragers on the southern South African coast about 110 ka, and the earliest evidence of intergroup conflict the authors cite also comes from sites that relied on aquatic food. The belief I would expect most readers to carry is that boundary-making arrived with rich shorelines and that inland foragers stayed open and mobile. Hora 1 tests that belief away from the water.

What did the Hora 1 animal bones show?

Alex Bertacchi (Yale University), Potiphar Kaliba (Department of Museums and Monuments, Malawi) and Jessica C. Thompson (Yale University and Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins) report in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology1 that the fauna fits the model’s Scenario B: a home range with limited mobility and limited contact with other groups, whether friendly or hostile. They read the foragers as not strongly territorial. The assemblage does not fit Scenario A (defended territory on dense, predictable food) or Scenario D (undefended territory with frequent intergroup contact).

I class this as added detail rather than a reversal. The study extends the model to an inland woodland and finds a result the model has a slot for. This post is about how much social inference those bones can carry, and my answer is less than the abstract implies.

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The assumption she is working against is a familiar one. Early foragers are usually pictured as organized around large game, with plants and small animals as supplements, and insects as a famine food or an accident of storage. Shillito argues that this picture was built from the evidence that survives best and gets looked for most.

What does the review claim about insects in the past?

Shillito, a professor in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University, published “Edible insects as heritage foods: towards an archaeology of alternative proteins for food sustainability” online in World Archaeology on 27 October 2026.1 It is a synthesis, and I think readers should know that up front: it reports no new excavation, sample or measurement. It makes two arguments. The first is that insects’ marginal place in archaeological syntheses reflects taphonomic filters (what preserves), methodological priorities and interpretive habits, and does not reflect absence in the past. The second is that archaeology is well placed to reframe insects as heritage foods in current sustainability debates, because it can show that Western disgust is historically contingent.

The one number that carries the most weight is a meta-analysis of over 9,000 human coprolites from 52 sites across the Americas, covering the late Pleistocene to the recent precontact period. It suggests that roughly a third of assemblages contain evidence for intentional insect consumption (Julison and Haas 2024).

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The glow turned up in a study aimed at something less dramatic, which is finding the thin film of calcite that has grown over the drawings. Most of us picture cave art as pigment on bare rock, and we think of calcite as a threat, either a crust that hides the art (at the Grande Grotte of Arcy-sur-Cure an opaque layer completely masked Paleolithic paintings until restorers abraded it) or a complication for dating. The Chauvet team asks whether a translucent veil might behave like varnish instead, and whether you can find it without touching the wall.

Yohan Boulard, Philippe Walter and colleagues report in ACS Omega (2026, 11, 60980−60990)2 that ultraviolet fluorescence spectroscopy can tell speleothem calcite (calcite deposited by dripping or flowing water) from the limestone bedrock, even though both are chemically calcite. They collected 60 spectra in the cave, each from a spot of about 1 mm², with the operator standing up to 2.5 m from the wall. Their reading is that a translucent calcite veil covers the drawings on the Horses panel, that the veil varies a lot in the Alcove of the Lions, and that the orange glow may be a trace of hot charcoal. The first claim is the method’s main result, the second is a useful mapping result, and the third is a guess.

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That infant is one of four people in the first ancient genomes from Ecuador, reported in PNAS Nexus1 by John Lindo (University of California, Berkeley), Richard Lunniss (Universidad Técnica de Manabí) and colleagues. Salango’s history gives a reason to expect turnover in its population: a volcanic eruption at Pululahua around 330 BCE that the paper says ended the Formative tradition, then elite burial complexes, chiefdoms and, by the Manteño period, a maritime exchange network centered on Spondylus shell. I suspect most of us assume that upheaval on that scale, in one stretch of coast, brought in new people at some point. The paper sets out to test that assumption.

The four genomes come from two Very Early Guangala individuals, one Early Guangala individual (about 1,900 BP) and one Early Manteño individual (about 740 BP), with mean coverage between 0.54x and 2.31x. They cluster together and near ancient and present-day people from Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, and the authors conclude that Salango’s cultural changes happened largely within a stable local population rather than through large-scale replacement. A demographic model dates the split of the Ecuadorian coastal lineage from other Southern Native American lineages to about 9,800 years ago (95% CI: 9.6 to 10.1 ka). I think the continuity result is plausible but less secure than the abstract suggests, and that the divergence date is the weakest number in the paper.

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I suspect most readers assume that genetic relatedness in the Pacific should decay with distance, so that the two most remote islands would look the most different. The data point the other way. The authors also describe cumulative founder effects an order of magnitude stronger than those documented in European-descent groups such as the Finnish and Amish.

What did the Science paper find?

The paper is “Message in a bottleneck: Nested founder effects from French Polynesia to Rapa Nui and Hawaiʻi,” by Cole Shanks, Edward C. Huang, Christophe Thomassin and colleagues, with Alexander Ioannidis of Stanford University as co-senior author (Science 394, pp. 216–221, 8 October 2026).1 Using whole-genome sequences from across Polynesia, they report that Hawaiʻi and Rapa Nui are two of the most bottlenecked populations, that the two are the most closely related pair, and that both were likely settled by the same ultravoyagers with earlier ancestral roots in Mangareva. The editor’s summary adds that the intensity of the effect rose with each successive migration, which fits the idea of nested events in the title.

The paper also reports a loss-of-function mutation in the gene FAN1 (a change that knocks out the gene’s working product) at a frequency above 1% in Eastern Polynesia. The variant is entirely absent from gnomAD, a large public aggregate of human genomes and exomes.

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Most readers carry a picture in which Neanderthal meat means large hoofed animals, and the authors open by saying the field has long reconstructed it that way. They also note that rabbits and tortoises at Bolomor Cave in Spain already showed small prey predating the Upper Paleolithic (Blasco and Fernández Peris 2012), and that cut-marked beavers and marmots are known from other European sites. Valdegoba adds one more case to an existing list, and I think the paper is better read that way than as a challenge to the old picture.

The preprint, posted on Research Square on 15 October 2026 and not yet peer reviewed, is by Ona Redon and J. Carlos Díez (Universidad de Burgos) and César Laplana (Universidad de Alcalá). They examined every specimen of Castor fiber (Eurasian beaver) and Marmota marmota (alpine marmot) from the excavations of 1987 to 1991 and 2006: 171 beaver specimens from at least 12 individuals and 60 marmot specimens from at least nine. Four of the 231 carry cut marks the authors consider confidently human, three on beaver and one on marmot. Carnivore tooth marks appear on 22. The authors infer a palimpsest, a deposit written over by several agents, with carnivores and natural deaths as the main inputs and Neanderthals as an occasional contributor. They call the exploitation occasional and not systematic, and I find that well supported, because the paper reports no recurrent butchery pattern, no burning and no strong age selection.

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People who know southern African rock art carry a fairly firm belief about its techniques. The art is abundant and varied, but most hunter-gatherer painting is fine brushwork and most farmer and pastoralist painting is done with fingers, with handprints, finger dots and printed motifs as occasional extras. Stenciling, which is common elsewhere in the world, was not on that list. This paper adds it, on the evidence of one panel. That adds a technique to the regional repertoire without revising what we think the art means, and the authors say plainly that they cannot tell us what it means.

What is the stenciled rock art at La Rochelle?

David G. Pearce (Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand) and Kiah Johnson (Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge) describe the figures in a Field and Technical Report titled “First report of stencilled rock art in Mpumalanga, South Africa,” in the South African Archaeological Bulletin 81(224): 20–26, 2026.1 They argue that two figures at the shelter, known locally as La Rochelle or Klein Buffelspruit, were made as stencils, a technique with no published record in southern Africa. The paper’s own wording is more careful than that sounds: the find is apparently unique, as far as the authors are aware. The rest of this post asks how secure the identification is, because the date, the maker and the meaning are all open.

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I would start from that shrine because it cuts against a picture many readers carry: that after the Classic period (AD 300 to 900) the great cities of northern Yucatán were left as empty stone. Roberto Rosado-Ramirez of the University of Virginia’s Department of Anthropology says this view appears in tourism material and in some academic narratives. At Ake itself, earlier archaeologists, including Ruben Maldonado Cardenas (1995) and Beatriz Quintal Suaste (1993), proposed that the post-AD 1100 material was left by pilgrims visiting sporadically from Mayapan. Specialists have not held the empty-city view uniformly, since the paper itself lists post-collapse settlements at Dzibilchaltun, Kuluba, Ek Balam, and Uxmal.

What did Rosado-Ramirez find at Ake?

The paper is a single-author study in Latin American Antiquity (2026).1 It argues that a community lived inside Ake’s walled center from about AD 1100 to 1550, among buildings that had been decaying since the political collapse of AD 1000 to 1100. Ake had been a city of as many as 19,000 people at its peak around AD 900 (Table 1), organized around a 2.5 hectare paved plaza ringed by its seven largest buildings. Rosado-Ramirez links the later occupation to Maya ideas about ruins as living places, and he argues that the break that matters in northern Maya history came with Spanish colonial rule. This post asks how much of that account the excavated evidence supports, and the answer differs claim by claim.

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The expectation comes from a mismatch the field has lived with for years. The Gravettian (about 34 to 25 ka) looks like a single continental network in its tools and portable art, yet ancient DNA has described two ancestry clusters that stayed relatively stable across it: the Fournol cluster in the west and southwest, descended from the Aurignacian individual Goyet Q116-1 from Belgium, and the Věstonice cluster in central Europe and Italy, named for Dolní Věstonice in Czechia. The model this paper challenges, drawn from Posth et al. (2023) and related work, held that the Franco-Cantabrian region and the rest of western Europe were exclusively Fournol-related around 30 ka.

The paper reports genome-wide data from three Gravettian individuals: the Isturitz woman, a tooth from Chufín Cave in Cantabria, Spain, and Ostuni1b, a male fetus from a cave at Ostuni in southern Italy. It adds human DNA recovered from sediment at El Mirón Cave, also in Cantabria. The headline result is that the Isturitz genome is mostly Fournol-like but carries a contribution from a population related to the ancestors of the Věstonice cluster, which the authors model as mixing between 32,500 and 31,500 cal yr B.P. First author Pere Gelabert, Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Vienna, said in the university’s statement: “Our results show that eastern and western European populations were not as genetically isolated as previously assumed.” The claim I want to weigh is whether one woman’s genome can carry that conclusion, and my answer is that the signal is solid while its interpretation is softer.

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Since the fossils came out of the ground between 1976 and 1979, Xujiayao has been filed as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, as early H. sapiens, as archaic H. sapiens, and, to avoid the argument, as archaic Homo. Most recently it became the holotype of Homo juluensis, a species proposed partly on the 1,700 ml endocranial capacity of the Xujiayao 6 cranium (Wu et al., Journal of Human Evolution, 2022)1. If you follow East Asian Middle Pleistocene hominins, you probably carry a picture of Dali, Jinniushan and Hualongdong as archaic humans with unsettled names, and of Denisovans as a lineage known from a genome plus a few molecularly confirmed jaws and one cranium.

The paper appeared in Nature2 on 21 October 2026. Song Xing, Zhongyou Wu, Qingfeng Shao and Junyi Ge are the equal-contribution first authors, and Qiaomei Fu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing is the corresponding author. The team sampled two of the 20 Xujiayao cranial, mandibular and dental fossils, recovered 18 endogenous ancient proteins, and concluded that the assemblage belongs to a late Middle Pleistocene East Asian Denisovan population. They then compared skull and jaw anatomy across East Asian archaic Homo and argued that most of those fossils, Dali, Jinniushan and Hualongdong included, are Denisovan as well, and that the size gap behind H. juluensis is variation within one population. This post is about how much of that sweeping reclassification two bones and one amino acid can carry.

How do researchers know the proteins are ancient?

The sampling was minimal. The team CT-scanned both specimens first (37.56 μm resolution), then drilled a small hole in each in a dedicated clean room, shielding the surrounding bone with aluminium foil. They dissolved the powder, split the proteins into fractions, and digested them with trypsin, an enzyme that cuts proteins into short peptides. A mass spectrometer then reads the mass of each peptide fragment, which allows the amino acid sequence to be inferred. The runs were done in two independent laboratories, one at Capital Medical University and one at Fudan University, and the data were searched with two software packages, PEAKS Online and MaxQuant. Extraction blanks were processed alongside the samples, and a modern camel bone served as a positive control.

The hard part with any ancient protein is separating the real thing from modern contamination, and the authors lean on deamidation. Over long burial, the amino acids asparagine and glutamine slowly lose an amine group, so ancient proteins show high deamidation and fresh contaminants show little. In specimen PA1490 (the parietal), the main bone collagens had asparagine deamidation of 61.4 to 94.7% and glutamine deamidation of 44.9 to 92.6%, while keratins and trypsin, the usual contaminants, sat at 0.0 to 5.3% and 0.0 to 7.7%. PA1497 (the mandible) looks similar. After that filter, plus removal of peptides that could not be tied to a single gene, anything seen in the blanks, and anything MaxQuant could not confirm, 18 endogenous proteins remained: 13 for PA1490 and 15 for PA1497. Figure 2b gives the endogenous share of peptides as 91.4% for PA1490 and 94.1% for PA1497, and the extraction blank scores 0.0.

The taxonomic call comes in two steps. Searches against a mammalian type I collagen database placed both samples in the genus Homo, and the team then looked at single amino acid polymorphisms (SAPs), positions where sequences differ between lineages. The informative one is COL1A2-996. The paper’s Figure 3 shows the supporting peptides, 207 peptide-spectrum matches (individual spectra assigned to a peptide) for PA1490 and 244 for PA1497. The lysine peptides also show elevated deamidation at nearby residues (Asn977 at 69.2% and 69.4%, Gln1002 at 100% in both), which argues that they are genuinely ancient. The authors also built a Bayesian tree from 2,074 amino acid positions in eight proteins, with Denisova3, the Altai and Vindija 33.19 Neanderthals, 50 present-day humans from the Human Genome Diversity Project, and a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) as outgroup. Xujiayao and the Denisovans form a clade with posterior probability above 99%.

Within that clade the tree gives nothing: individuals fall into unstable arrangements with posterior probabilities below 50%, because no variant other than COL1A2-996K is shared. That is why the authors say only that Xujiayao is Denisovan in a general sense, without placing it relative to Xiahe, Penghu, Harbin or Denisova Cave. The dating, for what it is worth, is 199 to 138 ka from combined uranium-series and electron-spin-resonance methods (Shao et al., Quaternary Science Reviews, 2026)3, which makes Xujiayao about contemporary with the earliest confirmed Denisovans from northeastern China and southern Siberia.

Does skull shape make Dali and Jinniushan Denisovan too?

This is where I slow down, because the molecular result covers two bones and the morphological claim covers most of East Asia. With Xujiayao and Harbin both classed as Denisovan, the authors characterize a Denisovan skull. It has erectus-like traits (a low, wide neurocranium; a vault 7.7 mm thick at bregma and 12.0 mm at the parietal tubercle on Xujiayao 6), derived traits shared with later Homo (a strongly arched temporal squama), and a combination found in neither H. erectus nor modern humans: a low profile with near-parallel lateral walls, a nearly vertical but non-rounded occipital, and a mandible with a depression in the planum triangulare. They then check whether Dali, Jinniushan, Hualongdong and Xuchang show the same suite, and conclude that they do.

I find the Xujiayao assignment far stronger than that extension, for a reason the paper concedes itself: the suite “does not appear simultaneously in individual specimens but manifests in different forms or combinations across various specimens.” A definition that tolerates different combinations in different fossils is hard to falsify, and the definition was built from Xujiayao and Harbin before being tested on the rest. Hualongdong is the clearest case, since the paper says its mandibular features are only partly present, and it had previously been read as a transitional form toward H. sapiens. The principal component plot in Figure 4b has a comparison group of three East Asian late Middle Pleistocene archaic Homo specimens, against six East Asian H. erectus, six Southeast Asian H. erectus, four H. heidelbergensis and early Neanderthals, five late Neanderthals and 20 modern humans. Xujiayao 6 itself is a sample of one.

The H. juluensis argument deserves the same scrutiny. The authors point out that 1,700 to 1,800 ml for the Xujiayao and Xuchang group, against 1,120 to 1,420 ml for other East Asian late Middle Pleistocene Homo, falls inside the modern human range (1,090 to 1,880 ml) and the Neanderthal range (1,065 to 1,740 ml). That is true, but those ranges are species-wide, and the argument is that the gap is variation within one population. I would want the comparison made against variation within single populations, which the paper does not do. I also notice that the species proposal and the Denisovan assignment compete, and only the second now has molecular support.

What are the limits of the Xujiayao result?

The authors state several limits. The proteins cannot resolve relationships among Denisovans, and they add that incongruence between datasets might arise because the proteomic data are modest in amount. A test for a Penghu-specific variant (COL5A2-E1211V) returned no reliable evidence either way. Extra authenticity proxies were tried and not used because they were not examined with enough data. The Denisovan label for the other fossils rests on anatomy, and the paper offers the idea that admixture with early modern humans or other archaic groups reshaped late Neanderthal crania only as something that “might explain” the divergence.

Several weaknesses are not stressed. The assignment rests on a single variant, and the main text reports that no other variant is shared within the clade, so I could not tell how much of the >99% posterior depends on that one site. The consensus sequences also cover only eight proteins and 16.0% of the alignment. “Denisovan-specific” is itself defined by a small reference set: two Xiahe individuals, Penghu 1, Harbin and Denisova3 (Chen et al., Nature, 2019;4 Tsutaya et al., Science, 2025;5 Fu et al., Science, 20256), compared against Neanderthals and modern humans, so lysine at 996 has not been shown absent in every other Middle Pleistocene lineage. Two of 20 fossils were sampled, and the assemblage spans roughly 60,000 years of stratigraphy, so extending the result to every Xujiayao fossil assumes one population throughout. I could not find which layers the two sampled specimens came from. The paper reports no genome, and the dating gives no error ranges in the main text. The face of the Denisovan portrait comes from Harbin and other specimens, not from Xujiayao.

My verdict is that the Xujiayao result is convincing at the level the authors claim, a late Middle Pleistocene East Asian Denisovan population. Two bones, two laboratories, two search engines and a consistent deamidation signal make contamination an unlikely explanation for the lysine, and it fits the Xiahe, Penghu and Harbin picture. The wider reclassification of Dali, Jinniushan, Hualongdong and Xuchang is partly convincing at best, because it is a morphological argument built on a suite that no single fossil shows in full. Two things would settle it. One is more informative variants or DNA from additional Xujiayao individuals, ideally from different layers. The other is protein from the other fossils: the paper presents no molecular data for Dali, Jinniushan, Hualongdong or Xuchang, and if the Denisovan hypothesis is right, any of them that yields collagen should show lysine at COL1A2-996.

Most readers of this site carry a working assumption about Middle Stone Age ochre. The red powder survives, whatever it was mixed with does not, and so its use gets inferred from grindstones, stained shells and San ethnography. This paper tests that assumption directly and finds a species-level protein signal in the powder itself.

What did the Klipdrift study find?

Zahra Haghighi (SapienCE, University of Bergen) and colleagues, including Takumi Tsutaya and Enrico Cappellini, report in Proceedings of the Royal Society B1 that two of five archived sediment samples yielded type I collagen. One sample came from layer PBD and one from PBE, and the collagen matched common eland, Taurotragus oryx. The authors offer two readings: eland protein was mixed into an ochre preparation, or an ochre-covered eland hide was left at the site and decayed, leaving the ochre behind. They call a human origin most probable. They also say the single case cannot support ritual significance for eland.

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I suspect most readers carry two assumptions about this kind of work. One is that shelters in steep forested country turn up only when someone walks the cliff lines; the other is that once a shelter is on the register, its coordinates say where it is. The paper,1 from a University of Sydney team working with the Dharug Custodian Aboriginal Corporation, tests both in the Blue Mountains, and the answer so far is modest: LiDAR can narrow where surveyors need to walk, and the register’s coordinates for six shelters checked on the ground sat 1.78 to 30.10 meters from the mapped shelter edge.

The study, by Jacob L. Bongers and six co-authors including Wayne Brennan and Amy Mosig Way, appeared in Remote Sensing in 2026 (volume 18, article 3495). The team wrote models that flag candidate shelters in two LiDAR datasets, then went to see whether the candidates were real. Across a 1,057 square kilometer study area, the model run on public aircraft data produced 751,655 detections. The team’s own drone flights covered four zones totaling 4.16 square kilometers and produced 2,017. After screening candidates on a computer, they visited 19 drone detections on foot, a step called ground-truthing, and all 19 were shelters or similar recesses beneath rock formations. Six registered shelters were relocated, and three unregistered shelters (BM139, BM140 and BM141) were found to hold stone artifacts, with rock art at BM140. What I want to work out is how much of that result the method deserves credit for, given that a person chose which detections to visit.

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The usual account of that mining puts Hispania at its center. Polybius, Posidonius, Strabo and Diodorus Siculus all dwelt on the mineral wealth of Iberia, and the archaeology of Roman mines grew up leaning on them, so that the Iberian peninsula became the default answer for where the Empire’s lead and silver were dug. The peat gives a different answer. In a paper published in Science Advances1 in October 2026, Delile and colleagues, including Janne Blichert-Toft of the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, report that lead fingerprints from 19 peat bogs across Europe line up, throughout the Roman period, with ore districts in the French Massif Central, the Rhenish Massif, the German uplands and Britain, while the Spanish districts of Cartagena-Mazarrón and the Sierra Morena barely register.

Lead matters for a reason that has little to do with lead. In nature it travels with silver inside the ore galena, and ancient smelters who roasted galena to get at the silver for coins sent a good part of the lead up the flue, where it drifted and settled on whatever was growing below. A bog that takes its water and dust from the sky keeps that fallout in order, layer on layer, and the lead in each layer carries the isotopic signature of the rock it was dug from. If you can read the signature, you can say which hills supplied the money.

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The trench cuts through 20 separate sediment horizons that carry human footprints, spread across roughly 1,800 years, between 23,500 and 21,700 years ago. The obvious reading, the one most educated readers would reach for, is that twenty layers means a place people returned to and lived beside, and that the gaps between layers mean the people had gone. Two papers published this year, one in Science Advances1 led by Kathleen Springer of the US Geological Survey and one in Fossil Studies2 by Matthew Bennett of the University of Reading and Sally Reynolds of Bournemouth University, complicate that reading considerably.

The excavation behind the first paper was physical work. In January 2020 and again in January 2022 the team cut the trench to a final length of 25 meters, exposing about 2.7 meters of stratigraphy, using a dirt-rated chainsaw to score the lateral edges and a pry bar to lever up blocks of sediment along their natural bedding planes. Those planes often carried footprints on their upper faces. Outlines show up as faint color shifts and changes in grain size, and in many places the tracks sat on hard gypsum-rich layers and appeared once the overlying silt was removed. The loose sediment was sieved in both seasons, and no artifacts were recovered.

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“It’s so round, it’s like, what is it?”

That was Emma Pomeroy’s first thought, she told Science News.1 Pomeroy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, is lead author of a study published October 15 in Scientific Reports2 that describes these bones, dug up in 2019 and 2022, and the person they belonged to, a Neanderthal the team calls Shanidar A. Anyone raised on the phrase Stone Age pictures a killing in this period done with stone, a flake of flint knapped to a point and bound to a shaft. Neanderthals did use weapons like that, but a hafted stone point leaves a different mark. When archaeologists drive replica stone points into carcasses, the wounds come out oval or lozenge-shaped, sometimes a narrow slot, following the flattened section of the blade, whereas a sharpened wooden shaft, round in section, leaves a circle.

Shanidar has encouraged the stone picture before. A man excavated there in the 1950s, known as Shanidar 3, has a narrow puncture in his left ninth rib, and in 2009 Steven Churchill, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, and his colleagues tried to reproduce it by driving replica Mousterian and Levallois points into the chests of pig carcasses, using a calibrated crossbow to control the energy of each strike. They judged the wound most consistent with a light, stone-tipped projectile and, because early modern humans were in western Asia at around that time and may already have had throwing weapons, raised the possibility that one of them threw it. The rib had started to heal, so Shanidar 3, who died roughly 50,000 years ago, some 25,000 years after Shanidar A, seems to have lived for weeks after he was hit. The older bone points to a different weapon. The University of Cambridge’s announcement presents the new hole as possibly the first evidence that sharpened wooden spears were used anywhere in the prehistoric Middle East, and possibly the earliest example in the hominin fossil record of lethal violence between individuals with a wooden spear, a second claim the paper itself stops short of.

On October 7, in Science Advances, Palmira Saladié and colleagues at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution described 597 pieces of wood from Abric Romaní,3 a rock shelter near Barcelona that Neanderthals used between about 62,000 and 40,000 years ago. Much of that wood survives only as the shape of where it was: water heavy with calcium carbonate wrapped the pieces in travertine as they rotted, and the excavators recorded the molds. Thirteen had been worked or used, among them two spears, the better preserved 2.45 meters long. Josep Vallverdú, an archaeologist at the institute, told Gizmodo4 that the simplest lesson of the site was that the Paleolithic was “not a world made only of stone,” a strange thing to need to say about a period whose name means Old Stone Age. It needs saying because stone is what lasts, so stone is what archaeologists mostly have; wooden shafts, handles and spears turn up only where some accident of chemistry has kept them.

Shanidar has no travertine and no waterlogged mud. Apart from pollen and charred wood, the paper notes, the cave has kept almost nothing organic, so the spear that went through Shanidar A is gone, and the only record of it is the space it took up on its way out of the body. That is why the hole has been worth the trouble the Cambridge team has taken over it. Read closely enough, it is a cast of a weapon nobody will ever hold, and perhaps a little more than that, a record of the direction the weapon came from, which is as close as the evidence gets to whoever was at the other end of it.

A root can bore through buried bone, and so can a burrowing insect or a careless trowel. Because the scapula came out with the sand beneath it still in place, the team could scan the whole block by micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) and look down through the hole into the sediment, where there was no root channel and no burrow of the right width. The rim carries the same crust of manganese oxide as the rest of the bone, so the hole is old, and its edges show no remodeling and none of the disorganized woven bone a living body lays down when it starts to repair a wound. The cracks running from it, the kind that form when fresh bone gives way under a sudden load, put it at the time of death; perimortem, in the paper’s term.

A video of a 3D rendering of the hole in the scapula and fragments embedded in the sediment underneath the scapula in situ prior to conservation. Credit: Dr. Emma Pomeroy

Then the scans showed something better than an absence. In the sand directly under the hole lay at least four slivers of bone, each at least 4 millimeters long. One of them can be fitted back into the edge of the hole with confidence, because a faint ridge on the inner face of the scapula, a linea muscularis, where muscle once anchored, runs from the blade across the break and onto the fragment, the way a road lines up again across the two halves of a torn map. The others probably came from the hole as well, but they are small and brittle, and some broke further during recovery and conservation, so where each belongs in the rim can no longer be worked out. Whatever went through the bone punched them out and carried them a short way into the soft tissue on the back of the shoulder blade, and there they stopped. As the body decayed, the fine sand it lay in probably trickled into the spaces the flesh left behind and held them in place, and when floodwater later tore through and carried off most of the skeleton, the slivers stayed where they were, sheltered by the ridge of the scapular spine, which lay upstream of them.

On the back of the blade the rim of the hole flares outward in a shallow bevel. Bone fails rather like glass struck by a pellet, chipping away in a cone on the side the force leaves by, so a bevel marks an exit, and this one says the weapon came through the chest from the front and left through the shoulder blade. The slivers add the angle. They were pushed slightly outward, toward the arm, and slightly down, toward the feet, and they lie tilted away from the center of the hole, from which the authors infer that the weapon entered from above and from nearer the midline of the body, heading down and outward to the left shoulder blade; if it was then pulled back out through the front, that could have dragged them farther. On that path it would have gone through the left lung and perhaps major blood vessels, and death would most likely have come fast.

Holes very like this one turn up fairly often in the shoulder blades of hunted animals, though almost never in human ones. Archaeologists have described round and lozenge-shaped perforations with radiating cracks and an exit bevel in animal scapulae from Paleolithic and Mesolithic sites, among them a red deer shoulder blade from Mesolithic Denmark described in 1974, and the reading that often goes with them is the heart shot, a blow aimed through the shoulder at the organs that bring an animal down fastest. The phrase has followed Shanidar A into the university’s announcement, in which Pomeroy reads the position of the wound, and the force it would take to push a spear clean through a chest, as the marks of a deliberate strike at the heart. The identification of the weapon rests on experiments, among them a 2018 study in which Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and her colleagues reproduced, with a wooden thrusting spear driven in at low speed, one of the lesions on two extinct fallow deer (Dama dama geiselana) killed about 120,000 years ago at Neumark-Nord, near Halle in Germany. Against that work, and against experiments with stone- and bone-tipped weapons, a 15-millimeter circle fits a sharpened wooden shaft better than a flat point of any material; the first Neanderthal bone spear point to be identified, reported from Abric Romaní in 2024,5 is closer in cross-section to a stone point than to a round shaft.

Bruno Maureille, an anthropologist at the University of Bordeaux who was not involved in the study, told Science News6 he had no doubt that a wooden spear made the wound, though Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an archaeologist and the author of Kindred, a book on Neanderthal life, told Live Science7 she would like to see the hole compared with the damage a wild goat’s horn can do, since wild goat, she noted, was the animal hunted most intensely at Shanidar. Graeme Barker of the University of Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, who leads the Shanidar excavations and is the paper’s senior author, put the limits of the evidence to Gizmodo8 in a sentence:

“The science gets us to the point of showing death by spear thrust.”

Past that point, Barker said, all is speculation, and he listed what he could not exclude: someone tripping over a spear, a spearing by a member of the same group or of a neighboring one, a fight with Homo sapiens. Even the word “thrust” runs a little ahead of the paper, whose authors describe experiments still under way to test whether the hole’s features could be produced by a high-energy impact as opposed to a low-energy one, the distinction Churchill’s group used in 2009 to tell a spear driven by hand from a weapon that was thrown. Nor does the paper choose between an accident and a killing. Most injuries on Neanderthal skeletons, the authors note, look like the accidents of hunting big animals at close quarters, and Pomeroy, in the university’s statement, allows that this death could have been one, though the same statement calls violence between Neanderthals the most straightforward interpretation, which is further than the paper goes; it says only that which it was cannot be known, and that either way the spear went into the left side of a person who was facing it.

Accident or not, the wound is rare. Libby Cowgill, a biological anthropologist at the University of Missouri, reminded Science News9 that many ways of dying leave no mark on a skeleton at all, which is one reason the list of Paleolithic deaths by violence is so short. The oldest is Cranium 17, a skull about 430,000 years old from the Sima de los Huesos in northern Spain, broken by two blows from the same object; Nohemi Sala, a taphonomist now at Spain’s National Research Center on Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Burgos, described it in 2015,10 and she is one of the Shanidar A authors.

The Schöningen spears, and a monkey tooth beneath them

At Schöningen, an open-cast lignite mine in Lower Saxony some 3,000 kilometers northwest of Shanidar, the wood survived. In the 1990s, excavators led by the archaeologist Hartmut Thieme of Lower Saxony’s state heritage office took about ten spears out of the mud of an ancient lakeshore there, most of them carved from slow-grown spruce and one from pine, some more than two meters long and, the Cambridge statement notes, balanced for throwing like a javelin. They lay among the remains of nearly 50 wild horses. Older still is a sharpened tip of yew that the collector Samuel Hazzledine Warren took from the foreshore at Clacton-on-Sea, on the Essex coast of England, in 1911, now put at roughly 400,000 years old. Both are round in section, and both are the kind of weapon Pomeroy has in mind when she says, in the university’s statement, that replicas of spears from this period leave holes that fit Shanidar A’s very well.

No bone of the people who made the Schöningen spears has ever been found at the site.

On June 6, 2004, in the Lower Berm area of the mine, in a layer cataloged as Schöningen 13 II-3b2 that lies a little below the Spear Horizon, 13 II-4, the excavators recovered a milk tooth 7.47 millimeters long. It is the upper fourth deciduous premolar of a Barbary macaque, or of something close enough that Thijs van Kolfschoten of Leiden University, Ivo Verheijen of the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage and Jordi Serangeli of the University of Tübingen, who described it in September in Quaternary Environments and Humans,11 call it Macaca cf. sylvanus, the “cf.” marking caution over the last step of the identification, and it is the first primate the site has produced. Its crown is barely worn, which in a macaque, whose last milk premolar comes in at six or seven months and which is weaned at about a year, puts the animal at around a year old. It is also the only macaque tooth among more than 40,000 vertebrate remains collected at Schöningen since 1992, and at 52.08 degrees north it is the northernmost fossil of its genus on the European mainland; only English finds, at Hoxne in Suffolk and West Runton in Norfolk, lie farther north.

The layer formed in open woodland where birch and pine took turns as the commoner tree, at a time when summers were much like today’s and winters at least a degree Celsius colder, a cold that Barbary macaques, which have been reported to sit out January temperatures as low as minus 22 degrees, could probably bear. The harder limit, the authors suggest, drawing on a 2014 model by Sarah Elton of Durham University and Hannah O’Regan of the University of Nottingham, may have been daylight: at that latitude the short winter days squeeze the hours a macaque has for feeding, foraging, moving, resting and socializing, and the monkeys of northern Germany and Britain may have been living at the edge of what the light allowed.

The monkey paper also dates its layer, on the excavators’ long-standing chronology, to between 310,000 and 315,000 years ago, which takes a side in a dispute over how old the spears above it are. They were called 400,000 years old when they were found, and later about 300,000. In May 2025 a team led by Jarod Hutson of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, working with Kirsty Penkman’s amino acid group at the University of York, measured how far the amino acids in the shell lids of freshwater snails of the genus Bithynia, taken from the Spear Horizon itself, had turned from their living form into its mirror image, and with a reassessment of the regional sequence put the spears at about 200,000 years, in the time of the early Neanderthals. Thomas Terberger of the University of Göttingen told the Associated Press he found the arguments “interesting, but not absolutely convincing.” In June, Charles Turner of the University of Cambridge, Brigitte Urban of Leuphana University Lüneburg and van Kolfschoten argued in Quaternary International12 that the fossil mammals support an age of about 300,000 years for the spears, and the monkey paper keeps to that chronology, while the Cambridge paper on Shanidar A, published a month after it, uses 200,000.

Neanderthal burial at Shanidar Cave

Six of Shanidar A’s lower front teeth survived, loosened from a jaw that did not and jammed by moving water against the ribs. They are worn down far enough to put their owner at around 45, old by Neanderthal standards, and in a pattern odd even for Neanderthals; the bones cannot say whether this was a man or a woman. One of the six, the left lateral incisor, had been split lengthwise, and the half nearer the midline is gone. Calculus, the mineral crust better known as tartar, coats the broken faces of what remains down to the tip of the root, so the broken tooth stayed in the mouth long enough for tartar to build up over every surface the break exposed, and a polish from continued wear cuts through the thin calculus on its biting edge, so it was still in use. Micro-CT scans show the calculus in layers. The broken tooth and the central incisor beside it had probably been twisted in their sockets, and the canine pressed against it is worn unusually as a result. A heavy blow to the front of the mouth is the likeliest explanation, the authors write, whether from a fall onto a hard surface or from another person; a sharp edge cannot be ruled out, though nothing on the teeth points to one. Pomeroy estimates, in the university’s statement, that Shanidar A lived with the injury for at least a year.

The paper suggests that for some of that time Shanidar A may have needed help from others with eating, with speaking and with the pain, and Pomeroy has floated the idea that they were given soft food; earlier work at the cave by members of the same team found charred plant food that had been soaked and pounded before cooking. Survival is the evidence for the care, and nothing more direct, and the authors concede that how far back such care goes in the human lineage is still argued over.

The body lay at the bottom of a cluster of Neanderthals, all dated to between about 70,000 and 75,000 years ago, packed into a space about 1.5 meters long, a meter wide and a meter deep, directly behind a large boulder that had fallen from a fault in the cave roof and would have stood above the cave floor of the time. In 1960 the American archaeologist Ralph Solecki, whose excavations here between 1951 and 1960 recovered ten Neanderthals in all, removed four individuals from this spot in a single block of earth: the adults Shanidar 4, 6 and 8 and an infant, Shanidar 9. The Cambridge excavations that began in 2015 have found at least three more adults directly beside them, Shanidar Z in 2018, then A and B, and because Shanidar 4, Z, A and B each preserve the same piece of the left shoulder blade, the acromion at the point of the shoulder, the new paper puts the minimum count for the cluster, with the infant, at five. Whether Z, A or B could be parts of the people Solecki called Shanidar 6 and 8 is something the team hopes to check against the 1960 bones, which are in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Solecki’s own reading of the spot, that Shanidar 4 had been buried with flowers, has not lasted; in 2023 Chris Hunt of Liverpool John Moores University and colleagues, Pomeroy and Barker among them, argued that at least some of the clumps of pollen found with that skeleton were probably left by solitary bees nesting in the cave floor.

The bodies were not laid there at once, as a group sheltering from the cold behind the rock might have died together. Thin layers of sediment separate them, the later ones disturbed the earlier, and the pollen and sediments point to mild conditions when they were put there. And they came close together in time, since in most cases a new body went in before the last had finished decomposing, which the authors take to mean that the dead were placed within living memory of one another, and they read the choice of so small a space, again and again, as deliberate.

Shanidar A came first. The body lay about 15 centimeters below the chest of Shanidar Z, on its back with the head to the east, as Z’s is, in a shallow channel that water had cut into the cave floor and that was dry when the body was set down; for Z someone had scraped out a hollow, but there is no sign that anyone dug for Shanidar A. The team reads the placing of a body that had just been run through with a spear, in a spot that others would keep returning to, as care of a kind, extended past death. Sand washed over the body soon afterward and partly covered it, and it decayed there. Later, once the flesh was gone and the sediment had dried, the flash flood came through the channel, thick with stones, and carried off most of the skeleton, leaving the ribs, the shoulder blade with its slivers, the teeth caught against the ribs, and the right hand. The hand’s position, south of the left ribs, means the right arm had been lying across the chest, and the hand itself had come to rest against the boulder, bent at the knuckles, with its back to the stone.

There was one more tooth in the sand under the shoulder blade, an upper third molar with the taurodont roots that are more common in Neanderthals than in Homo sapiens, and with so much less wear than the six front teeth that the team thinks it came from someone else. The paper does not say whose.

Further Reading

• Hutson, J. M., et al. (2025). Revised age for Schöningen hunting spears indicates intensification of Neanderthal cooperative behavior around 200,000 years ago. Science Advances 11, eadv0752. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adv0752

• Thieme, H. (1997). Lower Palaeolithic hunting spears from Germany. Nature 385, 807-810. https://doi.org/10.1038/385807a0

• Allington-Jones, L. (2015). The Clacton spear: The last one hundred years. Archaeological Journal 172, 273-296. https://doi.org/10.1080/00665983.2015.1008839

• Churchill, S. E., Franciscus, R. G., McKean-Peraza, H. A., Daniel, J. A., Warren, B. R. (2009). Shanidar 3 Neandertal rib puncture wound and paleolithic weaponry. Journal of Human Evolution 57, 163-178. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.05.010

• Gaudzinski-Windheuser, S., et al. (2018). Evidence for close-range hunting by last interglacial Neanderthals. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2, 1087-1092. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0596-1

• Noe-Nygaard, N. (1974). Mesolithic hunting in Denmark illustrated by bone injuries caused by human weapons. Journal of Archaeological Science 1, 217-248. https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-4403(74)90024-7

• Pomeroy, E., et al. (2020). New Neanderthal remains associated with the ‘Flower Burial’ at Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan. Antiquity 94, 11-26. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.207

• Hunt, C. O., Pomeroy, E., Reynolds, T., Tilby, E., Barker, G. (2023). Shanidar et ses fleurs? Reflections on the palynology of the Neanderthal ‘Flower Burial’ hypothesis. Journal of Archaeological Science 159, 105822. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2023.105822

• Kabukcu, C., Hunt, C., Hill, E., Pomeroy, E., Reynolds, T., Barker, G., Asouti, E. (2023). Cooking in caves: Palaeolithic carbonised plant food remains from Franchthi and Shanidar. Antiquity 97, 12-28. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2022.143

• Elton, S., O’Regan, H. J. (2014). Macaques at the margins: the biogeography and extinction of Macaca sylvanus in Europe. Quaternary Science Reviews 96, 117-130.

• University of Cambridge (2026, October 15). Fatal Neanderthal wound may be earliest evidence of a wooden spear attack on a human ancestor. https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/neanderthal-spear-wound-shanidar-cave

• Ramakrishnan, A. (2025, May 9). Ancient wooden spears found in Germany may have been wielded by Neanderthals, a new study suggests. Associated Press.

The standard assumption runs the other way. Linguists and speech engineers have long treated the pitch and timbre peculiar to one speaker as noise, something to be normalized out before the real signal of the language is read, and the authors point to the view, expressed in Labov’s Principles of Linguistic Change,2 that biology finished its work when the language faculty arrived and that everything since is cultural transmission. On that account the anatomy of the speaker is a nuisance, and the differences between English and Hindi have nothing to do with the differences between two English speakers’ jaws.

The data do not support so clean a separation, though the study’s reach is narrow, and I will come to its limits.

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The picture of the Bering Land Bridge that most educated readers carry is a corridor: a cold steppe crossed by small parties of hunters following mammoth and bison, who left little behind because they did not stay. Kelly Graf, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, and fifteen co-authors argue in Science Advances1 that the people who left F21.04 did stay, and that the site is better described as a base camp than a hunting stop. The corridor picture has an excuse, since the paper itself opens by calling Beringia’s archaeological record poorly understood, but the excuse thins when one counts what has accumulated on this one bluff, which includes more than 80,000 specimens from a block of ground only 25 square meters across.

The question behind the paper comes from genetics. Geneticists predict that between 16,000 and 13,000 years ago Beringia held at least three populations (the ancestral Native Americans and two labeled UPopA1 and UPopA2) and possibly a fourth, Population Y, all of which gave rise to the ancestors of Indigenous Americans south of the Canadian ice sheets, along with a fifth, the Ancient Beringians, who appear to have stayed in northwest North America. Archaeologists, the authors say, are struggling to match those populations to the variation in the ground, and the Tanana basin offers the most to work with: nineteen of the 28 Beringian occupations dated to before or during the Clovis era (13,200 to 12,750 years ago, the span of fluted-point technology in temperate North America) lie in an area slightly larger than Maryland, and none of them contains a fluted point.

The site sits on a bluff about 35 meters high, 55 kilometers south-southeast of Fairbanks, with a bedrock knob rising 434 meters behind it that sheltered the inhabitants from northwesterly winds. Its name, which means “they were there” in Alaska Native Athabascan, was given by the elders of Healy Lake Village; a cultural resources survey found the site in 2010, when it was known as McDonald Creek. Roughly 320 centimeters of windblown sediment bury four archaeological components, labeled C1 (the lowest), C2a, C2b and C3, and C1 supplies most of what follows.

Fifty of the site’s 66 radiocarbon dates come from C1, and a Bayesian model places that component between 13,850 and 13,500 years ago. C2a and C2b are brief later visits at 13,080 to 12,840 and 12,820 to 12,640 years ago, and C3 is a diffuse scatter from the middle Holocene. The C1 model took three runs, with four dates that disagreed with the rest removed along the way, and the authors caution that the result narrows the component considerably and may be flattening several separate occupations that began as early as 14,050 years ago and ended as late as 13,120. The modeled duration of C1 is 284 years, plus or minus 34.

Rhyolite dominates the stone at 70 percent, and 64 of the 71 rhyolite pieces sourced by x-ray fluorescence trace to a quarry nobody has located, though its frequent appearance in early Nenana Valley assemblages points to that district. All 25 obsidian artifacts came from Batza Téna, 370 kilometers west-northwest, and none from Wiki Peak, the other major interior source, 400 kilometers southeast.

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Those figures, together with 0.62 at the Shigu site, sit above the 0.52 the authors report as the average for the agricultural units in their sample. The study, published in Science Advances1 by Dongdong Li and Xingcan Chen of the Institute of Archaeology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and Suwei Guo of the School of History at Renmin University of China, runs against a belief most educated readers hold without having examined it: that inequality is what grain did to people, that stored surplus produced owners and heirs, and that a society of foragers is by default a society of rough equals.

The comparison has limits the authors state themselves. Median Gini coefficients for hunter-gatherer units fall below those of agricultural units, but the confidence intervals overlap broadly, and the paper reports no statistically significant difference between the two. Jiahu and Shigu are a few cases within a sample of eleven hunter-gatherer units, fifteen agricultural and eighteen agropastoral.

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That last detail carries the assumption this essay is about: that a working animal’s skeleton keeps a record of the work, so that a dog which pulled a sled should show it in the spine and joints, and that the way to find sled dogs in the archaeological record is to look for wear. Spondylosis deformans, the technical name for those spinal spurs, was proposed as evidence of sled use in 1979 (Arnold), and a systematic evaluation by Kathryn Latham and Robert Losey in 2019 questioned its diagnostic value. The one other attempt the authors know of to identify habitual sled pulling without relying on pathology, a 2025 study of entheses (the attachment sites of muscle and ligament) by Sick and colleagues, offers no quantitative framework for diagnosis.

A team led by Mitya Kletzerman at the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures, University of Haifa, argues in iScience1 that the whole approach starts from the wrong end. Pathology, in their reading, marks a mismatch between the load imposed on an animal and what its skeleton could bear. A population bred for traction over many generations would have lost the dogs that broke down and kept the ones that did not, which leaves the evidence in inherited proportions, in the shape of the animal, and in much less of it on any one individual’s bones.

The stakes are practical. Sled parts rarely survive in the ground, so the question of when dog sledding began and how it spread has rested on a thin run of finds: sled parts alongside dog remains on Zhokhov Island about 9,000 years ago, then a long gap, then the same pairing at Ust’-Polui in northwestern Siberia about 2,000 to 1,500 years ago. Inuit culture was taking shape in what remained of Beringia at roughly that time, and its eastward expansion across the Bering Strait region around 1,000 to 800 years ago replaced the Paleo-Inuit traditions of the Eastern Arctic; the arrival of the Inuit is marked by more dog remains and more sled equipment. Morey and Aaris-Sørensen suggested in 2002 that the rise in dog remains reflects the emergence or intensification of sledding. The Haifa team states that the claim has never been tested empirically.

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