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Phys.org reports that a new analysis of a skull fragment and jaw fragment found in northern China's Xujiayao archaeological site in the 1970s suggests that the fossils belonged to Denisovans. Qiaomei Fu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and her colleagues identified 18 proteins in the fossils. One of the collagen variants is found only in Denisovans, and not in Neanderthals nor modern humans. Then the researchers evaluated the shapes of the fossils and used 3D computer models to reconstruct the bones. These images were compared with fossils from Neanderthals, modern humans, and other hominins. The study suggests that Denisovans...

Well-preserved Neanderthal hand bones containing collagen have been recovered from northern Spain's Abauntz Cave, according to an IFL Science report. The bones have been radiocarbon dated to 46,000 years ago. "The cave's location is important," said Andión Arteaga of the University of Warsaw and the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, and Mikel Arlegi of the Musée de l'Homme. "Abauntz lies along a natural corridor connecting both sides of the Pyrenees. [This makes] it a particularly interesting site for investigating how these late Neanderthal populations moved across the region and how different groups may have interacted," the researchers...

A Bronze Age man buried in a monumental tomb near the Black Sea may have died from complications of a urinary tract infection (UTI) more than five millennia ago, according to a new study. Archaeologists identified a grape-size object consistent with a kidney or bladder stone in the man's burial. "He lived with a chronic urogenital infection," study lead author Natalia Berezina, an anthropologist at Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia, told Live Science in an email. "It was not a brief episode," she said. "His last years were probably marked by considerable and more or less constant pain." Berezina...

The Oman Observer reports that burial chambers containing human remains and pottery have been excavated in northwestern Oman by archaeologists from Oman's Department of Heritage and Tourism. The burials have been dated to the third millennium B.C. and attributed to Mesopotamia's Jemdet Nasr civilization. Walid bin Hamad al Ghafri of the Department of Heritage and Tourism said that the excavation uncovered many beads, in addition to bronze arrowheads, axes, and daggers. Archaeological sites in the region are in danger of destruction due to rapid urban development, he concluded. To read about how people lived in the Omani desert some 5,000...

Science Alert reports that Alexander Ioannidis of Stanford University and his colleagues analyzed the genomes of more than 1,000 people who live in French Polynesia; 12 genomes from individuals on the island of Rapa Nui; and the genomes of people native to Hawaii, Samoa, Tonga, and Tahiti. First, the researchers isolated segments of Polynesian ancestry with machine learning, and then they applied an identity by descent method, which can identify common ancestors of living people and people from the past. The study shows that people traveled across Polynesia in small populations, sometimes resulting in a genetic bottleneck of reduced genetic...

Additional ring ditches have been discovered at the Hunn burial ground in eastern Norway with ground-penetrating radar, according to a Science Norway report. Standing stone circles are known to have stood in the South Field some 2,000 years ago. The newly uncovered circles were found in the West Field, where traces of large burial mounds remain. "They may have made the circle first in order to plan the construction of the burial monument, or it may have formed because people walked in a circle around it," said Anne Lene Melheim of Norway's Museum of Cultural History. Several possible graves have...

Analysis of more than 190 bones from people who were buried in Scandinavia between about 500 B.C. and A.D. 1050 suggests that violent encounters increased over time, Live Science reports. The remains were interred in domestic areas, but it is not known if the violence occurred during domestic disputes, or as a result of warfare or some form of punishment. "The fact is that not all bodies ended up in monumental burial mounds in the Iron and Viking Ages, or even in more modest urnfields and cemeteries," said Marianne Hem Eriksen of the National Museum of Denmark. Eriksen and her...

Haaretz reports that Emma Pomeroy of the University of Cambridge and her colleagues examined the remains of Shanidar A, a Neanderthal of about 45 years of age who was buried in Iraqi Kurdistan's Shanidar Cave some 75,000 years ago. The researchers suggest that the individual had been killed when a weapon, likely a sharpened stick, was forced into his chest from the front, passed through a lung, and punched a hole in his left shoulder blade. Similar holes have been identified in fossilized animal bones. About a year before his death, this individual had also suffered facial injuries, including a...

La Brújula Verde reports that a camp used by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers has been found just underneath artifacts left by the first farmers of the Neolithic period in intact archaeological layers in Tina Jama, a mountain cave on the northern coast of the Adriatic Sea. Federico Bernardini of Ca’ Foscari University, Elena Leghissa of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and their colleagues suggest that farmers arrived in the region some 7,500 years ago. Prior to the arrival of farming in the region, hunter-gatherers built a hearth in the most sheltered part of the cave. They also closed off the...

Roughly seven thousand years ago, something erased the majority of men from the human gene pool. Not a plague. Not a famine. Something else entirely, and the evidence is still sitting in your own DNA. We dig into the genetic study that first uncovered this bottleneck, the mass graves across Neolithic Europe that back it up, and the invention sitting at the center of it all, one so ordinary you would never suspect it. When Our Simplest Invention Killed 95% Of All Men Alive | 22:04 The First Dawn | 17.8K subscribers | 240,685 views | August 3, 2026

Analyzing the teeth of a 25,000-year-old skeleton from Sulawesi, Indonesia, researchers have deduced that this individual habitually sucked on betel nuts, and probably developed an addiction to this popular stimulant. Widely consumed across southeast Asia and the Pacific, betel nuts are the world's fourth most popular drug, behind alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine. These days, the nuts are typically mixed with slaked lime and chewed as a "quid" in order to release the psychoactive compound arecoline, triggering mild euphoria and heightened alertness. Although the roots of this practice are poorly understood, it is generally assumed that betel chewing does not pre-date...

Archaeologists in El Salvador are examining a discovery that may date back to around 850 B.C. According to a news release from El Salvador's Ministry of Culture, a pre-Hispanic burial site was found in Antiguo Cuscatlán, a suburb of San Salvador, earlier this month. An excavation of the remains began on July 21... A human skull was found alongside a small Usulután ceramic vessel shaped like a sea turtle, per the news release. Layers of volcanic ash also preserved the remnants of cassava branches... The remains, which were found face down, are set to undergo radiocarbon dating to determine their...

The skeleton of a young 6ft 5in-tall (1.9m) Viking-era man who had undergone trepanation has been found in a mass grave.A hole had been bored in his skull while he was alive. It had signs of healing before his remains were flung into a burial pit with nine other men, some dismembered...The grisly discoveries were found during a University of Cambridge training dig just outside the city last year...If the young man had had a tumour on his pituitary gland, this could have caused an excess of growth which might explain his height, explained Biers, curator of the Duckworth Collections...

A prehistoric burial near Stonehenge long known as the “Shaman of Upton Lovell” has been identified as a woman’s, overturning a belief that shaped archaeological interpretation for more than 200 years. Ancient DNA analysis revealed that the individual buried near Stonehenge about 4,000 years ago was biologically female. The finding challenges one of Britain’s best-known prehistoric identifications and is prompting researchers to rethink the roles women held in Early Bronze Age society. Researchers examined surviving skeletal remains, including fragments of the skull, a tooth and a foot bone. DNA testing identified XX chromosomes, confirming the individual was female. The findings,...

The finding, made by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, shows that genes are not always inherited only from parent to offspring. Some genes can move, and in this case, the researchers directly observed evidence that a jumping gene can pass between species, from predator to prey. Jumping genes are genetic parasites found in bacteria, plants, animals, and humans. They can be released inside cells as small RNA molecules from ribonucleic acid (RNA), then use specialized mechanisms to insert themselves into other parts of the genome. When they land in a new place, they can...

The boy was around 14 when he joined the Continental Army. He signed his enlistment papers with an “X,” suggesting that he’d never learned to write his name. During his three-and-a-half-year military career, he marched more than 1,000 miles. When he died at the Battle of Camden in South Carolina in 1780, he was buried in an unmarked grave and forgotten for nearly 250 years. Researchers excavated the boy’s remains in 2022. Now, they’ve discovered this young soldier’s identity: His name was Private John Pumphrey, and he was one of America’s oldest John Doe cases. “As far as we knew,...

In TV2 show Sensing Murder, three psychics independently identified a spot at the falls as the burial site of Williams. The Tauranga woman disappeared without trace from her Gate Pa home on June 5, 1986. Her body has never been found. A man phoned police the day after the show screened, saying he knew of a skull at the falls. But his discovery was kilometres away from the spot the pyschics were drawn to - at the top lake end of McLaren Falls... Historic Places Trust archaeologists were able to determine that the bones were ancient, likely "pre-European" by marks...

A mere 2 hours before his grisly murder about 5,300 years ago, Ötzi the iceman chowed down on some mouthwatering morsels: wild meat from ibex and red deer, cereals from einkorn wheat and — oddly enough — poisonous fern, a new study finds. It's unclear why Ötzi ate the toxic fern, known as bracken (Pteridium aquilinum). But it's possible that he used the fern to wrap his food, almost like a piece of plastic wrap, and then unintentionally ingested some of the toxic spores the fern left behind, said study co-senior researcher Albert Zink, head of the Eurac Research Institute...

Research out today shows the remains of Ötzi “the Iceman” are teeming with living microorganisms. Scientists in Italy conducted an extensive survey of Ötzi, a mummy naturally frozen in a mountain glacier for over 5,000 years. They found ample bacteria and fungi inside and on Ötzi’s body, some of which might have survived for millennia and appear to be active even today under tightly maintained storage conditions. Since his discovery, scientists have learned much about Ötzi’s life and the Copper Age society he was a part of. That includes his last meal and the likely possibility that he was killed...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - It was a great legend while it lasted, but DNA testing has finally ended a century-old story of the Hawaiian arrow carved from the bone of British explorer Captain James Cook who died in the Sandwich Islands in 1779. "There is no Cook in the Australian Museum," museum collection manager Jude Philp said on Thursday in announcing the DNA evidence that the arrow was not made from Cook's bone. But that will not stop the museum from continuing to display the arrow in its exhibition, "Uncovered: Treasures of the Australian Museum," which does include a feather cape...