Standing Up in the Sahel

At position 996 of a collagen chain called COL1A2, the protein extracted from a right parietal bone from Xujiayao, a Middle Pleistocene site in the Nihewan Basin of northern China, carries lysine in 57 distinct peptides and arginine in one. The second Xujiayao specimen sampled, a mandibular ramus, gives 61 lysine-bearing peptides against a single arginine one. Every Denisovan with protein or genome data carries lysine at that position, while Neanderthals and modern humans carry arginine, and those two bones are the main reason the Xujiayao hominins are now being called Denisovan. Since the fossils came out of the ground between 1976 and 1979, Xujiayao has been filed as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, as early H. sapiens, as archaic H. sapiens, and, to avoid the argument, as archaic Homo. Most recently it became the holotype of Homo juluensis, a species proposed partly on the 1,700 ml endocranial capacity of the Xujiayao 6 cranium (Wu et al., Journal of Human Evolution, 2022). If you follow East Asian Middle Pleistocene hominins, you probably carry a picture of Dali, Jinniushan and Hualongdong as archaic humans with unsettled names, and of Denisovans as a lineage known from a genome plus a few molecularly confirmed jaws and one cranium. The paper appeared in Nature on 21 October 2026. Song Xing, Zhongyou Wu, Qingfeng Shao and Junyi Ge are the equal-contribution first authors, and Qiaomei Fu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing is the corresponding author. The team sampled two of the 20 Xujiayao cranial, mandibular and dental fossils, recovered 18 endogenous ancient proteins, and concluded that the assemblage belongs to a late Middle Pleistocene East Asian Denisovan population. They then compared skull and jaw anatomy across East Asian archaic Homo and argued that most of those fossils, Dali, Jinniushan and Hualongdong included, are Denisovan as well, and that the size gap behind H. juluensis is variation within one population. This post is about how much of that sweeping reclassification two bones and one amino acid can carry. How do researchers know the proteins are ancient? The sampling was minimal. The team CT-scanned both specimens first (37.56 μm resolution), then drilled a small hole in each in a dedicated clean room, shielding the surrounding bone with aluminium foil. They dissolved the powder, split the proteins into fractions, and digested them with trypsin, an enzyme that cuts proteins into short peptides. A mass spectrometer then reads the mass of each peptide fragment, which allows the amino acid sequence to be inferred. The runs were done in two independent laboratories, one at Capital Medical University and one at Fudan University, and the data were searched with two software packages, PEAKS Online and MaxQuant. Extraction blanks were processed alongside the samples, and a modern camel bone served as a positive control. The hard part with any ancient protein is separating the real thing from modern contamination, and the authors lean on deamidation. Over long burial, the amino acids asparagine and glutamine slowly lose an amine group, so ancient proteins show high deamidation and fresh contaminants show little. In specimen PA1490 (the parietal), the main bone collagens had asparagine deamidation of 61.4 to 94.7% and glutamine deamidation of 44.9 to 92.6%, while keratins and trypsin, the usual contaminants, sat at 0.0 to 5.3% and 0.0 to 7.7%. PA1497 (the mandible) looks similar. After that filter, plus removal of peptides that could not be tied to a single gene, anything seen in the blanks, and anything MaxQuant could not confirm, 18 endogenous proteins remained: 13 for PA1490 and 15 for PA1497. Figure 2b gives the endogenous share of peptides as 91.4% for PA1490 and 94.1% for PA1497, and the extraction blank scores 0.0. The taxonomic call comes in two steps. Searches against a mammalian type I collagen database placed both samples in the genus Homo, and the team then looked a

Seven and a half meters down in Shanidar Cave, in the Zagros Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, the left shoulder blade, or scapula, of a Neanderthal had lain for some 75,000 years with a hole through it. The bone was too soft to pick up. The excavators soaked it where it lay with an acrylic consolidant, Paraloid B72 dissolved in acetone, backed it with cotton gauze, and cut it out of the ground inside a block of its own sediment; it had come through nearly whole, which is rare for a bone so thin in places that it is almost translucent. The hole sits low on the back of the blade, in the broad hollow anatomists call the infraspinous fossa. It is about 15 millimeters across and very nearly a perfect circle, and at least three hairline cracks run out from its rim. “It’s so round, it’s like, what is it?” That was Emma Pomeroy’s first thought, she told Science News. Pomeroy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, is lead author of a study published October 15 in Scientific Reports that describes these bones, dug up in 2019 and 2022, and the person they belonged to, a Neanderthal the team calls Shanidar A. Anyone raised on the phrase Stone Age pictures a killing in this period done with stone, a flake of flint knapped to a point and bound to a shaft. Neanderthals did use weapons like that, but a hafted stone point leaves a different mark. When archaeologists drive replica stone points into carcasses, the wounds come out oval or lozenge-shaped, sometimes a narrow slot, following the flattened section of the blade, whereas a sharpened wooden shaft, round in section, leaves a circle. Shanidar has encouraged the stone picture before. A man excavated there in the 1950s, known as Shanidar 3, has a narrow puncture in his left ninth rib, and in 2009 Steven Churchill, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, and his colleagues tried to reproduce it by driving replica Mousterian and Levallois points into the chests of pig carcasses, using a calibrated crossbow to control the energy of each strike. They judged the wound most consistent with a light, stone-tipped projectile and, because early modern humans were in western Asia at around that time and may already have had throwing weapons, raised the possibility that one of them threw it. The rib had started to heal, so Shanidar 3, who died roughly 50,000 years ago, some 25,000 years after Shanidar A, seems to have lived for weeks after he was hit. The older bone points to a different weapon. The University of Cambridge’s announcement presents the new hole as possibly the first evidence that sharpened wooden spears were used anywhere in the prehistoric Middle East, and possibly the earliest example in the hominin fossil record of lethal violence between individuals with a wooden spear, a second claim the paper itself stops short of. On October 7, in Science Advances, Palmira Saladié and colleagues at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution described 597 pieces of wood from Abric Romaní, a rock shelter near Barcelona that Neanderthals used between about 62,000 and 40,000 years ago. Much of that wood survives only as the shape of where it was: water heavy with calcium carbonate wrapped the pieces in travertine as they rotted, and the excavators recorded the molds. Thirteen had been worked or used, among them two spears, the better preserved 2.45 meters long. Josep Vallverdú, an archaeologist at the institute, told Gizmodo that the simplest lesson of the site was that the Paleolithic was “not a world made only of stone,” a strange thing to need to say about a period whose name means Old Stone Age. It needs saying because stone is what lasts, so stone is what archaeologists mostly have; wooden shafts, handles and spears turn up only where some accident of chemistry has kept them. Shanidar has no travertine and no waterlogged mud. Apart from pollen and charred wood, the paper notes, the cave has kept almost nothing organic, so the spear that went thr

At the Ōzuka tomb, five horses parade across the stone gateway leading into the burial chamber. Their eyes are large and deliberate. Their harnesses are picked out in careful color. You can tell, from the way the artist rendered their bodies, which animals are male and which are female. Riding them are six human figures, and every one of them is a stick. No faces. No sex. One rider is drawn at roughly a quarter the size of his own horse. This wasn’t a failure of skill. The same hands that gave the horses anatomical precision chose, apparently on purpose, to leave the people blank. A new study by Claudia Zancan, published in Antiquity, argues that this wasn’t an isolated quirk of one tomb but a consistent regional pattern across the decorated tombs of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, and that the pattern tells us something specific about how these communities thought about death. A Regional Style That Refused to Individualize Kyushu sits closest to the Korean Peninsula of any part of Japan, and during the sixth and seventh centuries it absorbed plenty of continental influence. Across the water, Koguryŏ tombs painted the dead as dominant, detailed figures towering over their servants and animals, exactly the kind of imagery you’d expect from an elite burial tradition that wanted to broadcast the status of the person inside. Kyushu had access to that visual vocabulary. It didn’t use it. Zancan’s study systematically catalogued anthropomorphic figures across 38 decorated tombs, 20 painted and 18 rock-cut, and found the same thing again and again: human figures rendered smaller than the objects around them, stripped of individualizing detail, and, in every single case in the sample, impossible to sex. Not one figure across the entire corpus shows primary or secondary sexual characteristics, even in tombs where the artists were clearly capable of that level of detail. Compare that to contemporary Kyushu funerary sculpture like sekijin stone figures or the haniwa of the Kanto region, both of which do occasionally mark sex and social role. The anonymity in the tomb paintings looks like a choice, not a limitation. This matters because the period itself was a moment of real transformation in Japanese mortuary practice. Older Kofun-period burials were sealed pits, built once and closed for good. The horizontal stone chambers that appear in the Late Kofun period could be reopened, over and over, for successive interments. A tomb stopped being a monument to one death and became a space for ongoing ritual. Zancan’s argument is that the imagery inside these chambers reflects that shift. If a tomb is going to be reopened for generations, its decoration doesn’t need to commemorate the specific person laid to rest last. It needs to do something else. Borrowing a classification system originally built for Iberian rock art, Zancan mapped where the human figures actually sit within the architecture of each tomb, and three locations kept recurring. On the exterior façades of rock-cut tombs, figures appear holding weapons, facing outward, and these are the only figures in the entire corpus with anything resembling faces. They read as guardians, warding off whatever might approach from outside. Inside, at the entrance to the burial chamber, a second set of figures marks the threshold itself, the physical and symbolic boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. This is architecturally and mythologically loaded ground in Japanese tradition. It’s the same threshold where the god Izanagi, in the origin myth, searches for his dead wife Izanami and finds her transformed by the underworld. And at the very back of the chamber, on the rear wall closest to where the body would be laid, the human figures shrink to their smallest scale of all. None of these three positions functions as a portrait spot. Read together, they sketch a route: guarded threshold, liminal crossing, final resting place. The figures aren’t depicting who died. T

A drained lakebed in the mountains of Jotunheimen doesn’t look like much: gray silt, exposed stone, the odd meltwater channel cutting through it. But in 2022, when the water level at Lake Tesse dropped for its usual spring maintenance, someone walking the exposed mud spotted wood poking out of the ground. Not driftwood. Poles. Dozens of them, still standing upright where they’d been driven into the lakebed, arranged in a tight circular chamber with a fence of angled supports leading into it. A fish trap. That alone wouldn’t be remarkable. People have been building lattice-wall fish traps in Scandinavia for millennia, and the type is well documented from wetland sites across northwestern Europe going back to around 4000 BC. What made this one strange was the radiocarbon date. The trap was closer to 4950 BC. And it sat in a lake that, by every reconstruction of the region’s glacial and hydrological history, should not have had fish in it at all. A landscape with a locked door Lake Tesse sits at 854 meters above sea level in the central Norwegian mountains, fed and drained by a river system that eventually reaches the Oslofjord. The ice sheet that covered this terrain for most of the last glacial period didn’t finish retreating from the area until around 8400 BC. Once it did, the landscape opened up fast, both to colonizing plants and animals and to the hunter-fisher-gatherer groups moving in from the coasts. Fish followed too, but only where they could. In the lowlands, trout, pike, and a couple dozen other species swam upstream from the sea and from the shrinking freshwater and brackish remnants of the Baltic as relative sea levels dropped through the Early Holocene. Above a certain elevation, that migration hit a wall. Literally: waterfalls and steep gradients along the Tessa River made it physically impossible for fish to swim up into Lake Tesse from the watercourses below. Historically, the lower stretches of that same river system supported around twenty-five species. The upper stretches, cut off by the falls, supported exactly one: brown trout. Not because brown trout were better adapted to alpine conditions than everything else. Because brown trout were the only species that ever got up there, and they didn’t get up there on their own. That’s the setup the new paper, published in Antiquity by Axel Mjærum and colleagues at the University of Oslo, is working with. If fish couldn’t climb the falls, and Lake Tesse had fish anyway, something else put them there. The obvious candidate, in a lake that’s been renowned since the twentieth century as one of Norway’s most productive trout fisheries (it once yielded close to nine tonnes of fish a year before it was dammed for hydro-power in the 1940s), is people. The trap dating just pushes back how far that “something else” goes. Considerably. What the poles actually show The excavation recovered four traps in total, with 73 individual poles subjected to dendrological and radiocarbon analysis. The construction itself is unglamorous and entirely functional: small stems of Scots pine, with some birch and willow mixed in, averaging about 37 millimeters in diameter, driven vertically into the lakebed to form a circular chamber roughly 3.5 meters across, braced by poles set at 30 to 45 degree angles. Cut marks and traces of lashing show the wood was deliberately worked, not just accumulated debris. It’s the kind of trap ethnographically documented across the Nordic countries well into the twentieth century, built in spring, fished through summer, sometimes maintained and rebuilt over years. The dating is where it gets interesting. Trap 5 comes back at roughly 4950 BC via radiocarbon on its outer tree rings, placing it squarely in the Late Mesolithic. Trap 2 dates to around 5000 BC as well. Trap 1, dated both by radiocarbon and by cross-matching against a regional pine tree-ring chronology from Jämtland, Sweden, comes out at 3850 BC, with two of its posts felled about twelve years apart,

Grave 311 held an eighteen-year-old whose teeth didn’t match their bones. That mismatch is the whole story, so it’s worth sitting with it before anything else. A second molar forms in early childhood, between roughly three and eight years old, and once it’s mineralized it stays chemically frozen at that age forever. Bone collagen is different. It keeps remodeling throughout life, so it mostly records the years just before death. In this one skeleton, the two tissues told opposite stories. The dentine carried a strong signal of C4 plants, almost certainly millet, the kind of signature you’d expect from a diet common across parts of southeastern Europe. The bone collagen showed nothing of the sort, just the C3-dominated cereal diet, rye and buckwheat, typical of everyone else buried in medieval Vilnius. Strontium and oxygen values from the enamel pointed the same direction as the childhood carbon signal, away from the Vilnius region entirely, toward baselines more consistent with present-day Ukraine or southern Poland. Put plainly: this person grew up somewhere far to the south, moved to Vilnius sometime in adolescence, and adjusted their diet to match. They died there, buried according to strict Christian custom, with no grave goods at all. That’s a striking amount of individual biography to pull out of a skeleton. But the reason it matters goes beyond one traveler’s life story. Lithuania was, famously, the last pagan state in Europe. Grand Duke Jogaila didn’t formally adopt Catholicism until 1387. Before that, the standard picture is of a country still cremating its dead, still worshipping outside the Christian framework that had already swallowed the rest of the continent. Grave 311 belonged to a cemetery that shouldn’t, by that picture, have existed yet. The cemetery is on Bokšto Street in Vilnius’s old town, part of a district medieval chroniclers called the Civitas Ruthenica, the Ruthenian city. Archaeologists excavated more than 500 intact graves there over eight years, and the burial customs are unambiguously Christian: bodies laid supine, oriented east to west, cross pendants and enkolpions turning up in some graves, cremation entirely absent. Radiocarbon dating places the cemetery’s use across roughly 150 years, spanning the second half of the thirteenth century through the fourteenth, meaning this Orthodox Christian community was burying its dead in a formally pagan city for a century and a half before Catholicism ever arrived. That much was already known from the archaeology. Byzantine-style jewelry, the chaplets, the decorative headpieces made from ornaments stitched to leather and cloth, closely resembled fashions from Halych-Volhynia, a region of the former Kievan Rus’ now split between western Ukraine and southern Poland. The material culture argued for a connection. What it couldn’t do was prove that any given skeleton had actually made that journey rather than simply adopted the style secondhand. That’s the gap isotope analysis is built to close, and it’s why a research team led by Giedrė Motuzaitė Matuzevičiūtė sampled bone, dentine, and enamel from 15 individuals, layering carbon and nitrogen data against strontium and oxygen ratios and comparing everything to a local baseline built from modern plants collected around Vilnius. A city sorted by sex Once the isotope data came back, a pattern emerged that the grave goods alone hadn’t shown: mobility in this population was heavily gendered. Every sampled female returned isotope values consistent with growing up locally. Not one showed the kind of childhood signature that would suggest an origin outside the Vilnius region. Several of these women were buried with grave goods, cowrie shells, glass pendants, the kinds of items that don’t fit neatly with strict Christian burial custom and read more as holdovers from older, non-Christian traditions. The team’s interpretation is that these were local women who converted, plausibly through marriage into Orthodox househol