Ancient DNA, 108 radiocarbon dates and Mesolithic bone piles suggest hunting, inbreeding and spreading forest together ended the Scandinavian aurochs.

Excavations at Tambo Viejo in Peru’s Acarí Valley found whole coca leaves where Spanish chroniclers said the Inka burned them.

Ancient DNA from 1,204 people in the Americas shows lineages diversifying no earlier than 21,000 years ago, an awkward fit for the oldest sites.

Skulls from Matelica, Italy, show deformational plagiocephaly nearly 3,000 years before the Back to Sleep campaign

A skull fragment from Drimolen pushes the adult Homo erectus record back to 2 million years ago, among far more Paranthropus.

A 2026 study uses digital tracing on Walter Emery’s photograph of a Saqqara sealing to argue that Meretneith held the royal serekh of the First Dynasty.

Babylonian scribal schools taught religion through god-lists, and at Uruk the priests trained on them used the lists to raise Anu above Ištar.

In Tennessee’s chert-rich river valley, the first Ice Age hunters resharpened their points to stubs while Cumberland successors discarded usable ones.

Red glyphs painted in Cave 19 at Chalcatzingo, Morelos, name a Singing Mountain and add new evidence that Teotihuacan had a true writing system.

A 12-year study of wild Sumatran orangutans finds that most of what looks like an infant’s solo trial and error starts with watching another ape.

The site’s first intact burials suggest much of its scattered human bone began in graves under house floors, not in the rites of a Neolithic skull cult.

Strontium isotope analysis of six Greek sites puts migrants at 5 to 10 percent across the Bronze Age, with young adults the likeliest newcomers.

A new facial reconstruction from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, joins one fossil’s braincase, another’s jaw and a modern stranger’s CT scan

Gene switches set before we parted from Neanderthals cut the sugars that cushion human cartilage, a clue to why we are so prone to osteoarthritis.

A resurvey of a Vinča culture village in Serbia finds it nearly twice the size once thought, ringed by five ditches, with little house-size inequality.

A 5,900-year-old Copper Age pottery kiln at Ursoaia, Romania, is larger than any kiln yet published from the Trypillia megasites.

Archaeoentomology at Cruz de la Esquina shows Indigenous Canarians buried their dead fresh, on planks laid over the leftovers of stored grain.

Bone scans show Australopithecus climbed like an African ape while walking on two legs, and that early Homo had quit the trees by 1.8 million years ago.

Seeds from Phoenician-era Huelva and Islamic Valencia put some Iberian wine grapes two or three generations from vines that reached Spain 3,000 years ago.

Enamel isotopes from teeth gathered by Jesuit collectors show the central Levant kept its woodlands through glacial cycles as parts of the south opened up.

At Mizyn in northern Ukraine, Ice Age carvers engraved the Schreger lines of mammoth ivory onto some of Europe’s earliest schematic female figurines.

DNA, radiocarbon dates and climate models put 1788 Aboriginal Australia at over seven times the old estimate, with excess deaths near 2 million by 1861.

Genomes from 34 Iron Age and medieval burials show how Swedish migration after 1250 reshaped Finland’s southwest coast while inland Häme barely changed.

A 2025 study said two macaques could synchronize to a beat. A rebuttal, and what newborn brains already do, say otherwise.

Two teeth from a Pilbara rock shelter show devils scavenged human camps in Australia’s arid interior, until the dingo’s arrival changed everything.

Dental wear and arecoline traces from two Sulawesi foragers show psychoactive nut use began in the Late Pleistocene, long before farming or slaked lime.

Ancient DNA failed on every bone from Yunnan’s Bianfu Cave, so five Denisovan fossils were identified from proteins preserved over 130,000 years.

A new AI model shows that for some human traits, primate DNA alone predicts genetic risk better than the full span of vertebrate evolution.

Sedimentary DNA from Canada geese at Crawford Lake is more damaged than genetic material recovered from permafrost tens of thousands of years older.

Multi-tissue isotope analysis of skeletons from a Polish cemetery pushes millet’s earliest use back a century, and argues against a wave of migrants.

Zircon lifted by adhesive tape traces Britain’s tallest stone row to a tor 18 km away, and to a war memorial built from its missing stone.

A new study proposes the ‘natural kiln hypothesis’: ancient wildfires may have shown Neolithic farmers how to fire clay into pottery.

DNA from two 900-year-old melon seeds pulled from a sunken Chinese port shows a fruit closer to a pickled vegetable than a dessert melon.

A new biomechanical study compares humans and chimpanzees to explain why the heel-first walk central to human bipedalism carries a hidden physical cost.

Digitizing 148,000 items of Sudanese heritage meant smuggled cash, customs delays, and hard drives now missing since the war began.

New radiocarbon dates from Malalmuerzo, Carigüela, and Majolicas caves in Granada reveal a massacre, a ritual practice, and an unresolved puzzle.

A University of Udine survey used magnetometry, drone topography and Cold War spy imagery to read the 340-hectare Neo-Assyrian city below the fields.

Ancient DNA from 149 individuals at eleven sites in northwestern China finds wheat, barley, cattle and sheep arriving around 4,000 years ago with no genetic trace of the people who domesticated them.

Isotopes from three hilltop sites in eastern Botswana trace metal moving more than 950 kilometers , and reveal a strange blind spot for the mines next door.

Excavation at Red Lodge, Suffolk, shows a burial mound already two thousand years old becoming the centre of a Roman sacred enclosure, and staying its focus for another two hundred years.

A Raspberry Pi, a ring of LEDs, and a meter of black Danish soil that refuses to be read by eye.

Twelve leaf packets from Wuwangdun have the shape of zongzi and none of the contents, which is what makes them interesting.

A rockshelter in Quinkan Country has produced the first macropod tooth ornaments ever found outside a burial in northeast Australia, and nobody is quite sure what to make of them.

Lidar data used to map ruins turns out to carry a second signal: the shape of the forest growing on top of them

A new analysis of 143 skeletons from three post-medieval Dutch communities finds the heaviest spinal wear in a dairy village, not in the mills.

Twenty of western Arnhem Land’s largest painted Ancestral Beings cluster inside 27 square kilometres of Amurdak Country, and the team that recorded them argues the timing is not incidental.

Twenty-eight microsamples from fourteen artworks also yield glue made from cattle, sheep or goat, donkey, horse, and possibly antelope, with no discernible pattern behind the choices.

Ancient DNA from two 900-year-old sherds in Georgia does what residue chemistry could not.

A new comparative analysis of Hadza actigraphy argues that Homo sapiens keeps diurnal physiology while running a far looser 24-hour schedule than the label implies.