The Met catalogues it as 86.11.286a under the name a-še-er gi-ta. That is not a title in our sense. Mesopotamian compositions were identified by their opening words, the way papal encyclicals still are.

The word means the instrument first

A balag is a musical instrument, most likely a large bow harp, though the evidence is mixed enough that some scholars have argued for a drum, and the instrument may well have changed over the two thousand years the word was in use. The genre takes its name from the thing that accompanied it.

Individual instruments had proper names and were sometimes treated as minor deities in their own right, receiving offerings. This was not a prop.

The singer was a gala, and he sang in a woman’s dialect

The performer was a gala, kalû in Akkadian, a specialist in lamentation attached to the temple. They appear in records from the middle of the third millennium BC and were numerous enough to form a significant part of temple and palace personnel.

They sang in Emesal, a dialect of Sumerian which the texts associate with female speech. Goddesses speak Emesal in Sumerian literature. So do the gala. This is one of the more discussed features of the office, and it connects to a wider set of ritual performers around Inanna whose gender presentation the sources treat as deliberately ambiguous.

Emesal has another distinction. When Sumerian stopped being written for most purposes after the Old Babylonian period, the cultic songs in Emesal carried on. They are the one Sumerian literary genre that survived.

The point was not to feel sad

The temptation with a text like this is to read it as an outpouring of grief, and that is not quite what it is.

Balags were ritual instruments for managing divine anger. A god whose temple had been destroyed, or was about to be demolished for rebuilding, was dangerous. So was an eclipse, or an inauspicious day. The lament was performed to settle the deity, to say the terrible thing aloud in the god’s own voice and take the force out of it. The related genre of eršaḫunga is named for exactly this, the lament that soothes the heart.

The ancestors of the balag are the city laments of around 2000 BC, the great compositions on the destruction of Ur and of Sumer, recited when temples were pulled down and put up again. By the Seleucid period the genre had been running for the better part of two millennia.

Nobody spoke either language

This is the part the object is usually celebrated for, and it deserves stating carefully.

Sumerian stopped being anyone’s mother tongue around 2000 BC. Akkadian had probably ceased to be spoken by the time this tablet was written, displaced across the Near East by Aramaic and, in places, Greek. The scribe was writing a Sumerian text with an Akkadian translation, and the streets outside were speaking neither.

That sounds extraordinary and was, in context, routine. Temple scholarship in Hellenistic Babylonia was conducted in these languages as a matter of course, in the way that European learned writing was conducted in Latin long after Latin had no native speakers. There is a small group of tablets from roughly this period, the Graeco-Babyloniaca, with cuneiform on one side and Greek transliteration on the other, apparently made by students working their way into the material.

What was not routine is how little time was left. Cuneiform was written for perhaps another century or two and then stopped. This lament belongs to the last stretch of a three-thousand-year writing tradition, copied out by people who knew the words for a grief that was, by then, a very long way behind them.

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Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art, object 86.11.286a, and Spar and Lambert, Cuneiform Texts in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume II. Cohen, M.E. (1974), Balag-Compositions, and (1988), The Canonical Lamentations of Ancient Mesopotamia. Delnero, P., on the ritual performance of Sumerian laments.

The work was carried out with Pamela Fragnoli of the Austrian Archaeological Institute and Johannes Sterba of TU Wien, as part of a joint project between the Heritage Commission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture and the University of Vienna.

It was called Midianite pottery for fifty years

The name came from Peter Parr and colleagues in 1970, after painted sherds turned up at Qurayyah and at sites across northwest Saudi Arabia. Qurayyah sits in the region that historical sources place as Midian, so the pottery became Midianite pottery.

Benno Rothenberg then found large quantities of it at Timna in the southern Negev, including in the Egyptian temple of Hathor, and read the copper industry there as run by Midianite tribes working under Egyptian control. The label stuck, and it carried a biblical charge, since Midian is where Moses is said to have fled and where he met Jethro.

Parr himself warned against it in 1988. There was no established connection between Qurayyah and the Midianites, and attaching an ethnic name to a pottery style was a bad habit. He proposed Qurayyah Painted Ware, which is what specialists have used since, though the older name persists in popular accounts.

What nobody had done was prove the pottery came from Qurayyah at all.

Neutron activation and thin sections

Two techniques answered that.

Sterba’s laboratory ran neutron activation analysis, which gives a chemical fingerprint down to trace element level and can be matched against clay sources. Fragnoli’s team cut thin sections and examined them under a polarising microscope, reading the mineral inclusions in the fabric, and studied how the vessels were formed alongside the stratified material from the excavation.

The two lines converge on Qurayyah.

The production ran far longer than anyone thought

This is where the chronology shifts. Doralice Klainscek, a doctoral candidate at Vienna and a co-author, reports that the first group of Qurayyah Painted Ware was made around 3,600 years ago.

That is several centuries before the conventional dating, which was built on the Egyptian finds at Timna and put the ware in the thirteenth to mid-twelfth centuries BC. The Levantine evidence had been dating the pottery by where it ended up rather than where it started.

Klainscek describes continuous evolution rather than a fixed style. Around 3,200 years ago, four hundred years into the sequence, the potters developed the rich repertoire of painted animals and human ritual scenes that the ware is known for. Production at the oasis then carried on for roughly another thousand years, to the end of the Iron Age.

Eight things that make a brand

The framing the study uses is that this qualifies as a brand, and the useful part is that the authors set out what they mean by that rather than asserting it.

Their criteria are visual identity, material consistency, technological continuity, centralised production, circulation through export, imitation by others, deliberate commercial reach, and cultural prestige. Qurayyah Painted Ware meets all of them.

Luciani’s wider point concerns where this happened. Desert oases are short of the things pottery production needs, which is clay, water and fuel. The communities at Qurayyah were nonetheless connected to technological networks shared with the southern Levant and Syria, and inventive enough to develop a repertoire of their own, which they kept at home and eventually exported.

Where the pots ended up

North, several hundred kilometres, to the southern Levant and sites such as Tell el-Kheleifeh, and to the Hathor temple at Timna. South, into northern Arabia.

The Timna vessels are worth a note. Rothenberg observed that the painted pottery from the temple was of noticeably better quality and greater variety than what turned up elsewhere in the valley, which he took as a sign these were votive offerings rather than everyday ware. On the new reading, someone was carrying the good stuff a long way to leave it in an Egyptian shrine.

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Sources: Luciani, M., Fragnoli, P., Gilstrap, W.D., Sterba, J.H., Klainscek, D., Greene, J.A., and Donnelly, P. (2026). “Creating a Brand. Genesis, Transformation and Diffusion of Qurayyah Painted Ware.” PLOS ONE 21(8), e0351296. University of Vienna announcement, 19 August 2026. Background on the naming from Parr et al. (1970), Parr (1988), and Rothenberg and Glass (1983).

What they also found was gold. Buckles at her ankles, a headdress covered in plaques, and a face on her forehead that looks like a Greek gorgoneion.

The grave is Burial 11 at the Karakabak-10 cemetery. The study is by A.E. Astafyev of the Mangystau State Historical and Cultural Reserve and E.S. Bogdanov of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography at the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published in Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia.

The shoes were made for the grave

At her ankles were two shoe straps, each with a buckle of carved wood covered in gold foil and small gold-covered tips at the other end.

The study is clear that these were never walked in. They show no wear, and the excavators take them as objects made specifically for the burial. Whatever they were for, it was not footwear.

A separate gold buckle in the shape of a bird of prey with spread wings also came from the grave. Its style belongs to what archaeologists call the Shipovo horizon, after a site in the Volga region of Russia. Gold shoe fittings of this kind are unusual for the area around the Caspian and Aral seas.

A Greek face on a steppe headdress

The headdress carried dozens of small gold plaques, two carved wooden masks covered in gold at her temples, and a larger gold-covered face worn on the forehead.

That forehead piece resembles a gorgoneion, the head of Medusa used as a protective motif in Hellenistic Greek art and carried east through the Black Sea colonies and the Bosporan kingdom. Comparable masks have turned up in the Volga region and near the Black Sea. The wooden temple masks have no known parallel anywhere.

She may not have been from here

The other graves at Karakabak-10 show what the researchers call Pontic fashion, a style associated with communities near the Black Sea. Burial 11 shows very little of it.

That absence, together with the unmatched temple masks, leads the authors to suggest she may not have been local. The gold itself probably was. They think it was made at a nearby settlement called Karakabak, on the strength of similarities with objects found earlier at Altynkazgan.

Source: Astafyev, A.E., and Bogdanov, E.S. (2026), in Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia.

The study is by Sue O’Connor of the Australian National University, with Shimona Kealy, Hendri Kaharudin, Ceri Shipton and colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Why nobody could put a date on this art

The motif is familiar across eastern Indonesia and the western Pacific. Prominent rocks carry red concentric circles with rays, in a style resembling common representations of the sun, and the tradition is associated with Austronesian-speaking populations.

The trouble has always been chronology. The rocks these images are painted on are far older than the paint, and there is nothing datable in the pigment, so the tradition has been hard to place in time.

A painted slab buried in organic sediment is different. The sediment can be dated, which is how this piece has acquired an age when the rock panels have not.

The claim that the art came before the pottery

Here is what makes the date interesting. If it reflects when the slab arrived on Wetar rather than a later deliberate burial, then the painting tradition reached the island before pottery did.

That is a substantial claim. Pottery is one of the key technologies associated with Austronesian expansion, and it had reached Taiwan from China long before this. O’Connor’s reading is that spreading their art mattered to these voyagers more than carrying even a technology of that importance.

She raises a possible sequence. The explorers, whom she calls argonauts, may have visited islands first with their art, scouting rather than settling, and returned later with pottery once people had established themselves. Whether or not they were carrying pots, the ideas were being taken up where they found suitable islands.

The motifs are painted where they can be seen from the sea

The Austronesian language family covers more than half the world. Linguistics, genetics and archaeology together trace its origins to Taiwan, from where speakers moved into the Philippines, Indonesia, and then across the Pacific and Indian oceans, reaching Rapa Nui in one direction and Madagascar in the other.

The usual explanation for that expansion is an advance in boat technology. None of the early boats survives, so nobody knows what the advance was. Some anthropologists have argued instead that ideas drove it.

The paper sits on that side. Its authors point to the importance of founders in Austronesian culture and the respect accorded to them, which may have pushed people into long and dangerous voyages. The sun motifs are typically painted high on cliffs where they can be seen from a distance, which makes them function as an announcement that representatives of this culture had arrived.

Shipton’s point is that people travelling to new islands were not only carrying technologies and objects. They were carrying ideas, identities and ways of understanding the world.

O’Connor draws a modern comparison, noting how readily people can now be influenced on something like vaccination, and observing that cults and influencers have always had a large effect.

What happened when the ideas arrived

When Europeans reached these islands thousands of years later they brought their own ideology, usually alongside violent conquest. O’Connor says there appears to be little evidence of conflict following the Austronesian expansion, though this cannot be known with certainty. Instead people joined the culture, adopting Austronesian languages, art, technologies and burial practices.

Portable does not mean it was carried anywhere

That the slab is portable does not establish that it was carried to Wetar. O’Connor notes the limestone could be local or could have come from another island. Whether the argonauts carried objects like this on their voyages is not known.

One slab is also a thin basis for an ideology that took root across a very large number of islands. O’Connor considers the team lucky, since they excavated an area of only two meters by one.

The choice of where to dig was not random. The find came beneath an overhang with what she calls a magnificent view of the coast, which suggests a good ocean view has been valuable property for a very long time. The walls of the shelter were themselves covered in Austronesian Painting Tradition art, which O’Connor thinks may have served as a marker visible from the sea.

Source. O’Connor, S., Kealy, S., Kaharudin, H.A.F., Nutman, E., et al. (2026). “4000-Year-Old Painted Plaque From Southeast Indonesia Reveals Austronesian Painting Tradition Preceded Neolithic Pottery.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 123(34).

A trawler brought them up from a hundred metres down

An industrial trawler brought them up from about a hundred metres down, roughly 25 kilometres off Taiwan’s southern coast, along with a large quantity of animal bone. The material was acquired by researchers in 2010 from a collection donated by the Taiwanese artist Li-Ren Hou to the National Museum of Natural Science, and some of the bones were recognised as hominin at that point.

During glacial periods when sea levels dropped, the channel was dry land connecting Taiwan to the Asian mainland.

The context is worth being plain about. These fossils came out of indiscriminate trawling, so they arrived jumbled together with no stratigraphy and no record of where on the seafloor any individual bone was picked up. Kaifu’s own paper says as much, that there is no record of when or where in the Penghu Channel each of the leg bones was collected. Nothing establishes that the two individuals were contemporaries, or that either is contemporary with Penghu 1, the mandible identified as Denisovan in Science last year.

One method says 45,000 years, another says 160,000

Radiocarbon on purified collagen from the tibia gives a calibrated age of 45,575 to 44,522 years before present. That is the figure in all the coverage.

Uranium-series dating on the same bone, published by Rainer Grün and Chris Stringer in 2023, indicated an age in excess of 160,000 years. The femur could not be dated by that method at all.

John Hawks, who works on Denisovan material at the University of Wisconsin, calls this a divergence by a factor of four and not a minor difference. His reading is that a radiocarbon age from purified collagen is fairly convincing evidence the uranium modelling was wrong, which has consequences well beyond Penghu, since a great many East Asian fossils are dated by uranium uptake and few can be checked against radiocarbon. The Harbin skull is among them.

The size claim has a sampling problem

The paper’s central argument is that Denisovans in this region were larger than earlier Homo erectus and larger than Late Pleistocene Homo sapiens in eastern Asia, and that this runs against Bergmann’s rule, which predicts body size declining as you move toward the equator. The authors also suggest the large Denisovan brain may follow partly from large body size.

Hawks is sceptical, and his objection is about how these bones came to be in a collection at all. Trawling nets catch larger and thicker elements more readily, and thicker bones survive the process with their morphology intact. A collector sorting through dredged material will pick out the well-preserved pieces, and thin or juvenile bones are less likely to be recognized as anything.

There is also a wider pattern. Hawks has written previously on the sample bias in known Denisovan remains, which are mostly male. Both Penghu individuals are identified as male.

His conclusion is that the sample sizes for groups other than Neanderthals are small enough that he would not make much of these measurements beyond saying the bones are human.

The isotopes put them at the trophic level of carnivores

A companion preprint led by Minoru Yoneda, posted the same day, ran stable isotopes on the same bones. Nitrogen values put the Penghu 3 individual at a trophic level comparable to carnivores, close to what is seen in Neanderthals. The carbon indicates a landscape dominated by C4 plants, which fits a southern coastal setting and differs from the C3 environments of the Neanderthals and of Tianyuan, the early modern human from northern China.

Hawks notes that isotopic composition is not vulnerable to the biases that affect the body-size argument, which may make this the more useful result of the two papers.

East Asia has almost nothing from these millennia

The Denisovan record has a gap. Neanderthals are abundant in the window between 70,000 and 45,000 years ago, so abundant that the term classic Neanderthals exists for them. East Asia has almost nothing from those millennia that can be attributed to Denisovans or to any other archaic human.

If the radiocarbon date holds, Penghu 3 sits directly in that gap and becomes some of the latest direct evidence for Denisovan survival anywhere. Hawks describes this as the major value of the new material, and adds that if collagen survives this well in the tibia, DNA may too, which would tell us considerably more about late Denisovans than anything currently available.

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Sources: Kaifu, Y., Chang, C.-H., Tarusawa, Y., Sawafuji, R., Yonemoto, S., Shimamura, S., Takai, M., Kono, R.T., Sun, C.-H., Tsai, C.-H., Yoneda, M., and Tsutaya, T. (2026). "Denisovan Leg Bones From Taiwan Reveal Large Body Size." bioRxiv, doi.org/10.64898/2026.08.07.743438. Yoneda, M., et al. (2026). "Habitat and Feeding Ecology of a Denisovan From Late Pleistocene Taiwan." bioRxiv, doi.org/10.64898/2026.08.07.743455. Hawks, J., "Legs of the Last Denisovans," 8 August 2026. Grün, R., and Stringer, C. (2023). Quaternary Science Reviews 322, 108379. Tsutaya, T., et al. (2025). "A Male Denisovan Mandible From Pleistocene Taiwan." Science 388(6743), 176 to 180.

A study in the Journal of Archaeological Science by Wu Mingming, Hu Ping, Zhai Kai, Wang Quanyu and colleagues offers an answer. The pigment was bound to the rock with blood, and at one of the sites they sampled, that blood was between 97 and 99 percent human.

What the analysis found in the paint

The team had to drill for their samples, which was the first indication of how firmly the paint was attached. What the analysis showed was that the paintings had been laid down in two stages. The artists began with a ground layer, made by burning animal bone, bird droppings, limestone and shell together to produce calcium phosphate and quicklime, then slaking that with water and blood into a mortar. They spread it on the cliff, let it start to set, and painted over it with red pigment made from local clay rich in iron oxide.

The blood was doing chemistry. Its proteins biomineralised the calcium carbonate in the mortar, and biomineralised calcium carbonate is, in effect, limestone. The ground layer became the same material as the cliff it was sitting on, with the pigment particles sealed inside it. Not paint adhering to rock, but paint that had become rock.

The human proportion in the mortar varied. One sample was 61 percent human and 39 percent cattle, with the remainder at the first site made up of one to three percent from various herbivores. When the researchers looked more closely at the human blood, they found prolactin-induced protein and lactotransferrin. Both are close to absent in most people and both rise steeply in women late in pregnancy and in women who are breastfeeding.

That is where the paper moves from chemistry to argument. The Huashan images include copulation scenes, pregnant women and phallic figures, and the Luoyue who painted them are generally described as a matrilineal fishing and hunting society. The authors put those things together and suggest the blood was collected during childbirth and added to the paintings as a fertility rite. The proteins are a laboratory result. What the blood was doing on the cliff is a reading of the pictures.

The cliffs along the Zuojiang

The site itself is enormous. UNESCO inscribed it in 2016 as thirty-eight locations spread over about 105 kilometres of the Zuojiang and its tributary the Mingjiang, holding more than five thousand images in some three hundred groups. The largest panel, at Ningming, runs 221 metres along a cliff 140 metres high, with the paintings sitting between 30 and 90 metres above the water. That height has kept them safe from people as effectively as the blood has kept them safe from rain.

Among the figures are bronze drums, knives, swords, bells and boats, and a great many humans in a squatting posture, the largest such concentration known anywhere. Scholars have read the squatting as ritual, or as an imitation of frogs, which carry fertility associations in the rice-growing cultures of the region. Nobody is certain. Almost nothing survives of the Luoyue apart from this, and UNESCO describes the landscape as the only remaining witness to their tradition.

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Sources: Wu, M., Hu, P., Zhai, K., Weng, X., Wang, Y., Chen, H., and Wang, Q., et al. (2026). "Blood-Induced Biomineralized Calcium Carbonate Used for Binding in the Huashan Rock Art of Guangxi, Southern China." Journal of Archaeological Science 193, 106650. Reported by IFLScience, 14 August 2026. Site details from UNESCO World Heritage listing 1508.

The decision was not a guess. Surface scans and geomagnetic measurements indicate that this part of the mound also holds large public buildings, rectangular-plan structures and huts. That builds on the geophysical campaign run under the Heritage for the Future and Taş Tepeler project, in which teams from Istanbul University, the German Archaeological Institute and Freie Universität Berlin combined geomagnetic mapping, ground-penetrating radar and lidar to detect not only the familiar circular enclosures but rectangular traces that may be early dwellings.

That distinction matters. Göbekli Tepe is famous for its circular enclosures of T-shaped pillars, but the picture emerging now is of a site with houses as well as monuments. Excavations under the project have already exposed rectangular-plan buildings belonging to Göbekli Tepe's second phase, dated to the 8th millennium BC.

Work is running on several fronts at once. Excavation continues in the GT1 and GT2 areas under their two protective roofs, while conservation and consolidation are underway in Structures A, C and D. The final surface fragments of the pillars in Structure C have been returned to place, the walls of Structure D have been reinforced along with the ground fixings of its two central pillars, and steel cabling is being added to protect the pillars against seismic movement. Renewed visitor paths, laid out around the new excavation zones, will open shortly.

Source: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı (Republic of Türkiye, Ministry of Culture and Tourism)

The study is by Sonia Alconini of the University of Virginia and Walter Sánchez-Canedo of the Universidad Mayor de San Simón, published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal. The deposit dates to somewhere between AD 1300 and 1536.

The context is a grain store, not a temple

The building is a qollqa, the circular stone structure used across the Andes for storing crops. That placement matters, because the bells were not alone in it.

They were deposited alongside a small stone carving of an ear of maize, a polished stone, a land snail shell and a stone axe. Taken together, this reads as a deliberate offering rather than a stored object or something mislaid, and the maize carving points at what the offering concerned.

The clappers were chosen to sound different

The variation is the striking part. Six bells of similar form, each fitted with a clapper of a different material, gives a set of distinct tones rather than a uniform chime.

That is a design decision. Copper, shell and stone ring differently against the same body, and whoever assembled this bundle wanted a range of sounds rather than one sound repeated. It suggests the bells were meant to be heard together, and that the differences between them carried meaning.

The comparison Alconini and Sánchez-Canedo draw is with living practice

Dancers in the modern Jalqa and Tarabuco communities of the Sucre region wear bells and spurs, and the metallic sound they make is associated with welcoming a good harvest.

The authors propose that the Yoroma bells worked in a comparable way. Bells, a carved maize cob and a grain store belong to the same set of concerns, and the ethnographic parallel gives a plausible reading of what the sound was for.

The distance between the two is roughly five hundred years, which is a long time for a practice to persist, and the analogy is an argument rather than a demonstration. But the Jalqa and Tarabuco are the descendants of this region’s population, not an unrelated comparison drawn from elsewhere.

Oroncota was a frontier

The valley sits on the eastern slopes of the Andes, along the Pilcomayo River at about two thousand metres. The Yampara had been the principal population there for well over a thousand years when the Inka took the area under Topa Inca Yupanqui, sometime between 1471 and 1493, and turned it into a defensive outpost on the empire’s eastern edge.

Beyond that edge were the Chiriguano, Guaraní-speaking groups who attacked the region heavily during the last years of Inka rule and eventually took control of it.

So this is a provincial site in a contested zone rather than a centre of imperial power, which is Alconini’s long-standing research interest. She has published extensively on how the Inka governed their southeastern frontier, and on what happened to Yampara identity and material culture before and after the conquest.

What the bells say about exchange

Copper bells of this kind circulated over long distances in the ancient Andes, and the paper’s title places them within networks of exchange as much as ritual.

An object that carries both a sound and a source has two things to tell you. Where the metal came from indicates who the community was connected to. What it was used for indicates what those connections were understood to mean locally. At Yoroma the answer to the second question appears to involve the harvest, buried in the building where the harvest was kept.

Sources: Alconini, S., and Sánchez-Canedo, W. (2026). "Sacred Sounds, Exchange, and Copper Bells in the Ancient Southeastern Andes, The Yamparas and Inka Empire." Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1 to 18. doi.org/10.1017/S095977432610064X.

Only two of these were actually excavated. One was recovered by Ofer Bar-Yosef from Nahal Hemar in 1983, a cave above the Dead Sea that also contained basketry, beads, and what is generally considered the oldest known glue. The second came from Horvat Duma, near Hebron.

Both are now in the Israel Museum. One is still designated as the Moshe Dayan specimen because it was donated by him.

The other 13 have a very different story. None were found in archaeological excavations, and most were once part of the private collection of New York collectors Judy and Michael Steinhardt.

The study

For almost a decade, archaeologist and curator of prehistory Debby Hershman at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum has been studying these groups and was the organizer in 2014 of a show that grouped together twelve for the exhibition Face to Face-one of the first times that any of them had all been together in the one space. The stone type and any patination and use were studied by Yuval Goren at Tel Aviv University, who was able to show that all fifteen are from the one area, within approximately 50 kilometers of each other. Given that there is no information about Where the find was made, for one group of artifacts that would be as strong as this project can probably ever yield because it suggests a geographical unity without the input of an excavator’s field information.

3D models were generated by the computer archaeology unit of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University showing that most masks could be comfortably worn on the face of a man.

Portraits of the dead

Hershman’s interpretation is that the masks are portraits of particular individuals. The faces differ from one another, some reading as old and some as young, which she takes as individual likeness rather than a generic type. Many of them, in her words, look like dead people.

On that basis she proposes an ancestor cult, with the masks worn during ceremonies by shamans or tribal chiefs, and notes that masks used in West African ancestor cults today weigh as much or more.

What cannot be checked

There’s no written source to tell us anything about them. Writing only reaches the region several thousand years after these masks were carved.

And for 13 of the 15 masks, there’s very little archaeological context to work with. We don’t know whether they were found in an occupation layer, buried with the dead, or deliberately placed somewhere as a cache. For the masks that came onto the market, we don’t even know where they were originally found.

Their dates are largely based on how closely they resemble the two masks that were actually excavated.

Hershman has also been quite open about the fact that she doesn’t know whether future examples might be found in special buildings or other specific contexts.

The Steinhardt case

In December 2021, Michael Steinhardt handed over 180 looted antiquities, valued at around $70 million, to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. He also agreed to an unprecedented lifetime ban on acquiring antiquities.

The investigation, which began in 2017, examined thousands of objects Steinhardt had bought and sold since 1987. Investigators traced many of them through a network of antiquities traffickers operating across 11 countries, including Israel.

Steinhardt was never arrested. He maintained that he had not known the objects he purchased were stolen.

Sources: Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Face to Face, The Oldest Masks in the World, 11 March to 13 September 2014, curated by Debby Hershman. Reporting by the Times of Israel, Live Science, National Geographic and the Biblical Archaeology Society, March to June 2014. Manhattan District Attorney's Office, statement of 6 December 2021, as reported by the Art Newspaper, CNBC and Forbes.

It is made of rock crystal, it was struck by a Neanderthal somewhere between 45,000 and 80,000 years ago, and it was dug up more than a century ago by an American team who did not entirely know what they had.

The tool came out of the Abri des Merveilles, a rock shelter near the commune of Sergeac in the Castel-Merle valley of the Dordogne, close to Lascaux. It was found in 1924 by the American School of Prehistoric Research, then led by George Grant MacCurdy and now a department at Harvard.

Seven pieces of crystal

Neanderthals normally worked flint or chert, which fracture predictably and give a reliable cutting edge. A small number of Neanderthal sites in Europe have produced tools of rock crystal instead, a transparent quartz that yields strikingly clear scrapers and points.

MacCurdy’s team found seven of them at Merveilles across successive seasons. In the paper he eventually published, he described the first, recovered in 1924, as transparent and tinged with just enough yellow to give it colour, and identified it as a combination scraper and point. It is that piece the museum has now displayed. Number three, found in 1928, was amethystine. Numbers five, six and seven all came out in 1929.

Alongside the tools were tiny chips of rock crystal, which indicated the pieces had been knapped on site rather than carried in finished. The raw material may have washed down from sources feeding the Vézère, the river that runs through the valley.

Why the date is a range

Abri des Merveilles has never been properly dated, and the reason is the excavation itself.

The site was first identified in 1878. The Archaeological Society of Washington secured a ten year lease in 1924, and MacCurdy and his students worked there for seven summers before moving on in 1930. The shelter holds an Aurignacian level of roughly 45,000 to 25,000 years old and Upper and Lower Mousterian levels running from about 160,000 to 45,000 years ago. A probable Neanderthal molar turned up in 1926, found by Castanet, the owner of the site.

That tooth is associated with a Lower Mousterian level, but like much of the material recovered in the 1920s it is difficult to place precisely, because the note-taking was poor and the archaeological contexts were largely lost. The 45,000 to 80,000 year bracket for the crystal tools rests on stratigraphy, tool types, and the molar rather than on any absolute date.

What it meant in 1931

The conclusion MacCurdy drew was not obvious at the time.

Most specialists then held that Neanderthals were ape-like and unintelligent, a view owing a great deal to Marcellin Boule’s 1909 analysis of the skeleton from La Chapelle-aux-Saints. Boule was working from the remains of an elderly man with osteoarthritis and produced a reconstruction of a stooping, knuckle-walking creature. That image persisted well into the twenty first century, until geneticists established that Neanderthals and modern humans had interbred.

MacCurdy read the crystal tools differently. He noted that we are accustomed to thinking of Neanderthal man as lacking aesthetic sense, which was a reasonable summary of the field in 1931, since none of the Neanderthal rock art, engravings, carved objects or pigment use recognised today had yet been found.

Writing in PNAS, in a paper called The Use of Rock Crystal by Paleolithic Man, he concluded that the Neanderthal was not an artist in the strict sense, but that an eye for beauty of form and colour was evident even from the limited use he made of rock crystal, and that he should be given credit for discerning the beauty and quality of the material he worked with.

The museum’s assessment is that MacCurdy drew highly innovative conclusions from these seven pieces, and that they helped open the way to the modern understanding of Neanderthals.

Sources: MacCurdy, G.G. (1931). "The Use of Rock Crystal by Paleolithic Man." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 17(12), 633 to 637. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.17.12.633. Excavation history from the American School of Prehistoric Research, Harvard University. Musée d'Archéologie Nationale, Object of the Month, September 2025.

Roman libraries are notoriously hard to identify. The books were papyrus and parchment, the shelving was wood, and both rot away completely. What survives is an empty shell with no obvious signature.

So Antonio López García, Javier Martínez Jiménez and Eduardo Cerrato Casado, working out of the universities of Granada and Córdoba, applied shape grammar, a computational method adapted to Roman library architecture by Myrsini Mamoli. It breaks a room into minimal architectural units and tests whether their arrangement is coherent enough to read as a library. At Fuente Álamo the pattern held: an apse, rectangular niches sized for shelving, semicircular niches, a raised podium, and adjoining rooms suited to storage or scribal work.

The site began as a bathing complex in the 1st century BC, was rebuilt as a luxury villa around the 3rd century AD, reached its peak over the two centuries that followed, and was remodelled again in the 6th.

There is a neat inversion here with Herculaneum. The Villa of the Papyri preserved the books but not the room that held them. Fuente Álamo preserves the room but not a single book.

The paper also covers a second site: Room 7 in the so-called Theodosian Palace at Stobi, capital of Macedonia Salutaris, tested with the same method. Most coverage has dropped that half of the study.

Two caveats worth keeping. First, this is a reinterpretation rather than a fresh find. The room was excavated between the 1980s and early 2000s, and a 2018 study had already described it as an office or library. Second, the authors link the room to the Declamatio sarcophagus, found in the 19th century near the villa and now in the Museum of Málaga. They read its seated bearded figure as holding a scroll in one hand and an open codex in the other, a fitting emblem for the 4th century shift between formats, and note his resemblance to a figure in the villa’s mosaic thought to be the owner. Brent Nongbri has since pointed out that the figure may simply be unrolling a single scroll held at both ends, exactly as Manuel Rodríguez de Berlanga described it in 1903.

Even with the caveats, the picture is a good one. A landowner in the rural interior of Baetica, far from Rome, built a room for books and wanted to be remembered for it.

Sources:

• López García, A., Martínez Jiménez, J., and Cerrato Casado, E. (2026). “New Approaches to Identifying Roman Libraries: Two Late Antique Examples from Stobi (North Macedonia) and Fuente Álamo (Spain).” Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 39. doi.org/10.1558/jma.35930 — https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JMA/article/view/35930

• Cosana, C. et al. (2018). “Análisis de los morteros y pinturas murales de la villa romana de Fuente Álamo.” Antiquitas 30, 79–88. The earlier “office or library” reading.

• Nongbri, B. “A Roman Library in Spain and the declamatio sarcophagus.” Variant Readings, 31 July 2026 — https://brentnongbri.com/2026/07/31/a-roman-library-in-spain-and-the-declamatio-sarcophagus/

• Rodríguez de Berlanga, M. (1903). Catálogo del Museo Loringiano, 99–101. The 1903 reading of the sarcophagus figure.

Emona was founded as a Roman colony in the first century AD and lies beneath the centre of the modern Slovenian capital. The northern cemetery extended out along the road to Celeia, present-day Celje. Slovenian heritage law required excavation ahead of the infrastructure works now planned for the intersection, and the cemetery’s presence there was already known, though not how well this particular stretch of it had survived.

Preserved by falling

The monument was found in the ditch beside the Celeia road. It had toppled from its original position at some point in antiquity, possibly through an earthquake or ground instability, and sediment covered it soon after. Being buried is what saved it, from weathering and from anyone who might have taken the stone for reuse.

It has broken into numerous fragments, but the surfaces are in good condition. Conservators are stabilizing it in place before it can be lifted, and have designed an extraction system meant to keep the pieces intact during transport. The lift is expected within days.

The two things that make it unusual are its form and the iconography carved on it. Neither can be assessed properly while the monument is still in the ground and in pieces. That work waits for the laboratory.

Roman burial along the roadside

Roman cemeteries ran along the roads out of a city rather than sitting in a single enclosed plot, so tombs and commemorative monuments lined the approaches. A monument in the ditch beside the Celeia road is consistent with that arrangement and adds a fixed point to what archaeologists know about how the ground north of Emona was laid out.

The rest of the excavation

Development has destroyed a great deal of Roman Ljubljana over the centuries, which makes a well-preserved stretch of cemetery unusual in itself. This one has produced a substantial quantity of material relating to burial practice and to daily life in the colony, which sat at the northeastern edge of Roman Italy near the Pannonian frontier.

The deadline

The section is due to be handed to the construction crews at the end of next week. That has forced the team to decide what to pursue and what to leave, and summer heat is not helping the pace of open-air work. The excavation is on schedule, and the directors say they are satisfied with the results so far, with several working days still to run.

Sources: (Ne)odkrita arheologija Ljubljane, August 2026. Excavation by the Ljubljana City Museum and the Archaeological Research Consortium for Ljubljana. Slovenian media reported on 27 July 2026 that 125 graves had been documented at the site in the preceding month.

A new radiocarbon study has established when. The answer is that they kept coming back for roughly 1,500 years.

The work, by Karen Steelman and Michael Fuller, appears in American Antiquity.

What the pigment dated to

Steelman and Fuller sampled red and black pigment from 24 of the images and ran radiocarbon dates on them. The results spread across a range of between 905 and 1,480 years, with the earliest paintings possibly made as early as AD 85.

The most recent dates to around AD 1630.

That end date is worth pausing on. It places people still painting in this cave well into the seventeenth century, long after European contact had begun reshaping the continent. Whatever Picture Cave meant to the communities using it, they did not stop.

Two eras on the same walls

The chronology cuts across a major change in how people in this region lived.

The most recent study dates one particular image, a spiritual being known variously as Morning Star, Hawk, or Birdman, shown in a scene depicting the first sunrise, to about 980 years ago. That places it in the Mississippian period, when stratified societies developed across the Southeast and Midwest, with Cahokia as their great centre.

Other images are considerably older, reaching back into the Woodland period, when social organisation was less hierarchical.

Ritual painting continued through that transition. The people changed how they organised themselves and kept returning to the same cave.

The authors read Picture Cave as a place set aside for sacred ritual, its images representing elements of Siouan cosmology. The artists were likely connected to Cahokia, and are ancestral to the present-day Omaha, Osage, Ponca, Kansa, and Quapaw nations.

Reading the images with descendants

Last year a separate group of researchers worked with tribal elders from some of these nations to understand the pictographs and what they meant. That collaboration produced the identification of the Morning Star figure, among others.

The images include horned beings understood as underwater spirits, a warrior holding a mace with bow and arrows, and the Great Serpent depicted with an erect phallus. These are not decoration. They are a visual record of a cosmology.

Sold in 2021

In September 2021 the cave and the 43 acres around it were auctioned by Selkirk Auctioneers and Appraisers in St Louis and sold to an anonymous bidder for 2.2 million dollars. The land had been in private hands since 1953, owned by a family who used it mainly for hunting, and went to auction after negotiations with the Osage Nation broke down.

The Osage Nation had tried to buy it, backed by The Conservation Fund, which raised two million dollars toward the purchase. They were outbid.

The Nation called the sale truly heartbreaking. Their statement noted that their ancestors had lived in the area for 1,300 years, that it had been their land, and that hundreds of thousands of their ancestors are buried across Missouri and Illinois, including at Picture Cave. Andrea Hunter, the Nation’s tribal historic preservation officer, said it is Osage ancestors buried in the cave, Osage ancestors who made the images and performed the rituals there, and that the site is the most sacred they have.

Elders on the Traditional Cultural Advisors Committee described Picture Cave as among the most significant cultural and sacred sites for the Osage people, and its pictographs as unique in offering a visual record of their ancestors’ way of life, religion, and traditions.

The buyer was described by the auction house as a cave conservationist who wished to remain private. The Osage Historic Preservation Office has stated that the buyer did not respond to repeated attempts at contact.

The cave remains in private ownership. The current owner does appear willing to respect its cultural and religious significance, and has permitted research teams and Indigenous elders to continue studying the pictographs.

Sources: Steelman, K.L., and Fuller, M.J. (2026). "Picture Cave (23WN79), Pictograph Chronology." American Antiquity, 1 to 9. Reporting on the 2021 sale from NPR, Smithsonian Magazine, Artnet News, and the Osage Nation Historic Preservation Office.

The study appeared in Science on July 30, 2026, from a team led by Yulin Zhang and Arjun Biddanda with Priya Moorjani at the University of California, Berkeley, alongside Sarah Johnson of Berkeley's Center for Computational Biology and Colm O'Dushlaine of 54Gene.

Ancestry without a fossil

What we know about archaic ancestry, we know because certain bones held onto their DNA. Most people outside sub-Saharan Africa carry between 1 and 2.4 percent Neanderthal ancestry. Asian and Oceanian populations carry Denisovan ancestry ranging from 0.1 to 6 percent. Those numbers exist because a genome came out of a fossil.

Other archaic populations almost certainly contributed as well. The problem has always been that you cannot match modern DNA against a reference sequence that nobody has.

TRACE, the method the Berkeley team built, gets around this. It needs no archaic sample and no unadmixed outgroup, only living genomes, of which the team used more than 500 from around the world. From those it reconstructed an ancestral recombination graph, a map of how every stretch of the genome relates to every other through shared ancestry, recording where lineages split and where they rejoin.

The thing they were hunting for was depth. Most of the genome traces back to a common ancestor fairly recently. Now and then a sequence appears whose common ancestor sits far further back than it should, and that gap points to descent from a population that parted from ours a very long time ago.

Moorjani puts the change in practical terms. Nobody has to wait for a fossil to survive in exactly the right conditions any more, because living genomes hold traces of these ancestors and genealogical methods can pull some of that history back out.

They tested it before trusting it. TRACE found the Neanderthal segments it was supposed to find, and in Asian and Oceanian genomes it found the known Denisovan ones. Then it found two things nobody had characterised.

The one everybody carries

The first ghost lineage shows up in every modern human population, which places the interbreeding before the last big dispersal out of Africa, more than 50,000 years ago.

Zhang notes that earlier work had suggested such a lineage might exist without being able to say whether it was confined to Africans or when the mixing occurred. TRACE mapped the actual segments and showed the ancestry sits in everyone.

It accounts for somewhere between 0.5 and 1 percent of the modern genome, which is roughly what Neanderthal ancestry contributes in many people. The population appears to have split from ours about 800,000 years ago, around the same time as Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Then there is a result that unsettles something researchers thought they understood. Parts of the genome are known as ancestry deserts, regions where Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA is conspicuously absent, and these have been read as territory specific to Homo sapiens. Ghost ancestry is in them. Whatever was being selected against, it was not archaic DNA in general.

The candidate the researchers offer is Homo heidelbergensis, present in Africa and Europe between roughly 700,000 and 200,000 years ago. Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, who had no part in the study, said he agrees, pointing out that the species survived in Africa until about 300,000 years ago.

The one that came the long way

The second lineage is older and considerably stranger. It diverged from our ancestors around 1.8 million years ago, before the common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans existed at all, and it turns up only in Oceania.

The quantity is tiny, averaging about 0.002 percent of the Oceanian genomes examined. What makes it legible is its position. These super-archaic segments sit inside regions of Denisovan ancestry and not Neanderthal ancestry, which means they arrived in modern humans through Denisovans rather than directly. Denisovan genomes themselves are thought to be 3 to 5 percent super-archaic, and only some of that was ever passed along.

Homo erectus is the obvious suspect, being the longest-surviving human species we know of. Fernando Villanea, a population geneticist not involved in the work, thinks the timing fits, and notes that Homo erectus skulls from Yunxian in China share features with Denisovan fossils. Very little Homo erectus genetic material has been analysed, though, so this stays a suggestion rather than an identification.

Immunity and metabolism

Segments from both lineages are scattered across the genome, but they cluster in regions tied to immune function and metabolism.

Moorjani is not surprised. Adapting to new pathogens and new food sources has been among the strongest pressures acting on human evolution, and interbreeding was a fast way to acquire DNA that already worked.

Less a tree, more a network

Villanea takes the findings as evidence that modern humans are the product of more than one species, and that interbreeding was the rule rather than the exception. Hybridisation shows up across the evolution of many species, he says, and results like these help shift scientific thinking away from human exceptionalism.

Moorjani makes a related point about shape. Human history looks less like a branching tree and more like a network of populations, tied together by repeated rounds of divergence, migration, and mixture.

Stringer sees a practical use. The technique offers indirect ways to reconstruct parts of the genomes of species like Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis, neither of which has produced usable ancient DNA.

Moorjani expects the resolution to improve as genome databases take in a wider range of human populations. More Denisovan genomes would help a great deal, since only one has been published. And protein fragments recently sequenced from Homo erectus fossils might one day put a name to the super-archaic ancestor.

Sources: University of California, Berkeley. Zhang, Y., Biddanda, A., Johnson, S.A., O’Dushlaine, C., and Moorjani, P. (2026). “Recovering Signatures of Archaic Hominin Introgression Using Ancestral Recombination Graphs.” Science. doi.org/10.1126/science.aef8874

Two Ice Age bird figurines from the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Hohle Fels, dating to around 40,000 years ago. Credit: Ralf Ehmann / Universität Tübingen / urmu

The two carvings were presented on July 29, 2026, in Blaubeuren, where they were named find of the year. They come from the lower Aurignacian layers of the cave, the deposits that have made this stretch of southwestern Germany the richest source of the earliest figurative art known anywhere.

Small enough to lose in a pocket

Most Ice Age figurines from the region measure between three and nine centimetres. These do not. The bird with outstretched wings is two centimetres long, one centimetre wide, and half a centimetre high. Its companion is comparably tiny. Together they weigh roughly 1.3 grams and 0.7 grams.

Nicholas Conard, the Tübingen prehistorian who leads the excavations, calls them genuine featherweights, and notes that despite the scale nothing about the carving is simplified. The resting bird has pronounced round eyes. The other has a distinct beak and parallel incisions across the wings that render plumage. In Conard’s assessment, this is not a generic bird shape wrestled out of a mammoth tusk. It is precise observation of nature translated into a figure detailed enough that researchers can seriously debate which species is depicted and what the animal is doing.

Birds caught in the act

That second point is what separates these from most Ice Age animal carvings, which typically show their subjects in static poses.

The resting bird is flattened and rounded, its head drawn tightly to the body and its legs tucked in. Conard’s team reads that posture as possibly brooding, sitting on a nest. The second bird, with wings fanned wide and neck extended, admits several readings, flying, landing on water, threatening, or displaying in courtship.

The species is no easier to settle than the behaviour. Ptarmigan are one candidate, since their bones turn up frequently in excavations across the region. The researchers also consider other galliform birds such as capercaillie, and certain birds of prey.

The two figurines were found in the same layer but about a metre and a half apart, which leaves open whether one person carved both or whether they were made generations apart. What the pair does demonstrate, Conard says, is that the carvers of the world’s oldest art could depict birds in varied and extremely delicate ways, and that particular motifs appear to be specific to particular sites.

Entrance of Hohle Fels Cave, one of the most significant Ice Age archaeological sites in Europe. Credit: Jens Burkert / Weltkultursprung

A signature unique to one cave

That last observation is the substantive claim behind the find, and it rests on a comparison across the wider region.

Hohle Fels now holds three bird depictions, counting the waterbird excavated there a quarter of a century ago. The other three Ice Age art sites within the UNESCO World Heritage area have produced an impressive range of animal figures, mammoth, cave lion, wild horse, but not a single bird between them.

Conard draws the conclusion carefully. The pattern suggests people were making individual works and drawing on different motifs depending on which ivory workshop they belonged to, so that each site carries its own distinctive signature. Why the people at Hohle Fels, in the Ach valley near Schelklingen, were preoccupied with birds forty thousand years ago remains unexplained.

So does what the objects meant to the people who made them. Conard sets out the open question plainly, whether they functioned as personal talismans or as group symbols carrying a shared identity. Objects this small and this carefully made were clearly not casual, but the archaeology cannot say more than that.

Birds in a landscape that still has them

Stefanie Kölbl, managing director of the Museum of Prehistory and Ice Age Art in Blaubeuren, makes the connection to the living landscape. The area has always supported a wide variety of bird species, and today includes a European bird protection area at the Schmiechener See. Forty thousand years ago birds were a constant presence too, greeting the day with song, signalling the turn of the seasons with their migrations, warning of danger when a flock scattered. People imitated their calls on bone flutes. That they also shaped these creatures so vividly in ivory strikes her as remarkable.

The figurines are on display near where they were found, at the Blaubeuren museum, in an exhibition running until April 4, 2027 whose German title plays on the birds being light as a feather and heavy on research questions. The museum sits among the Stone Age caves that UNESCO designated a World Heritage Site in 2017 under the listing Caves and Ice Age Art in the Swabian Jura, and its best known object is the original Venus of Hohle Fels.

Sources: Universität Tübingen, press release, July 29, 2026. Regierungspräsidium Stuttgart. Conard, N.J., Janas, A., and Zeidi, M., “Hochwertige Funde aus dem Mittelpaläolithikum und zwei aurignacienzeitliche Vogeldarstellungen aus dem Hohle Fels bei Schelklingen,” in Archäologische Ausgrabungen in Baden-Württemberg 2025, July 2026, 46 to 52.

Nearly fifty years later, that surface has produced a result that overturns what paleoanthropologists thought they knew about the body size of Paranthropus boisei, an extinct human relative long assumed to have been considerably smaller than its contemporaries. The footprints indicate individuals standing up to 1.8 meters tall and weighing around 75 kilograms, comparable to a large modern human.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on July 27, 2026, was led by Kevin Hatala of Chatham University in Pittsburgh, who is also an associated researcher in the Department of Human Origins at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

A site that took five decades to read

The geologist was Kay Behrensmeyer of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, who has worked in this region since 1969. After she and her team documented the first prints in 1978, the site, designated GaJi10, was reburied in sand to protect it. The team returned in 2016 and again in 2023, uncovering far more of the same layer each time.

The surface now preserves 21 hominin footprints made by eight individuals, alongside tracks left by hippopotamus, antelope, and other animals. Volcanic ash in the surrounding rock dates the layer to roughly 1.43 million years ago, in the Early Pleistocene.

Behrensmeyer has been direct about why footprints matter in a discipline built largely on bones. What makes them scientifically valuable, she notes, is that they preserve an instant in time, and they let people connect with these fossils far more readily than an isolated fragment of bone or jaw can. On the length of the project, she has said she never imagined in 1978 that the find would grow into an assemblage this large or yield insights this broad into hominin ecology.

Why the size is a problem

Almost everything known about Paranthropus boisei comes from the head. The species is represented overwhelmingly by skulls with massive jaws and heavy grinding teeth, and its anatomy below the neck has remained poorly documented. Earlier estimates, built from a small number of postcranial fossils, suggested it was substantially smaller than Homo erectus, the contemporary species generally considered a possible direct ancestor of modern humans.

The GaJi10 tracks contradict that. The team identified them as Paranthropus using analytical methods they developed in 2024, based on foot anatomy and patterns of movement preserved in the prints. The sizes then came as a surprise, since they fall in the same range as tracks attributed to Homo erectus.

That matters beyond a single measurement. If Paranthropus was as large as Homo erectus, then two similarly sized hominins were sharing the same landscape at the same time, which changes how researchers should think about competition, resource use, and coexistence along this lakeshore.

The two species were certainly both present. In 2024, members of the same team described a slightly older trackway nearby preserving prints from both Paranthropus and Homo erectus, evidence that they occupied the same habitats across hundreds of thousands of years. What is not known is how they behaved toward one another. Behrensmeyer puts the limit plainly, that we cannot say how the two hominins interacted on the mudflats, only that both were there at the time.

Eight adults, no children

The footprints also record something bones cannot, which is a group in motion.

All eight individuals appear to have been adults, and mostly adult males. There are no juveniles and no clear evidence of females in the group. Neil Roach of Harvard University, a co-author, takes that composition as a hint at social complexity, suggesting these hominins may have lived in large groups where males competed for mates but also tolerated one another at times, gaining safety in numbers in a dangerous environment.

The landscape justified the caution. The same shoreline at that period supported crocodiles, elephants, hippopotamus, and the other large animals whose tracks cross the same surface.

Why the lake keeps appearing

GaJi10 belongs to a larger pattern. Researchers have now documented hundreds of hominin footprints across more than half a dozen sites along the eastern shore of Lake Turkana, deposited over a span exceeding 100,000 years.

Behrensmeyer finds the geological repetition striking, noting that the same kind of lake margin deposits occur in two areas of East Turkana some 40 kilometers apart and of roughly the same age. Her working question is what conditions allowed these tracks to be preserved at all, on the reasoning that understanding the preservation should help explain why hominins kept returning to this environment across so long a period.

Purity Kiura of the National Museums of Kenya, a co-author, framed the find in terms of what it means for the region and for stewardship of it. The footprints along the margins of Lake Turkana, she said, reinforce the area’s global importance for understanding human evolution and preserve remarkable evidence of how these relatives lived 1.4 million years ago, strengthening Kenya’s standing as one of the world’s leading paleoanthropological landscapes and underlining the responsibility to protect that heritage.

The team returns to Kenya later this year. Hatala describes the accumulating sites as a photo album under construction, each one a snapshot offering a different window onto hominin anatomy, locomotion, behavior, and environment in the Early Pleistocene.

Sources: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Smithsonian Institution, press releases, July 27, 2026. Hatala, K.G., Roach, N.T., et al. (2026). “Insights Into Hominin Body Size, Locomotion, and Behavior From Early Pleistocene Trackways in Northern Kenya.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 123(31), e2530996123. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2530996123

The restored vault was presented on July 24, 2026, in the Palestra Grande at Pompeii, following an international workshop at the site’s auditorium where Italian and foreign institutions working within the park compared notes on current excavation campaigns.

A house with a bakery, and worse

The ceiling comes from the Casa con Panificio, the House with Bakery, in Insula 10 of Regio IX. The name is prosaic, but the building has produced some of the most striking Pompeian archaeology of recent years.

Excavation of the insula began in 2023, prompted by the need to stabilize excavation fronts and improve drainage across the plateau, and it quickly became the largest dig at Pompeii in a generation. The block sits between two insulae opened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it held the only stretch of street frontage on Via di Nola in Regio IX still buried. Two connected atrium houses emerged, both originally Samnite and both converted in the first century AD to accommodate commercial work, a laundry in one and a bakery with its oven, millstones, and food-processing rooms in the other. The house with the bakery has been associated with a man named Aulus Rustius Verus.

The same building yielded the so-called prison bakery, a room with barred high windows and a single exit into the atrium, its floor marked by the circular grooves of millstones worked by a donkey and by enslaved labor. It also produced the black room, a dining space with dark walls and a white mosaic floor carrying Third Style paintings of scenes from the Trojan War. Three victims of the eruption were found in the bakery rooms, two adults and a child of roughly three or four, killed by collapsing ceilings while the house was in the middle of renovation work.

Fragments that stayed where they fell

The newly restored decoration belonged to the vaulted ceiling of a cenacolo, a dining room on the upper floor. Its survival owes something to how it was destroyed. Because the fragments were recovered at the spot where the ceiling collapsed, archaeologists could attribute them to that room with certainty and begin matching pieces together during the excavation itself, identifying numerous joins before conservation work formally started.

The restoration built on that preliminary sorting, combining conservation treatment, archaeological study, and the design of the eventual display. Crucially, the team limited its work to fragments whose original position was sufficiently documented, which is why only part of the composition has been reassembled. That restraint follows the modern conservation principles of recognizability and reversibility, meaning the reconstruction should never be mistaken for the original and can be undone.

What the ceiling showed

The reconstructed portion reveals an elaborate scheme organized around a large central panel, framed by painted aediculae, decorative borders, vegetal festoons, allegorical figures of the seasons, winged genii, and a dense array of ornament, all in rich polychromy.

The central subject is a hierogamy, the sacred union of Dionysus and Ariadne. That scene survives only in fragments, and its reconstruction depended on comparison with other ancient depictions of the same theme. At the center, Dionysus reclines on a chariot facing Ariadne, who plays a harp accompanied by a lyre-playing eros, while two musician centaurs draw the chariot forward.

The identification is supported by the rest of the decoration, which is saturated with Dionysiac reference. Among the festoons heavy with fruit and flowers appear ritual symbols of the god’s cult, theatrical masks, and vessels used in libations, the whole scheme converging on the divine couple at its center.

A support built to be added to

The park describes the project’s most innovative element not as the painting but as the mount built to hold it. A traditional flat panel would have been useless here, since the fragments came from a curved vault, and only the gradual reassembly of the pieces revealed what that curvature had originally been. The support was therefore designed in parallel with the restoration itself, developing as the shape of the ceiling emerged.

The result restores something of the room’s original spatial feel while protecting the fragments, and it is modular. New pieces can be added without disturbing what has already been assembled, which matters because the reconstruction is explicitly unfinished. Numerous fragments belonging to this ceiling are stored separately, and more may yet come out of the house as excavation continues. In effect, the restoration has been designed as an open process that can be updated as the archaeology advances.

Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the park’s director, framed the work as an example of Italian leadership in archaeological restoration, and noted that sharing the results of conservation projects is also a way of sharing research.

A Dionysiac year at Pompeii

The ceiling arrives in a year the park has organized around Dionysus. That focus was sharpened by the discovery, between 2024 and 2025, of a megalography in the Casa del Tiaso in the same Regio IX, depicting a procession in honor of the god and counted among the most important paintings of its kind found at the site.

The theme extends beyond scholarship. The second edition of the park’s Esopop storytelling festival, titled Ecstatic Pompeii, will bring live theatrical performances to cultural sites across the Vesuvian area every Friday and Saturday from August 28 to September 26, 2026, during the park’s evening openings, an attempt to put new archaeological findings into conversation with contemporary performance.

Sources: Parco Archeologico di Pompei, press release, July 24, 2026. Additional context from Pompeii Sites e-journal and excavation reports on Regio IX, Insula 10.

A new study of microscopic plant remains from Cloggs Cave, on GunaiKurnai Country in Victoria, has traced that practice continuously across the entire span of the cave’s human use, offering rare physical confirmation of ritual traditions long recorded in GunaiKurnai oral history and nineteenth-century ethnography.

The research was published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology on July 22, 2026, led by Dr. Elle Grono, a postdoctoral researcher at the Australian National University, with colleagues from Australia, France, and New Zealand.

Research done with, not on, a community

The excavations behind the study, carried out in 2019 and 2020, were requested by the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Corporation itself, and representatives of the GunaiKurnai community took part in the study’s design, the fieldwork, the interpretation of results, and the publication of findings. Professor Bruno David of Monash University co-led the excavations jointly with the corporation. That arrangement matters to how the findings should be read, since the archaeological evidence here is presented alongside GunaiKurnai knowledge rather than in place of it.

The GunaiKurnai are the acknowledged traditional custodians of Gippsland and the southern Victorian Alps in southeastern Australia. Caves within their Country are known, from oral traditions and from nineteenth-century ethnographic records, as places where mulla-mullung, powerful and learned men and women, together with other spiritual practitioners, performed rituals of magic, healing, and cursing. Cloggs Cave, set on a bluff not far from the town of Buchan, is one of them.

Crystals that record where a plant died

The evidence comes from phytoliths, microscopic bodies of silica that form within plant tissues and survive long after the plant itself has decayed. Their value here lies in a specific property Grono explained plainly. Unlike pollen, which wind and insects scatter across the landscape, phytoliths mostly accumulate at the precise spot where a plant breaks down. Because no plants grow inside the cave, where there is no light, any phytolith found in its sediments must have been carried in, either by people or by animals such as possums, on their fur or in their scats.

The team sharpened that distinction further by analyzing the phytolith contents of individual, well-preserved buried possum scats, allowing them to separate animal-borne material from human activity. Their key indicator turned out to be burning. As Grono put it, the team focused on the half-burnt phytoliths in the ashy layers, since only humans could have brought those in, whereas unburnt material could have arrived by either route.

Seventy-three layers and a standing stone

Working with two excavation pits reaching depths of 1.5 and 2.3 meters, the researchers separated thousands of phytoliths into taxonomic groups under the microscope. The upper portions of those pits held 73 thin ashy layers, dated by optically stimulated luminescence and accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating to between roughly 4,400 and 1,600 years ago, each one laid down by people.

Within those layers the excavation turned up something unexpected, a standing stone 28 centimeters tall, which subsequent analysis showed had been placed upright in the cave by the Old Ancestors for ritual purposes around 2,000 years ago. The burnt phytoliths at the heart of the study came from the ash layers surrounding it.

Grasses chosen deliberately, and brought whole

Across the deposits, the team identified 29 distinct phytolith types spanning grasses, herbs, and woody plants, most of them exceptionally well preserved, with even the most delicate silica structures, such as hair cells, remaining intact.

Grasses overwhelmingly dominated, accounting for up to 97 percent of the material. These came from the Pooideae subfamily, which favors temperate and cool climates, and from Panicoideae, which grows mostly in warm and humid conditions. Phytoliths from Chloridoideae, drought-tolerant grasses suited to hot, dry environments, were less common, and those from woody plants and herbs were rare.

That pattern points to deliberate selection rather than convenience. The Old Ancestors avoided the many species available in the coastal forest and open woodland surrounding Cloggs Cave, targeting instead grasses that could be found a short distance from the cave mouth. The phytoliths themselves came from stems, leaves, flowers, and roots alike, which as Grono noted indicates the grasses were brought in whole, inedible parts included, rather than gathered for food.

Overall, nearly a fifth of the phytoliths, up to 18 percent, were burnt or melted. Their presence throughout the dated deposits, from top to bottom, implies people were carrying plants into the cave and burning them there across the entire 25,000-year span.

Ash, spirits, and greased sticks

David placed the burning within GunaiKurnai practice directly. The burning is consistent, he said, with traditional GunaiKurnai practices of using ash to perform magic and ritual, and also to track the footsteps of anyone entering the cave, including spirit-Beings.

The grasses were not the only plants involved. Deeper and older deposits at the site have yielded other macrobotanical evidence, including trimmed wooden sticks made from Casuarina trees and smeared with grease, indicating that rituals employing woody plants were performed there as well, alongside the burning of grass.

Taken together, the phytoliths, the ash layers, the standing stone, and the greased sticks converge on a single picture, one that GunaiKurnai tradition had already described. Cloggs Cave was a special and secluded place, used across hundreds of generations for practices that the archaeological record can now measure but that the community’s own knowledge has carried forward all along.

Sources: Frontiers (July 22, 2026). Grono, E., David, B., Mullett, R., Stevenson, J., Petchey, F., Delannoy, J.J., et al. (2026). "Phytoliths From Cloggs Cave, GunaiKurnai Country (Southeastern Australia) Reveal the Gathering of Whole Grasses for Burning Practices Inside the Cave." Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, 5, 1871928. doi.org/10.3389/fearc.2026.1871928

The discovery comes from Mujina pećina, a cave in southern Croatia, where researchers applied a technique called optically stimulated luminescence, or OSL, to sediment layers packed with stone tools. The study, published in the journal Antiquity on July 22, 2026, was led by Ivor Karavanić of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Zagreb, working with colleagues from the Croatian Geological Survey, the University of Pisa, Eastern Oregon University, and Illinois State University.

A cave above the Adriatic

Mujina pećina sits north of the towns of Trogir and Kaštela, roughly 280 meters above sea level, a modest chamber measuring about 10 by 8 meters. Its floor holds layers of sediment dense with stone tools of the Mousterian tradition, a Middle Palaeolithic toolmaking style associated with Neanderthals and their contemporaries. The site holds particular importance for the region, since it is the first place in Dalmatia to be systematically excavated and radiometrically dated with a clear, unambiguous Middle Palaeolithic sequence.

Earlier work using radiocarbon dating and electron spin resonance had placed the cave’s occupation between roughly 49,000 and 39,000 years ago. Those methods, however, had a built-in limit, they could not reach far enough back in time to date the deepest layers of the deposit, where some samples fell beyond the range radiocarbon can measure at all.

How luminescence reads the dark

To break through that ceiling, the team turned to OSL, a method that dates sediment rather than organic material. The technique measures how long buried mineral grains, in this case quartz, have been shielded from sunlight, since natural radiation in the surrounding soil steadily builds up a trapped energy signal in the grains that is wiped clean by light exposure and begins accumulating again the moment they are buried. Reading that signal reveals how long ago the sediment was last exposed to daylight.

Because light exposure would corrupt the reading, sampling demands unusual care. In 2020, the researchers cleaned the cave’s stratigraphic profile, then drove opaque tubes into three separate layers, one near the top of the sequence and two near the bottom, so the sediment inside was never struck by light. The samples were sent to the Luminescence Dating Laboratory in Gliwice, Poland, for analysis.

Two layers far older than expected

The results split neatly in two. The uppermost sampled layer returned an age of roughly 35,000 to 39,000 years, closely matching the earlier radiocarbon estimates and confirming the existing chronology for that part of the sequence.

The two deeper layers told a startlingly different story. One came back at roughly 65,000 to 73,000 years old, and the deepest at between 73,000 and 82,000 years, about 30,000 years older than researchers had assumed for that part of the site. Rather than belonging to the Middle Palaeolithic phase known as Marine Isotope Stage 3, as previously thought, those layers instead date to the colder MIS 4, and in the case of the oldest, the earlier MIS 5a, deep within the last glacial cycle.

A wider pattern along the Adriatic

The oldest layer carries a further clue about who was making tools there. It contains a high proportion of transverse scrapers, a signature of the toolmaking tradition known as the Balkan Charentian, which gives archaeologists a sharper reference point for tracing how these early industries spread along the Adriatic coast and comparing them against finds elsewhere.

The new dates do not stand alone. They align closely with as-yet-unpublished OSL results from another Dalmatian site, Velika pećina in Kličevica, and come near the oldest dates obtained for Crvena stijena in neighboring Montenegro, together pointing to a broader pattern of early human settlement across the eastern Adriatic during this period. Scattered surface finds had long hinted at an even deeper human antiquity in Dalmatia, though those claims have never been firmly dated and remain unproven. What Mujina pećina now provides, for the first time, is solid radiometric evidence confirming just how far back human activity in this corner of the Adriatic genuinely reaches.

The researchers are appropriately measured about one detail. The uppermost sample sat at a shallow depth of just 170 millimeters, which means some contamination by later sediment cannot be entirely ruled out for that layer. The deep dates driving the headline finding, however, come from securely buried layers well down in the sequence, and it is those, around 70,000 and 80,000 years old, that rewrite the timeline of when people first lived along this stretch of the Croatian coast.

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Sources: Karavanić, I., Miko, S., Banda, M., Boschian, G., Becker, R., and Smith, F.H. (2026). “Mousterian Occupations in Dalmatia, Croatia, Early Dates Suggested by Optically Stimulated Luminescence.” Antiquity, 1 to 7. doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10400

A 4,000-Year-Old Contract That Planned for Everything, Including Infertility

The clay tablet recording their agreement, discovered at the site of Kültepe-Kanesh in Turkey’s Kayseri province, has been identified by researchers as the world’s oldest known marriage contract, a small, unassuming block of baked clay covered in cuneiform script that turns out to address some genuinely contemporary concerns, infertility, surrogacy, and what happens if the marriage doesn’t work out.

A city built on trade, and paperwork

Kültepe-Kanesh was not an isolated village. During the early second millennium BC, it served as the site of Karum Kanesh, a major Assyrian trading colony, part of a wider commercial network linking the city-state of Assur in Mesopotamia with Anatolia. Assyrian merchants settled there to trade textiles, tin, and other goods for local silver and gold, and they brought their writing system with them, cuneiform script rendered in the Old Assyrian dialect of Akkadian.

That commercial culture left behind an extraordinary paper trail, or rather, a clay one. Since systematic excavations began at the site in 1948, archaeologists have recovered close to 25,000 cuneiform tablets and texts there, according to some counts, making Kültepe-Kanesh home to the single largest body of private written records to survive from anywhere in the ancient Near East. As UNESCO notes in its own description of the site, unlike the royal or temple archives typically recovered from other ancient centers, these were private documents, kept in archive rooms, carefully arranged inside clay vessels, wooden chests, wicker baskets, or sacks, everyday paperwork belonging to ordinary merchant families rather than kings or priests.

The tablets survived largely by accident. A fire eventually destroyed the settlement where they were stored, and excavation later revealed that many tablets were still sealed inside their original clay envelopes, evidence that whatever business they recorded had been interrupted rather than completed and filed away.

The clauses of an ancient marriage

Among that vast archive, the tablet recording Laqipum and Hatala’s marriage stands out for what it anticipated. Analyzed by a research team led by Professor Ahmet Berkız Turp of Harran University and published in the journal Gynecological Endocrinology, the text lays out the couple’s arrangement with striking practicality.

Should the marriage fail to produce a child within two years, the contract specifies, Hatala would provide her husband with a hierodule, generally understood as a female slave or temple attendant, to act as a surrogate. Any son born of that arrangement would secure the family’s line, and the hierodule herself would be freed once she had given birth to a male child. The researchers behind the study describe this as the earliest known written reference to infertility as a recognized concern, and among the earliest documented instances of a surrogacy arrangement anywhere in human history. As the study’s authors put it, there are many different ways people have tried to solve infertility, surrogacy among them, and the concept turns out to be considerably older than most people would assume, not a problem unique to the modern age, but one that has recurred across the ages.

The contract did not stop at children. It also laid out clear terms for divorce, protecting both parties should the marriage end. Should Laqipum choose to divorce Hatala, the text specifies, he would owe her five minas of silver, a substantial sum. Should Hatala choose to divorce him instead, she would owe the same amount in return, a symmetry that suggests the agreement was genuinely meant to protect both spouses rather than favor the husband alone. Related Kültepe marriage documents studied by scholars such as Klaas Veenhof show similar provisions elsewhere in the archive, including clauses explicitly guarding against polygamy, further evidence that these were not one-off arrangements but part of a broader, fairly standardized legal tradition.

A single seal, sealing a family’s future

Physically, contracts like this one were often protected inside a clay envelope, itself stamped with the impression of a cylinder seal, a small carved cylinder rolled across wet clay to leave behind a continuous decorative and authenticating band of imagery, typically showing standing figures before symbols of the gods, a practice already well established in Mesopotamian visual culture by the end of the third millennium BC. That seal functioned much like a signature or a notarized stamp would today, marking the document as genuine and binding, witnessed and sealed before it was ever fired and archived away.

What the tablet still has to say

It is worth being honest about what remains unknown. Archaeologists have never found any record confirming whether Laqipum and Hatala ultimately needed the surrogacy clause they had so carefully written into their contract, whether a hierodule was ever actually engaged, or whether the marriage simply proceeded without incident. The tablet preserves only the plan the couple made, not the story of how their lives actually unfolded afterward.

What the tablet does preserve, with remarkable clarity, is a reminder that many of the anxieties and negotiations people associate with modern marriage, financial protection, family planning, contingency for hardship, are not new inventions at all. Four thousand years before anyone used the word prenuptial, a merchant family in Bronze Age Anatolia had already worked out, in careful cuneiform, exactly how to plan for the future they could not predict.

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Sources. Turp, A.B., et al. (2017). “Infertility and Surrogacy First Mentioned on a 4,000-Year-Old Assyrian Clay Tablet of Marriage Contract in Turkey.” Gynecological Endocrinology. UNESCO World Heritage listing, Kültepe-Kanesh Karum. Michel, C. (2010). “Presentation of an Old Assyrian Document,” in Anatolia’s Prologue, Kültepe Kanesh Karum. Veenhof, K.R. (1998). “Two Marriage Documents From Kültepe,” Archivum Anatolicum, 3.