Modern geologists and archaeologists have now examined three of the most famous. One turned out to be exactly as the ancient writers described it, and still lethal. One sits on real gas-bearing faults, though what that gas did remains in dispute. And one, it seems, was never an oracle at all.

Strabo threw sparrows into the gate at Hierapolis

Hierapolis in Phrygia, the ancient city above the white travertine terraces of Pamukkale in Denizli province, held a sanctuary called the Ploutonion, sacred to Pluto, lord of the dead.

The geographer Strabo visited around the turn of the era and left a precise account. A small opening, just big enough for a person, led down into the ground. It was filled with a vapour so thick the floor could barely be seen. Any animal that went in died. Bulls led inside collapsed and were dragged out dead, and Strabo threw in sparrows himself and watched them fall. The only ones who could enter unharmed were the Galli, the castrated priests of the mother goddess Cybele. Strabo wondered whether this was divine protection or some antidote. Pliny the Elder recorded the place as well.

For a long time this read like one of the stranger tales in ancient literature.

The cave was found again in 2013 by following a spring

Francesco D’Andria of the University of Salento, who spent decades excavating Hierapolis, found the Ploutonion in 2013 by tracing the course of the city’s thermal spring back to its source.

His team uncovered a temple, a small grotto opening beneath it, and a walled arena in front with stepped seating where spectators could watch the sacrifices. Inscriptions were dedicated to Pluto and Kore, the queen of the underworld. Statues of Cerberus, the three-headed hound who guards the gate of Hades, and of a serpent came out of the ground nearby. Christians destroyed the sanctuary in the sixth century AD, and earthquakes did the rest.

During the excavation, birds that flew too close to the opening dropped dead.

Carbon dioxide at up to 91 percent, and why the priests survived

In 2018 the volcano biologist Hardy Pfanz of the University of Duisburg-Essen published measurements made with Turkish geologists Galip Yüce of Hacettepe University, Ahmet Gülbay of Eskişehir Osmangazi University and Ali Gökgöz of Pamukkale University. Inside the grotto, carbon dioxide reached 91 percent. Gas escaping from its mouth into the arena ran between 4 and 53 percent depending on height above the ground, and at night it reached levels that would kill a person within a minute.

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The paper, by Sue Kelly of the Czech Institute of Egyptology at Charles University and Crystal Miller of the University of Bucharest, appears in Prague Egyptological Studies volume 36. It concludes that Meretneith, also written Merneith, held the serekh reserved for rulers and began her political life as Djer’s co-regent.

Petrie first took her for a king

The story begins at Abydos. Flinders Petrie thought he had found a new king, Merneit, when he excavated tomb Y in the royal cemetery, even though the name on the royal stela lacked a serekh. Further inscriptions of the name with a feminine ending led scholars to identify Meretneith as a queen consort.

Her tomb is one of the reasons the debate never closed. Tomb Y measured 16.5 by 14.0 metres and 2.7 metres deep, with eight narrow chambers around the burial chamber, and Petrie remarked that it was the most carefully built in the cemetery. The surviving limestone stela, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, gives her name with Neith’s crossed arrows and shield, the hoe and the mouth sign, but no serekh and no title.

Emery’s stoppers carried four serekhs

At Saqqara tomb S3503, the stoppers lay on a shelf and around the mouth of the tomb shaft. Each impression showed four serekhs in a line, three together and a fourth after a noticeable gap. Emery recognised the first and fourth as Djer’s and noted that the other two carried a different name and lacked the Horus falcon. Stone vessels inscribed with Meretneith’s name lay beside the sarcophagus and in the burial chamber.

Emery did not interpret the middle serekhs in his 1954 report. In 1961 he described them as Meretneith’s serekhs topped by Neith’s crossed arrows and suggested she might have been Djer’s successor. Several scholars accepted the reading. Peter Kaplony argued in 1963 that the published sealing was unconvincing, and his objection prompted the new study.

The evidence has since shrunk. The stopper and Emery’s original glass plate are both missing, leaving only the black-and-white print in the Egypt Exploration Society archive and Emery’s line drawing.

A scanned photograph stands in for the missing artefact

In September 2022, staff of the Egypt Exploration Society made high-resolution scans of the print on an Epson Perfection V700 flatbed scanner. The authors corrected the contrast in Adobe Lightroom and exported the result as a TIFF file.

They first tried DStretch, a decorrelation tool widely used on rock art. Because it works on colour differences, its usefulness on a black-and-white print was limited, so the team kept its results as a baseline for comparison. The main method used Photoshop. A high-contrast threshold mask separated the raised impression from the clay surface, the background was removed and the colours inverted, and the result was converted into a vector drawing. The authors liken the output to a charcoal rubbing and consider it far more accurate than a hand drawing.

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The enhanced serekhs show a doubled hoe sign

In the first serekh beside Djer’s, the name compartment shows the hoe sign, read mr, written twice. Its form closely matches other inscriptions of Meretneith’s name, though it sits at a slight angle. The emblem above this serekh matches the Neith traces Emery recorded, and the authors reject Silke Roth’s earlier suggestion that it was part of a falcon.

The third serekh is less clear. It again appears to have a doubled hoe, but the figure on top does not look like the Neith symbol. Roth had said in 1997 that the legs and belly of the royal falcon could be made out on Emery’s photograph, and the new illustration appears to confirm her. The authors call the idea of a first known female Horus serekh tempting but remain cautious.

The authors argue spelling varied for every early ruler

The main objection to Emery’s reading was that the doubled hoe differs from how Meretneith’s name is written elsewhere. Kelly and Miller survey her inscriptions and find no standard form. Some add a mouth sign, some a feminine ending, and her name runs vertically or horizontally in either direction. The one constant across all her inscriptions is the hoe sign, the sign doubled in the serekhs.

Kings’ names were just as unstable in this period. Jochem Kahl identified 15 different writings of Narmer’s name. Djer’s flax-bundle sign varies even within a single seal, and Anedjib’s heart sign appears with four blood vessels in one serekh and seven in the next. On this basis, the authors conclude that little argument remains against attributing the serekh to Meretneith and read the Neith emblem as the female counterpart of the Horus falcon.

The authors read the seal as a co-regency with Djer

No other known seal impression places two rulers’ serekhs side by side. The authors compare it with two ivory labels that Günter Dreyer read in 2021 as naming Narmer and Aha together, and with a contested year label from Qaa’s tomb showing the serekhs of Semerkhet and Qaa. They conclude, in their own words, that the first stage of Meretneith’s career was as a co-regent, following earlier proposals by Peter Schulze and Jean-Pierre Pätznick.

Her family ties remain uncertain. Scholars generally consider her Djer’s daughter, the successor of Djet and possibly his wife.

Seals from Den’s tomb at Abydos name her king’s mother

A later stage appears on necropolis seal impressions from the tomb of her son Den at Abydos. In both main reconstructions, by Werner Kaiser and by Günter Dreyer, the seal lists early rulers and ends with Meretneith bearing the title mwt nswt, king’s mother. She is the only person named without the funerary god Khentiamentiu before her. Kaiser explained this by her status as queen regent. Vivienne Callender and Pätznick instead suggest she was the living author of the seal, acting while Den was a minor.

Her memory lasted. A necropolis seal from the reign of Semerkhet, found by the German Archaeological Institute, still lists her. Qaa’s seal leaves her out.

Inscriptions link her name to the treasury

Several stone vessel fragments pair Meretneith’s name with royal institutions. Three from her tomb point to authority over the treasury, including a British Museum fragment, a bowl in Chicago’s Oriental Institute Museum and a piece recovered by Christiana Köhler’s team, which has been re-excavating her tomb since 2020. The authors read these as evidence of her active power, while noting that they give her no title.

Köhler’s team found hundreds of large wine jars in the tomb, some still sealed with their original stoppers. The University of Vienna described the complex as including the tombs of 41 courtiers and servants. Kelly and Miller, citing Petrie, count 49 subsidiary graves and chambers.

Other Egyptologists dispute the serekh reading

The serekh interpretation remains contested. Eva-Maria Engel of Humboldt University in Berlin, who was not involved, examined the enhanced images and told Smithsonian she does not think Meretneith appears among the names, while agreeing she was powerful. Kelly and Miller’s paper had listed Engel’s 2021 study among the works that accept the reading.

Other evidence also cuts both ways. Some scholars take the missing serekh on her stela as proof that she was a regent, not a ruler. Kelly and Miller answer that Djet and Den had both reigned since her time with Djer, which may explain the change. A funerary enclosure in Abydos’s North Cemetery, 66.5 by 25.5 metres, is attributed to her by David O’Connor and Laurel Bestock, while Kaiser and Toby Wilkinson assign it to Den.

Kelly and Miller propose a career in stages

The paper’s broader hypothesis divides her career by evidence type. The serekh marks a co-regency with Djer, the Abydos seals a later role as regent king’s mother for Den, and the treasury inscriptions her direct authority over officials. Citing radiocarbon modelling by Michael Dee and colleagues, the authors estimate she held power for at least 30 years. They suggest she could step on and off the platform of rulership as circumstances required. The final report from Köhler’s excavation at tomb Y has yet to be published.

Sources:

1. Kelly, S. and Miller, C. (2026). “New technology illuminating ancient evidence. Re-evaluating Meretneith’s serekhs and political position.” Prague Egyptological Studies 36, 28 to 49. Licence CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/212321

2. Emery, W. B. (1954). Excavations at Sakkara. Great Tombs of the First Dynasty II. London, Egypt Exploration Society.

3. Emery, W. B. (1961). Archaic Egypt. Baltimore, Penguin Books.

4. Petrie, W. M. F. (1900, 1901). The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty I and II. London, Egypt Exploration Fund.

5. Kaplony, P. (1963). Die Inschriften der ägyptischen Frühzeit. Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz.

6. Roth, S. (1997). “Königin, Regentin oder weiblicher König?” In Gundlach, R. and Raedler, C. (eds), Selbstverständnis und Realität. Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 99 to 123.

7. Dreyer, G. (1987). “Ein Siegel der frühzeitlichen Königsnekropole von Abydos.” MDAIK 43, 33 to 43.

8. Kaiser, W. (1987). “Zum Siegel mit frühen Königsnamen von Umm el-Qaab.” MDAIK 43, 115 to 119.

9. Köhler, E. C. et al. (2023). “A Preliminary Report of New Archaeological Fieldwork at the Tomb of Queen Meret-Neith of the 1st Dynasty at Abydos, Umm el-Qaab.” Ägypten und Levante 33, 75 to 144.

10. Dee, M. et al. (2013). “An absolute chronology for early Egypt using radiocarbon dating and Bayesian statistical modelling.” Proceedings of the Royal Society A 469 (2159). DOI 10.1098/rspa.2013.0395

11. University of Vienna (9 October 2023). “5,000-year-old wine for Egyptian queen.” Press release. https://medienportal.univie.ac.at/en/media/recent-press-releases/detailansicht-en/artikel/5000-year-old-wine-for-egyptian-queen

12. Smithsonian Magazine (1 October 2026). Coverage of Kelly and Miller, with comment from Eva-Maria Engel. Via Arkeofili, “Kraliçe Merneith Mısır’ı Tek Başına Yönetmiş Olabilir,” 2 October 2026. https://arkeofili.com/kralice-merneith-misiri-tek-basina-yonetmis-olabilir/

The single burial in trench L09-65, beside Special Building A at Göbeklitepe. The white lines in panel C reconstruct the position of the body, flexed on its left side facing east. Credit: Gresky and Clare, PLOS ONE 2026, CC BY. Photographs J. Gresky, orthophoto B. Waszk, German Archaeological Institute.

Nine hundred and twenty-eight bone fragments with no context

Since excavation began in 1995, human bone has been coming out of Göbeklitepe in pieces. The assemblage now runs to 928 fragments, mostly unrelated to one another, from males and females of every age.

They turn up in the fill of the monumental buildings and in the soil between the structures, scattered across three thousand square meters of the main excavation area and through every stratigraphic layer to a depth of several meters. Most were found singly. None could be assigned reliably to individuals.

Cranial fragments outnumber postcranial ones, 408 against 283.

Two explanations, one of them attractive

The first is that somebody put them there. Secondary and tertiary burial practices are well documented across Neolithic eastern Anatolia, and Göbeklitepe already has evidence of deliberate treatment of the dead. Gresky’s 2017 work identified deep incisions running along the midline of crania, now recognised on five individuals, which she and colleagues described as a previously unknown form of skull cult.

The iconography points the same way. Pillar 43 in Special Building D carries a headless human figure. Stone heads have been found detached from statues. Sculptures from Nevalı Çori and Karahantepe show animals and birds gripping human heads. Corvids, which scavenge, appear in the animal bone at Göbeklitepe at four times the frequency recorded at other sites of the period, which has been read as a possible trace of excarnation in the open.

The neighbours reinforce it. At Sefertepe a skull was set into the floor plaster of a niche, and a small cell now called the skull chamber held at least twenty-one skulls placed on their bases with nearly all facing southeast. Çayönü Tepesi has its Skull Building, with around seventy skulls in its later phases. At Karahantepe some seventy fragments show cutting, incising, scraping and burning. At Sayburç, crania and long bones from at least nineteen individuals were found on and in front of a stone bench in a dwelling, some burnt.

The second explanation is duller. Burials placed under house floors higher up the mound slid downhill and ended up in the fill.

The site and the two burials, with the collective grave in panels C and D and the scattered bone fragments from the building fill in panels E and F. Credit: Gresky and Clare, PLOS ONE 2026, CC BY. Photographs E. Küçük, C. Lelek-Tvetmarken and J. Gresky, German Archaeological Institute, Göbeklitepe Research Project.

What the two burials look like

The first came to light in 2017 during construction of a drainage channel for the shelter that now covers the main excavation area. A kidney-shaped pit had been cut through the plaster floor of a rectangular building, and it held at least three people and possibly four.

Almost nothing remained in place. The crania had been gathered in the southeastern corner, the postcranial bones piled toward the centre, some long bones laid along the western wall. Only the lower part of one left arm survived in anatomical position, resting on an older plaster floor beneath.

The three are a woman of at least thirty-five, a man of twenty to thirty, and a girl of eleven to fourteen. Gresky and Clare read the arrangement as sequential use. Complete bodies went in, were pushed aside to make room for the next, and were tidied once more before the grave was closed. The presence of hand and foot bones shows whole bodies rather than prepared remains, and no cut marks appear anywhere.

The second burial was found in 2012, sealed again for want of time, and excavated in 2022. It lay against the eastern wall of a small space immediately west of Special Building A. A young woman had been placed flexed on her left side, facing east, on a layer of fist-sized stones with no cut pit around her.

The fragmentation happened in the ground

This is the part that settles the argument, and it turns on unglamorous evidence.

Both burials show the same alterations found across the scattered assemblage. Heavy postmortem fragmentation, with the ends of the long bones broken off and missing. Calcareous deposits covering most surfaces, which in this soil penetrate the bone and crack it apart, and which affect large bones worst. Rodent gnawing. Serrated fracture edges from soil pressure.

Because the second burial is a clear primary inhumation that was never moved, those changes must have occurred inside the grave. The breakage is not somebody smashing bones.

That similarity supports the erosion reading. Buildings higher on the mound held subfloor burials, slope slides carried the deposits down into the hollows where the special buildings sit, and the bones arrived mixed and broken. An uneven scatter across three thousand square metres is what that process produces.

The distribution argues against deliberate placement on its own terms. Anyone depositing selected bones would concentrate them somewhere, and skull fragments at Göbeklitepe are mixed with postcranial bone from both sexes and every age group.

The temple reading keeps receding

Göbeklitepe spent two decades being described as a ritual centre without significant permanent occupation, largely following Klaus Schmidt. That interpretation has been under revision for years as evidence for dwellings and domestic activity accumulated throughout the sequence.

Burials under house floors are ordinary practice across the Pre-Pottery Neolithic in Anatolia and the Levant, and finding them here is another mark in the domestic column. Gresky and Clare say as much directly.

What stays open

The paper does not claim erosion accounts for everything, and the authors are careful about it.

The incised crania remain unexplained by slope movement, and they cannot yet be assigned to the earlier or later phase of the site. The corvid numbers are still unusual. The practices at Sefertepe, Karahantepe, Sayburç and Çayönü are real and nearby.

What has changed is the default. The scattered bone no longer needs a ritual explanation, because a geological one now fits the evidence. Anything else at Göbeklitepe has to be argued for on its own.

Source: Gresky, J., and Clare, L. (2026). "First Burials Give Insights Into Mortuary Rites at Göbeklitepe, Early Neolithic Türkiye." PLOS ONE 21(9), e0358979. Open access under CC BY. Excavation directed by Necmi Karul, with the General Directorate of Cultural Assets and Museums and the Şanlıurfa Museum.

Professor Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University leads the team, which began work on 28 June. Preliminary findings are expected within a few months and a full report in 2027.

What the formation is and where it sits

Durupınar lies in the Tendurek Mountains above the Uzengili valley, at about 1,980 meters, roughly 29 kilometres south of Mount Ararat. It measures around 160 meters from end to end and 48 meters at its widest, with one end pointed and the other rounded, and raised flanks that crest above the surrounding slope.

A Turkish army captain named İlhan Durupınar noticed it in aerial photographs taken in 1959, and the site carries his name. From 1977 the American amateur explorer Ron Wyatt promoted it as the Ark, claiming petrified ribs, iron fittings and stone anchors.

The dimensions are the reason the identification began. Genesis gives the Ark as 300 cubits long, and whether the formation matches depends on which cubit value is used, since ancient cubits range from roughly 45 to 52 centimeters.

The scans and what they are said to show

Noah’s Ark Scans, a California group led by Andrew Jones, has worked at the site since 2019 with partners including Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University, Istanbul Technical University and Andrews University. They ran ground-penetrating radar in 2019, electrical resistivity tomography in 2021, and soil dating in 2022.

In August they released results from a three-dimensional radar system built by Khosrow Bakhtar, which produced volumetric images rather than the profile slices earlier equipment gave. The team reports angular structures reaching six meters down, a central corridor running about 71 meters, tunnel-like features roughly four meters below the surface and two meters high, and right angles at seven meters. Jones describes the pattern as possible support beams and walls arranged across three levels.

Soil samples taken in September 2024 and analyzed that December showed elevated organic matter and potassium, and carbon levels around 40 percent higher inside the formation than outside it. The team reads that as a possible chemical trace of decayed wood.

The geological explanation has been on the record for thirty years

The published case against the identification is specific rather than dismissive, and it comes from Lorence G. Collins, an emeritus professor of geology at California State University, Northridge.

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The altar of Temple 4 at Kition and its two ship graffiti, traced in black on a photogrammetric model. Credit: Model and drawing by T. V. Manolova, from Braun et al., International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 2026. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

In 2024 Graham Braun of the University of Cincinnati and Caroline Barnes of the University of British Columbia pointed a terrestrial laser scanner at the same wall. They were recording ashlar masonry, the dressed stone blocks, for a wider study of Late Bronze Age building on Cyprus. The ships came out of the data unannounced.

Barnes says they had not expected to find them at all. The study, written with Tzveta Manolova, who had been recording the site’s graffiti separately by photogrammetry, is published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

One temple block at Kition in five laser scan renderings, with two newly identified ships marked in the tracing above. Credit: Scans and drawing by G. C. Braun, from Braun et al., International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 2026. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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The fort belongs to the chain of garrisons Ramesses II maintained along the western frontier, watching for Libyan raids and later for the Sea Peoples. Earlier seasons at the site produced a ceremonial cow burial and a bronze sword carrying the pharaoh’s cartouche. This is the first campaign to uncover the living quarters street by street.

The settlement was planned

Hisham el-Leithy, secretary general of the Council, describes a large mudbrick complex with a main street about four meters wide running east to west, crossed by a second street that leads to the fort’s limestone southern gate.

The team reads that grid as deliberate planning rather than a settlement that accumulated around a garrison. Rooms within the complex held grain silos and cylindrical ceramic ovens. Mohamed Abdel-Badei, head of the antiquities sector, says some rooms north of the main street served as wheat stores, and large jars recovered from them still contained charred grain.

Nearby stand three stone wells inscribed with the titles of Ramesses II, found in previous seasons.

View of the archaeological excavations. Image credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

The horse was buried with care

The animal is a young male, and preliminary study suggests a medium-sized, fast breed of the kind used for military training or for drawing chariots.

What marks it as an honorary burial rather than a disposal is the intact posture, the position of the head and the evident attention paid to the arrangement. A few metres away the team recovered cylindrical pieces of alabaster and limestone, probably decorative fittings from a chariot harness.

Two stelae and a Libyan captive

Khaled Abdel-Ghani Farhat, director of Beheira antiquities and supervisor of the dig, reports a limestone stela fragment carrying a hieratic inscription naming Merneptah, son and successor of Ramesses II, who reigned from 1213 to 1203 BC. The text compares his strength to Set and invokes Ptah. Farhat describes it as without precedent in the region.

A second limestone stela, in hieroglyphs, carries the birth name, coronation name and Horus name of Ramesses II. A third fragment shows a bound prisoner identified as a Meshwesh Libyan.

That detail carries an irony the garrison could not have seen coming. Less than three centuries after Ramesses II died, a Meshwesh chief named Sheshonq I took the Egyptian throne and founded the Twenty-second Dynasty.

What the soldiers kept

Scarabs from the site name Ramesses II and Seti I, along with Amun, Sekhmet, Ptah and Set. Amulets take the form of a fish, a lotus, a cobra, a baboon and the nefer sign.

The rest is domestic. Storage and cooking pottery, vessels for perfume and oil, loom weights, fragments of mills and mortars, balance weights and personal ornaments. Among them is a pilgrim’s flask associated with the cult of Abydos, the Osiris sanctuary far to the south, carried by somebody stationed at the other end of the country.

What has not been established

Neither the ministry nor the team has said which phase of the fort’s occupation the residential district and the horse burial belong to, or whether they connect to the cow burial and the sword from earlier seasons. Work on the fortress plan and its place in the New Kingdom’s western defensive network continues.

Source. Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, September 2026.

It measures about 6.6 by 7.7 centimeters and carries lines from Book 12 of the Odyssey.

The passage is the cattle of the sun

Circe had warned Odysseus to keep away from Thrinakia, the island of Helios. He and his crew landed there anyway, after surviving Scylla and Charybdis, and he agreed to it on the condition that no one touch the cattle.

A month of storms followed and the food ran out. Eurylochus and the men killed and ate the sacred herd. Helios demanded redress, and Zeus destroyed the ship, drowning everyone aboard except Odysseus.

De Kreij’s own assessment is that the Odyssey contains a good many dull stretches, and that this is not one of them.

It came from a pocket-sized book

The parchment belonged to a codex made in Egypt in the third or fourth century AD, probably in the Fayum oasis, small enough to carry. Around thirty comparable fragments are known.

De Kreij suggests it survived because it sat in the middle of the book, protected by the pages on either side. How it ended up inside a collection of Egyptian texts is not known. Utrecht bought the material in the middle of the twentieth century, among early Christian manuscripts.

He found it in 2024. The full study appears shortly as a book, Hieratic, Demotic, Greek, and Coptic Texts in the Utrecht University Collection.

The reverse of the parchment fragment, about 6.6 by 7.7 centimeters, mounted between glass with a scale bar at right. The catalogue label reads Utrecht Papyri Gr. Ms. 66.39. Credit: Utrecht University

The second Homeric find this year

In the spring, archaeologists in Egypt recovered papyrus fragments of the Iliad from inside a Roman-period mummy.

Both epics were composed in the late eighth or early seventh century BC, the Iliad on the ten-year war at Troy and the Odyssey on the ten years Odysseus spent getting home to Ithaca.

Sources. Utrecht University. Live Science, 16 September 2026.

Mieza is the site where Aristotle is said to have taught the young Alexander. This year’s work, led by Angeliki Kottaridi, focused on the eastern side of the complex, where the palaestra meets the Didaskaleion, the house of teaching. There the team found the classrooms, rows of stone benches still facing where a teacher would have stood.

Next to them stood a three-room building of more than 160 square metres, built around a central vestibule flanked by two andrones, the men-only dining halls of the Greek world. Both keep their mosaic floors, and the raised platforms show each hall held ten couches, so at least twenty guests reclining at once. The students studying alongside Alexander were learning to host and attend symposia with the same ceremony practised at court.

The comparison with Aigai carries real weight. It suggests Mieza was not an ordinary school but a building raised to palace standard, quite possibly by the same craftsmen who worked for the Macedonian kings.

Archaeologists carefully cleaning the mosaic in the northern portico. Credit: Hellenic Ministry of Culture

What earlier seasons found

Systematic excavation began in 2024. By 2025 it had produced four bronze writing styluses linked to the wax-tablet exercises of Aristotle’s students, and fragments of Panathenaic amphorae, the containers for the sacred olive oil awarded at Athens. The largest feature remains the xystos, a two-storey covered colonnade nearly 200 meters long where students ran laps under cover.

The Aristotle link is a hypothesis

Worth stating plainly. The connection to Aristotle’s actual lessons rests on later literary sources, chiefly Plutarch, who places the tutoring at a nearby Sanctuary of the Nymphs rather than inside the gymnasium. Identifying this building as the classroom is supported by the dating, the scale, the quality and the proximity to Pella, but it is not documented certainty.

What is certain is the ending. The Romans dismantled the gymnasium after the second Battle of Pydna in 148 BC, which ended Macedonia as an independent kingdom. The demolition debris and a later fire buried the plaster and floors, which is why they survive nearly intact twenty-one centuries on.

Source. Hellenic Ministry of Culture, September 2026.

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The red line marks Dogger Bank, which is most likely a moraine formed in the Pleistocene . Image credit: Public Domain

A study published in PNAS in March 2026 makes a different argument. Doggerland was not a corridor people passed through. It was a place with forests on it, thousands of years earlier than anyone expected, and it may have been one of the reasons northern Europe was habitable at all during the coldest part of the last Ice Age.

The work was led by Robin Allaby at the University of Warwick with Vincent Gaffney at Bradford and colleagues at St Andrews, Glasgow and the Smithsonian, as part of Europe’s Lost Frontiers, the largest directed archaeological project ever mounted on the drowned landscapes of the North Sea.

What is actually down there

Doggerland occupied what is now the southern North Sea, connecting eastern Britain to the Netherlands, northern Germany, Denmark and northern France. It was exposed repeatedly through the Pleistocene whenever sea levels dropped, and the name is generally used for its last phase, from the Late Pleistocene into the Early Holocene.

The sea took it back between roughly 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, breaking it first into low islands and then covering it entirely. The drowned surface is called the Dogger Littoral.

It was named after Dogger Bank, which was named after the doggers, the Dutch fishing boats that worked there. Those boats are also how anyone first knew something was underneath. Trawlers kept hauling up mammoth bone, antler and, in 1931, a barbed harpoon point out of a lump of peat.

Doggerland drowning in four stages, from a continuous landmass at 10,000 years ago to open sea by 7,000. The Southern River, the system the study sampled, is marked in red. Credit: Allaby et al., PNAS 2026, CC BY. Figure adapted from Walker et al., 2020.

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Ötzi's digital twin, with the photogrammetric skin above and the CT-derived skeleton below. Credit: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology and Arc-Team

Ötzi is kept at minus 6.5 degrees and 99 percent humidity, in a cold cell at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano. Those numbers reproduce the glacier he came out of, and they are what stop his tissues drying out, losing mass or growing anything.

They also make him very difficult to photograph, because the conditions leave him under a protective layer of ice with wet skin beneath it, and both reflect light in a way that defeats the software used to build 3D models. Solving that problem is most of what the new paper in Heritage is about.

The work was done by Arc-Team, a small archaeological company in Cles, led by Luca Bezzi with Alessandro Bezzi, Rupert Gietl and Cicero Moraes, working with the museum, the radiology department at Bolzano hospital and a forensic pathologist from Munich. The artefacts were surveyed in 2022, the mummy in 2023 and 2024, and the paper was published on 26 August.

One of the three archaeologists photographing Ötzi in the sterile laboratory chamber. The shoot ran for nearly six hours. Credit: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology and Arc-Team

Why ice is hard to photograph

Structure from Motion works by finding the same point in many overlapping photographs and calculating where it must be in space. It assumes surfaces scatter light evenly in all directions, which most things do.

Ice and wet skin do not. They reflect specularly, throwing back bright highlights that move as the camera moves. The software sees a feature that appears to be in a different place in every frame, and the reconstruction falls apart.

The team had solved this before, on a project photographing Hellenistic gold in Taranto, by working in a blacked-out room with a single polarised light source. That was not available here, because the laboratory chamber could not be darkened and its lighting could not be filtered.

So they built the light instead. A ring LED with a custom polarising filter cut from high-efficiency sheet, matched by a second polariser on the camera lens. The ring overwhelmed the ambient lighting, the crossed filters removed the glare, and what reached the sensor was diffuse reflection only.

The scan happened in a gap in the conservation schedule

Getting to him took some arranging.

The survey was slotted into a window during a microbiological inspection, when the mummy had been partially defrosted so meltwater could be sampled. That thinned the ice layer, which happened to be ideal for scanning, and the work had to finish before the routine misting with sterile water that counteracts his ongoing weight loss.

Access ran through a decontamination room into a Class 10,000 cleanroom with ultraviolet germicidal irradiation. Equipment and personnel were sterilised. Three archaeologists rotated through a shoot lasting nearly six hours, working two at a time, while the chamber was brought back down to minus 6.5 degrees.

None of them touched him. All handling was done by Oliver Peschel, a forensic pathologist from Munich, and Martina Tauber, a pathologist at Bolzano.

They took 1,294 usable photographs, 640 of the front and 654 of the back.

Digital models of the Iceman's clothing and equipment, from the bearskin cap at top left to a shoe at bottom right. Credit: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology and Arc-Team

He was not in the same position for both halves

This is the part that surprised them, and it only became apparent afterwards.

Between the front survey and the back survey, his posture had changed. The right hand had moved about five centimetres and the left about one. Minimal handling, especially during the partial defrosting, is enough to shift a body that has been frozen for five thousand years.

That broke the processing pipeline, which assumes a rigid subject. The fix was to stop treating him as one object. They cut the model into four segments, the torso with head and left arm, the left forearm and hand, the upper right arm and the lower right arm, processed each separately and reassembled them.

The same problem then appeared at a larger scale. The CT scan they wanted to merge with the surface model had been taken at Bolzano hospital in 2021, and by 2023 his limbs were no longer where the scan said they were. So they took the skeleton apart digitally, disarticulating the knees, the shoulders and the joint between the skull and the first vertebra, producing five blocks that could be realigned against the new surface.

The bearskin cap needed a different technology entirely

Most of the equipment scanned adequately, the quiver, the axe, the belt and pouch, the loincloth, the shoes, the leggings, the coat and the bow.

The bearskin cap did not. Dense overlapping fur is the sort of thing photogrammetry either turns to noise or smooths into a blank surface, and neither was acceptable.

They ran the same photographs through a Neural Radiance Field instead. Rather than building a surface from points, a NeRF trains a network to answer what colour and density exist at any coordinate seen from any angle, which handles fur because it never has to decide where the surface is.

The result is two records of the same object doing different jobs. The photogrammetric model is measurable and simplified. The NeRF model is not measurable but captures what the cap actually looks like.

The reason for all of this is monitoring

The output is a web application, built on an open-source framework called 3DHOP, that lets a researcher anywhere slice the model along three axes or fade the skin away to reveal the skeleton underneath. It is the first time CT data and a photogrammetric twin have been fused this way.

But the paper is clear that the display is secondary. The plan is to repeat the survey roughly every seven years and compare the results, looking for micro-dehydration, small losses of volume from water still sublimating inside the chamber, surface damage from handling, or early signs of biological change. Quantifying that is how you find out whether the preservation regime is working before anything visible goes wrong.

There is also something CT cannot do. Tomography records density, not colour, so Ötzi’s 61 tattoos are invisible in it. They show up only in photographs.

Luca Bezzi’s framing is that the value lies in integration rather than resolution, that this is the first time the outer surface and the internal anatomy have sat in a single model. The museum’s director, Elisabeth Vallazza, puts it as documenting condition with unprecedented accuracy while keeping the object out of harm’s way.

The paper’s own phrase for it is an ethical proxy. Every future examination that happens on the model is one that does not happen on the body.

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Sources: Bezzi, L., Bezzi, A., Gietl, R., Moraes, C., Vallazza, E., Guareschi, E.E., Tauber, M., Peschel, O., Pernter, P., and Putzer, A. (2026). “Preserving the Past, The 3D Documentation of Ötzi, the Iceman Mummy, and Its Archaeological Context.” Heritage 9(9), 339.

The skull of one of the two foragers from Sulawesi, showing the heavy dental wear the researchers attribute to years of holding whole betel nuts in the mouth. Photo Credit: Fakhri

Two people buried on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, roughly ten thousand years apart, have deep rounded grooves worn into their teeth. Nobody had recorded that pattern before. A study published in Science Advances on 9 September argues it comes from holding whole betel nuts in the mouth, day after day, for years.

If the reading holds, it is the earliest evidence anywhere for the habitual use of a mind-altering plant, and it predates farming by a considerable margin.

The work was led by Adam Brumm at Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution in Brisbane, with biochemical analysis by Carney Matheson.

One died in the depths of the last ice age, the other after it ended

The first is a man who died between the ages of forty and fifty, and who lived somewhere between 25,000 and 16,000 years ago. That spans the Last Glacial Maximum, the coldest stretch of the last ice age, though Sulawesi itself was never under ice.

The second lived between 7,600 and 6,300 years ago and died at a similar age. The sex could not be determined.

Skeletal remains of this period from Sulawesi are rare. These two come from different sites and are separated by around ten thousand years, and they carry the same unusual damage.

Dental wear on the Sulawesi foragers. Arrows mark the grooves, dotted lines follow their curve. Credit: Brumm et al., Science Advances 2026

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It is the only completely preserved chair of any kind from Bronze Age Europe.

The Guldhøj folding chair, made in Denmark around 1389 BC and the only complete example from Bronze Age Europe. Credit: National Museum of Denmark

It was lying at a man’s feet in an oak coffin

Guldhøj, Gold Hill, is a large barrow near Vamdrup in southern Jutland. It was excavated in 1891, under Vilhelm Boye, and held three Bronze Age oak coffins.

One belonged to an adult and had been robbed. One held a child, lined with black goatskin, and by the time it was opened the body had gone to what the excavator called a reddish gruel. With the child were fragments of woven clothing, an arrow shaft and two dried apples.

The third held a man, and the chair was at his feet. His coffin has been dendrochronologically dated to 1389 BC. He wore woven wool and there are fragments of two round-crowned hats. Buried with him were a bronze dagger in a wooden scabbard, a bronze axe, a bronze brooch, two wooden vessels, one studded with tin tacks, a bark bucket and a spoon of horn.

Kirsten Prangsgaard’s 1999 study set out the construction. Two frames, each around thirty-three centimetres high, opening to forty-five degrees to give a seat about twenty-four centimetres from the ground. Bronze rivets probably held it together at first, and appear to have been taken out before it was buried.

Almost nothing organic survives from this period and then there are the oak coffins

Several hundred Danish Bronze Age graves have been dug. In nearly all of them the wood and the cloth are long gone.

Roughly twenty are different, and they are the reason this object exists. Hollowed oak trunks, sealed inside mounds where the conditions turned waterlogged and airless, preserved organic material that would have vanished anywhere else. The group includes the Egtved Girl, buried in 1370 BC with her string skirt, along with Muldbjerg Man, Skrydstrup Woman, Trindhøj and Borum Eshøj. Bones frequently dissolved in the acid while hair, skin and textile came through.

Tutankhamun had one made of ebony and ivory

Folding chairs of this form were used across the Mediterranean in the city and palace cultures of the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries BC, and turn up as grave goods in the richest burials. One stood in Tutankhamun’s tomb, made of ebony and ivory with gold fittings. He died in 1327 BC. Another survives from Thebes, dated to around 1400 BC.

Folding chairs appear in northern Europe from roughly the same moment, around 1400 BC.

The museum’s position on what that means is precise and worth quoting the shape of. The chair itself did not travel from the Mediterranean to Denmark. The design did. Guldhøj is a domestic product made after a distant model.

In both places the object marked the rank of whoever sat on it during ceremonies. Prangsgaard and colleagues observe that in Scandinavia the chairs seem to belong specifically to the warrior graves of the Early Bronze Age. Guldhøj is not the only northern example, only the complete one. Fragments have come from Store Høj in western Jutland and from sites in Sweden and northern Germany.

Two Danish designers have put it back into production

In 1934 Ole Wanscher made a version, the PJ-2000, working from the Egyptian folding chair rather than the Danish one.

Later, Poul Hundevad produced his Guldhøj stool from the Bronze Age design, changing very little. He worked in Vamdrup, the town the barrow sits beside. It became the piece he was known for, and it still trades second-hand in oak and leather, filed under mid-century Danish modern.

The original is in Room 9 of the National Museum in Copenhagen.

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Sources: National Museum of Denmark, on the folding chair from Guldhøj, the graves from Guldhøj, the chair as status symbol, and design through the ages. Prangsgaard, K., et al. (1999). Live Science, 7 September 2026.

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.