The Dead Sea Scrolls. Image credit: Israel Museum, Jerusalem

The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the 1950s, remain one of the twentieth century’s most significant archaeological finds, preserving the earliest known manuscripts of the Tanach alongside a broader collection of Jewish literary works from the late Second Temple period. Despite decades of scholarship, the precise locations where the scrolls were manufactured and copied have stayed unknown.

A five-year effort with a five-year predecessor

The ERC has awarded a 2.5 million euro Advanced Grant to Professor Mladen Popović of the University of Groningen, one of the world’s leading authorities on the scrolls, to lead the new five-year project, titled Tracing Scribes and Scrolls. It brings together the University of Groningen, the Israel Antiquities Authority, and several other European laboratories and institutions in a joint international effort.

The project builds directly on Popović’s earlier ERC-funded work, The Hands That Wrote the Bible, which pioneered the use of artificial intelligence to identify individual scribes responsible for copying different scrolls. Tracing Scribes and Scrolls pushes that work further, moving past the question of who wrote each manuscript to ask where those scribes actually worked, what materials they used, and what broader cultural and intellectual networks carried the manuscripts into circulation across ancient Judea and potentially beyond.

New ERC-funded international research project to trace the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls set to launch, June 30, 2026; AI dubbing. (CREDIT: YOLI SCHWARTZ/SHAI HALEVI/ISRAEL ANTIQUITIES AUTHORITY)

Chemistry, handwriting, and the physical scroll itself

The research plan centers on roughly 250 samples of parchment, papyrus, and ink drawn from the Israel Antiquities Authority’s own collection, examined through a combination of state-of-the-art chemical analysis, artificial intelligence, paleography, the study of ancient handwriting, and codicology, the study of manuscripts as physical, cultural artifacts.

One strand of the work is genuinely unprecedented. The chemical signatures extracted from scrolls found at Qumran and other sites across the Judean Desert will be compared directly against ancient Egyptian papyri, the first time such a comparison has been attempted at this scale. Researchers expect the comparison to help identify each scroll’s material fingerprint, trace the origins of its raw materials, recognize distinct production practices, and uncover connections between where a scroll was made and the broader network of known scribal centers across the region.

The chemical data will then be processed using AI tools built to detect complex patterns that conventional analysis tends to miss, results the team plans to combine with paleographic study of the actual handwriting, codicological analysis of physical construction details such as sheet preparation, column layout, margins, and stitching technique, and the existing body of linguistic and literary evidence built up around the scrolls over decades of prior research.

Building a database with no precedent

Popović described the scope of the undertaking plainly, calling it the largest research project to date to apply artificial intelligence to the cultural context of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These manuscripts, he said, offer an extraordinary window into the intellectual world of ancient Judea. By combining advanced laboratory analysis with handwriting study and recent advances in artificial intelligence, he added, the team can now approach questions that were previously out of reach entirely, who actually copied these manuscripts, where they were produced, how knowledge moved between communities, and what role the texts played within the society that produced them.

Dr. Ilit Cohen-Ofri of the Israel Antiquities Authority, a key participant in the project, said the coming research will assemble what she called an unprecedented database of the chemical composition of scroll samples. The authority is entrusted with preserving, documenting, and studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, she said, and continues to invest heavily in advancing their scientific investigation, noting that the IAA has only relatively recently come to appreciate how much information the scrolls’ raw materials, parchment, papyrus, and ink, actually have to offer. Taking part in an international project of this scale, she added, lets the authority contribute its expertise in material analysis to some of the field’s most important open questions, benefiting scholars and the wider public alike.

A wide international network

The project draws together research teams led by Cohen-Ofri at the Israel Antiquities Authority, Popović and Dr. Maruf Dhali at the University of Groningen, Ilaria Degano at the University of Pisa, Leila Birolo at the University of Naples Federico II, and Kaare Rasmussen and Frank Kjeldsen at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. It also includes collaborations with the Egyptian Museums in Berlin and Turin and with KU Leuven in Belgium, partnerships built specifically around the comparative study of papyri from Egypt alongside manuscripts from the Judean Desert.

Source. The Jerusalem Post.

Aerial view of the excavation area. Credit: José Antonio Riquelme-Cantal et al. 2026

Researchers have identified grooves worn into the animal’s nasal bone by the friction of a bridle or noseband, alongside chemical evidence that some of these horses had traveled between climatically distinct regions, together forming the oldest known evidence of ridden and transported horses anywhere on the Iberian Peninsula.

The find comes from the Castillo Reyes site in Pinto, Madrid, and is described in a paper by José Antonio Riquelme Cantal, Juan Manuel Garrido Anguita, Francisco Miró, Jorge Vega y Miguel, Antonio Delgado Huertas, Manuel Novales-Durán, and José Clemente Martín de la Cruz, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Reports. The team draws on researchers from the University of Córdoba, Spain’s National Research Council, known as the CSIC, and several other institutions.

A groove written by friction, not by chance

The remains belong to the Cogotas I culture, a Bronze Age tradition that dominated the Iberian interior between roughly 1450 and 1150 BC. Direct radiocarbon dating places the Castillo Reyes horse remains at around 3,300 years ago, squarely within the period Spanish archaeologist Blanco González identified in 2014 as the peak of Cogotas I culture, a chronological fit reinforced further by the site’s ceramic typology and structure, evidence the researchers say rules out any possibility that the remains are a later intrusion or a displaced find from another period.

At the center of the discovery is a rostral skull fragment showing a well-developed groove along the dorsal margin and inner surface of the nasal process of the incisive bone, essentially the upper muzzle area just behind the nostrils. The team used radiography, multidetector computed tomography, and 3D volume rendering to examine the groove in precise detail, finding it positioned 3.92 centimeters from the nasoincisive notch along a total incisor length of 10.19 centimeters. The groove’s shape and location match a well-documented pattern in modern ridden horses, mechanically induced bone remodeling caused by sustained pressure and friction from control devices worn over the nose, the kind of wear a bridle or noseband leaves behind after prolonged, repeated use.

Core area, sphere of influence, and peripheral sites of the Cogotas I cultural horizon across the Iberian Peninsula. Adapted from Blanco González (2014) and José Antonio Riquelme-Cantal et al. (2026).

Teeth that recorded a journey

The skull fragment was not the only evidence the team gathered. To understand how these horses actually lived and moved, the researchers carried out sequential stable isotope analysis on the tooth enamel of several adult horses from the site, sampling at millimeter-scale resolution to build a detailed record of each animal’s changing environment as its teeth formed. In total, the analysis yielded 179 paired measurements of carbon and oxygen isotopes preserved in the enamel.

Right lateral view of the rostral skull fragment showing a groove (arrow) on the dorsal margin and medial surface of the left nasal process of the incisive bone. Credit: José Antonio Riquelme-Cantal et al. (2026).

The carbon isotope values pointed to a diet dominated by C3 plants, the photosynthetic pathway typical of temperate-climate vegetation, consistent with grazing in the Iberian interior. The oxygen isotope values told a more varied story. Some horses showed isotopically stable, homogeneous profiles consistent with having lived their whole lives in one local area. Others showed structured shifts within a single tooth that could not be explained by a single, consistent local water source, a signature the researchers interpret as evidence of real mobility, animals that had moved between climatically distinct regions during their lives.

Riding, transport, and a mixed population

Taken together, the cranial evidence and the isotopic data point to the same conclusion from two independent directions. As the study’s authors put it, the combined osteological and isotopic evidence indicates the presence of domesticated horses used for riding or transport at Castillo Reyes, alongside a genuinely mixed population of both locally raised and non-local individuals living and dying at the same Late Bronze Age site.

The researchers frame Castillo Reyes as, for now, the oldest known assemblage anywhere in the Iberian Peninsula to combine all three strands of evidence at once, clear domestication, direct evidence of riding or transport use, and proof of horses moving between regions. For the communities of Spain’s central plateau during the Bronze Age, the find suggests the horse had already become something considerably more significant than a source of meat. It was a working technology of mobility, one that let people and, very possibly, goods and ideas move across considerable distances centuries earlier than previously documented for this part of Europe.

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Source. Riquelme Cantal, J.A., Garrido Anguita, J.M., Miró, F., Vega y Miguel, J., Delgado Huertas, A., Novales-Durán, M., and Martín de la Cruz, J.C. (2026). “Evidence of Horse Riding in Domestic Horses During the Bronze Age in Iberia.” Journal of Archaeological Science, Reports, 74. doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2026.105913

Entrance to Qafzeh Cave. Photo credit: LS via Wikimedia Commons.

The study, published in Scientific Reports on June 30, 2026, was led by researchers from Spain’s National Research Center on Human Evolution, known as CENIEH, working with colleagues from Tel Aviv University. Its lead author, Ana Pantoja-Pérez, has worked on questions of ancient violence before, having previously contributed to the analysis of a 430,000-year-old skull from Spain’s Sima de los Huesos site widely interpreted as evidence of one of the earliest known homicides in the human fossil record.

A wound written on the bone

Violence, the care of the sick and injured, and funerary behavior rank among the hardest aspects of the deep human past to reconstruct, since the physical evidence is often faint, ambiguous, or destroyed entirely by time. To get past those limits with Qafzeh 25, the team combined macroscopic and microscopic examination with high-resolution micro-computed tomography, allowing them to study the bones and teeth in far finer detail than earlier analyses of the same remains had achieved.

The scans revealed a thin, linear lesion on the left side of the lower jaw, reaching into one of the lower premolar teeth. Its shape and morphology matched damage caused by a sharp object striking living bone, rather than any of the processes, weathering, carnivore gnawing, or accidental breakage, that typically account for postmortem damage on fossils this old. Crucially, the wound also showed clear signs of healing, localized bone porosity and thickening around its margins indicating that new bone had begun to form. Whoever this person was, they survived the injury and lived on for some time afterward.

Cases of confirmed sharp-force trauma from the Middle Paleolithic are exceedingly rare. Qafzeh 25 now joins a very small group of human remains from this period bearing similar evidence, deepening what researchers can say about the presence, and the survivability, of interpersonal violence deep in our species’ history.

MicroCT analysis of the left maxillary region. (A) Three-dimensional reconstruction of the left mandibular and maxillary region showing the proposed trajectory of the traumatic injury (1). (B) Close-up of the root of the left upper canine (2), preserved in situ and still covered by sediment. (C) CT reconstruction highlighting fractures affecting the left maxillary dentition. Credit: A. Pantoja-Pérez et al., 2026.

A mouth that told its own story

The micro-CT scans turned up more than the jaw wound alone. Researchers identified a previously hidden cavity inside one of the lower premolars, along with enamel defects scattered across several other teeth, dental problems that earlier studies of the same individual had missed entirely. These findings echo similar reports of cavities and tooth abnormalities already documented in other fossils from Qafzeh, suggesting the population as a whole dealt with real, ongoing health burdens tied to diet, genetics, or the pressures of daily life in the Middle Paleolithic Levant.

Ruling out an accident of decay

Because ancient bone can mislead as easily as it can inform, the team also carried out a full taphonomic reassessment, tracing how the skeleton had changed in the tens of thousands of years since burial. Their results rule out the possibility that the observed alterations came from carnivore activity or from the body lying exposed on the surface for an extended period before burial. Instead, the state of anatomical preservation across the skeleton is consistent with deliberate, intentional burial, exactly the kind of careful treatment of the dead that Qafzeh Cave has long been recognized for.

A fuller portrait of one ancient life

Qafzeh Cave already ranks among the most important sites anywhere for understanding the earliest funerary behavior of Homo sapiens, and this new evidence reinforces that standing rather than complicating it. Taken together, the healed jaw wound, the dental pathologies, and the confirmation of deliberate burial sketch a fuller and more human picture of the individual behind Qafzeh 25, someone who suffered a violent injury and survived it, lived with ongoing dental trouble, and was, in the end, laid to rest by a community that treated the dead with evident care. For researchers piecing together how violence, illness, and grief were handled at the very dawn of our species, that combination of trauma survived and burial performed offers a rare and valuable window all at once.

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Sources. CENIEH (July 2026); Phys.org; Archaeology News Online Magazine. Pantoja-Pérez, A., Martín-Francés, L., May, H., et al. (2026). “A taphonomic reassessment of Qafzeh 25 and its implications for violence, health and funerary practices.” Scientific Reports. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-58670-0

‘Assyro-Levantine’ stamp seal discovered at Yavne. Credit: Assaf Peretz, Yaakov Shmidov, and Ulrike Zurkinden.

Rediscovered by Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologists nearly 2,700 years later, the object offers a rare, intimate link between an industrial corner of a Levantine town and the astral cults the Bible’s own writers condemned by name.

The seal is described in a study by Christoph Uehlinger of the University of Zurich, together with Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologists Pablo Betzer, Revital Golding-Meir, and Daniel Varga, and Gunnar Lehmann of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Found beside the kilns

The seal turned up in Area U of the Yavne East excavations, part of an extensive Iron Age IIC ceramic production complex on the city’s outskirts. The industrial zone held nine kilns, several potter’s wheels, and multiple work surfaces equipped with grinding tools, storage jars, and other tools of the trade. The seal itself was found on one such surface, alongside storage jars, a mortar, and loom weights, about three meters from a potter’s wheel and some twenty meters from the kilns, a working corner of a working site rather than a temple or shrine.

Intact and small enough to fit easily in a palm, the seal measures 14.6 millimeters long, 13.2 millimeters wide, and 8 millimeters high. It is carved from reddish crystalline limestone and pierced lengthwise, meaning it was almost certainly worn as a pendant or personal ornament rather than kept purely for administrative sealing.

Its presence stands out precisely because it does not belong. Researchers describe it as the only clearly foreign element in the immediate environment of the workshop. Yet it is not entirely alone at the site. About 160 meters north, in Area H, excavators had already uncovered several tombs carrying features distinctive of Assyrian funerary tradition, including two burials covered by large inverted ceramic vessels and a crypt built of mud brick, a tomb type previously unknown in the region for this period. Taken together, the seal and the tombs point to a non-local population with a real presence at Yavne, not just passing imperial influence.

Iron Age potters’ workshop in Area U, viewed eastward, showing the kiln (upper right), working surfaces with stone- and pebble-paved floors (centre right), flat kurkar stones, and a potter’s wheel. Credit: Assaf Peretz, Israel Antiquities Authority.

A man, a moon, and a star

The seal’s engraved base carries a compact but legible scene. A bearded male figure, dressed in a long, ankle-length two-piece garment, stands facing left toward three symbolic elements, one arm extended forward with the palm open, in a gesture the researchers read clearly as worship or ritual greeting.

Arranged vertically before him are an offering stand or pedestal at the base, a crescent moon above it, and higher still an eight-pointed star. The researchers identify the crescent and the star with the Mesopotamian moon god Sin and the goddess associated with the planet Venus, two of the central figures of the Assyro-Babylonian pantheon. To the worshiper’s right stands a cypress-like tree, a detail the study takes as a sign that the scene depicts an outdoor ritual, performed in the open rather than inside a temple building.

The composition is not unique to Yavne. Researchers have identified closely comparable seals from Akko, Tell Jemmeh, Jerusalem, Megiddo, and Shiqmona, each combining the same basic repertoire, worshiper, offering stand, crescent moon, star, and tree, in varying arrangements.

‘Assyro-Levantine’ stamp seal from Yavne. Credit: Assaf Peretz, Yaakov Shmidov, and Ulrike Zurkinden.

The moon rises over the sun

The Yavne find fits a broader shift the study’s authors trace across the region’s glyptic art. During the eighth century BC, seal iconography in the southern Levant was dominated by solar imagery. Across the seventh century, that balance tipped decisively toward the moon, the planets, and the stars.

The authors connect that shift directly to the westward expansion of the Assyrian Empire and to changes in imperial religious policy spanning the reigns of Tiglath-Pileser III through Ashurbanipal, the period they call the Assyrian century, running roughly from 730 to 630 BC. They are careful, however, not to overstate the case for a simple imperial imposition. The Yavne seal belongs to a fairly homogeneous group of seals, made of brown or reddish limestone, roughly circular in shape, and carved using a technique that combines incised lines with flat relief and interior shading. Although these objects clearly arrived in the southern Levant as a consequence of Assyrian expansion, the researchers stress they should not simply be labeled Assyrian, since no comparable examples have turned up at the empire’s own core, in Nineveh, Arbela, or Assur.

Rather than a phenomenon imposed top-down from the Assyrian center, the study frames the rise of astral cult imagery and its associated seal production as something closer to a regional response, a way local populations across the southern Levant adapted to the new realities of Assyrian hegemony on their own terms.

The priests Josiah swept away

Perhaps the study’s boldest proposal is who these seals actually belonged to. The researchers connect the worshiping figures depicted on them to a specific class of ritual specialists, known in Aramaic inscriptions as kmr and in the Hebrew Bible as kemarim. The term appears in the Book of Hosea and in the Second Book of Kings, where these priests are described as practitioners of astral cults and divination, a class of ritualists the biblical narrative says King Josiah suppressed as part of his religious reforms.

The relevant passage, 2 Kings 23:5, names the kemarim as those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, to the moon, to the planets, and to all the host of heaven. For Uehlinger and his co-authors, this priesthood was not a phenomenon confined to Judah alone, but part of a wider network of ritual specialists active across the southern Levant during the Assyrian period, of which the Yavne seal’s owner may well have been one small, otherwise anonymous member.

Yavne under Assyrian rule

Yavne sits roughly 15 kilometers from Ashdod and 40 kilometers from Ashkelon, a strategic position on the southern coastal plain. The researchers place the seal’s context within the broader arc of Assyrian domination over the region, which took effective hold following Tiglath-Pileser III’s campaigns of 734 and 732 BC. In 711 BC, Sargon II conquered Ashdod and converted the territory into a province under an Assyrian governor, a presence attested by fragments of three Assyrian royal stelae found at Ashdod and by a monumental administrative building at Ashdod Ad Halom, roughly 15 kilometers southwest of Yavne, likely the governor’s residence. Local kingship persisted alongside that imperial administration, the researchers note, citing inscriptions of Esarhaddon from 677 BC and Ashurbanipal from 667 BC that name a king of Ashdod called Ahimilki, alongside an Assyrian governor, Samas-kasid-ayabi, recorded as eponym of the year 669 BC. Assyrian control over the Yavne and Ashdod area lasted until roughly 637 to 635 BC, when the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus I’s campaign against Ashdod brought it to an end.

‘Double-pot’ burial unearthed in Area H. Credit: Assaf Peretz, Israel Antiquities Authority.

An industrial hub in an imperial economy

The pottery complex where the seal was found carries its own economic significance. About 20 kilometers south of Yavne, the city of Ekron hosted a major olive oil production center under Assyrian rule, an industry that would have consumed vast quantities of ceramic storage containers, yet no pottery workshops have been identified at Ekron itself. Yavne, by contrast, held a substantial ceramic production facility clearly capable of manufacturing containers at scale. Although no direct evidence of oil or wine production has turned up at Yavne itself, the researchers consider it plausible that the site supplied ceramics to Ekron or to other centers within the wider Assyrian economic network.

The Assyrian-style tombs uncovered nearby, with their inverted double-vessel burials and mud-brick crypt, may belong to deportees resettled from Mesopotamia, a practice documented in the territory of Ashdod and at Tel Hadid, or to individuals otherwise connected to the Assyrian administration. Together with the seal, the researchers conclude, these finds offer a privileged window into the complex interactions between Yavne’s local population and Assyrian imperial power during the seventh century BC, evidence not simply of military and administrative control, but of a local population that adopted, reinterpreted, and adapted elements of imperial culture on its own terms, as a small stone seal, lost on a potter’s work surface, quietly attests.

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Source. Uehlinger, C., Betzer, P., Golding-Meir, R., Varga, D., and Lehmann, G. (2026). “An ‘Assyro-Levantine’ Stamp Seal with a Worship Scene Found near Tel Yavne.” Tel Aviv, 1 to 26. doi.org/10.1080/03344355.2026.2637186

A new study of Üçağızlı II Cave in Hatay province argues that when Homo sapiens replaced the Neanderthals who had occupied the site before them, daily life there barely changed at all.

The research, led by İsmail Baykara of Gaziantep University’s Department of Archaeology, with Naoki Morimoto of Kyoto University and a wider international team, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A small cave with a long memory

Üçağızlı II sits near the mouth of the Orontes River in the northern Levant, a region long used as a corridor for early human movement between Africa and Eurasia. Archaeologists have known of the site for years, but systematic excavation only began in 2020, and the cave itself is modest, its floor covering roughly 56 square meters.

What it lacks in size it makes up for in continuity. Fossil remains recovered from multiple occupation layers, four individual teeth and a partial jawbone with two more teeth still attached, allowed the team to establish a clear chronology. Neanderthals occupied the cave from roughly 77,000 to 59,000 years ago. Homo sapiens then took over the same space from about 59,000 to 47,000 years ago, giving the site a combined occupation history spanning some 30,000 years.

The same tools, the same prey

Alongside the fossils, the excavation recovered 19,252 stone tools and 24,236 animal bone fragments, distributed across every layer of occupation. The pattern that emerged surprised the researchers. Rather than showing a shift in technology or subsistence strategy when Homo sapiens arrived, the record shows both species making the same types of stone tools from the same local flint sources, and hunting the same prey, wild goats, fallow deer, roe deer, and wild boar, using what appear to be the same techniques.

A tiny Columbella rustica shell discovered alongside Neanderthal fossils in Üçağızlı II Cave. It was likely not collected as food, but worn as an ornament. Credit: Naoki Morimoto

Seashells that meant nothing to eat

The clearest signal of shared culture, however, came from something that had nothing to do with survival. Researchers recovered 59 mollusk shells scattered through the occupation layers, 29 of them from a small sea snail called Columbella rustica. These shells carry little to no food value, which points toward a different purpose entirely. Several bore small deliberately made holes, suggesting they were strung and worn as ornaments, and one shell recovered from the Neanderthal layers had clearly been heated on purpose, a treatment that altered its color before use.

Because Columbella rustica shells turned up consistently across the entire occupation sequence, both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens layers alike, the researchers argue that the incoming modern humans used these shells in essentially the same way the cave’s earlier Neanderthal occupants had, thousands of years before. As the study’s authors put it, this points to shared behaviors between Neanderthals and modern humans that go beyond mere subsistence and extend into non-utilitarian practices.

Baykara did not hide his surprise at the finding. Speaking to IFLScience, he said the result was genuinely striking, since the team had not expected this level of continuity between Neanderthals and modern humans, though he added that it makes sense given what is already known about interbreeding between the two groups. In a separate interview with CNN, he put it more directly, saying the findings suggest Neanderthals and Homo sapiens likely shared more than just the same landscape. While direct contact between the two populations at the cave cannot yet be proven, he said, the remarkable continuity in technology, hunting practices, and the transport of shell beads is consistent with populations that interacted and passed cultural traditions between one another over time.

Co-author Naoki Morimoto, speaking to Discover Magazine, called the shell preference one of the study’s biggest surprises specifically because Neanderthals sharing a strong attachment to Columbella rustica was previously thought to be a behavior exclusive to modern humans, a finding he said forces researchers to reconsider the nature of cultural boundaries, and perhaps cognitive capacities, among different human groups in the Levant.

A contested question, not a settled one

The Üçağızlı findings fit into a wider and still unsettled debate about how much Neanderthals and Homo sapiens actually had in common. At Mandrin Cave in France, researchers have documented a very different pattern, with occupation layers linked to the two species showing distinct cultural artifact types rather than continuity, a contrast some specialists point to as evidence of multiple, quite different Homo sapiens populations and cultural trajectories moving through Eurasia at different times. By contrast, excavations at Tinshemet Cave in Israel had already turned up shared funerary traditions and technology between Neanderthals and modern humans, a pattern Üçağızlı II now appears to echo and extend.

Baykara is careful not to overstate what the Hatay evidence proves. The discovery does not mean the two groups lived identical lives in every respect, only that certain everyday practices, and some non-essential ones, remained remarkably stable even after a different human species took over the cave. Whether that stability reflects direct cultural transmission, coincidental convergence, or something in between remains, in his own words, a topic that is still somewhat speculative. Determining how cognitive capacities, ultimately a matter of brain structure and function, actually differed or overlapped between Neanderthals and modern humans, he says, will require further research still to come.

Sources. IFLScience (July 6, 2026); CNN; Live Science; Scientific American; Discover Magazine. Baykara, İ., Turan, D., Eren Kural, E., Silibolatlaz, D., Agras, M.K., Şahiner, E., Kavak, S., Zanolli, C., Ishihara, Y., Morita, W., and Morimoto, N. (2026). “Long-term cultural continuity across the Neanderthal-modern human sequence at Üçağızlı II Cave, northern Levant.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 123(29). doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2609061123

Odysseus and Polyphemus, painted by Arnold Böcklin (1896). Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Two studies released within weeks of each other in 2026, one geological, one philological, now converge on a striking resolution. Ithaca, they argue, was never an island at all, and Homer himself knew it.

An old hypothesis meets new rock

The idea traces back to Robert Bittlestone’s 2005 book Odysseus Unbound, written with Cambridge classicist James Diggle and University of Aberdeen geoscientist John Underhill. Bittlestone proposed that Ithaca was not the island called Ithaki today, but Paliki, the low-lying western peninsula of neighboring Kefalonia. The idea fit Homer’s description of a homeland positioned furthest west among three neighboring islands, low-lying rather than mountainous, unlike Ithaki, which faces east and rises steeply.

There was an obvious snag. If Homer’s Ithaca was an island, then Paliki had to have been a genuine island in Odysseus’s Late Bronze Age, roughly 1200 BC, separated from the rest of Kefalonia by open water. Bittlestone found support for this in the Greek geographer Strabo, who wrote in the first century AD that at its narrowest point Kefalonia formed a low isthmus, often submerged from sea to sea. Bittlestone read this as describing a marine channel later filled by earthquake-triggered landslides, in one of Europe’s most tectonically active zones.

Testing that claim became Underhill’s life’s work. Over two decades, he led an extensive geoscientific campaign across the Thinia Valley, the narrow six by two kilometer land bridge connecting Paliki to the rest of Kefalonia, using seismic imaging, airborne geophysics, borehole sampling, subsurface rock cores, and geomorphological analysis. Presenting the results at the EAGE conference in Aberdeen in June 2026, Underhill reported that the marine channel hypothesis does not hold up. The team found marine sediments dating to the Late Pleistocene, but no evidence of a continuous seaway running through the valley during the Bronze Age. Instead, Thinia appears to have been shaped by an overland drainage system, an upland lake and meadow feeding rivers that flowed north and south to the coasts, a pattern that still shows itself occasionally today after heavy storms, and one Underhill argues matches Strabo’s actual description more closely than a vanished channel ever did.

Telemachus’ journey, based on the reconstruction by Robert Bittlestone. Credit: James Diggle and John Underhill

A blow that became a breakthrough

On the face of it, this result undercut Bittlestone’s founding mechanism. If Paliki was never separated from Kefalonia by water, it could not have been an island in Odysseus’s time, seemingly disqualifying it from matching Homer’s island Ithaca.

Instead, the finding sent Diggle back to the Greek text itself, and what he found overturned an assumption scholars had carried since antiquity. In a paper titled “Was Homer’s Ithaca an Island?,” published in the online journal Antigone on July 5, 2026, Diggle and Underhill argue that Homer never actually calls Ithaca an island in the first place. Despite having abundant opportunity to use the Greek word for island, nisos, a word that would have fit the poems’ meter just as easily, Homer instead consistently describes Ithaca using words meaning land, native land, or domain, gaia, patris, and dimos.

One passage, long read as clinching proof of an island Ithaca, turns out to hinge on a subtle mistranslation. When Odysseus finally makes landfall at the end of his ten-year voyage, standard translations describe his ship approaching “the island,” where “on Ithaca there is a bay of Phorcys.” Diggle points out that Homer’s actual phrase is “in the dimos of Ithaca,” meaning “in the domain of Ithaca,” language that implies Ithaca is a district within a larger island the ship is approaching, not the island itself. A further clue comes from the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships, where Odysseus leads not “Ithacans” but “the gallant Cephallenians,” the very name later used for the inhabitants of Kefalonia as a whole.

Map of the islands of Cephalonia and Ithaca. Credit: Gobbler / Wikimedia Commons

Reassembling the map

Freed from the requirement that Ithaca be a freestanding island, the case for Paliki grows stronger rather than weaker. Homer’s description of Ithaca as low-lying and facing west toward the setting sun, with the neighboring islands of Zacynthos, Same, and Doulichion turned instead toward dawn, matches Paliki and not Ithaki, which sits mountainous and east-facing. Zacynthos and Same can be identified confidently as modern Zakynthos and Kefalonia. Doulichion has long puzzled scholars, but if Paliki is Ithaca, modern Ithaki itself becomes the obvious candidate for Doulichion, an identification that appeared on some early maps.

Underhill and Diggle describe the result as an elegant explanation that unifies the geoscience, the Homeric text, and Strabo’s ancient account into a single coherent picture, one they say remains entirely consistent with Bittlestone’s founding insight even though its supporting mechanism has changed. Recent excavations by the Ephorate of Antiquities for Kefalonia and Ithaca have added a further encouraging thread, uncovering newly identified Early Bronze Age sites on Paliki, including Livadi Marsh, the location Bittlestone proposed as the site of Odysseus’s harbor.

A myth measured against real ground

The renewed attention arrives at a fitting moment, with global interest in Homer’s epics heightened by the approaching release of Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the Odyssey. Underhill frames the convergence of geoscience and classical philology as proof that the line between myth and physical reality can be narrower than long assumed. The debate over Odysseus’s true homeland has never fully closed. Other scholars have argued over the past century for Lefkada to the north, or continued to defend the traditional island of Ithaki itself, and the new studies will not be the last word. But by tying precise textual analysis to two decades of hard geological fieldwork, the Diggle and Underhill research offers what may be the most tightly argued case yet for where Odysseus was actually trying to go.

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Sources. University of Aberdeen (June 11 and July 1, 2026). James Diggle and John Underhill, “Was Homer’s Ithaca an Island?,” Antigone (2026).

According to a new study, the extinct human species Homo floresiensis, commonly known as the “hobbit,” may have been a scavenger. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

A new study of ancient animal bones from the species’ cave home on the Indonesian island of Flores now overturns that picture. Homo floresiensis, the research suggests, was not a hunter at all. It was a scavenger, picking over the leftovers that the island’s fearsome Komodo dragons left behind, and it shows no convincing evidence of ever having tamed fire.

The study, led by paleoanthropologist Elizabeth Grace Veatch of the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program and the Cluster of Excellence in Human Origins at the University of Tübingen, was published on July 3, 2026, in the journal Science Advances.

A hobbit with a giant reputation

Homo floresiensis was first uncovered in 2003 in the limestone cave of Liang Bua on Flores, a species whose ancestors are thought to have reached the island at least 700,000 years ago. Standing an average of about 106 centimeters tall, with a brain only slightly larger than a chimpanzee’s, prominent teeth, and notably large feet, the species quickly earned its hobbit nickname. Alongside its bones, archaeologists found stone tools, animal bones bearing cut marks, and bones that appeared charred, a combination that seemed to point toward the sophisticated behaviors associated with our own genus Homo. The hobbits vanished around 50,000 years ago, roughly when Homo sapiens began spreading across Southeast Asia.

Veatch wanted to test that inherited assumption directly. As she put it, she wanted to see whether the evidence could really show that Homo floresiensis was the hunter it had long been portrayed as.

Selected bone fragments showing marks left by Homo floresiensis and Komodo dragons. Credit: E. Grace Veatch et al. (2026)

Teaching a dragon to testify

The obstacle was that Flores’ Stegodon, a dwarf elephant relative, is extinct, and there was no way to run a hunting experiment on a living one. So the team turned to the island’s other apex predator, the Komodo dragon, the world’s largest living lizard, which still stalks the same landscape. Researchers fed a goat carcass to a captive Komodo dragon named Rinca at Zoo Atlanta, then recovered the goat’s skeleton and used 3D scanning to painstakingly document every pit, notch, furrow, and tooth score the dragon’s bite had left behind. The pattern was clear. The dragon’s teeth concentrated heavily on the meatiest cuts, the fore and hind quarters, exactly the parts a hungry predator would prioritize.

With that reference library of dragon bite marks in hand, the team turned to the real evidence, examining more than 3,000 Stegodon bone fragments from Liang Bua alongside a broader sample that totaled over 10,000 bones and stone artifacts from the site. They found 54 cut marks made by hobbit stone tools and almost twice as many Komodo dragon tooth marks on the same Stegodon remains. The locations told the real story. The dragon marks clustered on high-meat areas, just as in the goat experiment, while the human cut marks turned up mostly on low-utility parts, the skull, neck, and feet, places with comparatively little to eat.

Second in line at the carcass

Taken together, the researchers argue, the distribution of marks points to Komodo dragons having primary access to Stegodon carcasses, with Homo floresiensis arriving second to scavenge whatever scraps were left. The likely scenario echoes how Komodo dragons hunt large prey such as water buffalo today, delivering a venomous bite and then tracking the weakening animal, sometimes for kilometers, using their extraordinary sense of smell to find a carcass. Once the dragons had eaten their fill, the hobbits appear to have moved in with their stone tools to cut whatever meat remained from the bones the dragons had left behind.

No fire in the ashes

The second pillar of the hobbits’ supposed sophistication was fire, and it fared no better under scrutiny. The team searched for burn traces across the Stegodon bone assemblage and found essentially none, one single bone out of more than 3,000 showed any sign of heat exposure, and that specimen most likely came from a disturbed section of the deposit. The researchers also examined roughly 7,000 bones of giant rats from later, more recent layers of the cave associated with Homo sapiens, looking for the same fire signatures across a combined sample of about 10,000 bones. What earlier researchers had taken for evidence of burning on some remains, the team now concludes, was most likely natural manganese staining rather than the residue of a hearth.

Study co-author Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian, noted that thousands of stone tools were found alongside Homo floresiensis remains, tools apparently crafted from local chert specifically to strip meat from bone. That toolmaking skill was real. What appears to be missing is the pairing of hunting and cooking that anchors so much thinking about advanced hominin behavior. The hobbits, the researchers suggest, most likely ate their scavenged meat raw, alongside plants and insects, and may have survived alongside the island’s dragons in part through group living and caution, since even modern Komodo dragons rarely attack people without provocation.

What it means for the hobbit’s ancestry

The absence of hunting and fire technology reopens the question of where Homo floresiensis actually came from. Veatch suggests it is entirely possible that the ancestor of the hobbits split off from the genus Homo before hunting and the control of fire had become established behaviors at all. As she frames it, the findings underline the importance of weighing behavior alongside anatomy in these debates, and point toward an ancestor that did not depend on hunting and cooking as subsistence strategies, perhaps an early form of Homo rather than a more advanced one.

Two competing hypotheses for the hobbits’ origin remain in play. One holds that they descended from a larger-bodied species, evolving smaller body size over many generations through island dwarfism driven by limited resources. The other proposes they descended from an already small-bodied, more primitive Homo species. The new study does not settle that argument outright, since so little is known about the behavior of early hominins elsewhere in Southeast Asia, including Homo erectus on Java, or across the wider region once known as Sundaland, the landmass between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean that has been intermittently exposed and submerged over the last 2.6 million years. If Homo floresiensis really did descend from Homo erectus, it would imply a substantial reversal of established behaviors somewhere along the way.

Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia who was not involved in the study, sees that possibility as entirely plausible for a hominin lineage cut off on an island. Such a transition, he suggests, may have involved not only the well-known anatomical shifts of shrinking body size and brain volume, but behavioral adaptations as well. Flores, in his view, was a genuinely unpredictable place in the story of early human evolution, the kind of setting where almost anything could happen, including the loss of hominin behaviors as deeply rooted as hunting and the use of fire.

Sources. Live Science (July 3, 2026); CNN; National Geographic. Article, E. Grace Veatch et al. (2026), "Taphonomic analysis at Liang Bua reveals the behavioral and technological capabilities of Homo floresiensis," Science Advances 12, doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aeb7219.

Artifacts recovered from the elite burial site of Eleke Sazy in eastern Kazakhstan. Credit: Zainolla Samashev

Sequencing the genomes of 85 Iron Age individuals from across Central Eurasia, researchers have found that these nomadic societies were organized around powerful elite dynasties, ruling families whose authority was inherited and whose blood ties stretched across burial grounds hundreds of kilometers apart. Nearly half of those elites were women.

The work, published on July 3, 2026, in the journal Science Advances, was led by archaeogeneticist Ayshin Ghalichi of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the University of Texas at Austin, with an international team that included colleagues in Kazakhstan. Its central finding is that social inequality among the steppe nomads emerged during the Iron Age, around 900 BC, and hardened into something like dynastic rule.

Reading power in the genome

Almost everything known about the Scythians has come from the outside. Ancient Greek and Roman writers described these skilled equestrians, and their monumental burial mounds, called kurgans, dot the steppe from the Altai Mountains to the Black Sea. Their tattooed mummies, their exquisite animal-style goldwork, and their women warriors, who may have inspired the Greek legend of the Amazons, were famous across the ancient world. Yet the Scythians left no writing of their own, and after a run of military defeats around 200 BC they were largely absorbed into other groups.

To get at how these scattered communities were connected and how their societies were structured politically, the team sequenced DNA from 85 individuals dating between roughly 900 and 200 BC, comprising 38 people from elite kurgan burials and 47 from ordinary graves, including 45 or 46 newly sequenced genomes. What emerged was a clear genetic signature of a ruling class. Elite individuals were about eleven times more likely to be biologically related to one another than to non-elites, pointing to a powerful, extended family group presiding over the steppe nomads.

Map showing major Iron Age Eurasian steppe sites included in the study. Ancient DNA reveals evidence of elite dynastic rule among Iron Age Eurasian steppe nomads. Credit: Study authors.

Kin scattered across the grasslands

Within that elite the researchers identified close family bonds, including two pairs of full brothers, a brother and sister, and a parent and child. In one striking case, two brothers had been buried in different regions far apart from each other. In another, an elite grandfather and his grandchild were laid to rest in entirely separate cemeteries. That last pattern, elite kin linked across distant burial grounds, is the strongest evidence for dynastic rule, since it shows that a single ruling lineage held sway over a wide territory rather than a single local community.

At the same time, elite burials tended to cluster closer together than ordinary ones. As co-author and genetic anthropologist Ainash Childebayeva notes, this hints at a degree of geographic centralization, and she points to the famous “Valley of the Kings” in Siberia, an area dense with large elite kurgans likely from a period similar to the one in the study, as a possible expression of the same tendency.

Women at the top

One of the most consequential results concerns gender. Ancient authors such as Herodotus had claimed that Scythian women could hold positions of high status, and the genetics now supports them. Nearly half of the elite individuals in the dataset were women, which Ghalichi describes as a noticeable presence indicating that women held high social standing in Iron Age Scythian society. Rather than authority passing strictly through male or female lines, the team found that power seems to have run through extended elite family networks in which women were full participants, buried in the same richly furnished graves, with the same gold and honors, as elite men.

The mystery of the Golden Man

Reconstruction of the “Golden Man,” whose DNA was sequenced as part of the study. Credit: Gulmira Mukhtarova

The DNA also settled a decades-old question about one of the steppe’s most celebrated finds. The Golden Man, a young skeleton discovered in 1969 in a kurgan at Issyk in Kazakhstan, was buried with more than 4,000 gold ornaments and a silver bowl bearing an inscription that has never been deciphered. Because the bones alone could not reveal the individual’s sex, and because experts tended to assume a powerful warrior must be male, the Golden Man was long presumed to be a man, even though Scythian women clearly wielded comparable power. This study produced the first genome-wide data for the Golden Man, and although the coverage was low, the result indicates the individual was more likely male than female. The team could not establish any kinship links for this person.

More telling, according to Childebayeva, is that the Golden Man died young, around age 17 by the evidence of the bones, yet was given elite burial, a combination that argues for inherited rather than earned status. She calls an even more dramatic example the match between an elite grandfather and his one-year-old grandchild, both interred in elite kurgans. Graves of elite children like these reinforce the conclusion that among the Iron Age steppe nomads, social status was passed down by birth.

One of the kurgan burial mounds before excavation. Credit: Rinat Zhumatayev.

A new view of the steppe

The picture that emerges is of a nomadic world far more hierarchical and politically structured than the romantic image of free riders suggests. By weaving together archaeology, anthropology, and genetics, the study reconstructs patterns of marriage, kinship, and political organization that were invisible in the archaeological record alone, revealing dynasties whose reach crossed the grasslands and whose power descended through the generations. As the authors put it, the findings advance our understanding of how social inequality and differentiation arose among the ancient nomadic groups of Eurasia, and shed light on the earliest of them in the first millennium BC.

Sources. Live Science; Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Article, Ayshin Ghalichi et al. (2026), “Ancient DNA reveals elite dynastic rule among Iron Age Eurasian Steppe nomads,” Science Advances, doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aef0108.

Detail of the newly discovered Byzantine city. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

The settlement at the site of Ain al-Sabil, in New Valley Governorate, comes with streets, squares, houses, a church, watchtowers, a fortress, coins, and roughly 200 written documents, making it one of the most complete urban sites of its period ever found in the Egyptian desert.

The discovery was announced on July 3, 2026, by Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, following excavations by an Egyptian mission of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Sherif Fathy called the find an important addition to Egypt’s archaeological record, one that highlights the cultural diversity that flourished in the country’s oases across different historical periods and promises to boost cultural tourism in the region.

View of the excavation site. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

A city built to a plan

What sets Ain al-Sabil apart is not a single spectacular object but the coherence of the whole. According to Diaa Zahran, head of the Islamic, Coptic and Jewish Antiquities Sector at the Supreme Council, the city followed a carefully organized layout. Broad main streets ran from north to south, intersected by smaller cross streets running east to west, and their crossings opened into squares and courtyards distributed through the settlement. Every building uncovered so far was raised in mudbrick, the material that has allowed desert sites in the oases to survive in a state of preservation almost unthinkable in the Nile Valley.

This was no loose scatter of farmhouses. The plan knits together domestic, religious, and defensive spaces into a functioning urban whole, which is precisely what makes the site so valuable for understanding how such desert communities actually worked.

Detail of the excavated structures. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

Church, fortress, and the house of a deacon

At the heart of the city, overlooking one of its main streets, stood a basilica-style church that the mission dates to the middle of the fourth century AD, an early moment in the Christianization of Egypt’s countryside. Mahmoud Masoud, director general of Dakhla Antiquities and head of the archaeological mission, said the settlement contained all the key elements of a thriving, self-sufficient community. Along its perimeter the team found the remains of two watchtowers, together with a heavily fortified structure girded by thick defensive walls, a reminder that life on the desert margin required protection as well as prosperity.

The residential quarters tell the domestic side of the story. Houses featured spacious halls and vaulted ceilings, and around them the excavators documented bread ovens, kitchens, and stone tools used to grind grain, the humble machinery of everyday survival. Among the best-preserved buildings is a house dated to the second half of the fourth century AD that belonged to a man named Tisus, a deacon of the church, a rare case in which archaeology can attach a name and an office to a specific desert home.

Two hundred voices on broken pottery

Perhaps the most valuable haul is textual. Zahran Mahdi, director of the Excavations Department at the Islamic and Coptic Antiquities Sector, highlighted a collection of about 200 ostraca, fragments of pottery bearing writing in both Coptic and Greek. The texts record commercial transactions, personal correspondence, and other threads of daily life, offering researchers a direct line into the administration, economy, and social relationships of the community, written by its own inhabitants.

Alongside the documents came the material fabric of daily life. The excavation produced household pottery, bottles for storing oils and perfumes, oil lamps, and grinding equipment, together with numerous well-preserved bronze coins bearing the portraits of Byzantine emperors, Latin inscriptions, and Christian symbols, which will help anchor the site’s chronology.

Coins uncovered during the excavation. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

The oasis that was never a backwater

Hisham El-Leithy, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the excavation delivers valuable new information about life in the Dakhla Oasis during the Byzantine period, sharpening our picture of the settlement’s urban design, social organization, and economic activity. That picture fits a broader scholarly reassessment of Egypt’s western oases. Far from being isolated outposts, Dakhla and its neighbor Kharga formed a connected world of settlements, wells, fields, roads, and administration, and they preserve some of the clearest evidence anywhere for daily life in Late Antique Egypt beyond the Nile. Long-running excavations at Dakhla sites such as ancient Kellis and Amheida have already yielded houses, temples, churches, and archives, and Ain al-Sabil now adds a full planned town to that record.

One point of precision is worth keeping in view. The mid-fourth century falls at the transition between the Late Roman and early Byzantine worlds, so the ministry’s description of a “complete Byzantine residential city” is best read as a well-preserved Late Roman and early Byzantine settlement whose life extended into the Byzantine centuries. However the label is drawn, the substance is the same. In the sands of Dakhla, an entire town has come back into view, streets, squares, ovens, church, and the letters of its people included.

Sources. Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (July 3, 2026); Supreme Council of Antiquities.

A Carved Stela Found in Mexico Shows Two Figures Receiving a Sacred Liquid. Credit: INAH

The find was announced by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and reported by Smithsonian Magazine on July 1, 2026. It emerged during a salvage excavation in Coatepec, on a plot of about 12 hectares slated for residential development, in the San Lucas subdivision near the long-studied archaeological site of Campo Viejo. For Lino Espinoza García, one of the INAH archaeologists coordinating the work, the discovery is unique and unprecedented, unlike anything previously recorded in this part of Veracruz.

A monolith buried face down

The stela is a substantial monument. It stands 1.88 meters tall, reaches 1.47 meters at its widest point, and varies between 22 and 25 centimeters in thickness. Strikingly, it was not found standing. According to INAH archaeologist Mireya Moreno Aguirre, the stone had been placed face down in antiquity, and later structures were built directly on top of it, a deliberate act of burial that preserved the carving in remarkably good condition.

A monolith buried face down. Credit: INAH

The engraved scene shows two seated elite individuals, richly attired with headdresses and ear ornaments, gathered in what the researchers read as a ritual. Above them, an entity appears to emanate a substance flowing down toward the vessel the figures hold. Espinoza García says the team believes the liquid is water, and that in this context it is clearly a sacred fluid. He suggests the scene may commemorate a period of great drought in the region, a moment when the gift of water from a divine source would have carried enormous weight.

The team is careful about what the liquid actually represents. In Mesoamerican art, flowing substances can stand for water, blood, pulque, maize drinks, or rain, and without laboratory analysis or an inscription the safest reading is a sacred transfer of liquid rather than any single substance.

A composition never seen in the region

What makes the carving so unusual is not just its subject but its arrangement. Annick Daneels, an archaeologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, notes that a composition of two seated figures facing one another had never before been documented in central Veracruz. Adding to the intrigue, one of the two figures displays what researchers describe as possible Maya-like traits.

That detail matters because of where the site sits. Coatepec lies well beyond the Maya heartland of the Yucatán Peninsula, whose Classic period ran from roughly 250 to 900 AD. A Maya-looking figure on a Gulf coast stela does not mean the Maya lived here. It more likely points to long-distance contacts, shared visual conventions, or a local community absorbing elements from the wider Mesoamerican world.

Illustrated rendering of the carvings on the stela. Credit: Lino Espinoza Garcia / INAH

A platform unlike its neighbors

The stela was associated with an equally puzzling structure, a civic-ceremonial platform some 30 meters long and 12 meters wide. It was built of stone slabs and white limestone with a plaster-like texture, which specialists attribute to an induced firing process applied intentionally to decorate the walls. Its ornamentation includes engraved lines and square-like shapes, along with circular stones set along two of its sides.

None of this matches the known building tradition of the area. INAH archaeologist Alberto Vázquez Domínguez, who co-directs the interdisciplinary team, says there is no record connecting the structure to other ancient sites. The site sits on the periphery of Campo Viejo, a major center of ceremonial plazas first identified in 1972 and systematically studied by the INAH Veracruz Center since 2000. Daneels describes Campo Viejo as the principal settlement of its era in the densely populated region around modern Xalapa, positioned near one of the routes that linked the Gulf coast to the central highlands and served as an axis of interaction from Preclassic times onward.

Offerings of maize and greenstone

Around the platform, excavators recovered traces of ritual activity. There were fragments of burnt maize, possibly deposited as offerings to higher powers, along with buried ceramic vessels and a greenstone bead broken into four pieces. Every recovered item is headed to the laboratory for analysis, which may sharpen both the dating and the interpretation of the site.

The chronology currently points to the Early Classic period, roughly 200 to 600 AD, with the settlement’s later phase matching the figure of about 1,400 years ago. As for who lived here, the honest answer is that no one yet knows. Totonac territory lies relatively nearby, but the excavation produced no evidence of Totonac presence at Coatepec. The researchers’ working hypothesis is a distinct local culture, separate from both the Totonac and the Maya, that shared traits with other ancient coastal groups.

Mexico’s Secretary of Culture, Claudia Curiel de Icaza, framed the discovery as a reminder that every structure and object recovered through archaeological research testifies to one of the deepest and most diverse cultural heritages in the world, and reaffirms the importance of protecting that heritage as a common good. For now, the two stone figures keep their secret, seated across from one another as they have been for fourteen centuries, sharing a drink poured from the hand of a god.

Source: National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), Mexico.

Ship carvings at Kelleby. Credit: Gerhard Milstreu.

For decades these carvings drew far less attention than the spectacular boat art of southern Scandinavia, where more than 20,000 ship images survive. Now a new study argues that the two traditions, separated by some 3,000 kilometers of Atlantic coastline, are unmistakably related, and that the resemblance points to a Bronze Age Europe knit together by long-distance seafaring far tighter than once assumed.

The research, led by Durham University’s Department of Archaeology and published on June 9, 2026, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, compared boat petroglyphs at sites in Northwest Iberia with the well-documented corpus of Nordic ship carvings in Sweden and Denmark. Its central finding is that the vessels share a precise vocabulary of design, down to details that would be hard to explain by coincidence.

A shared design language

When the team set the Iberian carvings beside their Scandinavian counterparts, the same distinctive features kept appearing in both. The boats carry matching end-ship decorations, including bird shapes and s-shapes at prow and stern. They show rigging, oars, masts, and sail-like elements rendered in comparable ways. In several cases the parallels are nearly identical, such as a “mushroom” or “cult-axe” shape placed at the center of the vessel that recurs in the same position in both regions.

To the researchers, this is not a matter of two cultures independently drawing boats in roughly similar ways. The specificity of the overlap suggests that ideas, symbols, and shipbuilding knowledge were moving across Europe along maritime routes. As the team frames it, the carvings record technologies and beliefs being shared between distant coastal communities rather than invented separately in each place.

Examples of Atlantic and Figurative rock art traditions in northwestern Iberia: (A) Tapada do Ozão, Valença, and (B) Monte de Porreiras 6, Paredes de Coura, Portugal. Credit: Luís Coutinho / Marta Díaz-Guardamino.

How the carvings were dated

The Iberian boat art has long resisted firm dating, because rock carvings rarely sit in contexts that can be pinned to a calendar. The Scandinavian material, by contrast, is anchored by securely dated finds, including ship images on bronze objects and on stone slabs from closed grave contexts. The accepted Nordic chronology uses the shape of a boat’s two end-ships as its main dating criterion, tracing the tradition across the Bronze Age from roughly 1700 to 500 BCE.

By matching the Iberian vessels to these dated Scandinavian forms, the team proposed a Late Bronze Age range of about 1300 to 800 BCE for the Iberian carvings. That placement is significant, because it lines the Iberian images up chronologically with known Nordic maritime technology, and with a period when Atlantic exchange networks were intensifying. The dating holds, the authors note, whether the engravings were left by visiting foreign crews or by local sailors who had adopted foreign naval technology. Either way, the communities of Northwest Iberia were plainly enmeshed in expansive, long-distance maritime networks.

Boats placed in a watery landscape

Alongside the iconography, the team studied where the carvings sit. Using high-resolution 3D laser scanning and photogrammetry, they built detailed digital models of the Iberian panels, then used Geographic Information Systems to map each site and analyze its relationship to coastlines, rivers, and estuaries.

The pattern was consistent. Almost every Iberian boat-art site lay near the sea or a river, or was positioned so that water was visible from it. Even sites deep inland kept a clear visual or physical link to navigable water. At one upland location in southern Galicia, more than 100 kilometers from the coast, the carved panels still command views over the creeks and river below. The placement looks deliberate, the researchers argue, as though these were meant to be maritime places, set apart from ordinary domestic life and tied to the routes of seafarers.

Boat 3 from Panel 2 at Santo Adrião, showing details that closely parallel southern Scandinavian boat imagery: (A) boat carving from Bottna, western Sweden, (B) rubbing of a boat carving from Himmelstalund, eastern Sweden, and (C) part of a rock art panel from Tanum, western Sweden. Credit: Boel Bengtsson.

Sun crosses and a shared mythology

The connection may run deeper than trade and technology. On both the Iberian and the Scandinavian panels, the team identified cosmological motifs accompanying the ships, in particular sun crosses placed near or even inside boats. In Scandinavian rock art the pairing of vessels and solar symbols is common, and has been linked to the importance of the sun in navigation and belief. Finding the same association in Iberia hints at a shared focus on solar mythology, and suggests that boats in this art were not merely transport but carried symbolic weight bound up with ritual and cosmology.

A review cited in the study found that sun crosses, known in Portugal as segmented circles, are relatively common in Northwest Iberia, with more than 100 depictions across twenty-nine rock art sites. At Laje da Churra in northern Portugal, a sun cross overlays the hull of one carved boat, echoing Scandinavian examples where solar signs ride inside the vessels.

Metals, trade, and a connected Bronze Age

Behind the carvings lies a question about metals. The Late Bronze Age saw copper, silver, and probably tin moving across Atlantic Europe, and Northwest Iberia sat at a junction of those flows, channeling goods from southern Iberia outward toward western France, southern England, and the north Atlantic, and onward to Scandinavia. Boats were the means by which that economy functioned, and the shared ship imagery fits neatly with the idea of Iberia as a hub mediating Atlantic exchange.

Some of the boat depictions, the authors suggest, may even record local communities trying to make sense of foreign travelers arriving in an era of early “globalization.” Whether Nordic crews physically reached these Atlantic shores, or whether local sailors absorbed northern designs through down-the-line contact, the carvings testify that the people of Bronze Age Iberia were looking outward across the water.

The broader message is that Bronze Age communities were far less isolated than the old picture allowed. Maritime travel carried not just cargo but cultural ideas across thousands of kilometers, leaving a trace in stone that we are only now reading clearly, with the help of lasers, 3D models, and a careful eye for the shape of an ancient prow.

Sources. Durham University; Díaz-Guardamino M, Bengtsson B, Newton E, Bettencourt AMS, Ling J, Latorre-Ruiz J, et al. (2026) “Boats on the rocks. Late prehistoric nautical iconography and landscape, from Northwest Iberia to Scandinavia.” PLOS ONE 21(6), e0349417. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0349417

Excavation area near the perimeter of the ZAT and adjacent to the Tula River, where archaeologists uncovered a wealth of discoveries. Credit: Gerardo Peña, INAH

Carved stone panels that once decorated Pyramid B, the towering, atlante-topped temple of the Toltec capital, were pried loose around a thousand years ago, carried roughly 100 meters from the ceremonial heart of the city, and reused to adorn an elite residence on the outskirts. Buried beneath the floor of a nearby house lay the remains of six children, sacrificed together.

The discovery, announced by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), emerged from a salvage operation that began in May 2026, prompted by the construction of a water treatment plant in the 16 de Enero neighborhood of Tula de Allende, in the state of Hidalgo. What the excavation has produced is less a single artifact than a window onto the city’s afterlife, the centuries when Tula’s monumental core was fading in significance while people on its margins worked to claim its prestige for themselves.

Researchers from INAH uncovered a 40 by 80 meter structure featuring detached reliefs from Pyramid B, along with children’s burials and evidence of ritual sacrifice. Credit: Gerardo Peña, INAH

The capital of the Toltecs

Tollan-Xicocotitlan, or Tula, was the seat of the Toltec civilization, which dominated central Mexico in the centuries before the rise of the Aztecs. The city reached its height between roughly 900 and 1100 AD, sprawling across several square miles and, by some estimates, housing tens of thousands of people. Its civic center included temple pyramids, a palace complex, ball courts, and the colonnaded structures that gave the site its monumental character. By the twelfth century, however, Tula’s influence had collapsed.

The most recognizable monument at the site is Pyramid B, also known as the Temple of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, the “Lord of the Dawn” or “House of the Morning Star,” an aspect of the feathered-serpent deity Quetzalcoatl associated with the planet Venus. The five-tiered pyramid is crowned by four colossal basalt warrior figures, the famous atlantes, which once helped support the roof of a temple at its summit. Its façades were originally clad in carved and brightly painted stone panels depicting processions of jaguars, coyotes, eagles, and serpents, imagery binding the Toltec rulers to war, sacrifice, and cosmic order.

It was precisely these decorative panels, or fragments matching them, that the new excavation recovered far from the pyramid itself.

The structure’s decoration featured depictions of chalchihuites, greenstone beads associated with power and wealth. Credit: Gerardo Peña, INAH

Panels carried to the periphery

The salvage area sits nearly 100 meters from the boundary of the Tula Archaeological Zone, adjacent to the river. There, archaeologists exposed a substantial building, roughly 40 by 80 meters, decorated with images of chalchihuites, greenstone beads long associated with power, fertility, and wealth in Mesoamerican symbolism. Within and around the structure they found two carved tombstone-like slabs whose iconography points unmistakably to a single origin.

One slab depicts the god Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli; the other shows a feline. Both match the imagery known from Pyramid B. The Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli panel measures about 78 by 53 centimeters, the feline panel about 53 by 42 centimeters, and both retain traces of their original stucco and polychromy. For Luis Gamboa Cabezas, the lead archaeologist on the project, the context speaks to a deliberate act of borrowed legitimacy. At a moment when the core of Tula may no longer have held the same sacred authority, he suggests, people from the periphery came to the old palace area, took the symbols they needed, and used them to identify themselves as Toltecs, to feel, and to be seen as, heirs to the city’s greatness.

The feline panel also resolves a question that had lingered for the better part of a century. In the mid-twentieth century, the archaeologist Jorge R. Acosta documented processions of coyotes and felines moving from right to left along the east side of Pyramid B, but found nothing comparable on the west. The newly recovered slab shows the animals moving in the opposite direction, from left to right, evidence that the procession of carved beasts once wrapped all the way around the structure, rather than decorating only one side.

Two reliefs were uncovered by INAH researchers, one depicting a feline and the other the deity Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli. Credit: Gerardo Peña, INAH

Six children beneath a floor

If the reused panels speak to ambition and identity, other finds from the same operation speak to something darker. Among the primary and secondary burials recovered was a single offering of six infants, aged between one and six years at the time of death, placed together beneath a house floor. Child sacrifice is well attested at Tula and across Mesoamerica more broadly; earlier work near the Toltec capital has turned up groups of children associated with rain deities and altars, and the site’s history of ritual violence is one of its most studied and unsettling features.

Another artifact deepens that picture. The excavators recovered a copper awl whose tip matches a scraping mark found on a human lower jaw, evidence, they believe, that the tool was used to remove skin in a ritual context, a practice known from later Mesoamerican religion in connection with deities of renewal and agricultural fertility.

The broader haul of material, dating from roughly 1100 to 1521 AD, reflects a community that continued to live and work in the shadow of the old capital long after its political collapse. Archaeologists recovered vessels, plates, bone awls, shell beads, seals, spindle whorls, and numerous figurines, including a blue-painted fragment showing a canid wearing a headdress and a vessel fragment bearing a feathered serpent. The area’s deep ritual significance was already apparent. In a 2018 rescue phase, researchers found 23 skulls bearing the dental and cranial modifications typical of pre-Hispanic elites, placed in vessels and aligned near an altar.

Heirs to a fading city

Taken together, the finds sketch a portrait of Tula’s long twilight. As the monumental center lost its grip on sacred and political authority, communities on the periphery did not simply abandon the Toltec legacy. They appropriated it. They stripped sacred imagery from the great pyramid, installed it on their own elite buildings, and continued to perform the rituals, including human sacrifice, that had defined Toltec religious life. Many groups settling in the area over the following centuries adopted Toltec architecture, artifacts, and styles precisely to assert their standing as the city’s rightful successors, a claim later cultures, including the Aztecs, would also stake.

The discovery carries a pointed lesson about how much remains hidden. As INAH archaeologist Carlos Arriaga Mejía noted, the protected polygon of the Tula Archaeological Zone represents only a sliver of the original pre-Hispanic city, a reminder that significant remains may lie beneath any patch of ground in the region, and that development and heritage protection must work in tandem.

Because the artifacts were recovered from land historically prone to flooding from the Tula River, their preservation demands careful handling. Each piece is transported to camps within the archaeological zone for safekeeping, then cleaned, classified, and registered in INAH’s databases for future study and possible public display. Once the architectural remains have been documented and consolidated, they will be covered with geotextile and earth to protect them. INAH and the Hidalgo State Water and Sewerage Commission have agreed to set the area aside for low-impact construction that will not bear down on the buried Toltec structures. That arrangement allows the water treatment plant to proceed while leaving the relics of the Lord of the Dawn undisturbed beneath the soil.

Source. National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), Mexico

The 737 known elements of H. naledi . Credit: Lee Roger Berger research team .

For more than a decade, the fossils of Homo naledi have posed a quiet puzzle. The adults pulled from the depths of the Rising Star cave system, in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind, looked strikingly alike. They varied little in size or shape, far less than scientists expect from a population that mixes males and females. Now a new molecular study offers an answer that few researchers saw coming: every individual the team could test was biologically female.

The finding comes from the first successful extraction of ancient proteins from the teeth of this extinct human relative, published on 24 June 2026 in the journal Cell. An international team analyzed enamel from 23 teeth representing at least 20 individuals and found a complete absence of the protein marker that identifies biological males. As the largest extinct hominin sample ever examined with ancient protein analysis, the result reshapes long-held assumptions about Homo naledi and hints at a cultural practice older than any comparable evidence from our own species or the Neanderthals.

A comparison of skull features of H. naledi with other small-brained Homo: H. habilis, H. erectus georgicus, and H. floresiensis

A marker hidden in enamel

To read the biological sex of fossils hundreds of thousands of years old, the researchers turned to a protein called amelogenin. The protein comes in two slightly different versions produced by two genes: AMELX, carried on the X chromosome, and AMELY, carried on the Y. Because only males carry a Y chromosome, the presence of AMELY peptides is a near-certain signature of a male individual. Find it, and the tooth belonged to a male. Fail to find it across a well-preserved sample, and the most straightforward reading is that no males are present.

The team searched for AMELY in tooth after tooth and never found it. Adults, adolescents, children, and even a two-year-old infant all carried protein markers consistent with female sex.

Tooth enamel is uniquely suited to this kind of deep-time detective work. As the hardest tissue in the human body, it shields its proteins from environmental contamination for hundreds of thousands and even millions of years, long after DNA has degraded beyond recovery.

“Unlike those found in other remains like bone fragments, proteins in tooth enamel are preserved because dental enamel, the hardest tissue in the human body, shields proteins from environmental contamination even for millions of years. This makes them ideal carriers of genetic information from deep time,” said lead author Palesa Madupe, a South African-born molecular scientist who conducted the work as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen and is now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “Our study helps resolve the long-standing mystery of why Homo naledi lacked significant variation; it’s probably because they could have all belonged to one sex.”

To recover the proteins, the researchers applied a minimally destructive acid etching technique, lightly treating a small area of enamel to release fragments called peptides. The peptides were then read by a mass spectrometer to identify the proteins present, a method known as paleoproteomic analysis. A practical breakthrough of the work was showing that this gentle approach can yield as much protein data as far more invasive sampling, an advance that matters for fragile fossils elsewhere in the world.

A facial reconstruction of Homo naledi. Credit: By Cicero Moraes (Arc-Team)

One in a million

The teeth in the study came from across the entire cave system, including the Dinaledi and Lesedi Chambers, the Hill Antechamber, and the locality where the skull and teeth of a Homo naledi child were found. Around half of the individuals were children. Among the adults was the well-known “Neo” skeleton from the Lesedi Chamber, one of the largest individuals in the entire collection and long assumed by some to be male. The proteins say otherwise. Neo was female.

For Lee Berger, the National Geographic Explorer in Residence who first described the species and serves as a corresponding author on the study, the odds make the case hard to dismiss. “It appears that the most likely explanation for the observed absence of an Amelogenin-Y marker in these individuals is that we are seeing a sex-bias in mortuary practice, a practice until now only observed in contemporary human cultures,” Berger said. “The chance of having sampled twenty individuals and they are all from one sex, is quite literally one in a million.”

The result lands as the latest chapter in a story that has repeatedly challenged ideas about what early human relatives were capable of. Homo naledi lived between roughly 335,000 and 241,000 years ago and carried a brain only slightly larger than a chimpanzee’s, yet the Rising Star team has reported evidence of fire use, engraved symbols, and deliberate burial. If the all-female pattern reflects how these individuals came to rest deep underground, it would point to the oldest sex-specific mortuary practice yet documented.

“There are many past human societies with sex-specific burial practices, but we’ve found very little hard evidence of this from the earliest burial sites of modern humans or Neanderthals,” said co-author John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a member of the Rising Star team. “These remains of Homo naledi are older than any known Neanderthal or modern human burial site, and it’s remarkable to see that they may all be female.”

Location and layout of the Rising Star cave system. Credit: P. Madupe, Alberto J. Taurozzi

The case for caution

The team is careful not to overstate certainty. Of the 22 individuals examined, the protein evidence is decisive for 20; for two others, lower peptide recovery makes the reading less firm. Several analytical approaches from multiple labs converged on the same conclusion, that the absence of AMELY cannot be explained away by poor preservation. If those 20 individuals had been male, the male marker should have appeared.

There is also a genetic alternative the authors raise honestly. The AMELY gene can be deleted or inactivated in a male without otherwise altering his biology, a phenomenon already documented in living men and even in the DNA of a Neanderthal male. Could every male in this population have happened to lose it?

“While the deletion of the entire AMELY gene has already been observed in extant male humans and even in the DNA of a Neanderthal male, it’s very unlikely that this would be the case among even half of the 20 individuals we studied or for an entire population,” said senior author Enrico Cappellini, professor of paleoproteomics at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, where the analytical work was carried out. “Either scenario, namely the absence of H. naledi males in the Rising Star cave system or a systematic deletion of their AMELY gene, is fascinating and would have deep implications for a better understanding of the biology and evolution of this species.”

Rethinking old assumptions

The molecular result did not arrive out of nowhere. The skeletal sample has long shown unusually low variation, and a 2024 analysis of the Dinaledi teeth led by Lucas Delezene suggested the collection looked more like a single sex than a random mix of both. The proteins now confirm that intuition with hard data.

The implications run deeper than a single cave. Researchers have often assumed that fossil assemblages represent a random cross-section of a population, and that the most complete skeletons are likely male. Homo naledi upends both. It also means that for years, scientists may have been describing “average” body size, brain size, and tooth size for a species using a sample drawn from only half of it.

The discovery was unveiled the same week the National Geographic Society opened its new Museum of Exploration in Washington, D.C., where Berger’s work and the Rising Star program feature prominently. For the researchers, the lesson reaches beyond Homo naledi itself. The most surprising findings, they suggest, often reveal less about the distant past than about the assumptions we carry into it.

Source: La Brujula Verde, “Discovery reveals that all Homo naledi fossils found in the Cradle of Humankind belong exclusively to female individuals,” 26 June 2026. Based on Palesa P. Madupe, Alberto J. Taurozzi, et al., “Proteomic analysis of dental enamel from 20 Homo naledi individuals shows no male markers,” Cell (2026), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2026.05.044.

A collection of decorated hand motifs from the site. Credit: Barbara Oosterwijk, LASTJOURNEY Project

Hand stencils are among the oldest and most universal forms of rock art on Earth. They appear on cave and cliff walls from Europe to Australia, and the world’s oldest known rock art, a cluster of hand stencils in Indonesia, belongs to this tradition. While many such images are thought to have been made simply by pressing or blowing pigment around a hand, often by children, archaeologists have long suspected that certain elaborately decorated handprints served a very different, far more deliberate purpose: as ritual markings made by community leaders.

A new study published in the journal World Archaeology now offers compelling evidence for that idea, focusing on one of the richest rock art landscapes in the world: the Serranía de la Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon.

A Monumental Canvas of Red Ochre

Located in Colombia’s Guaviare department, La Lindosa is home to thousands of red-ochre paintings dated to roughly 11,000 years ago, making it one of the most extensive and visually stunning bodies of prehistoric art ever documented. Earlier research into the site’s imagery, much of it conducted by the same international team behind this latest paper, has already linked many of its painted figures to shamanic ritual, particularly scenes showing human figures transforming into powerful animals such as jaguars and snakes.

For the new study, researchers Barbara Oosterwijk, Linda Hurcombe, Jamie Hampson, and José Iriarte turned their attention specifically to the site’s handprints, examining two major painted rock faces known as Cerro Azul and Paredones del Potrero.

Hundreds of Hands, Hundreds of Stories

Across the two panels, the team catalogued 496 individual hand images. Strikingly, 348 of them, about 70 percent, were not plain stencils but carried distinctive decorative patterns across the palm and fingers. Of these, 256 featured spiral designs, while 84 displayed linear motifs such as zigzags and ellipses.

Just as telling as the decoration was the placement. Most of the painted hands were found between two and three meters above the ground, too high to have been made without assistance from a ladder or scaffold. For the researchers, that detail alone signals that these were not casual or incidental markings, but images whose creators went to considerable effort, underscoring their importance within the artistic tradition of the site.

What the Elders Say

To interpret the patterns, the researchers once again turned to the Indigenous communities whose ancestors are believed to have created, and whose oral traditions still echo, this art. Their testimony adds a layer of meaning that the painted rock alone cannot provide.

According to the study’s authors, Ulderico Matapí, a ritual specialist from the Matapí community, explained that each hand motif represents a form of shamanic knowledge tied to managing the land, from cultivating crops to gathering medicinal plants. Desana elder Victor Caycedo offered a complementary reading, suggesting that the stylistic variation between different types of hands reflects the presence of distinct social or spiritual groups, each expressing its own identity through the designs.

Taken together, these accounts point to the handprints functioning as a kind of encoded record, one that communicated cosmological principles and ritual authority within a belief system in which the rock face itself was understood as a threshold, a meeting point between the human, ancestral, and spiritual worlds.

Caution Over Certainty

Importantly, the research team stops short of assigning fixed, literal meanings to individual motifs. Rock art interpretation is notoriously difficult to pin down with certainty, and the authors are careful to present the elders’ testimony as an interpretive lens rather than a definitive translation of a “code.”

What the study does argue, more confidently, is methodological: that collaborating directly with descendant Indigenous communities is essential to understanding prehistoric rock art, rather than relying solely on external archaeological analysis. This approach builds on the team’s earlier work at La Lindosa, which similarly drew on testimony from Tukano, Desana, Matapí, Nukak, and Jiw elders to interpret the site’s broader iconography of human-animal transformation.

A Living Connection to a Prehistoric Past

The findings add another layer to what is already considered one of the most significant rock art complexes on the planet, sometimes likened to an Amazonian “Sistine Chapel” for its scale and density of imagery. For the descendant communities involved in the research, the work is more than academic: it represents a continuing thread connecting their ancestors’ artistic and spiritual practices to living cultural knowledge today.

As excavation and analysis of La Lindosa continues, researchers say further papers examining the site’s geometric, plant, and figurative motifs are expected, each promising to add new pieces to the picture of how the rock art’s ancient creators understood, and recorded, their place in the world.

Source: Oosterwijk, B., Hurcombe, L., Hampson, J., & Iriarte, J. (2026). “Joining hands: cross-cultural analysis of decorated handprints.” World Archaeology, 1–24. DOI: 10.1080/00438243.2026.2680483. Reported by IFLScience, June 25, 2026.

A sample is collected from a rock art figure in Tebellín, Spain. Credit: ABAMIA ARKEOS-ALBERTO MARTÍNEZ VILLA

A new study flips that assumption on its head by showing that the walls of painted caves themselves can hold onto traces of the people who once stood in front of them — sometimes for thousands of years.

A genetic survey of Ice Age art

The research, published on June 23 in the journal Nature Communications, was carried out by an international team working under the banner of the First Art project, a collaboration centered on dating Europe’s oldest cave paintings and figuring out what they’re made of. Researchers from Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, China, and Germany contributed to the work, with the genetic analysis led by Alba Bossoms Mesa of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

The team didn’t limit itself to one site. They examined material from 24 separate rock art panels spread across 11 caves on the Iberian Peninsula, sampling everything from simple painted marks and hand stencils to loose pigment that had flaked off some of the famous figurative artwork at Altamira. For comparison, they also swabbed nearby stretches of bare cave wall that had never been painted at all.

Working with sterile scalpels and double gloves to avoid contaminating the samples with their own DNA, the researchers wanted to find out whether the simple act of touching a wall thousands of years ago could leave a genetic fingerprint behind. As project organizer Hipólito Collado Giraldo, an archaeologist with the Extremadura regional government in Spain, put it: given how sensitive modern ancient-DNA techniques have become, the team suspected that even brief contact with a wall might leave something detectable — potentially genetic information about the very people who made the art.

A red dot with a secret

Out of all 24 painted panels, only one delivered. It came from a small, otherwise unremarkable red dot in Escoural Cave, Portugal, cataloged as “Panel 11.” What made that sample special wasn’t the pigment itself, but a thin coating of calcite — a mineral that slowly crystallizes out of dripping cave water — that had sealed over the paint like an insect trapped in amber, shielding it from later contamination.

Beneath that mineral seal, the team recovered genetic material from a Homo sapiens individual who lived at least 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, likely older still. Notably, the sample contained human DNA but no detectable animal DNA, hinting that it was deposited through direct contact with the wall rather than carried in on dirt or sediment.

Two more unpainted samples from the same general area also turned up ancient human DNA — one from a male, one from a female, both apparently from a similar time period. That second finding mattered because it suggested the artists weren’t the only ones leaving genetic traces behind — anyone who touched the walls could have, whether or not they were painting at the time.

Other samples, taken from Covarón Cave in northern Spain, told a messier story. There, human DNA showed up mixed with genetic material from wild cats, rabbits, and various large herbivores — a combination the researchers attribute to sediment that people likely tracked in on their hands and feet as they moved through the cave. Genetic analysis tied this human DNA to ancient Western hunter-gatherer populations that lived in Europe thousands of years ago.

The rule, not the exception, is finding nothing

It’s worth being upfront about the odds here: this kind of discovery is rare. Out of the 24 panels tested, ancient DNA turned up in just one, plus two nearby unpainted spots. The researchers think this scarcity reflects how seldom painted surfaces hold onto enough genetic material to survive millennia, especially when they aren’t protected by a mineral crust or sealed off from the environment in some other way. As Bossoms Mesa noted, preservation of human DNA on cave walls varies enormously — but on the rare occasions it does survive, it can tell a remarkably detailed story.

The team also tried a different angle at Altamira, testing a bird bone that may once have been used as a blowpipe for applying pigment to the cave’s famous polychrome ceiling. No ancient DNA turned up on it.

What it doesn’t prove — and what it opens up

It’s important not to overstate the result. Finding human DNA near a painting doesn’t prove that DNA belonged to whoever painted it — people could have touched a wall long after the art was made, or for reasons unrelated to art at all. What the study does establish is more modest but still significant: cave walls can act as an unexpected genetic archive, preserving evidence of human presence in places where bones, tools, and sediment layers are absent or have already been picked clean by previous excavations.

Senior author Matthias Meyer, also of the Max Planck Institute, framed the implications broadly: “This study fundamentally changes how we think about where ancient DNA can be found. We were surprised to see that ancient DNA can be recovered not only from pigmented samples, but also from cave walls that show no visible evidence of past human activity. We can now ask new questions.”

That’s the real headline here — not a single red dot in a Portuguese cave, but a new tool for archaeologists. If a smear of paint or a bare patch of limestone can hold a genetic record going back thousands of years, then caves that have already been studied for decades might still have stories left to tell, written not in bone, but in rock.

Source: Bossoms Mesa et al., Nature Communications (2026); press materials from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Restored bronze ritual cart from Casas del Turuñuelo. Credit: César Hernández, CSIC.

The discovery was made during the eighth excavation campaign at the site, led by the Instituto de Arqueología de Mérida, a joint research center of the Spanish National Research Council, CSIC, and the Junta de Extremadura. The find was presented in Madrid together with other objects recovered from the latest campaign.

The cart preserves two wheels and part of its main box. Although incomplete, it retains a rich figurative decoration with mythological beings, including griffins, human support figures, and a frontal image identified with Achelous, a river deity known in Greek and Etruscan iconography.

The object adds a major new piece to the study of Tartessos. It suggests that the people who occupied Casas del Turuñuelo were connected to luxury exchange networks reaching across the Mediterranean, including Etruria, Greece, Egypt, and eastern Mediterranean regions.

Casas del Turuñuelo and the world of Tartessos

Casas del Turuñuelo is one of the most important archaeological sites for the study of Tartessos, the early civilization of the southwestern Iberian Peninsula. The site lies in Guareña, in the province of Badajoz, within the Middle Guadiana Valley.

Tartessos flourished during the first millennium BC, especially in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, in areas connected with modern Andalusia and Extremadura. Ancient authors associated the region with wealth, metals, trade, and distant Mediterranean contacts.

For a long time, Tartessos was surrounded by myth and uncertainty. Archaeology has gradually changed that picture. Sites such as Cancho Roano, La Mata, El Carambolo, Huelva, and Casas del Turuñuelo have helped define Tartessos as a complex society with monumental architecture, religious practices, elite display, writing, imported goods, and strong Mediterranean connections.

Casas del Turuñuelo has become especially important because of its extraordinary preservation. The main building was intentionally sealed beneath a large mound after a final ritual episode around the end of the 5th century BC. This act protected parts of the structure and its contents for more than two millennia.

Archaeologists uncover a bronze ritual cart at the Tartessian site of Turuñuelo de Guareña in Badajoz. Credit: IAM-CSIC.

A monumental building sealed beneath a tumulus

The main building at Casas del Turuñuelo is one of the most remarkable Tartessian structures ever excavated. It was built with adobe and other materials and is known for its size, preservation, and unusual ritual deposits.

The mound covering the complex measures about 90 meters in diameter and around 6 meters high. The latest excavation campaign focused on the northern and southern sectors of this tumulus, around room H-100, a space of about 70 square meters and currently the largest room excavated in the building.

Archaeologists have documented new rooms and circulation areas that expand the known plan of the complex. This is important because Casas del Turuñuelo was not a simple rural building. It was a monumental structure with complex architecture, ritual spaces, elite objects, and evidence for carefully organized ceremonies.

The site has repeatedly produced finds that reshape understanding of Tartessian society. Earlier campaigns revealed a large animal sacrifice, the first known human representations from Tartessos, a slate tablet with warrior imagery and a southern Paleohispanic alphabet, and the oldest Greek marble altar so far known in the western Mediterranean.

The bronze cart now joins this sequence of exceptional discoveries.

Tartessian sculptures uncovered at the Turuñuelo archaeological site in Guareña, Badajoz. Credit: Samuel Sánchez.

The bronze cart from corridor S3

The ritual cart was found in the southern sector of the main building, in corridor S3. This area already had a strong ritual character because archaeologists had documented a distinctive altar shaped like a bull hide nearby.

The cart appears to preserve half of the original object, including two wheels and part of the box. It is small, around 62 centimeters according to reports from the excavation presentation, but its technical and symbolic complexity is extraordinary.

The object was made from bronze elements assembled with iron components. This construction indicates skilled metalworking and careful planning. The cart was not a practical vehicle for transport in the ordinary sense. Its size, material, iconography, and location point toward a ceremonial function.

The researchers describe it as a votive or ritual cart. Its exact use remains under study, but its discovery beside a ritual area suggests that it belonged to ceremonial activity inside the building.

Detail of the Achelous figure on the bronze ritual cart from the Tartessian site of Turuñuelo de Guareña in Badajoz. Credit: IAM-CSIC.

Achelous on the front

One of the most striking elements is the figure represented on the front of the cart.

Researchers identify it as Achelous, a river deity from Greek mythology. Achelous often appears in Mediterranean art as a powerful water-related being, sometimes with hybrid features. In the Turuñuelo cart, the figure may also carry associations with the underworld because of its gesture and iconographic treatment.

Some reports describe the figure as a hybrid image connected with Achelous and gorgon-like features. This combination is especially significant because it suggests the adaptation of Mediterranean mythological imagery into a Tartessian ritual context.

The image does not simply show artistic imitation. It points to a visual language shared across cultures, then reworked locally. A Greek or Etruscan figure could become meaningful inside a Tartessian building in the interior of the Iberian Peninsula.

This is one of the strongest signs that Casas del Turuñuelo was part of a connected Mediterranean world.

Detail of a griffin on the bronze ritual cart from Turuñuelo de Guareña. Credit: IAM-CSIC.

Griffins, atlantes, and decorated wheels

The cart’s decoration also includes two griffins on the sides. Griffins are mythological beings with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. In ancient Mediterranean art, they often appear as guardians, protective creatures, or symbols linked with power, death, and the divine.

At the ends of the cart, two human figures with raised arms support the structure. These are described as atlantes, figures that appear to hold or carry an architectural or symbolic weight.

The wheels are also decorated, which shows that the cart was designed as a complete ceremonial object. Its surface was not left plain. Every visible part seems to have contributed to the visual and symbolic effect.

The combination of Achelous, griffins, human support figures, and decorated wheels gives the cart a dense mythological language. It connects water, protection, power, and possibly the underworld.

Etruscan parallels

The closest known comparisons come from ancient Etruria, in central Italy.

This does not prove with certainty that the cart was made in Etruria, but the parallel is important. The researchers consider an Etruscan origin possible, based on the structure and decoration of similar objects known from that region.

If the cart was imported, it would represent a luxury object that traveled from the central Mediterranean into the interior of the Iberian Peninsula. If it was made locally by craftspeople familiar with Etruscan models, it would still show intense cultural contact and the circulation of technical and symbolic knowledge.

In either case, the cart shows that Tartessian elites were engaging with high-status Mediterranean objects and images.

This is especially important because Casas del Turuñuelo lies inland, far from the main coastal ports usually associated with Mediterranean exchange. The object shows that luxury goods and ideas could move deep into the Guadiana Valley.

A ceremony of banquets, perfumes, and closure

The function of the cart is still being studied, but researchers have proposed a ritual use connected with banquets and ceremonial activity.

Sebastián Celestino, one of the excavation directors, has suggested that the cart may have been linked with activities around banquets. The object was found near the so-called banquet room, connected with the final communal meal or ceremonial gathering before the building was closed.

Another possibility is that the cart carried perfumes, incense, or aromatic resins. Some reports describe it as a possible mobile incense burner or perfume burner. If so, it may have held embers or aromatic substances during ritual ceremonies.

This interpretation fits the character of Casas del Turuñuelo. The building appears to have been deliberately closed through a complex ritual sequence that included banqueting, animal sacrifice, and intentional burning. The cart may have formed part of that final ceremonial world.

Imported goods from Greece, Egypt, and the East

The bronze cart was not the only important find from the latest campaign.

Archaeologists also recovered Greek pottery from the region of Attica, an Egyptian alabaster vessel, and carved ivory objects of eastern origin. Some of the ivories are decorated with warriors, animals, and plant motifs.

These objects are crucial because they show the long-distance networks connected to Casas del Turuñuelo. The site was receiving or using materials and luxury objects linked with multiple Mediterranean regions.

Greek ceramics point to Aegean trade connections. Egyptian alabaster points to the prestige circulation of exotic vessels. Oriental ivories point to eastern Mediterranean craft traditions and elite display.

Together with the bronze cart, these finds show that Tartessian elites were not isolated local rulers. They participated in a wide exchange system where objects, symbols, materials, and ritual forms moved across seas and inland routes.

Bronze objects from the northern sector

The northern sector of the excavation also produced important metal objects.

Archaeologists recovered two bronze braziers and a bronze cauldron. These finds reinforce the impression of wealth, ritual consumption, and ceremonial practice at the site.

Bronze vessels and braziers were not ordinary household items in this context. They belonged to a world of feasting, heating, offering, scent, display, and ritual preparation.

When considered together with the cart, imported ceramics, alabaster, and ivories, the metal finds show a high level of elite material culture.

They also point to repeated patterns at Casas del Turuñuelo: formal spaces, imported goods, metalwork, ritual equipment, and controlled closure of the building.

The final closing of the building

One of the most remarkable aspects of Casas del Turuñuelo is the way the building was closed.

The evidence suggests that the structure was intentionally burned and sealed after a major ritual episode. This was not ordinary abandonment. The people who used the building appear to have carried out a deliberate act of closure.

Previous discoveries at the site include a large animal sacrifice, especially involving equids, described as one of the largest such deposits in the western Mediterranean. This event appears to belong to the final phase of the building.

The new cart may have participated in this same ritual atmosphere. Found near the banquet area and close to ritual installations, it likely belonged to ceremonies that marked the final use of the building.

The closure of Casas del Turuñuelo therefore seems to have been a carefully staged event involving food, animals, fire, precious objects, and symbolic imagery.

A site of political and ritual power

The richness of the finds suggests that Casas del Turuñuelo was a place of significant authority.

Its architecture required organized labor. Its imported objects required access to trade routes and exchange partners. Its ritual deposits required social coordination. Its precious materials reveal access to wealth.

Esther Rodríguez and Sebastián Celestino have emphasized that objects of this kind reflect the power of the people who controlled the site. The cart, in particular, suggests an elite capable of attracting rare objects from distant regions or commissioning work inspired by Mediterranean models.

This power was not only economic. It was also ritual and political.

The building seems to have been a center where authority was performed through ceremonies, banquets, sacrifice, and display. The bronze cart was part of that performance.

Tartessos beyond the coast

The discovery also strengthens a broader shift in how Tartessos is understood.

Older interpretations often focused heavily on the coastal southwest, especially Huelva, Cádiz, and the Guadalquivir region. These areas remain central to the history of Tartessos because of metals, ports, Phoenician contacts, and early urban development.

But Casas del Turuñuelo shows that the interior also played a major role.

The Middle Guadiana Valley was not peripheral. It contained elite centers with monumental architecture, specialized ritual activity, and access to Mediterranean goods. The bronze cart makes this point especially clear because it places an object with possible Etruscan connections inside an inland Tartessian ceremonial complex.

This changes the map of Tartessos. The culture was not limited to coastal exchange zones. Its networks extended inland, where local elites transformed imported objects and ideas into their own forms of power.

A Mediterranean language of myth

The cart’s iconography shows how mythological imagery traveled across the ancient Mediterranean.

Achelous belongs to Greek myth. Griffins appear widely across Near Eastern, Greek, Etruscan, and other Mediterranean visual traditions. Atlante figures also belong to a shared artistic vocabulary of support, strength, and cosmic or architectural symbolism.

At Casas del Turuñuelo, these images appear together on a bronze ritual object in a Tartessian context.

This does not mean Tartessos simply copied foreign art. The more interesting possibility is cultural selection and transformation. Foreign symbols were adopted because they had meaning, prestige, or ritual power. Once placed inside a local building, they became part of Tartessian ceremonial life.

The cart therefore offers a rare view of symbolic exchange. It shows not only the movement of an object, but the movement of visual ideas.

Conservation after excavation

The bronze cart required immediate conservation.

Bronze can begin to deteriorate when exposed after long burial, especially once it meets light, oxygen, and changing humidity. Because of this risk, the piece was transferred for specialized treatment.

The conservation work is being carried out at the Servicio de Conservación, Restauración y Estudios Científicos del Patrimonio Arqueológico, SECYR, at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

This phase is essential. Cleaning, stabilization, documentation, drawing, imaging, and material analysis will help researchers understand the object’s construction, technology, function, and history.

The excavation has revealed the object, but the laboratory will reveal many of its details.

Infographic showing the alphabet engraved on a 2,500-year-old slate tablet from the Tartessian site of Turuñuelo de Guareña in Badajoz

A decade of discoveries

The bronze cart is part of a longer sequence of discoveries at Casas del Turuñuelo.

In 2017, archaeologists documented a major animal sacrifice. In 2023, they revealed the first human representations known from Tartessos. In 2024, they presented a slate tablet with warrior scenes and a southern Paleohispanic alphabet. In 2025, they reported a Greek marble altar described as the oldest known in the western Mediterranean.

Each discovery has added a new layer.

The site has shown that Tartessian society had monumental buildings, complex rituals, figural art, writing, imported goods, and highly developed forms of elite display.

The 2026 bronze cart fits directly into this pattern. It is not an isolated curiosity. It belongs to a site that has repeatedly produced evidence for a sophisticated, connected, and powerful community.

A rare object from a connected world

The bronze cart from Casas del Turuñuelo is exceptional because it combines technical skill, mythological imagery, ritual function, and Mediterranean connectivity.

Its possible Etruscan parallels link it to central Italy. Its imagery draws from a wider Mediterranean symbolic world. Its discovery beside ritual spaces connects it to banquets, offerings, scents, fire, and the closure of the building. Its presence in Badajoz shows that luxury exchange reached deep into the Iberian interior.

The object gives researchers a new way to study Tartessos. It shows a society that was local and cosmopolitan at the same time.

At Casas del Turuñuelo, Mediterranean gods, imported ceramics, Egyptian alabaster, eastern ivories, bronze ritual equipment, and Tartessian architecture all came together inside one monumental building.

The cart is small in size, but its historical meaning is large. It carries the image of a connected Iron Age world, where objects moved across seas, symbols crossed cultures, and the elites of Tartessos used foreign forms to express their own authority.

Sources

1. El País. (2026, June 24). Un carro ritual de bronce único de hace 2.500 años arroja luz sobre los lazos entre Tarteso y otras civilizaciones mediterráneas. El País.

2. Agencia SINC. (2026, June 24). Encuentran un carro de bronce único en la Península que evidencia un comercio de lujo entre Tarteso y el Mediterráneo. SINC.

3. Junta de Extremadura. (2026, June 24). El hallazgo en el Yacimiento Casas del Turuñuelo de un carro de bronce único en la Península evidencia un comercio de lujo entre Tarteso y el Mediterráneo. Junta de Extremadura.

4. Ayuntamiento de Guareña. (2026, June 24). Hallado en el Turuñuelo de Guareña un excepcional carro votivo de bronce, único en la península ibérica. Ayuntamiento de Guareña.

5. La Vanguardia. (2026, June 24). Un excepcional carro de bronce hallado en Casas del Turuñuelo revela el comercio de lujo entre Tartessos y el Mediterráneo hace 2.500 años. La Vanguardia.

6. Cadena SER. (2026, June 24). El carro votivo de Casas del Turuñuelo, una pieza única en el mundo. Cadena SER.

7. Cadena SER. (2026, June 25). Este carro refleja el enorme poder de quienes habitaron Casas del Turuñuelo. Cadena SER.

8. Heritage Daily. (2026, June 25). Archaeologists discover ceremonial Tartessian bronze chariot. Heritage Daily.

The older ramp (in red) beneath which the remains of the two studied individuals were discovered, and Photograph of the discovery in situ. Credit: J. Herrerín et al. 2026

The discovery consists of two adult male skeletons found outside the southern defensive wall of the settlement, together with six large red deer antlers. The men were not cremated, not placed in a formal tomb, and not arranged according to normal funerary custom. Instead, their bodies appear to have been deposited rapidly after violent deaths, in a filled space beside the wall.

The study, published as a Research Square preprint in 2026, was carried out by Jesús Herrerín, Aurora Grandal-d’Anglade, Nataša Šarkić, Ana García-Vázquez, and colleagues. It combines archaeology, physical anthropology, ZooMS proteomic identification, and stable isotope analysis of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.

The authors interpret the deposit as a case of “bad death”: a non-normative treatment of the dead connected with violence, punishment, ritual protection, or social exclusion. The presence of deer antlers makes the context even more striking, because no close parallel is currently known in Iberian archaeology for two complete human bodies deposited with large antlers in this way.

An Iberian oppidum in Oretani territory

Cerro de las Cabezas is an Ibero-Oretani fortified settlement located near Valdepeñas, in the province of Ciudad Real, Castilla-La Mancha. The site occupies a strategic position in the southern Meseta, close to routes linking the interior of the Iberian Peninsula with Andalusia and the Guadalquivir region.

The settlement was occupied mainly between the 6th and 2nd centuries BC. It was protected by walls, gates, towers, and defensive sectors, while excavations have also revealed domestic areas, storage spaces, sanctuaries, streets, warehouses, and urban planning features.

Cerro de las Cabezas is one of the most important sites for understanding the Oretani, an Iberian people of the central and southern interior. Its architecture, ceramic production, defensive system, and evidence of Punic influence show a complex community connected to wider Mediterranean and inland networks.

The new deposit was found in Area LL1, outside the south-eastern wall, close to the modern A-4 motorway. Its location near the defensive perimeter is central to its interpretation.

A deposit outside the southern wall

The remains were uncovered during the 2010 excavation campaign, beneath an earthen ramp connected with the modern visitor route.

Plan of the settlement’s walls and gates, and Aerial view of the site with the red circle marking the location of the findings. Credit: J. Herrerín et al. 2026

The two individuals, named Individual A and Individual B, were found in anatomical articulation, meaning the bodies decomposed in place rather than being moved after skeletonization. They were associated with six large red deer antlers, some of them more than one meter long.

The deposit belonged to a single stratigraphic unit, LL1/Ue6. It was located directly on a use-surface connected with the final occupation phase of the wall. Based on the stratigraphic relationship, the context dates to the late 3rd or early 2nd century BC, near the final stage of the oppidum’s occupation.

No burial cut was found. No tomb architecture was present. There was no protected burial chamber, coffin, or formal funerary arrangement. The bodies appear to have been placed into a filled space and covered quickly.

This setting already made the deposit exceptional. In Iberian funerary practice, cremation was the dominant ritual, normally performed in necropolises. Complete adult inhumations in settlement contexts are rare, and articulated bodies connected with violent death are even more unusual.

A different kind of death

The expression “bad death” is used by researchers to describe deaths and post-mortem treatments that fall outside accepted funerary norms.

In many ancient societies, a person who died violently, dishonorably, outside the community, in war, by execution, or under ritual suspicion could receive a different kind of treatment after death. The body might be excluded from the cemetery, displayed, mutilated, placed in a boundary zone, or deposited in a way that communicated punishment or social separation.

At Cerro de las Cabezas, several features point in this direction.

The two men were not cremated. They were not placed in a regular burial area. Their bodies were deposited outside the wall. The arrangement was rapid and irregular. Both show evidence of extreme violence. The antlers appear to have been deposited at the same time as the bodies.

This combination suggests that the deposit was not a normal burial. It was a deliberate act with social and symbolic meaning.

View of Cerro de las Cabezas site. Credit: ElDesmitificaRelatos / Wikimedia Commons

Individual A: a man with signs of mobility

Individual A was identified as a male between 35 and 45 years old.

He was found lying on his left side, with the body still in close anatomical articulation. His upper limbs showed medium robusticity, while his lower limbs were more robust. The researchers identified musculoskeletal markers linked with regular long-distance walking or significant physical mobility.

One important sign came from the Achilles tendon insertion. Reactive bone formation in this area may reflect sustained or intense physical activity connected with movement.

His teeth also preserved information about life history. He had advanced periodontal disease and severe wear on the upper incisors. This kind of wear may sometimes be related to using the teeth for tasks beyond ordinary chewing, although the exact activity cannot be reconstructed with certainty.

These details suggest a physically active adult male, possibly involved in movement, carrying, herding, or other labor-intensive activities.

The injuries of Individual A

Individual A had evidence for two separate traumatic episodes.

The first injury was a blunt-force blow to the frontal bone. This injury showed early healing, including porosity and rounded fracture edges. The researchers estimate that it occurred between two and six weeks before death.

This means the cranial injury was not the fatal event. It belongs to an earlier episode of violence or accident.

The second injury was far more severe. A deep transverse cut was found on the distal third of the right femur. The cut was made by a heavy sharp-edged weapon, possibly a sword, axe, or similar chopping blade.

The blow penetrated deeply into the bone but did not completely sever the limb. The weapon likely struck with great force, damaging the bone and soft tissues. The researchers suggest that the cut would have severed major vessels in the popliteal region, causing major blood loss and plausibly leading to death through hypovolaemic shock.

The position of the leg suggests that the injury happened while the man was lying face down or otherwise incapacitated. After death, he appears to have been thrown or placed without careful arrangement, ending up on his left side with the injured leg twisted unnaturally.

Older ramp marked in red, with the in situ discovery of the two individuals beneath it. Credit: J. Herrerín et al. 2026.

Individual B: decapitation and forced posture

Individual B was identified as a male between 40 and 59 years old.

His body was discovered in a twisted prone-lateral position. Most of the skeleton remained in anatomical alignment, but the head had been separated from its normal position and placed about 40 centimeters away.

The skull, mandible, and first three cervical vertebrae were still attached to one another. This detail is important. It shows that the head was removed while soft tissues were still present, and that the separation cannot be explained as later movement after decomposition.

The researchers interpret the evidence as decapitation. The pattern suggests a cut through the middle cervical region, around the C3 to C4 level. The most likely position was prone, allowing access to the back of the neck.

The body posture also points to rapid and rough handling. The trunk was twisted, the arms were displaced above the shoulders, and the legs lay in a forced position. The authors suggest that the corpse may have been lifted by the extremities or thrown into the feature.

The head placed with the body

The decapitation of Individual B is especially important because it differs from better-known Iberian severed-head practices.

In northeastern Iberia and southern France, severed heads were sometimes treated, curated, displayed, or nailed as trophies. These practices are often linked with warfare, enemies, power display, or ritual treatment of opponents.

At Cerro de las Cabezas, the head was not removed for separate public display. It was placed back into the same deposit with the body and antlers.

This makes the Cerro de las Cabezas case different. It may share the broader Iron Age language of violent treatment of the dead, but it does not fit neatly into the known pattern of displayed severed heads.

Here, the head seems to belong to the final depositional sequence itself. It was part of the act, not a trophy kept elsewhere.

The sequence of deposition

The study reconstructs a possible order for the event.

First, several deer antlers were placed at the base of the feature. Individual A was then deposited, probably after receiving the fatal sharp-force injury to the right femur. His body came to rest on the left side, partly over the antlers.

Individual B was deposited immediately afterward, with his body partly over Individual A. More antlers were then added above the bodies. Finally, the severed head of Individual B was placed on top of the deposit, resting above the left arm and over one of the antlers.

This sequence is important because it shows that the deposit was not a random accumulation of bones. The bodies and antlers entered the feature as part of a single rapid episode.

The act was rough, but structured. The bodies were treated without funerary care, but the antlers were deliberately included.

Six red deer antlers

The six large red deer antlers are one of the most unusual elements of the discovery.

Some were placed below the bodies. Others lay above or between the human remains. Their positions suggest they were deposited at the same time as the corpses.

The study argues that the antlers were unlikely to be ordinary waste or practical tools. Their size, number, placement, and close association with the bodies point toward symbolic or ritual meaning.

Red deer had importance in Iberian culture. Deer remains appear in sanctuaries, cremation deposits, communal deposits, and feasting contexts. Deer are also represented in Iberian sculpture, including at Castulo, another Oretanian site.

Antler was also a valued material for making objects. Iberian craftspeople used it for handles and other worked items. But the Cerro de las Cabezas antlers were not simply raw material. Their arrangement with executed bodies suggests a different role.

Antlers, walls, and protection

The location beside the defensive wall opens another interpretive path.

In parts of Iron Age Iberia, especially Celtiberian contexts, deer antlers were sometimes placed beneath foundations, walls, or monumental structures. These deposits have often been interpreted as apotropaic acts, meaning rituals intended to protect a place, boundary, building, or community.

Examples are known from sites such as Blacos, La Hoya, Solar del Antiguo Instituto, and Peñahitero. At La Hoya, antler and stone arrangements have been interpreted in connection with ritual practice and possible deer cult.

Cerro de las Cabezas lies in Oretani territory, but Oretanian lands bordered Celtiberian areas to the north. Shared ritual practices or symbolic influences are therefore possible.

The deposit may have combined two dimensions: punishment of the men and symbolic protection of the settlement wall.

Punishment and protection in one act

The study does not reduce the deposit to a single explanation.

The evidence points to violent death, exclusion from normal funerary rites, rapid deposition, and a symbolic association with antlers. It may have been connected with execution, social sanction, public display, ritual protection, or a foundation-like deposit near the defensive perimeter.

These possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

In ancient societies, violence and ritual could overlap. A punished body could become a warning. A death outside normal order could be transformed into a protective act. A boundary deposit could reinforce the social and physical limits of the community.

At Cerro de las Cabezas, the wall was not only a military structure. It marked the edge of the settlement and the community. Placing violently killed men and symbolic antlers outside that line may have carried a message about power, protection, exclusion, and control.

Diet from stable isotopes

The study used stable isotope analysis to reconstruct diet and mobility.

Carbon and nitrogen isotopes in bone collagen can help identify broad dietary patterns. Oxygen isotopes in bone and tooth enamel can provide clues about drinking water and mobility, because water isotope values vary geographically and environmentally.

Only Individual A yielded collagen suitable for dietary interpretation. Individual B’s collagen preservation was too poor.

Individual A’s carbon and nitrogen values suggest a diet based mainly on terrestrial C3 resources, with a significant contribution from animal protein. The evidence points especially toward domestic animals rather than wild deer.

The comparison between rib collagen and tooth dentine suggests that his diet remained relatively stable from adolescence into adulthood. There is no strong sign of a major dietary shift between youth and the last years of life.

Water signatures and movement

Oxygen isotope values were obtained for both individuals.

Individual A and Individual B showed different oxygen isotope signatures in bone and enamel. The difference between their values suggests that they may have grown up or lived in areas with distinct drinking-water signatures.

However, the authors are cautious. Both values still fall within the broader variability documented in nearby regional contexts, including Motilla del Azuer and the Campo de Calatrava Volcanic Field.

For this reason, the study cannot firmly identify either man as non-local.

Still, the difference between them is meaningful. It suggests that the two men did not necessarily share the same life history. Individual A’s oxygen values are closer to those of pigs from the site, and his skeleton shows signs of habitual long-distance walking. The researchers tentatively suggest a possible connection with herding domestic animals, but this remains speculative.

ZooMS and the animal remains

The study also used ZooMS, or zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry, to identify some animal bone fragments.

This method examines collagen peptide markers to identify animal remains when ordinary visual identification is difficult. At Cerro de las Cabezas, ZooMS helped classify ambiguous faunal fragments, including remains compatible with Sus sp., meaning pig or wild boar.

This matters because the animal isotope data helped build a local baseline for interpreting the human values.

The antlers themselves belonged to red deer, Cervus elaphus. Only one of the antlers preserved enough nitrogen for collagen isotope analysis. The results must therefore be interpreted carefully, especially because antler tissue reflects a particular period of growth rather than the animal’s full yearly diet.

Iberian funerary customs

The Cerro de las Cabezas deposit stands out because it does not match normal Iberian funerary practice.

Cremation was the dominant funerary rite in many Iberian communities. The dead were usually cremated and placed in necropolises, often with grave goods depending on status, identity, and local tradition.

At Cerro de las Cabezas itself, the known funerary record is limited. Earlier evidence included infant burials within domestic structures. The discovery of two uncremated adult males outside the wall therefore adds a very different kind of evidence.

The bodies were complete and articulated, but the context was neither formal burial nor ordinary disposal. It was something more socially charged.

This is why the authors place the find within the category of non-normative or “bad death” practices.

Severed heads in Iberian archaeology

The new discovery also connects with a broader Iberian and Celtic tradition of violent treatment of heads.

Severed heads are known from several Iberian sites, especially in the northeast. Some skulls were nailed, displayed near gates or towers, treated with substances such as resins or oils, or positioned in prominent places.

These practices have often been interpreted as the display of enemies, trophies, warnings, or powerful ritual objects. They may have marked victory, territorial control, prestige, or protection.

Recent work has expanded the known geographical range of Iberian severed-head practices. Finds from Olèrdola and Molí d’Espígol show that this ritual was not restricted to the groups traditionally associated with it.

Cerro de las Cabezas contributes to this wider discussion, but with a distinctive form. Individual B was decapitated, but his head was deposited with the body, not displayed separately. The context also includes six deer antlers, making it unlike the classic severed-head cases.

A violent deposit at the edge of the settlement

The placement outside the wall may have been central to the meaning of the event.

Settlement boundaries were powerful spaces in Iron Age communities. Gates, walls, towers, and entrances controlled movement and symbolized the separation between inside and outside, citizen and stranger, order and threat.

Human remains placed near these boundaries could carry strong messages. They could warn enemies, mark punishment, protect the settlement, consecrate a construction phase, or dramatize social power.

The Cerro de las Cabezas deposit was located outside the southern defensive wall during the final phase of the settlement. The antlers and violently killed bodies were therefore placed in a liminal zone: close to the community, but outside normal social and funerary space.

That position may be the key to the whole event.

The final occupation phase

The deposit dates to the late 3rd or early 2nd century BC.

This was a period of major tension and transformation in the Iberian Peninsula. The Second Punic War, Roman expansion, and changing power structures affected many communities. The Oretani territory, located in the interior but connected to wider trade and military routes, was part of this changing world.

The study does not claim that the two men were casualties of a specific historical event such as war. The evidence does not allow that level of precision.

But the date places the deposit during the final occupation phase of Cerro de las Cabezas. This was a moment when social, political, and military pressures may have been intense.

The violent deposit beside the wall may reflect local conflict, punishment, ritual anxiety, or attempts to reinforce communal order at a time of instability.

A rare view of social power

The bodies from Cerro de las Cabezas preserve more than physical violence.

They reveal how a community may have used death as a social message. The men were denied normal funerary treatment. Their bodies were placed in a boundary zone. Their injuries suggest execution or extreme violence. Their association with antlers links the act to ritual symbolism.

This makes the discovery important for understanding power in Iberian society.

Power was not expressed only through walls, weapons, trade, or elite goods. It could also be expressed through the treatment of bodies. A corpse could become a public statement. A violent death could be transformed into a ritual event. The boundary of a settlement could become a stage for social control.

The Cerro de las Cabezas deposit shows that death could be used to reinforce community norms, mark exclusion, and perhaps protect the settlement at the same time.

Science behind the interpretation

The strength of the study comes from combining several methods.

Archaeology provided the context: location, stratigraphy, wall association, body position, and antler placement.

Physical anthropology reconstructed sex, age, trauma, posture, health, dental wear, and musculoskeletal activity.

Stable isotope analysis provided information about diet and possible mobility.

ZooMS helped identify animal remains that were difficult to classify visually.

Together, these methods allow the deposit to be interpreted as a single event rather than a collection of isolated finds.

The evidence does not produce one simple answer. It builds a layered picture: two adult men, violent death, rapid deposition, symbolic antlers, boundary placement, and possible connections with punishment and protection.

A unique Iberian case

The authors describe the deposit as exceptional and possibly unique in the Iberian archaeological record.

There are other examples of severed heads, foundation deposits, human remains in unusual contexts, and antler deposits. But the combination at Cerro de las Cabezas is extraordinary: two complete adult male bodies, clear violent trauma, six large red deer antlers, no formal grave, no cremation, and a location outside the defensive wall.

The find does not fit neatly into one known category. It touches several traditions at once: bad death, execution, boundary ritual, antler symbolism, defensive-wall deposition, and Iron Age practices involving human remains.

This complexity is what makes the discovery valuable.

Rather than offering a simple story of burial or execution, Cerro de las Cabezas reveals a ritualized act at the edge of an Iberian city, where violence, symbolism, and social order converged.

Sources

1. Herrerín, J., Grandal-d’Anglade, A., Šarkić, N., García-Vázquez, A., et al. (2026). “Bad death” at the Ibero-Oretani site of Cerro de las Cabezas (Valdepeñas, Spain): an anthropological and multi-isotopic (δ13C, δ15N, δ18O) study. Research Square. DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-9781535/v1

2. La Brújula Verde. (2026, June). Unique Discovery at the Iberian Oppidum of Cerro de las Cabezas: Two Executed Men Deposited Alongside Six Deer Antlers in a “Bad Death” Ritual. La Brújula Verde.

3. Valdepeñas Tourism. Archaeological Park Cerro de las Cabezas. Concejalía de Turismo, Valdepeñas.

4. Reguero González, J. (2021). Arqueología de la arquitectura en el oppidum oretano de El Cerro de las Cabezas (Valdepeñas, Ciudad Real): los bastiones de la puerta S. Archaeopress.

5. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. (2026, February 4). New study expands the frontiers of Iberian severed head ritual. Department of Prehistory, UAB.

6. De la Fuente-Seoane, R., Molist, N., Principal, J., Riba-Vidal, M., Tarifa-Mateo, N., & Subirà, M. E. (2025). Cabezas cortadas iberas en contextos cosetanos e ilergetes. Nuevas aportaciones bioantropológicas en El Molí d’Espígol (Tornabous, Lleida) y Olèrdola (Olèrdola, Barcelona). Trabajos de Prehistoria, 82(2), 1049. DOI: 10.3989/tp.2025.1049

Panel Lum.D.II in Lumentxa Cave, showing two left-facing bison and a right-facing horse head. Credit: Garate et al. 2013 / I. Intxaurbe 2026.

The research, published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory in 2026, was carried out by Iñaki Intxaurbe. It uses co-occurrence network analysis, multivariate statistics, and detailed spatial documentation to examine more than 500 graphic figures from nine decorated Magdalenian cave sites along the Bay of Biscay axis.

The study does not claim to decode the exact meaning of the images. Instead, it asks a different question: were Paleolithic artists arranging themes in a structured way?

The answer appears to be yes. Across the caves studied, certain motifs repeatedly appear together, certain animals occupy central positions in the visual system, and formal choices such as orientation and inclination show patterned distributions. The strongest organizing themes are large herbivores, especially bison, horse, and ibex.

Paleolithic art as a structured visual system

Paleolithic cave art has often been interpreted through symbolic, ritual, magical, or hunting-related explanations. Since the scientific recognition of cave art in the late 19th century, researchers have debated whether these images were connected with subsistence, belief, social identity, storytelling, memory, or ritual practice.

Earlier approaches often focused on the meaning of individual animals or the possible motivations behind image-making. Later structural approaches, especially in the mid-20th century, shifted attention toward the arrangement of figures, the relationship between themes, and the possibility that cave art worked as an organized system of signs.

The new study belongs to this second tradition, but with a modern computational method. Instead of beginning with a fixed interpretation, it examines the internal structure of the art itself: which figures occur together, which motifs become central, which remain peripheral, and how themes are distributed across panels.

This approach treats Paleolithic rock art as a semiotic system. In simple terms, that means the images are studied as organized visual signs. The goal is not to translate them like words, but to understand whether their combinations followed repeated conventions.

The Bay of Biscay and the Magdalenian world

The study focuses on Magdalenian parietal art along the Bay of Biscay axis, especially in the Basque region. This area forms a key transitional zone between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of continental Europe.

During the Upper Paleolithic, the broader Cantabrian and Franco-Cantabrian region became one of the most important areas of cave art in the world. Decorated caves in northern Spain and southwestern France preserve paintings, engravings, signs, and sculptural traces created by Homo sapiens over many thousands of years.

The Magdalenian period, roughly between 17,000 and 12,000 years ago in broad terms, was one of the richest phases of European Paleolithic art. In the study’s dataset, most assemblages fall within the Late Middle and Upper Magdalenian, approximately 17,000 to 14,500 calibrated years before present.

This was a time of strong cultural networks across southwestern Europe. People moved through corridors linking the Cantabrian region, the Pyrenees, and southwestern France. Art, tools, raw materials, and symbolic practices all formed part of this wider world.

Reconstruction of the lighting conditions in Santimamiñe Cave before its closure to the public in 2007. Credit: I. Intxaurbe 2026.

Nine decorated caves

The study analyzes more than 500 graphic motifs from nine decorated caves.

The caves are Santimamiñe, Lumentxa, Atxurra, Ekain, Altxerri, Aitzbitarte IV, Aitzbitarte V, and Alkerdi 1 in Spain, along with Etxeberri in France.

Together, these caves preserve a wide range of Paleolithic imagery. The corpus includes zoomorphic figures, anthropomorphic figures, and complex non-figurative signs. Animals include bison, horses, ibex, deer, hinds, reindeer, and other species. Non-figurative motifs include dots, paired strokes, sinuous lines, rectangles, arrows, V-shaped motifs, crosses, and a possible claviform sign.

Very simple or unclear marks were excluded when their intentional character or chronological attribution could not be established with confidence. This matters because the study depends on a carefully controlled dataset rather than a loose collection of all visible traces.

The analyzed corpus represents 67.93 percent of the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figures currently documented in the region. Four of the caves included in the study were discovered after 2010, adding more than 168 previously undocumented figures to the analytical base.

Binary bipartite network showing motif presence and absence. Credit: A. Ruiz-Redondo / O. Rivero / I. Intxaurbe.

Significance and Practical Applications of the Dataset

The strength of the study lies partly in the quality of the documentation.

Paleolithic cave art is difficult to analyze statistically because the surviving record is incomplete. Walls erode. Pigments fade. Engravings become hard to see. Sediment movement, water flow, calcite formation, human visitation, and modern damage can all affect what remains visible today.

For this reason, Intxaurbe’s work relies on systematic geomatic and geoarchaeological documentation. The caves were studied using methods such as terrestrial laser scanning, Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry, GNSS data, 3D modeling, cartography, and spatial analysis.

The study also considers taphonomy: the processes that affect preservation. This is important because a network analysis is only as reliable as the dataset behind it. If some panels are heavily damaged or if some motifs are missing, the resulting pattern could be distorted.

By integrating preservation assessment, 3D spatial documentation, and a transparent dataset, the study attempts to reduce one of the major problems in the study of cave art: the reuse of old, partial, or insufficiently contextualized records.

From panels to networks

The central method used in the study is co-occurrence network analysis.

The basic idea is straightforward. If two motifs appear together on the same panel, they are treated as connected. If they repeatedly appear together across many panels, their connection becomes stronger. Over time, a network emerges.

In this network, motifs are nodes. Connections between motifs are edges. A bison and a horse appearing together on the same panel form one kind of relationship. If bison, horse, and ibex repeatedly occur in related contexts, they may form part of a central organizing core.

The panel is the main unit of analysis. This is important because cave art does not exist as isolated images floating in space. It appears on surfaces, in chambers, on walls, in galleries, and in compositional units. A panel can therefore be treated as a meaningful visual context.

The study’s database is organized hierarchically: site, sector, panel, and motif. This allows the analysis to preserve spatial context while still making large-scale comparison possible.

Frequency and Jaccard networks

The research first built two unfiltered co-occurrence networks.

One was frequency-weighted. This measured how often two motifs shared panels. The other was Jaccard-normalized. This measured relative similarity between motif distributions, helping reduce the effect of very common themes dominating the results only because they appear frequently.

Both approaches produced similar broad structures. This is important because it shows that the results were not simply an artifact of one weighting system.

In both networks, large herbivores occupied central positions. Bison, horse, ibex, and indeterminate figures acted as major compositional hubs. Less frequent motifs were arranged around these central themes.

The similarity between the two networks gave the study its first major signal: the organization of themes was stable across different ways of measuring association.

Filtering the network

Unfiltered networks can become very dense. When many motifs are connected, it becomes difficult to see which relationships are structurally important and which are weak or incidental.

To address this, the study used a filtered network. Edges were retained only when they met minimum thresholds: at least three co-occurrences and a Jaccard similarity of 0.12 or higher.

This filtering revealed a clearer structure. The network showed a central core of strongly connected themes, a secondary cluster of more moderately connected themes, and a peripheral set of weak or isolated motifs.

Within the central core, bison, horse, ibex, and indeterminate figures remained important. The filtered network also revealed a secondary substructure around the goat or ibex motif, linking it with cervid figures such as hind and deer.

The result suggests that Paleolithic panels were not assembled as loose mixtures of images. Some motifs repeatedly formed stable relationships, while others played more contextual or secondary roles.

The minimum spanning tree

The study also used a minimum spanning tree, or MST.

An MST reduces a dense network to the minimum set of connections needed to preserve the overall structure. In archaeological terms, it helps identify hierarchy by removing redundancy. It shows which motifs act as primary connectors and which depend on them within the network.

In this analysis, bison emerged as the most important organizing node.

Two major branches extended from this bison-centered structure. One linked bison with ibex and a cervid substructure involving hind, deer, and reindeer. The other connected bison with horse and points.

This result is one of the clearest findings of the study. While ibex can appear as a major hub in some filtered views of the network, bison becomes the dominant organizing theme once the network is simplified into its hierarchical backbone.

In other words, bison is not only frequent. It helps structure the relationships between other motifs.

Panel Lum.D.II in Lumentxa Cave, showing two left-facing bison and a right-facing horse head. Credit: Garate et al. 2013 / I. Intxaurbe 2026.

The bison, horse, and ibex triad

The most stable pattern in the study is the recurring importance of three large herbivores: bison, horse, and ibex.

These animals form the dominant thematic backbone of the analyzed cave art. Their exact ranking can shift depending on the model, but their combined importance remains stable.

When indeterminate figures are excluded from the analysis, ibex can become more prominent. When the Atxurra assemblage is also removed, horse can become the dominant node. But these changes do not erase the larger structure. Bison, horse, and ibex remain the central organizing themes across sensitivity tests.

This is important because it shows that the result is not dependent on one cave, one ambiguous category, or one statistical choice. The system remains organized around the same core group of large herbivores.

The study therefore supports the idea that Magdalenian artists in this region shared at least some graphic conventions for how major animal themes were combined.

Indeterminate figures and the problem of ambiguity

One of the more difficult categories in the study is the group of indeterminate or “unknown” figures.

These are motifs that cannot be securely identified because of preservation, schematic execution, ambiguity, or incomplete form. The category is useful, but it also creates a methodological problem. It may group together figures that were not actually related in Paleolithic thought.

For this reason, the study repeated analyses with indeterminate figures excluded. It also tested alternative classifications for disputed motifs, including certain animal identifications.

The overall structure remained broadly stable. The same major organizing themes continued to dominate.

At the same time, the study does not simply dismiss ambiguous figures as noise. Some indeterminate forms may reflect deliberate simplification, hybridity, or images that do not fit modern taxonomic categories. Their ambiguity may have been meaningful in the original visual system.

This is why the study treats inclusion and exclusion as two different analytical choices, each with its own costs.

Panel-theme networks

To complement the theme-to-theme networks, the study also created panel-theme bipartite networks.

A bipartite network connects two different kinds of nodes. In this case, panels and motifs. This allows researchers to examine how themes are distributed across compositional units and identify panels that act as convergence points.

Two models were used: a binary model based on presence or absence, and a count-weighted model that included motif repetition within panels.

These models confirmed that some themes are widely distributed and structurally important, while others are rare or marginal.

One example concerns vulva motifs. In the binary network, sexual motifs occupy a very marginal position. They are rare, weakly connected, and do not structure the wider distribution of panel-theme associations. In the analyzed corpus, vulva motifs occur in a single panel at Aitzbitarte IV, a panel devoted exclusively to that theme.

This does not make them unimportant culturally. It means that, in this specific network, they do not function as major connectors in the broader system.

Orientation and direction

The study also examined formal variables, especially the direction in which figures face.

This is important because a visual system can be structured not only by which figures appear together, but also by how they are drawn.

At the level of individual themes, bison and ibex tend to be oriented leftwards, while horses tend to be oriented rightwards. These tendencies appear in the raw results, although the author treats them cautiously because some do not remain statistically strong after correction for multiple comparisons.

At the corpus level, however, the relationship between theme and orientation is statistically meaningful. The study reports that theme and orientation are not independent, suggesting that direction was partly structured by the type of figure being represented.

This means orientation was not just a casual artistic choice. It formed part of the wider graphic organization of the panels.

Horses and alignment

The study also tested whether horses tend to face other motifs in confrontational arrangements within the same panel.

The result is interesting because horses do not appear primarily as confrontational figures. Instead, they tend to align more often in the same general direction as associated motifs.

This finding matters because it challenges a simple reading of animal panels as scenes of direct opposition. The arrangement of figures may reflect conventions of association, sequencing, or visual grammar rather than literal narrative encounters.

The study therefore adds nuance to how panels should be read. A horse next to another animal does not automatically represent a direct interaction. Its placement and direction may belong to a deeper compositional rule.

Inclination and spatial positioning

Figure inclination also shows patterned structure.

Horses are strongly associated with horizontal positions. Anthropomorphic figures and stylized female figures are more strongly associated with vertical orientation. Bison show a more varied pattern, including inclined and vertical positions.

This suggests that the visual system worked at more than one level. Theme choice mattered. Co-occurrence mattered. Orientation mattered. Inclination also mattered.

Together, these features point to a structured graphic system in which certain animals were not only chosen repeatedly but also placed and drawn according to recurring conventions.

The study therefore argues that laterality and inclination should be treated as part of the syntax of Paleolithic art.

What “grammar” means here

The word “grammar” can easily be misunderstood.

The study does not claim that Paleolithic cave art was writing. It does not argue that bison, horse, and ibex functioned like words in a sentence. It also does not decode the meanings of individual images.

Instead, grammar refers to patterned organization: repeated rules or conventions governing how themes are combined and distributed.

A grammar can exist in a visual system without being a spoken language or written script. In this case, the grammar appears in recurrent associations between motifs, hierarchical relationships between central and peripheral themes, and formal choices such as direction and inclination.

The study is therefore careful. It identifies structure, but it avoids overinterpretation.

The central role of bison in ecosystems and human history

Bison emerges as the strongest organizing node in the minimum spanning tree and appears as a major pole in the broader network.

This matches older structural interpretations of Cantabrian and Franco-Cantabrian cave art, where bison often occupies an important symbolic and compositional position. The new study strengthens that idea by showing that the pattern can be demonstrated statistically in a large and systematically documented dataset.

The importance of bison does not mean that the animal had one fixed meaning across all caves. It may have carried different associations depending on panel, cave, group, or period.

What the study shows is more precise: bison repeatedly appears in structurally important positions within the analyzed Magdalenian graphic system.

In that sense, bison was not only an animal image. It was a central element in the organization of the visual field.

The Basque region as a cultural corridor

The location of the study is important.

The Basque region lies between the central-western Cantabrian area and the Pyrenean-Aquitaine world. During the Last Glacial Period, this zone formed part of a corridor connecting the Iberian Peninsula with continental Europe.

The recurrence of similar organizational patterns in this intermediate zone supports the idea of partially shared graphic principles across connected Magdalenian networks.

This does not mean all caves followed the same rigid system. The sensitivity analyses show that local variation existed. In some models, ibex or horse becomes more prominent. Some caves preserve unusual concentrations of particular motifs. Preservation and discovery history also affect the dataset.

But beneath this variation, the same triad of bison, horse, and ibex remains structurally important.

That points to a shared visual tradition with local flexibility.

A method for studying symbolic systems

One of the most important contributions of the study is methodological.

Paleolithic cave art is difficult to interpret because the artists left no written explanation. Researchers must work from images, surfaces, spatial context, archaeological deposits, and comparison across sites.

Network analysis provides a way to study structure without claiming to know meaning in advance. It allows researchers to ask whether motifs cluster, whether some themes act as hubs, whether panels form groups, and whether the system behaves differently from a random distribution.

This method can be especially useful because it is transparent and reproducible. The study’s workflow and network files are made available through a public GitHub repository, allowing other researchers to examine, test, and adapt the method.

That transparency is important in a field where interpretation can easily become subjective.

The limits of the study

The study is careful about what it can and cannot show.

It does not reveal the exact meaning of bison, horses, ibex, signs, or anthropomorphic figures. It does not prove a single shared myth. It does not reconstruct a spoken language or a literal narrative system.

It also depends on the quality of preservation and classification. Some figures may be lost. Some are difficult to identify. Some caves are better preserved or more completely documented than others. The category of indeterminate figures remains methodologically challenging.

The author addresses these issues through taphonomic evaluation, sensitivity analyses, and careful discussion of uncertainty.

This makes the conclusion stronger. The claim is not that every detail is fixed, but that the major patterns are stable enough to be meaningful.

How this discovery reshapes our understanding and what it could mean moving forward

The study changes how Paleolithic cave art can be discussed.

Instead of treating images only as isolated animals, researchers can examine how they function within panels, caves, and regional systems. Instead of asking only what a bison meant, the question becomes: where does bison appear, what does it appear with, how is it oriented, and what role does it play in the wider network?

This approach moves the study of cave art closer to a formal analysis of visual communication.

It also supports a long-standing idea: Paleolithic artists were working within shared conventions. Their images were not placed or combined casually. They belonged to structured traditions that were learned, repeated, modified, and transmitted across communities.

Why this research is important

The Cantabrian and Bay of Biscay cave art traditions are among the most important records of early human symbolic behavior.

The new study shows that this art can be investigated with tools normally used to study complex systems: networks, modularity, hierarchy, co-occurrence, and distribution.

The result is a more rigorous picture of Magdalenian visual culture. Large herbivores, especially bison, horse, and ibex, formed the central backbone of the system. Other motifs played more contextual roles. Orientation and inclination followed patterned tendencies. These patterns remained visible across multiple analytical approaches.

The deeper significance is that Paleolithic art was organized. Its structure can be measured, compared, and tested.

More than 14,000 years after the Magdalenian artists entered these caves, their images still preserve traces of a visual order: a grammar of animals, signs, panels, and surfaces shaped by the symbolic world of Ice Age communities.

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Sources

1. Intxaurbe, I. (2026). Mapping the Symbolic Structure of Palaeolithic Rock Art Using Co-occurrence Network Analysis. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 33, Article 59. DOI: 10.1007/s10816-026-09796-y

2. La Brújula Verde. (2026, June). Paleolithic Cave Art Was Not Random: A Study Reveals a Hidden Grammar in the Caves of the Cantabrian Region. La Brújula Verde.

3. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Cave of Altamira and Paleolithic Cave Art of Northern Spain. UNESCO World Heritage List.

4. Intxaurbe, I., Garate, D., & Arriolabengoa, M. (2024). Drawing in the depths: spatial organization patterns related to Magdalenian cave art. Related research on the spatial organization of Magdalenian cave art.

5. Garate, D., Rivero, O., Rios-Garaizar, J., et al. (2020). New data from the rock art findings in Aitzbitarte caves. PLOS ONE.

6. Research repository. (2026). Rock-Art-Theme-Co-occurrence-Network. GitHub repository associated with the study’s reproducible network analysis workflow.

Despite its small size, the brain of Homo naledi may have been organized to support more complex cognitive abilities. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The research, published in Brain Structure and Function, examined the brain structure of Homo naledi, the extinct hominin discovered in South Africa’s Rising Star cave system. Although Homo naledi had a brain much smaller than that of modern humans, the new work suggests that parts of its frontal lobe had a more human-like organization than its overall brain size would suggest.

The most discussed finding concerns the inferior frontal gyrus, or IFG, a brain region associated in modern humans with language, planning, vocal production, and tool use. In the reconstructed Homo naledi endocast, this region appears relatively expanded and anatomically derived. That finding does not prove that Homo naledi had language, buried its dead, or made symbolic art. But it does show that its brain was not simply primitive because it was small.

A small-brained hominin at the center of a major debate

Homo naledi was announced in 2015 after the discovery of an unusually large collection of fossils in the Rising Star cave system, part of the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa. The remains were recovered from deep underground chambers, especially the Dinaledi Chamber, where hundreds of bones belonging to multiple individuals were found.

The species immediately drew attention because of its strange combination of traits. Its hands, feet, teeth, shoulders, body proportions, and skull showed a mosaic of primitive and more human-like features. Some parts looked unexpectedly modern, while others seemed closer to earlier hominins.

One of the most striking features was brain size. The known Homo naledi endocasts show endocranial volumes in the range of roughly 465 to 610 milliliters. That is much smaller than the average modern human brain and closer in absolute size to some earlier hominins.

This created a major interpretive problem. Homo naledi’s fossils were later dated to between about 335,000 and 236,000 years ago, meaning the species lived surprisingly late, at a time when early Homo sapiens were also emerging in Africa. A small-brained hominin was therefore living in the same broad period as larger-brained humans.

The Rising Star cave system

The Rising Star cave system lies in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind, a region famous for its rich fossil record. The Homo naledi remains were found in deep chambers that are difficult to access, with narrow passages, vertical drops, and areas without natural light.

The context of the fossils has been central to the debate. Some researchers have argued that Homo naledi deliberately entered the cave system and placed dead individuals in remote chambers. If correct, that would represent a form of mortuary behavior far earlier than many scholars once expected for a small-brained hominin.

The claim remains controversial. Critics have questioned whether the evidence is strong enough to demonstrate intentional burial or funerary behavior. Other researchers argue that geological, taphonomic, and spatial evidence supports deliberate body disposal in the cave.

Because of this debate, Homo naledi’s brain has become especially important. If the species really carried bodies into dark, difficult cave spaces, researchers want to understand whether its brain anatomy could have supported planning, navigation, cooperation, memory, and complex action sequences.

What is an endocast?

The new study focuses on endocasts. An endocast is a cast or digital reconstruction of the inner surface of the skull. Since the brain presses against the inside of the cranial bones during life, the inner skull surface can preserve traces of brain shape, blood vessel impressions, and some surface anatomy.

Endocasts do not preserve the brain itself. They cannot reveal thoughts, intelligence, language, or behavior directly. But they are one of the few ways researchers can study the brains of extinct species.

For Homo naledi, endocasts are especially valuable because several partial crania are available. Earlier work reconstructed endocasts from Dinaledi Chamber skull fragments. The new 2026 study focused especially on the more complete Lesedi Chamber skull, known as LES1.

LES1 is associated with the partial skeleton nicknamed Neo, meaning “gift” in Sesotho. The specimen is one of the most complete Homo naledi individuals yet found and provides the best opportunity to reconstruct the overall shape of the species’ brain.

Reconstructing the Homo naledi brain

The study was carried out by Zachary Cofran, Shawn Hurst, and John Hawks. The authors used geometric morphometric methods to reconstruct the full shape of the LES1 endocast and compare it with modern humans and fossil hominins.

Because the fossil is incomplete, the team did not rely on a single reconstruction. Instead, they used multiple reference specimens and statistical methods to estimate missing regions. This approach allowed them to test how sensitive the results were to missing data and different reconstruction assumptions.

The comparative sample included 80 adult modern humans and 13 fossil hominin specimens, including Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, African Homo erectus, Indonesian Homo erectus, and Australopithecus africanus.

The goal was not simply to measure brain size. The researchers wanted to understand brain shape and organization, especially in areas that may relate to cognition, planning, tool use, and social behavior.

Partial skulls of Homo naledi shown on the left, with reconstructed endocasts on the right. The fossils are scaled to a similar visual size and aligned to the same antero-posterior anatomical position as LES1. DH2 and DH4 preserve the right side of the skull and are mirrored here for comparison.

A brain close in size to early Homo

The LES1 endocast has an estimated volume of around 610 milliliters. That is larger than the smaller Dinaledi Chamber estimates, but still small compared with modern humans.

Virtual reconstruction workflow for the LES1 endocast. The figure summarizes how multiple endocast reconstructions and endocranial volume estimates were produced. From top left, moving counterclockwise: A: the original LES1 cranium in left lateral view, with the preserved endocranial surface highlighted in pink. B: the landmark and semilandmark template shown over the preserved, mirror-imaged LES1 endocast; preserved points are shown in black and missing data in white. C: the full landmark template with fossil-based reconstructions of missing regions shown as color-coded wireframes according to reference fossil group. D: the solid triangle mesh representing the average LES1 virtual reconstruction inside the endocranial cavity.

The study found that Homo naledi’s absolute brain size was broadly comparable to some of the earliest fossil members of Homo. Its relative brain size, however, remained closer to australopith-like levels when considered against body size.

This is one reason Homo naledi is so interesting. It lived late in human evolution but retained a small brain. At the same time, its brain shape does not fit a simple primitive category.

The researchers emphasize that brain size alone is not enough to understand cognition. A larger brain can support more neurons and expanded networks, but organization also matters. Homo naledi forces researchers to separate the question of size from the question of structure.

A unique combination of ancestral and derived traits

The new study supports earlier findings that Homo naledi had a mixture of ancestral and derived brain features.

On one hand, its total brain size, cerebro-cerebellar proportions, and some aspects of morphology remained primitive compared with later Homo species. On the other hand, parts of the frontal lobe appear more derived and closer to the condition seen in humans and other later Homo lineages.

Comparison of cerebellar and cerebral size in Homo naledi and other samples. The two variables represent the log10 centroid sizes of landmark sets covering the cerebrum and cerebellum, shown on the LES1 endocast inset. The regression line is based only on the adult human sample, while colors and symbols follow the same sample categories used in the other figures.

This combination is important. Homo naledi was not simply an old-fashioned species surviving late with an unchanged ancestral brain. Its brain anatomy had its own evolutionary pattern.

The authors describe Homo naledi as having a derived frontal lobe while retaining ancestral brain size and proportions. That means its brain may have been reorganized in certain areas without undergoing the large-scale expansion seen in modern humans or Neanderthals.

The inferior frontal gyrus

The most important region discussed in the study is the inferior frontal gyrus, or IFG.

In modern humans, the IFG includes Brodmann areas 44 and 45. These areas are involved in spoken language and are also recruited during stone tool production. The IFG is one of the major regions where human brains differ morphologically from those of other apes.

In apes, the corresponding areas are usually arranged differently, often divided by a fronto-orbital sulcus. In humans, expansion and reorganization of the prefrontal cortex changed the position and configuration of these areas.

The Homo naledi endocast suggests that its IFG was relatively enlarged and anatomically derived. In other words, this small-brained hominin had a frontal-lobe configuration that appears more human-like than expected for its brain size.

This is the finding that has drawn attention because of its connection with language, toolmaking, and advanced action planning.

What an enlarged IFG might mean

An enlarged or derived IFG does not mean Homo naledi had language in the modern human sense. It also does not prove that the species created rock art or performed ritual burials.

The authors are careful about this point. Brain anatomy can suggest possible capacities, but it cannot directly prove behavior. The IFG is involved in many functions, including vocal production, sequencing, planning, and tool use. Its morphology may indicate neural systems capable of organizing complex actions.

The study proposes that Homo naledi’s enlarged orbitofrontal region and derived IFG anatomy could have supported behaviors that required imagining an outcome, planning a sequence, and carrying out extended actions.

That is an important but cautious interpretation. It gives researchers a biological reason to consider complex behavior plausible, but the evidence for any specific behavior must still come from archaeology.

Tool use and the missing archaeological record

One question remains unresolved: what tools did Homo naledi make or use?

Hand bones of Homo naledi suggest strong manipulative abilities, and recent research has argued that bone structure in the fingers may reflect habitual stone tool production or use. Yet no clear stone tool industry has been securely tied to Homo naledi inside the Rising Star cave system.

This creates another puzzle. The anatomy suggests the species may have been capable of tool-related behavior. Its brain organization may also fit with planning and action sequencing. But the archaeological signature remains uncertain.

It is possible that Homo naledi made tools elsewhere, outside the cave system, and that these tools have not yet been identified. It is also possible that tools in the broader Middle Stone Age landscape were made by more than one hominin species.

This uncertainty matters because researchers often assign stone tools to Homo sapiens by default when they come from the right period. Homo naledi shows why such assumptions can be risky.

Burial claims and the brain debate

The most controversial question surrounding Homo naledi is whether it deliberately disposed of its dead.

Some researchers argue that bodies were repeatedly carried into the dark zone of Rising Star cave and placed in chambers or shallow pits. If true, this would suggest that a small-brained hominin engaged in behavior involving memory, social meaning, and planned movement through a difficult underground environment.

Others remain cautious. They argue that the evidence does not yet prove intentional burial in the strictest sense and that more work is needed to rule out alternative explanations.

The new brain study does not settle this debate. Cofran and colleagues emphasize that whether Homo naledi buried its dead is primarily an archaeological question. Endocasts can inform discussions of anatomy and possible neural capacity, but they cannot by themselves demonstrate funerary behavior.

This distinction is crucial. The study adds nuance, but it does not turn a debated archaeological claim into a proven one.

Why brain size is not the whole story

The Homo naledi case challenges a long-standing assumption: that small brains necessarily mean simple behavior.

Modern humans have large brains, and brain expansion is a major feature of human evolution. But size is not the only variable. Brain organization, regional specialization, connectivity, development, and life history all matter.

Homo naledi appears to have combined a small brain with some derived frontal-lobe features. This shows that evolutionary change in the brain did not always happen through overall enlargement.

A small brain could still be reorganized in ways that affected behavior. Conversely, a large brain does not automatically reveal specific behaviors without archaeological evidence.

This is why Homo naledi has become such an important species for paleoneurology. It forces scientists to ask more precise questions about what brain fossils can and cannot tell us.

A comparison with Homo erectus

One of the notable observations from the new study is that the LES1 endocast appears most similar in shape to some fossils attributed to Indonesian Homo erectus.

This does not mean Homo naledi was simply a small version of Homo erectus. The authors explicitly reject that idea. Instead, they describe Homo naledi as having a distinctive combination of features: some ancestral, some more aligned with later members of Homo.

This comparison matters because Homo erectus is often seen as a major stage in the evolution of human body form, brain expansion, dispersal, and tool-related behavior. If Homo naledi’s brain shape resembles aspects of Homo erectus while retaining its own unusual features, it may represent a separate evolutionary experiment within the genus Homo.

The result complicates any simple linear story of human brain evolution.

The role of the orbitofrontal region

The study also draws attention to the orbitofrontal region, a part of the frontal lobe associated in modern humans with decision-making, evaluation, social behavior, and flexible responses.

In Homo naledi, this region appears relatively enlarged. Together with the derived IFG anatomy, this suggests that some frontal systems may have been more developed than overall brain size would predict.

The authors cautiously suggest that these neural substrates could have supported advanced behaviors involving planning and the execution of long action sequences.

That phrase is important. It does not specify language, ritual, or symbolic behavior. It points more generally to the ability to organize behavior over time.

For a species that may have entered deep cave chambers, such capacities would be relevant, though still not direct proof of the most debated claims.

What endocasts cannot tell us

Endocasts are powerful but limited.

They can preserve information about overall brain size, broad shape, asymmetry, and some surface impressions. They can sometimes show the location of major sulci and regions related to the frontal, parietal, or occipital lobes.

But they cannot show neural circuits, cell types, neurotransmitters, detailed internal organization, or actual behavior. They cannot tell us whether Homo naledi spoke, what it understood, what it intended, or whether it had symbolic thought.

This is why the authors repeatedly emphasize caution. The connection between fossil brain shape and behavior is indirect. Researchers must combine endocast data with anatomy, archaeology, cave context, taphonomy, dating, and comparative neuroscience.

Homo naledi’s brain may have been more complex than expected, but that conclusion must be kept separate from stronger claims about specific cultural practices.

A species living near the origin of Homo sapiens

The age of Homo naledi adds another layer to the discussion.

The fossils from the Dinaledi Chamber have been dated to between about 335,000 and 236,000 years ago. This places Homo naledi in the Middle Pleistocene, close to the period when early Homo sapiens were emerging in Africa.

This means that Africa at the time was not occupied by a single human form. Instead, different hominin species and populations may have lived side by side or at least in overlapping time ranges.

Homo naledi, with its small brain and unusual anatomy, shows that late Middle Pleistocene Africa contained more evolutionary diversity than once assumed.

The possibility that Homo naledi existed alongside early Homo sapiens makes the question of its behavior even more important. It raises the possibility that multiple human-like species contributed to Africa’s archaeological record.

A broader view of human evolution

The new study fits into a larger shift in paleoanthropology.

Older models often treated human evolution as a gradual line moving from small brains to large brains, from simple tools to complex culture, and from archaic bodies to modern humans. Discoveries like Homo naledi undermine that simple ladder.

Instead, evolution appears branching, mosaic, and uneven. Different species evolved different combinations of traits. Some had modern-looking hands and small brains. Others had large brains but different body forms. Some may have shared landscapes and perhaps behaviors.

Homo naledi is a strong example of mosaic evolution. Its body, brain, and chronology do not fit neatly into older expectations.

The 2026 brain study reinforces this point by showing that even a small-brained hominin could have a derived frontal lobe architecture.

The question remains open

The central lesson of the study is caution with openness.

Homo naledi had a small brain, but not a simple one. Its brain anatomy included features that may relate to planning, tool use, vocal behavior, and complex sequencing. At the same time, endocasts alone cannot prove what the species actually did.

The archaeology of Rising Star Cave must continue to answer the behavioral questions. The brain evidence adds context, but the claims about burial, fire use, toolmaking, and symbolic behavior still depend on material evidence.

For now, Homo naledi remains one of the most challenging discoveries in human evolution: a small-brained hominin living surprisingly late, with a brain organized in unexpected ways, and a cave context that continues to generate debate.

The new study does not close the discussion. It sharpens it.

Sources:

1. The main study is Zachary Cofran, Shawn Hurst, and John Hawks, “Brain structure and function in Homo naledi,” published open access in Brain Structure and Function in 2026. The paper reports that Homo naledi’s endocasts show a unique combination of ancestral and modern human-like characteristics, including a derived frontal lobe while retaining small brain size and ancestral proportions.

2. IFLScience’s 22 June 2026 article summarizes the public-facing significance of the study, including Cofran’s comments that the reconstructed Homo naledi endocast resembles Indonesian Homo erectus in some respects but is not simply a scaled-down Homo erectus brain

3. The 2017 eLife dating study established that Homo naledi fossils from Rising Star are most likely between 236,000 and 335,000 years old, placing the species surprisingly late in human evolution and broadly contemporary with early Homo sapiens in Africa.

4. The Australian Museum identifies LES1 as a relatively complete Homo naledi skull from the Lesedi Chamber, nicknamed Neo, with an estimated brain size of about 610 ml.

Illustration showing the evolution of hominin body size, with a major increase appearing in later Homo around 2 million years ago.

For decades, researchers have debated whether hominins slowly became larger over millions of years, or whether a major increase in body size happened at a specific point in the evolution of the genus Homo. The new research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2026, supports a mixed picture. Body size did increase across hominin evolution, but the strongest signal points to a major jump around 2 to 2.5 million years ago, especially with later members of Homo such as Homo erectus, Homo ergaster, and possibly Homo rudolfensis.

The study was carried out by Jacob D. Gardner, Thomas A. Püschel, Suzy White, Manabu Sakamoto, and Chris Venditti. By combining hundreds of fossil body-mass estimates with statistical models that account for evolutionary relationships and uncertainty, the team found that our ancestors did not simply grow larger in a straight line.

Instead, the human family tree shows both gradual trends and sharp changes. Some branches became larger and more mobile. Others, such as Homo floresiensis and Homo naledi, stayed small or moved in a very different evolutionary direction.

Biological Significance of Body Size in Human Evolution

Body size is one of the most important biological traits in any animal. It influences metabolism, movement, diet, reproduction, heat regulation, life history, ecological range, and survival strategies.

In human evolution, body size has been especially important because it is closely tied to other major changes. Larger bodies can affect walking efficiency, long-distance movement, energy needs, hunting and scavenging strategies, brain size, and the ability to live in different environments.

Early hominins were generally much smaller than many later humans. Some australopiths averaged around 40 kilograms, with stature closer to that of a modern child. By contrast, later species such as Homo erectus and Homo ergaster reached average body masses closer to 60 kilograms or more, placing them much nearer to the range of many modern humans.

This difference has long raised an important question: did hominins slowly grow larger over time, or did one part of the human lineage experience a more dramatic shift?

The new study suggests that both ideas contain part of the answer.

Historical Debate on Patterns of Body-Size Evolution

Paleoanthropologists have not agreed on the exact pattern of body-size evolution.

Some earlier studies supported a general increase through time, suggesting that hominins gradually became larger as evolution progressed. Other studies argued that the pattern was not so simple and that increases in body size were limited to certain lineages or specific evolutionary moments.

Part of the disagreement comes from the fossil record itself. Fossil hominins are rarely preserved as complete skeletons. Body mass often has to be estimated from fragments such as limb bones, pelvises, teeth, or other skeletal elements.

Different studies have used different fossil samples, different anatomical measurements, different species assignments, and different statistical methods. As a result, one study might emphasize a gradual increase, while another might highlight a sudden shift in later Homo.

Jacob Gardner of the University of Reading explained that these disagreements may have emerged because researchers were looking at different parts of a larger puzzle. When more fossils are examined together and competing hypotheses are tested in the same framework, a clearer and more complicated picture appears.

Cast of a Homo erectus skull from Tautavel, Pyrénées-Orientales, France. Dated to around 450,000 years ago, it represents one of the oldest human fossils found in the country. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Compilation and Scope of the Fossil Dataset

To address the problem, Gardner and colleagues assembled body-mass estimates from 386 fossil specimens representing 21 hominin taxa.

This sample ranged from ancient australopiths to members of Homo, including Homo sapiens. The goal was to test multiple models of body-size evolution at the same time rather than treating each hypothesis separately.

The team used Bayesian phylogenetic generalized linear mixed models. In simpler terms, this method allowed them to examine body-mass change while accounting for the fact that related species share evolutionary history. A fossil from one species cannot be treated as completely independent from a fossil belonging to a close evolutionary relative.

The method also allowed the researchers to account for several sources of uncertainty. These include uncertainty in body-mass estimates, variation within species, incomplete skeletal remains, and disagreement over how fossil specimens should be assigned to species.

This was important because body-mass reconstruction is not a simple measurement. It is an estimate built from fragmentary evidence. The new study tried to make that uncertainty part of the analysis rather than ignoring it.

Evaluation of Alternative Evolutionary Models

The researchers did not ask only whether hominins grew larger over time. They tested several possible explanations together.

One model considered a broad, gradual increase in body size across all hominins. Another tested whether a major shift occurred specifically in the genus Homo. A third tested whether the strongest change appeared in later members of Homo, excluding Homo habilis.

This distinction matters. Homo habilis is often treated as one of the earliest members of the genus Homo, but it retained a relatively small body and many primitive features. If Homo habilis is grouped with all later Homo species, it can blur the signal of later body-size expansion.

The study found strong evidence for a marked increase in body mass among later Homo species, especially after Homo habilis. It also found moderate support for a slower, general increase across hominin evolution as a whole.

In other words, hominin body size did trend upward over time, but the most important change happened later within Homo.

Timing and Nature of the Body-Size Increase

The strongest signal points to a body-size jump around 2 to 2.5 million years ago.

This is the period when species such as Homo erectus and Homo ergaster appear in the fossil record. Homo rudolfensis may also belong to this broader phase of body-size change, depending on taxonomy and interpretation.

These later Homo species were different from earlier hominins in several important ways. They were more committed to efficient bipedal walking. Their bodies were better suited for longer-distance movement. Their diets likely included more meat. Their geographic ranges expanded beyond the more restricted landscapes of earlier hominins.

A larger body may have supported these changes. Bigger bodies can improve walking efficiency over long distances, especially for a species moving across open or varied environments. They may also help with endurance, thermoregulation, and access to a broader range of foods.

This does not mean that larger size was automatically better in every situation. But for some later Homo lineages, increasing body mass appears to have been part of a wider ecological and behavioral transformation.

Anatomical Developments in Homo erectus

Homo erectus is especially important in this discussion because it is often associated with a more human-like body plan.

Compared with earlier hominins, Homo erectus generally had longer legs, a body more adapted to walking and running, and a larger average body size. This species also spread widely, eventually appearing outside Africa in parts of Eurasia.

The new study fits this broader picture. It suggests that the emergence of larger-bodied Homo was not just a minor change in anatomy. It may have been tied to a new way of living.

Larger bodies would have required more energy, but they could also support a more mobile lifestyle. A hominin that could walk efficiently across larger territories could search more widely for food, water, shelter, and suitable habitats. Such mobility may have become increasingly important as climates and landscapes changed.

The rise of Homo erectus and related forms therefore marks more than a body-size change. It marks a shift in ecology, movement, diet, and survival strategy.

Ecological and Dietary Implications of Increased Size

The timing of the size increase is significant because it coincides with broader changes in the behavior and ecology of later Homo.

Researchers have long linked larger body size in early Homo with changes in diet, especially greater reliance on animal foods. Meat and marrow are energy-rich resources, and access to them may have helped support larger bodies and, eventually, larger brains.

A larger body could also have helped hominins compete in more open environments. It may have improved endurance travel, made long-range foraging more efficient, and allowed early humans to exploit a wider range of habitats.

Thomas Püschel of the University of Oxford emphasized that the body-size shift coincided with changes in how our ancestors moved through landscapes and used their environments. This connection points to a close relationship between anatomy and behavior.

Body size, in this view, was not evolving in isolation. It was part of a larger adaptive package involving locomotion, diet, range expansion, and ecological flexibility.

Evidence for Gradual Trends in Body Size

Although the clearest signal is the later Homo size jump, the study also found moderate support for a broader increase in body mass through time.

The models suggest a possible general increase across all hominins of up to about 0.99 kilograms per million years. This is a modest trend compared with the sharper shift seen in later Homo.

This slower increase may fit with a wider biological pattern sometimes discussed as Cope’s rule. Cope’s rule refers to the tendency of some animal lineages to evolve larger body sizes over time.

Several explanations have been proposed for this pattern. Larger bodies can sometimes help animals compete for mates, deter predators, regulate temperature, or access new food resources. However, Cope’s rule is not universal, and the causes behind body-size increase are still debated.

The hominin evidence fits this complexity. There may have been a general tendency toward larger size, but that trend alone does not explain the full pattern.

Limitations of Cope’s Rule in Hominin Evolution

Cope’s rule is useful as a broad evolutionary concept, but it cannot explain every detail of human evolution.

In some lineages, increasing body size may provide advantages. In others, smaller size may be favored by island environments, restricted resources, ecological specialization, or other pressures.

The new study shows why a simple rule is not enough. Hominin evolution included both size increase and size reduction. Some branches grew larger, while others remained small even when living much later in time.

This is why the human family tree should not be imagined as a straight ladder from small to large, or from primitive to modern. It was a branching evolutionary landscape, with different species adapting in different ways.

The body-size story is therefore not a single trend. It is a combination of gradual change, lineage-specific shifts, and striking exceptions.

Homo floresiensis as a Case of Reduced Body Size

One of the most famous exceptions is Homo floresiensis, often nicknamed the “hobbit.”

Homo floresiensis lived on the Indonesian island of Flores and had a very small body size. Its small stature has often been discussed in relation to island dwarfism, a process in which large-bodied animals evolve smaller sizes on islands because of limited resources, ecological pressures, or reduced predator competition.

In the new study, Homo floresiensis falls well below the body-mass expectations produced by broader hominin trends.

This matters because Homo floresiensis lived much later than the early stages of Homo evolution. Its small size was not simply a survival from the distant past. It represents a separate evolutionary path in which one branch of the human family remained or became small while other Homo lineages had become larger.

Homo floresiensis is a strong reminder that human evolution was never moving in only one direction.

Homo naledi and Persistence of Small Body Forms

Homo naledi is another important exception.

Discovered in South Africa’s Rising Star cave system, Homo naledi lived surprisingly late, between about 335,000 and 236,000 years ago. Yet it retained a small body and a small brain compared with modern humans and many later Homo species.

Like Homo floresiensis, Homo naledi falls below the expected body size for its time period. Its presence shows that small-bodied hominins survived long after larger-bodied Homo species had appeared.

This is important because Homo naledi existed in Africa during a period close to the emergence of early Homo sapiens. Its anatomy does not fit a simple story in which all later hominins became larger and more modern-looking.

Instead, Homo naledi shows that different evolutionary experiments continued side by side. Some lineages became larger and more mobile; others retained small bodies and unusual anatomical combinations.

The Role of Homo habilis in Interpreting Size Trends

Homo habilis plays a central role in the study because it complicates the definition of body-size change within Homo.

If all Homo species are grouped together, the pattern of body-size increase becomes less clear. Homo habilis was relatively small and retained many traits closer to earlier hominins. Later Homo species, especially Homo erectus and Homo ergaster, show a more obvious increase in body mass.

The new study found less support for a distinct size increase across all of Homo. Instead, the stronger signal appears when Homo habilis is separated from later Homo species.

This matters for how researchers think about the early evolution of our genus. Homo may not have appeared fully formed with a modern-like body plan. Instead, early Homo included smaller forms, while the larger-bodied pattern emerged later.

The transition from Homo habilis to later Homo may therefore represent one of the key anatomical shifts in human evolution.

Challenges in Reconstructing Fossil Body Mass

The study also highlights a major challenge in paleoanthropology: estimating body size from incomplete fossils.

A complete skeleton can provide relatively strong evidence for body mass. But fossil hominins are usually fragmentary. Researchers may have only a femur, pelvis fragment, tooth, jaw, or partial skull.

Different bones can produce different estimates. A limb bone may suggest one body mass, while a tooth or joint surface may suggest another. Some fossils are difficult to assign confidently to a species. Others may represent individuals that were unusually large or small within their population.

These problems have contributed to disagreement in earlier studies.

Gardner and colleagues tried to address this by building uncertainty into their models. Rather than relying on one fixed value for each fossil, they considered a range of plausible body-mass estimates and multiple evolutionary relationships.

This approach does not remove uncertainty, but it makes the analysis more realistic.

Integrating Evidence from a Complex Fossil Record

The result is a more nuanced picture of hominin body-size evolution.

The study suggests that earlier researchers were not necessarily wrong when they saw different patterns. Those patterns may have depended on which fossils, species, and methods they used.

A study focused on early hominins might detect gradual growth. A study focused on later Homo might see a sharper jump. A study emphasizing small-bodied exceptions might conclude that the trend is weak or uneven.

By testing these possibilities together, the new analysis shows that several patterns can coexist.

There was likely a slow general increase across hominins, a stronger later shift in Homo, and notable exceptions that moved away from the main trend.

Relationship Between Body Size and Brain Evolution

Body size also matters because it is connected with brain evolution.

Larger bodies often require larger brains for basic bodily control, but brain size can also increase in response to cognition, social behavior, technology, and ecological demands. In hominins, larger body size and larger brain size are often discussed together, especially in later Homo.

However, the relationship is not simple. Homo naledi had a small brain and small body but may have had unexpected brain organization. Homo floresiensis also had a very small brain relative to later Homo species. Homo erectus had a larger body and a larger brain than earlier hominins, but not a modern human brain.

The new body-size study does not focus directly on brain evolution, but it helps clarify the anatomical background in which brain changes occurred.

The emergence of larger-bodied Homo may have created new energetic, ecological, and behavioral conditions that later shaped brain expansion.

Implications for Geographic Expansion

One of the most important implications of larger body size is geographic movement.

Later Homo species, especially Homo erectus, expanded across much larger areas than earlier hominins. Moving through open landscapes, following seasonal resources, and occupying varied habitats would have favored efficient locomotion.

Long legs, larger bodies, and improved bipedal walking likely made long-distance travel more practical.

This does not mean body size alone caused dispersal. Many factors were involved, including climate, tools, diet, social organization, and landscape change. But larger body size may have contributed to the ability of later Homo to occupy broader ranges.

In this sense, the body-size leap around 2 million years ago may be connected to one of the major turning points in human evolution: the expansion of Homo beyond earlier ecological limits.

A Branching Model of Human Evolution

The strongest message of the study is that human evolution was branching, not linear.

Some hominins became larger. Some stayed small. Some developed more efficient bipedal bodies. Some retained unexpected combinations of primitive and derived traits. Some spread widely, while others were restricted to islands or particular regions.

The human body did not evolve through a single upward path toward modern form. Instead, different lineages explored different possibilities.

Homo erectus and Homo ergaster show one path: larger bodies, wider ranges, and major ecological flexibility. Homo floresiensis and Homo naledi show another: small-bodied survival long after larger Homo forms had appeared.

This makes the human family tree more complex, but also more realistic.

Reassessment of Previous Interpretations

The study challenges the idea that human ancestors simply became larger and larger over time.

It shows that body mass did generally increase, but the most important change happened later within Homo. It also shows that some branches strongly resisted or reversed the trend.

The findings help explain why previous studies disagreed. The fossil record contains more than one signal. It contains gradual change, a later Homo shift, and small-bodied outliers.

By bringing these signals into one statistical framework, Gardner and colleagues provide a clearer way to understand the evolution of hominin body size.

The result is not a single simple answer. It is a more accurate model of a complicated process.

Broader Implications of the Findings

The study matters because body size is connected to many of the major themes in human evolution: walking, diet, energy, brain size, migration, ecology, and survival.

The major size increase around 2 to 2.5 million years ago appears to line up with a broader transformation in later Homo. These ancestors were moving differently, eating differently, and using landscapes in new ways.

At the same time, the small-bodied exceptions show that evolution did not produce one inevitable outcome. Homo floresiensis and Homo naledi demonstrate that other human relatives followed different paths and remained outside the larger-bodied trend.

Human body-size evolution was therefore not a smooth climb. It was a mixed process: gradual increase, sudden expansion, and evolutionary divergence.

Around 2 million years ago, one branch of the human family took a major step toward the body size familiar in humans today. Other branches kept their own forms, proving that the story of human evolution was never one straight line.

Sources

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