Archaeology

Centuries before the Inca, Peru’s wealthy imported parrots from afar

ancient people did stuff, Archaeology, inca, indigenous americans, indigenous south america, parrots, Pre-Columbian civilizations, Science, wari / DJ Henderson / March 12, 2026

The Inca Empire’s system of roads were built on centuries-old trade routes.

This large, elaborate Ychsma funerary bundle features a wooden mask painted with cinnabar and adorned with a parrot-feather headdress. Credit: Olah et al. 2026

Centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire, a much smaller kingdom on the central coast of Peru already had a sophisticated trade network—one it used to import live parrots across the Andes from the Amazon rainforest.

Australian National University conservation geneticist George Olah and his colleagues recently studied feathers from a headdress in a Ychsman noble’s tomb, dating to 1100–1400 CE (the centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire). DNA and chemical isotopes reveal that the parrots the feathers came from (still bright blue, yellow, and green after all these centuries) were born in the wild on the far side of the Andes but kept in captivity somewhere on the Peruvian coast. To pull off importing live parrots from hundreds of miles away across the steep, towering Andes, the Ychsma (who the Inca annexed around 1470) must have had a far-reaching trade network that spanned at least half a continent.

And they must have really liked birds.

Long-distance trade before the Inca roads

Olah and his colleagues carefully selected fragments of individual barbs (the thin keratin strands that make up the body of a feather) from 25 feathers sewn onto funerary headdresses found at the pre-Inca city of Pachacamac, located on the dry coast of present-day Peru, just south of Lima. From each fragment, researchers sequenced mitochondrial DNA and measured the ratios of certain nitrogen and carbon isotopes, which can reveal information about a creature’s diet.

The results suggest the parrots were born in the wild but spent at least a year in captivity eating local maize. That means they must have been captured hundreds of kilometers away, because parrots don’t tend to flock to the desert on their own.

The Ychsma kingdom grew out of a fragment of the old Wari Empire (known for its hallucinogenic beer, its canal system, and for breaking up around 1100 CE after a solid 500-year run). Centered at Pachacamac, the Ychsma built pyramids and irrigated their arid river valleys to grow crops. And like most of the cultures that lived in the Andes highlands and along the coasts of modern-day Peru and Chile, they really had a thing for parrot feathers.

Parrots’ colorful blue, green, and red feathers were the status symbol, “essential for communicating status, power, and cosmology,” as Olah and his colleagues put it. In the Andes highlands, the Wari—and later the Inca—imported bright-feathered rainforest birds in the millions over several centuries. On the coasts, the Moche and Nasca cultures did much the same.

Parrot feathers feature in headdresses and in tunics made from thousands of feathers sewn onto cotton cloth. The birds themselves show up in tombs and temples as mummified offerings, and they were sculpted and painted onto centuries’ worth of pottery.

The parrot feathers on a handful of funerary headdresses from one of the only unlooted, intact tombs left at Pachacamac recently indicated that the Ychsma were linked to a trade network that once connected huge swaths of two continents across hundreds of kilometers.

Based on parrots and their feathers alone, archaeologists knew there must have been connections that reached from the Amazon basin west to the coastal deserts of Chile and Peru and north to Mexico and the southwestern United States. But the details of that trade—including how live parrots ended up crossing one of the world’s most daunting mountain ranges—were unclear for the centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire and its imperial road networks.

Until recently, archaeologists and historians assumed that the period between the breakup of the Wari Empire and the rise of the Inca was mostly a time when smaller kingdoms and confederations, like Ychsma and its neighbors, squabbled with each other and had influence that didn’t reach much beyond their own region. But based on parrot feathers, these between-empires Andean cultures actually had complex, thriving, and very sophisticated trade relationships without needing to have a system imposed by a central imperial government.

photo of roughly a dozen red and blue macaws on a cliffside — Macaws hang out in the Peruvian Amazon. Credit: Balazs Tisza

Born in the rainforest, raised in the desert

The headdress feathers came from four parrot species: scarlet macaws, red-and-green macaws, blue-and-yellow macaws, and mealy amazons. (The last are cute little green dudes that really deserve a nicer name; “mealy” is apparently a reference to the dusty “powder down,” grains of keratin formed by the disintegrating tips of their down feathers.) All of them live in lowland tropical forests and palm swamps in the Amazon Basin; Peru’s coastal deserts are practically the opposite of their usual wet, lush habitat.

Some pre-colonization cultures bred their own parrots, including at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and at a huge pueblo complex called Paquimé in Mexico’s Chihuahua Desert. You can tell from the Paquimé parrots’ DNA that they came from a small, slightly inbred population, probably one descended from a breeding colony imported together on a single trip.

But at Pachacamac, the parrots’ DNA looked like it had come from a larger, more genetically diverse population. In fact, it looked a lot like the level of genetic diversity found in modern wild parrots. In other words, the Pachacamac headdresses used feathers from parrots born and bred in the wild.

But they didn’t spend their entire lives there. “The birds were not living in the rainforest when these feathers grew,” wrote Olah and his colleagues. A high proportion of carbon-13 in the feather barbs meant that while they were growing, the birds had been eating a diet rich in domestic grains like maize. Meanwhile, nitrogen-15 in the feathers suggested that ocean food chains had played a role, perhaps through seabird guano being used to fertilize the maize.

Most parrot species molt and regrow feathers about once a year, though it can vary by a few months, so these birds must have spent at least six to 18 months in Ychsma territory before being plucked for someone’s funerary headdress. And that means that someone in the Amazon was trading with the Yschma, handing over not just bundles of feathers but live parrots.

Archaeologists found similar evidence in mummified parrots, buried as ritual offerings, at the trading city of Pica, roughly 1,000 kilometers south of Pachacamac in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Pica thrived from around 900 CE to around 1400 CE, the same pre-Inca period as Pachacamac.

photo of part of a headdress with blue and yellow feathers attached — These feathers detached from the headdress they were originally part of. Credit: Izumi Shimada

Very intrepid delivery service

Getting a bunch of parrots across the Andes Mountains alive and in reasonably good condition is not an easy task—certainly not one your faithful correspondent would volunteer for. The authors used least-cost modeling, a method that maps the most efficient or lowest-energy path across a landscape, to create a likely map of those ancient parrot-trading routes, starting from ten sites in the Amazon and ending at Pachacamac.

If river travel were an option, one potential route cuts straight east across the Andes to Pachacamac. It lines up well with historical accounts describing how the Arawak-speaking Yanesha people traveled along very similar paths to trade in the coastal valleys of central Peru.

Another route crosses the Andes further north, ending up around Chimú, home of the Kingdom of Chimor, the largest of the post-Wari, pre-Inca kingdoms. From that area of northern Peru, it then follows the coastline southward to Pachacamac. Archaeological evidence already shows that Chimor traded with the Chachapoyas culture, located in the cloud forests on the eastern slopes of the Andes. And their “people were known for their bird-catching skills,” according to Olah and his colleagues.

Since both of these routes are supported by archaeological and historical evidence, it’s entirely possible that the Ychsma were getting their parrots through both networks. Presumably, they must have been sending back valuable goods in return.

“Transporting goods such a great distance by land and/or sea raises the questions of the high costs involved,” wrote Olah and his colleagues. But for people in both the Andes highlands and along the arid coasts, the parrots and their colorful, exotic feathers were presumably worth whatever it cost to get them. In other words, the most affluent and powerful people among the Ychsma and their neighbors were willing to make it worth the Amazon traders’ while to procure and deliver the birds.

(Unfortunately, that’s still true of unscrupulous pet breeders and collectors today.)

“This study also provided a deep historical context for a human fascination with colorful parrots that today drives a destructive illegal trade threatening their very survival,” Olah and his colleagues wrote.

Nature Communications, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-69167-9 (About DOIs).

Kiona is a freelance science journalist and resident archaeology nerd at Ars Technica.

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An unlikely set of clues helps reconstruct ancient Chinese disasters

ancient china, anthropogenic climate change, Archaeology, El Niño, extreme weather, Science, typhoons / DJ Henderson / March 9, 2026

Shang Dynasty oracle bones and modern weather models feature in the same study.

This diorama at Xinxiang City Museum, Henan Province shows what a Shang Dynasty village might have looked like. Credit: Gary Todd, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Warmer waters in the Pacific Ocean may have brought devastating floods to the cradle of ancient Chinese civilization, according to a recent study in which its authors link three wildly different lines of evidence to tell the story.

People in Shang Dynasty China, around 3,000 years ago, probably didn’t realize that the massive floods sweeping through their heartland were the product of typhoons battering the southern Chinese coast hundreds of kilometers away. They certainly couldn’t have seen that the sheer intensity of those typhoons was fueled by a sudden shift in temperature cycles over the Pacific Ocean thousands of kilometers to the south and east. But, with the benefit of 3,000 years of hindsight and scientific progress, Nanjing University meteorologist Ke Ding and colleagues recently managed to connect the dots. The results are like a handwritten warning from the Shang Dynasty about how to prepare for modern climate change.

Typhoons, oracle bones, and abandoned settlements

Around 3,000 years ago, two great civilizations were flourishing in central China. In the Yellow River Valley, the Shang Dynasty rose to prominence, producing the first Chinese writing and also sacrificing thousands of people in ceremonies at the capital, Yinxu. Meanwhile, on the Chengdu Plain in southwestern China, the Shanxingdui culture built a walled capital city and sculpted large bronze heads, gold foil masks, and tools of jade and ivory, which they buried in huge sacrificial pits.

Archaeological sites across central China reveal that at various points between 2,500 and 4,000 years ago, disasters rocked these thriving societies, decimating the population, forcing settlements to relocate, and causing major cultural shifts and political upheaval.

Both civilizations rebounded after these disruptions; it didn’t take long, in the archaeological scheme of things, for populations to swell and settlements to rebuild. But for a little while, life was clearly disrupted.

A few wildly different clues point to the cause—or at least, one of the causes—of this upheaval: modern weather simulations, archaeological sites hundreds of miles from the Chinese coast, coastal sediments in Japan and South Korea that record the intensity of ancient typhoons, and even Shang Dynasty divination texts. All three of these lines of evidence converged on the same dates, telling a single horrifying story.

Reconstructing ancient storm seasons

We have a pretty good idea of how the size and intensity of a storm determines what kind of footprint it leaves on coastal sediments. Researchers look for similar traces in ancient sediments and use them to reconstruct what tropical storm seasons were like in the past (the field is called paleotempestology, which is your faithful correspondent’s new favorite word).

Based on paleotempestology records not only in China, but also along the coasts of South Korea and southwestern Japan, typhoons moving west across the Pacific Ocean tended to be more intense during the storm seasons around 2,800 years ago. Typhoons that curved northward had more intense seasons around 3,800 years ago and again around 3,300 years ago.

Those bouts of more intense typhoons may be related to something that happened off the coast of Peru around 3,000 years ago, when El Niño events suddenly got more frequent, more extreme, and longer-lasting. Paleoclimate researchers know this because around this time, shellfish species that live in cool water (but can’t take the heat) all but disappear from the Peruvian archaeological record, replaced by more heat-tolerant species. Around the same time, people living along the coast gave up building huge monumental temples, and villages shrank. You’re going to want to keep those dates in mind, because…

Ding and colleagues charted radiocarbon dates from sites across China’s Central Plains and Chengdu Plain, hoping to pinpoint changes in population and potential signs of a society in crisis. They noticed that the number of sites on the Central Plain, home to the Shang Dynasty, decreased sharply around 3,800 years ago and again about 3,300 years ago; at the sites that weren’t abandoned, changes suggested smaller populations overall. On the Chengdu Plain, something similar happened around 2,800 years ago. Villages, towns, and cities shifted toward higher ground; layers of mud left behind by flooding hint at the reason.

map of the Pacific ocean and China showing typhoon paths — This map shows the tracks of typhoons during the 1995 storm season; note that some plow straight west, while others veer northward. Credit: By Nilfanion – Created using Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones/Tracks. The background image is from NASA [1]. The tracking data is from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center’s best track database, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2505757

How does a typhoon in the Pacific flood inland China?

Seeing how well those dates lined up with when coastal sediments suggest more intense typhoons had been churning through the Pacific, Ding and colleagues ran some computer simulations using an LLM-based program called Pango-weather. The goal was to figure out how a typhoon on the coast could bring torrential rains and flooding to communities hundreds of miles inland. The answer wasn’t that the typhoon swept across the entire country; often, the typhoons in question never even made landfall. But they didn’t have to make landfall to stir up easterly winds that carried more water vapor across hundreds of miles to the plains.

Both the Shang Dynasty and Shu civilizations set up their capitals on plains just to the east of large mountain ranges. Normally, that works out very well for farmers, because the mountains force eastbound air upward, where it cools; water vapor condenses and rain falls. But settlements on the windward side of mountain ranges are also vulnerable to extreme rainfall events—like the ones caused by typhoons messing with the region’s airflow patterns.

Ding and colleagues’ results suggest that an increase in the average intensity of typhoons (which means that the researchers boosted the storms’ starting wind speed from about 54 kilometers per hour to about 126 kilometers per hour) caused more moisture to gather over regions like the Chengdu Plain and the Central Plains. Specifically, the Chengdu Plain was more impacted by typhoons moving west, while the Central Plains caught more flooding from typhoons that followed northward tracks. The effects were on the order of an extra 51 millimeters of rain a day in the Central Plains and extra 24 millimeters a day on the Chengdu Plain.

Consulting the oracle bones

The people of the Shang Dynasty and the Shu civilization probably didn’t know that large-scale weather systems, or even larger-scale climate shifts, were to blame for their woes, but they were definitely aware that they were living through periods in which serious floods were more likely. Writings on more than 55,000 pieces of burned bone from the late Shang Dynasty (2,996–3,200 years ago) reveal that Shang royals and nobles were very worried about heavy rains and floods during the period—worried enough to ask oracles to try to predict them.

Shang Dynasty rulers took their most pressing questions to oracles, who would throw oxen shoulder blades (scapulae) or the bony undersides of turtle shells (plastrons) onto a fire, then interpret the pattern of cracks in the burned bone. Fortunately for modern historians, those oracles also inscribed both the question and the answer into the bone itself, producing some of China’s first systematic writing.

Ding and colleagues counted the references to “upcoming rain” and “upcoming heavy rain” in the texts and found that Shang nobility asked their diviners about downpours much more often during the exact time periods when sediments suggest more intense typhoons and archaeological evidence suggest major social and political upheaval. And you don’t tend to keep asking if there’s going to be a big flood unless you have good reason to think that there might be.

photo of an ox scapula inscripted with early Chines characters in columns — 3,000 years ago, a Shang Dynasty oracle tossed this ox scapula into a fire, looking for hints about the future in the way the burned bone cracked. Credit: By Gary Lee Todd 2011-09-01 12: 34: 54 https://www.flickr.com/photos/101561334@N08/9830601816/, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=96430584

When it rains, it pours

Of course, it’s not possible to say that these periods of unrest and struggle in ancient China happened entirely thanks to more intense typhoons, but the cycle of worsening storm seasons probably played a role. And in between floods, the lack of water may have been another major factor.

Paleoclimate records in ancient sediment reveal that even as typhoons were getting more intense, central China was baking under a drought—also thanks to the same cycle that drives El Niño today (recent studies suggest that El Niño years lead to severe droughts in central China and more intense typhoons in the Pacific). And the oracle bones reflect Shang dynasty rulers’ concerns about drought, too: references to prayers for rain and plagues of locusts closely match the periods of El Niño conditions identified in previous studies. The Shang Dynasty was getting hit with a one-two punch of climate disasters: years of drought, punctuated by heavy rains and devastating floods.

“This pattern bears similarities to the climatic challenges faced by the Maya civilization,” wrote Ding and colleagues, “where prolonged El Niño-like conditions may reduce overall rainfall while intensified cyclone activity could increase extreme rainfall, ultimately contributing to social declines.”

Why it matters today

Those 3,000-year-old oracle bones hold a warning for modern China. The character for “disaster” in the oracle bone scripts is a set of squiggly horizontal lines that immediately calls to mind floodwaters, and floods are still one of the deadliest and costliest disasters that China faces. Not only are floodwaters destructive, but they can leave behind too much salt in the soil and can also lead to outbreaks of insects and other pests (for both people and crops).

The mechanics that connect typhoon intensity to flooding in inland China work the same way they did during the Shang Dynasty. Current climate models predict that typhoons could be 14 percent more intense, on average, by the end of this century, thanks to humans and our pollution habits.

But the message from the oracle bones isn’t about despair; it’s about planning. As Ding and colleagues put it: “This study urges better preparation against the disastrous impact of intensified typhoons, especially in inland areas where facilities to mitigate extreme rainfalls and floods are relatively inadequate.”

Science Advances, 2026 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.eaeb1598 (About DOIs).

Kiona is a freelance science journalist and resident archaeology nerd at Ars Technica.

An unlikely set of clues helps reconstruct ancient Chinese disasters Read More »

Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans

anthropology, Archaeology, forensic archaeology, Science / Mike M. / March 4, 2026

The results: The team found traces of wild grasses and legumes, fruits or berries, green vegetables, and roots and tubers native to the broader region. Shards recovered from sites in the Don River basin showed these people used the seeds of wild legumes (possibly clover) and grasses, as well as showing some evidence of bran and barley. By contrast, shards from the Upper Volga and Dnieper-Dvina region contained more traces of guelder rose berries and other fleshy fruits and smaller-seeded Amaranthaceae plants.

Shards from the Baltic region showed higher traces of freshwater fish, with some regions also including berries, sea beetroot, flowering rush, beets, and sea club-rush tubers. There were also traces of dairy products in shards from a site in Denmark, likely obtained from nearby farming communities.

For the cooking experiments, the authors explored different potential food mixtures focusing on two main plant species: guelder rose berries and species related to the Amaranthaceae family (beet, goosefoot, and saltbush specifically). The berries were gathered in the fall from the south of England and frozen right afterward. They boiled the berries with water in replica pottery vessels, combining some batches with freshwater fish like carp, and also varying the distance of the vessels from the open flames and active embers. They then sampled the cooking residues and compared those results to the samples taken from the prehistoric vessels.

“Our results show that there was a general tendency towards combining specific foods into distinct preparations and in particular regions,” the authors concluded, such as combining Viburnum berries with freshwater fish in the Upper Volga and Baltic regions. Fish accompanied by wild grasses and legumes were preferred in the Don River Basin, while other sites preferred their fish with green vegetables. So “hunter-gatherer-fishers were not living on fish alone,” the authors wrote. “They were actively processing and consuming a wide variety of plants.”

PLoS ONE, 2026. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0342740 (About DOIs).

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“Million-year-old” fossil skulls from China are far older—and not Denisovans

anthropology, Archaeology, Denisovans, extinct hominins, hominin evolution, homo erectus, homo longi, out of africa, paleoanthropology, Science, skulls / Mike M. / February 20, 2026

careful with that, it’s an antique

The revised age may help make sense of 2-million-year-old stone tools elsewhere in China.

Two skulls from Yunxian, in northern China, aren’t ancestors of Denisovans after all; they’re actually the oldest known Homo erectus fossils in eastern Asia.

A recent study has re-dated the skulls to about 1.77 million years old, which makes them the oldest hominin remains found so far in East Asia. Their age means that Homo erectus (an extinct common ancestor of our species, Neanderthals, and Denisovans) must have spread across the continent much earlier and much faster than we’d previously given them credit for. It also sheds new light on who was making stone tools at some even older archaeological sites in China.

Homo erectus spread like wildfire

Yunxian is an important—and occasionally contentious—archaeological site on the banks of central China’s Han River. Along with hundreds of stone tools and animal bones, the layers of river sediment have yielded three nearly complete hominin skulls (only two of which have been described in a publication so far). Shantou University paleoanthropologist Hua Tu and his colleagues measured the ratio of two isotopes, aluminum-26 and beryllium-10, in grains of quartz from the sediment layer that once held the skulls. The results suggest that Homo erectus lived and died along the Han River 1.77 million years ago. That’s just 130,000 years after the species first appeared in Africa.

(Side note: This river has been depositing layers of silt and gravel on the same terraces for at least 2 million years, and that’s just extremely cool.)

The revised date suggests that Homo erectus spread across Asia much more quickly than anthropologists had realized. So far, the oldest hominin bones found anywhere outside Africa are five skulls, along with hundreds of other bones, from Dmanisi Cave in Georgia. The Dmanisi bones are between 1.85 million and 1.77 million years old, and they (probably—more on that below) also belong to Homo erectus.

Until recently, the next-oldest Homo erectus fossils outside Africa were the 1.63-million-year-old fossils from another Chinese site, Gongwangling, a short distance north of Yunxian. (That’s not counting a couple of teeth from a site in southern China with an age that is a little less certain.) Those dates had suggested Homo erectus seemed to have taken a leisurely 140,000 years to spread east into Asia. But it now looks like hominins were living in Georgia and central China at about the same time, which means they spread out very fast, started earlier than we knew, or both.

**The Homo longi and short of it**

All of this means that the Yunxian skulls are probably not—as a September 2025 study claimed—close ancestors of the enigmatic Denisovans. The authors of that paper had digitally reconstructed one of the skulls and concluded that it looked a lot like a 146,000-year-old skull from Harbin, China (which a recent DNA study identified as a Denisovan, also known as Homo longi).

The researchers had argued that the original owners of the Yunxian skulls had lived not long after the Denisovan/Homo longi branch of the hominin family tree split off from ours—in other words, that the Yunxian skulls weren’t mere Homo erectus but early Homo longi, close cousins of our own species. Using the original paleomagnetic dates for the Yunxian skulls, that study’s authors drew up a hominin family tree in which our species and Denisovans are more closely related to each other than either is to Neanderthals—one in which the branching happened much earlier than DNA evidence suggests.

There were many issues with those arguments, but the revised age for the Yunxian skulls sounds like a death knell for them. “1.77 million years is just too old to be a credible connection to the Denisovan group, which DNA tells us got started after around 700,000 years ago,” University of Wisconsin paleoanthropologist John Hawks, who was not involved in the study, told Ars in an email.

But the most interesting thing about these skulls being 1.77 million years old is that the date provides a reference point for understanding even older sites in China—sites that may suggest that Homo erectus wasn’t even the first hominin to make it this far.

Photograph of stone tools — Stone tools collected from Shangchen, China. Credit: Prof. Zhaoyu Zhu

Out of Africa: The prequel

Homo erectus first shows up in the fossil record around 1.9 million years ago in Africa, where it’s sometimes also called Homo ergaster because paleoanthropologists seem to enjoy naming things and then arguing about those names for several decades. A few hundred thousand years later, Homo erectus showed up everywhere: from South Africa northward to the Levant and from Dmanisi Cave in Georgia eastward to the islands of Indonesia.

We typically think of Homo erectus as the first of our hominin ancestors to expand beyond Africa, along routes that our own species would retread 1.5 million years later. More to the point, many paleoanthropologists think of them as the first hominin that could have adapted to so many different environments, each with its own challenges, along the way.

But we may need to give earlier members of our genus, like Homo habilis, a little more credit because stone tools from two other sites in China seem to be older than Homo erectus. At Shangchen, a site on the southern edge of China’s Loess Plateau, archaeologists unearthed stone tools from a 2.1-million-year-old layer of sediment. And at the Xihoudu site in northern China, stone tools date to 2.43 million years ago.

“If you have a site in China that’s 2.43 million years, and the origin of Homo erectus is 1.9 million years ago, either you need to push the origin of Homo erectus back to 2.5 or 2.6 million years or we need to accept that we need to be looking at other hominins that may have actually moved out of Africa,” University of Hawai’i at Manoa paleoanthropologist Christopher Bae, a coauthor of the new study, told Ars.

So who made those 2-million-year-old tools?

Archaeologists have unearthed stone tools but no hominin fossils at both sites, making it difficult to say for sure who the toolmakers were. But if they weren’t Homo erectus, the next most likely suspects would be older members of our genus, like Homo habilis or Homo rudolfensis. That would mean hominin expansion “out of Africa” actually happened several times during the history of our genus: once with early Homo, again with Homo erectus, and yet again with our species.

“There could have been an earlier wave that died out or interbred, so there’s all kinds of possibilities open there,” Purdue University paleoanthropologist Darryl Granger, also a coauthor of the recent study, told Ars.

In fact, there’s some debate about whether the Dmanisi fossils actually belonged to Homo erectus proper. One thing the two dueling reconstructions of the Yunxian skulls agree on is that those hominins had flattish faces, more like ours—and like the 1.63-million-year-old Homo erectus skull from Gongwangling. But the Dmanisi hominins’ lower faces project dramatically forward, like those of older hominins.

Some paleoanthropologists classify the Dmanisi fossils as their own species, but others argue they’re more like early members of our genus, such as Homo habilis or Homo rudolfensis. Those earlier hominins may have been more capable of migrating and adapting than we’ve realized.

It’s still very clear, from both fossil and genetic evidence, that our species evolved in Africa and spread from there to the rest of the world. But it’s also increasingly clear that there were several other species of hominins in other places, doing other things, at least off and on, for a very long time before we showed up. Yunxian, and its revised age, could help anthropologists better understand part of that story.

“Actually being able to anchor the Homo erectus sites with firm, solid dates helps us try to reconfigure this model,” said Bae. “This is where Yunxian really plays a major role in this. Now that we’ve got older dates to anchor the Yunxian Homo erectus fossils, I think we can really bring in this discussion with Xihoudu and Shangchen.”

Time to dig deeper

The answers may still lie buried—maybe just a few meters below the fossil skulls and stone tools at sites like Yunxian and Gongwangling, in older sediment layers. Archaeologists may not have seen a reason to explore these, since no one lived in China before 1.7 million years ago. The age of the Yunxian skulls, along with the even older stone tools at Shangchen and Xihoudu, may warrant deeper digging.

“People haven’t been looking for artifacts and fossils in two-plus million-year-old sediments in these locations in China,” said Granger. “I can think of places that I would like to go back and look if I had more time and money.”

At other sites, researchers have already unearthed fossil animal bones from the same age range as China’s oldest stone tools, but paleoanthropologists haven’t double-checked whether any of those bones might belong to early hominins rather than other mammals. Bae said, “It’s just that they haven’t been receiving any attention, or not enough attention.”

Science Advances, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ady2270 About DOIs).

Kiona is a freelance science journalist and resident archaeology nerd at Ars Technica.

“Million-year-old” fossil skulls from China are far older—and not Denisovans Read More »

This 67,800-year-old hand stencil is the world’s oldest human-made art

anthropology, Archaeology, australia, cave art, hominins, human migration, Indonesia, rock art, Sahul, Science / Beth Washington / January 24, 2026

generative AI could never

The world’s oldest art has an unintentional story to tell about human exploration.

These 17,000-year-old hand stencils from Liang Jarie Maros, in another area of Sulawesi, bear a striking resemblance to the much older ones in Liang Metanduno. Credit: OKtaviana et al. 2026

The world’s oldest surviving rock art is a faded outline of a hand on an Indonesian cave wall, left 67,800 years ago.

On a tiny island just off the coast of Sulawesi (a much larger island in Indonesia), a cave wall bears the stenciled outline of a person’s hand—and it’s at least 67,800 years old, according to a recent study. The hand stencil is now the world’s oldest work of art (at least until archaeologists find something even older), as well as the oldest evidence of our species on any of the islands that stretch between continental Asia and Australia.

Photo of an archaeologists examining a hand stencil painted on a cave wall, using a flashlight — Adhi Oktaviana examines a slightly more recent hand stencil on the wall of Liang Metanduno. Credit: Oktaviana et al. 2026

Hands reaching out from the past

Archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana, of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency, and his colleagues have spent the last six years surveying 44 rock art sites, mostly caves, on Sulawesi’s southeastern peninsula and the handful of tiny “satellite islands” off its coast. They found 14 previously undocumented sites and used rock formations to date 11 individual pieces of rock art in eight caves—including the oldest human artwork discovered so far.

About 67,800 years ago, someone stood in the darkness of Liang Metanduno and placed their hand flat against the limestone wall. They, or maybe a friend, then blew a mixture of pigment and water onto the wall, covering and surrounding their hand. When they pulled their hand carefully away from the rock, careful not to disturb the still-wet paint, they left behind a crisp outline of their palm and fingers, haloed by a cloud of deep red.

The result is basically the negative of a handprint, and it’s a visceral, tangible link to the past. Someone once laid their hand on the cave wall right here, and you can still see its outline like a lingering ghost, reaching out from the other side of the rock. If you weren’t worried about damaging the already faded and fragile image, you could lay your hand in the same spot and meet them halfway.

Today, the stencil is so faded that you can barely see it, but if you look closely, it’s there: a faint halo of reddish-orange pigment, outlining the top part of a palm and the base of the fingers. A thin, nearly transparent layer of calcite covers the faded shape, left behind by millennia of water dripping down the cave wall. The ratio of uranium and thorium in a sheet of calcite suggests that it formed at least 71,000 years ago—so the outline of the hand beneath it must have been left behind sometime before that, probably around 67,800 years ago.

A photo of two figures on a cave wall, with the faint outline of a hand circled in black — The hand stencil is faded and overlain by more recent (but still ancient) artwork; it’s circled in black to help you find it in this photo. Credit: Oktaviana et al. 2026

That makes Liang Metanduno the home of the oldest known artwork in the world, beating the previous contender (a Neanderthal hand stencil in Spain) by about 1,100 years.

“These findings support the growing view that Sulawesi was host to a vibrant and longstanding artistic culture during the late Pleistocene epoch,” wrote Oktaviana and his colleagues in their recent paper.

The karst caves of Sulawesi’s southwestern peninsula, Maros-Pangkep, are a treasure trove of deeply ancient artwork: hand stencils, as well as drawings of wild animals, people, and strange figures that seem to blend the two. A cave wall at Liang Bulu’Sipong 4 features a 4.5-meter-long mural of humanlike figures facing off against wild pigs and dwarf buffalo, and a 2024 study pushed the mural’s age back to 51,200 years ago, making it the second-oldest artwork that we know of (after the Liang Metanduno hand stencil in the recent study).

Archaeologists have only begun to rediscover the rock art of Maros-Pangkep in the last decade or so, and other areas of the island, like Southeast Sulawesi and its tiny satellite islands, have received even less attention—so we don’t know what’s still there waiting for humanity to find again after dozens of millennia. We also don’t know what the ancient artist was trying to convey with the outline of their hand on the cave wall, but part of the message rings loud and clear across tens of millennia: At least 67,800 years ago, someone was here.

Really, really ancient mariners

The hand stencil on the wall of Liang Metanduno is, so far, the oldest evidence of our presence in Wallacea, the group of islands stretched between the continental shelves of Asia and Australia. Populating these islands is “widely considered to have involved the first planned, long-distance sea crossing undertaken by our species,” wrote Oktaviana and his colleagues.

Back when the long-lost artist laid their hand on the wall, sea levels were about 100 meters lower than they are today. Mainland Asia, Sumatra, and Borneo would have been high points in a single landmass, joined by wide swaths of lowlands that today lie beneath shallow ocean. The eastern shore of Borneo would have been a jumping-off point, beyond which lay several dozen kilometers of water and (out of view over the horizon) Sulawesi.

The first few people may have washed ashore on Sulawesi on some misadventure: lost fishermen or tsunami survivors, maybe. But at some point, people must have started making the crossing on purpose, which implies that they knew how to build rafts or boats, how to steer them, and that land awaited them on the other side.

Liang Metanduno pushes back the timing of that crossing by nearly 10,000 years. It also lends strong support to arguments that people arrived in Australia earlier than archaeologists had previously suspected. Archaeological evidence from a rock shelter called Madjedbebe, in northern Australia, suggests that people were living there by 65,000 years ago. But that evidence is still debated (such is the nature of archaeology), and some archaeologists argue that humans didn’t reach the continent until around 50,000 years ago.

“With the discovery of rock art dating to at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi, a large island on the most plausible colonization route to Australia, it is increasingly likely that the controversial date of 65,000 years for the initial peopling of Australia is correct,” Griffith University archaeologists Adam Brumm, a coauthor of the recent study, told Ars.

photo of an archaeologists studying a flashlight-lit cave wall adorned with ancient figures of animals in red — Archaeologists Shinatria Adhityatama studies a panel of ancient paintings in Liang Metanduno. Credit: Oktaviana et al. 2026

Archaeologists are still trying to work out exactly when, where, and how the first members of our species made the leap from the continent of Asia to the islands of Wallacea and, eventually, via several more open-water crossings, to Australia. Our picture of the process is pieced together from archaeological finds and models of ancient geography and sea levels.

“There’s been all sorts of work done on this (not by me), but often researchers consider the degree of intervisibility between islands, as well as other things like prevailing ocean currents and wind directions, changes in sea levels and how this affects the land area of islands and shorelines and so on,” Brumm said.

Most of those models suggest that people crossed the Makassar Strait from Borneo to Sulawesi, then island-hopped through what’s now Indonesia until they reached the western edge of New Guinea. At the time, lower sea levels would have left New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand as one big land mass, so getting from New Guinea to what’s now Australia would actually have been the easy part.

A time capsule on the walls

There’s a sense of deep, deep time in Liang Metanduno. The cave wall is a palimpsest on which the ancient hand stencil is nearly covered by a brown-hued drawing of a chicken, which (based on its subject matter) must have been added sometime after 5,000 years ago, when a new wave of settlers brought domesticated chickens to the island. It seems almost newfangled against the ghostly faint outline of the Paleolithic hand.

A few centimeters away is another hand stencil, done in darker pigment and dating to around 21,500 years ago; it overlays a lighter stencil dating to around 60,900 years ago. Over tens of thousands of years, generations of people returned here with the same impulse. We have no way of knowing whether visitors 21,500 years ago, or 5,000 years ago might have seen a more vibrantly decorated cave wall than what’s preserved today—but we know that they decided to leave their mark on it.

And the people who visited the cave 21,500 years ago shared a sense of style with the artists who left their hands outlined on the wall nearly 40,000 years before them: both handprints have slightly pointed fingers, as if the artist either turned their fingertip or just touched-up the outline with some paint after making the stencil. It’s very similar to other hand stencils, dated to around 17,000 years ago, from elsewhere on Sulawesi, and it’s a style that seems unique to the island.

“We may conclude that this regionally unique variant of stencil art is much older than previously thought,” wrote Oktaviana and his colleagues.

photo of pointy-fingered hand stencils on a cave wall — These 17,000-year-old hand stencils from Liang Jarie Maros, in another area of Sulawesi, bear a striking resemblance to the much older ones in Liang Metanduno. Credit: OKtaviana et al. 2026

And Homo sapiens wasn’t the first hominin species to venture as far as Indonesia; at least 200,000 years earlier, Homo erectus made a similar journey, leaving behind fossils and stone tools to mark that they, too, were once here. On some of the smaller islands, isolated populations of Homo erectus started to evolve along their own paths, eventually leading to diminutive species like Homo floresiensis (the O.G. hobbits) on Flores and Homo luzonensis on Luzon. Homo floresiensis co-discoverer Richard Roberts has suggested that other isolated hominin species may have existed on other scattered islands.

Anthropologists haven’t found any fossil evidence of these species after 50,000 years ago, but if our species was in Indonesia by nearly 68,000 years ago, we would have been in time to meet our hominin cousins.

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09968-y (About DOIs).

Kiona is a freelance science journalist and resident archaeology nerd at Ars Technica.

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Archaeologists find a supersized medieval shipwreck in Denmark

Archaeology, maritime archaeology, medieval Europe, nautical archaeology, Science, shipwrecks / Beth Washington / January 16, 2026

the wreck and the story of the wreck

The sunken ship reveals that the medieval European economy was growing fast.

This is a replica of another cog, based on an excavated shipwreck from Bremen. Note the sterncastle. Credit: VollwertBIT

Archaeologists recently found the wreck of an enormous medieval cargo ship lying on the seafloor off the Danish coast, and it reveals new details of medieval trade and life at sea.

Archaeologists discovered the shipwreck while surveying the seabed in preparation for a construction project for the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. It lay on its side, half-buried in the sand, 12 meters below the choppy surface of the Øresund, the straight that runs between Denmark and Sweden. By comparing the tree rings in the wreck’s wooden planks and timbers with rings from other, precisely dated tree samples, the archaeologists concluded that the ship had been built around 1410 CE.

photo of a scuba diver swimming over wooden planks underwater — The Skaelget 2 shipwreck, with a diver for scale. Credit: Viking Ship Museum

A medieval megaship

Svaelget 2, as archaeologists dubbed the wreck (its original name is long since lost to history), was a type of merchant ship called a cog: a wide, flat-bottomed, high-sided ship with an open cargo hold and a square sail on a single mast. A bigger, heavier, more advanced version of the Viking knarrs of centuries past, the cog was the high-tech supertanker of its day. It was built to carry bulky commodities from ports in the Netherlands, north around the coast of Denmark, and then south through the Øresund to trading ports on the Baltic Sea—but this one didn’t quite make it.

Most cogs would have been about 15 to 25 meters long and 5 to 8 meters wide, capable of carrying about 200 tons of cargo—big, impressive ships for their time. But Svaelget 2, an absolute unit of a ship, measured about 28 meters from bow to stern, 9 meters wide, and could have carried about 300 tons. Its size alone was a surprise to the archaeologists.

“We now know, undeniably, that cogs could be this large—that the ship type could be pushed to this extreme,” said archaeologist Otto Uldum of Denmark’s Viking Ship Museum, who led the excavation, in a press release.

Medieval Europe’s merchant class was growing in both size and wealth in the early 1400s, and the cog was both a product of that growth and the engine driving it. The mere fact of its existence points to a society that could afford to invest in building big, expensive trading ships (and could confidently expect a return on that investment). And physically, it’s a product of the same trading networks it supplied: while the heavy timbers of its frame were cut locally in the Netherlands, the Pomeranian oak planks of Svaelget 2’s hull came from Poland.

“The cog revolutionized trade in northern Europe,” said Uldum. “It made it possible to transport goods on a scale never seen before.”

The super ship’s superb superstructure

For about 600 years, layers of sand had protected the starboard (right, for you landlubbers) side of the wreck from erosion and decay. Nautical archaeologists usually find only the very bottoms of cogs; the upper structures of the ship—rigging, decks, and castles—quickly decay in the ocean. That means that some of the most innovative parts of the ships’ construction appear only in medieval drawings and descriptions.

But Svaelget 2 offers archaeologists a hands-on look at the real deal, from rigging to the ship’s galley and the stern castle: a tall wooden structure at the back of the ship, where crew and passengers could have sought at least a little shelter from the elements. Medieval drawings and texts describe cogs having high castles at both bow and stern, but archaeologists have never gotten to examine a real one to learn how it’s put together or how it connects with the rest of the ship’s construction.

“We have plenty of drawings of castles, but they have never been found because usually only the bottom of the ship survives,” said Uldum. “[The castle] is a big step forward compared to Viking Age ships, which had only open decks in all kinds of weather.”

Lying on and around the remains of the cog’s decks, Uldum and his colleagues also found stays (ropes that would have held the mast in place) and lines for controlling the ship’s single square sail, along with ropes and chains that would once have secured the merchant vessel’s cargo in the open hold.

Life at sea in the Middle Ages

The cog would probably have sailed with between 30 and 45 crew members. No remains were found on the wreck, but the lost crew left behind small, tantalizing traces of their lives and their presence. Uldum and his colleagues found combs, shoes, and rosary beads, along with dishes and tableware.

“The sailor brought his comb to keep his hair neat and his rosary to say his prayers,” said Uldum (and one has to picture the sailor’s grandmother beaming proudly at that description). “These personal objects show us that the crew brought everyday items with them. They transferred their life on land to life at sea.”

Life at sea, for the medieval sailors aboard Svaelget 2, would have included at least occasional hot meals, cooked in bronze pots over an open fire in the ship’s galley and eaten on dishes of ceramic and painted wood. Bricks (about 200 of them) and tiles formed a sort of fireplace where the cook could safely build a fire aboard the otherwise very flammable ship.

“It speaks of remarkable comfort and organization on board,” said Uldum. “Now sailors could have hot meals similar to those on land, instead of the dried and cold food that previously dominated life at sea.” Plenty of dried meat and cold biscuits still awaited sailors for the next several centuries, of course, but when weather and time permitted, at least the crew of Svaelget 2 could gather around a hot meal. The galley would have been a relatively new part of shipboard life for sailors in the early 1400s—and it quickly became a vital one.

Cargo? Go where?

One thing usually marks the site of a shipwreck, even when everything else has disintegrated into the ocean: ballast stones. When merchant ships were empty, they carried stones in their holds to help keep the ship stable; otherwise, the empty ship would be top-heavy and prone to tipping over, which is usually not ideal. (Modern merchant vessels use water, in special tanks, for ballast.) But Uldum and his colleagues didn’t find ballast stones on Svaelget 2, which means the cog was probably fully laden with cargo when it sank.

But the cargo is also conspicuously absent. Cogs were built to carry bulk goods—things like bricks, grain and other staple foods, fabric, salt, and timber. Those goods would have been stowed in an open hold amidships, secured by ropes and chains (some of which remain on the wreck). But barrels, boards, and bolts of fabric all float. As the ship sank and water washed into the hold, it would have carried away the cargo.

Some of it may have washed up on the shores or even more distant beaches, becoming a windfall for local residents. The rest probably sank to the bottom of the sea, far from the ship and its destination.

Kiona is a freelance science journalist and resident archaeology nerd at Ars Technica.

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Switching water sources improved hygiene of Pompeii’s public baths

Archaeology, hydraulics, Pompeii, Science / Mike M. / January 12, 2026

From well to aqueduct

The specific sites studied included the Stabian baths and related structures, which were built after 130 BCE and remained active until the aforementioned eruption; the Republican baths, built around the same period but abandoned around 30 BCE; the Forum baths, built after 80 BCE; and the aqueduct and its 14 water towers, constructed during the Augustan period.

There were variations in the chemical composition of the deposits, indicating the replacement of boilers for heating water and a renewal of water pipes in the infrastructure of Pompeii, particularly during the time period when modifications were being made to the Republican baths. The results for the Republican baths’ heated pools, for instance, showed clear contamination from human activity, specifically human waste (sweat, sebum, urine, or bathing oil), which suggests the water wasn’t changed regularly.

That is consistent with the limitations of supplying water at the time; the water-lifting machines could really only refresh the water about once a day. After the well shaft was enlarged, the carbonate deposits were much thinner, evidence of technological improvements that reduced sloshing as the water was raised. Once the aqueduct had been built, the bathing facilities were expanded with a likely corresponding improvement in hygiene.

On the whole, the aqueduct was a net good for Pompeii. “The changes in the water supply system of Pompeii revealed by carbonate deposits show an evolution from well-based to aqueduct-based supply with an increase in available water volume and in the scale of the bathing facilities, and likely an increase in hygiene,” the authors concluded. Granted, there was evidence of lead contamination in the water, particularly that supplied by the aqueduct, but carbonate deposits in the lead pipes seem to have reduced those levels over time.

The results may also help resolve a scientific debate about the origins of the aqueduct water: Was it water from the town of Avella that connected to the Aqua Augusta aqueduct or from the wells of Pompeii/springs of Vesuvius? Per the authors, the stable isotope composition of carbonate in the aqueduct is inconsistent with carbonate from volcanic rock sources, thus supporting the Avella source hypothesis.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2517276122 (About DOIs).

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We have a fossil closer to our split with Neanderthals and Denisovans

anthropology, Archaeology, Denisovans, hominins, homo erectus, human evolution, Neanderthals, paleoanthropology, Science / 9u50fv / January 7, 2026

The Casablanca fossils are about the same age as hominin fossils from Spain, which belong to a species called Homo antecessor. This species has been suggested to be a likely ancestor of Neanderthals and Denisovans. Overall, it looks like the fossils from Casablanca are a North African counterpart to Homo antecessor, with the Spanish hominins eventually leading to Neanderthals and the North African ones eventually leading to us.

Both groups share some features in their teeth and lower jaws, but they’re also different in some important ways. The teeth and chins in particular share some older features with Homo erectus. But the jaws have more newfangled features in the places where chewing muscles once attached to the bone—features that Neanderthals and our species share. On the other hand, the teeth are missing some other relatively recent features that would later help define Neanderthals (and were already beginning to show up in Homo antecessor).

Altogether, it looks like the Homo erectus populations and the Neanderthals and Denisovans had been separated for a while by the time the hominins at Grotte à Hominidés lived. But not that long. These hominins were probably part of a generation that was fairly close to that big split, near the base of our branch of the hominin family tree.

Here’s looking at you, hominin

Based on ancient DNA, it looks like Neanderthals and Denisovans started evolving into two separate species sometime between 470,000 and 430,000 years ago. Meanwhile, our branch would eventually become recognizable as us sometime around 300,000 years ago, or possibly earlier. At various times and places, all three species would eventually come back together to mingle and swap DNA, leaving traces of those interactions buried deep in each other’s genomes.

And 773,000 years after a predator dragged the remains of a few unfortunate hominins into its den in northern Africa, those hominins’ distant descendants would unearth the gnawed, broken bones and begin piecing together the story.

Nature, 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09914-y (About DOIs).

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Parasites plagued Roman soldiers at Hadrian’s Wall

Archaeology, archaeoparasitology, Hadrian's Wall, paleoparasitology, parasitology, Science / Beth Washington / December 20, 2025

It probably sucked to be a Roman soldier guarding Hadrian’s Wall circa the third century CE. W.H. Auden imagined the likely harsh conditions in his poem “Roman Wall Blues,” in which a soldier laments enduring wet wind and rain with “lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.” We can now add chronic nausea and bouts of diarrhea to his list of likely woes, thanks to parasitic infections, according to a new paper published in the journal Parasitology.

As previously reported, archaeologists can learn a great deal by studying the remains of intestinal parasites in ancient feces. For instance, in 2022, we reported on an analysis of soil samples collected from a stone toilet found within the ruins of a swanky 7th-century BCE villa just outside Jerusalem. That analysis revealed the presence of parasitic eggs from four different species: whipworm, beef/pork tapeworm, roundworm, and pinworm. (It’s the earliest record of roundworm and pinworm in ancient Israel.)

Later that same year, researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of British Columbia analyzed the residue on an ancient Roman ceramic pot excavated at the site of a 5th-century CE Roman villa at Gerace, a rural district in Sicily. They identified the eggs of intestinal parasitic worms commonly found in feces—strong evidence that the 1,500-year-old pot in question was most likely used as a chamber pot.

Other prior studies have compared fecal parasites found in hunter-gatherer and farming communities, revealing dramatic dietary changes, as well as shifts in settlement patterns and social organization coinciding with the rise of agriculture. This latest paper analyzes sediment collected from sewer drains at the Roman fort at Vindolanda, located just south of the defense fortification known as Hadrian’s Wall.

An antiquarian named William Camden recorded the existence of the ruins in a 1586 treatise. Over the next 200 years, many people visited the site, discovering a military bathhouse in 1702 and an altar in 1715. Another altar found in 1914 confirmed that the fort had been called Vindolanda. Serious archaeological excavation at the site began in the 1930s. The site is most famous for the so-called Vindolanda tablets, among the oldest surviving handwritten documents in the UK—and for the 2023 discovery of what appeared to be an ancient Roman dildo, although others argued the phallus-shaped artifact was more likely to be a drop spindle used for spinning yarn.

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This is the oldest evidence of people starting fires

Archaeology, firestarting, hominins, making fire, Neanderthals, Science / Mike M. / December 10, 2025

We didn’t start the fire. (Neanderthals did, at least 400,000 years ago.)

This artist’s impression shows what the fire at Barnham might have looked like. Credit: Craig Williams, The Trustees of the British Museum

Heat-reddened clay, fire-cracked stone, and fragments of pyrite mark where Neanderthals gathered around a campfire 400,000 years ago in what’s now Suffolk, England.

Based on chemical analysis of the sediment at the site, along with the telltale presence of pyrite, a mineral not naturally found nearby but very handy for striking sparks with flint, British Museum archaeologist Rob Davis and his colleagues say the Neanderthals probably started the fire themselves. That makes the abandoned English clay pit at Barnham the oldest evidence in the world that people (Neanderthal people, in this case) had learned to not only use fire, but also create it and control it.

A cozy Neanderthal campfire

Today, the Barnham site is part of an abandoned clay pit where workers first discovered stone tools in the early 1900s. But 400,000 years ago, it would have been a picturesque little spot at the edge of a stream-fed pond, surrounded by a mix of forest and grassland. There are no hominin fossils here, but archaeologists unearthed a Neanderthal skull about 100 kilometers to the south, so the hominins at Barnham were probably also Neanderthals. The place would have have offered a group of Neanderthals a relatively quiet, sheltered place to set up camp, according to Davis and his colleagues.

The cozy domesticity of that camp apparently centered on a hearth about the size of a small campfire. What’s left of that hearth today is a patch of clayey silt baked to a rusty red color by a series of fires; it stands out sharply against the yellowish clay that makes up the rest of the site. When ancient hearth fires heated that iron-rich yellow clay, it formed tiny grains of hematite that turned the baked clay a telltale red. Near the edge of the hearth, the archaeologists unearthed a handful of flint handaxes shattered by heat, alongside a scattering of other heat-cracked flint flakes.

And glinting against the dull clay lay two small pieces of a shiny sulfide mineral, aptly named pyrite—a key piece of Stone Age firestarting kits. Long before people struck flint and steel together to make fire, they struck flint and pyrite. Altogether, the evidence at Barnham suggests that Neanderthals were building and lighting their own fires 400,000 years ago.

Fire: the way of the future

Lighting a fire sounds like a simple thing, but once upon a time, it took cutting-edge technology. Working out how to start a fire on purpose—and then how to control its size and temperature—was the breakthrough that made nearly everything else possible: hafted stone weapons, cooked food, metalworking, and ultimately microprocessors and heavy-lift rockets.

“Something else that fire provides is additional time. The campfire becomes a social hub,” said Davis during a recent press conference. “Having fire… provides this kind of intense socialization time after dusk.” It may have been around fires like the one at Barnham, huddled together against the dark Pleistocene evening, that hominins began developing language, storytelling, and mythologies. And those things, Davis suggested, could have “played a critical part in maintaining social relationships over bigger distances or within more complex social groups.” Fire, in other words, helped make us more fully human and may have helped us connect in the same way that bonding over TV shows does today.

Archaeologists have worked for decades to try to pinpoint exactly when that breakthrough happened (although most now agree that it probably happened multiple times in different places). But evidence of fire is hard to find because it’s ephemeral by its very nature. The small patch of baked clay at Barnham hasn’t seen a fire in half a million years, but its light is still pushing back the shadows.

an artist's impression of a person's hands holding a piece of flint and a piece of pyrite, striking them together to make sparks — This was the first step toward the Internet. We could have turned back. Credit: Craig Williams, The Trustees of the British Museum

A million-year history of fire

Archaeologists suspect that the first hominins to use fire took advantage of nearby wildfires: Picture a Homo erectus lighting a branch on a nearby wildfire (which must have taken serious guts), then carefully carrying that torch back to camp to cook or make it easier to ward off predators for a night. Evidence of that sort of thing—using fire, but not necessarily being able to summon it on command—dates back more than a million years at sites like Koobi Fora in Kenya and Swartkrans in South Africa.

Learning to start a fire whenever you want one is harder, but it’s essential if you want to cook your food regularly without having to wait for the next lightning strike to spark a brushfire. It can also help maintain the careful control of temperature needed to make birch tar adhesives, “The advantage of fire-making lies in its predictability,” as Davis and his colleagues wrote in their paper. Knowing how to strike a light changed fire from an occasional luxury item to a staple of hominin life.

There are hints that Neanderthals in Europe were using fire by around 400,000 years ago, based on traces of long-cold hearths at sites in France, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and Ukraine. (The UK site, Beeches Pit, is just 10 kilometers southwest of Barnham.) But none of those sites offer evidence that Neanderthals were making fire rather than just taking advantage of its natural appearance. That kind of evidence doesn’t show up in the archaeological record until 50,000 years ago, when groups of Neanderthals in France used pyrite and bifaces (multi-purpose flint tools with two worked faces, sharp edges, and a surprisingly ergonomic shape) to light their own hearth-fires; marks left on the bifaces tell the tale.

Barnham pushes that date back dramatically, but there’s probably even older evidence out there. Davis and his colleagues say the Barnham Neanderthals probably didn’t invent firestarting; they likely brought the knowledge with them from mainland Europe.

“It’s certainly possible that Homo sapiens in Africa had the ability to make fire, but it can’t be proven yet from the evidence. We only have the evidence at this date from Barnham,” said Natural History Museum London anthropologist Chris Stringer, a coauthor of the study, in the press conference.

a person holds a tiny fragment of pyrite between a thumb and forefinger — The two pyrite fragments at the side may have broken off a larger nodule when it was struck against a piece of flint. Credit: Jordan Mansfield, Pathways to Ancient Britain Project.

Digging into the details

Several types of evidence at the site point to Neanderthals starting their own fire, not borrowing from a local wildfire. Ancient wildfires leave traces in sediment that can last hundreds of thousands of years or more—microscopic bits of charcoal and ash. But the area that’s now Suffolk wasn’t in the middle of wildfire season when the Barnham hearth was in use. Chemical evidence, like the presence of heavy hydrocarbon molecules in the sediment around the hearth, suggests this fire was homemade (wildfires usually scatter lighter ones across several square kilometers of landscape).

But the key piece of evidence at Barnham—the kind of clue that arson investigators probably dream about—is the pyrite. Pyrite isn’t a naturally common mineral in the area around Barnham; Neanderthals would have had to venture at least 12 kilometers southeast to find any. And although few hominins can resist the allure of picking up a shiny rock, it’s likely that these bits of pyrite had a more practical purpose.

To figure out what sort of fire might have produced the reddened clay, Davis and his colleagues did some experiments (which involved setting a bunch of fires atop clay taken from near the site). The archaeologists compared the baked clay from Barnham to the clay from beneath their experimental fires. The grain size and chemical makeup of the clay from the ancient Neanderthal hearth looked almost exactly like “12 or more heating events, each lasting 4 hours at temperatures of 400º Celsius or 600º Celsius,” as Davis and his colleagues wrote.

In other words, the hearth at Barnham hints at the rhythms of daily life for one group of Neanderthals 400,000 years ago. For starters, it seems that they kindled their campfire in the same spot over and over and left it burning for hours at a time. Flakes of flint nearby conjure up images of Neanderthals sitting around the fire, knapping stone tools as they told each other stories long into the night.

Nature, 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09855-6 About DOIs).

Kiona is a freelance science journalist and resident archaeology nerd at Ars Technica.

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Pompeii construction site confirms recipe for Roman concrete

Archaeology, materials science, Pompeii, Roman concrete, Science / Mike M. / December 9, 2025

Back in 2023, we reported on MIT scientists’ conclusion that the ancient Romans employed “hot mixing” with quicklime, among other strategies, to make their famous concrete, giving the material self-healing functionality. The only snag was that this didn’t match the recipe as described in historical texts. Now the same team is back with a fresh analysis of samples collected from a recently discovered site that confirms the Romans did indeed use hot mixing, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

As we’ve reported previously, like today’s Portland cement (a basic ingredient of modern concrete), ancient Roman concrete was basically a mix of a semi-liquid mortar and aggregate. Portland cement is typically made by heating limestone and clay (as well as sandstone, ash, chalk, and iron) in a kiln. The resulting clinker is then ground into a fine powder with just a touch of added gypsum to achieve a smooth, flat surface. But the aggregate used to make Roman concrete was made up of fist-sized pieces of stone or bricks.

In his treatise De architectura (circa 30 CE), the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius wrote about how to build concrete walls for funerary structures that could endure for a long time without falling into ruin. He recommended the walls be at least two feet thick, made of either “squared red stone or of brick or lava laid in courses.” The brick or volcanic rock aggregate should be bound with mortar composed of hydrated lime and porous fragments of glass and crystals from volcanic eruptions (known as volcanic tephra).

Admir Masic, an environmental engineer at MIT, has studied ancient Roman concrete for several years. For instance, in 2019, Masic helped pioneer a new set of tools for analyzing Roman concrete samples from Privernum at multiple length scales—notably, Raman spectroscopy for chemical profiling and multi-detector energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) for phase mapping the material. Masic was also a co-author of a 2021 study analyzing samples of the ancient concrete used to build a 2,000-year-old mausoleum along the Appian Way in Rome known as the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, a noblewoman who lived in the first century CE.

And in 2023, Masic’s group analyzed samples taken from the concrete walls of the Privernum, focusing on strange white mineral chunks known as “lime clasts,” which others had largely dismissed as resulting from subpar raw materials or poor mixing. Masic et al. concluded that was not the case. Rather, the Romans deliberately employed “hot mixing” with quicklime that gave the material self-healing functionality. When cracks begin to form in the concrete, they are more likely to move through the lime clasts. The clasts can then react with water, producing a solution saturated with calcium. That solution can either recrystallize as calcium carbonate to fill the cracks or react with the pozzolanic components to strengthen the composite material.

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3D model shows small clans created Easter Island statues

Archaeology, easter island, Science / DJ Henderson / December 2, 2025

Credit: ArcGIS

Easter Island is famous for its giant monumental statues, called moai, built some 800 years ago. The volcanic rock used for the moai came from a quarry site called Rano Raraku. Archaeologists have created a high-resolution interactive 3D model of the quarry site to learn more about the processes used to create the moai. (You can explore the full interactive model here.) According to a paper published in the journal PLoS ONE, the model shows that there were numerous independent groups, probably family clans, that created the moai, rather than a centralized management system.

“You can see things that you couldn’t actually see on the ground. You can see tops and sides and all kinds of areas that just would never be able to walk to,” said co-author Carl Lipo of Binghamton University. “We can say, ‘Here, go look at it.’ If you want to see the different kinds of carving, fly around and see stuff there. We’re documenting something that really has needed to be documented, but in a way that’s really comprehensive and shareable.”

Lipo is one of the foremost experts on the Easter Island moai. In October, we reported on Lipo’s experimental confirmation—based on 3D modeling of the physics and new field tests to re-create that motion—that Easter Island’s people transported the statues in a vertical position, with workers using ropes to essentially “walk” the moai onto their platforms. To explain the presence of so many moai, the assumption has been that the island was once home to tens of thousands of people.

Lipo’s latest field trials showed that the “walking” method can be accomplished with far fewer workers: 18 people, four on each lateral rope and 10 on a rear rope, to achieve the side-to-side walking motion. They were efficient enough in coordinating their efforts to move the statue forward 100 meters in just 40 minutes. That’s because the method operates on basic pendulum dynamics, which minimizes friction between the base and the ground. It’s also a technique that exploits the gradual build-up of amplitude, suggesting a sophisticated understanding of resonance principles.

3D model shows small clans created Easter Island statues Read More »