Topic
The study of past human life through excavation and analysis of material remains such as artifacts, structures, and sites.
Kelly Graf and co-authors report a 13,800-year-old camp in interior Alaska holding the oldest known needles in the Western Hemisphere. Stone tools from the camp resemble Siberian types, a link between eastern Beringia and northeast Asia.
Reality
Researchers report that pollen in White Sands rock shows conifers and a lake 24,200 years ago giving way to oak and sagebrush in two millennia. The authors say the people who left the footprints kept using the area as it warmed.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Cambridge archaeologists attribute a 15 mm hole in the Shanidar A Neanderthal's shoulder blade to a wooden spear about 75,000 years ago. Whether the thrust was a hunting accident or violence between people cannot be known, the authors write.
Perspective Coverage
12 publishersReality
Researchers using high-precision radiocarbon dating at two sites say Waihemo's diet had shifted away from moa and seals by about 1410. They report that some economic change in early Māori society began earlier than previously thought.
Reality
Researchers found French ancestry in all 45 people sequenced from Montreal's Notre-Dame Cemetery, with no recent Indigenous or African admixture. It bears on Quebec family stories of Indigenous ancestry, but it describes one small cemetery sample.
Reality
Oxford-led excavators at Great Zimbabwe have found jade-green Longquan celadon, a Chinese pottery first made around A.D. 950. Chirikure, who leads the dig, says the sherds are scarce and perhaps elite goods. The find establishes contact. Its scale is unknown.
Reality
Michael Legge's team identified at least 17 people in jumbled bones from Highsted and dated the cemetery's use past the Roman invasion. Its possible rank as third-largest of its type rests on about 26 burials recorded in 1955, a count that matches 20 skeletons plus six possible cremations.
Reality
Turkish researchers report in Gephyra that a pillar found in 2024 at Kibyra carries replies from a 56-answer knucklebone oracle. Its verses sit closest to the Kremna copy, with slips the authors put down to stonemasons or local editing.
Reality
Archaeologists in Russia's Kuban region report an elite Maeotian warrior grave dated to the early first century B.C. by two gold coins. Both show Alexander the Great, yet they were struck under Mithridates Eupator, born 188 years after Alexander died.
Reality
Humans were catching tuna in East Timor about 44,000 years ago, the oldest definitive evidence in a review drawing on 18 researchers. The authors set it beside a global industry worth around US$40 billion a year, using bones, art and written accounts.
Reality
Hannah Farrell's team at Haifa University used a 700,000-year-old straight-tusked elephant molar to reconstruct wetland and oak woodland in northern Israel. The tooth covers a few years of one animal's life at one site, so the evidence fits a wet stopover on the route out of Africa.
Reality
A study co-authored at the University of Latvia finds sharp-force wounds on three of the six people in a ninth-century grave. A co-author says a Viking raid cannot be proved, though the date keeps it possible.
Reality
Jesse Tune and Shane Miller's study of some 500 Tennessee Valley spear points finds Clovis hunters resharpened them more than their Cumberland successors. The pair read that thrift as caution by newcomers who did not yet know where to find good stone.
Reality
A Sheffield Hallam and Curtin team paired mineral grain dating with simulations of last-glaciation ice sheets. The models let ice carry the six-tonne sandstone to the North Sea and leave the rest of the 700 km to people.
Reality
A reanalysis of 18 mammoth ivory figurines dug up in northern Ukraine between 1908 and 1913 finds their engraved lines following structures inside the tusk. Mizyn is so far the only site where the pattern has been reported.
Reality
Greece's culture ministry reports a fourth-century B.C. complex at Mieza with two banquet halls, a stadium and a lecture hall of stone desks, while the name of the teacher who worked there still comes from Plutarch.
Reality
Florida Museum researchers compared 58 plain and decorated sherds from Tampa Bay and report in American Antiquity that migrant artisans made the decorated vessels on the coast, one of three explanations archaeologists had weighed for a century.
Reality
Maamoun Abdulkarim ran Syria's antiquities directorate when the Deir ez-Zor Museum was emptied in the summers of 2014 and 2015, and he has now published his own account of the operation in a curatorship journal.
Reality
The 2023 excavation of a ridge in northwestern Morocco dated a multiphase ditch, rampart and wall to about 4,000 to 3,500 years ago, the earliest confirmed defensive construction in North Africa outside Egypt.
Reality
Nothing grows in the dark at Cloggs Cave, so the half-burnt silica plant microfossils in its ash layers came in with people. The dated layers show the same act being repeated for at least 2,800 years.
Reality