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Scientists discover the earliest ancestral human face of Western Europe

A team of scientists led by IPHES-CERCA, a transdisciplinary research institution in Tarragona, Spain, has assigned an ancestral human (hominin) midface fossil fragment discovered at the Sima del Elefante site in the Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain, to a new hominin species designated as Homo aff. erectus. Dated to between 1.4 million and 1.1 million years ago, the fossil (ATE7-1) was initially discovered in 2022. According to the research study* authors, “this fossil (ATE7-1) represents the earliest human face of Western Europe identified thus far”. The species, according to the study authors, is more primitive than the famous Homo antecessor fossil found at the neighboring Gran Dolina site, also in the Sierra de Atapuerca, which has been dated to between 900,000 and 800,000 years ago. 

The Sima del Elefante is an ancient Cretaceous limestone sinkhole in the Atapuerca mountain range. Hominin fossils have been discovered in the sinkhole dating back to more than 1.22 million years. The stratigraphy of the sinkhole was exposed in the 19th century as a result of the construction of a railway line. 

Excavation of the site began in 1992, becoming systematic in 1996. In addition to the hominin remains, herbivore fossils that showed modification by stone tools, as well as a hundred Oldowan tools, considered among the earliest hominin stone tool industries, were found.

In 2007, excavations at level TE9c yielded a tooth and a hominin mandible with seven teeth still in place. Excavations in 2008 then yielded a hominin phalanx a proximal phalanx of the left little finger of an individual determined to be about 16 years old. And finally, in 2022, excavations at level TE-7 of the site led to the discovery of the subject partial mid-face, or upper jaw, dated to 1.4 million years ago.

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Original fossil (ATE7-1) of the midface of a hominin assigned to Homo aff. erectus recovered at level TE7 of the Sima del Elefante (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos). Credit: Maria D. Guillén / IPHES-CERCA. Maria D. Guillén / IPHES-CERCA.

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Original fossil (ATE7-1) alongside the mirrored right side by means of virtual 3D imaging techniques of the face of a hominin assigned to Homo aff. erectus found in level the TE7 of Sima del Elefante site. Credit: Maria D. Guillén / IPHES-CERCA / Elena Santos / CENIEH. Maria D. Guillén / IPHES-CERCA / Elena Santos / CENIEH.

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Archaeological excavation work at level TE7 of the Sima del Elefante (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos). Maria D. Guillén / IPHES-CERCA.

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General view of the archaeological excavation work at the Sima del Elefante site (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos). Maria D. Guillén / IPHES-CERCA.
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*Huguet, R., Rodríguez-Álvarez, X.P., Martinón-Torres, M. et al. The earliest human face of Western Europe. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08681-0

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What Was It Like for Our Sapiens Ancestors to Meet and Mix With Cousin Species?

Deborah Barsky is a writing fellow for the Human Bridges, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, and an associate professor at the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, with the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). She is the author of Human Prehistory: Exploring the Past to Understand the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Until now, at least 14 different species have been assigned to the genus Homo since it emerged in Ethiopia some 2.8 million years ago revealing branching evolutionary stories of survival, intermixing, and extinctions. Archaeology is increasingly allowing us to glimpse into one of those epochs, from 50,000 to 35,000 years ago—the period of transition between the Middle and the Upper Paleolithic eras when modern humans emerged as the last representative of our genus on the planet.

In 2017, new finds from the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco were published, indicating that our species—H. sapiens—appeared on the scene as early as 300,000 years ago. Spreading into Eurasia l00,000 years later, these early anatomically modern humans rubbed shoulders with Neandertals and Denisovans, and may also have had encounters with five other distinct hominin populations that have only very recently been identified, including H. floresiensis, H. luzonensis, H. longi, and H. juluensis in Asia and Nesher Ramla Homo in the Levant.

Given what we know from historical events that chronicle human population exchanges through time, many archeologists question whether the “disappearances” of these other human lineages might have had anything to do with their coming into contact with modern humans.

Taking an example of human interactions that took place more than half a millennium ago helps us to understand how these interactions can deeply impact the human condition on multiple levels, many of which would be incomprehensible in the prehistoric archeological record without written documents.

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The people of Western Europe living in hierarchized social configurations had reached a stage of technological readiness that led them to innovate ways to sustain life over extended periods of seafaring. As a result, they came into contact with the great civilizations established in the precolonial Americas over hundreds of generations. Before this encounter, the millions of people who lived in the Americas were oblivious to the existence of Europeans who would build powerful empires on the ruins of their treasured territorial and cultural heritage.

The consequences of the ensuing exchanges were both cataclysmic and transformative. Notwithstanding their immeasurable human impact, this contact altered the course of animal demography and deeply affected the global distribution of countless species of plants and trees that the colonizing populations freely displaced and exploited to enrich their own countries. Against the backdrop of this extraordinary scenario was the unprecedented spread of bacterial, viral, and fungal assemblages that indelibly modified evolutionary systems established over millennia—decimating an estimated 90 percent of Indigenous populations in their wake soon after the consolidation of colonization.

While it is difficult for us to conceive the magnitude of global turbulence generated after this event, we know that it led to a new world order that used human slavery to build systems of unidirectional wealth distribution whose ramifications still resound today.

Written records provide information about this period of global turmoil that help us to build our understanding of complex events that occurred in the past. Thirty thousand years from now, how will the multilevel repercussions of this period of human history be reflected in the archeological record?

Unlike the chaotic shifts that rocked the world at the cusp of the European Renaissance, archeologists studying the remote past cannot rely on written accounts of how ancient population interactions played out. In retrospect, it should be pointed out that the decimation of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas involved exchanges among a single human species, whereas the transition from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic involved human forms with distinct or even mosaic genetic, anatomic and sociocultural traits, with only one species remaining by around 35,000 years ago.

In conformity with the doctrines of their time, Europeans justified their actions by evoking cultural and racial differences that they believed made them superior to the populations they subjugated, while uneven levels of technological hegemony allowed them to consolidate domination.

Scientific results emanating from ancient genomics are shedding light on these paleo-interactions and painting a new picture of how humanity evolved, migrated, adapted, and reproduced during this key period of prehistory. Each individual’s genetic code is transcribed in the sequence of the base pairs composing the double-stranded helix of the DNA molecule carrying biological information passed on by reproduction. Discrete sections of a DNA strand are composed of the genes that define phenotypic (observable) and genotypic (hidden) traits defining a population. Throughout the world today, the human genetic code differs between individuals by only around 0.1 percent.

Under the right conditions, genetic data retrieved from ancient human fossils can be a powerful tool to study similarities and differences separating human lineages and is complementary to classical paleontological methods like Linnaean taxonomy and morphometric determination. Recent reconstructions of the genomic histories of fossil H. sapiens, Neandertals, and the Denisovans confirm not only that interspecific breeding took place but also that it produced fertile offspring, suggesting biological mixing played a role in the outcome of the modern human condition.

Having successfully occupied a huge territorial range stretching from the Levant to Western Europe and northward into Siberia for thousands of generations, our cousin species H. neanderthalensis is at the center of the enigma. The paleo-genetic data obtained from Neandertal fossils indicates a complex scenario with physical encounters taking place with modern humans between 65,000 and 47,000 years ago. Meanwhile, a Neandertal genetic inheritance of between 1 and 4 percent has been documented in present-day non-African populations, and gene flow from early modern humans to some Neandertals also took place as early as 100,000 years ago.

Analyzing genetic records from early modern humans living in Siberia and Central Europe 45,000-35,000 years ago revealed comparatively higher and relatively recent admixtures of Neandertal DNA, with these individuals believed to have contributed little to the gene pool of later European populations. In some cases, fossil human remains and their genomic signatures have even been found to display a mosaic of archaic and derived features, leading some paleoanthropologists to consider the possibility that Neandertals did not “disappear,” but rather, they were assimilated into a modern human clade developing in Eurasia at the time.

This raises the possibility of an ancestral population of anatomically modern humans that migrated out of Africa and subsequently underwent speciation as they spread into the ecologically diverse regions of Eurasia, where they evolved locally into diverse groups that occasionally interbred with one another, producing fertile offspring. From the Darwinian viewpoint, the decrease in Neandertal DNA genetic sequences shows that they were not selected in the natural evolutionary process that gave way to modern humans.

To explore this puzzling scenario, some archeologists turn to the cultural record left behind by these ancient human groups. Specific methods applied to study human-made artifacts are used to link them to predefined stages of techno-social evolution traditionally equated with distinct cultural complexes. Since the early 20th century, prehistorians have ascribed these cultural entities to different types of humans. But the apparent inter-specific mixing evidenced by the genetic data and the emergence of H. sapiens far earlier than previously thought have contributed to changing this traditional human-culture equation.

Once conveyed as brutish and primitive, Neandertals were alleged to have been incapable of matching the relatively “advanced” esthetic and technological capacities of their modern human counterparts. But this premise has also changed with new data demonstrating that Neandertals lived in socially advanced groups, that they appear to have practiced some form of art and body ornamentation, and that they intentionally buried their dead, suggesting powerful symbolic and even ritual practices.

So what do the artifacts tell us about the transitional period that saw the replacement of H. neanderthalensis by H. sapiensA number of archeological sites preserve a record of this transitional phase, with Middle Paleolithic layers yielding the so-called Mousterian artifacts made from prepared stone cores attributed to Neandertals, overlain by strata containing Upper Paleolithic stone blades or bladelets attributed to H. sapiens. The blade industries attributed to modern humans are also associated with finely crafted bone, ivory, and antler artifacts, shell beads, ochre, and diverse forms of figurative art.

Using detailed technological and typological criteria, archeologists further subdivide these cultural complexes, refining the cultural groupings to reconstruct a chrono-cultural framework reflecting human population turnover in time and space. Because only one species of Homo lived during the Upper Paleolithic (after around 35,000 years ago), changes observed in the tool kits are thought to reflect different traditions, rather than different hominins. These shifts are attributed to multiple factors, including cultural transmission through inter-populational contact. However, since multiple species of Homo were present during the Middle Paleolithic, cultural change is often thought to signal the disappearance of one lineage and its replacement by another.

This begs the question: Do we observe a gradual or an abrupt transition from one phase to the next?

If modern humans and Neandertals were interbreeding, then we might assume that they could also have exchanged cultural and technological know-how. This means that we might anticipate finding some blending of cultural evidence, just as we might expect to find hominin fossils with intermediate anatomical traits.

Still, in most cases, the different cultural complexes defined for the Upper Paleolithic—generally beginning with the Early or Proto-Aurignacian cultures—appear sequentially above the Middle Paleolithic deposits, without intermixing of technological, typological, or stylistic features. Paradoxically, what we now know to have been a long period of contact between Neandertals and modern humans is not clearly reflected in the cultural materials found in the archeological record.

But there are some intriguing exceptions. In Western and Central Europe, the Near East, and Siberia, where these intra-specific exchanges are being validated by paleo-genomics and comparative anatomy in several archeological sites, the “intermediary” cultural scenarios are also becoming clearer. In some cases, transitional assemblages with elements inherited from the Middle Paleolithic combine with tools conveying innovative features commonly attributed to the Upper Paleolithic.

For now, there is little consensus about which hominin was responsible for making these “transitional” took kits in the timeframe that witnessed the disappearance or assimilation of the Neandertals and resulted in the ultimate domination of H. sapiens. Further research is needed to clarify humanity’s complex evolutionary history that—in the 3 million years since the emergence of Homo—has only been condensed into a single representative species since around 35,000 years ago.

When we compare this prehistoric chronicle to a transformative historical event for which we have a rich body of written information, we can see how huge revolutions can take place swiftly, almost imperceptibly, on the geological time scale. As archeologists discover more about the transitions in time that led us to where we are today, the subtleties of the complex biocultural mixing nascent to the contemporary globalization of our species are being revealed.

Cover Image, Top Left: ArtSpark, Pixabay

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This article was produced by Human Bridges.

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First burials: Neanderthal and Homo sapiens interactions in the Mid-Middle Palaeolithic Levant

The Hebrew University of JerusalemA new discovery at Tinshemet Cave in central Israel is reshaping our understanding of human interactions during the Middle Palaeolithic (MP) period in the Near East. The cave, remarkable for its wealth of archaeological and anthropological findings, has revealed several human burials—the first mid-MP burials unearthed in over fifty years.

This research*, published in Nature Human Behaviour, marks the first publication on Tinshemet Cave and presents compelling evidence that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in the region not only coexisted but also shared aspects of daily life, technology, and burial customs.These findings underscore the complexity of their interactions and hint at a more intertwined relationship than previously assumed.

The excavation of Tinshemet Cave, led by Prof. Yossi Zaidner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Prof. Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University, and Dr. Marion Prévost of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has been ongoing since 2017. A primary goal of the research team is to determine the nature of Homo sapiens–Neanderthal relationships in the mid-Middle Palaeolithic Levant. Were they rivals competing for resources, peaceful neighbors, or even collaborators?

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By integrating data from four key fields—stone tool production, hunting strategies, symbolic behavior, and social complexity—the study argues that different human groups, including Neanderthals, pre-Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens, engaged in meaningful interactions. These exchanges facilitated knowledge transmission and led to the gradual cultural homogenization of populations. The research suggests that these interactions spurred social complexity and behavioral innovations. For instance, formal burial customs began to appear around 110,000 years ago in Israel for the first time worldwide, likely as a result of intensified social interactions. A striking discovery at Tinshemet Cave is the extensive use of mineral pigments, particularly ochre, which may have been used for body decoration. This practice could have served to define social identities and distinctions among groups.

The clustering of human burials at Tinshemet Cave raises intriguing questions about its role in MP society. Could the site have functioned as a dedicated burial ground or even a cemetery? If so, this would suggest the presence of shared rituals and strong communal bonds. The placement of significant artifacts—such as stone tools, animal bones, and ochre chunks—within the burial pits may further indicate early beliefs in the afterlife.

Prof. Zaidner describes Israel as a “melting pot” where different human groups met, interacted, and evolved together. “Our data show that human connections and population interactions have been fundamental in driving cultural and technological innovations throughout history,” he explains.

Dr. Prévost highlights the unique geographic position of the region at the crossroads of human dispersals. “During the mid-MP, climatic improvements increased the region’s carrying capacity, leading to demographic expansion and intensified contact between different Homo taxa.”

Prof. Hershkovitz adds that the interconnectedness of lifestyles among various human groups in the Levant suggests deep relationships and shared adaptation strategies. “These findings paint a picture of dynamic interactions shaped by both cooperation and competition.”

The discoveries at Tinshemet Cave offer a fascinating glimpse into the social structures, symbolic behaviors, and daily lives of early human groups. They reveal a period of profound demographic and cultural transformations, shedding new light on the complex web of interactions that shaped our ancestors’ world. As excavations continue, Tinshemet Cave promises to provide even deeper insights into the origins of human society.

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Above and below: Tinshemet cave during the excavations. Yossi Zaidner

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Yossi Zaidner excavating human 110 thousand years old human skull and associated artifacts. Boaz Langford

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Lithic artefact from Tinshemet Cave made using technology shared by Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. Marion Prévost

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Ochre. Tinshemet Cave provides evidence for the extensive use of ochre (mineral pigments), which may have been used for body decoration. Yossi Zaidner

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Article Source: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem news release.

Advanced radiocarbon dating pins down the chronology of the Lapedo Child

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—Using advanced radiocarbon dating techniques, researchers have arrived at a new date for the life of the Lapedo Child, one of the most famous prehistoric human remains, and one who displays a mixture of modern human and Neanderthal features. The experiments provide one of the most accurate estimates yet of the child’s chronology, indicating that he or she lived from around 27,780 to 28,850 years ago. “The direct date for the Lapedo Child demonstrates that this compound-specific radiocarbon dating method can also be applied to poorly preserved samples that would otherwise fail routine pretreatment methods,” Bethan Linscott and colleagues write*. The Lapedo Child was discovered by chance in 1998 when several students stumbled upon a rock shelter at the base of a cliff in the Lapedo Valley in central Portugal. Salvage work revealed a nearly intact skeleton of a four-to-five-year-old child. However, scientists still hadn’t calculated a reliable radiocarbon date for the skeleton, despite four previous attempts. Here, Linscott et al. turned to a new method called hydroxyproline dating, which targets specific amino acids and can remove more contaminants than standard dating methods. They applied this technique to a sample of the Lapedo Child’s right radius and arrived at a new estimate of 27,780 to 28,850 years ago. The team also dated other bone samples from the burial environment, including some red deer bones, rabbit remains, and a horse mandible. Linscott et al. speculate that the technique could prove useful at other culturally important Paleolithic human remain sites, including the Mladeč Caves in the Czech Republic and Saint-Césaire in France.

How Mesopotamia’s Urban and Industrial Revolution Started Politics as We Know It Today

Michael Hudson is an American economist, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He is a former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator, and journalist. You can read more of Hudson’s economic history on the Observatory.

Archaeologist and scholar Giorgio Buccellati’s book At the Origins of Politics describes how Mesopotamia’s urban revolution in the late fourth millennium BC shaped a new mentality. The segmentation and specialization of industrial production required written recordkeeping, standardization of weights and measures, and surveying and allocation of land planning. This inherent logic of handicraft production and its related organization of trade and market exchange, especially with the palace and temple institutions, led to new forms of social interaction, with the state and its laws and religion consolidating the new managerial hierarchies.

I met Buccellati in 1994 at the first of what would become a decade-long series of Harvard-based colloquia to compile an economic history of the Bronze Age Near Eastern origins of money and interest, land tenure, and its public obligations. Since these innovations were shaped largely by relations with the temples and palaces, our group started by focusing on just what it meant to be public or private.

It was fairly clear what “privatization” meant, but calling the palace or temples “public” was problematic. Royal price schedules for grain, silver, and other key commodities applied only to transactions with these large institutions, which were corporately distinct from the rest of the economy where prices were free to vary. Hammurabi’s laws focused on the relations between the palatial sector and the family-based economy on the land, which followed its own common law tradition for wergild-like personal offenses and other legal problems not involving the palace. How far beyond the palace did the state extend?

Buccellati’s paper focused on a broader philosophical idea of “public” as referring to the overall system of social and economic organization: “The dichotomy between public and private is coterminous with the origin of the city.”1 As he points out in At the Origins of Politics: “The increased size of the settlements created a critical mass, whereby face-to-face association no longer was possible among each member of the social group.” The relationship was political. “On the etymological level, the terms ‘urbanism’ and ‘politics’ are equivalent, given that they both derive from the word for ‘city’ in Latin and Greek respectively.” His term “state-city” emphasizes the overall political and administrative context.

He views industrialization as the economic dimension of the urban revolution that occurred in the late fourth millennium BC. The scale and social complexity of mining (or trading for metal) and metallurgy, beer-making, and weaving involved increasingly impersonal relationships as industrial organizations created products beyond the ability of individuals to make by themselves. The evolution was from direct personal contact to being part of a long, specialized chain.

Describing this takeoff as the first Axial Age, Buccellati explains how economic and social relations had been transformed over the 50,000-year evolution from small Paleolithic groups to urban industrial production, trade, and property relations. The technology and administration of production transformed the character of labor and what Buccellati calls para-perceptual thought. The moral principles of mutual aid, group solidarity, protection of the needy, and basic rights to means of self-support were retained from pre-urban practice but were administered on the state level.

“The state was never able to eliminate or even ignore the people… political ideology became a way for the leadership to justify itself in front of the base,” bolstered by religious attitudes to popularize an “Ideology of Control… the ideology of command, of leadership not necessarily based on coercive means.” Even in the face of “ever-increasing gaps in prestige and economic ability,” the rhetoric of kingship promoted “a sense of solidarity that transcends the limit of reciprocal face-to-face recognition.”

For the king, the aim was to make “submission not just tolerable but actually desirable.” That enabled Mesopotamian rule to be personal and indeed dynastic. “The king was not just the most powerful private individual; he embodied a distinct organism.” Kings were described as serving heaven, as reflected in Hammurapi’s stele depicting him presenting his laws to the god of justice, Shamash (or in some interpretations, receiving them from Shamash).

“The private model was thus superimposed from scratch on the public one,” merging the state and religion as every new king pointed to his ancestors as if this meant continuity of the law. The principle of kings being hereditary was accepted “without ever being formulated in theoretical terms.”

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From Living in a State of Nature to a Stratified Managerial Order

Buccellati describes production as evolving from interpersonal and small scale to institutional and large scale. He describes how Paleolithic hunters and gatherers met their needs by using what they found in nature. They napped flints to make spear points and cutting tools, and wove plant fibers to make clothing, baskets, and other artifacts, but these materials were as they found them. And personal wealth took the form of shells or other objects found in nature. However, the increasing complexity of industrial organization transformed the character of producers in that they ceased to have face-to-face relations with the users of the objects they made. Products evolved increasingly beyond objects found in nature, and also beyond the ability of single individuals to make them as they required chains of transformation via metallurgy and manufacturing.

Although Buccellati does not focus on land tenure, money, and credit in this volume, his analytic schema of the transition from “nature” to man-made institutional structures suggests how land and credit relations evolved along similar lines, from informal and spontaneous to formal and standardized. If there was an archaic relationship with the land, it was for an Indigenous tribe to claim territory as belonging to itself for hunting and gathering and for ceremonial or religious functions.

Most exchange was domestic, taking the form of reciprocal gifts, often of the same food types simply as a means of binding groups together in the spirit of mutual aid. But artifacts were traded among Indigenous communities already in the Ice Age, from one tribal group to another, sometimes passed along over long distances.

Gathering places for such exchange existed already in the Ice Age, often at river crossings or natural meeting points. These would have been seasonal sites, with chieftains responsible for keeping the lunisolar calendar to time when to travel to such spots. If anything, such gathering places were the opposite of the later city that Buccellati describes. The idea was to prevent any one group from dominating others or restricting territorial control. The result was akin to the amphictyonic centers of classical antiquity, neutral zones set aside from political cities and rivalries, with careful equality of participants as a condition for amicable relations.

Deities often were trees, woods, or natural rock formations such as those that survived in Germanic religion into the first millennium of our era, and Japan’s Shinto religion. Lunar and solar deities were part of an astronomical cosmology reflecting the rhythms of nature. By the Bronze Age, gods took on the role of patrons of social authority and justice as urbanization transformed the natural environment.

Technology enabled the production of new shapes and “artifacts that have no analogy in nature.” Mud bricks became standardized to build walls. “Stone is no longer seen as an adaptation of pre-existing forms” but was shaped to produce new building structures. Fire played an important role in controlling the environment, not only to cook food but also to bake mud bricks and harden ceramics, and to refine metal from ores and make alloys such as bronze to produce tools, weapons, and other implements. The potter’s wheel and spindles for weaving were developed, and a managerial class came into being as manufacturing such products required increasingly complex organization, from producers and traders to armies.

The Neolithic agricultural revolution saw the standardization of land, allotted to community members in lots sufficient to support their families, with proportional obligations attached—obliging their holders to serve in the army and provide seasonal corvée labor on communal building projects.

These obligations were what defined land tenure rights. That created a strict relationship with the emerging urban centers that transformed “the village as it existed in prehistory… in the sense of autonomous villages that found an end in themselves. … Agricultural or manufactured production did not have as its end point the village, but rather and especially the urban markets.” Rural villages became part of the city, and local conflicts were settled by traveling urban judges.

Monetization of Exchange Between the Rural and Urban Centers

Money evolved as part of the valuation dimension of exchange. Anthropologists studying surviving Indigenous communities have found that artifacts typically are valued for their rarity or lineage of ownership. In archaic times such objects were often buried with their wearers, having become part of their personal identity. In time, they took a proto-monetary signification of esteem. But it was in southern Mesopotamia that money became formalized as a measure of valuation, simultaneously for domestic agrarian and industrial exchange—mainly for grain and wool—and for foreign trade. In both cases, the palace and temples played a key role. A standardized measure of value was needed for the economy’s own industrial and institutional functioning, not merely for personal decoration and status.

Foreign trade was necessary to obtain raw materials not found in the region’s river-deposited soil. Copper and tin were the key metals that were needed, the alloy of which gave its name to the Bronze Age (3500-1200 BC), but silver was adopted as the main measure of value for palace transactions and those of entrepreneurs, presumably because of its role in religious symbolism. Silver and other commodities were obtained by a mercantile class of entrepreneurs, whose major customers were the palace and temples, which also supplied most of the textiles being exported.

The largest categories of debts and fiscal obligations were inter-sectoral, owed by citizens on the land and mercantile entrepreneurs to the palace sector and its temples. The seasonal character of agriculture made credit necessary to bridge the gap between planting and harvesting, to be paid on the threshing floor when the crop was in. Grain served as the main domestic agrarian measure of value and the medium for paying agrarian debts.

The palace and temples integrated their economic accounts by setting the silver mina and shekel that denominated the value of commodities obtained in foreign trade (and consignments of what was exchanged for them) as equal to corresponding measures of grain, while dividing the relevant measures into 60ths to facilitate the allocation of food and raw materials based on the 30-day administrative month used by the large institutions.

The resulting monetary system of account-keeping for credit and fiscal collection was part of a broader economic context in which standardized weights and measures were used to quantify and calculate the various magnitudes of the inputs required by the large institutions for producing commodities in their workshops, along with the amounts of the charges, fees, and rents payable to the institutions and fiscal collectors.

The surplus grain rent paid to the large institutions supported dependent labor in the weaving and handicraft workshops. Commodities no longer were made by individual craftpersons known to the users, but by many, whose identities were institutional and hence collective and impersonal as far as the buyers or users were concerned. The workforce consisted largely of war widows and orphans, and also slaves captured from the mountains surrounding Mesopotamia. (A typical word for slave was “mountain girl.”)

The textiles woven by this labor were consigned to merchants to act as intermediaries between the large institutions or the growing class of private estate holders and foreign purchasers. Interest charges (usually equal to the original loan value for consignments of five years) served as a means for consigners and backers to obtain their share of the gain that merchants were expected to make on their trade.

Bucellati shows how the urban revolution’s “evolutionary process in motion” to transform society and with it “the very nature of human existence.” The development of writing, for instance, had a deep effect in transforming thought processes, much as the creation of languages had served to “externalize thought.” It enabled the communication of ideas to others without having to rely on memory.

Originally used by the eighth millennium BC to oversee and quantify trade and exchange transactions, it came to be used for accounting and credit, and increasingly to preserve, arrange and order thoughts, public announcements, treaties, poetry, and laws. The written word became a new medium for thought. Buccellati describes this “reification of thought” as part of the “removal from nature.” That was part of the evolving uniformity that spread from the production of commodities to shape the overall social order.

Debt Strains Lead Rulers to Protect Their Economies From Polarizing

Industry and entrepreneurial foreign trade concentrated control and wealth in the hands of managers and “big men.” Their economic gains caused a wealthy class to emerge, initially within the large institutions, with credit being used to pry labor away from palace control. Creditor claims on indebted cultivators accumulated, largely at the institutional level of landholders, merchant-creditors, and also ale-women, whose customers ran up tabs for their beer, to be settled at “payday” on the threshing floor when crops were harvested.

It was inevitable that strains would develop as a result of the rising role of credit and debt relations, especially in times of flooding or crop failure. As rent and other payment arrears and interest charges mounted up, private lending (often by royal or temple officials acting on their own account) became the major initial way to obtain the labor of debtors, by requiring them to work off their debts. That prevented cultivators from performing the stipulated corvée and military service that they owed in exchange for their land tenure rights.

The result was a threefold conflict: first, creditors against debtors; second, creditors against the palace over the appropriation of labor via debt bondage; and third, the assertion of creditor power against traditional communal moral ideas of equity and mutual aid. Archaic communities traditionally sought to minimize economic inequality, perceiving much personal wealth as being achieved by exploiting others, above all by indebting them. By the third millennium, indebted cultivators faced the threat of being disenfranchised, losing their personal freedom and self-support land through foreclosure.

As Buccellati observed in our 1994 colloquium royal protection of homesteaders, canceling the overgrowth of personal debt resulted “more from a concern for the public domain than as a phenomenon of privatization.” Rulers from the third millennium BC onward protected palace claims on the labor of their citizens from being disrupted by debt strains of the type to which subsequent Western civilization has succumbed. Sumerian rulers made sure that these strains would not be permanent because that would have been at the expense of the palace’s own requirements for corvée and military service from agrarian debtors.

Buccellati pertinently notes that three main considerations shaped Near Eastern public laws: “the concept of rules, the sense of justice, [and] the decisive moments in resolving conflict.” Hammurapi’s “code” was simply a collection of judgments, but his andurarum proclamations were enforced by the courts to cancel personal debts (but not mercantile debts), liberate bondservants (but not slaves), and redistribute self-support land (but not townhouses) that had been forfeited to creditors or sold under economic duress. These Clean Slates were the most basic royal administrative acts of Mesopotamian rulers from Sumerian times onward. They were the moral pillar of the state.

The Mesopotamian State Solved the Debt Problem That Western Civilization Has Not

Buccellati sees the transformation of production, economic control, and ways of perceiving and thinking about one’s place in society as progressing toward a geopolitical peak with the Assyrian Empire. What enabled and made this sustained achievement so successful were royal laws to regularly restore economic balance on a system-wide level. Clean Slate proclamations prevented a creditor oligarchy from emerging to rival palace claims on the labor and crop surpluses of citizens on the land. In this respect, the distinction between financial and industrial gain-seeking—and the socially destructive character of usury and creditor self-interest—was recognized already in the third millennium BC in the Hymn to Shamash, the Akkadian god of justice (lines 103-106):

What happens to the loan shark who invests his resources at the (highest) interest rate?

He will lose his purse just as he tries to get the most out of it.

But he who invests in the long term will convert one measure of silver into three.

He pleases Shamash and will enrich his life.2

Buccellati rightly states that “We are the heirs of Mesopotamian perception and political experience.” Modern civilization, however, has retrogressed from the Bronze Age Mesopotamian achievement of avoiding deepening financial and economic imbalance. He notes that modern society defines property as being alienable, but in the West securing property rights always has entailed the “right” to forfeit it to creditors or sell under duress—irreversibly. That has been the case ever since Near Eastern commercial and credit practices were brought to the Aegean and Mediterranean lands in the first millennium BC.

The West has adopted the basic economic practices invented in the fourth and third millennia BC, but not the economically protective measures that rulers took to annul the buildup of creditor claims to reverse the increase in debt bondage and loss of land by debtors. That decontextualization is what in my view makes the West “Western.”

Bronze Age Near Eastern practice was so different from the Western worldview that most modern historians resist recognizing and appreciating the relevance of the region’s takeoff in the fourth and third millennia BC. Indeed, today’s anti-state economic ideology denies that money and industrial enterprise could have been innovated by what Buccellati calls the state, that is, the palatial authority.

This ideology obscures a great question posed for the West: How is it that Near Eastern “divine kingship” achieved what Western democracy has failed to do: check the emergence of a creditor rent-seeking oligarchy, which in classical antiquity would strip the Greek, Italian, and other populations of their means of self-support that had formed the basis of economic liberty for the first 3,000 years of the Mesopotamian takeoff that this book so comprehensively describes.

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1. Buccellati, Giorgio, “The Role of Socio-Political Factors in the Emergence of ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Domains in Early Mesopotamia,” in Hudson, Michael and Levine, Baruch (eds.), Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass: Peabody Museum [Harvard], 1996):131.

2. In Giorgio Buccellati, “When on High the Heavens…”: Mesopotamian Religion and Spirituality with Reference to the Biblical World (London, 2024):194, citing Reiner, Erica, Your Thwarts in Pieces, Your Mooring Rope Cut: Poetry from Babylonia and Assyria (Ann Arbor, 1985): 68-84, and W.G. Lambert, W.G., Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford, 1960): 122-138.

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This text is adapted from Michael Hudson’s foreword to At the Origins of Politics by Giorgio Buccellati, and this excerpt was produced by Human Bridges.

Cover Image, Top Left: Markuk and Mesopotamia. MythologyArt, Pixabay

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Experience a unique, up-close-and-personal hike among ancient hilltop towns in central Italy. You will walk the sensational countryside of the regions of Umbria and Tuscany, soaking in important sites attesting to the advanced Etruscan civilization, forerunners of the ancient Romans; imposing architectural and cultural remains of Medieval Italy; local food and drink; and perhaps best of all — spectacular scenic views! Join us in this collaborative event for the trip of a lifetime!

The standardized production of bone tools by our ancestors pushed back one million years

CNRS—Twenty-seven standardized bone tools dating back more than 1.5 million years were recently discovered in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania by a team of scientists from the CNRS and l’Université de Bordeaux1, in collaboration with international and Tanzanian researchers. This discovery challenges our understanding of early hominin technological evolution, as the oldest previously known standardized bone tools date back approximately 500,000 years.2

During these excavations, the researchers identified tools shaped on-site from hippopotamus bones within the same geological layer. More surprisingly, they also found elephant bones that had been transported to the site as either tools or raw materials for tool-making. This behavior suggests an early ability for planning and the transmission of know-how among these ancient populations.

These results were obtained via an approach combining archaeological excavations and experimental archaeology.3 The study* will be published on 5 March in the journal Nature.

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Tool shaped out of an elephant’s humerus. It was discovered at site T69 in the Olduvai Gorge. Top: © d’Errico-Doyon, Bottom: © Laboratorio de Arqueología del Pleistoceno-CSIC

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Article Source: CNRS Press news release

*Systematic bone tool production at 1.5 million years ago. Ignacio de la Torre, Luc Doyon, Alfonso Benito-Calvo, Rafael Mora, Ipyana Mwakyoma Jackson K. Njau, Renata F. Peters, Angeliki Theodoropoulou & Francesco d’Errico, Nature, March 05, 2025.

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1 – Working at the From Prehistory to the Present: Culture, Environment, and Anthropology laboratory (CNRS/Ministère de la Culture/Université de Bordeaux). The project received support from the European Research Council (ERC).

2 – The study shows indisputable traces of the intentional cutting, shaping, and modification of bone edges, thereby giving them an elongated shape.

3 – Experimental archaeology involves reproducing the techniques and gestures of ancient societies to better understand the production and use of their tools, their habitats, and their everyday objects.

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The first Bronze Age settlement in the Maghreb

University of Barcelona—Most Bronze Age settlements have been documented in European territory. Despite its geographical proximity, the Maghreb has always been absent from these historical narratives, erroneously characterized as an ‘empty land’ until the arrival of the Phoenicians around 800 BC. Now, a research study led by Hamza Benattia Melgarejo ( University of Barcelona) has uncovered the first Bronze Age settlement in this geographical area, predating the Phoenician period. This discovery is of great significance for the history of Africa and the Mediterranean. 

According to the results published in Antiquity, excavations at Kach Kouch, located in northwest Morocco, reveal a human occupation datable to between 2200 and 600 BC. This would show that it would be the earliest site of this chronology in Mediterranean Africa, except for Egypt. 

The international research team, led by Hamza Benattia Melgarejo, PhD student at the UB’s Faculty of Geography and History and member of the UB’s Classical and Protohistoric Archaeology Research Group, has been working on the prehistoric settlement of Kach Kouch, which extends over an area of approximately one hectare near the Lau River. It is located ten kilometers from the present-day coast, near the Strait of Gibraltar, and thirty kilometers southeast of Tétouan. 

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Excavations have revealed different phases of occupation. The first, from 2200-2000 BC, is poorly represented but significant. The evidence suggests an initial contemporary occupation in the transition from the Bronze Age to neighboring Iberia. 

The second phase, 1300-900 BC, is a vibrant period in the history of the settlement. A stable agricultural community was established at Kach Kouch and is the first definitive evidence of sedentary life before the Phoenician presence in the Maghreb. Wooden mud-brick buildings, rock-cut silos and grinding stones reveal a thriving agricultural economy based on crops such as barley and wheat, supplemented by sheep, goats and cattle. 

A third phase, extending from 800 to 600 BC, demonstrates the flexibility and adaptability of the inhabitants of Kach Kouch. During this period, several cultural innovations from the eastern Mediterranean were introduced, such as wheel-thrown pottery, iron tools and new architectural traditions using stone. This mix of local and foreign practices illustrates how the community actively participated in Mediterranean exchange networks.

“Kach Kouch is one of the first well-documented examples of continuous settlement in the Maghreb and tells a very different story from the one that has existed for a long time: it shows the history of dynamic local communities that were far from isolated”, says Benattia. “The excavations at this site are another step towards correcting these historical biases and reveal that the Maghreb was an active participant in the social, cultural and economic networks of the Mediterranean”, says the UB researcher. 

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Kach Kouch is located ten kilometres from the present-day coast, near the Strait of Gibraltar, and thirty kilometres southeast of Tétouan. Hamza Benattia Melgarejo ( University of Barcelona)

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Excavations have revealed different phases of occupation. Hamza Benattia Melgarejo ( University of Barcelona)

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Article Source: University of Barcelona news release

*Rethinking late prehistoric Mediterranean Africa: architecture, farming and materiality at Kach Kouch, Morocco, Antiquity, 17-Feb-2025. 10.15184/aqy.2025.10 

Vesuvian ash cloud turned brain to glass

Springer—A unique dark-colored organic glass, found inside the skull of an individual who died in Herculaneum during the 79 CE Mount Vesuvius eruption, likely formed when they were killed by a very hot but short-lived ash cloud. The conclusion, from research published in Scientific Reports*, is based on an analysis of the physical properties of the glass, thought to comprise the fossilized brain of the individual.

Glass rarely occurs naturally due to the specific conditions required for formation. For a substance to become glass, its liquid form must cool fast enough to not crystallize when becoming solid — requiring a large temperature difference between the substance and its surroundings — and the substance must become solid at a temperature well above that of its surroundings. As a result, it is extremely difficult for an organic glass to form, as ambient temperatures are rarely low enough for water — a key component of organic matter — to solidify. The only suspected natural organic glass was identified in 2020 in Herculaneum, Italy, but it was not clear how this glass formed.

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Guido Giordano and colleagues analyzed fragments of glass sampled from inside the skull and spinal cord of a deceased individual from Herculaneum, found lying in their bed in the Collegium Augustalium. The results of the analysis — which included imaging using X-rays and electron microscopy — indicated that, for the brain to become glass, it must have been heated above at least 510 degrees Celsius before cooling rapidly.

The authors note that this could not have occurred if the individual was heated solely by the pyroclastic flows which buried Herculaneum, as the temperatures of these flows did not reach higher than 465 degrees Celsius and would have cooled slowly. The authors therefore conclude, based on modern volcanic eruption observations, that a super-heated ash cloud which dissipated quickly was the first deadly event during Vesuvius’s eruption. They theorise that such an event would have raised the individual’s temperature above 510 degrees Celsius, before it rapidly cooled to ambient temperatures as the cloud dissipated. The bones of the individual’s skull and spine likely protected the brain from complete thermal breakdown, allowing fragments to form this unique organic glass.

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Skeletal remains at Herculaneum. Andrea Schaffer, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Above and below: Remains of Herculaneum, destroyed during the famous eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD.

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Earliest evidence for humans in rainforests

Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology—Rainforests are a major world biome which humans are not thought to have inhabited until relatively recently. New evidence now shows that humans lived in rainforests by at least 150 thousand years ago in Africa, the home of our species.

Our species originated in Africa around 300 thousand years ago, but the ecological and environmental contexts of our evolution are still little understood. In the search for answers, rainforests have often been overlooked, generally thought of as natural barriers to human habitation. 

Now, in a new study* published in Nature, an international team of researchers challenge this view with the discovery that humans were living in rainforests within the present-day Côte d’Ivoire much earlier than previously thought. The article reveals that human groups were living in rainforests by 150 thousand years ago and argues that human evolution occurred across a variety of regions and habitats. 

The story of this discovery begins in the 1980s, when the site was first investigated by co-author Professor Yodé Guédé of l’Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny on a joint Ivorian-Soviet mission. Results from this initial study revealed a deeply stratified site containing stone tools in an area of present-day rainforest. But the age of the tools – and the ecology of the site when they were deposited there – could not be determined.

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“Several recent climate models suggested the area could have been a rainforest refuge in the past as well, even during dry periods of forest fragmentation,” explains Professor Eleanor Scerri, leader of the Human Palaeosystems research group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and senior author of the study. “We knew the site presented the best possible chance for us to find out how far back into the past rainforest habitation extended.”

The Human Palaeosystems team therefore mounted a mission to re-investigate the site. “With Professor Guédé’s help, we relocated the original trench and were able to re-investigate it using state of the art methods that were not available thirty to forty years ago,” says Dr. James Blinkhorn, researcher at the University of Liverpool and the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. The renewed study took place just in time, as the site has since been destroyed by mining activity.

“Before our study, the oldest secure evidence for habitation in African rainforests was around 18 thousand years ago and the oldest evidence of rainforest habitation anywhere came from southeast Asia at about 70 thousand years ago,” explains Dr. Eslem Ben Arous, researcher at the National Centre for Human Evolution Research (CENIEH), the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and lead author of the study. “This pushes back the oldest known evidence of humans in rainforests by more than double the previously known estimate.”

The researchers used several dating techniques, including Optically Stimulated Luminescence and Electron-Spin Resonance, to arrive at a date roughly 150 thousand years ago. 

At the same time, sediment samples were separately investigated for pollen, silicified plant remains called phytoliths, and leaf wax isotopes. Analyses indicated the region was heavily wooded, with pollen and leaf waxes typical for humid West African rainforests.  Low levels of grass pollen showed that the site wasn’t in a narrow strip of forest, but in a dense woodland. 

“This exciting discovery is the first of a long list as there are other Ivorian sites waiting to be investigated to study the human presence associated with rainforest,” says Professor Guédé joyfully. 

“Convergent evidence shows beyond doubt that ecological diversity sits at the heart of our species,” says Professor Scerri. “This reflects a complex history of population subdivision, in which different populations lived in different regions and habitat types. We now need to ask how these early human niche expansions impacted the plants and animals that shared the same niche-space with humans. In other words, how far back does human alteration of pristine natural habitats go?”

The research was funded by the Max Planck Society and the Leakey Foundation. 

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Stone tools like this one, excavated at the Anyama site, reveal that humans were present at the rainforested site roughly 150,000 years ago. Jimbob Blinkhorn, MPG

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The trench initially excavated by Professor Guédé’s team was overgrown when researchers returned for the current study. Jimbob Blinkhorn, MPG

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Article Source: Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology news release.

*Humans in Africa’s wet tropical forests 150 thousand years ago, Nature, 26-Feb-2025. 10.1038/s41586-025-08613-y 

Exploring Ancient Understandings of Meteorites in Archaic Societies

Andrew Califf is a journalist, archaeologist, and anthropologist interested in how people interact with the natural world. He has covered environmental conservation and Indigenous rights stories and conducted archaeological topographic analysis research in remote regions.

Five times a day, approximately one-fourth of the world’s population turns toward Mecca to bow their heads in prayer. The Kaaba at the center of this global genuflection has a cornerstone that some speculate is a meteor.

Meteoritic artifacts appear as early as the dawn of Egypt’s Early Dynastic Period, approximately 4,500 years ago. Archaeological teams in the 1920s reported that beads from the Gerzeh cemetery in northern Egypt had very high concentrations of nickel, typical of meteoritic iron. These are the earliest analyzed artifacts, and modern metal testing technologies mean that chemists can now identify and catalog the presence of meteoritic iron in archaeological collections across Eurasia. Since 2013, this has led to many discoveries reframing the prominence of extraterrestrial resources in the archaeological record, including identifying that King Tutankhamun’s dagger was crafted from a meteor.

Experts believe this opulent weapon was a gift to the boy king’s grandfather Amenhotep III around 1300 BCE, from the king of the Mitanni region, based on the Amarna tablets. This high-status gift is one of the many ways meteoritic iron was revered by ancient civilizations. One of the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphics for iron seems to be derived from a longer phrase translating to: “iron from the sky.”

This word has cosmological connotations associated with the Egyptian belief that the sky was an iron pot or tub filled with water, and bits of it fell to the Earth in the form of meteorites.

“We have evidence for the idea that the sky was a dome made of iron in a few different civilizations,” explains Victoria Almansa-Villatoro, the Egyptologist who analyzed the hieroglyphic for iron (and sky), during an interview. “If all of these civilizations had this idea and they are so spread apart, it is possible that the idea goes way back in time, maybe before writing was invented.”

Almansa-Villatoro emphasizes tracing any common meanings or beliefs linking such cultures is purely speculation. Contemporaneously to the Mitanni, it is believed the Hittites used meteoritic iron by 3,000 to 2,000 BCE as one iron dagger excavated in Alaca Höyük in modern-day Turkey was made from a meteor and dated to 2,500 BCE. Iron pendants from Umm el-Marra in Syria and an iron axe from Ugarit in Lebanon are other key examples of hammered meteoritic iron.

The process of working with meteoritic iron is much simpler than having to reduce the impurities out of terrestrial iron ore (because meteoritic iron is already a metal). All that needs to be done is hammering the material. This key difference is why meteoritic iron appears well before terrestrial iron and even before the beginning of the Bronze Age, which varies by region but is approximately from 3,000 to 1,200 BCE.

The Gerzeh beads and King Tutankhamun’s dagger were hammered cold or hot, similar to early gold and copper processing. Smelting out impurities from terrestrial iron demarcates the start of the Iron Age because Bronze Age furnaces were not hot enough for such a complex process. The dawn of this development is between 1,200 and 600 BCE depending on the region. How early metallurgists started working with iron ore is still being actively explored by experts. Even though the melting of copper is much simpler than iron production, it may have played a role in the development of iron reduction.

“Copper slags have a lot of iron oxide, and if your furnace reduces too much you will get a small amount of iron in your slag,” explains geochemist and metallurgist Albert Jambon, Sorbonne University, during an interview. “Maybe the first people were working with slags, but to go from slag to an ore, I just don’t know.”

Slag is the waste from metal processing, and it is a good and readily available source of data in the archaeological record. Jambon devised a chemical strategy for identifying meteoritic iron by studying the ratios of nickel to iron and copper in artifacts. It seems that all the iron artifacts from the Bronze Age came from outer space, but research published in 2025 identified that three of 26 iron artifacts were meteoritic. These artifacts were found in an early Iron Age cemetery of the Lusatian culture in modern-day Poland. Oddly, these artifacts were not found with any wealthy implements in what seemed like graves of “commoners,” a stark contrast to how meteoritic iron was valued during earlier historic periods.

Even though approximately 17,000 meteors weighing more than 50 grams hit Earth each year, most are made of stone. Only about 4 percent are composed of iron alloys with abnormal nickel content that people can use. These materials became a rare commodity for ancient people, who began valuing this easy-made iron above gold. Cuneiform tablets found at the Old Assyrian Colonial site of Kültepe-Kanesh in Turkey from approximately 4,000 years ago refer to a “sky metal” that cost as much as 40 times the price of silver. Silver was the most valuable common precious metal in the region at the time.

Assur, the capital of the Old Assyrian city-state, felt that the meteoritic iron needed to be taxed, which makes Jan Gerrit Dercksen of Leiden University think that it was common enough to be included in the system of trade tariffs. In Anatolia, not every merchant could afford to trade meteoritic iron, and it seems that groups of merchants combined their funds to buy this sky metal in bulk according to Dercksen.

There was a smaller source of meteoritic iron coming from the East into Assur, but it is difficult to identify where the trade originated. Jambon has struggled to identify more meteoritic iron artifacts farther East, but it has been difficult to obtain and test artifacts from Turkey. As for Iran, there are very few iron artifacts and they don’t appear well into the Iron Age.

This as well as the context in which most Bronze Age meteoritic iron was found suggests that its rarity in part made it a highly valued commodity. This changed with the Iron Age, while meteoritic iron remained rare, terrestrial iron became more common and the early Iron Age cemetery site in Poland is the only identified site where meteoritic iron was found alongside terrestrial iron. It is unclear how much meteoritic iron was used as the number of iron artifacts exploded in the archaeological record.

“There are two possibilities: either there was so little meteoritic iron [artifacts] that it looks like there was no meteoritic iron or the second possibility [is], the price of iron sank so much cheaper than copper,” explains Jambon. “People didn’t care anymore about meteoritic iron because iron was so common it was no longer fashionable.”

The Sky is Falling

There is evidence globally that meteors have carried importance across millennia, including the Western Hemisphere. Archaeologists in Arizona found the Winona meteorite inset in what was assumed to be a ritual cyst in a pre-Columbian settlementThe Clackamas tribe in Oregon have a rich oral tradition and a range of ceremonies surrounding the Willamette meteor, the largest meteor found in North America. Just like the ancient Egyptians, the Hopewell tribe made beads out of meteoritic iron brought from more than 400 miles away as well as adzes and earspools.

In the 1500s, Indigenous guides brought Spanish soldiers to a field of at least 26 impact craters 500 miles north of Buenos Aires that they called Piguem Nonraltá. The Spanish translated this to Campo del Cielo—“field of the sky.” The Spanish soldiers claimed they saw a huge slab of iron but couldn’t believe the local stories that it had fallen from the sky.

The meteor shower occurred approximately 4,500 years ago and was recorded by the local cultures as a great catastrophe. Spanish records indicate that the Indigenous tribes made weapons from the iron, but none have been preserved or identified. This field is home to some of the world’s largest meteorite fragments including the 30-ton Gancedo fragment found in 2016.

A meteorite currently in the Academy of Sciences of Munich struck Zanzibar in the middle of the 19th century only to be revered by the Wanika tribe until a Maasai cattle raid made them lose respect for it. They promptly sold it to German missionaries.

Prehistoric stone tools also developed a type of lore as good luck charms in different periods and regions due to different cultic traditions largely associated with cosmological concepts.

Tuvan reindeer herders in northern Mongolia continue to collect prehistoric stone tools for good luck and call them “sky stones.” Obsidian and flint tools of the Neolithic and Paleolithic in both classical Greek and Roman periods were called “lightning stones” because they looked like weapons and were associated with the lightning bolt weapons of Zeus. It was recorded as late as the 20th century in Italy that Neolithic flints were treated as amulets to protect against lightning and natural disasters.

It is speculated that people didn’t associate these tools or lightning stones as man-made from an earlier period. Scholar Christopher A. Faraone writes that there is “no evidence that the Greeks or Romans realized that these axe-heads were manufactured by previous stone-age cultures and indeed the inclusion of them in [natural history and geology books] confirms… that they were believed to be ‘natural’ stones which, like amber, jet or coral, had special protective powers.”

The historical depth and meaningful associations people have historically placed on meteoritic iron are more fully illustrated by the tale of a 1,000-year-old Buddha statue, made by the Bon culture in Tibet. A Nazi expedition looted the statue weighing just more than 10 kilograms between 1938 and 1939 not knowing that it was made out of meteoritic iron.

Indiana Jones wasn’t there to rescue the statue, and it disappeared for decades. The statue reappeared in the hands of a private collector, who collaborated with researchers and determined its extraterrestrial composition and landing spot on Earth. They determined it came from the Chinga meteor which landed 10,000 to 20,000 years ago in southern Siberia, likely traveling thousands of kilometers in its journey to Tibet. While the space-born Buddha is one of the most unique and intricate objects crafted from a meteor, the oldest meteoritic artifacts found east of the Levant are weapons from China’s Shang Dynasty, dating to 1,400 BCE. A knife and a pole-mounted dagger-axe called ge from 900-800 BCE were also made from meteoritic iron.

Baetyls

Meteors are part of many myths and stories around the globe, but one of the most interesting correlations between meteors and sacred sites is found in southwest Eurasia and the Mediterranean region. Baetyls are an ancient tradition of using sacred stones thought to be meteorites or based on meteorites. The etymological origin of the word translates to “house of god.”

Thought to originally refer to open-air sites of worship from the original Semitic term, depictions across cultures and civilizations, however, all show hewn stones at the center of god’s house that some speculate are meteorites. The word baetyl itself is now used to refer to these revered stones.

In Agia Eirini, Cyprus, more than 2,000 terracotta figurines were found surrounding and facing a cultic stone on an altar. This miniature terracotta army was surrounding a round-shaped small boulder that appears contextually to have been treated as a sacred baetyl.

Baetyls were known to be in the Phoenician cities of Byblos and Tyre and were adopted by Greek tradition in Delphi at the Temple of Apollo and the Needle of Aphrodite in Paphos. The origin of the baetyl at Tyre may be related to accounts from the Phoenician writer, Sanchuniathon, that the goddess Astarte found a stone fallen from the sky, which she took to Tyre to worship in a shrine.

It is even speculated that the cultic practices around meteors played a role in the founding of Rome. Rome had a sacred black stone and shrine like a baetyl called the Lapis Niger, which was believed to have been derived from preexisting cultic worship practices. According to the Roman Grammarian and teacher Marcus Verrius Flaccus, the Lapis Niger marks a spot of ill omen and was intended to be the mythical founder Romulus’s burial spot but was, in fact, not used as such.

Excavations under Giacomo Boni at the Roman Forum in 1899 uncovered what was dubbed the Lapis Niger and the tomb of Romulus. This was something of a misnomer because it is unclear whether he actually found this site or if the accounts were accurate in the first place.

The archaeological journal volume about his excavations from 1903 suggested that the polished black stone on the Lapis Niger that Flaccus saw could have been a meteorite, but the excavations from 1899 only seemed to have uncovered copies influenced by the Lapis Niger. Etruscan grave markers from a major necropolis in Cerveteri have similar black stones to that of the Lapis Niger.

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There are several textual references to sacred stones from the sky in Greco-Roman sources that experts believe are meteor fragments. The religious historian Mircea Eliade even asserted that important holy sites, including the Palladion of Troy, the Artemis of Ephesus, and the Cone of Elagabalus in Emesa, were actually based on meteorites.

There is no physical evidence supporting the origin stories of these shrines and the historical speculations surrounding them—no excavated or identified baetyl was a meteor. Other descriptions of baetyls are regularly just rock or even simply mounds of earth. The same stands true for the Egyptian Benben stone—a black pyramidal stone thought to either be on top of a pyramid or influence the pyramids in ancient Egypt.

Benben has become a generic term for the top cornerstone of a pyramid or obelisk, but it is derived from a revered one mentioned repeatedly in Egyptian texts. The original was venerated at the “Mansion of the Phoenix” within the Great Sun Temple of Heliopolis but likely predates the sun cult of Ra. It is linked to the creation story of Atum, one of the oldest Egyptian deities. The Benben is either the hill he rises out of the waters from or what he falls out of the sky on (remember the Egyptian sky being an iron tub of water). But Atum is credited with and linked to many cosmological symbols.

Just like the Black Stone of the Kaaba in Mecca, it is still not scientifically conclusive whether or not any revered stones recorded in historical documents are meteors. It is speculated there are cultic, pre-Abrahamic items of worship inside the Kaaba Similarly, any potential meteor worship in the Greco-Roman pantheons could have been derived from earlier traditions, like how Atum’s Benben predated the Sun God Ra.

Although the Black Stone, or al-Hajar al-Aswad in Arabic, makes appearances during the lifetime of Abraham and Muhammad, it supposedly fell to Earth when Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden. It landed where they were to build the first temple, and it was placed into the Kaaba by the Prophet Muhammad in 605 CE. According to tradition, the Black Stone was originally white but turned black as it absorbed the sin of the hajis who touched it at Mecca. Islamic tradition is the only source of information on the origin of al-Hajar al-Aswad.

In the oldest known epic poem from Mesopotamia, the titular protagonist Gilgamesh dreams of a meteor landing outside the ancient city of Uruk that he is unable to move. This dream has prophetic meaning for the rest of the epic, putting meteors front and center in one of the oldest pieces of literature.

Philosophers of the Greco-Roman period were some of the first known to record rocks falling from the sky. Aristotle, Plutarch, and Pliny the Elder, to name a few, were the first to record a meteor fall in Turkey around either 467 or 466 BC. Meanwhile, the community of European scientists debated the existence of meteors until the early 19th century; a meteor shower in France in 1803 ended the debate.

The uncertainty of textual references can hopefully be proved by the archaeological record. Jambon first started using his chemical analysis looking for meteoritic iron in 2010 after purchasing an XRF instrument. Despite the many obstacles in obtaining old artifacts from around Eurasia, he continues to shine a light on ancient metallurgical technologies.

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This article was produced by Human Bridges.

Image, Top Left: Tutankhamun’s dagger made from meteorite. Replica. Juhele_CZ, CC 1.0 Universal, Wikimedia Commons

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Ancient genomes illuminate Huns’ origin

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—Researchers report genetic evidence clarifying the origin of the European Huns. The origin of the Huns, who arrived in Europe in the 370s, had previously been linked to the Xiongnu nomadic group of the Mongolian steppe. However, little historical and archaeological evidence exists to bridge the 300-year gap between the fall of the Xiongnu empire and the appearance of the Huns. Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone and colleagues analyzed archaeological evidence alongside genomic data for 370 people*. The genomic data came from people in the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE Xiongnu period in the Mongolian steppe; the 5th–6th century CE Hun period in the Carpathian Basin, including some rare burials exhibiting cultural connections to the steppe; and the intervening 2nd–5th century CE period across central Asia. The authors found high genetic diversity among people across the Eurasian steppe. The findings suggest a mixed origin of the Hun-period population, with no evidence of a large steppe descent community living in the Carpathian Basin during this period. However, some of the Hun- and post-Hun-period individuals carried genetic lineages linking them to elites of the Xiongnu empire. Although the Xiongnu are likely not the principal ancestors of the Hun-period population, some Huns were likely descended from Xiongnu, according to the authors.

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Article Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences news release.

*“Ancient genomes reveal trans-Eurasian connections between the European Huns and the Xiongnu Empire,” by Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 24-Feb-2025. https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2418485122

Image, Top Left: Roman villa in Gaul sacked by the hordes of Attila the Hun. GRochegrosse, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

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Viking skulls reveal severe morbidity

University of Gothenburg—Sweden’s Viking Age population appears to have suffered from severe oral and maxillofacial disease, sinus and ear infections, osteoarthritis, and much more. This is shown in a study from the University of Gothenburg in which Viking skulls were examined using modern X-ray techniques.

About a year ago saw the publication of research based on the examination of a large number of teeth from the Viking Age population of Varnhem in the Swedish province of Västergötland. Varnhem is known for its thousands of ancient graves and excavations of well-preserved skeletons.

Now, odontologists at the University of Gothenburg have taken this research further, looking at not only teeth but also entire skulls, by using modern computed tomography, also known as CT scans.

Detailed image analysis

The results presented in British Dental Journal Open* suggest that the fifteen individuals whose skulls were examined suffered from a broad range of diseases. The CT scans show pathological bone growths in the cranium and jawbone, revealing infections and other conditions.

Several individuals showed signs of having suffered from sinus or ear infections that left traces in the adjacent bone structures. Signs of osteoarthritis and various dental diseases were also found. All the skulls came from adults who died between 20 and 60 years of age.

The study lead, Carolina Bertilsson, is an assistant researcher at the University of Gothenburg and a dentist within Sweden’s Public Dental Service. The study was performed with specialists in dental radiology at the University of Gothenburg and an archaeologist from Västergötlands museum.

Together, they conducted the examinations and analyzed the images. CT scans provide three-dimensional images that enable researchers to study in detail the various types of skeletal damage, layer by layer, in the different parts of the skull.

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Greater understanding

“There was much to look at. We found many signs of disease in these individuals. Exactly why we don’t know. While we can’t study the damage in the soft tissue because it’s no longer there, we can see the traces left in the skeletal structures,” says Carolina Bertilsson, and continues:

“The results of the study provide greater understanding of these people’s health and wellbeing. Everyone knows what it’s like to have pain somewhere, you can get quite desperate for help. But back then, they didn’t have the medical and dental care we do, or the kind of pain relief – and antibiotics – we now have. If you developed an infection, it could stick around for a long time.”

The study is described as a pilot study. One important aspect was to test CT as a method for future and more extensive studies.”Very many of today’s archaeological methods are invasive, with the need to remove bone or other tissue for analysis. This way, we can keep the remains completely intact yet still extract a great deal of information,” says Carolina Bertilsson.

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The skulls of Viking-era individuals were examined with modern computed tomography, in the search for infections, inflammations and other diseases. Photo by Carolina Bertilsson

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Computed tomography provide 3D photos and the possibility of advanced image analysis where layer by layer of bones, jaw bones and teeth are studied in detail. Photo by Carolina Bertilsson

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Clues of advanced ancient technology found in the Philippines and Island Southeast Asia

Ateneo de Manila University—The ancient peoples of the Philippines and of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) may have built sophisticated boats and mastered seafaring tens of thousands of years ago—millennia before Magellan, Zheng He, and even the Polynesians.

In a new paper* coming out in the April 2025 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Ateneo de Manila University researchers Riczar Fuentes and Alfred Pawlik challenge the widely-held contention that technological progress during the Paleolithic only emerged in Europe and Africa.

They point out that much of ISEA was never connected to mainland Asia, neither by land bridges nor by ice sheets, yet it has yielded evidence of early human habitation. Exactly how these peoples achieved such daring ocean crossings is an enduring mystery, as organic materials like wood and fiber used for boats rarely survive in the archaeological record. But archaeological sites in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Timor-Leste are now providing strong evidence that ancient seafarers had a technological sophistication comparable to much later civilizations.

Microscopic analysis of stone tools excavated at these sites, dating as far back as some 40,000 years ago, showed clear traces of plant processing—particularly the extraction of fibers necessary for making ropes, nets, and bindings essential for boatbuilding and open-sea fishing. Archaeological sites in Mindoro and Timor-Leste also yielded the remains of deep ocean fish such as tuna and sharks as well as fishing implements such as fishing hooks, gorges, and net weights. 

“The remains of large predatory pelagic fish in these sites indicate the capacity for advanced seafaring and knowledge of the seasonality and migration routes of those fish species,” the researchers said in their paper. Meanwhile, the discovery of fishing implements “indicates the need for strong and well-crafted cordage for ropes and fishing lines to catch the marine fauna.” 

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This body of evidence points to the likelihood that these ancient seafarers built sophisticated boats out of organic composite materials held together with plant-based ropes and also used the same rope technology for open-sea fishing. If so, then prehistoric migrations across ISEA were not undertaken by mere passive sea drifters on flimsy bamboo rafts but by highly skilled navigators equipped with the knowledge and technology to travel vast distances and to remote islands over deep waters.  

Several years of fieldwork in Ilin Island, Occidental Mindoro, inspired the researchers to think of this topic and to test this hypothesis. Together with naval architects from the University of Cebu, they recently started the First Long-Distance Open-Sea Watercrafts (FLOW) Project, supported by a research grant from the Ateneo de Manila University, with the aim of testing raw materials that were probably used in the past, and to design and test scaled-down seacraft models. 

The presence of such advanced maritime technology in prehistoric ISEA highlights the ingenuity of early Philippine peoples and their neighbors, whose boat-building knowledge likely made the region a center for technological innovations tens of thousands of years ago and laid the foundations for the maritime traditions that still thrive in the region today. 

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New archaeological evidence suggests that ancient inhabitants of the Philippines and Island Southeast Asia had the advanced plant-working technology needed for sophisticated boat building and open-sea fishing. Alfred Pawlik

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Evidence of plant-working technology in ancient human habitations across Island Southeast Asia suggests that the prehistoric peoples of the Philippines and their neighbors possessed both sophisticated seacraft and advanced nautical skills. Riczar Fuentes and Alfred Pawlik, CC BY-NC

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Article Source: Ateneo de Manila University news release.

Describing previously unknown aspects of Copper Age ceremonial clothing

University of Seville—Researchers from the University of Seville have led a study* that analyzed the perforated beads discovered in the Tholos de Montelirio, part of the Copper Age mega-site of Valencina de la Concepción-Castilleja de Guzmán (Seville). The conclusions of their work, published in the journal Science Advances, highlight the importance of the ceremonial clothing and its symbolism.

The garments worn by the women buried in the Montelirio tholos were made using perforated beads and probably linen fibre to bind them together. They were ceremonial garments which, in at least two cases, were full-length tunics. These robes were also ornamented with ivory and amber pendants representing acorns, birds and other, unidentifiable, items. The radiocarbon dating study reveals that these robes were manufactured at the same time as the Montelirio burials were made, between 2800 and 2700 BC.

The materials found at Montelirio constitute the largest collection of perforated beads ever documented in a single tomb. A quantification of the collection, which is currently conserved at the Archaeological Museum of Seville, has found that some 270,000 of these beads have been found to date. This makes Montelirio the largest collection of such objects discovered anywhere in the world.

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These beads, with an average diameter of between 2 and 5 millimeters, were mostly made from the shells of marine molluscs of the Pectinidae and Cardidiae families. Of these, the popular ‘scallop’ shells stand out; they are known today as the symbol of the apostle St. James and the famous pilgrimage route associated with him, but which in antiquity were the symbol of the goddess Venus/Aphrodite. The results of the experimental study show that, in total, more than 800 kilogrammes of these shells were used, which had to be collected from the coasts and beaches that 5000 years ago stretched along what is now the lower Guadalquivir Valley and its marshes.

The garments had a strongly symbolic meaning, given the marine nature of the raw material used and their intense white colour. Dressed in them, and probably ornamented (perhaps painted) with red cinnabar pigment, which is found in abundance in the same tomb, these women performed tasks of religious and probably political leadership in their time, managing a famous sanctuary around which important congregations of great social significance took place.

An extensive study carried out over the last five years – including meticulous quantification of the collection, characterisation of raw materials, radiocarbon dating and statistical chronometric modeling, morphometric analysis, phytolith analysis, experimental work and contextual analysis – has revealed several new features of these remarkable creations. The role of the garments as sumptuary attributes loaded with symbolism, used by a selected group of women of high social position, underlines the extraordinary role that the mega-site of Valencina played 5,000 years ago as a central social, political and religious place, a reference for a wide range of communities distributed throughout the Guadalquivir Valley and, more generally, the south of the Iberian Peninsula.

The work, led by researchers from the University of Seville’s Atlas Group features eighteen specialists from various national and international scientific institutions, including the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO-CSIC), the universities of La Laguna, Huelva, Granada and Basque Country (Spain), Southampton and Durham (UK) and Northwestern (USA), as well as the Municipal Museum of Valencina de la Concepción (Seville).

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Tholos de Montelirio – human remains with remains of a dress made from amber and shell beads. Murillo-Barroso M, Peñalver E, Bueno P, Barroso R, de Balbín R, Martinón-Torres M; CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Article Source: University of Seville news release.

The inner ear of Neanderthals reveals clues about their enigmatic origin

Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont—Neanderthals emerged around 250.000 years ago from European   populations—referred to as “pre-Neanderthals”—which inhabited the Eurasian continent between 500.000 and 250.000 years ago. It was long believed that no significant changes occurred throughout the evolution of Neanderthals, yet recent paleogenetic research based on DNA samples extracted from fossils revealed the existence of a drastic genetic diversity loss event between early Neanderthals (or ancient Neanderthals) and later ones (also referred to as “classic” Neanderthals). Technically known as a “bottleneck”, this genetic loss is frequently the consequence of a reduction in the number of individuals of a population. Paleogenetic data indicate that the decline in genetic variation took place approximately 110,000 years ago.

The presence of an earlier bottleneck event related to the origin of the Neanderthal lineage was also a widespread assumption among the scientific community. As such, all hypotheses formulated thus far were based on the idea that the earliest Neanderthals exhibited lower genetic diversity than their pre-Neanderthal ancestors, as consequence of a bottleneck event. However, the existence of a bottleneck at the origin of the Neanderthals has not been confirmed yet through paleogenetic data, mainly due to the lack of genetic sequences old enough to record the event and needed for ancient DNA studies.

In a study* led by Alessandro Urciuoli (Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Mercedes Conde-Valverde (Cátedra de Otoacústica Evolutiva de HM Hospitales y la Universidad de Alcalá), researchers measured the morphological diversity in the structure of the inner ear responsible for our sense of balance: the semicircular canals. It is widely accepted that results obtained from studying the morphological diversity of the semicircular canals are comparable to those obtained through DNA comparisons.

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The study focused on two exceptional collections of fossil humans: one from the Sima de los Huesos site of Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain), dated to 430,000 years old, which constitutes the largest sample of pre-Neanderthals available in the fossil record; and another from the Croatian site of Krapina, this representing the most complete collection of early Neanderthals and dated to approximately 130.000-120.000 years ago. The researchers calculated the amount of morphological diversity (i.e., disparity) of the semicircular canals of both samples, comparing them with each other and with a sample of classic Neanderthals of different ages and geographical origins.

The study’s findings reveal that the morphological diversity of the semicircular canals of classic Neanderthals is clearly lower than that of pre-Neanderthals and early Neanderthals, which aligns with previous paleogenetic results. Mercedes Conde-Valverde, co-author of the study, emphasized the importance of the analyzed sample: “By including fossils from a wide geographical and temporal range, we were able to capture a comprehensive picture of Neanderthal evolution. The reduction in diversity observed between the Krapina sample and classic Neanderthals is especially striking and clear, providing strong evidence of a bottleneck event.”

On the other hand, the results challenge the previously accepted idea that the origin of Neanderthals was associated with a significant loss of genetic diversity, prompting the need to propose new explanations for their origin. “We were surprised to find that the pre-Neanderthals from the Sima de los Huesos exhibited a level of morphological diversity similar to that of the early Neanderthals from Krapina,” commented Alessandro Urciuoli, lead author of the study. “This challenges the common assumption of a bottleneck event at the origin of the Neanderthal lineage,” the researcher stated.

Alessandro Urciuoli is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Zurich (previously employed at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona as a Margarita Salas postdoctoral fellow) and associated researcher at the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont; Mercedes Conde-Valverde is lecturer at the Universidad de Alcalá and director of the Cátedra de Otoacústica Evolutiva de HM Hospitales and the Universidad de Alcalá.

Are we still primitive? How ancient survival instincts shape modern power struggles

Taylor & Francis Group—The evolutionary roots of human dominance and aggression remain central to social and political behavior, and without conscious intervention these primal survival drives will continue to fuel inequality and division.

These are the arguments of a medical professor who, as global conflicts rise and democracies face growing challenges, says understanding how dominance and tribal instincts fuel division is more critical than ever.

In A New Approach to Human Social Evolution, Professor Jorge A. Colombo MD, PhD explores neuroscience, anthropology, and behavioral science to provide a new perspective on human social evolution.*

He argues that fundamental behavioral drives – such as dominance, survival instincts, and competition – are hardwired into our species and continue to shape global politics, economic inequality, and social structures today. Without a conscious effort to counteract these instincts, we risk perpetuating the cycles of power struggles, inequality, and environmental destruction that define much of human history.

“In an era marked by rising authoritarianism, economic inequality, environmental crises, and nationalism, understanding how ancient survival mechanisms continue to shape human behavior is crucial,” he explains. “With increasing polarization in politics, conflicts over resources, and the struggle for social justice, I contend that only through education and universal values can humanity transcend these instincts to foster a more sustainable and equitable society.”

Professor Colombo, who is a former Full Professor at the University of South Florida (USA) and Principal Investigator at the National Research Council (CONICET, Argentina), explains how current human behaviour evolved based on an ancient heritage of animal drives which has been progressively built and placed into practice— grounded on survival, social gain, and profit— and is compressed to our basic neural systems and basic survival behavioral construction.

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When humans shifted from prey to universal predator, it affected the organization of the human brain, he argues. However, the human species also had to contend with the notion of mortality, and so in our core neural circuits (mainly in the basal brain) survive our basal drives (reproductive, territorial, survival, feeding), basic responses (fight, flight), and the thresholds for their behavioural expression.

Over time, he explains, thanks to the brain’s plasticity, it has added a neurobiological scaffolding on top of our animal drives, allowing for the emergence of traits such as creativeness, cognitive expansion, artistic expression, progressive toolmaking, and rich verbal communication.

Nevertheless, he argues, these traits did not deactivate or suppress those ancient drives and only succeeded in diverting (camouflaging) their expression or repressing them temporarily.

He argues that humans are bound to their ancestral demands imprinted as a set of basic drives (territorialism, reproduction, survival, secure feeding sources, dominance, and cumulative behaviour), which exist in friction with our cultural drives.

“Ancient animal survival drives persist in humans, masked under various behavioural paradigms. Fight and flight remain basic behavioural principles. Even subdued under religious or mystic beliefs, aggressive and defensive behaviours emerge to defend or fight for even the most sophisticated peaceful beliefs, and events throughout humankind’s history support this evidence,” he explains.

He points to examples of dominance in politics (military oppression, propaganda, or financial repression), religion (punishing gods, esoteric menaces), and education (forms of punishment and thought process conditioning).

However, dominance exerted through political, economic, social class, or military power adds privileged structures to social construction, Colombo argues.

As a dominant species with evolved cultural and technological strategies, it has resulted in the over-exploitation of natural resources, the development of arms of massive destruction, strategies to foster massive consumerism, and political means to manipulate public opinion, which also, in turn, create poverty, deprivation, marginalization, and oppression.

He argues that without education and the promotion of universal values involving individual opportunities to evolve and protect the environment, more communities will become undernourished, impoverished, and without access to primary healthcare or adequate education for the continuous changes in the modern world.

He points to AI as an example of a growing, uneven educational gap that would reinforce socioeconomic disparity and social inequality. He argues that people should proactively create policies to work towards a viable, multicultural, equitable humanity and an ecologically sustainable planet.

“The aggressiveness, cruelties, social inequities, and unrelenting individual and socioeconomic class ambitions are the best evidence that humans must first recognize and assume their fundamental nature to change their ancestral drive,” he suggests. “Profound cultural changes are only possible and enduring if humans come to grips with their actual primary condition.”

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Article Source: Taylor & Francis Group news release

Image, Top Left: Hansuan_Fabrigas, Pixabay

How We Distribute Power Will Influence Our Future

Professor of anthropology (emerita) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Carole Crumley is a founding scientist of the research strategy termed historical ecology. Her key concept of heterarchy is now applied to studies of societal and environmental change. She is the director of the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE) initiative, a global network of researchers based at Sweden’s Uppsala University that unites the biophysical and social sciences and community voices to build a livable future.

Power in human societies is often viewed as hierarchical, meaning that it’s tiered and ranked. This view doesn’t fully capture the complexity of how power is managed in different cultures. Some societies are not strictly hierarchical but heterarchical, where power is distributed among various groups or individuals who work together without a clear ranking. There is ample evidence for the existence of heterarchy for a variety of forms of social and political power, including in the archaeological record.1

Historically, the idea that more complex societies are superior to simpler ones has justified racism, colonialism, and domination. However, research conducted since the end of the 20th century increasingly shows that all human societies are fluid and interconnected, with power often shared among different groups.

Understanding these power dynamics helps us see how societies change over time. For example, when an elite group loses control of trade, new power structures may emerge, such as guilds or associations. These changes affect the entire society and can lead to more distributed power and democratic institutions.

The combined study of heterarchy and hierarchy allows us to trace how societies adapt and respond to challenges. It shows that power can shift and evolve into new forms of social organizations that help societies survive and thrive, even if they may face new tensions or conflicts later.

A Closer Look At Authority Structures

Heterarchies are self-organizing systems in which elements engage and affect one another. In the context of social systems, the relative power of groups can change based on the situation, which often depends on the degree of communication and collaboration among entities with different sources of power. When power is consolidated in a society by merging distinct entities (for example, religious, political, or economic) into a single, tightly controlled system (hyper-hierarchy or hypercoherence), there is less flexibility in dealing with surprise.2

The term polity is preferred to include the gamut of political organizations. Keep in mind that no polities are entirely hierarchical or heterarchical but instead are diverse and have changing packages of governance. For example, some organizations (armies, police, and firefighters) are necessarily quite hierarchical to clarify chains of command but can serve a polity in which all citizens have free access to health care.

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Hierarchical Polities

Administrators in strong hierarchies (authoritarian states, oligarchies, and hyper-hierarchies) have several advantages. Due to a clear decision-making chain, they respond well to fast-developing crises (such as a military attack or insurrection). Because the rules and responsibilities are familiar, political interactions among decision-makers are fewer and more formalized, and political maintenance of the system is low. Administrative hierarchies are equipped with powerful security forces that can successfully defend the state perimeter and suppress internal dissent.

Polities that are strongly hierarchical are at a disadvantage, however, because data-gathering techniques, tied to the pyramidal decision-making framework, slow or stop the arrival of important information (especially subversive activity) at the apex of the pyramid. This necessitates the formalization and elaboration of internal security forces. Decisions are not necessarily popular; dissatisfaction is high and there must be considerable investment in coercion or propaganda. This also leads to high security costs. An example of this can be seen in most military dictatorships. In Chile under Augusto Pinochet, for example, the regime held onto power through the systematic suppression of opposition parties and the persecution of dissidents.

Heterarchical Polities

Administrators in polities with a strong heterarchical organization receive good quality information from many sources within and outside the decision-making lattice. In general, decisions are fair and reflect popular consensus. Decision-makers hear of a variety of solutions to problems. Because heterarchies are more likely to value the contributions of disparate segments of the community (ethnic groups and women, for example), their society is better integrated and the workforce is proud and energized.

Heterarchical polities are at a disadvantage because consensus is slow to achieve. Decision-makers must engage with constituents, requiring considerable time, energy, and constant maintenance. The cacophonous voices and choices a decision-maker hears complicate the search for workable solutions. The greater the groups’ involvement and trust in the system, the greater the possibility of consensus, but the response time is slower, and long-range planning is more difficult.

Trade-offs

Heterarchies value spontaneity, flexibility, and a definition of state power that involves balancing diverse elements. Individuals gain status through merit (rather than through inheritance or loyalty). State power should be used to improve citizens’ safety and well-being. Hierarchies, by contrast, value rule-based authority, rigid class lines linked to ascribed as well as achieved status and rank, a control definition of state power, and once achieved, the status quo. State democracies exhibit characteristics of both, which explains in part why they are more stable than authoritarian states.

Key Issues for Future Research

In all societies, the power of various individuals and factions fluctuates relative to changing circumstances. Today, as resources worldwide are being depleted and environmental conditions deteriorate, new ways to stabilize societies and reduce conflict must be found. One of the most important conditions for reducing conflict is to ensure inclusive and equitable conditions for everyone, particularly as regards food and water security, personal and group safety, and a satisfying quality of life.

In human societies, heterarchy is a corrective to power theories that conflate hierarchy with (civil) order, thereby creating a conundrum: will you submit and be safe or resist at your peril? To reenvision an equitable future for humankind, there must be a means to conceptualize and evaluate shifts between exclusive and inclusive power relations in diverse spatial and temporal scales and contexts. There must also be a way to assess the implications of each type of relationship in terms of how beneficial it is to society and how suitable it is for the future.

Created in the process of building nation-states around the globe, analytic tools that measure efficiency illuminate only hierarchical political, economic, and social forms and ignore the stabilizing power of heterarchical forms; in this way, hyper-hierarchical and other inherently unstable forms of wealth distribution and political power accumulate. The controlling model of hierarchy-as-order, ubiquitous and all but invisible, exacerbates growing tensions.

Bioarchaeology as a Window to Political Relationships

Public policies, systems of exchange, subsistence strategies, and social roles structure how people obtain resources and how they experience the result of toil and violence. Bioarchaeology (the scientific study of biological remains from archaeological sites) and genomics have become invaluable to the study of early political relationships.

It is now possible to reconstruct many aspects of an individual’s life by extracting DNA and evaluating trauma in human remains. In addition to much more reliable identification of sex and age at death, we can now know the region where a person was born, if they traveled widely or emigrated to another region, and we can find clues to what they ate, the kind of work they did, and how they were treated. Together these pieces of information can form a picture of life as lived, marking stressful and tranquil periods that the person and/or the group survived.

These new tools produce reliable determinations of historic risk and vulnerability across various scales, from the individual level to large populations. While community-wide governance in smaller-sized groups is no surprise, this was also seen in cooperative states, regions, and urban agglomerations (Callejón de Huaylas/Requay, central Thailand, Mimbres, Tiawanaku, and Marroquíes) and even empires (Xianbei and Genghis Khan’s Mongols) that were collaboratively organized.3

Future Thinking

This is important information for the human future: the old paradigm that asserted competition and conflict to be the primary motors of civilization can now be reconsidered. In the course of human history, societies engaged in cooperative activities that advanced their well-being, and they also fell into conflict or under the rule of tyrants. If we begin with the premise that the tension between competition and cooperation exists in all human societies, it then behooves us to explore the ways rules and norms permit or deny each other, and how both interact with history and changing conditions to forge institutions.4

The political climates of the past demonstrate that human accomplishment is not on a rising staircase culminating in the state; instead, we find a long history of diverse experiments and their results, to which we now have access. In the contemporary world, we face an important question: How can the equity and effectiveness of coalitions, federations, leagues, unions, and communities in societies of all sizes help us construct and strengthen societies of the future?

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1 Angelbeck, Bill and Grier, Colin. (2012). “Anarchism and the Archaeology of Anarchic Societies.” Current Anthropology 53(5): 547-587.

Chapman, Robert. (2003). Archaeologies of Complexity. London, Routledge.

Ehrenreich, Robert M.; Crumley, C.L.; and Levy, Janet E. (eds.) (1995). “Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies.” Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association no. 6. Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association.

Kohring, Sheila, Wynne-Jones, Stephanie (2007). Socialising Complexity: Approaches to Power and Interaction in the Archaeological Record. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Souvatzi, Stella G. (2008). A Social Archaeology of Households in Neolithic Greece: An Anthropological Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2 Piketty, Thomas. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

3 Becker, Sara K. and Juengst, Sara L. (eds.) (2020). “Cooperative Bodies: Bioarchaeologists Address Nonranked Societies.” Vital Topics Forum, American Anthropologist 122 (4).

Thurston, T.L., and Fernández-Götz, Manuel (eds.) (2021). Power from Below in Premodern Societies: The Dynamics of Political Complexity in the Archaeological Record. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4 Chapman, Robert (2003). Archaeologies of Complexity. London: Routledge

Cover Image, Top Left: MetsikGarden, Pixabay

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This article was produced by Human Bridges.

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A Hunter’s Hypothesis: Ancient Mammoth-Bone Circles Were Smokehouses

It was a remarkable discovery. In March of 2020, the journal Antiquity published a research paper detailing the analysis by a team from the University of Exeter, University of Cambridge, Kostenki State Museum Preserve, University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Southampton, of what has been referred to as a mammoth-bone circle located at the village of Kostenki, 500 km south of Moscow in the Russian Plains. Dated to 20,000 BP, it is now considered the oldest known circular structure of mostly mammoth bones like this built by humans in present-day Ukraine and the west Russian Plain. So far, 70 such structures have been discovered in the region. While most of the bones at the Kostenki site consisted of a total of 51 mammoth lower jaws and 64 mammoth skulls used to construct the 30ft by 30ft wall structure, with other mammoth bones scattered within its interior, site investigators also found bones of reindeer, horse, bear, wolf, red fox and arctic fox. They also recovered more than 300 stone and flint chips—debris created from knapping stone nodules into sharp tools that could be used for tasks like butchering animals and scraping hides. 

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The Kostenki mammoth-bone circle remains as can be seen within the museum. Владислав Тищенко, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Mammoth bones at Kostenki (detail). evatutin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Why were these structures built?

Archaeologists have advanced several possible explanations, ranging from habitation to places used for community activity and ritual/religious practices. None of them offer a slam-dunk interpretation of their purpose.

Enter here John Gleissner, a retired attorney, writer, history buff, and deer/meat hunter for 40 years, who undertook an extensive study of the available evidence for mammoth hunting by prehistoric humans. His conclusory hypothesis:

The mammoth-bone circles were actually smokehouses.

Hunting experience and meat processing of wild game allowed me to see the practical aspects missed by a large number of archaeologists,” says Gleissner. “Many archaeologists failed to recognize the practical aspects of meat science, carcass transportation, and the accumulation of so much bone and so many tusks in these isolated locations”. Gleissner continues, “The hunters only had two basic options to bring the raw meat directly to a form for immediate consumption or, at their discretion, stored for future consumption. One of those options was dried, tough, stringy fully dried meat strips, and the other was to smoke larger pieces and retain some moisture.”

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According to his suggestion, which he calls the Smokehouse Hypothesis, the Paleolithic hunters killed mammoths in the beds of the rivers, floated the carcasses down to a location near their settlements located on promontories above the rivers, butchered the mammoths, and then took the meat to smokehouses they constructed on promontories above the rivers to smoke, cure and store. Each mammoth could produce two to three metric tons of raw meat, which had to be processed at one time.

“River transport of the carcasses is the only way that many skulls, tusks, bones, and meat could be brought to a single location,” Gleissner maintains.

Moreover, if Gleissner’s hypothesis can be supported through further study, the Paleolithic hunters may have used what could be one of the earliest forms of cold-smoking—the food preservation technique that involves exposing food to smoke at a low temperature without cooking it. 

Archaeologist Dr. Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University encouraged and supported, with literature, Mr. Gleissner’s research. “Archaeologists found many artifacts consistent with smokehouses in the smokehouse floors,” continued Gleissner, “and we are indebted to them for all their research.”

“Smokehouses included mammoth-bone circles, large oval smokehouses, and long smokehouses,” he added. “The most telling clues are nine (9) hearths arranged in a line around a structure matching that arrangement, with the line along a precise NW/SE axis. Back in Dolni-Vestonice (an Upper Paleolithic archaeological site near the village of Dolní Věstonice in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic), [for example] some of the floors of the smokehouses had 80 to 100 cm of ash forming the floors”.

Gleissner emphasizes the importance of terrain, hunting site advantages, and that all the mammoth-bone circle settlements were directly above navigable rivers. In a more detailed research manuscript, he details the bulk work efficient “production line” from first observing mammoths to consumption of smoked meat. He has submitted the manuscript to a number of  peer-reviewed academic journals. He anticipates publication this year.

Meanwhile, new discoveries and research will likely continue to produce new questions and answers revolving around the mysterious mammoth-bone circles of Ice Age hunters marking the landscape of present-day eastern Europe and Russia. One unanswered question is: where did the hunters spend the winters? Gleissner doubts they spent it on the tops of ridges and hills exposed to the winds of the Russian Plain.

Cover Image, Top Left: Mammoth, AI-generated. JuliusH, Pixabay  https://pixabay.com/users/juliush-3921568/

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The Archaeological Wonders of Madhya Pradesh

Editor’s Note: Following is a documented interview of Ramesh Yadav, Archaeological Officer at the Directorate of Archaeology, Archives, and Museums, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India, by Popular Archaeology Magazine. Yadav relates the activities and significance of work that will reveal a remarkable past yet to be fully realized by the world’s public. 

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1. What would you consider to be the ‘hot spots’ or ‘hot sites’ for archaeological investigation and/or excavation in Madhya Pradesh, and why?

Since 1995, the Directorate of Archaeology, Archives, and Museums has been systematically conducting village-to-village surveys to identify and document archaeological heritage sites across Madhya Pradesh. As part of this initiative, teams of archaeologists visit various locations to assess and record the presence of ancient remains, often leading to the discovery of remnants of early settlements.

The selection of excavation sites is based on the findings from these surveys, including surface collections and recovered artifacts. Extensive surveys have been carried out throughout the state, with a notable concentration of significant excavation sites along the banks of the Narmada River. To date, at least 30 such sites have been excavated, offering valuable insights into the region’s historical and cultural evolution.


2. What is it about this region that stands out for archaeological investigation and archaeological visitation/ tourism in India, and/or, as compared to anywhere else?

Madhya Pradesh holds a prominent place in India’s archaeological landscape, with remains spanning from the prehistoric period to the 19th century. The region is home to significant rock paintings, some dating back to the Upper Paleolithic period, with Bhimbetka—a UNESCO World Heritage Site—being among the most renowned. Beyond Bhimbetka, extensive rock art sites are found in the Mandsaur and Neemuch districts, the Gwalior and Rewa regions, and the Satpura range.

For the Chalcolithic period, the state features several key excavation sites that provide valuable insights into early human settlements. In terms of built heritage, Madhya Pradesh is home to some of India’s most iconic historical sites, including Sanchi, Mandu, Gwalior, and Khajuraho. Additionally, sites like Sahastradhara and remains from the Mauryan period in Ujjain further enrich the region’s archaeological significance.

With its diverse and extensive archaeological wealth, Madhya Pradesh continues to be a focal point for researchers, historians, and heritage enthusiasts, offering a deep and immersive experience into India’s historical and cultural evolution.

3. Where (in terms of a site) has the most significant or most promising archaeological investigation or excavation work taken place?

Several regions in Madhya Pradesh have emerged as promising areas for archaeological investigation. The Chambal-Gwalior belt is of particular interest, with multiple sites reported to have significant excavation potential. Additionally, the corridor between Ujjain and Mandsaur, especially in the Ratlam and Ujjain districts, has been identified as an area rich in archaeological heritage, warranting further exploration. These regions continue to offer valuable insights into the historical and cultural evolution of the state.

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4. What new developments in the process of archaeological research and investigation have taken place in relation to the site(s) mentioned above?

Archaeological research in Madhya Pradesh has seen significant advancements in recent years. One of the key initiatives involves extensive explorations and village-to-village surveys to systematically identify and document archaeological sites. In addition to this, a major focus has been placed on the identification and restoration of ancient temples that date back over a thousand years. These temples, originally constructed during the reigns of the Kachchhapaghata, Pratihara, Chandela, Kalachuri, and Paramara dynasties, saw extensive development between the 9th and 13th centuries but suffered damage over time due to invasions and natural calamities.

The Directorate of Archaeology is actively engaged in the scientific excavation of these sites, with a strong emphasis on temple restoration. If a site yields over 90% of a temple’s structural remains, efforts are made to restore it to its original architectural form, making this a priority project. Additionally, the department is conducting targeted excavations at historically significant sites, where findings have the potential to reshape our understanding of the region’s history and cultural heritage. These developments mark an important step forward in preserving and uncovering Madhya Pradesh’s rich archaeological legacy.

5. What are the plans and objectives going forward in relation to the above?

One of the key objectives moving forward is to enhance public awareness and engagement with the state’s rich archaeological heritage. To achieve this, the Directorate of Archaeology is actively working on publishing books focusing on district-level archaeology. These publications aim to make archaeological knowledge more accessible to a wider audience, allowing people to discover and appreciate the historical significance of their own villages and districts.

In addition to these educational initiatives, there are plans to expand excavation projects at identified sites with significant historical potential. The department is also prioritizing the restoration and conservation of ancient structures, particularly temples and monuments that have been damaged over time. Efforts are being made to implement modern conservation techniques while maintaining the authenticity of these heritage sites.

Furthermore, the Directorate aims to leverage digital technology by digitizing archival records and excavation findings. This will facilitate research, enable remote access to historical data, and encourage academic collaborations at national and international levels.

Through these initiatives, the overarching goal is to preserve, document, and promote Madhya Pradesh’s archaeological treasures, ensuring that future generations continue to connect with and appreciate the state’s remarkable historical legacy.

6. What specific historic /cultural/ archaeological questions are you trying to answer in relation to the above research and exploration?

One of the key research objectives is to uncover and reinterpret the historical narratives of Madhya Pradesh’s ancient civilizations. A notable example is the excavation conducted near the town of Maihar, at a site known as Manora Hill. The findings from this site have provided significant insights into the history of the Vindhya region, reshaping our understanding of its past.

Through careful analysis of the unearthed remains, we have been able to establish that Manora Hill was once the capital of the Vakataka dynasty. This discovery is particularly important as it offers new evidence about the political and cultural landscape of the region during that era. Our research continues to focus on understanding the extent of Vakataka rule, their architectural advancements, and their influence on trade, administration, and society.

Additionally, ongoing studies aim to explore connections between Madhya Pradesh’s archaeological sites and other ancient civilizations, helping to answer broader questions about the historical evolution of settlements, trade networks, and artistic influences in Central India. These investigations not only add depth to academic research but also contribute to the conservation and promotion of the state’s cultural heritage for future generations.

7. What is the potential for archaeological tourism for this region?

Madhya Pradesh offers immense potential for archaeological tourism, given its rich historical and cultural heritage. The state is home to a diverse range of archaeological sites, spanning from prehistoric rock art to grand medieval temples and forts, making it an ideal destination for history enthusiasts and scholars alike.

Recognizing this potential, the Madhya Pradesh government has taken significant steps to promote and develop archaeological tourism. Visitors have the opportunity to explore these ancient sites first-hand, immersing themselves in the region’s storied past while gaining insights into India’s historical evolution.

To further enhance this experience, the state has established 44 museums dedicated to preserving and showcasing archaeological artefacts. These museums serve as vital repositories for scattered sculptures, inscriptions, and excavated relics, ensuring that valuable heritage is both protected and accessible to the public.

With ongoing conservation efforts, improved infrastructure, and increasing public awareness, Madhya Pradesh continues to position itself as a key hub for archaeological tourism, offering travellers an unparalleled glimpse into the past.

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Aparajta. 11th Cent.A.D., Hinglajgarh, Mandsaur

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Ravnanugraha, 11th Cent. A.D., Hinglajgarh, Mandsaur

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Shakti-Ganesh, 11th Cent. A.D., Mandsaur

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State Museum

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Gohad Fort Exterior

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Gohad Fort Interiors

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Dr. Ramesh Yadav -Archaeological Officer

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Evidence of cannibalism 18,000 years ago

University of Göttingen—An international research team including the University of Göttingen has gained new insights into the burial rituals of Late Ice Age societies in Central Europe. Signs of human remains from the Maszycka Cave in southern Poland being manipulated indicate systematic dissection of the deceased, as well as cannibalism. The research was published in Scientific Reports*.

The Maszycka Cave in Poland is a significant excavation site for the late Upper Palaeolithic times. More than 100 years ago, researchers discovered human bones there among stone and bone tools alongside the remains of hunted Ice Age animals. These discoveries were associated with a late Ice Age society in France, known as the Magdalenian, that existed between 20,000 and 14,500 years ago. Excavations in the 1960s yielded more human remains, so that a total of 63 bones from ten individuals dating back 18,000 years were available for examination. This is one of the most important collections of human remains from the late Upper Palaeolithic.

Using modern methods, the team identified 36 bone fragments, which showed signs that the individuals were dissected immediately after death. Cut marks on skull fragments indicate that the muscle attachments and scalp were removed before the long bones were smashed to get to the bone marrow. First author Francesc Marginedas from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution explains: “The position and frequency of the cut marks, as well as the targeted smashing of bones, leave no doubt that their intention was to extract nutritious components from the dead.”

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But how and why did cannibalism happen here? The Magdalenian are known for their impressive art – such as the famous cave paintings at Lascaux. “The wide range of artistic evidence points to favourable living conditions during this period. It therefore seems unlikely that cannibalism was practiced out of necessity,” says Professor Thomas Terberger from the Department of Prehistory and Early History at the University of Göttingen. Marginedas adds: “It is possible that this was an example of violent cannibalism. After the last Ice Age, there was population growth, and that may have led to conflicts over resources and territories. And there is evidence of isolated incidences of cannibalism in connection with violent conflict. Furthermore, human remains were found mixed with settlement debris in the Maszycka Cave, which indicates that the dead were not treated with respect.” The results help to improve our understanding of the cultural development and group-dynamics in the Late Ice Age society.

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The entrance to the Maszycka Cave in southern Poland. Darek Bobak

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Cut and impact marks indicating cannibalism on various human parts of the skeleton from the Maszycka Cave. Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo IAM (CSIC-Junta de Extremadura)

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The 18,000-year-old discoveries from the Maszycka Cave include decorated hunting tools made of bone and antler. Darek Bobak

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Article Source: University of Göttingen news release

*Francesc Marginedas et al. New insights of cultural cannibalism amongst Magdalenian groups at Maszycka Cave, Poland, Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-86093-w

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