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American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—Genomic insights into Greenland’s iconic sled dog reveal a rich history of Inuit migration and Arctic adaptation, according to a new study. The findings provide a crucial guide for preserving the ancient breed amid climate threats and rapid cultural change. For over 9,500 years, sled dogs have been a central part of Arctic life. While many Arctic sled dog breeds have been replaced, mixed with other dogs, or shifted into domestic roles, the Greenland sled dog, or Qimmeq (pl. Qimmit), has uniquely preserved its traditional role as a working sled dog. However, this ancient working relationship now faces modern threats: climate change, urbanization, and modern technologies like snowmobiles are rapidly eroding the conditions that have long supported Qimmit and their traditional role. The ongoing decline in Qimmeq population underscores the urgency of documenting their remaining genetic diversity to guide conservation efforts. To reconstruct the breed’s history, Tatiana Feuerborn and colleagues sequenced genomes from 92 dogs across Greenland spanning the past 800 years, capturing both ancient and modern individuals, and compared them with over 1,900 published dog genomes. Feuerborn et al. discovered that Qimmit form a distinct clade with other ancient Arctic dogs – most notably a 3,700-year-old Alaskan dog. This genetic continuity, despite thousands of years and great geographic distances, supports the theory of a rapid Inuit migration across the North American Arctic. Notably, the authors found that the genetic differentiation among regional dog populations mirrors the cultural and linguistic divisions of the indigenous peoples of Greenland. Moreover, the analysis revealed further evidence of two distinct migrations of dogs into Greenland, with data that indicate an earlier-than-expected arrival of people to the region. Feuerborn et al. also show that despite European colonization of Greenland, there is minimal European ancestry in present-day Qimmit, likely due to overall isolation of the populations and more modern preservation policies. “These insights into the Qimmit provide a baseline for levels of inbreeding and introgression that can serve as a foundation for informed management aimed at the preservation of these remarkable dogs,” write the authors. “Studies such as this demonstrate the relevance of paleogenomic insight into current conversations and decisions centered around conservation and preservation of culturally significant species.”

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Article Source: AAAS news release

*Origins and diversity of Greenland’s Qimmit revealed with genomes of ancient and modern sled dogs, Science, 10-Jul-2025.

Cover Image, Top Left: Husky sled dogs. cocoparisienne, Pixabay

University of Houston—Archaeologists from the University of Houston working at Caracol in Belize, Central America have uncovered the tomb of Te K’ab Chaak, the first ruler of this ancient Maya city and the founder of its royal dynasty. Now in ruins, this metropolis was a major political player in Maya history, dominating the southern part of the Yucatan Peninsula from 560 through 680 AD before its abandonment by 900 AD.  

The discovery is the first identifiable ruler’s tomb found in over four decades of work in Caracol, the largest Maya archaeological site in Belize and in the Maya lowlands. 

Te K’ab Chaak, who acceded to the throne in 331 AD, was interred at the base of a royal family shrine with eleven pottery vessels, carved bone tubes, jadeite jewelry, a mosaic jadeite mask, Pacific spondylus shells, and other perishable materials. Pottery vessels in the chamber included a scene of a Maya ruler holding a spear and receiving offerings from supplicants in the form of deities. Another vessel portrays the image of Ek Chuah, Maya god of traders, surrounded by offerings. Four of the pottery vessels portray bound captives (similar vessels also appeared in two related burials). Two vessels supported lids with modeled handles of coatimundi (pisote) heads. The coatimundi, or tz’uutz’ in Maya, was used by subsequent Caracol rulers as part of their names. 

A team led by husband and wife collaborators Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase of the University of Houston has been excavating at Caracol for more than 40 years; this field season was carried out in concert with Belize’s Institute of Archaeology and was supported by the Alphawood Foundation, the University of Houston, the Geraldine and Emory Ford Foundation, and the KHR Family Fund.  

The Chases estimate that at the time of his burial the ruler was of advanced age and approximately 5’7” in height. He had no remaining teeth. 

Their investigations at Caracol’s Northeast Acropolis show that Te K’ab Chaak’s tomb was the first of three major burials dating to about 350 AD, a time of early contact with the central Mexican city of Teotihuacan, some 1200 kilometers distant. By 300 AD, Teotihuacan was a huge city that traded throughout Central America. 

“One question that has perplexed Maya archaeologists since the 1960s is whether a new political order was introduced to the Maya area by Mexicans from Teotihuacan,” said Diane Z. Chase, archeologist and senior vice president for academic affairs and Provost at the University of Houston. “Maya carved stone monuments, hieroglyphic dates, iconography, and archaeological data all suggest that widespread pan-Mesoamerican connections occurred after an event in 378 AD referred to as the “entrada.” Whether this event represented actual Teotihuacanos in the Maya area or Maya using central Mexican symbols is still debated. The Caracol archaeological data suggests that the situation was far more complicated.” 

A cremation placed in the center of Caracol’s Northeast Acropolis plaza, recovered in 2010 and placed after Te K’aab Chaak’s burial has been dated to AD 350 by radiocarbon analysis and included artifacts from central Mexico. It contained the remains of three individuals, as well as two large knives, six atlatl points, and fifteen pristine blades of green obsidian from Pachuca, Mexico (north of Teotihuacan); several pottery vessels also likely came from central Mexico. Additionally, a carved atlatl projectile tip, atypical for the Maya but typical for a Teotihuacan warrior, was included in the cremation.  

The cremation itself and its placement in the center of a residential plaza are also more typical practices for a high-status Teotihuacano and do not accord with standard Maya burial practices. Based on other ceramics in this cremation, the main individual was likely a Caracol royal family member that had adopted central Mexican ritual practices. This individual may even have served as a royal Maya envoy who had lived at Teotihuacan and returned to Caracol.  

A third burial – the tomb of a woman, also covered with hematite and containing four pottery vessels, a spondylus bead necklace, mirror fragments, and two Pacific spondylus shells – was recovered in the northern building of the same residential group in 2009 and is similarly dated.  

The three burials interred in the Caracol Northeast Acropolis all cluster at AD 350, at least a generation before the previously recognized Teotihuacan presence in the Maya area. They demonstrate that early Maya rulers were fully enmeshed in Mesoamerican-wide contacts prior to the Teotihuacan entrada recorded on Maya monument[s].  

“Both central Mexico and the Maya area were clearly aware of each other’s ritual practices, as reflected in the Caracol cremation, said Arlen F. Chase, professor and chair of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston. “The connections between the two regions were undertaken by the highest levels of society, suggesting that initial kings at various Maya cities – such as Te K’ab Chaak at Caracol – were engaged in formal diplomatic relationships with Teotihuacan.” The royal dynasty established by Te K’ab Chaak continued at Caracol for over 460 years. 

The Chase’s findings also indicate that ancient peoples in the new world were travelers. A trip between Teotihuacan and Caracol today by car would take over 23 hours. The one-way walking time may be estimated to be approximately 153 days. 

Research continues on the contents of the chamber with the reconstruction of the jadeite death mask and with ancient DNA and stable isotope analysis of the skeletal material. The Chases will present results of the 2025 Caracol field season at a conference on Maya–Teotihuacan interaction hosted by the Maya Working Group at the Santa Fe Institute (New Mexico) in August 2025. 

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University of Houston provost and archeologist Diane Chase in newly discovered tomb of the first ruler of the ancient Maya city Caracol and the founder of its royal dynasty. 
Caracol Archeological Project/University of Houston

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Article Source: University of Houston news release

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About the Chases 

Married since 1975, Diane and Arlen Chase are two of the most influential Maya archaeologists in the world, and the foremost experts on Caracol, one of the most significant ancient Maya cities. 

Since their first dig in 1985, the Chases have become known for:  

• Providing a nuanced picture of Caracol’s ancient landscape and people, including recognition of Caracol as a city of advanced urban planning, road systems and markets and a large non-elite population upending the notion of a strict Maya social hierarchy. In 1986 they discovered an inscription that told of Caracol’s military victory over Tikal in 562 AD, overturning the myth that Tikal was the most powerful Classic Period city and illustrating that Caracol was a major military and political power. 

• Using airborne LiDAR (light detection and ranging) technology to uncover structures hidden for centuries under dense jungle, revolutionizing how archaeologists explore Maya sites. Their work from the 1980s-2000s revealed a web of interconnected roadways, proving that Caracol was a massive, urban and integrated city. 

• Overturning outdated beliefs about the Maya, while providing new insights. Their archaeological work has shown that ancient Maya society was composed of many different social gradients, contrary to more simple two-class models. From the 1980s -2000, they and their team mapped numerous causeways (or roads) and thousands of agricultural terraces spread out across Caracol as well as hundreds of reservoirs in non-elite areas, proving that water, sacred to the Maya, was not controlled by the elite, as previously thought. The Chases’ son, Adrian Chase, also an archaeologist, found that Caracol had a decentralized water system and that residential groups had their own access. He is currently studying the urban structure of Caracol and changes in governance over time. 

The Chases will present detailed information on the tomb and other finds from Caracol at the Santa Fe Institute in August.  

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American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—New discoveries from the Pleistocene-age Gantangqing site in southwestern China reveal a diverse collection of wooden tools dated from ~361,000 to 250,000 years ago, marking the earliest known evidence of complex wooden tool technology in East Asia. The findings* reveal that the Middle Pleistocene humans who used these tools crafted the wooden implements not for hunting, but for digging and processing plants. Although early humans have worked with wood for over a million years, wooden artifacts are quite rare in the archaeological record, particularly during the Early and Middle Pleistocene. Most ancient wooden tools have been found in Africa and western Eurasia, with notable examples that include spears and throwing sticks from Germany and the UK, dating back 300,000 to 400,000 years, as well as structural elements like interlocking logs from Zambia and wooden planks and digging sticks from sites in Israel and Italy. While the long-standing Bamboo Hypothesis argues that early East Asian populations relied on bamboo for toolmaking, archaeological evidence for organic material-based tools from the region is scarce.

Here, Jian-Hui Liu and colleagues present new findings from the Gantangqing site in southwestern China, which has yielded a wide range of artifacts. Among these are 35 wooden artifacts that exhibit clear evidence of intentional shaping and use, including signs of carving, smoothing, and wear, suggesting that they were purposefully crafted by hominins. These tools, most of which were fashioned from pine, range from large two-handed digging sticks to smaller hand-held implements, and even include hook-like tools potentially used for cutting plant roots. According to Liu et al., compared to other well-known contemporaneous wooden tool sites in Europe, which are generally characterized by medium-sized hunting gear, Gantangqing stands out for its broader and more diverse array of small, hand-held tools designed primarily for digging up and processing plants. The sophistication of these wooden tools underscores the importance of organic artifacts in interpreting early human behavior, particularly in regions where stone tools alone suggest a more “primitive” technological landscape, say the authors.

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Article Source: AAAS news release

The Francis Crick Institute—Researchers from the Francis Crick Institute and Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) have extracted and sequenced the oldest Egyptian DNA to date from an individual who lived around 4,500 to 4,800 years ago, the age of the first pyramids, in research published today in Nature.*

Forty years after Nobel Prize winner Svante Pääbo’s pioneering attempts to extract ancient DNA from individuals from ancient Egypt, improvements in technology have now paved the way for the breakthrough today, which is also the first whole genome (the entire set of DNA in an individual) from ancient Egypt.²

During this period of ancient Egyptian history, archaeological evidence has suggested trade and cultural connections existed with the Fertile Crescent – an area of West Asia encompassing modern-day Iraq, Iran and Jordan, among other countries.

Researchers believed that objects and imagery, like writing systems or pottery, were exchanged, but genetic evidence has been limited due to warm temperatures preventing DNA preservation.

In this study, the research team extracted DNA from the tooth of an individual buried in Nuwayrat, a village 265km south of Cairo, using this to sequence his genome.

The burial had been donated by the Egyptian Antiquities Service, while under British rule, to the excavation committee set up by John Garstang. It was initially housed at the Liverpool Institute of Archaeology (which later became part of the University of Liverpool) and then transferred to World Museum Liverpool.³

The individual died at some point in the overlap between two periods in Egyptian history, the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods, and had been buried in a ceramic pot in a tomb cut into the hillside. His burial took place before artificial mummification was standard practice, which may have helped to preserve his DNA.

By analysing his genetic code, the researchers showed that most of his ancestry mapped to ancient individuals who lived in North Africa. The remaining 20% of his ancestry could be traced to ancient individuals who lived in the Fertile Crescent, particularly an area called Mesopotamia (roughly modern-day Iraq).

This finding is genetic evidence that people moved into Egypt and mixed with local populations at this time, which was previously only visible in archaeological artefacts. However, the researchers caution that many more individual genome sequences would be needed to fully understand variation in ancestry in Egypt at the time.

By investigating chemical signals in his teeth relating to diet and environment, the researchers showed that the individual had likely grown up in Egypt.

They then used evidence from his skeleton to estimate sex, age, height, and information on ancestry and lifestyle. These signs suggested he could have worked as a potter or in a trade requiring comparable movements, as his bones had muscle markings from sitting for long periods with outstretched limbs.⁴

Adeline Morez Jacobs, Visiting Research Fellow and former PhD student at Liverpool John Moores University, former postdoctoral researcher at the Crick and first author, said: “Piecing together all the clues from this individual’s DNA, bones and teeth have allowed us to build a comprehensive picture. We hope that future DNA samples from ancient Egypt can expand on when precisely this movement from West Asia started.”

Linus Girdland Flink, Lecturer in Ancient Biomolecules at the University of Aberdeen, Visiting Researcher at LJMU and co-senior author, said: “This individual has been on an extraordinary journey. He lived and died during a critical period of change in ancient Egypt, and his skeleton was excavated in 1902 and donated to World Museum Liverpool, where it then survived bombings during the Blitz that destroyed most of the human remains in their collection. We’ve now been able to tell part of the individual’s story, finding that some of his ancestry came from the Fertile Crescent, highlighting mixture between groups at this time.”

Pontus Skoglund, Group Leader of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at the Crick and co-senior author, said: “Forty years have passed since the early pioneering attempts to retrieve DNA from mummies without successful sequencing of an ancient Egyptian genome. Ancient Egypt is a place of extraordinary written history and archaeology, but challenging DNA preservation has meant that no genomic record of ancestry in early Egypt has been available for comparison. Building on this past research, new and powerful genetic techniques have allowed us to cross these technical boundaries and rule out contaminating DNA, providing the first genetic evidence for potential movements of people in Egypt at this time.”

Joel Irish, Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at Liverpool John Moores University and second author, said: “The markings on the skeleton are clues to the individual’s life and lifestyle – his seat bones are expanded in size, his arms showed evidence of extensive movement back and forth, and there’s substantial arthritis in just the right foot. Though circumstantial these clues point towards pottery, including use of a pottery wheel, which arrived in Egypt around the same time. That said, his higher-class burial is not expected for a potter, who would not normally receive such treatment. Perhaps he was exceptionally skilled or successful to advance his social status.”

In future work, the research team hopes to build a bigger picture of migration and ancestry in collaboration with Egyptian researchers.

*Morez Jacobs, A. et al. (2025). Whole-genome ancestry of an Old Kingdom Egyptian. Nature.  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09195-5

1. The Old Kingdom of Egypt, also known as the ‘Age of the Pyramids’, refers to the period from the Third Dynasty to the Sixth Dynasty (2686 to 2181 BCE). This period has fascinated archaeologists for decades, as there was a boom of progress, including the construction of the first pyramid of Egypt, the ‘step’ pyramid at Saqqara. The individual in this research lived at some point during the bridge between the Early Dynastic period and the Old Kingdom.
2. The technique used was called ‘whole genome sequencing’ where the entire DNA sequence is sequenced. This is different to previous methods which involved looking for specific markers in the DNA.
3. The export of the burial outside of Egypt by archaeologist John Garstang was approved under the ‘partage’ system, a legal framework established in 1883, which, until 1983, allowed the division of archaeological finds between Egypt and foreign institutions. Under this system, materials deemed sufficiently represented in Egyptian collections could be approved for export by museum authorities in Cairo. John Garstang exported eight burials to the UK under this framework out of more than 900 excavated during his career. The remaining burials were kept in Egypt, including those of the nearby Beni Hasan necropolis, currently held at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.
4. The researchers took evidence from the skeleton that the individual habitually sat on or near the hard ground, with arms and legs extended, though also often kneeling, and looking down a lot as he had severe arthritis in his neck. Though circumstantial, this is consistent with work as a potter. This theory is supported further by unusual wear on several toe and arch bones in his right foot only, potentially guiding a pottery wheel, which was invented in West Asia and spread into Egypt at this time. These skeletal markings match the positions that potters took as depicted in tomb paintings. This evidence for constant physical labour is at odds with his high-status tomb burial.

The Francis Crick Institute is a biomedical discovery institute with the mission of understanding the fundamental biology underlying health and disease. Its work helps improve our understanding of why disease develops which promotes discoveries into new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat disease.

An independent organisation, its founding partners are the Medical Research Council (MRC), Cancer Research UK, Wellcome, UCL (University College London), Imperial College London and King’s College London.

The Crick was formed in 2015, and in 2016 it moved into a brand new state-of-the-art building in central London which brings together 1500 scientists and support staff working collaboratively across disciplines, making it the biggest biomedical research facility under a single roof in Europe.

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Article Source: The Francis Crick Institute news release

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—A new assessment of U.S. media coverage of archaeological studies has found notable discrepancies in news about archaeological work conducted in different regions. The findings show that only 32% of 1,155 papers published in 7 different scientific journals from 2015 to 2020 earned coverage in 1 of 15 major U.S. news outlets – and that discoveries in China/Taiwan received 3 times less U.S. media attention than those featuring research in Israel/Palestine, Australia, or the U.K. Because of the cutthroat nature of today’s news landscape, many peer-reviewed studies do not receive mass media coverage. Importantly, studies that don’t reach the public don’t contribute to popular understandings of science. “Skewed coverage may be particularly charged for archaeology, a field with large public interest,” Bridget Alex and colleagues write. They argue that news coverage favoring discoveries in certain regions or cultures can “create a false impression that only those ancestries made great achievements in the past. Unreported or under-reported regions may be perceived as ‘primitive’ or lacking hallmarks of civilization.” Here, Alex et al. quantified archaeological coverage by U.S. and global outlets, assessing press attention from 1,155 archaeological papers in 1 specialist journal (Antiquity) and 6 generalist journals (Science, Nature, Science Advances, Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) from 2015 to 2020. They used the news tracking platform Altmetric and the press release posting platform EurekAlert! to observe trends, and also calculated a U.S.-specific news score based on a paper’s mention in 15 U.S. major outlets or aggregators (Yahoo, Google, MSN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, FOX, ABC, CNN, National Geographic, Discover, New Scientist, Newsweek, Scientific American, Forbes, and Los Angeles Times). The U.S. news score did not incorporate Associated Press coverage. Results showed that 68% of these papers had no coverage by U.S. sources. Globally, 48.3% of papers had no coverage in global news outlets according to Almetric. Coverage within the U.S. depended on the journal (correlating heavily with impact factor) and whether the authors had distributed a press release. Of note, EurekAlert! press releases often are password-protected and so not all promotion efforts could have been captured. Primarily, stories favored Paleolithic archaeological research and, secondarily, prioritized studies about early bread, beer, wine, or cannabis. Inspired by disparate coverage of two studies published in 2021 on ancient China and ancient Egypt respectively, the authors then examined geographic coverage patterns. Regression modeling showed that research covering archaeology in Israel/Palestine, the U.K., and Australia earned 3 times more coverage in at least 1 U.S. news outlet than papers covering archaeological work in China/Taiwan. “The findings point to actionable measures for researchers, press office workers, journalists, and news editors to enhance the geographic and cultural diversity of archaeology reported in U.S. press,” the authors write.

Article Source: AAAS news release.

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—Neanderthals were rendering animal bones for grease – extracting more nutrients from carcasses – in present-day Germany roughly 125,000 years ago, research suggests. The discovery of a Neanderthal “fat factory” at an Interglacial Paleolithic site substantially pushes back estimates for when hominins began practicing this type of resource intensification. The ability to get extra calories by harvesting bone marrow and grease has played a critical role in humanity’s evolution; better diets helped humans live longer and reproduce more. Until now, most signs of resource intensification have been found at Upper Paleolithic sites around 28,000 years ago, well after Neanderthals became extinct. Lutz Kindler and colleagues reveal that Neanderthals performed resource intensification far earlier in the Homo genus’s evolution, as far back as 125,000 years ago. They analyzed remains from 172 large animals (horses, deer, and bovids) at the Neumark-Nord (NN2/2B) site in present-day Germany. The data*, alongside more than 16,500 flint artifacts, stone manuports, and other items indicating fire use, showed that Neanderthals transported the animals to this 50-square-meter area to fracture bones for rendering into grease. “The evidence from NN2/2B constitutes the earliest clear case of intensive grease-rendering yet documented for the Paleolithic,” Kindler et al. write. The find showcases “a substantial investment by the site’s occupants of both time and effort aimed at retrieving precious lipids from a large number of prey animals,” they conclude.

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Year -round excavations. The Neumark-Nord 2/2B site was excavated through year-round campaigns by a core team from 2004 to 2009, alongside an international field school that included more than 175 students in total. Roebroeks, Leiden Univ

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Massive bone processing. At the Neumark-Nord 2 site, near the margin of a shallow pool, there is a dense concentration of bones from more than 170 larger mammals (highlighted in blue), mixed with flint artifacts (red) and hammer stones (red). All bones larger than 3 cm were carefully recorded during excavation and plotted together, creating the impression of a “bone floor” produced by Neanderthal activity at the site. Many of the bones were found in rounded depressions at the base of the excavation layer, as shown in the insets. These depressions represent the final stage of excavation, when most of the bones had already been removed, leaving only the remaining bone fragments at the bottom. Kindler, LEIZA-Monrepos

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Location of Neumark-Nord (Germany). The site’s position is depicted relative to the maximum extent of the Saalian and Weichselian glaciations. Kindler et al., Sci. Adv. 11, eadv1257

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From complete bones to tiny fragments. At the Neumark-Nord 2/2B sites, imported bones were initially smashed open to extract marrow from the hollow cavities (see A; arrows indicate hammerstone impacts on an aurochs humerus). Afterward, the bones were crushed and chopped into smaller pieces (shown in B to F, again from a humerus as seen in A) to facilitate the extraction of grease from both the spongy and compact bone tissue. Approximately 2,000 tiny bone fragments accidentally came into contact with fire after boiling, resulting in typical coloration (ranging from dark brown and black to white) and texture commonly found in heated bones. Kindler, LEIZA-Monrepos

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Article Source: AAAS news release.

University of Lausanne—The transition to agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle is one of the great turning points in human history. Yet how this Neolithic way of life spread from the Fertile Crescent across Anatolia and into the Aegean has been hotly debated. A Turkish-Swiss team offers important new insights, by combining archaeology and genetics in an innovative way.

How open are people to experimenting with new ways of life? Did farming spread from its origins in Anatolia to neighboring regions by farmers migrating? Or was it rather local hunter-gatherers adopting their neighbors’ ways of life? A new study, published in Science, now reconciles these opposing views. The authors find that this massive cultural change occurred through both phenomena – depending on the region and the period.

The research, led by geneticists and archaeologists at Middle East Technical University (METU) and Hacettepe University in Ankara (Turkey), and the University of Lausanne (UNIL, Switzerland), sheds light on a major turning point in human history. The team’s work shows that cultural changes took place not only due to the movement of people, but also through spread of ideas. “In some regions of West Anatolia, we see the first transitions to village life nearly 10,000 years ago. However, we also observe thousands of years of genetic continuity, which means that populations did not migrate or mix massively, even though cultural transition was definitely happening,” explains Dilek Koptekin, the study’s first author. 

A missing chapter in the Neolithic story

Previous research had already shown how agriculture gradually replaced hunting and gathering in Europe after 6,000 BCE, through the movement of farmers out of Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). But what happened before this tipping point, especially in Anatolia, remained unclear. “Our study allows us to go back in time – to events that were mainly a matter of speculation up to now,” says Koptekin.

This advancement was possible by sequencing the genome of a 9,000-year-old individual from West Anatolia, the oldest yet in the region. Combining this genome with 29 new paleogenomes as well as published data, the researchers found surprising genetic continuity in West Anatolia across seven millennia. “Genetically speaking, these people were mainly locals, meaning that their ancestors had not recently arrived from elsewhere. Yet their material culture evolved rapidly: they moved from caves to houses, and adopted new tools and rituals from afar. This suggests that these communities adopted Neolithic practices by cultural exchange rather than population replacement,” says computational biologist Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas from UNIL. 

How exactly did that happen? “The answer lies in what we call ‘background mobility’,” explains geneticist Mehmet Somel from METU. “This means a low but steady movement of individuals around different regions, perhaps linked to exchange, finding partners, or other motivations. These encounters then led to the sharing of material and ideas.” Such movement is illustrated by traces of obsidian, a volcanic glass used for tools, found in western Anatolia but sourced from central Anatolian volcanoes hundreds of kilometers away. Materials, and with them ideas, were apparently on the move. 

Ideas move further than people

Seeking deeper insights into this mobility, the team used an innovative approach, combining ancient DNA with archaeological material data. The researchers scoured hundreds of articles and quantified archaeological features such as pottery types, tools, and architectural remains. This allowed them to systematically compare materials with the genetic profiles of individuals buried at the same sites. “By giving quantitative values to the archaeological data, we were able to directly compare large amounts of data across different sites for the first time,” specifies archaeologist Çiğdem Atakuman from METU. The team thereby traced not only who moved where, but also how ideas and practices circulated.

The scientists’ findings challenge previous assumptions that new tools or objects necessarily indicate the arrival of a new population. “Archaeologists have this proverb, ‘Pots don’t equal people’. Our study confirms this notion,” comments Dilek Koptekin. 

An evolving mosaic

But this is not the whole story. In some areas of Anatolia, genetic data revealed both mobility and admixture of populations around 7,000 BCE. Here, new groups moved in, bringing both different genes and different practices. In the Aegean region, too, a later wave of population movement introduced further cultural elements that would eventually spread into Europe. 

“These types of migration events, which leave genetically visible shifts, probably comprised a small fraction of movement happening compared to background mobility,” says Füsun Özer from Hacettepe University. “The Neolithic, in this view, was not a single process, but a patchwork of transformations, combining cultural adoption, mobility, and at times, migration.” Koptekin adds, “Humans have always been adaptive and inclined to change their way of living. We don’t need crises or big migration events to bring about change.”

Conceptualized and led primarily by researchers based in Turkey, the study underscores the importance of supporting research in regions directly connected to the questions under investigation. For Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, it is a valuable example of how extending large-scale funding opportunities beyond established scientific hubs strengthens underrepresented research communities. “Our collaboration shows how we, as a scientific community, should move forward to create a more inclusive and globally balanced research landscape,” concludes the biologist.

The methodological leap achieved in this study, integrating genomic and archaeological data at large scale for the first time, marks a turning point for prehistoric research. It allows future research to move beyond simple models and embrace more complex realities of human history.

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Excavations at Çatalhöyük, Neolithic site in Central Anatolia. Christopher J. Knüsel

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Excavations performed at Girmeler, Turkey. Tlos Excavation Archive

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Researchers performing excavation at Bahçelievler, Bilecik, Turkey. Erkan Fidan

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Burial site at Pendik Höyük, Istanbul, Turkey. Mehmet Özdoğan

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Figurine from Ulucak Höyük in West Anatolia. Ulucak Höyük Excavation Archive

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Article Source: University of Lausanne news release.

University of Tokyo—When and where the earliest modern human populations migrated and settled in East Asia are relatively well known. However, how these populations moved between islands on treacherous stretches of sea is still shrouded in mystery. In two new papers, researchers from Japan and Taiwan led by Professor Yousuke Kaifu from the University of Tokyo simulated methods ancient peoples would have needed to accomplish these journeys, and they used period-accurate tools to create the canoes to make the journey themselves.

Evidence suggests that around 30,000 years ago, humans made a sea crossing — without maps, metal tools or modern boats — from what is now called Taiwan to some of the islands in southern Japan, including Okinawa. To find out exactly how this crossing was made, a team led by Kaifu performed various simulations and experiments, including the use of physical recreations, to learn the most plausible way this crossing was achieved. Of the two newly published papers, one used numerical simulations to cross one of the strongest currents in the world called the Kuroshio. The simulation showed that a boat made using tools of the time, and the right know-how, could have navigated the Kuroshio. The other paper detailed the construction and testing of a real boat which the team successfully used to paddle between islands over 100 kilometers apart.

“We initiated this project with simple questions: ‘How did Paleolithic people arrive at such remote islands as Okinawa?’ ‘How difficult was their journey?’ ‘And what tools and strategies did they use?’” said Kaifu. “Archaeological evidence such as remains and artifacts can’t paint a full picture as the nature of the sea is that it washes such things away. So, we turned to the idea of experimental archaeology, in a similar vein to the Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947 by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl.”

In 2019, the team constructed a 7.5-meter dugout canoe called Sugime, built from a single Japanese cedar trunk, using replicas of 30,000-year-old stone tools. They paddled it 225 kilometers from eastern Taiwan to Yonaguni Island in the Ryukyu group, which includes Okinawa, navigating only by the sun, stars, swells and their instincts. They paddled for over 45 hours across the open sea, mostly without any visibility of the island they were targeting. Several years later, the team is still unpicking some of the data they created during the experiment, and use what they find to inform or test models about various aspects of sea crossings in that region so long ago.

“A dugout canoe was our last candidate among the possible Paleolithic seagoing crafts for the region. We first hypothesized that Paleolithic people used rafts, but after a series of experiments, we learned that these rafts are too slow to cross the Kuroshio and are not durable enough,” said Kaifu. “We now know that these canoes are fast and durable enough to make the crossing, but that’s only half the story. Those male and female pioneers must have all been experienced paddlers with effective strategies and a strong will to explore the unknown. We do not think a return journey was possible. If you have a map and know the flow pattern of the Kuroshio, you can plan a return journey, but such things probably did not take place until much later in history.”

To understand whether such a journey could have been made in different circumstances, the team also used advanced ocean models to simulate hundreds of virtual voyages. These simulations tested different starting points, seasons and paddling strategies under both modern and ancient ocean conditions.

“I major in oceanography and use numerical methods and particle tracking techniques to research things like eel and salmon migrations, pumice drift after volcanic eruptions, and oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Yu-Lin Chang from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, and a visiting researcher at UTokyo and lead author of one of the papers in this study. “The Kuroshio Current is generally considered dangerous to navigate. I thought if you entered it, you could only drift aimlessly. But the results of our simulations went far beyond what I had imagined. I’m pleased this work helped illuminate how ocean voyages may have occurred 30,000 years ago.”

The simulations helped fill gaps that a one-time experiment could not. They revealed that launching from northern Taiwan offered a better chance of success than from further south, and that paddling slightly southeast rather than directly at the destination was essential for compensating against the powerful current. These findings suggest a high level of strategic seafaring knowledge among early modern humans.

“Scientists try to reconstruct the processes of past human migrations, but it is often difficult to examine how challenging they really were. One important message from the whole project was that our Paleolithic ancestors were real challengers. Like us today, they had to undertake strategic challenges to advance,” said Kaifu. “For example, the ancient Polynesian people had no maps, but they could travel almost the entire Pacific. There are a variety of signs on the ocean to know the right direction, such as visible land masses, heavenly bodies, swells and winds. We learned parts of such techniques ourselves along the way.”

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The team set out in their handmade canoe, making the entire experience as authentic as possible. ©2025 Kaifu et al. CC-By-ND.  ©2025 Kaifu et al. CC-By-ND

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The team used replica tools and a real tree. ©2025 Kaifu et al. CC-BY-ND ©2025 Kaifu et al. CC-By-ND

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(Left) GPS tracking and modeling of ocean currents toward the end of the experimental voyage. (Right) The team around the time of the left image. ©2025 Kaifu et al. CC-BY-ND ©2025 Kaifu et al. CC-By-ND

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Article Source: University of Tokyo news release.

*Traversing the Kuroshio: Paleolithic migration across one of the world’s strongest ocean currents, Science Advances, 25-Jun-2025. 10.1126/sciadv.adv5508 

PLOS—Article Abstract—Beginning with the Early Aurignacian, Homo sapiens demonstrated an enhanced symbolic capacity, expanding artistic expressions from body decoration to portable art and aesthetically refined tools. These artistic endeavors, often intertwined with utilitarian purposes, have sparked debates regarding their symbolic versus functional roles. Among these remarkable artifacts is a complete mammoth tusk boomerang from Layer VIII of Obłazowa Cave, Poland, found in association with a human phalanx. Determining its precise chronology and cultural context is critical for understanding the emergence and variability of symbolic behaviors among early Homo sapiens groups in Europe. This study refines the chronology of the Early Upper Paleolithic occupation of Layer VIII at Obłazowa Cave through radiocarbon dating of several bones and the human fossil found near the ivory boomerang. Bayesian modeling places the site’s main occupation phase between 42,810−38,550 cal BP (95,4% probability). The mammoth-ivory boomerang, calibrated to 42,290−39,280 cal BP with a 95.4% probability, emerges as one of Europe’s oldest known examples of this complex tool, exemplifying technological and symbolic innovation at Obłazowa Cave. This multi-disciplinary research underscores the importance of integrating advanced methodologies to explore cultural practices during the Upper Paleolithic. The findings not only deepen our understanding of Homo sapiens’ adaptive strategies but also highlight the nuanced interplay of technology, symbolism, and environmental interaction during the earliest phases of human dispersals in Central Europe.

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The Boomerang made of mammoth tusk of Obłazowa Cave from layer VIII. Talamo et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Article Source: PLOS news release

*Boomerang and bones: Refining the chronology of the Early Upper Paleolithic at Obłazowa Cave, Poland, PLOS One, 25-Jun-2025. 10.1371/journal.pone.0324911 

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — An ancient society near the southern shores of Lake Titicaca in modern-day Bolivia was once one of the continent’s most powerful civilizations. Known as Tiwanaku, the ancient society is widely considered by archaeologists to be one of the earliest examples of civilization in the Andes and a precursor of the Inca empire, but it mysteriously disappeared about a thousand years ago. Now, a team led by scientists at Penn State and in Bolivia have discovered a Tiwanaku temple, shedding new light on what the society looked like in its prime.

Much about the Tiwanaku civilization remains unknown, explained José Capriles, Penn State associate professor of anthropology and lead author on a study* about the temple discovery published today (June 24) in the journal Antiquity.

“Their society collapsed sometime around 1000 CE and was a ruin by the time the Incas conquered the Andes in the 15th century,” Capriles said. CE refers to the common era of the current calendar. “At its peak, it boasted a highly organized societal structure, leaving behind remnants of architectural monuments like pyramids, terraced temples and monoliths, most of which are distributed in sites around Lake Titicaca and, while we know Tiwanaku’s control and influence extended much further, scholars debate how much actual control over distant places it had.”

The newly discovered temple complex is located roughly 130 miles south of Tiwanaku’s established historical site, on top of a hill that was known to local Indigenous farmers but was never explored in depth by researchers due to its unassuming location. However, the position of the site is actually very strategic, Capriles explained.

At the time of Tiwanaku, the spot connected three main trade routes for three vastly different ecosystems: the productive highlands around Lake Titicaca to the north, the arid Altiplano ideal for herding llamas to the west and the agriculturally productive eastern Andean valleys of Cochabamba to the east.

As such, the researchers said they understood that the site must have held some importance for connecting people. Capriles explained that people moved, traded and built monuments in places of significance throughout the arid mountain landscape. After noticing an unmapped quadrangular plot of land, the researchers used various techniques to visualize the area.

“Because the features are very faint, we blended various satellite images together,” Capriles said. “We also conducted a series of UAV, or unmanned aerial vehicle, flights to acquire better pictures. By means of photogrammetry, a technique that uses photos to construct a 3D approximation, we got a more detailed rendering of the structure and its topography.”

Stone alignments revealed an ancient temple, called Palaspata after the native name for the area. The temple complex is approximately 125 meters long by 145 meters wide — about the size of a city block — and includes 15 quadrangular enclosures arranged around a rectangular inner courtyard. Its layout seems aligned to perform rituals following the solar equinox, the moment when the sun is directly above the equator, Capriles said. Using data they collected, the researchers developed a reconstruction to reveal what the ancient temple might have looked like.

The surface of the temple contained numerous fragments of keru cups. The cups were used for drinking chicha, a traditional maize beer, during agricultural feasts and celebrations and point to the temple’s function as a central hub for trade, Capriles said. The fact that maize was not locally grown but cultivated in the Cochabamba valleys versus the high-altitude temple site underscores the temple’s importance in facilitating access to various goods, including food, and connecting different culinary traditions, he added.

Capriles said the temple likely served a religious purpose, evidenced by the designated ritual areas as well as by its physical connection mediating trade and harvest distribution.

“Most economic and political transactions had to be mediated through divinity, because that would be a common language that would facilitate various individuals cooperating,” he said, as religion was often the common ground that connected different groups.

The discovery was a surprise even to the local inhabitants, explained Justo Ventura Guarayo, mayor of the municipality of Caracollo where the site is located.

“The archaeological findings at Palaspata are significant because they highlight a crucial aspect of our local heritage that had been completely overlooked,” Ventura Guarayo said. “This discovery is vital for our community, and we believe its documentation will be invaluable for promoting tourism and showcasing our region’s rich history.”

He added that the city is working with state and national authorities to ensure proper protection and preservation of the site, following guidance from archaeology experts like Capriles.

“With more insight into the past of this ancient site, we get a window into how people managed cooperation, and how we can materially see evidence of political and economic control,” Capriles added. “There’s still so much to discover that we don’t know about, and that could be hiding in plain sight. It just requires opening your eyes to see what’s out there.”

The researchers worked with the Bolivian Ministry of Cultures, Decolonization, and Depatriarchalization to export samples, which were dated at the Penn State’s Institute of Energy and the Environment Radiocarbon Dating Lab.

This paper was co-authored with Sergio Calla Maldonado, a Bolivian graduate student at Universidad de Granada; Juan Pablo Calero, a Bolivian architect; and Christophe Delaere, a Belgium research associate at Université libre de Bruxelles. The U.S. National Science Foundation funded this research in part via grants BCS-2015924 and DEB-2208411.

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The newly discovered temple complex is located roughly 130 miles south of Tiwanaku’s established historical site, on top of a hill that was never explored in depth by researchers due to its unassuming location. Credit: José Capriles / Penn State. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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The surface of the temple contained numerous fragments of keru cups. The cups were used for drinking chicha, a traditional maize beer, during agricultural feasts and celebrations and point to the temple’s function as a central hub for trade. Credit: José Capriles / Penn State. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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The temple’s layout seems aligned to perform rituals following the solar equinox, the moment when the sun is directly above the equator. Using data they collected, the researchers developed a reconstruction to reveal what the ancient temple might have looked like. Credit: José Capriles / Penn State. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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Stone alignments revealed an ancient temple, called Palaspata after the native name for the area. The temple complex is approximately 125 meters long by 145 meters wide — about the size of a city block — and includes 15 quadrangular enclosures arranged around a rectangular inner courtyard. This is a digital reconstruction of the temple. Credit: José Capriles / Penn State. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

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At Penn State, researchers are solving real problems that impact the health, safety and quality of life of people across the commonwealth, the nation and around the world.

For decades, federal support for research has fueled innovation that makes our country safer, our industries more competitive and our economy stronger. Recent federal funding cuts threaten this progress.

Learn more about the implications of federal funding cuts to our future at Research or Regress.

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Article Source: Penn State University news release.

*José M. Capriles, et al., Gateway to the east: the Palaspata temple and the south-eastern expansion of the Tiwanaku state, Antiquity 2025 Vol. 99 (405): 831–849 https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.59

University College Dublin—New research cast doubts over suggestions an incestuous social elite ruled over the ancient people of Ireland, 5500 years ago.

A paper led by researchers from University College Dublin, in collaboration with University of Bergen, Australian National University, University of York, University of Exeter, University of Liverpool, and Archaeological Consultancy Services Unit (a commercial archaeological company), has questioned the belief that burial within the ‘mega’ passage tomb of Newgrange was the preserve of kings and other dignitaries, who represented a dynasty that practiced incest.

Such claims were widely reported in the media following the discovery that a skull fragment found inside the tomb chamber of this Stone Age monument came from a man who was the product of either a brother-sister or parent-child pairing.

This finding, together with the identification of distant relatives from other passage tombs across the island, led to the suggestion of incestuous elites ruling in Neolithic Ireland.

This was based on comparison with royal dynasties or “god-kings” that practiced incest, such as the pharaohs of ancient Egypt and leaders of the Inca Empire.

However, publishing their findings in Antiquity, Associate Professor Jessica Smyth and Associate Professor Neil Carlin, UCD School of Archaeology, point out that no other incestuous unions have been identified in Neolithic Ireland and Britain, and that there is a lack of evidence for inbreeding across prehistoric Europe. 

They also say the evidence found at the site does not support the existence of a ‘king’ of Newgrange or any hereditary power or dynasty with a shared ancestry.

“People were definitely being selected for burial in passage tombs – the whole community does not end up in these monuments. However, we don’t know the reasons behind this selection, and why they were thought to be special,” said Professor Smyth. 

“Unlike today, bodies don’t tend to be buried ‘whole’ or ‘intact’ in this time period. Before they end up in megalithic monuments, bodies are broken down, sometimes cremated and even circulated around their communities”.

“For these reasons, the media claims that there was an incestuous ruling elite in Stone Age Ireland did not match our understanding of society at this time, it did not fit the evidence very well,” added Professor Carlin.

Older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Giza, Newgrange is believed to have been built by a farming community that prospered in the Boyne Valley, County Meath, some 5,000 years ago.  

Dated to 3340 – 3020 BC, the skull fragment, referred to as NG10, revealed the rare case of incest, which led to claims in 2020 that the individual was a high-status ruler, with press coverage dubbing them a “god-king.”

However, Professors Smyth and Carlin argue that these conclusions relied heavily on unsuitable comparisons with hierarchical societies where incest was limited to ruling families, such as in ancient Egypt,  while ignoring examples of incest in non-elite or egalitarian communities.

“A one-off example of incest is a shaky foundation on which to reconstruct an elite, let alone a specific social [hierarchy],” said the authors.

The genetic clustering in passage tombs, such as at Newgrange, typically reflects very distant biological relationships – like second cousins or great-great-great-grandparents – rather than close familial ties.

This, they argue, suggests burial practices were not strictly determined by lineage. Rather than these being the burials of elite rulers or a ruling dynasty, tombs were places where people made their kin through a range of practices, including living, working and burying their dead together.

“We now have some really great examples of monuments elsewhere in Europe that contain people with very close biological ties – parents, children, grandparents etc. This sort of aDNA evidence is much closer to the idea of a lineage or dynasty. We do not see this evidence in Irish passage tombs,” said Professor Smyth.

Given the renown of Newgrange, the authors said there had been surprisingly little focus on the people or the traces they left inside the passage tomb. Newgrange was rediscovered in AD 1699 and its interior had been heavily disturbed prior to its modern excavation in the 1960s. 

“Burnt and unburnt fragments from just five people were recovered from the 1960s excavations of the tomb. Due to the high levels of disturbance in the centuries before that, we don’t know if this number was originally much higher,” said Professor Carlin.

Historically, Irish megalithic monuments, and passage tombs in particular, have been examined in isolation from the other structures and social activities of the communities that built and used them.

This has hindered the ability to identify who, if anyone, was preferentially chosen for deposition within.

“[It] doesn’t make sense to continue to focus so exclusively on forms of stable, individual rule, in Neolithic Ireland and elsewhere, when the evidence is insufficient to support such claims,” said the authors.

“Doing so perpetuates the myth that only important individual males were socially active, and downplays the contribution made by collective action in the prehistoric past.”

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Older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Giza, Newgrange is believed to have been built by a farming community that prospered in the Boyne Valley, County Meath, some 5,000 years ago.  Tjp Finn

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Unburnt bone fragments recovered from inside Newgrange during the 1960s excavations. O’KELLY, MJ 1982

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Location of burnt and unburnt bone lots recovered during Professor Michael J. O’Kelly’s excavations of the the megalithic passage tomb at Newgrange.  O’KELLY, MJ 1982

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Article Source: University College Dublin news release.

In the early 20th century, architects turned to a newly discovered past to craft novel visions of the future: the ancient history of Mesopotamia. Eva Miller traces how both the mythology of Babel and reconstructions of stepped-pyramid forms influenced skyscraper design, speculative cinema in the 1910s and 20s, and, above all else, the retrofuturist dreams of Hugh Ferriss, architectural delineator extraordinaire.

In a dramatic, monochrome rendering in ink and charcoal, a fractal of pyramids and steps regenerates at different scales and angles. Vertiginous towers, the tallest outgrowing the frame, ascend from a base of tiered structures—or ziggurats—rising in regular terraces. The roofs of lower blocks are dotted with minuscule trees that echo the larger, man-made shapes around them. They are the only living things visible at this scale, but an accompanying text tells us that this skyline is populated with people who enjoy the city’s elaborate roof gardens, sun porches, and open-air swimming pools.

This was how Hugh Ferriss imagined the future of urbanism in his treatise Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929). Born in St. Louis in 1899, Ferris trained as an architect and forged a career for himself in a role for which he invented his own job title: “architectural delineator,” bringing other architects’ projects to life on paper. His portfolio, now held by the Avery Art and Architecture Library at Columbia University, speaks to his proximity to numerous major works of modern architecture and engineering, including renderings of Rockefeller Center, Works Progress Administration infrastructure projects, World’s Fairs, United Nations buildings, and various mysterious, unnamed structures of his own imagination—visions swimming up to us through Ferriss’ dramatic wash of line and shadow.

City of Tomorrow

Metropolis is a portfolio of Ferriss’ images, annotated with reflections on the work he had participated in and the architectural changes he had witnessed during recent decades, when American cities, especially his adopted home of New York, exploded upward. He made modest trend forecasts for the near future: glass, he predicted, would be huge (true); hydroplanes would be everywhere (sadly not).

In the final, most memorable section of the book, he sketched a distant City of Tomorrow. This city would be planned along rational lines to maximize human health and spiritual happiness through a three-part plan with districts for art, science, and business, each centered on aesthetically appropriate superblocks.

Ferriss’ dramatic depictions of towering skyscrapers and lofty perspectives became, as media scholar Eric Gordon argues, the means by which “the image of the American urban future in the popular imagination took shape.” His futurism anticipated and influenced Norman Bel Geddes, as he created his Futurama for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Walt Disney Company’s Tomorrowland, TV’s “The Jetsons,” and numerous other prognostications of the rational planned city, the elevated expressway, and the heliport.

Yet Ferriss’s forward-looking vision also repeatedly evoked the ancient past. The pyramid skyscraper that he promoted was, in his own description, a “modern ziggurat,” the monumental architectural form of ancient Mesopotamian cities. Centered in modern-day Iraq, both Assyria and Babylon were geopolitical superpowers of the first millennium BCE, empires discussed in both biblical and classical traditions, which had once been considered lost to the desolating force of time. Beginning in the mid-19th century, the crumbled remains of ziggurat towers had inspired speculative reconstructions.

By the 1920s, German excavations had exposed the well-preserved urban fabric of Babylon’s 6th-century BCE city walls and gates, parts of which were also partially reconstructed in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, looking rather Art Nouveau. Meanwhile, the nearby city of Ur was being excavated by thousands of workers in digs sponsored by the British Museum and the Penn Museum, turning up mass burials of gold-bedecked bodies. These new discoveries stirred those who read about them in the popular press to imagine an antiquity that was also somehow strangely modern: The women’s fashion in the Ur burials led to press jokes about the dead bodies being traces of the original flappers.

Ferriss was clearly not the only person who thought there might be some connection between the urban spaces of ancient Babylon and Assyria and the cutting edge of modernity. At a time when being modern, especially in architecture, often meant explicitly rejecting historical reference, it is notable how much the idea of an original urban form structured visions of the future.

Learning From the Past

At the time of Ferriss’ Metropolis, a question had bedeviled modern architects for decades: What could be learned from the traditions of the past? Were the great buildings of antiquity, particularly of classical Greece and Rome, eternal blueprints, a standard never to be bettered? Architectural training programs in the United States during the early 20th century suggested this was the case. But increasing numbers of builders worried that the adulation of the past produced dead, stagnant structures that were irrelevant to the modern world.

Wherever they came down on this matter (and there was a wide middle ground), numerous commentators with different aesthetic preferences could agree on damning random and eclectic historical borrowing—even if they might have disagreed on what constituted an example of that tendency.

Perhaps no writer treated this historicizing, classicizing eclecticism with more vitriol than the perpetually worked-up Ayn Rand. Her architectural-philosophical melodrama The Fountainhead, published in 1943 but set during the years that Ferriss was writing, was an insightful, if unsubtle, rant against these trends. She castigated architects who “competed on who could steal best, from the oldest source and from the most sources at once,” resulting in “shingled post offices with Doric porticos, brick mansions with iron pediments, lofts made of twelve Parthenons piled on top of one another.” She imagined a benighted public who celebrated a skyscraper which “offered so many columns, pediments, friezes, tripods, gladiators, urns, and volutes that it looked as if it had not been built of white marble but squeezed out of a pastry tube.”

Ferriss was against this kind of inauthenticity, too, advocating that modern buildings must follow the diktat of America’s great modernist innovator, Louis Sullivan: Form ever follows function. Architects of the future, Ferriss assures us:

“…will dismiss, as sentimentality, the notion that architectural beauty was once and for all delivered to the builders of ancient times. The employment of modern construction to support what are little more than classic or medieval stage sets, they will look upon as, at its most harmless, a minor theatrical art, but no longer as being Architecture.”

He mocked this kind of “stage set” architecture in an illustration of the “Reversion to Past Styles” for Metropolis. He bemoaned this tendency’s persistence “despite the logical, and sometimes impassioned, pleas of leaders in modern design.” Still, stacks of “the same conventional forms” were appearing, and Ferriss believed it was his “duty to show what would happen if architects continued piling Parthenons upon skyscrapers!”

Ferriss nonetheless found in the past some examples of an ethos, if not an aesthetic, to imitate. He explained: “It can be recalled that there have been periods in the past when architects must have been quite aware of the influence of Architecture and consciously employed it for a specific object. Moreover, it is precisely these periods that are still spoken of as the ‘great periods’ of Architecture.”

His illustrative example is the Gothic cathedral, intended by its builders, through its very form, to exert “an influence for the betterment of mankind… It would seem, in fact, that Architecture was here consciously employed for no less an object than the elevation and evolution of Man.” This decidedly futurist conception of architecture’s possible benefits (“elevation,” “evolution,” and “Man” with a capital “M”) had a venerable, historical precedent.

Ferriss’ distinction—between mere regurgitation, on the one hand, and a deeper appreciation of the eternal power of certain forms and practices, on the other—was also made by architects who agreed that there might be lessons to be drawn from the approaches of medieval and ancient civilizations. The Swiss modernist Le Corbusier, perhaps the most famous prophet of planned future cities, cited the Parthenon as the apogee of an architecture of basic geometric forms, a “pure creation of the mind,” evoking “emotion of a superior, mathematical order” and embodying a spirit of “imagination and cold reason.” He detected an analogous spirit at work in the design of the telephone, the airplane, and the automobile.

Louis Sullivan agreed. In the same article in which he argued for form to follow function, Sullivan cited rare periods when architecture was a “living art,” which had produced “the Greek temple, the Gothic cathedral, the medieval fortress”—a grouping he argued was now being joined by “the tall office building.” In all of these examples, radical designs enabled by new technologies were nonetheless produced by the same animating spirit, the same eternal dicta, as the enduringly powerful forms of the past.

The Tower of Babel and Modern Babylons

While Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals were often cited in this period as architecture done right, they were also models tarnished by poor and unsuitable imitation and inauthentic to modern materials and methods of construction. For thinkers wary of mere historical reproduction but nevertheless in search of essential or eternal forms, ancient Assyria and Babylon were appealing places to turn to due to their simultaneous associations with modernity (a “newly discovered” past) and originality.

This latter association was forged both by historians who drew on archaeological evidence to identify these civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia as the cradle of (Western) civilization and by the enduring cultural power of one of the most familiar and transmitted stories about the origins of monumental architecture: the Biblical Tower of Babel (or Babylon—merely two English renderings of the same place name).

Western artistic traditions had often visualized the Tower of Babel as a spiral, a form that Frank Lloyd Wright famously adopted and described as a ziggurat or, when turned upside down for the Guggenheim, a “tarrugiz.” As historical knowledge of ancient Iraq grew in the latter decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries, archaeological reconstructions imagined the mythical urban tower as a stepped pyramid, similar to the descriptions of Babylonian buildings by the Greek historian Herodotus.

The brief but rich story of the Tower of Babel closes the series of primordial origin myths in the first part of Genesis: the end of humanity’s childhood. “Let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth,” its builders resolve. God sees a threat in this cooperative venture, for humans who could complete such a project would be unstoppable, like gods. To prevent its completion, he turns their universal language into a nonsensical babble of tongues and scatters humans across the earth.

In the early 20th century, the Tower of Babel was frequently associated with the emerging skyscraper form. The reference had an ambiguous valence. It could express unease about the changing look of modern cities and anxieties about whether experimenting with non-traditional values (architectural or otherwise) was the first symptom of societal collapse on a biblical scale.

The Tower of Babel’s link with technological hubris dovetailed with associations regarding ancient sexual immorality, derived from Herodotus’ salacious reports of ritualized prostitution in Babylon and the New Testament figure of the “Whore of Babylon” in the Book of Revelation, where Babylon was a stand-in for the Roman Empire. In the late 19th century, it was low-rise London that was most often designated “Modern Babylon” after an 1885 series of articles published in the Pall Mall Gazette by its editor W. T. Stead exposed sexual trafficking in the city; the series was entitled, with reference to Herodotus, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.”

The “babble” that the Tower of Babel triggered could also lend itself to associations with modern polyglot cosmopolitan spaces, which were both celebrated for their variety and damned for their dangerous racial ferment.

Yet as the skyscraper came to dominate the skylines of many American cities in the 1920s, designating a city a “modern Babylon” was increasingly meant primarily to invoke its architectural form. Absent from the connotations of sexual depravity or confusion of tongues, the association of skyscrapers with the never-bettered ancient tower was often merely a form of aggrandizement, a celebration of the technological wonders modernity could produce, coupled with perhaps a tinge of nostalgic hope that modern technology might facilitate a return to cooperation and human unity of purpose.

Hence: a 1908 article on the triumphant rebuilding of post-earthquake San Francisco as a record achievement for any “ancient or modern Babylon”; a 1923 article on the skylines of New York and ancient Babylon as “growing more alike every day,” in each case a “good advertisement” for urbanism; a 1924 article describing the University of Pittsburgh’s “Cathedral of Learning” skyscraper as a new Tower of Babel uniting all scattered tongues with “all the sciences and arts of the age of steel”; a 1929 review of the painter William S. Horton’s New York skyline scenes showing “a modern Babylon, as no Babylon ever was, burning in gold and luxurious color, a city rising far above its mere human inhabitants, and dreaming the long dreams of mingled past and future”; and a 1934 description of the Boulder Dam as “Modern Babylon,” representing “the application of all the newest knowledge engineering,” yet visually “reminiscent of long bygone days.”

Here, biblical associations were joined by classical Greek accounts expressing awe at Babylon’s magnificent monumental architecture, including the seemingly mythical Hanging Gardens, a watered and planted version of the ziggurat, and a canonical Wonder of the World.

The most famous mobilization of Babylon for a vision of futurity was another, better-known, Metropolis of the 1920s: the German director Fritz Lang’s 1927 epic film. The design of its futuristic skyscraper city, home of a “new tower of Babel,” in which an underclass toiled in the bowels of factories and the rich played erotic games on rooftop gardens, was inspired by the skyline of New York. The film features a sequence in which its kindhearted, revolutionary heroine tells the biblical Tower of Babel story to a meeting of workers, rendering it as a parable about exploitation and injustice. The heroine’s evil double, most famous for her android form, appears in a dream sequence as the Whore of Babylon, in minimal clothing.

Lang’s various evocations of Babylon show that he was thinking of grandiose architecture, sexual immorality, and doomed tyrannical political powers all at once. But he was perhaps also thinking merely about what worked as a cinematic spectacle. At the time, Hollywood’s most famous depiction of ancient Babylon was D.W. Griffith’s 1916 mega hit Intolerance, which boasted massive, riotously adorned sets of the ancient city. This Orientalist extravaganza and other similar epics with biblical settings—like the Austrian Sodom und Gomorra (1922), which featured an enormous ziggurat—provided Lang with a suitably monumental cinematic vocabulary to invoke other worlds, whether long gone or yet to come.

Ferriss and the Ziggurat Form

The ziggurat-skyscraper shape that Lang detected in the New York skyline was kindled by one regulation of outsized importance: the 1916 New York City zoning law that established maximum permissible massing for new buildings in the city. This law limited the total area of a lot that a building could occupy after a certain height, meaning that buildings would need to be “stepped back” as they rose, allowing sufficient light and air to reach surrounding structures.

The law effectively ended the possibility of simply building up in ever-higher boxes, a trend that had characterized skyscrapers before the law was passed. While the so-called “step-back skyscraper” emerged as a solution to a local piece of municipal legislation, the architectural historian Carol Willis has argued that, over the course of the 1920s, it would come to be understood by American critics and architects as the ultimate expression of a positive, and deliberate, aesthetic for American modernity. Outside of New York, other cities followed suit, and the step-back form became the paradigmatic shape of the skyscraper, as seen in the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building.

Ferriss was an evangelist for the forms encouraged by the 1916 zoning law. In 1922, he created a series of visualizations of step-backs in successive stages of abstraction. In Ferriss’ four-part sequence, the ziggurat, an ancient form, is revealed by this empirical, mathematical calculation of space as the answer for the future. Discussing this sequence of the “evolution of the step-back building” in Metropolis, Ferriss contrasts the pre-zoning Cube City with the post-zoning Pyramid City. A city of cubes is one in which each building “loses its essential identity,” whereas “no matter how closely pyramids are placed in rows, each preserves its essential individuality of form… which is essential to architectural dignity.”

No wonder, then, that in the whole of Metropolis, the ziggurat is the only ancient architectural form Ferriss evokes as a direct solution for the modern age: “The ancient Assyrian ziggurat, as a matter of fact, is an excellent embodiment of the modern New York legal restriction; may we not for a moment imagine an array of modern ziggurats, providing restaurants and theaters on their ascending levels?” Through Ferriss’s hand, the sacred architecture of ancient civilizations gets reimagined for the Jazz Age.

Ferriss’s interest in ziggurats likely had its origins in an act of imaginative reconstruction of a famous biblical structure with a better reputation than the Tower of Babel. In 1923 and 1924, the architect Harvey Wiley Corbett commissioned Ferriss to make a series of drawings for a reconstructed Temple of Solomon, the “First Temple,” destroyed by Babylonian troops in 585 BCE during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II. This was no mere exercise of historical speculation: The temple was to be erected as a temporary structure at the 1926 Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition, celebrating 150 years since the foundation of the U.S.

The mastermind of this project was John Wesley Kelchner, an eccentric New York native who spent his career pursuing reconstructions of Moses’ wilderness tabernacle and ultimately of Solomon’s Temple, styling himself as the leader of the “Temple Restoration Movement.” Kelchner ultimately wanted to reconstruct seven identical Temples of Solomon “as world symbols of universal peace—the physical embodiments of a plan of spiritual unity throughout the world.”

The Temple of Solomon is one of the most often reimagined ancient buildings, even more so than the Tower of Babel. A detailed description in 1 Kings 7 provided the raw material for these imaginings, and from the early 19th century, ideas about Solomon’s Temple increasingly reflected the European fascination with Egyptian architecture. After the excavation of Assyrian palaces in northern Iraq in the 1840s, the architecture of Mesopotamia was also drafted to provide an analog of the Israelite wonder.

The exterior form that Ferriss and Corbett imagined for the temple seemingly drew from archaeological reconstructions, as well as from the set design of Griffith’s Intolerance, with its hybrid of Assyrian, Persian, and modern “Oriental” references. Corbett explained that “in the final design there will be found the trace of every type of construction known at the time of King Solomon: influences of Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt all blended into a magnificent and harmonious structure.” He promised that “when we have completed our work, you will behold exactly the spectacle that King Solomon gazed upon when he had finished his temple”—an extraordinary claim for the collapsing of the ancient into the modern.

Yet, despite much publicity around the Philadelphia plan, the donation of land by the city, and the creation of a company called Temples and Citadels Incorporated to fund the venture, the reconstruction was never financially or practically feasible. Ferriss’ drawings simultaneously depict scenes of the ancient Middle Eastern past and the (then) American future: the ziggurat Temple of Solomon, as it existed in antiquity, but also as it could have been reconstructed in Philadelphia for a fair celebrating the foundation of the U.S., yet never was.

Ferriss got something out of it, though: a drawing he could reuse for imagining the architecture of the future. The style and certain incidental details make it clear that Ferriss’s “Modern Ziggurats” drawing, featured in Metropolis of Tomorrow, must surely have once belonged to this sequence of renderings.

Ferriss’ Final Clue

In the epilogue of Metropolis of Tomorrow, Ferriss reflects on the ideas he has presented and leaves us with one last image, a schematic city plan with a gnomic aphorism: “The CITY — ITS SCIENCES / ITS ARTS / ITS BUSINESS — could be made in the image of MAN — HIS THOUGHTS / HIS FEELINGS / HIS SENSES — who is made in the image of…” The sentence remains incomplete, its final words seemingly torn off the manuscript, but Ferriss proceeds to explain this image within a frame narration:

“A few years ago, he [Ferriss, writing in third person] happened upon a rather curious inscription. The manuscript was partly mutilated; it may have been of quite ancient origin. Was it simply a curio? Or did it contain a clue? The author did not actually comprehend… yet he secured the copy which he now, at the last moment, includes—leaving it to whatever attention the chance reader may be inclined to give.”

This graphic and its apocryphal discovery are the most explicit evocation of an esoteric and mystical dimension that underlies all of Ferriss’ futurism. Though never a committed follower of any specific mystical path, he was, as Carol Willis puts it, drawn to “mystical philosophies which celebrated intuition and personal creativity and looked to geometry and harmonic proportions to discern universal laws.”

Ferriss traveled in circles enchanted by both Theosophism and the teachings of the Greek-Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. For Ferriss, as for many colleagues and friends in the modernist arts scene of 1920s New York, Machine Age aesthetics and their association with the rational complemented, rather than clashed with, an interest in a geometric mysticism that assigned psychological and spiritual significance to certain built forms.

When does the “discovery” of this piece of paper, this “clue,” take place? Is it “now,” in Ferriss’s present day, or in a faraway future walk-through of the Metropolis? The text doesn’t make it clear, but I think the latter. As such, the broken, “ancient” document probably could be dated to 1929, when Ferriss conceived this plan and dedicated it to the future builders who might realize his urban dream. It is fitting that his work ends with a confusion between past, present, and future, evoking a city of the future that, his text suggests, might have been planned at a time of “quite ancient origin.”

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This article, “Modern Babylon: Ziggurat Skyscrapers and Hugh Ferriss’ Retrofuturism” was originally published on The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. If you wish to reuse it, please see: https://publicdomainreview.org/reusing-material. This version was produced for The Observatory by the Independent Media Institute.

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Cover Image, Top Left: Ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil, Alireza.heydear, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

There is an incredible amount of scientific effort put toward understanding the past and bringing some of it back to life. Everyone agrees it’s nice to have some old structures around—like the pyramids at Giza and the Great Wall of China—but what about the living creatures we once lived alongside? With recent advances in genetic technology, de-extinction may be a possibility—but should we be doing it?

Several scientific disciplines are currently geared specifically to provide us with realistic insights into what life would have been like in the past. Archaeology in particular has rank after rank of specialists tuned toward reconstructing the built environment—monuments, houses, caves, and even whole towns—and the ways people would have lived in those environments. We conduct these experiments to understand the choices our species has made as we evolved into the cultures and societies that exist today, and we conserve the walls and temples of our pasts because they mean something to the people who visit them.

We have highly trained conservators who carefully rebuild, brick by brick, the great Mesopotamian temples of 5,500 years ago (alongside conservators who are not as well-trained but whose good intentions outstrip their abilities, as seen with the case of the Ecce Homo reconstruction in Borja, Spain). There are also an extraordinary number of experimental archaeology projects aimed at unraveling even the most intangible mysteries of the past—helping us see that the beautiful Paleolithic art in caves like Lascaux may have been an early form of animation when seen under a torch, or that making some stone tools requires special cognitive abilities.

Advances in technology make the reconstruction of the past increasingly realistic. But what if we could recreate the living environment of our evolutionary past? What if we could bring back species that haven’t been seen since the last Ice Age?

This is exactly the question that a major new research effort is asking. The Colossal project is a private enterprise that wants to use advances in genetics to attempt the “de-extinction” or “resurrection” of an iconic Ice Age animal: the woolly mammoth. De-extinction has certainly grabbed imaginations (not to mention headlines), but as research funding is squeezed by economic conditions around the globe, scientists must ask themselves: what will this achieve?

For Colossal, there are clear benefits. There is the wow factor of creating a cold-adapted elephant that has not existed for thousands of years, and of course, there is the potential of developing new and, possibly, incredibly lucrative bioscience tech based on modifying genetics. Perhaps these technologies could save animals from extinction and bring back the past, even if many scientists are concerned about the prospect due to ethical and technical reasons.

However, as archaeology has learned, bringing back the past is never as straightforward as it seems. Something as obvious as preserving 1,000-year-old ruins for future generations to marvel at becomes less clear-cut when future generations might need to build their own monuments and walls (or even just roads). How much of the past should we bring back? The debate over how much of the Stonehenge prehistoric landscape should be sacrificed to build a tunnel for one of the most congested roads in England has shown that even trained professionals can’t agree on what is “enough” of the past to save.

This makes for some tricky questions for those who want to rebuild and recreate the past. What will happen if we really do succeed in the ‘de-extinction’ of a woolly mammoth—an animal that will be born alone into a world that it is not adapted to? Will it help us save the elephants that are under threat today? Colossal is putting a lot of effort into elephant conservation, but how will creating a genetically cold-adapted elephant address the habitat loss that has led our big-bodied species to face extinction? Would we be better off spending our research efforts on recreating the environments of the past, or the charismatic animals who once roamed them?

What parts of the past to preserve—and which to leave behind—remains a complicated tangle of ethical, practical, and even philosophical quandaries. The toppling of a historic statue of a slave trader into Bristol harbor in 2021 by outraged citizens is a clear example of how governments, citizens, and professionals are still grappling with how we bring the past into the present. As technology advances, we will be confronted with even thornier issues—like the ethics of bringing animals or even people back to life. If we cannot agree on the morality of preserving the past as a cold metal statue, how will we resolve the question surrounding the consequences of bringing something that lives and breathes back into the world?

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This article was produced by Human Bridges.

Cover Image, Top Left: Kellepics, Pixabay

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—New research* confirms the hotly contested age of fossilized human tracks found in White Sands National Park, New Mexico. Stratigraphic records corroborate that the footprints range from 21,000 to 23,000 years old, dating to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), when a lake and wetlands were present at the site. In 2021, scientists dated fossilized human footprints and trackways found at White Sands to 23,000 years ago. However, the discovery caused controversy because it challenged existing theories of how people first populated North America, suggesting that people migrated before the LGM’s ice blocked the continent from Asia. Researchers argued whether the techniques used – radiocarbon dating of seeds and pollen – had produced accurate and reliable results. Subsequent work in 2023 corroborated the earlier results, but questions lingered. Now, Vance Holliday and colleagues provide even more evidence confirming the age of these human tracks. They independently radiocarbon-dated a variety of materials at new sites associated with the paleo-lake Otero, yielding a newly measured and dated stratigraphy that closely matches the findings of previous work. Notably, these wetland radiocarbon dates came from labs unaffiliated with the original 2021 study, placing humans at the site squarely in the LGM and supporting an early human presence in North America.

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The exposure at Gypsum Overlook near the White Sands dunes. The red-brown lenses in the foreground are stream deposits dating ~22,000 years old. They can be traced directly to the stream layers ~1 mile (~1.6 km) away with human footprints of the same age. Above the red-brown layers up to the skyline are thin layers of olive-gray lake clays spanning ~22,000 to ~17,000 years old and representing ancient Lake Otero.  Photo by Vance Holliday

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Article Source: AAAS news release

Chinese Academy of Sciences Headquarters—“What Denisovans looked like, despite their genetic contributions to present-day East Asians and Oceanians?” This is one of the most important questions that has arisen since the discovery of the Denisovans 15 years ago.

Now, recent research by a team led by FU Qiaomiei from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and JI Qiang of Hebei GEO University has helped answer this question by confirming that a nearly complete hominin skull discovered near Harbin belongs to the Denisovan lineage. It dates back to at least 146,000 years ago. 

The team developed a method for automatic identification of human populations based on ancient proteins, revealing the most informative ancient human proteome to date. They also optimized extraction techniques and developed bioinformatic algorithms to trace the evolution of ancient human DNA from Pleistocene dental calculus, successfully retrieving  host mitochondrial DNA from the dental calculus of the Harbin cranium.

These evidences suggest that the Harbin cranium is indeed Denisovan and is linked to the early Denisovan lineage from Siberia. These findings were recently published online in the journals Science and Cell, respectively.

The Harbin cranium, dating back at least 146,000 years, provides crucial insights into the wide distribution of Denisovans in Asia. Prior to this discovery, Denisovan fossils were limited and fragmentary, complicating our understanding of their morphology and evolutionary history. The Harbin fossil, identified as a new species, Homo longi, shares significant morphological similarities with Denisovan remains found at other locations.

The research team conducted independent palaeoproteomic analyses and innovative ancient DNA experiments on the Harbin cranium and its dental calculus. For the first time, their findings conclusively linked the nearly complete skull to the Denisovan population, resolving a question that has persisted since Denisovans were first identified through ancient DNA in 2010.

Using a newly established palaeoproteomic system, the team analyzed mass spectrometric data from the Harbin cranium, identifying over 308,000 peptide-spectrum , more than 20,000 peptides, and confirming 95 endogenous proteins. This extensive dataset surpasses previous results from contemporaneous fossils.

The team also discovered 122 single amino acid polymorphisms (SAPs) unique to Hominidae species, confirming the Harbin individual’s classification within the Homo genus.

Notably, they identified three variants unique to Denisovans, establishing a phylogenetic link between the Harbin individual and Denisova 3.

Despite the challenges of ancient DNA research, the team successfully retrieved mitochondrial DNA from dental calculus samples with a lot of effort. They optimized extraction methods and constructed multiple libraries, ultimately identifying Denisovan-specific mutations for further analysis.

The results confirmed that the Harbin individual belongs to an early mtDNA lineage of Denisovans, suggesting a wide distribution from Siberia to Northeast China during the late Middle Pleistocene. This study highlights the potential of dental calculus for preserving ancient human DNA, opening a new window into the genetic research of Middle Pleistocene hominins.

The two studies not only resolve the classification controversy surrounding the Harbin cranium and reveal the relatively complete skull morphology of Denisovans, but also provide important references for identifying other ancient human fossils in East Asia that may belong to the Denisovan lineage, such as those from Dali and Jinniushan.

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The Harbin cranium. Gary Todd, CC0 1.0 Universal, Wikimeda Commons

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Article Source: Chinese Academy of Sciences Headquarters news release

*The proteome of the late Middle Pleistocene Harbin individual, Science, 18-Jun-2025. 10.1126/science.adu9677