A Painted Stone Reached Wetar Island Before Pottery Did
What a small red plaque from a cave in eastern Indonesia says about what Austronesian voyagers actually carried across the Pacific.
Anthropology.net
A newsletter about anthropology.
Overdue Last read · last published · next check
Last read 17 hours ago, longer than this feed's 4 hours schedule.
Latest episodes
A body built for winters that no longer exist
A genomic study of 42 ancient hunter-gatherers traces cold-survival genes back to an isolated Ice Age population, and finds a “ghost population” in Hokkaido that vanished from the record
Three Small Cups That Rewrite the Map of Medieval Chinese Metallurgy
Crucibles from a government workshop in Guangzhou push the archaeological record of Chinese brass-making back six centuries, and point toward the sea rather than the Silk Road
Two Leg Bones from a Drowned Taiwanese Channel Suggest Some Denisovans Were Ice Age Giants
Proteins extracted from a femur and tibia dredged from the Taiwan Strait indicate that at least one regional Denisovan population grew unusually large, and nobody is quite sure why.
Ancient DNA Reveals Two Separate Migrations Shaped the Pacific’s Most Diverse Islands
A three-thousand-year genomic record from Fiji, Vanuatu, and Tonga shows how later arrivals, not the first settlers, built the region’s deep cultural diversity.
Blood, Lime, and the Chemistry of Memory
How a matriarchal society in Bronze Age China may have used blood to fuse red pigment to limestone cliffs for two thousand years
A Cave in the Söğütlü Valley, and a Fireplace 15,000 Years Old
What a single trench in Türkiye’s eastern Black Sea region reveals about a gap in the map of Ice Age hunter-gatherers
Human Centromeres Are the Most Mutable Part of the Genome, and Some Carry Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA
A global study of 2,110 centromeres reveals rapid mutation hotspots, inherited "three-headed" chromosomes, and ancient DNA surviving over 40,000 generations.
Rain, Not Selection: What Actually Made the First Cultivated Grains Bigger
New isotope evidence from Jordan suggests the earliest “domestic-sized” barley wasn’t bred that way. It just grew somewhere wetter.
Neanderthals in a Romanian Cave Were Making Tools From Whatever Bones Were Lying Around
A new analysis of over 10,000 bone fragments from the Eastern Carpathians finally closes a geographic gap in the record of Neanderthal bone tool use
Two Weeks to Move a Mountain of Mud
What a 500-hectare stretch of Colombian wetland just taught archaeologists about power, planning, and who actually builds big things
A Scallop Shell Bead Buried 68 Kilometers from the Sea Rewrites the Timeline of California’s Inland Trade Networks
An 8,500-year-old Monterey ornament reveals coastal luxury goods reached inland trade routes 5,000 years earlier than known.
A Hunter-Gatherer's Genome Explains Why the Yayoi Rice Farmers Weren't the Whole Story
High-coverage ancient DNA from two skeletons buried five thousand years apart shows Japan's deepest dietary adaptations predate agriculture entirely
The Brain Ran on Fruit Long Before It Ran on Meat
A new modeling study suggests glucose from fruit and honey, not protein from meat, was the real fuel behind four million years of human brain evolution.
Growth Hormone, Faster Growth, and a Neanderthal in the Gym
A Neanderthal-derived receptor variant makes cells grow faster, and some people alive today are still carrying it around
What the Inside of an 850,000-Year-Old Skull Can Tell You
Three parietal fragments from Gran Dolina just gave Homo antecessor its first adult cranial profile, and the layers inside its skull look surprisingly familiar
Two Infants, a Sewer, and What Counts as Care in Byzantine Ephesos
A grave built inside an abandoned Roman latrine turns out to be one of the gentlest funerary arrangements archaeologists have found from the period.
Teaching a Machine to Sort Five Thousand Years of Charred Seeds
An AI system trained on 8,340 charred seed images now does in seconds what took archaeobotanists years to learn
Two Ghosts in the Genome
How a new method for reading DNA’s family tree found evidence of ancient human relatives who left no bones behind
Two Bodies From Chile Just Rewrote the Genetic History of Smallpox in the Americas
A now-extinct viral lineage, recovered from a mummified Inca-colonial community, gives colonization-era disease history its first direct molecular anchor