Evolutionary Insights by Anthropology.net

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  1. 1D AGO

    What Local Adaptation Actually Requires

    The Sama people of the Philippines spend their lives on or near the ocean, and much of their foraging happens underwater. Over generations, something measurable shifted in their biology: their spleens got bigger. The spleen functions partly as a reservoir for red blood cells; more spleen means more oxygen available during a long breath-hold dive. The gene variants that produce larger spleens became more common in the population. Natural selection, working slowly and without intention, found a useful trait and amplified it. This is what a genuine local adaptation looks like. Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, uses examples like this one throughout his new book, Adaptable: How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us (Penguin Random House, 2025), to illustrate something he treats as central to what our species is. We are, above almost everything else, flexible. “That’s why there’s 9 billion of us and not 9 billion of some other primate,” Pontzer told Live Science. Adaptability is the mechanism. It’s what allowed Homo sapiens to occupy every biome on the planet, adjusting through culture, technology, and accumulated biological change across generations. No other primate comes close. The book is a tour of the human body, system by system, with particular attention to how environments have shaped what those systems do. Pontzer has spent years working with the Hadza of Tanzania, a contemporary hunter-gatherer population, and that research gives him a frame of reference for thinking about baseline human physiology that most biomedical research lacks. Working with diverse populations doesn’t just add data points; it changes the questions you know to ask. What Local Adaptation Actually Requires The Sama spleen story is clean, but Pontzer is precise about what makes it possible. Local adaptations are real and documented, but the conditions that produce them are narrow. A trait has to help individuals survive and reproduce in one specific place. Not everywhere, just there. It has to persist across enough generations for selection to accumulate. And the environment driving it has to be stable enough, and geographically bounded enough, that gene flow, the constant mixing of alleles through interbreeding between populations, doesn’t dilute the effect before it takes hold. Most traits don’t survive those criteria. Skin pigmentation does. The gradient of ultraviolet radiation between the equator and the poles is old and consistent, and so is the gradient of melanin production across human populations. Darker skin offers protection against UV damage; lighter skin permits greater vitamin D synthesis where UV is scarce. Both directions of the trade-off have been advantageous in their respective environments for long enough that selection has had time to work. High-altitude adaptations in Himalayan populations follow a similar structure: the mountains have been high throughout the entire span of human prehistory, and so have the selection pressures they impose. Other proposed local adaptations collapse under the same scrutiny. In the 1990s, some researchers argued that Black Americans might carry alleles predisposing them to hypertension and heart disease, the implication being that some evolutionary pressure had shaped cardiac function differently in West African populations. Pontzer is skeptical, for reasons that follow directly from the mechanics of local adaptation. Having a heart that functions well is not a localized advantage. It is useful everywhere. Traits that are universally beneficial spread through gene flow. They don’t concentrate in populations. The same logic applies to claims, still circulating, about population-level differences in cognitive ability having evolutionary roots. Intelligence has been selected for across the entire species, continuously, for as long as Homo sapiens has existed. There is no environment where diminished cognitive ability was adaptive. Any variants that enhance brain function would be expected to spread broadly, not cluster. The framework that makes the Sama spleen story coherent is precisely what makes these other claims incoherent. A Body Built for Somewhere Else Pontzer’s work with the Hadza feeds into a second argument in the book: our bodies were shaped in an environment radically different from the one most people now inhabit, and the gap between those environments is doing measurable damage. Hunter-gatherers are physically active continuously, eating from wild food sources, exposed to a wide range of pathogens. This was the norm for Homo sapiens, and for the hominin lineages that preceded our species, for millions of years. The body we have is a product of that context. Move it into a climate-controlled house with a caloric surplus and minimal required movement, and the same physiology fine-tuned for one environment starts producing maladaptive outcomes in another: heart disease, metabolic disorders, allergies, conditions that appear to have been rare before the agricultural transition and are common now. This is the evolutionary mismatch, and Pontzer is careful not to let it slide into nostalgia or primitivism. It is a mechanistic observation, not a moral one. The body is responding rationally to its conditions; the conditions just happen to be novel in ways that have outpaced any biological adjustment. One of the more interesting extensions of this framework involves genetics and development. Pontzer describes the genome as setting a range of possible outcomes rather than a fixed destination. Your genes constrain what you can become but don’t determine it. The environment usually has the larger visible effect on which possibilities actually materialize. Epigenetics adds another layer: environmental stresses can alter how genes are expressed, switching them on or off in ways that persist for a lifetime. In mice, these changes have been shown to transmit to offspring. The environment a mother experiences can affect her children’s biology. In humans, the evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is suggestive but not yet settled. The studies required take decades to run, and the full picture isn’t in yet. What Pontzer keeps returning to is that diversity is real but layered in ways that resist simple categorization. Knowing something about a person’s pigmentation tells you essentially nothing reliable about their cardiovascular risk, their cognitive profile, or most other things you might want to know. The systems are largely independent. They evolved under different pressures, respond to different environments, and vary along different axes. The assumption that populations sort cleanly into types, and that a trait in one domain clusters reliably with traits in others, is precisely the error that the correct application of local adaptation logic should prevent. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe

    20 min

  2. 4D AGO

    The Lehringen Spear, Revisited

    In 1948, a small team of amateur excavators working a marl quarry near the village of Lehringen in Lower Saxony pulled a wooden spear from sediments laid down during the last interglacial. It was 2.38 meters long, made from yew, still in one rough piece, and it had been lying between the ribs of a straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) for approximately 125,000 years. No photographs of the original find position exist. Neither do reliable drawings. The site was a commercial fertilizer operation, not a planned excavation, and the team did the best they could under the circumstances. The find became world-famous anyway. Lehringen entered the literature as the clearest possible case of Neanderthal elephant hunting: a complete wooden weapon, the first ever found from a Middle Paleolithic context, lying in anatomical association with the largest land mammal known to have lived in Pleistocene Europe. The picture was compelling. Then the skeptics arrived. The problems were real. The spear’s tip showed use-wear traces that left open the possibility it functioned as a multi-purpose tool, perhaps a digging implement or a snow probe rather than a hunting weapon. More troublingly, some researchers argued the spear might have washed into proximity with the carcass at the margins of the paleo-lake, a coincidental association rather than a killing blow. Without proper documentation, there was no way to definitively rule this out. For decades the site existed in an interpretive limbo: famous, referenced constantly, but not quite settled. A study published this year in Scientific Reports by Ivo Verheijen, Gianpiero Di Maida, Gabriele Russo, and Thomas Terberger represents the first systematic zooarchaeological analysis of the Lehringen faunal assemblage. Their findings do not simply shore up the hunting hypothesis. They reframe the site altogether. What the bones say The elephant at Lehringen was a male, probably around 30 years old, based on molar wear. Not yet fully grown, but already large. His long bone epiphyses were still unfused, consistent with that age estimate. His death from natural causes is unlikely: the analysis found only minor pathologies to the vertebral column, and an animal in the prime of life at this size would not simply die at a lakeshore and then happen to have a spear fall beside him. The key evidence is on the ribs. Seven ribs or rib fragments carry cut marks. Most of these are on the lateral surface, perpendicular or diagonal to the long axis of the bone, consistent with filleting meat from the rump. That alone would support butchery, not hunting. But one rib fragment carries something more diagnostic: a series of cut marks on its internal face, the surface that faces inward toward the chest cavity. Cut marks on the internal face of a rib have a specific meaning. To make them, someone had to be working from inside the thorax. The carcass had to be fresh. The organs were the target. This matters because access to the internal organs requires primary access to the carcass, before carnivores have opened it, before any substantial decomposition. The cut marks on the inner rib surface indicate the elephant was eviscerated while still in a state that made the organs worth recovering. The researchers note that carnivore gnawing is present on the distal ends of ribs and the dorsal spines of vertebrae, but it is limited. The bone surface shows no significant weathering. The picture is not of a carcass opportunistically encountered and partially scavenged. It is of a fresh animal, butchered by hominins who got there first. The lithic assemblage, 25 Baltic flint flakes recovered near the elephant’s skull, reinforces this. Use-wear analysis on some of these pieces is consistent with defleshing activity. No cores were recovered, which probably means the knapping happened elsewhere. These were working tools, brought to the carcass. No direct evidence of spear impact was found on the elephant’s skeleton. No wound channel, no bone lesion attributable to a thrown or thrust weapon. The absence is not definitive: soft tissue injuries leave no skeletal trace, and an animal struck in the flank or neck might show nothing on the bones that survived. The spear between the ribs remains the most literal association of weapon and prey in the Paleolithic record, and the fresh-carcass evidence, the prime-age male, the lithics with butchery wear, and the lack of any plausible alternative explanation for the elephant’s death all point in the same direction. A wider spectrum The elephant is not the only story at Lehringen. The site preserves faunal remains from multiple stratigraphic layers spanning different phases of the Eemian interglacial. What the new analysis makes clear is that Neanderthals were not visiting this lakeshore once for a single spectacular kill. They were coming back, exploiting whatever was available. Aurochs (Bos primigenius) remains represent at least three subadult individuals, recovered from the basal peat layer beneath the marl that contains the elephant. The remains of the most complete individual include cut marks on the lateral ramus of a mandible and on a lumbar vertebra, indicating defleshing. Carnivore gnawing, probably from wolf, is also present on the aurochs bones, suggesting that other predators were working these carcasses too, though whether before or after Neanderthal butchery cannot be determined. A single brown bear (Ursus cf. arctos) is represented by two bones: a rib fragment and a distal femur. Both show anthropogenic modification. The rib carries cut marks on its external surface, consistent with filleting. The femur shows cut marks from filleting on both faces, and also impact marks with cone fractures on the shaft. Someone fractured that femur to access the marrow. Brown bear femora contain substantial marrow fat, particularly relevant in late summer and autumn when bears are at maximum fat deposition. The researchers note that bears, beavers, and elephants share a common dietary appeal: high fat content. This may not be coincidental. The beaver (Castor fiber) evidence is the most anatomically detailed. Pelvis fragments, skull elements, and mandibular pieces all carry traces of human activity. Cut marks on the ilium suggest disarticulation at the hip joint. Marks on the maxilla, near the zygomatic arch, are positioned to indicate severance of the masticatory musculature, perhaps to detach the mandible. Marks on the lateral surface of a mandible fragment are consistent with skinning. Beaver fur is dense and waterproof. That the Lehringen Neanderthals were skinning beavers, not just butchering them for meat, fits with documented patterns at other Middle Paleolithic sites including Krapina in Croatia and Taubach in Germany, and goes back even earlier at Bilzingsleben, where both the European beaver and the giant beaver (Trogontherium cuvieri) were being processed with stone tools. The breadth of prey at a single open-air lakeshore site is what stands out. Palaeoloxodon antiquus, a megaherbivore weighing several tons. Bos primigenius, large and dangerous. Ursus cf. arctos, a bear. Castor fiber, a semi-aquatic rodent valued for both its flesh and its pelt. The assemblage also preserves wels catfish (Silurus glanis), pike (Esox lucius), pond turtles, herons, cormorants, deer of multiple species, rhino, wolf. Not all of these were prey. But the lake environment clearly concentrated resources in ways that Neanderthals recognized and returned to. The researchers interpret this as opportunistic procurement rather than specialized hunting. The contrast is with sites like Mauran and La Borde in France or Salzgitter-Lebenstedt in Germany, where large numbers of a single prey species point to targeted, probably organized drives or ambushes. At Lehringen, the diversity of exploited species and the absence of large numbers of any one taxon suggest a different mode: taking what the landscape offered, across multiple visits, from the full range of what the Eemian interglacial around a paleo-lake could provide. The spear itself The Lehringen thrusting spear deserves its own moment. Made from yew (Taxus sp.), from the trunk rather than a branch, it required the removal of up to 39 knots and side branches. That is not a weapon thrown together at a kill site. Yew was not a random choice either: the wood is flexible and strong, properties that matter in a thrusting weapon that needs to absorb impact without shattering. The time investment in its production implies forward planning and a clear conception of what the tool was for. The spear shows extensive use-wear, suggesting it had been used repeatedly before ending up at Lehringen. Its current curved shape is a result of post-depositional deformation, probably from the overlying weight of the elephant and sediment. Some researchers suggested that curvature and use-wear indicated it might have served other functions, including digging, and this remains technically possible. But a digging stick is not what you build from a carefully trimmed yew trunk with a hardened point and 39 removed branches. The spear was recovered in seven pieces and is currently broken into eleven, all of which fit together. It is held in Hanover, preserved in beeswax, and remains one of the most extraordinary objects from the Paleolithic record anywhere in the world. What Lehringen offers now, with a proper zooarchaeological foundation under it, is a site that actually supports what the 1948 discovery seemed to show. Neanderthals hunted a straight-tusked elephant. They butchered it fresh, opening the chest cavity to reach the organs. They made the tools to do it, brought them to the lakeshore, and left traces on bones that have lasted 125 millennia in remarkably good condition. They also came back, or never left, hunting aurochs from the peat below the elephant and processing bear and beaver on other occasions. The lake was a resource concentration point, and th

    19 min

  3. 5D AGO

    Coral Walls, Uranium Clocks, and the Homes Europeans Never Wrote Down

    When French Catholic missionaries arrived in the Mangareva Islands in 1834, they came with tools, building expertise, and an agenda. Within a few years, the frères bâtisseurs — lay builder-brothers attached to the mission — had transformed the volcanic archipelago at the southeastern edge of French Polynesia. They raised a massive cathedral in Rikitea, the main village. They put up churches on the neighboring islands of Aukena, Akamaru, and Taravai. Schools, a dormitory, a workshop for the weaver-brothers, communal bread ovens, a royal palace for the converted chief Maputeoa, and a watch tower along the coast. The missionaries were thorough record-keepers and left detailed documentation of everything they built. They wrote almost nothing about the homes their converts lived in. Those homes still exist, or what’s left of them does. Across four islands, 69 ruined stone cottages survive in varying states of collapse, their walls made from blocks of coral cut out of the surrounding reef. Known in Mangarevan as ‘are po’atu, they account for more than half of all the colonial-era structures archaeologists have recorded in the islands. The missionaries taught local people to build this way — Polynesian converts learning European masonry techniques, cutting Acropora branch coral from near-shore reefs and from beach rock formations on the motu, the narrow coral islets that fringe the lagoon. The technique spread. The construction materials were local. The buildings were everywhere. And European sources, predictably, were mostly silent about who built them and when. The problem with recovering that history is partly chronological. Radiocarbon dating, the default method for establishing age in archaeological contexts, becomes unreliable for organic materials less than about 400 years old. The Mangarevan cottages were built mostly in the 1830s to 1860s. Radiocarbon can’t resolve that timeframe with useful precision. Dating by artifact typology is possible — imported ceramics and glassware have known production date ranges — but this requires excavation, adds interpretive noise, and still only narrows things down to multi-decade spans. Coral is a different material. A new study by James Flexner of the University of Sydney, published in Antiquity, demonstrates that uranium-thorium (U-Th) dating can be applied directly to the coral blocks in the walls of these buildings, producing construction dates accurate to within a few years. How the Method Works, and Where It Gets Complicated Coral skeletons incorporate uranium from seawater as they grow. Once the coral dies, uranium slowly decays to thorium. Because fresh coral contains essentially no thorium at death, the ratio of uranium to thorium in a sample is a measure of time elapsed since death. For the past 500 years or so, lower concentrations of decay products make this technically demanding, but it works if samples are carefully selected and processed under ultra-clean conditions. Flexner had 10 branch coral samples analyzed at the University of Queensland Radiogenic Isotope Facility. The samples came from unweathered or minimally weathered branch corals embedded in Acropora sp. limestone blocks — either pulled from walls still standing or recovered from blocks that had clearly fallen from adjacent ruins. This is important: heavily weathered coral becomes chemically compromised, and a few of the samples in this study illustrate what that looks like. The watch tower at Mata-Kuiti point returned a date predating European contact with Mangareva by half a century. The sample was notably weathered. The boys’ school at Aukena — the Collège d’Anaotiki, whose construction dates are known from missionary documents as 1853 to 1858 CE — returned 1831 ± 2 CE from a more weathered sample where better material wasn’t accessible. So sample quality matters. But the more interesting complication lies in what the dates actually measure. U-Th dating on coral tells you when the coral died, not when it was placed in a wall. There can be a gap. Coral harvested from the seaward edge of a living reef would have died shortly before it was cut and used. But builders also drew material from the shoreward limestone, where coral might have been dead for years or decades before it was quarried. Some blocks may have been reused from older structures — the archaeological literature on Mangareva has long suggested that pre-contact sacred sites called marae were cannibalized for building material during the missionary construction period. Flexner’s team treats this as analogous to the “old wood” problem in radiocarbon dating of timber buildings: the tree whose ring you’re dating may have died long before it was incorporated into a structure. The U-Th date is best understood as a terminus post quem — a “no earlier than” marker — rather than a direct construction date. The building can’t be older than the coral in its walls; it can only be the same age or younger. With those caveats in place, the dates from the seven undated Polynesian cottages are coherent and informative. Most cluster in the first decade or so of missionary presence: AKH-7 at 1834 ± 3, AKH-10 at 1840 ± 3, AKH-1 at 1841 ± 2, AKH-35 at 1844 ± 2, AKH-20 at 1846 ± 2. One outlier, AKH-11, returned a pre-contact date of 1779 ± 2, which Flexner interprets as probable reuse of coral from a pre-European structure — possibly a marae. The gap between that date and the known period of cottage construction is decades long, but not centuries. No sample showed the kind of age gap that would suggest systematic large-scale looting of ancient reef formations. The reuse, where it occurred, was modest. The Pit Beneath the House The most vivid result in the study involves a house on Akamaru called AKH-20 and a pit feature found beneath its floor. When excavators opened a test unit in the southwest corner of the building, they found a pit — PN-318 — filled with an unusually high concentration of material: bone fragments, shell, glass, and iron artifacts. Food and drink, including what appears to be alcohol-related debris. Compared with the other houses sampled on the island, this pit was exceptional for the density and variety of its contents. The initial hypothesis was that this represented the waste from a single feasting event, perhaps connected to the construction of the house itself. A garbage pit inside a tropical household would be impractical, which made it unlikely that the material accumulated over the course of normal daily life. More plausible was a one-time deposit, sealed beneath the foundation when the building went up. The two U-Th dates support this interpretation. A coral block from the wall of AKH-20 returned 1846 ± 2 CE. A branch coral recovered from inside pit PN-318 returned 1848 ± 4 CE. The dates overlap within their error ranges. Flexner suggests that the coral from the pit probably fell off during the trimming of blocks ahead of construction — builders cutting and shaping coral on site, trimmings falling into the pit, the pit then sealed as the walls went up. If that reading is right, the dates bracket a moment: a feast, a construction event, and a household coming into existence. The feast debris sealed beneath the floor of a Polynesian Catholic home in the 1840s. None of that appears in any missionary document. The objects inside the walls of these buildings add to the picture. Glassware, cooking pots, and ceramics found in excavated contexts indicate how families organized their domestic lives under the mission system — how meals were prepared, how interior space was structured, how religious practice shaped household routines. The architecture and its contents together tell a story about what it meant to be a Polynesian convert in the mid-nineteenth century: a life partly reshaped by European Catholicism and partly continuous with older ways of being that the documentary record treats as invisible. What Flexner’s study opens up is the ability to put those buildings in sequence, to understand which came first and how quickly the construction spread across the islands. The boys’ school on Aukena was a control site with known dates; the Polynesian cottages had none. Now several of them do. Applied more broadly across the 69 surviving structures, U-Th dating could produce a construction timeline detailed enough to ask new questions about how the mission built its community of converts — which households appeared earliest, which came later, whether there are spatial or social patterns embedded in the sequence. The same technique could work well beyond Mangareva. Coral limestone buildings survive across the tropical Pacific, across the Caribbean, along the East African coast. Much of that architecture was built by people who left no written record, documented by Europeans who saw no reason to write about the domestic lives of colonized populations. In those places too, the coral in the walls keeps a chemical record of time. It just needed a method capable of reading it. Further Reading * Kirch, P.V. et al. (2021). Coordinated ¹⁴C and ²³⁰Th dating of Kitchen Cave rockshelter, Gambier (Mangareva) Islands, French Polynesia. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2020.102724 * Kirch, P.V. & Sharp, W. (2005). Coral ²³⁰Th dating of the imposition of a ritual control hierarchy in precontact Hawaii. Science 307: 102–104. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1105432 * Sharp, W.D. et al. (2010). Rapid evolution of ritual architecture in Central Polynesia indicated by precise ²³⁰Th/U coral dating. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 107: 13234–39. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1005063107 * Schiffer, M.B. (1986). Radiocarbon dating and the “old wood” problem: the case of the Hohokam chronology. Journal of Archaeological Science 13: 13–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-4403(86)90024-5 * Emory, K.P

    22 min

  4. 5D AGO

    The Cemetery at the Edge of the Islamic World

    In 902 CE, a fleet dispatched by the Umayyad Emirate of Córdoba arrived at Ibiza. The island was barely inhabited. Contemporary Andalusi writers rarely mentioned it at all. Whatever pre-conquest population existed had either fled or dwindled to near nothing. The newcomers — Imazighen clan groups, some Arabs, some Islamized Iberians — settled onto essentially empty land. What happened next, genetically speaking, is what a new study published in Nature Communications sets out to reconstruct. Researchers from the Centre for Palaeogenetics at Stockholm University analyzed ancient DNA recovered from 13 individuals buried in a section of the Maqbara of Madina Yabisa, the main urban Muslim cemetery of medieval Ibiza, discovered during construction work at 33 Bartomeu Vicent Ramon Street in Ibiza town. The burials date to 950–1150 CE. Simple earth pits, bodies placed on the right side facing southeast toward Mecca, no grave goods — with one exception, a burial containing two silver rings. These were people interred according to Islamic law, in a functioning urban cemetery on an island that had gone from empty to organized in a single generation. From 30 sampled individuals, 13 yielded enough DNA for population genomic and metagenomic analyses. That’s a small number. What they show is not. Who Was Buried Here The genetic picture of these 13 individuals is anything but homogeneous. Principal component analysis places them across a wide swath of the ancestral landscape: two cluster within European population space, one sits close to North African populations, eight occupy positions somewhere between European, Middle Eastern, and North African, and two sit squarely in Sub-Saharan African genetic space. The majority carry mixtures of Iberian and North African ancestry, consistent with the known demographic history of al-Andalus after the Islamic conquest of Iberia in 711 CE, when Imazighen (Amazigh, often called Berbers in older literature) formed the largest group of new arrivals. Y-chromosome haplogroups E1b1b1b1a1 and E1b1b1a1a1c2 — both common in North African Amazigh populations — appear in six of the nine males. One individual, s.107, clusters so closely with pre-European contact Canary Islanders and Moroccan Imazighen that the team interprets him as an Amazigh individual whose small European ancestry component likely reflects the ancient European-related ancestry already present in pre-Islamic North African populations, not recent admixture with local Iberians. Two individuals, s.157 and s.313, are genetic outliers in the other direction: minimal North African ancestry, genomes that look much like pre-Islamic Iberians. Both are buried in a Muslim cemetery. The team reads them as muladíes — muwalladûn in Arabic, recently Islamized local Iberians who retained the genetic signature of their ancestry while adopting a new religious identity. The observation has a larger implication: on Ibiza in the 11th century, cultural and religious transformation was apparently decoupled from genetic admixture. People converted to Islam faster than they mixed. Two People from Opposite Ends of the Sahel The two Sub-Saharan individuals are the most striking members of this group. Individual s.117 is male. His mitochondrial haplogroup is L3e1c, his Y-chromosome haplogroup E1b1a1a1a — both found primarily in Sub-Saharan African populations. When the team compared his genome against a comprehensive panel of modern African populations including groups from across Chad, Sudan, the Sahel, West Africa, and East Africa, he aligned most closely with present-day populations from southern Chad: the Sara and the Laal, speakers of a Nilo-Saharan language and an endangered language isolate, respectively. Individual s.197 also carries Sub-Saharan ancestry — mitochondrial haplogroup L3b2 — but his genome tells a different story. He clusters with Gambian populations and the Senegal Bedik, groups from the Senegambia region of West Africa. These two men, buried in the same small cemetery on a Mediterranean island, came from regions roughly 4,000 kilometers apart, connected by the trans-Saharan networks that Arabic sources describe in some detail. Historical records from Ibn ʿIdhārī, al-Bakrī, and the al-Bayān al-Mughrib tradition document the northward movement of enslaved individuals from the Lake Chad basin via the Kawar and Fezzan oases — through present-day Niger and Libya — toward North Africa and ultimately Iberia. Those same sources describe a military force of around 4,000 cavalry from the kingdom of Takrūr, in the middle-lower Senegal Valley, crossing into Iberia with Yūsuf b. Tāshfīn at the Battle of Zallaqa in 1086 CE. Takrūr had converted to Islam around 1030 CE, and trans-Saharan networks subsequently supplied the Almoravid armies with both captives and voluntary soldiers. The radiocarbon dates of s.117 and s.197, corrected for marine reservoir effects given Ibiza’s island context, place both individuals after 1115 CE — in the second demographic pulse that reached the Balearics following the Almoravid conquest of Mallorca in 1115–1116 CE. The genomic evidence and the historical record align on the same point: these were people moved by the Almoravid military and slave systems, arriving on Ibiza as part of a larger resettlement and garrisoning process. The coexistence of Chadian and Senegambian ancestry in a single small cemetery shows something the historical texts suggest but rarely make vivid: the al-Andalus of the 11th and 12th centuries was not drawing from one part of sub-Saharan Africa. It was drawing from both the western and central Sahel simultaneously, through distinct but overlapping networks. Timing the Mixture Beyond identifying ancestral origins, the team used haplotype-based local ancestry analysis to estimate when North African admixture actually occurred in the ancestors of these individuals. The method works by measuring the length of uninterrupted chromosomal segments of North African ancestry. When two populations mix, the resulting chromosomes carry long stretches of one ancestry type unbroken by recombination. Each subsequent generation, recombination shuffles those stretches shorter. The rate of that decay maps onto generational time. The population-level estimate, combining seven individuals radiocarbon-dated between 1073 and 1094 CE, places the main admixture event approximately 7.84 generations before 1080 CE. Using a generation time of 26.9 years, that translates to roughly 869 CE — predating Ibiza’s conquest in 902 CE by about 33 years, and likely reflecting admixture that began in mainland al-Andalus before or during the initial colonization. Individual-level estimates range from 2.49 to 7.81 generations, pointing to ongoing gene flow rather than a single founding event. One individual, s.157 — one of the two with predominantly European ancestry — shows an admixture date going back approximately 16 generations, to around 519 CE. This is pre-Islamic. The team interprets this as an ancient, low-level North African genetic contribution predating the Muslim conquest, probably connected to the demographic transformations of the late Roman period. S.157 may represent a family line that had a small North African contribution centuries earlier, absorbed into the local Iberian population long before Ibiza became part of al-Andalus. Two individuals, s.131 and s.315, show elevated runs of homozygosity consistent with consanguinity, with s.131’s pattern suggesting first-cousin parental relatedness. This kind of endogamy was documented among Imazighen communities and in other small medieval Iberian populations. S.131’s admixture timing of 3.47 generations suggests that both parents were already part of the admixed local gene pool of Ibiza — a community that had been mixing for generations and was now marrying within itself. The Leprosy Case Individual s.313 is one of the two with minimal North African ancestry, almost certainly a muladí. His bones show no diagnostic skeletal signs of leprosy — some facial elements are missing, which makes a definitive osteological assessment impossible, but what survives looks unremarkable. His DNA tells a different story. Metagenomic screening of s.313’s shotgun sequencing data detected Mycobacterium leprae, the bacterium responsible for leprosy. Target enrichment with a custom capture panel increased the read yield from roughly 29,000 reads to 128,800, enabling a mean genome coverage of 3.75x — enough for phylogenetic placement. The M. leprae genome from s.313 belongs to genotype 2F, a clade containing seven ancient genomes from across medieval Europe, dated between approximately 650 and 1250 CE. The clade stretches from Hospital of Sant Llàtzer/Santa Margarida in Barcelona to Sigtuna, Sweden. Maximum parsimony analysis tentatively groups s.313 with an individual from medieval Denmark (Jorgen749, 1223–1279 CE), though this specific relationship was not strongly supported in the maximum likelihood reconstruction. The distribution of genotype 2F across medieval Europe illustrates something that individual burial evidence tends to obscure: disease was moving across the continent along the same networks that moved people, goods, and armies. Ibiza was not isolated from that. A bacterium recovered from a Muslim muladí in the western Mediterranean shares a lineage with individuals buried in Sweden. S.313’s burial was indistinguishable from others in the cemetery. No sign of marginalization, no separation from the community. This is consistent with both Islamic theological and legal frameworks of the period, which placed considerable emphasis on the obligation to care for the sick, and with a broader pattern, also documented in contemporary Christian cemeteries, of including individuals with leprosy in standard community burials rather than excluding them. Whether s.313 had visible disease at the time of death, or died befor

    19 min

  5. 6D AGO

    One Species, Barely Holding Together

    The bone fragment pulled from Denisova Cave is 2.5 centimeters long. It was dug out of Layer 12 of the East Chamber, a vaulted space in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia where the light changes color in the afternoon and winter can kill you if you’re unprepared. The fragment was identified as hominin through ancient protein analysis, not morphology — it looks like nothing in particular. Then researchers drilled into it and extracted DNA from the powder, and what came out was one of the better-preserved Neandertal genomes ever sequenced: 37-fold average coverage from a single library, better than most ancient genomes require five to twenty libraries to achieve. The individual was male. He was probably about 110,000 years old. He had never been named or catalogued as a skeleton. He was, effectively, nobody — until he became one of the most informative people from the Pleistocene. Two studies published this week in PNAS, both drawing on new Neandertal genomic data, arrive at a picture of Homo neanderthalensis that is striking for how fragile it makes them look. Not just at the end, in the final few thousand years before their disappearance, but throughout their entire existence across Eurasia. They were a species running on fumes. The Fracture Lines The Denisova Cave individual — referred to in the Massilani et al. paper as Neandertal D17 — belonged to a population of Eastern Neanderthals more closely related to another individual from the same cave, roughly 120,000 years old and female, than to any Neandertal from Western Europe. This isn’t surprising on its face: they came from the same place. What is surprising is the degree of genetic separation between these eastern Altai Neanderthals and the western populations in Europe. The standard measure for comparing population differentiation is FST, which runs from 0 (identical) to 1 (completely separated). Among living humans, the most genetically distant populations on earth — Central African forest-dwelling groups like the Mbuti compared to Papuan Highlanders — reach an FST of around 0.27. These are populations that diverged somewhere between 130,000 and 220,000 years ago and have been largely separate ever since. The gap between Eastern Neanderthals (D5 and D17 from Denisova Cave) and Western Neanderthals (represented by individuals from Vindija Cave in Croatia and a newly sequenced genome from Belgium) comes out at FST = 0.30. That is larger than the most differentiated living human populations. The Eastern and Western Neandertal lineages diverged only about 115,000 years ago, compared to 260,000 to 440,000 years of separate drift between Mbuti and Papuans. Neanderthals were differentiating faster. The Massilani team attributes this to smaller effective population sizes, which amplify genetic drift: when groups are small and isolated, allele frequencies shift quickly just by chance, without any particular selective pressure driving them. How small were these groups? The genome of D17 shows that about 24 percent of his DNA sits in long homozygous runs — stretches where both copies of a chromosome are identical, a signature of recent inbreeding. In D5, the older female from the same cave, the figure is 20 percent. The Denisovan individual from the same site sits at 4 percent. Early modern humans come in between 1 and 6 percent. Population modeling using the length and distribution of these homozygous tracts suggests that the Altai Neanderthals — both the older Eastern ones and a later, Western-derived individual named Chag8 from a different cave in the same region — were living in groups of fewer than 50 individuals under realistic migration scenarios. The later Western Neanderthals in Europe appear to have lived in somewhat larger groups, but not dramatically so. Princeton geneticist Joshua Akey, who was not involved in either study, put it plainly: the global Neandertal population was probably only a few thousand breeding individuals, spread across most of Eurasia. There is something almost incomprehensible about that. Modern humans, for all the times we almost went extinct, have never been that reduced on a global scale while simultaneously occupying that much space. The Bottleneck You Can See Coming The second study, led by Charoula Fotiadou and Cosimo Posth at the University of Tübingen, approaches Neandertal demography from the other direction: not nuclear genomes from individuals, but mitochondrial DNA from dozens of specimens spanning the last 130,000 years of Neandertal history in Europe. Mitochondrial DNA is maternally inherited and present in large quantities in ancient bone, which makes it tractable even from fragmentary material. The team generated ten new mtDNA sequences from six sites in Belgium, France, Germany, and Serbia, and analyzed them against 49 previously published sequences. The pattern they found is stark. Before about 75,000 years ago, European Neanderthals showed multiple distinct mtDNA lineages. Individuals from different sites across the continent sat on different branches of the phylogenetic tree. There was genetic diversity — not a lot by modern human standards, but genuine regional variation. Then it collapses. The vast majority of Late Neanderthals, those living after about 57,000 years ago, cluster within a single mtDNA lineage. From Iberia to the Caucasus, across the whole surviving range of European Neanderthals, almost everyone is descended in the maternal line from the same ancestral population. The analysis places the origin of that lineage at around 65,000 years ago, with a 95 percent confidence interval running from 56,000 to 76,000 years ago. And it pinpoints the likely geographic source: southwestern France. What happened in between is not hard to guess. Marine Isotope Stage 4 — the glacial period peaking roughly 73,000 to 60,000 years ago — was cold and dry across Europe. The Fotiadou team’s analysis of the archaeological record, drawing on the ROCEEH Out of Africa Database (ROAD), shows Neandertal sites becoming dramatically concentrated in southwestern Europe during this period. The hotspot visible in the data through the 70,000 to 60,000 year window sits in southern France. Structured statistical tests on the spatial data show this cannot be explained by research bias or uneven sampling. Something pulled Neanderthals into that corner of the continent. The genetic and archaeological evidence converge on the same scenario: a population that had been distributed across most of Eurasia contracted into a refugium. Most of the earlier diversity was lost. Whatever lineages existed outside that southwestern European core either died out or were so reduced as to leave no detectable genetic trace in later populations. The only exceptions are two individuals in France — one from Les Cottés, one from Grotte Mandrin — whose mtDNA sits outside the main Late Neandertal lineage, suggesting the refugium itself preserved at least some of the older variation. When the ice retreated, sometime after 65,000 years ago, the survivors spread out again. Neanderthals reappeared at sites across Europe and into the Caucasus. But they were now, in the maternal genetic record, essentially one people. University of Tübingen paleogeneticist Cosimo Posth, a co-author on the Fotiadou study, described it directly: all the genetic diversity visible in the mitochondrial record before 60,000 years ago disappears, and a single lineage survives. This is not extinction followed by replacement from somewhere outside. There is no external source population arriving from Asia or Africa. The Neanderthals who recolonized Europe after the glacial maximum were the descendants of the ones who had sheltered in southwestern France. What the bottleneck destroyed, you cannot get back. 42,000 Years Ago The Bayesian skyline analysis in the Fotiadou study tracks effective population size through time, and the trajectory at the end is what you might expect given everything else in the data. There is no gradual thinning out. The line holds roughly steady until around 44,500 years ago, then drops sharply. It reaches its minimum around 42,000 years ago. That timing overlaps with the arrival of anatomically modern humans in Europe, which most evidence places between 45,000 and 43,000 years ago, and with the sharp climatic instability of Greenland Interstadial transitions around the same period. Qiaomei Fu, a geneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences not involved in either paper, noted that for a population already as constrained as the Neanderthals had become, environmental volatility would have been especially dangerous. When you have no buffer — no large connected populations to draw migrants from, no reservoir of genetic diversity to draw on — each stochastic shock matters more. Within roughly 3,000 years of that decline beginning, the Neandertal genetic signal disappears from the record entirely. Except, of course, for what survived through admixture with modern humans — the 1 to 4 percent of Neandertal ancestry still present in the genomes of everyone alive today outside sub-Saharan Africa. Something else emerges from the Denisova Cave genome. The two oldest individuals from that site — D5 (around 120,000 years old) and D17 (around 110,000 years old) — both carry segments of DNA that trace to Denisovan ancestry. The locations of Denisovan-like segments in the two genomes are significantly correlated, suggesting they shared at least some of the same introgression events. But the later Neandertal from the region — Chag8, from nearby Chagyrskaya Cave, dating to around 80,000 years ago — shows no comparable Denisovan signal. Neither does the Western European Neandertal from Vindija. The Massilani team’s interpretation is tentative but suggestive: the Western-derived population that replaced the Eastern Neanderthals in the Altai sometime between 110,000 and 80,000 years ago may have been recent arrivals with n

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  6. 6D AGO

    Before the First Harvest: Ancient DNA and the Paleolithic Dogs of Europe

    The caves of Ice Age Europe were not quiet places. People lived in them, killed animals inside them, made art on their walls, and sometimes processed their dead in them. At Gough’s Cave in Somerset, around 14,300 years ago, a group of humans associated with the Magdalenian technocomplex left behind something strange: human skulls reshaped into cups, human bones engraved, the clear signature of funerary cannibalism. Alongside those remains, among the same depositional layers, were the bones of a dog. That dog’s mandible has a perforation drilled through the masseteric fossa. The same kind of postmortem anthropic modification visible on the human bones. Whatever the precise meaning of that treatment, it says something about the relationship. These people were not keeping a wolf they had recently caught. The dog at Gough’s Cave, as confirmed by nuclear genomic data published this week in Nature, was a fully domesticated member of Canis lupus familiaris, genetically closer to a dog from central Anatolia than to any wolf living in late glacial Europe. The oldest dogs, confirmed by genome Two companion papers appeared simultaneously in Nature on March 25, 2026, both addressing the same problem from different directions: when did dogs first appear in Europe, and how do we actually know? The problem with earlier attempts to answer that question is that bones lie, or at least they mislead. Wolf morphology and early dog morphology overlap in ways that make confident separation difficult, especially for remains from 14,000 to 17,000 years ago when dogs were fresh out of the wolf lineage and may not yet have accumulated the skeletal changes we now associate with domestication. Previous claims for Paleolithic dogs in Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Siberia — some dated to 33,000 years ago or older — have repeatedly failed under genetic scrutiny. The animals turned out to be wolves, some of them from extinct lineages. The oldest definitive dog DNA, before these studies, dated to about 10,900 years ago from the Mesolithic site of Veretye in Karelia. That was the floor. The new papers blow through it. One team, led by researchers at the Natural History Museum London, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, and the University of Oxford, generated nuclear and mitochondrial genomes from canid remains at Pınarbaşı in central Anatolia (15,800 years old) and Gough’s Cave (14,300 years old). The other team, led by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, the University of East Anglia, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, analyzed DNA from 216 canid skeletal remains — 181 from pre-Neolithic contexts — across Europe and its margins, using a hybridization capture approach that enriched endogenous canid DNA by 10 to 100-fold from material where less than 1% of the total DNA was even host-derived. Together they confirmed dogs at five sites spanning from Britain to Turkey during the late Upper Paleolithic: Pınarbaşı, Gough’s Cave, Bonn-Oberkassel in Germany, Kesslerloch in Switzerland, and Grotta Paglicci in Italy. The Kesslerloch dog, which had been proposed as a dog on morphological grounds in earlier work and dates to 14,200 years ago, was confirmed genetically by the Crick-led team. It is the oldest dog in their dataset confirmed by genome-wide analysis. The 13,700-year-old canid from Goyet cave in Belgium, by contrast, had long been considered a probable dog. Small size, traces of human modification, red-colored stains. The genetic data says wolf. This is not a minor methodological caveat. It goes to the heart of how the field has been working and how often it has been wrong. A single population, spread across cultures Here is where it gets strange. The five confirmed Paleolithic dogs are associated with three genetically and culturally distinct human populations: the Magdalenian (Gough’s Cave), the Epigravettian (Bonn-Oberkassel, Kesslerloch, Grotta Paglicci), and Anatolian hunter-gatherers (Pınarbaşı). These groups had diverged long before the dogs appear in the record. The Magdalenian and Epigravettian splits probably predate the Last Glacial Maximum, around 24,000 to 21,000 years ago. The dogs don’t reflect this divergence. Dogs from Gough’s Cave and Pınarbaşı are more genetically similar to each other than to any other dog in the dataset. Their most recent common ancestor is estimated at roughly 16,900 years ago — which means their ancestral population was already diverging from other dog populations well before either of these individual animals was born. They cluster together in a distinct mitochondrial clade, C5, a sister group to all other C haplogroup dogs, that also includes Bonn-Oberkassel, Kesslerloch, and Grotta Paglicci. Greger Larson, a paleogeneticist at Oxford and an author on both studies, framed the oddity directly in a press context: the people are very different, but the dogs are very much the same. Across the five sites, the dogs were more genetically similar to each other than the humans at the same sites were to each other. One interpretation, favored by the Marsh et al. team, is that dogs spread westward with the expansion of Epigravettian-associated ancestry and material culture roughly 16,000 years ago, and people carrying Magdalenian ancestry in Britain and perhaps Spain acquired dogs through interactions with Epigravettians — without that interaction leaving any detectable trace of Epigravettian ancestry in the Magdalenian humans. The dog was exchanged; the genes were not. Whether Magdalenian people at Gough’s Cave acquired their dog from Epigravettians or through some other network remains genuinely open. The paucity of Paleolithic dog remains makes the data thin. But the pattern is real: a relatively genetically homogeneous dog population spread across populations of people who were quite distinct from one another. Greger Larson compared it to the spread of a new technology or art form — something people found useful and interesting enough to pass around. Where the dogs came from, and what they were not The larger question of dog domestication — where, when, by whom — remains unsettled. These papers narrow parts of it without resolving the whole. The Kesslerloch dog, at 14,200 years old, already shows more genetic affinity to later European dogs than to Asian dogs. Population structure in dogs, the data suggest, is at least 14,200 years old. For that differentiation to have already been in place by then, domestication must have occurred considerably earlier. The authors reason, cautiously, that domestication likely predates Kesslerloch by several millennia, to allow enough time for the genetic gap between European and Asian dogs to have opened up. On the question of which wolves were involved, both papers point away from European wolves. The Bergström et al. analysis finds that all the pre-Neolithic European dogs in their dataset are consistent with deriving from an eastern progenitor, the same source population that produced dogs in Siberia, East Asia, and Australasia. European Late Glacial wolves — the wolves that actually lived alongside these dogs — contributed detectably to dog ancestry in none of them. This is not new, but the Kesslerloch confirmation extends the result back several thousand years. One canid from Belgium that illustrates this point neatly: the Goyet cave specimen, genetically a wolf, has fully wolf-like ancestry. Its small size and human modifications were real, but those features, it turns out, don’t tell you what you think they do. A wolf can be small. A wolf can be associated with humans in ways that leave marks on bone. That doesn’t make it a dog. At the same time, the dogs at Gough’s Cave showed similar dietary stable isotope signatures to the humans there, consistent with the dogs eating what the people were eating, or at least food from the same trophic level. At Pınarbaşı, the isotope data for neonatal dogs and their mothers suggests an aquatic dietary component that matches the human diet at the site, where small freshwater fish are common in the occupied layers. The dogs were being provisioned. They were inside the system, not just following it from a distance. What farming did, and didn’t do, to European dogs The other major finding concerns what happened when agriculture arrived in Europe, roughly 9,000 years ago, carried by people migrating from Southwest Asia. In humans, the Neolithic transition in Europe involved a near-complete replacement of hunter-gatherer ancestry in many regions. Neolithic farmers typically had 70 to 80 percent Southwest Asian ancestry. Ancient DNA from these farmers shows they arrived with their own animals — sheep, goats, cattle, pigs — and largely displaced the wild progenitors of those animals in Europe. Dogs were the only domestic animal already present in Europe before farming arrived. The question was whether they experienced the same kind of replacement. They did not. The Bergström et al. analysis, using formal ancestry modeling, shows that Southwest Asian dog ancestry did enter Europe with Neolithic farmers — but at much lower proportions than in the humans. Neolithic dogs in Scotland showed 21 to 25 percent Southwest Asian ancestry. Dogs in southern Europe showed higher values, up to 66 percent in Greece. But the local Mesolithic dogs persisted in the gene pool, and they persist there still. Modern European dogs fall roughly halfway between Mesolithic European and Neolithic Southwest Asian dogs in ancestry cline analyses, which implies they trace approximately half their ancestry to the pre-agricultural dogs of Europe. The contrast with what happened to dogs when Europeans arrived in the Americas is stark. In the Americas, European dogs rapidly and almost completely replaced the pre-contact native American dog population. The Neolithic transition in Europe was softer. Incoming farmers incorporated local hunter-gatherer dogs to a substa

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  7. MAR 24

    One Lineage to Rule Them All: The Last Neanderthals Were Descended from a Single Refugium Population

    Somewhere in what is now the Dordogne, probably sometime around 65,000 years ago, a small group of Homo neanderthalensis survived. The continent around them was largely empty of their kind. The previous 30,000 years had not been kind. The climate had tightened, and the Neanderthals who had ranged from Iberia to the Caucasus and beyond had contracted into a rump population clinging to the warmer southwest of Europe. What happened to the others is not entirely clear. They didn’t disappear overnight. But when the data are assembled and analyzed, the genetic trace of that earlier diversity is almost entirely gone from the Late Neanderthal record. That’s the central finding of a study published this month in PNAS by Charoula Fotiadou, Cosimo Posth, and a large international team. They sequenced ten new Neanderthal mitochondrial genomes from six archaeological sites in Belgium, France, Germany, and Serbia, and analyzed them together with 49 previously published sequences. The result is the most comprehensive picture yet of what happened to European Neanderthals in the millennia before they vanished. The conclusion is stark. Nearly every Late Neanderthal in Europe — individuals spanning from El Sidrón in Spain to Mezmaiskaya in the Caucasus — belongs to a single mitochondrial lineage. The team dates the diversification of that lineage to approximately 65,000 years ago, and the geographic and archaeological evidence converges on a single explanation: a population refugium in southwestern France. The Genetic Contraction To understand what’s unusual about this, it helps to know what preceded it. Neanderthals from before MIS 3 — the time period associated with the last Neanderthals — show considerably more mitochondrial diversity. The older European individuals in this dataset fall on more deeply branching lineages. Two specimens from Tourtoirac in France (indirectly dated to before 57,000 years ago) fall on different branches entirely, which is itself telling: within a single site, two Neanderthals carry distinct mitochondrial lineages. The same pattern holds for the pre-MIS 3 Neanderthal tooth from Pešturina Cave in Serbia, dated by OSL and ESR methods to around 111,000 years ago. These individuals were part of a more genetically varied world. That world contracted. The researchers used the ROAD database — a large-scale archaeological repository developed by the ROCEEH project at the Heidelberg Academy — to track the geographic distribution of Neanderthal sites from 130,000 years ago onward, in 10,000-year slices. From 130,000 to about 80,000 years ago, Neanderthal sites are spread across western Eurasia, from the Iberian Peninsula to the Black Sea. Then the distribution tightens. By the 70,000–60,000 year window, site density is concentrated in southern France. The spatial statistics confirm this isn’t just a sampling artifact: hotspot analysis and rarefaction testing both support a genuine geographic contraction, not an illusion produced by uneven research coverage. The timing fits what we know about MIS 4. This glacial stage, roughly 73,000 to 60,000 years ago, brought cold and dry conditions across much of Europe. The potential niche space available to Neanderthals, modeled using paleoclimate reconstructions, reached its smallest extent during this period. A refugium in southwestern France would have made environmental sense. The region offered milder conditions, river systems, and game. Something persisted there. What followed that contraction was an expansion. After about 65,000 years ago, the diversity of mtDNA branches among Neanderthals effectively resets. The old lineages are gone, or nearly so. The population that survived in southwestern France radiated outward. By MIS 3, Neanderthals are again spread across the continent, but now they’re all carrying, maternally, the same ancestral signature. The rarefaction analysis shows the longitudinal spread of sites actually increases progressively after 80,000–70,000 years ago — statistically significant broadening that holds up even when controlling for sample size. The molecular dating analysis, run in a Bayesian framework using radiocarbon-dated individuals as calibration points, pins the diversification of the main Late Neanderthal mtDNA branch at around 65,000 years ago (95% HPD interval: 76,000–56,000 years ago). Crucially, this event was preceded by a period of roughly 30,000 years during which no new mtDNA lineages appear to have diversified at all — a long plateau of genetic stasis spanning most of MIS 4. The surviving population was small and isolated enough that its mitochondrial lineages were simply not branching. Goyet and What a Single Site Can Tell You The Belgium site of Goyet — the Troisième caverne — is doing a lot of work in this dataset. It’s the most densely sampled Neanderthal site with multiple individuals, and the team added three more mtDNA sequences from it here. What’s remarkable about Goyet is not just the number of specimens but what they span: within a roughly 4,000-year window (45,000–41,000 years ago), the Neanderthal individuals at Goyet encompass almost the entire range of mtDNA diversity seen across Late Neanderthals in Europe. A single cave, a few thousand years, and you’ve essentially sampled the continent’s genetic breadth. The team notes this is statistically indistinguishable from the diversity observed across the whole main Late Neanderthal branch — and the Goyet assemblage is not even a population sample in any conventional sense. Zooarchaeological analysis of the site has previously shown that the Neanderthal remains there reflect selective cannibalism, not ordinary occupation debris. Several of the newly dated Goyet specimens initially produced post-40,000-year radiocarbon dates — which would place them after the generally accepted timing of Neanderthal extinction. The team addresses this directly. Pairwise distance comparisons between some of these specimens and others from the same site show identical mtDNA sequences, suggesting they belong to the same chronological assemblage as Goyet individuals directly dated to 43,000–42,000 years ago. The anomalous radiocarbon results are attributed to collagen contamination from varnish applied to the specimens — a known problem with older museum collections. Molecular dating of these individuals produces ages consistent with the broader Goyet assemblage. Two Late Neanderthals at the French sites of Les Cottés and Grotte Mandrin don’t fit neatly into the main Late Neanderthal lineage. Les Cottés Z4-1514, in particular, falls on a more divergent branch and shows a striking number of accumulated substitutions — more than any other Neanderthal in the dataset. Thorin from Grotte Mandrin, dated to around 50,000 years ago, behaves differently still, with an unusually short branch length that complicates molecular dating. These two individuals may represent lineages that persisted within or near the southwestern French refugium even as the rest of Europe’s Neanderthal diversity was replaced. They’re the exceptions that confirm the pattern — surviving remnants of pre-bottleneck diversity sheltering in the same geographic region that gave rise to the dominant Late Neanderthal lineage. The Final Decline The demographic analysis doesn’t stop at the bottleneck. Running a Coalescent Bayesian Skyline analysis on the western Eurasian Neanderthal mtDNA sequences, the team identifies a sharp decline in effective population size beginning around 44,500 years ago and reaching its lowest point around 42,000 years ago. This is shortly before most estimates for final Neanderthal disappearance in Europe, which radiocarbon work by Higham and colleagues had placed around 40,000 years ago. What drove that final decline is not answered by this study. The population had already been severely bottlenecked once. Low genetic diversity in a small, fragmented population has well-documented consequences — reduced adaptive potential, increased vulnerability to inbreeding, susceptibility to stochastic local extinctions. The authors note that a recent morphological study of Neanderthal semicircular canals independently identified a similar bottleneck event. These lines of evidence are converging. The arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe was happening during this same period, though the relationship between that arrival and Neanderthal demographic collapse remains genuinely contested. This study doesn’t adjudicate between climate and competitive displacement as proxies for the final decline — the mtDNA data can show the timing of the crash, not its cause. What it does show is that the genetic story of Late Neanderthals is not one of steady decline from a diverse, continent-wide population. It’s a story of prior collapse, narrow survival, expansion from the remnant, and a second collapse. The Neanderthals who spread across Europe in the last 25,000 years of their existence were not the same populations that had previously inhabited those landscapes. They were the descendants of survivors, carrying a single maternal lineage into territories where older Neanderthal diversity had already been lost. Whether the material culture of this period reflects that demographic history is another question. The authors point out that despite the genetic homogeneity of Late Neanderthals, their archaeological assemblages are far from uniform — the Mousterian and its variants show regional variation that doesn’t map straightforwardly onto the genetic signal. The genes converge; the toolkits don’t, at least not obviously. That gap between genetic and cultural patterning is one of the more interesting problems the study leaves open. Further Reading * Hajdinjak, M., et al. Reconstructing the genetic history of late Neanderthals. Nature 555, 652–656 (2018). * Posth, C., et al. Deeply divergent archaic mitochondrial genome provides lower time boundary for

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  8. MAR 23

    What the Basement Kept

    On 3 March 2022, seven days after Russia’s full-scale invasion began, soldiers from the 55th Mountain Motorised Rifle Brigade arrived in Yahidne. The village sits roughly 120 kilometres northeast of Kyiv and 15 kilometres south of Chernihiv, on the eastern bank of the Desna River. The brigade was normally garrisoned in Kyzyl, in the Tuva Republic — more than 4,200 kilometres away. Within days of their arrival, the soldiers had fortified the primary school as a command centre and driven approximately 368 civilians, including 69 children, into the building’s basement. The youngest prisoner was a 1.5-month-old infant. The oldest was 93. They stayed for 27 days. The basement comprised seven chambers and a corridor, totalling around 200 square metres. There were no functioning toilets, no clean water, no adequate food. The space was damp. Ventilation was poor. There was no room to lie flat, so people slept sitting on chairs or on the concrete floor, which had been covered in cardboard for minimal insulation. Elderly detainees began dying from exhaustion and the absence of medical care. At first, Russian soldiers refused to allow the removal of the bodies, so the living remained alongside the dead in that confined space. Eventually some of the deceased were moved to the boiler building or buried hastily outside. Russian forces withdrew on 30 March. Ukrainian troops arrived the following day. During those 27 days, 10 civilians died in the basement. Between 17 and 19 others were killed elsewhere in the village — the exact number remains under investigation. What they left behind is the subject of a study published this month in Antiquity by Grzegorz Kiarszys of Szczecin University and Marek Lemiesz of the National Institute of Cultural Heritage of Poland. Their paper applies the framework of contemporary archaeology to the material traces of the Yahidne crime scene: the objects, the wall markings, the satellite record, the damaged structure. The result is something that sits at a genuinely uncomfortable intersection — between forensics, heritage studies, and the philosophy of memory. What a satellite sees, and what it misses In March 2022, obtaining commercial satellite imagery of the Yahidne area was not straightforward. Military conflict restricted access to most coverage. Kiarszys and Lemiesz were able to work with two Maxar images available through Google Earth: one from 18 March 2022 (WorldView-3, ground resolution 300mm), one from 22 March (WorldView-2, 500mm resolution). The 18 March image is strange to look at, once you know what you’re looking for. Heavy vehicle tracks are pressed deep into the arable fields at the centre of the settlement, indicating the prolonged presence of armoured machinery. Artillery craters mark the surrounding fields. Smoke rises from multiple points. Near the school, foxholes are aligned along the main road, and military vehicles cluster around the building. In one corner of the image, the elongated shadows of a group of Russian soldiers fall across the ground near the school’s rear entrance. The civilians are completely absent from the image. They are directly below, underground. Four days later, the second image shows fresh damage. The school’s roof and eastern facade have sustained direct rocket strikes. Other buildings previously occupied by soldiers have been destroyed, vehicles burned out and left in place. The authors draw on Roland Barthes’s description of photography as a kind of clock for seeing — a mechanism that connects the present with something that no longer exists. Satellite imagery, they argue, can function in much the same way. It fixes a moment in time with apparent precision while the most significant thing in the frame is invisible: 368 people in a basement beneath those elongated shadows, 368 people who do not appear in any pixel. The image shows the occupation perfectly. It cannot show the prisoners at all. What they drew on the walls After the village was liberated, Ukrainian criminal investigators examined the school. DNA samples collected from the site have since contributed to identifying perpetrators. Personal documents belonging to nine Tuvan soldiers were recovered from the upper floors. In November 2023, selected objects from both the civilian prisoners and the Russian soldiers were catalogued and secured by the Chernihiv Regional Historical Museum. Between late November and early December 2023, the National Institute of Cultural Heritage of Poland coordinated a project to digitally document the school building using LiDAR scanning, photogrammetric modelling of interior features, and CAD plans. By the time Kiarszys and Lemiesz were conducting fieldwork through multiple visits from December 2022 to March 2025, the basement still held much of what had been left behind. School furnishings remained scattered through the chambers: chairs, ping-pong tables, desks, doors that had been repurposed as makeshift beds. Children’s beds brought down from the nursery upstairs were still there. The concrete floor still bore the imprint of cardboard laid down for insulation. Among the objects: clothing, plastic bags, cups, remnants of military rations, jars of pickled cucumbers that soldiers had distributed. Schoolbooks, both Russian and Ukrainian language texts and Ukrainian history books for children. Abandoned toys, plastic and cuddly. Copies of Komsomolskaya Pravda — a special edition distributed by Russian forces, which announced a swift victory that never arrived and claimed that Ukrainian civilians were welcoming the invasion. Upstairs, in the rooms the soldiers had used, more jars of preserved vegetables, many bearing expiration dates from 2012 and 2014. Empty ration boxes, cigarette butts. Walls marked with unit names, nicknames, crude diagrams of observation zones and fields of fire, and hostile inscriptions aimed at Ukrainian opponents. The classrooms had been left heavily damaged and littered. What draws the most sustained attention in the paper is the children’s drawings on the basement walls. Someone had found crayons and paints, and the children drew. The imagery is exactly what you would expect from children who had not yet fully processed where they were or why: characters from the video game Among Us, Minecraft pickaxes, colourful flowers, butterflies, the sun, clouds, trees, Ukrainian flags, fantastical figures. In rooms without paint, charcoal was used instead — scenes of a football match, buildings, a meteor on a collision course with a grocery store. On one corridor wall, someone scratched a scene of two figures hunting a mammoth with a spear, accompanied by a wolf howling at the moon. Above one cluster of drawings, the word “Hello” is written in Ukrainian. Above another, “No Exit.” Elsewhere, a child wrote: “Mommy, when will you buy me a phone?” Words from the Ukrainian national anthem appear, and other inscriptions now partly faded or illegible. What is absent from all these drawings is as significant as what is present. Across the entire visual record left by the children, there is no depiction of the soldiers. No weapons, no violence, no acknowledgment of the foreign men occupying the floors directly above. The absence is total. Whether this reflects deliberate avoidance, protective instinct, or simply the way children’s imaginations work under extreme stress, the study does not speculate. But the authors note it carefully: the omission draws attention to itself. The adult inscriptions followed a different logic. Most were calendars. Drawn on walls in several rooms in varying forms, they tracked the days of imprisonment. The most striking appears on a door in one of the smaller chambers. It starts on 4 March, with certain dates underlined for unknown reasons. On 30 March — the day Russian forces withdrew — the calendar ends. On the following day, someone returned to that door and added a phrase in Ukrainian: “ours have come.” On the wall to the right of the door, someone had listed the dates and surnames of those who died in the basement. On the left, the names of those killed elsewhere in the village. The prisoners could only account for 17 of the 27 to 29 victims — the basement was sealed, and what happened above ground remained largely unknown to them. Hauntology and the question of what to do with the recent past The theoretical framework Kiarszys and Lemiesz bring to this material is Derridean hauntology, drawn from Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1993, published in English translation in 2006). The concept, broadly stated, holds that presence is always haunted by absence: by futures that never arrived and pasts that never fully disappeared. A spectre, in this framework, arises from unresolved past events — it returns uninvited, disrupts chronological continuity, and refuses to be definitively located in either the past or the present. Derrida tied this to Freud’s notion of the uncanny: the spectre reveals the strange within the familiar. It’s worth being clear about why this framework does real work here rather than serving as decorative theory. The problem the authors are grappling with is actually quite specific: what makes a mass-produced object — a jar of pickled cucumbers, a cuddly toy, a door with dates written on it — different from an almost identical object that has no association with atrocity? The standard archaeological answer points to context. The object derives meaning from the circumstances of its discovery, from collective memory, from emotional resonance. But that answer, the authors argue, describes the phenomenon without explaining it. It acknowledges that place and memory and meaning co-occur without accounting for the mechanism. Hauntology offers something more: the idea that material objects from sites of unresolved violence become conduits for the spectre. They do not merely represent the past. They carry the past into the present in a way tha

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