Evolutionary Insights by Anthropology.net

There’s a specific kind of power that lives in restricted space. The Classic Maya k’uhul ajaw — the divine king — expressed his authority partly through enclosure. His palace at the center of the city was internally segmented, its rooms accessible only to those with the right rank. Political decisions happened inside. The public stayed outside. The architecture didn’t merely reflect hierarchy; it produced it, embedding the logic of who mattered into stone and sightline.

That is what makes a building excavated in 2024 at Ucanal, in the Petén lowlands of Guatemala, genuinely strange. Structure K-1 is a colonnaded open hall — no thick masonry walls, no segmented interior, no enclosed space separating the deliberations of rulers from the people standing in the plaza below. The columns that define its facade leave the interior visible from outside. Whatever happened in that building, anyone in Plaza K could watch.

Christina Halperin of the Université de Montréal and her colleagues on the Proyecto Arqueológico Ucanal argue that Structure K-1 was a popol nah, a council house, and their paper in Antiquity places it at a pivotal moment in Maya political history. The building dates to the Terminal Classic period, roughly AD 810–950, a stretch of time that archaeologists have long recognized as a period of profound disruption across the Southern Maya Lowlands. Populations fell. Sites were abandoned. The epigraphic record, so voluble during the Classic period, goes quiet at site after site. What is less well understood is what came after the disruption — not the collapse, but the reinvention.

Ucanal offers a case study. The site was an important Late Classic center, capital of the K’anwitznal polity, and it did not simply fade. Instead, the archaeological and epigraphic evidence suggests something more like a rupture and reboot. Sometime in the early ninth century, a fire event destroyed a Late Classic royal tomb. Jade ornaments and human remains were burned, then incorporated into new construction at temple-pyramid K-2 in Plaza K. Halperin and colleagues have interpreted this as a deliberate act of rejection: an attack on or ritual erasure of the previous dynastic order.

What emerged in the wake of that event was a new ruler named Papmalil — the name itself is foreign, likely connected to Gulf Coast peoples, possibly the Putun or Chontal Maya. He didn’t claim the site’s traditional emblem glyph as part of his royal title. On a monument at the nearby site of Caracol, Altar 12, he is depicted seated facing another ruler, at the same level, in a horizontal rather than hierarchical arrangement. That visual choice is not incidental. It represents a departure from centuries of iconographic convention in which the k’uhul ajaw was positioned higher, larger, and to the dominant right of everyone else in the scene.

A building that did something different

Structure K-1 was constructed during Papmalil’s reign or shortly afterward. It sits on the eastern side of Plaza K, facing the open public space. Excavations in 2024 uncovered the columned bases of the second construction phase, each a low platform of neatly cut stones supporting wooden columns roughly 0.80 meters in diameter. No masonry benches. Walls likely perishable. A broad frontal staircase and raised platform in front of the colonnade would have served as a stage. A small off-center altar was found inside, with Early Postclassic incense burners deposited on top of it before being buried under later construction.

The radiocarbon date from the fill of this phase — calibrated to AD 783–880 at 95.4% probability — places it firmly in the Terminal Classic. Ceramic typology corroborates this. The building orientation, at 33–34° east of north, is unusual: it differs from the cardinal alignments of every other public building at Ucanal, and from the Late Classic causeway wall that lies directly beneath it. That departure from the site’s standard cosmological grid is hard to dismiss as accidental.

Halperin and colleagues argue that the design of K-1 was doing something specific. Ethnohistoric documents from the sixteenth century describe council houses — popol nah in Yucatec Maya, popol pat in Pokoman — as places where rulers, lineage heads, nobles, and other authority figures assembled to deliberate on political agreements, adjudicate disputes, plan for war, and prepare for ceremonies. The functions were diverse. What made the building form distinctive was its spatial logic: open, visible, accessible in the sense that the proceedings inside could be witnessed by people who had no formal political title.

This is the part that matters. The team is careful not to overstate the case. Spectacle and politics were deeply intertwined in Classic Maya governance too — public plazas hosted performances that consolidated the king’s authority by making it visible and legible to crowds. But watching a performance staged by a divine king at the foot of a temple-pyramid, with the palace behind locked walls, is a different kind of political participation than watching leaders deliberate in a building whose entire facade is open to the plaza. In the latter case, the crowd becomes a kind of constituency.

The material record from Papmalil’s reign and after reinforces this reading. Non-elite and middle-status residents at Ucanal gained increasing access to imported goods during the Terminal Classic period. Water infrastructure projects specifically benefited lower-topographic-zone residents. Architectural distinctions between elite and non-elite residences narrowed. There is no evidence of a Terminal Classic palace at Ucanal at all. The largest residential groups appear to have been elaborated versions of common patio groups rather than anything resembling Classic period palatial complexes.

The broader pattern

Ucanal Structure K-1 is not entirely without precedent. Council houses are attested in the Northern Maya Lowlands during the Late Classic period, and the Puuc region in particular shows a tradition of open-hall architecture. But the political context there was different. Polities in northern Yucatan placed less emphasis on divine kingship throughout the Classic period, with fewer carved stelae celebrating named rulers and fewer elaborate royal tombs. The open hall form may have had an easier path in regions where absolutist kingship was never as entrenched.

What the team is documenting at Ucanal is the spread of this architectural logic into the Southern Lowlands — a region where divine kingship had been the dominant organizing principle for centuries — in the context of political crisis. A similar Terminal Classic colonnaded open hall has been identified at Yaxha, and both predate what would become, during the Postclassic period, a widespread template: open halls with low off-center altars, facing public plazas, in political centers from the Petén lowlands to the Guatemalan highlands.

The iconographic record aligns with this. Across the Terminal Classic, a new visual trope appears in multiple media: figures seated or standing side by side, facing each other, roughly equal in size. These so-called conference scenes show up on Fine Orange molded-carved ceramics, on incised marine shell pendants, and on stone monuments like Caracol Altar 12. They contrast sharply with the Classic iconographic grammar in which the divine king towered over all others. The shift in how power was depicted and the shift in how political space was organized appear to be tracking each other.

None of this means the Terminal Classic transition to more collective governance was smooth, ideologically coherent, or universal. Kingship did not disappear. The institutions changed, not the category. What Halperin and colleagues are describing is something more gradual and contested: a series of architectural, iconographic, and material changes that, taken together, suggest that political legitimacy was being renegotiated, and that ordinary people — as witnesses, as potential sources of consensus, as residents who benefited from new infrastructure — were part of that negotiation in ways they hadn’t been before.

Whether that public presence constituted anything like political agency in a formal sense is genuinely hard to determine from the archaeological record. What the buildings can tell us is that the spatial conditions for such influence were being deliberately constructed. Halperin puts it plainly: ancient Maya societies didn’t collapse — they reworked their institutions. One of those reinventions involved the deliberate choice to tear down the walls that had kept governance out of sight.

Further Reading

* Halperin, C.T. et al. (2024). A pivot point in Maya history: fire-burning event at K’anwitznal (Ucanal) and the making of a new era of political rule. Antiquity 98: 758–76. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2024.38

* Inomata, T. (2006). Plazas, performers, and spectators: political theaters of the Classic Maya. Current Anthropology 47: 805–42. https://doi.org/10.1086/506279

* Bey III, G.J. & May Ciau, R. (2014). The role and realities of popol nahs in northern Maya archaeology, in G.E. Braswell (ed.) The Maya and their Central American neighbors: 335–55. New York: Routledge. [VERIFY full page range]

* Fash, B. et al. (1992). Investigations of a Classic Maya council house at Copán, Honduras. Journal of Field Archaeology 19: 419–42. https://doi.org/10.2307/530426

* Martin, S. (2020). Ancient Maya politics: a political anthropology of the Classic Period 150–900 CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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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.

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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 they knew it.

Further Reading

* Gaudzinski-Windheuser, S., Kindler, L., MacDonalds, K., & Roebroeks, W. (2023). Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125,000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behaviour. Science Advances, 9, eadd8186.

* Gaudzinski-Windheuser, S., Kindler, L., & Roebroeks, W. (2023). Widespread evidence for elephant exploitation by Last Interglacial Neanderthals on the North European plain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(50), e2309427120.

* Thieme, H., & Veil, S. (1985). Neue Untersuchungen zum eemzeitlichen Elefanten-Jagdplatz Lehringen, Ldkr. Verden. Die Kunde, N. F., 36, 11–58.

* Gaudzinski-Windheuser, S., Kindler, L., & Roebroeks, W. (2023). Beaver exploitation, 400,000 years ago, testifies to prey choice diversity of Middle Pleistocene hominins. Scientific Reports, 13, 19766.

* Kindler, L., et al. (2025). Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago. Science Advances, 11, eadv1257.

* Schoch, W. H. (2014). Holzanatomische Nachuntersuchungen an der eemzeitlichen Holzlanze von Lehringen, Ldkr. Verden. NNU, 83, 19–29.

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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. (1939). Archaeology of Mangareva and neighbouring atolls. Honolulu: B.P. Bishop Museum.

* Laval, H. (1968). Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Mangareva: ère chrétienne, 1834–1871. Paris: Musée de l’Homme.

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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 before symptoms appeared, or had a subclinical infection that never progressed, cannot be determined from the available evidence.

Pathogens Across the Group

The metagenomic analysis found traces of multiple pathogens beyond M. leprae. Hepatitis B virus was detected in individual s.167 with high confidence, and lower-coverage signals were validated in three others; genotyping recovered genotypes A and D, both known from medieval European HBV diversity. Human parvovirus B19, the cause of fifth disease, was recovered from four individuals as partial genomes clustering within genotype 2, with trace-level signals in five more. The parvovirus genomes help fill a temporal gap in the European B19V record between roughly 950 CE and the 20th century, and their assignment to genotype 2 extends the known persistence of that lineage.

In at least 3 of the 13 individuals analyzed, the team identified molecular evidence of infection by primary pathogens. Including lower-coverage HBV signals brings that number to 5, or approximately 38% — comparable to rates reported from broad-spectrum pathogen screening at other medieval sites. Including Streptococcus pneumoniae (which can be carried asymptomatically) and a periodontal pathobiont, Parvimonas micra, detected in individual s.133, puts the count at 7 individuals, or about 54%.

It’s a small community, and more than half of the people whose DNA could be recovered were carrying some detectable pathogen.

What the Island Was

Ibiza before 902 CE barely existed in the written record. By the time these 13 people were buried — between 950 and 1150 CE — the island had become a node in a network that extended south to the Sahel, east to the Levant, and north into a Mediterranean world increasingly structured by the confrontation between Islamic and Christian polities.

The genomes reflect this. They show an initial colonization wave from mainland al-Andalus, dominated by Imazighen with some Arab and Islamized Iberian participants, followed by a second pulse after the Almoravid conquest of Mallorca in 1115–1116 CE that brought new arrivals from North Africa, the Iberian peninsula, and — demonstrably — the far side of the Sahara. The timing estimates suggest admixture that had been ongoing for generations by the time these individuals were alive, some of it recent enough that the chromosomal blocks of North African ancestry were still long and largely intact.

The two individuals with the deepest European ancestry — genetically local, culturally Muslim — had apparently converted without marrying into the arriving populations. Or at least their ancestors had. And one of them, without any visible sign of disease, was carrying Mycobacterium leprae genotype 2F, a lineage traveling from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia and back again through the bodies of medieval Europeans who left few records other than this.

Further Reading

* Olalde, I. et al. “The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years.” Science 363, 1237–1241 (2019).

* Oteo-Garcia, G. et al. “Medieval genomes from eastern Iberia illuminate the role of Morisco mass deportations in dismantling a long-standing genetic bridge with North Africa.” Genome Biology 26, 108 (2025).

* Pfrengle, S. et al. “Mycobacterium leprae diversity and population dynamics in medieval Europe from novel ancient genomes.” BMC Biology 19, 1–18 (2021).

* Schuenemann, V.J. et al. “Ancient genomes reveal a high diversity of Mycobacterium leprae in medieval Europe.” PLOS Pathogens 14, 1006997 (2018).

* Mühlemann, B. et al. “Ancient human parvovirus B19 in Eurasia reveals its long-term association with humans.” PNAS115, 7557–7562 (2018).

* Kocher, A. et al. “Ten millennia of hepatitis B virus evolution.” Science 374, 182–188 (2021).

* Fortes-Lima, C.A. et al. “Population history and admixture of the Fulani people from the Sahel.” American Journal of Human Genetics 112, 261–275 (2025).

* Dury, G. et al. “The Islamic cemetery at 33 Bartomeu Vicent Ramon, Ibiza: investigating diet and mobility through light stable isotopes in bone collagen and tooth enamel.” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 11, 3913–3930 (2019).

* Bennison, A.K. The Almoravid and Almohad Empires. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

* Rodríguez-Varela, R. et al. “Five centuries of consanguinity, isolation, health, and conflict in Las Gobas: A Northern Medieval Iberian necropolis.” Science Advances 10 (2024).

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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 no prior contact with Denisovans, or their ancestors may have arrived after whatever direct interactions the earlier populations had experienced.

It is a strange thing to contemplate: two groups of Neanderthals, separated by perhaps 10,000 years, occupying the same cave system at different times, genetically distinct enough from each other to be classified into separate regional populations, each leaving a different archaeological footprint, each with different admixture histories. And none of them aware that in some broader sense they were all running out of time.

Max Planck geneticist Hugo Zeberg, a co-author on the Massilani paper, framed the comparative value of these datasets in terms of natural experiments. Modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans: three lineages navigating the same world during overlapping time periods. The question of why one of them is still here is not answered by these papers, but it gets sharper. Neandertal populations, the data suggest, were almost never large enough to absorb disruption the way modern human populations apparently could. The differentiation exceeded anything seen in living humans today — and it happened faster, over shorter timescales, because the groups were smaller and more isolated. Drift overwhelmed everything else.

The bone fragment from Denisova Cave is 2.5 centimeters long. From it, researchers reconstructed a genome that shows a man living in a population of fewer than 50 people, already genetically separated from the people his kind would later become, already carrying DNA from another species entirely. He was part of a group at the far eastern edge of its range, in a mountain cave in Siberia, 110,000 years ago.

Whether that feels like isolation or just ordinary life is a question the data cannot answer.

Further Reading

* Hajdinjak, M., et al. (2018). Reconstructing the genetic history of late Neanderthals. Nature 555, 652–656.

* Mafessoni, F., et al. (2020). A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Chagyrskaya Cave. PNAS 117, 15132–15136.

* Prüfer, K., et al. (2014). The complete genome sequence of a Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains. Nature 505, 43–49.

* Prüfer, K., et al. (2017). A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Vindija Cave in Croatia. Science 358, 655–658.

* Slimak, L., et al. (2024). Long genetic and social isolation in Neanderthals before their extinction. Cell Genomics 4, 100593.

* Skov, L., et al. (2022). Genetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals. Nature 610, 519–525.

* Higham, T., et al. (2014). The timing and spatiotemporal patterning of Neanderthal disappearance. Nature 512, 306–309.

* Urciuoli, A., et al. (2025). Semicircular canals shed light on bottleneck events in the evolution of the Neanderthal clade. Nature Communications 16, 972.

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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 substantial degree, rather than replacing them.

One plausible reading is that hunter-gatherer dogs and farmer dogs were doing overlapping jobs, or at minimum that the social relationships between arriving farmers and existing populations allowed for the mixing of dog populations in ways that colonial-era encounters did not. The genetic data can’t tell you which, but the pattern is clear enough.

The Marsh et al. paper adds another layer: eastern Eurasian dog ancestry also entered Europe during the Mesolithic, not just during the later Bronze Age steppe migrations as had been proposed. Balkan Mesolithic dogs from the Iron Gates sites in Serbia (Padina and Vlasac) and from Veretye in northwest Russia carried substantial eastern Eurasian dog ancestry — around 44 percent on average. Human genomes from the same contexts show those people also carried eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry. The dogs followed the people east to west, it seems, just as they had crossed western Eurasia at an earlier moment.

This eastern component persisted. Roughly 30 percent eastern Eurasian dog ancestry is present in Neolithic dogs, 33 percent in the Bronze Age, around 20 percent in medieval and modern breed dogs. The fundamental ancestry architecture of European dogs — a mix of western and eastern Eurasian lineages — was in place by at least 10,900 years ago and has not been fully erased since.

The question of exactly where dogs first emerged, and from which human group, the data cannot yet answer. The Kesslerloch dog’s genomic profile is divergent enough that it sits off the main cline of global dog diversity in some analyses — more distantly related to later Eurasian dogs than the Mesolithic Scandinavian dogs are. Whether that reflects a basal position in dog phylogeny, or admixture from some earlier dog lineage, or something else, requires more sampling from the gap between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago that currently has almost no coverage. Anders Bergström, the first author of the Crick-led paper, put it plainly: we’re still trying to find out where dogs come from and who were the people who first built this bond.

Further Reading

* Bergström, A. et al. Grey wolf genomic history reveals a dual ancestry of dogs. Nature 607, 313–320 (2022).

* Bergström, A. et al. Origins and genetic legacy of prehistoric dogs. Science 370, 557–564 (2020).

* Feuerborn, T.R. et al. Modern Siberian dog ancestry was shaped by several thousand years of Eurasian-wide trade and human dispersal. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, e2100338118 (2021).

* Posth, C. et al. Palaeogenomics of Upper Palaeolithic to Neolithic European hunter-gatherers. Nature 615, 117–126 (2023).

* Janssens, L. et al. A new look at an old dog: Bonn-Oberkassel reconsidered. Journal of Archaeological Science 92, 126–138 (2018).

* Sinding, M.-H.S. et al. Arctic-adapted dogs emerged at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. Science 368, 1495–1499 (2020). Botigué, L.R. et al. Ancient European dog genomes reveal continuity since the Early Neolithic. Nature Communications8, 16082 (2017).

* Charlton, S. et al. Dual ancestries and ecologies of the Late Glacial Palaeolithic in Britain. Nature Ecology & Evolution 6, 1658–1668 (2022).

* Bello, S.M. et al. Upper Palaeolithic ritualistic cannibalism at Gough’s Cave (Somerset, UK): the human remains from head to toe. Journal of Human Evolution 82, 170–189 (2015).

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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 African gene flow into Neanderthals. Nature Communications 8, 16046 (2017).

* Peyrégne, S., et al. Nuclear DNA from two early Neandertals reveals 80,000 years of genetic continuity in Europe. Science Advances 5, eaaw5873 (2019).

* Slimak, L., et al. Long genetic and social isolation in Neanderthals before their extinction. Cell Genomics 4, 100593 (2024).

* Higham, T., et al. The timing and spatiotemporal patterning of Neanderthal disappearance. Nature 512, 306–309 (2014).

* Urciuoli, A., et al. Semicircular canals shed light on bottleneck events in the evolution of the Neanderthal clade. Nature Communications 16, 972 (2025).

* Kandel, A.W., et al. The ROCEEH Out of Africa Database (ROAD): A large-scale research database serves as an indispensable tool for human evolutionary studies. PLoS ONE 18, e0289513 (2023).

* Banks, W.E., et al. An ecological niche shift for Neanderthal populations in Western Europe 70,000 years ago. Scientific Reports 11, 5346 (2021).

* Yaworsky, P.M., Nielsen, E.S., Nielsen, T.K. The Neanderthal niche space of Western Eurasia 145 ka to 30 ka ago. Scientific Reports 14, 7788 (2024).

* Rougier, H., et al. Neandertal cannibalism and Neandertal bones used as tools in Northern Europe. Scientific Reports 6, 29005 (2016).

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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 that resists resolution, that insists on being acknowledged. The comb recovered from a concentration camp is not more culturally significant than any other comb because of what it symbolises. It is more significant because the past it participates in has not been resolved, because the loss it points toward has not been adequately mourned, because justice for the harm has not arrived.

By this reasoning, the material record of Yahidne — the calendars, the drawings, the propaganda newspapers, the jars, the charcoal hunting scene on the corridor wall — is not evidence in the narrow forensic sense, though it is that too. It is also something that continues to do cultural work, that keeps the events present in a way that cannot be fully archived or put away.

The local community in Yahidne decided after the liberation that the school would never again function as a school. That decision had already been made before any archaeological work began. A memorial now stands at the back of the building, near the basement doors that still carry red lettering reading “Warning. Children.” Plans are underway to convert the building into a museum. An architectural proposal has already been developed, though residents have pushed back on the initial concept, insisting on active participation in shaping what the memorial will become.

The digital documentation produced by Kiarszys and Lemiesz — the LiDAR scans, the photogrammetric models, the photographic record — was conducted in part precisely because renovation will alter the building, and renovation will erase things. Selected objects from the basement have already been displayed in Ukrainian museum exhibitions and internationally. The door with the calendar and the names of the dead has been shown outside Ukraine. The photographs of the wall drawings have circulated further still.

What happens when a crime scene becomes heritage is not a question the discipline of archaeology has a settled answer to. Heritage is usually treated as a given, as something that exists in the world to be recognised and managed. Yahidne raises the prior question of how it comes into being — the process by which objects and places that are barely three years old acquire the kind of cultural gravity that would normally attach to things measured in centuries. The hauntology framework, whatever its limitations, at least takes that question seriously. The spectre is not the past preserved. It is the past that refuses to stay still.

Further Reading

* Davis, C. 2013. État présent: hauntology, spectres and phantoms, in M. del Pilar Blanco & E. Peeren (ed.) The Spectralities Reader: ghosts and haunting in contemporary cultural theory: 53–60. London: Bloomsbury.

* Domashchenko, I. 2023. Yahidne: court hears villagers’ testimony. Institute for War & Peace Reporting, 26 September 2023. https://iwpr.net/global-voices/yahidne-court-hears-villagers-testimony

* Oslavska, S. 2023. Inside the basement where an entire Ukrainian village spent a harrowing month in captivity. Time, 15 February 2023. https://time.com/6255183/ukraine-basement-yahidne-held-captive/

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In 2021, a metal detectorist named Peter Heads was working a field at Melsonby in North Yorkshire when he started pulling up pieces of corroded metal that didn’t fit any obvious pattern. Bent iron rings. Ornate copper-alloy fittings. Fragments of harness hardware. He contacted Tom Moore at Durham University. By the time excavation was complete in 2022, the site had yielded two separate deposits comprising nearly 950 individual objects, making it one of the largest Iron Age metalwork finds ever recovered in Britain.

The word hoard tends to flatten what was actually there. These weren’t coins or ingots. The assemblage was dominated by the disassembled remains of horse-drawn vehicles: iron tyres, linchpins, yoke fittings, rein rings, kingpins, nave bands, harness straps adorned with Mediterranean coral and glass enamel. There were cauldrons, spears, an iron mirror, fragments of melted silver. Three quarters of the material derived from horse-drawn vehicles and their harness. Whatever was buried here, someone had gone to considerable effort to gather it and dismantle it before putting it in the ground.

The first deposit, designated Hoard 1, was placed at the bottom of a ditch. Its core was 28 iron tyres, all of them bent or deformed before deposition, some entirely out of shape, then stacked carefully. Hundreds of other metal items were entangled within and around them. An inverted cauldron sat over part of the pile; a lidded vessel had been placed upside down at the base. While the pit was open, large rocks were thrown in. One of them crushed the cauldron. The base of that cauldron bears a repoussé fish motif in Celtic curvilinear style, possibly trout or salmon set in swirling water. Depictions of fish are rare on Iron Age metalwork across Europe, and worth noting here because the British Iron Age has a documented and debated pattern of apparent fish avoidance, visible in the zooarchaeological record.

The second deposit, Hoard 2, was found about 25 metres away. It had fused into a solid mass through iron corrosion, making field excavation impossible. The team lifted it as a block and sent it to the University of Southampton for CT scanning. Inside: more horse harness, iron spears, copper-alloy tubes, and what appears to be an iron pilum shaft threaded through hollow copper fittings. Traces of mineralised textile on the block’s edges and textile impressions in the surrounding fill indicate the bundle had been wrapped before burial. The researchers have decided not to disassemble it. Doing so would destroy one of the few preserved records of how such a deposit was actually constructed.

The Case for Wagons

The most significant finding from Melsonby, in terms of what it changes about the Iron Age British record, is the evidence for four-wheeled wagons. Until now, the British evidence for Iron Age wheeled vehicles consisted almost entirely of two-wheeled chariots, mostly from burials on the Yorkshire Wolds dating to the Middle Iron Age, roughly 400 to 150 BC. A single Late Iron Age chariot burial has been identified in Pembrokeshire. That is essentially the extent of the direct evidence.

The Melsonby assemblage suggests something different was in use in northern Britain by the first century AD. The U-shaped iron brackets found in Hoard 1 are not known from British two-wheeled chariot contexts anywhere. They have nails protruding from their arms, indicating attachment to thick wooden elements around cylindrical components, and they fit cylindrical iron bands that closely resemble hub collars from four-wheeled wagons on the continent, particularly those dated from around 100 BC to the first century AD. The iron tyres range from 0.77 to 1.08 metres in diameter, larger than those typical of lightweight chariots, and the harness fittings are atypically oversized throughout. Most telling are the kingpins: components specific to wagon steering mechanisms, with no function on a two-wheeled vehicle.

The closest material parallel is a pair of four-wheeled wagons recovered from a peat bog at Dejbjerg in Denmark, dated to around 100 BC. Those wagons were buried in pieces but retained their copper-alloy fittings, several of which resemble items from Melsonby: tubes and ferrules, finials, openwork ornamentation. A small repoussé face from Hoard 2 echoes faces decorating the Dejbjerg wagons. Four-wheeled vehicles are well documented across Late Iron Age continental Europe. Their presence in Britain had been anticipated on circumstantial grounds, but never confirmed with physical evidence. The Melsonby deposits represent, in the team’s assessment, the first tangible instance.

At minimum, the assemblage accounts for seven vehicles. Possibly more, possibly a mixture of four-wheeled wagons and lighter two-wheeled carts. The harness fittings across Hoards 1 and 2, and a third hoard found at the same site in 1843, show closely related stylistic groupings suggesting multiple matched sets, made in related workshops, treated as sets in deposition. The 1843 find appears to have included a separate cache of large iron wheel rims, described at the time as “iron hoops, conjectured to be tyres of chariot wheels.”

What Was Being Destroyed, and Why

The manner of deposition is as striking as the objects themselves. The vehicles had been dismantled. Many items had been deliberately bent, broken, or exposed to intense heat before burial. Partially melted copper-alloy objects, glass droplets, and melted silver were distributed throughout Hoard 1. The iron tyres had probably been heated to enable bending, a process that left haematite traces on their surfaces. But none of this burning happened in the pit: the surrounding sediment showed no discolouration, no charcoal concentration. The material had been processed elsewhere, then brought here.

One possibility is that these objects had been placed on a funeral pyre and then transferred to the ditch. This has been proposed for the 1843 hoard and for similar burning-affected metalwork deposits elsewhere. It fits what the rest of the assemblage contains. The large cauldron, with an estimated capacity of around 35 litres, the second vessel whose form echoes Etruscan wine-mixing bowls and which bears cast human face masks and applied coral studs, the iron mirror, the weapons: these are objects associated with feasting, display, and status. As a category they resemble elite funerary deposits from southern Britain in the same period, including assemblages from Lexden in Colchester and Folly Lane in St Albans.

There are no human remains at Melsonby. The small quantities of bone recovered appear to be animal, including probable cremated animal bone in Hoard 2’s trench. The researchers are careful about what this absence means. They point out that hoards, votive deposits, and funerary assemblages represent a continuum of practice rather than clearly bounded categories. The absence of a body does not exclude a funerary event. Cremation was becoming more common in Late Iron Age southern Britain; human remains may have been deposited in ways that are archaeologically invisible, or the event may have involved exposure to a funerary pyre without any conventional burial at all.

The site sits about 800 metres from the Late Iron Age oppidum at Stanwick, one of the major power centres of northern Britain and the probable seat of the Brigantes, a tribal confederacy described by classical writers. Stanwick was occupied through the first century BC and first century AD, precisely the period that preliminary radiocarbon dates from the Melsonby deposits indicate. Hoard 1 most probably dates to between 35 cal BC and cal AD 40, with Hoard 2 falling in a similar range. The assemblage includes Roman-influenced objects consistent with Stanwick’s documented engagement with Roman material culture beginning around the turn of the millennium.

Tacitus identified Queen Cartimandua as a Brigantian client ruler allied with Rome, active around AD 51 to 69. The team notes that the Melsonby dates, if the deposits are connected to a funerary event, suggest the person being commemorated was more likely Cartimandua’s parent or grandparent than Cartimandua herself. That doesn’t diminish the connection to Stanwick’s political world. The Brigantian reach suggested by the objects is wide: decorative motifs connecting to metalwork from southern Scotland to southern England, Mediterranean coral, Roman-influenced forms. And other aspects of the deposits are worth sitting with. The communal feasting equipment, the relative absence of personal ornaments like brooches, the sheer scale of destruction involved: whatever event this was, it seems to have been as much about collective display as about any individual. The tension between personal and community power is one that the archaeology of the British Iron Age keeps returning to, and Melsonby fits that pattern without resolving it.

What happened in that field near Stanwick in the late first century BC or early first century AD remains genuinely open. Something significant occurred, possibly more than once, or in a compressed sequence of related events. Vehicles were destroyed. Enormous quantities of high-value metalwork were bent, melted, bundled, and placed in ditches along a trackway connecting a major political centre to the south. A cauldron decorated with fish was placed upside down over the pile, and then rocks were thrown in on top.

Hoard 2 is still in its concreted block.

Further Reading

* Comeau, R. 2022. Cambrians Christmas Lecture, 2021; Adam Gwilt: The Pembrokeshire Chariot Burial Project. Archaeologia Cambrensis 171: 324–26.

* Dobney, K. & Ervynck, A. 2007. To fish or not to fish? Evidence for the possible avoidance of fish consumption during the Iron Age around the North Sea, in C. Haselgrove & T. Moore (ed.) The Later Iron Age in Britain and beyond: 403–18. Oxford: Oxbow.

* Foster, J. 1986. The Lexden Tumulus: a reappraisal of an Iron Age burial from Colchester, Essex (British Archaeological Reports British Series 156). Oxford: BAR.

* Giles, M. 2012. A forged glamour: landscape, identity and material culture in the Iron Age. Oxford: Windgather.

* Haselgrove, C. 2016. Cartimandua’s Capital? The Late Iron Age royal site at Stanwick, North Yorkshire, fieldwork and analysis 1981–2011 (Council for British Archaeology Research Report 175). York: Council for British Archaeology.

* Haselgrove, C. & McIntosh, F. 2016. The Melsonby hoard, in C. Haselgrove (ed.) Cartimandua’s Capital?: 343–48.

* MacGregor, M. 1962. The Early Iron Age metalwork hoard from Stanwick, N.R. Yorks. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 28: 17–57.

* Niblett, R. 1999. The excavation of a ceremonial site at Folly Lane, Verulamium (Britannia Monograph 14). London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies.

* Schönfelder, M. 2010. Die Wagen von Dejbjerg. Import, Umwandlung und Anregung, in J. Erzsébet & M. Schönfelder (ed.) Nord-Süd, Ost-West: Kontakte während der Eisenzeit in Europa: 257–68. Budapest: Archaeolingua.

* Schovsbo, P.O. 2010. Dejbjergvognene: keltiske impulser i førromersk jernalder. Højbjerg: Jysk Arkæologisk Selskab.

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