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A team of geneticists and archaeologists affiliated with multiple institutions in France has uncovered skeletons in an ancient gravesite not far from Paris that show evidence of steppe migrant integration with Late Neolithic Europeans. The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

Prior research has shown that there was a slow migration of herding people from what is now Russia and Ukraine to Europe thousands of years ago. During the migrations, many of the migrants (who were mostly male) produced children with the local farmers they encountered.

In this new study, the research team reports evidence of such reproduction in remains found in an open grave in the Champagne region of France. Skeletons in the grave showed evidence of a native European woman who had produced a child with a steppe migrant.

A controversial bill that would have allowed developers to build on archaeological sites in some environmentally sensitive coastal areas was overhauled on June 19.

Language that would have allowed builders to disturb archaeological resources in the course of development in the coastal Areas of Environmental Concern was removed from House Bill 385 entirely. After being introduced earlier this month, that original proposal met widespread opposition from Native Americans in North Carolina and the state's Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

The ancestors of Alaska Native people began using local copper sources to craft intricate tools roughly 1,000 years ago. Over one-third of all copper objects archaeologists have found in this region were excavated at a single spot, named the Gulkana Site.

This is the site I’ve studied for the past four years as a Ph.D. student at Purdue University. In spite of its importance, the Gulkana Site is not well known.

To my knowledge, it isn’t mentioned in any museums. Locals, including Alaska Native Ahtna people, who descend from the site’s original inhabitants, might recognize the name, but they don’t know much about what happened there. Even among archaeologists, little information is available about it – just a few reports and passing mentions in a handful of publications.

However, the Gulkana Site was first identified and excavated nearly 50 years ago. What gives?

Archaeology has a data management problem, and it is not unique to the Gulkana Site. U.S. federal regulations and disciplinary standards require archaeologists to preserve records of their excavations, but many of these records have never been analyzed. Archaeologists refer to this problem as the “legacy data backlog.”

As an example of this backlog, the Gulkana Site tells a story not only about Ahtna history and copperworking innovation, but also about the ongoing value of archaeological data to researchers and the public alike.

Archaeologists have analyzed the chemical makeup of glass beads from across the Great Lakes region of North America, revealing the extent of Indigenous influence on transatlantic exchange networks during the 17th century AD.

Glass beads were a key component of trade between Europeans and Indigenous Americans during early interactions between the two continents. One of the key actors in these networks was the Wendat Confederacy, which was based in southern Ontario until around 1650, when some Wendat people moved into the Western Great Lakes region.

Beads are a key symbol of European colonization, as they were produced in Europe but had a lasting impact on Indigenous Americans, with beadwork continuing to be integral to many Indigenous cultures to this day.

As such, it was thought that trans-Atlantic bead exchange networks must have been driven by European colonization. The first Europeans colonized the Western Great Lakes region around 1670.

In the early 1600s, the officials running Durham Cathedral, in England, had serious financial problems. Soaring prices had raised expenses. Most cathedral income came from renting land to tenant farmers, who had long leases so officials could not easily raise the rent. Instead, church leaders started charging periodic fees, but these often made tenants furious. And the 1600s, a time of religious schism, was not the moment to alienate church members.

But in 1626, Durham officials found a formula for fees that tenants would accept. If tenant farmers paid a fee equal to one year's net value of the land, it earned them a seven-year lease. A fee equal to 7.75 years of net value earned a 21-year lease.

This was a form of discounting, the now-common technique for evaluating the present and future value of money by assuming a certain rate of return on that money. The Durham officials likely got their numbers from new books of discounting tables. Volumes like this had never existed before, but suddenly local church officials were applying the technique up and down England.

A research project led by the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) and the Max Planck Institute has studied the remains of 25 individuals buried between the 12th and 15th centuries in the castle at Zorita de los Canes, Guadalajara. After exhuming the remains from the castle's cemetery, the research team was able to determine the diet, lifestyle and causes of death of the warrior monks, who were members of the Order of Calatrava.

The results, published in the journal Scientific Reports, have determined that 23 of the individuals died in battle and that the knights of the order followed a diet typical of medieval high society, with a considerable intake of animal protein and marine fish, in an area far from the coast. Unexpectedly, Carme Rissech, a researcher at the URV, identified the remains of a woman among the warrior monks.

Considered the oldest known horse sculpture made by anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens), this horse-shaped figurine is carved out of mammoth ivory. The palm-sized artifact measures roughly 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) high and 1.9 inches (4.8 cm) long and includes details such as a carved mouth, nostrils, eyes and mane. Although the ivory horse's head is complete, all four of its legs have been broken off. Archaeologists think the sculpture depicts a stallion, according to the Bradshaw Foundation, which asks, "Is this a stallion trying to impress a mare or a horse arching and kicking backwards against a predator?"

Neanderthals who lived 50,000 years ago were infected with three viruses that still affect modern humans today, researchers have discovered.

These traces of ancient viruses are the oldest remnants of human viruses ever discovered, New Scientist reported. They are around 20,000 years older than the previous record-holder for the most ancient human virus ever found: a common-cold virus uncovered inside a pair of 31,000-year-old baby teeth in Siberia.

Scientists found the ancient viruses after sifting through DNA sequences drawn from the skeletons of two male Neanderthals originally found in the Chagyrskaya cave, located in the Altai mountains in Russia. Several sequences appeared to be viral in origin, so the team compared them to modern viruses known to cause lifelong infections. They ruled out the possibility that the viruses came from modern humans who handled the skeletons or by predators that fed on them by looking at specific signatures in the viral DNA that differed between the ancient and modern samples.

In this way, they showed that our closest, now-extinct relatives could be infected with three common, modern human viruses: a type of adenovirus, a herpesvirus and a papillomavirus.

Irene Solano Megías, a predoctoral researcher at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), has just published the first techno-typological study of the most ancient lithic industry of level VI-B at the Mumba rockshelter in the journal African Archaeological Review. This site lies in the Lake Eyasi region in Tanzania, and the study has enabled better understanding of the activity of human groups in this region.

This is one of the most important sites in northern Tanzania from the period known as the Middle Stone Age (MSA). It was excavated in the 1930s and level VI-B was excavated between 1977 and 1981, but no data had been published until now.

According to the new study, the level VI-B lithic assemblage at Mumba is the result of settlement by groups of Homo sapiens present in the Lake Eyasi region between 109,000 and 131,000 years ago.

An Oregon State University study has found evidence that Indigenous groups in the Pacific Northwest were intentionally harvesting edible camas bulbs at optimal stages of the plant's maturation as far back as 3,500 years ago.

The findings contribute to the growing body of research around Traditional Ecological Knowledge and practices, demonstrating the care and specificity with which Indigenous groups have been stewarding and cultivating natural resources for millennia. The work is published in The Holocene journal.

Camas is an ecological and cultural keystone, meaning it is a species on which many other organisms depend and that it features prominently within many cultural practices.

"If you think about salmon as being a charismatic species that people are very familiar with, camas is kind of the plant equivalent," said Molly Carney, an assistant professor of anthropology in OSU's College of Liberal Arts and lead author on the study. "It is one of those species that really holds up greater ecosystems, a fundamental species which everything is related to."

Moose populations have been dwindling for years across the country due to many contributing factors, but new research at Washington State University has found the impact of Eleaophora schneideri, also known as the arterial worm, has likely been underestimated.

Researchers examined recently deceased Shiras moose in Idaho between March 2020 and July 2022. While the parasitic roundworm E. schneideri was not detected in any of the animals found in north Idaho, it was present in 10 of the 20 adult moose studied in the southeastern portion of the state. Nine of the infected not only had adult worms in their major arteries but their brains were littered with microfilariae, the microscopic early life stage of the worm.

"The microfilaria are just scattered throughout their brains, and even though the damage from each is miniscule, they're basically shot-gunning the whole brain," said Kyle Taylor, a pathologist at WSU's Washington Animal Disease Diagnostics Laboratory. "We hypothesize the cumulative effects of large numbers of microfilariae in the brain may be associated with increased morbidity or chance of mortality, with mortality more likely in cases with larger numbers of worms."

A nearly 130,000-year-old bear bone was deliberately marked with cuts and might be one of the oldest art pieces in Eurasia crafted by the Neanderthals, researchers say.

The roughly cylindrical bone, which is about 4 inches long (10.6 centimeters), is adorned with 17 irregularly spaced parallel cuts. A right-handed person most likely crafted the piece, probably in one sitting, a new study finds.

The carved bone is the oldest known symbolic art made by Neanderthals in Europe north of the Carpathian Mountains. It gives scientists a glimpse into the behavior, cognition and culture of modern humans' long-dead cousins, who lived in Eurasia from about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago, when they disappeared.