World’s earliest botanical art discovered and evidence of prehistoric mathematical thinking

 

 

image: 

Nax Mallowan excavation at Arpachiyah, Iraq. From the collections of the British Museum and UCL

view more 

Credit: Photos courtesy of Yosef Garfinkel

A new study reveals that the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia (c. 6200–5500 BCE) produced the earliest systematic plant imagery in prehistoric art, flowers, shrubs, branches, and trees painted on fine pottery, arranged with precise symmetry and numerical sequences, especially petal and flower counts of 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64. This suggests that early farming villages in the Near East already possessed sophisticated, practical mathematical thinking about dividing space and quantities, likely tied to everyday needs such as fairly sharing crops from collectively worked fields, long before writing or formal number systems existed.

Link to pictures: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1F6S8BpXIKxuNvZGis48ptTvAhA3AMEvK

A new study published in the Journal of World Prehistory reveals that some of humanity’s earliest artistic representations of botanical figures were far more than decorative, they were mathematical.

In an extensive analysis of ancient pottery, Prof. Yosef Garfinkel and Sarah Krulwich of the Hebrew University have identified the earliest systematic depictions of vegetal motifs in human history, dating back over 8,000 years to the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia (c. 6200–5500 BCE). Their research shows that these early agricultural communities painted flowers, shrubs, branches, and trees with remarkable care, and embedded within them evidence of complex geometric and arithmetic thinking.

A New Understanding of Prehistoric Art

Earlier prehistoric art focused primarily on humans and animals. Halafian pottery, however, marks the moment when the plant world entered human artistic expression in a systematic and visually sophisticated way.

Across 29 archaeological sites, Garfinkel and Krulwich documented hundreds of carefully rendered vegetal motifs, some naturalistic, others abstract, all reflecting conscious artistic choice.

“These vessels represent the first moment in history when people chose to portray the botanical world as a subject worthy of artistic attention,” the authors note. “It reflects a cognitive shift tied to village life and a growing awareness of symmetry and aesthetics.”

Among the study’s most striking insights is the precise numerical patterning in Halafian floral designs. Many bowls feature flowers with petal counts that follow geometric progression: 4, 8, 16, 32, and even arrangements of 64 flowers.

These sequences, the researchers argue, are intentional and demonstrate a sophisticated grasp of spatial division long before the appearance of written numbers.

“The ability to divide space evenly, reflected in these floral motifs, likely had practical roots in daily life, such as sharing harvests or allocating communal fields,” Garfinkel explains.

This work contributes to the field of ethnomathematics, which identifies mathematical knowledge embedded in cultural expression.

The motifs documented span the full botanical spectrum:

• Flowers with meticulously balanced petals
• Seedlings and shrubs, rendered with botanical clarity
• Branches, arranged in rhythmic, repeating bands
• Tall, imposing trees, sometimes shown alongside animals or architecture

Notably, none of the images depict edible crops, suggesting that the purpose was aesthetic rather than agricultural or ritualistic. Flowers, the authors note, are associated with positive emotional responses, which may explain their prominence.

Revising the History of Mathematics

While written mathematical texts appear millennia later in Sumer, Halafian pottery reveals an earlier, intuitive form of mathematical reasoning, rooted in symmetry, repetition, and geometric organization.

“These patterns show that mathematical thinking began long before writing,” Krulwich says. “People visualized divisions, sequences, and balance through their art.”

By cataloguing these vegetal motifs and revealing their mathematical foundations, the study offers a new perspective on how early communities understood the natural world, organized their environments, and expressed cognitive complexity.

---

Journal

Journal of World Prehistory

DOI

10.1007/s10963-025-09200-9 

Researchers Discover the Shocking Age of the Mysterious Pecos River Rock Art

The murals were painted on limestone canyon walls, in the same style, over the span of four millennia

Researcher Carolyn Boyd examines a Pecos River style pictograph in Seminole Canyon State Park and Historic Site.
  Texas State University / Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center

The limestone canyons along the Pecos River in southwest Texas are covered in ancient art. Painted by unidentified Indigenous peoples long ago, the Pecos River style murals stretch into northern Mexico, and they've long mystified archaeologists who have been unable to determine their age.

Now, researchers have finally dated some of the murals by analyzing the radiocarbon in paint and mineral deposits. According to their study, published in the journal Science Advances, the Pecos River valley’s inhabitants painted in the same cosmic style for millennia—from around 3700 B.C.E. until 900 C.E.

“Frankly, we were stunned to discover that the murals remained in production for over 4,000 years, and that the rule-bound painting sequence persisted throughout that period as well,” study coauthor Carolyn Boyd, an archaeologist at Texas State University, tells Live Science’s Aristos Georgiou. The canyons are like an “ancient library containing hundreds of books authored by 175 generations of painters,” she adds. “The stories they tell are still being told today.”

Researchers Tim Murphy and Diana Radillo Rolon capture microscopic images of a 10-foot feline pictograph in Panther Cave. Texas State University / Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center

The murals were painted in pigments bound with yucca or bone marrow. Jerod Roberts / Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center

Many of the Pecos murals, spread across countless canyon rock shelters, contain similar imagery. The researchers began their work by identifying recurring symbols, according to the study. They found that 134 of the murals include at least one of a specific group of motifs, including rabbit-eared headdresses, stylized dart tips, winged figures with antlers, power bundles and speech breath. A power bundle appears in more than 60 percent of the murals; it constitutes a plant-, animal- or human-like shape depicted at the end of two long lines extending from a figure’s hand.

“Many of the 200-plus murals in the region are huge,” Boyd tells Live Science. “Some span over 100 feet long and 20 feet tall and contain hundreds of skillfully painted images.”

Archaeologists don’t know much about who painted the Pecos murals, aside from the fact that they were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Per the study, the region boasts evidence of more than 12,500 years of hunter-gatherer occupation.

Quick fact: Scale of the Pecos River rock art

• Some of the murals measure as long as 100 feet and as tall as 20 feet. They depict human and animal figures, as well as geometric designs.

Southern Texas’ arid clime preserved the murals well but dating them still proved a difficult task. The researchers focused on 12 murals with similar imagery. Per the study, they used two independent methods of determining age. One dated the organic carbon in the paint’s binders—likely yucca plant and fatty bone marrow from deer. The other dated the carbon inside calcium oxalate accretions—mineral crusts that lie beneath and atop the paintings—to figure out the murals’ minimum and maximum ages.

“It is important to take a control sample of unpainted rock to see if there is any organic contamination in the rock surface,” study co-author Karen Steelman, science director at the Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center, tells Artnet News. “If not (which was the case for this study), then we can be certain that the organic material that we are dating is inherent in the paint alone.”

This photomicrograph shows layers of yellow, red and black paint. Texas State University / Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center

Anthropologists previously assumed each Pecos mural was assembled from small individual contributions over time. Actually, the radiocarbon dates of the murals’ pictographs were “clustered so closely as to be statistically indistinguishable, suggesting that they were produced during a single painting event,” Boyd tells Artnet News.

According to a statement from Texas State University, the researchers’ analyses of the 12 murals’ layers and iconography revealed that eight of them adhere to the same set of rules and established iconography—even though they were painted up to 4,000 years apart. As the researchers write in the study, this suggests “consistent messaging throughout a period marked by changes in material culture, land use and climate.”

The researchers think the Pecos River style paintings transmitted a system of “sophisticated metaphysics”—philosophy relating to concepts like being, time, space and the beginning of life. They write that the Pecos muralists’ “ancient cosmovision” likely informed the beliefs of later Mesoamerican agricultural societies, like the Olmec, Maya and Aztec.

“The murals are viewed by Indigenous people today as living, breathing, sentient ancestral deities,” Boyd tells Live Science, “who are still engaged in creation and the maintenance of the cosmos.”

The Huichol people live in western Mexico among the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains. They recognized one of the motifs in the Pecos murals: a crenellated arch below a portal through which figures pass.

“I was told by Huichol elders that it represents the sacred mountain,” Boyd tells Artnet News. “The undulations along the sides are a ladder for the sun to climb out of the world below each morning [and] to descend on its return each night.”

Love lounging in hammocks? You can thank indigenous cultures for that

Quickly adopted by European colonists, hammocks also had cultural meaning, according to Binghamton Professor John Kuhn

 Native to South America and the Caribbean, hammocks were traditionally woven by women, who were frequently fiber-workers in Indigenous cultures, said Binghamton University Associate Professor of English John Kuhn, who recently co-authored an article on the topic.

"The oldest preserved specimen is 4,000 years old, but they may actually be much older," said Kuhn, who also directs the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Binghamton. "We just don't know; textiles don't preserve well in the tropics."

Co-authored by Marcy Norton at the University of Pennsylvania, the research titled "Towards a history of the hammock: An Indigenous technology in the Atlantic world" recently appeared in postmedieval.

Hospitality ritual taking place in a hammock. From André Thevet, Les singularitez de la France Antarctique (Paris, 1588), 85–87. Image credit: Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. Credit: Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

Portable, versatile and easy to clean, hammocks are a comfortable way to sleep in a hot climate. They also protect the user from insects, especially when compared to the ground-based bedding common to European colonizers.

"Colonists basically adopt them right from the jump," Kuhn said. "They learn to use them because the hammock was a major component in hospitality rituals that are being extended to them by Indigenous groups who are seeking alliance and friendship."

The technology proved useful for military expeditions in the Americas and was adopted by figures such as English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh. As colonial settlements began to develop, their use was adopted by a wider population, from elites to slaves.

Hammocks are also connected to Indigenous culture with deep webs of meaning. In addition to sleep, the bed-slings were used as private spaces to chat, manufacture objects or play music. In short, they were a way to define an individual's personal space in an otherwise communal culture."We know from one Kalinago-French dictionary compiled in the early colonial period that the word for hammock was linguistically linked to the word for placenta," Kuhn said. "It's kind of poetic: You're in one kind of container and then, because hammocks are given to babies right away, you move to another one after you're born."

Hospitality ritual taking place in a hammock. From André Thevet, Les singularitez de la France Antarctique (Paris, 1588), 85–87. Image credit: Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. Credit: Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

The spread of hammock use among colonizers belies the common belief that European technology was far superior to that of Indigenous people. It's far from the only example of cultural borrowing; take chocolate and tobacco, which originated as stimulants developed by Indigenous cultures.

Kuhn is currently working on a book about another Indigenous technology: birchbark canoes, which North American colonists immediately adopted for their own use.

"Sometimes people have this idea that Indigenous cultures were just destroyed, and they aren't necessarily seen as huge technological contributors to the Atlantic world that emerges out of colonization," Kuhn said. "The next time you see a hammock, just take a minute to marvel at the ingenuity of the cultures that it sprang from."

More information: Marcy Norton et al, Towards a history of the hammock: An Indigenous technology in the Atlantic world, postmedieval (2025). DOI: 10.1057/s41280-025-00379-w

Stone tool production in the African rainforest during the Late Stone Age

 Stone tool production in the African rainforest during the Late Stone Age likely remained stable for roughly 5,000 years and had no specific cultural affiliations, according to findings from Pahon Cave in modern day Gabon

Article URL: https://plos.io/4iw1Qpk

Although the Later Stone Age as a distinctive techno-cultural phase has disappeared, forager groups in the African rainforest persist today. However, their origins remain poorly understood. The absence of stone tool production raises questions about the pace and processes of its decline and its relationship to the emergence or adoption of metallic tools. Archaeological sequences from the Middle and Late Holocene are particularly valuable for documenting the coexistence of diverse subsistence strategies and technologies within the Central African rainforest. In this context, the Pahon Cave sequence, in Gabon, spanning a period from 7,571 cal. BP to 2,523 cal. BP, provides an opportunity to study the evolution of stone tool production in the rainforest of the Ogooué Basin. This chronological range coincides with significant broader techno-cultural and environmental changes in Central Africa. 

This article provides a detailed description of the lithic industry for each layer, along with the identification of faunal remains, giving insight into the exploitation of rainforest resources and hunting practices. At Pahon Cave, our findings suggest that stone tool technology remained stable over time, at least until around 2,523 cal. BP. Furthermore, the technological characteristics of the lithic industry indicate no clear cultural affiliations. These features contribute highlighting a techno-cultural diversity during the Middle and Late Holocene Later Stone Age in Atlantic Central Africa.

Citation: Angue Zogo M-J, Mesfin I, de Saulieu G, Van Neer W, Cornelissen E, Pleurdeau D, et al. (2025) Pahon Cave, Gabon: New insights into the Later Stone Age in the African rainforest. PLoS One 20(12): e0336405. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0336405

Fingerprint of ancient seafarer found on Scandinavia’s oldest plank boat

 A fingerprint has been found in the tars used to build the oldest known wooden plank boat in Scandinavia, which provides a direct link to the seaborne raiders who used the boat over 2,000 years ago. By analysing the tar itself, Lund University researchers are closer to solving the long-standing mystery of where the attackers in the boat came from.

WATCH VIDEO: Archaeologist describes moment he discovered ancient fingerprint

In the 4th century BC, an armada of boats attacked the island of Als off the coast of Denmark. Traveling in up to four boats, the unknown attackers were defeated, with the defenders sinking the weapons of their foes into the bog in one of the boats, most likely  to give thanks for their victory.

“Where these sea raiders might have come from, and why they attacked the island of Als has long been a mystery,” says Mikael Fauvelle, archaeologist at Lund University.

The boat was discovered in the 1880s in the bog of Hjortspring Mose, excavated in the 1920s, and is now known as the Hjortspring boat. It is the only example of a prehistoric plank boat that has ever been found in Scandinavia. The finding is unique – since it was sunk in a bog as an offering, it was exceptionally well preserved. To this day, the Hjortspring boat has been on display at the National Museum of Denmark.

When the researchers unexpectedly located parts of the boat that had not been chemically preserved, they were able to study these using modern scientific methods.

“The boat was waterproofed with pine pitch, which was surprising. This suggests the boat was built somewhere with abundant pine forests,” says Mikael Fauvelle.

Several scholars had previously suggested that the boat and its crew came from the region around modern-day Hamburg in Germany. Instead, the researchers now believe they came from the Baltic Sea region.

“If the boat came from the pine forest-rich coastal regions of the Baltic Sea, it means that the warriors who attacked the island of Als chose to launch a maritime raid over hundreds of kilometers of open sea,” says Mikael Fauvelle.

So, exactly where did someone unknowingly leave their fingerprint in the tar, as a silent message to future generations? The best way to conclusively address the mystery of the boat’s origins would be through tree year ring counting which could match the planks on the boat to the area where the trees they came from were cut down. 

“We are also hoping to be able to extract ancient DNA from the caulking tar on the boat, which could give us more detailed information on the ancient people who used this boat,” concludes Mikael Fauvelle.

DETECTIVE WORK LED TO DISCOVERY:

The latest findings are the result of careful detective work by the researchers. 

The team wanted to find material from the boat that had not yet been subjected to conservation. This involved going through the archive at the National Museum and reading old correspondence, detailing when and where materials had been shipped between different storage areas and museums in Denmark. 

“When we located some of the boxes of materials, we were very excited to find that they contained samples from the original excavation that had not been studied in over 100 years,” says Mikael Fauvelle.

HOW THE RESEARCHERS EXAMINED THEIR FINDS:

The team used a wide range of modern scientific methods to study the Hjortspring material. They were able to carbon date some of the lime bast cordage used on the boat, giving them the first absolute date from the original excavation material and confirming its pre-Roman Iron Age dating. 

They also used x-ray tomography to make high resolution scans of the caulking and cordage material found on the boat. This included making a digital 3D model of the fingerprint found in some of the caulking tar.

They used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to study the caulking material and to see how it was produced. In addition, they worked with modern rope makers to create replicas of the ships cordage to study the rope-making process used in the boat’s construction. 

Pompeii offers insights into ancient Roman building technology

 Concrete was the foundation of the ancient Roman empire. It enabled Rome’s storied architectural revolution as well as the construction of buildings, bridges, and aqueducts, many of which are still used some 2,000 years after their creation.

 

Caption

An ancient Pompeii wall at a newly excavated site, where Associate Professor Admir Masic applied compositional analysis (overlayed to right) to understand how ancient Romans made concrete that has endured for thousands of years.
 

Credit

Archaeological Park of Pompeii

In 2023, MIT Associate Professor Admir Masic and his collaborators published a paper describing the manufacturing process that gave Roman concrete its longevity: Lime fragments were mixed with volcanic ash and other dry ingredients before the addition of water. Once water is added to this dry mix, heat is produced. As the concrete sets, this “hot-mixing” process traps and preserves the highly reactive lime as small, white, gravel-like features. When cracks form in the concrete, the lime clasts redissolve and fill the cracks, giving the concrete self-healing properties.

There was only one problem: The process Masic’s team described was different from the one described by the famed ancient Roman architect Vitruvius. Vitruvius literally wrote the book on ancient architecture. His highly influential work, “De architectura,” written in the 1st century B.C.E., is the first known book on architectural theory. In it, Vitruvius says that Romans added water to lime to create a paste-like material before mixing it with other ingredients.

“Having a lot of respect for Vitruvius, it was difficult to suggest that his description may be inaccurate,” Masic says. “The writings of Vitruvius played a critical role in stimulating my interest in ancient Roman architecture, and the results from my research contradicted these important historical texts.”

Now, Masic and his collaborators have confirmed that hot-mixing was indeed used by the Romans, a conclusion he reached by studying a newly discovered ancient construction site in Pompeii that was exquisitely preserved by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 C.E. They also characterized the volcanic ash material the Romans mixed with the lime, finding a surprisingly diverse array of reactive minerals that further added to the concrete’s ability to repair itself many years after these monumental structures were built.

“There is the historic importance of this material, and then there is the scientific and technological importance of understanding it,” Masic explains. “This material can heal itself over thousands of years, it is reactive, and it is highly dynamic. It has survived earthquakes and volcanoes. It has endured under the sea and survived degradation from the elements. We don’t want to completely copy Roman concrete today. We just want to translate a few sentences from this book of knowledge into our modern construction practices.”

The findings are described in a forthcoming paper in Nature Communications. Joining Masic on the paper are first authors Ellie Vaserman ’25 and Principal Research Scientist James Weaver, along with Associate Professor Kristin Bergmann, PhD candidate Claire Hayhow, and six other Italian collaborators.

Uncovering ancient secrets

Masic has spent close to a decade studying the chemical composition of the concrete that allowed Rome’s famous structures to endure for so much longer than their modern counterparts. His 2023 paper analyzed the material’s chemical composition to deduce how it was made.

That paper used samples from a city wall in Priverno in southwest Italy, which was conquered by the Romans in the 4th century B.C.E. But there was a question as to whether this wall was representative of other concrete structures built throughout the Roman empire.

The recent discovery by archaeologists of an active ancient construction site in Pompeii (complete with raw material piles and tools) therefore offered an unprecedented opportunity.

For the study, the researchers analyzed samples from these pre-mixed dry material piles, a wall that was in the process of being built, completed buttress and structural walls, and mortar repairs in an existing wall.

“We were blessed to be able to open this time capsule of a construction site and find piles of material ready to be used for the wall,” Masic says. “With this paper, we wanted to clearly define a technology and associate it with the Roman period in the year 79 C.E.”

The site offered the clearest evidence yet that the Romans used hot-mixing in concrete production. Not only did the concrete samples contain the lime clasts described in Masic’s previous paper, but the team also discovered intact quicklime fragments pre-mixed with other ingredients in a dry raw material pile, a critical first step in the preparation of hot-mixed concrete.

Bergman, an associate professor of earth and planetary sciences, helped develop tools for differentiating the materials at the site.

“Through these stable isotope studies, we could follow these critical carbonation reactions over time, allowing us to distinguish hot-mixed lime from the slaked lime originally described by Vitruvius,” Masic says. “These results revealed that the Romans prepared their binding material by taking calcined limestone (quicklime), grinding them to a certain size, mixing it dry with volcanic ash, and then eventually adding water to create a cementing matrix.”

The researchers also analyzed the volcanic ingredients in the cement, including a type of volcanic ash called pumice. They found that the pumice particles chemically reacted with the surrounding pore solution over time, creating new mineral deposits that further strengthened the concrete.

Rewriting history

Masic says the archaeologists listed as co-authors on the paper were indispensable to the study. When Masic first entered the Pompeii site, as he inspected the perfectly preserved work area, tears came to his eyes.

“I expected to see Roman workers walking between the piles with their tools,” Masic says. “It was so vivid, you felt like you were transported in time. So yes, I got emotional looking at a pile of dirt. The archaeologists made some jokes.”

Masic notes that calcium is a key component in both ancient and modern concretes, so understanding how it reacts over time holds lessons for understanding dynamic processes in modern cement as well. Towards these efforts, Masic has also started a company, DMAT, that uses lessons from ancient Roman concrete to create long-lasting modern concretes.

“This is relevant because Roman cement is durable, it heals itself, and it’s a dynamic system,” Masic says. “The way these pores in volcanic ingredients can be filled through recrystallization is a dream process we want to translate into our modern materials. We want materials that regenerate themselves.”

As for Vitruvius, Masic guesses that he may have been misinterpreted. He points out that Vitruvius also mentions latent heat during the cement mixing process, which could suggest hot-mixing after all.

The work was supported, in part, by the MIT Research Support Committee (RSC) and the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub.

###

Written by Zach Winn, MIT News

---

Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-025-66634-7 

New study links climate stress to the disappearance of early human species Homo floresiensis

 An international team of scientists, including the University of Wollongong (UOW), has found compelling evidence that a changing climate played a role in the extinction of the early human species Homo floresiensis, also known as ‘hobbits’. Their research, published in Communications Earth & Environment, reveals the hobbits abandoned Liang Bua – a cave they had occupied for around 140,000 years – during a drought that lasted for thousands of years.

The team combined chemical records from cave stalagmites with isotopic data from fossil teeth from a pygmy elephant species (Stegodon florensis insularis) that hobbits hunted. The results reveal an extensive drying trend beginning around 76,000 years ago, culminating in severe drought between 61,000 and 55,000 years ago, around the time the hobbits disappeared. Prolonged drought and competition for resources may have driven their departure from Liang Bua and, ultimately, their extinction.

The discovery highlights how environmental conditions can reshape the course of species survival, and how changing rainfall influenced the fate of our close relatives.

“The ecosystem around Liang Bua became dramatically drier around the time Homo floresiensis vanished,” said UOW Honorary Professor Dr Mike Gagan, the lead author of the study. “Summer rainfall fell and river-beds became seasonally dry, placing stress on both hobbits and their prey.”

The discovery builds on decades of groundbreaking UOW research into Homo floresiensis, first discovered in 2003 in Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores. Dubbed the hobbit due to its tiny stature, Homo floresiensis challenged prevailing theories of human evolution. It disappears from the fossil record around 50,000 years ago, but its fate has remained an enigma.

The scientists used stalagmites, a natural archive of rainfall, to reconstruct past climate and rainfall. Analysis of oxygen-isotopes in fossil tooth enamel showed the pygmy elephants relied on river water, which became increasingly scarce. The pygmy elephant population fell steeply around 61,000 years ago, meaning that an important food source for the hobbits was disappearing.

“Surface freshwater, Stegodon and Homo floresiensis all decline at the same time, showing the compounding effects of ecological stress,” UOW Honorary Fellow Dr Gert van den Berg said. “Competition for dwindling water and food probably forced the hobbits to abandon Liang Bua.”

While Homo floresiensis fossils pre-date the earliest evidence of modern humans on Flores, Homo sapiens were traversing the Indonesian archipelago around the time the hobbits disappeared.

“It’s possible that as the hobbits moved in search of water and prey, they encountered modern humans,” Dr Gagan said. “In that sense, climate change may have set the stage for their final disappearance.”

About the research

‘Onset of summer aridification and the decline of Homo floresiensis at Liang Bua 61,000 years ago’ by Michael K. Gagan, Linda K. Ayliffe, Mika R. Puspaningrum, Gerrit van den Bergh, Nick Scroxton, Wahyoe S .Hantoro, Heather Scott-Gagan, Scott A. Condie, R. Lawrence Edwards, HaiCheng, Jian-xin Zhao, JohnC. Hellstrom, Alena K. Kimbrough, Matthew J. Gagan, Bambang W. Suwargadi, Joan A. Cowley, Bronwyn C. Dixon, Garry K. Smith, Neil Anderson, Henri Wong and Hamdi Rifai, was published in Communications Earth & Environment: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02961-3

---